Thousands of country representatives have spent the last two weeks in Germany at the UN Bonn Climate Conference, marking the mid-year point to the biggest climate summit of the year: COP29. 

But despite being a core milestone each year for global climate discussions, there is troublingly little to show for it. And with less than six months before COP29 – and after years of negotiations – there has been a shameful lack of commitment on delivering for those on the frontline of the climate crisis.   

Climate finance and adaptation play imperative roles in ensuring communities are able to thrive in the face of unpredictable and unforgiving weather patterns. And while both topics have been heavy on the Bonn agenda, finance negotiations so far have failed to really consider those living with climate uncertainty right now. 

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WaterAid has been on the ground at the Bonn talks, calling for robust water, sanitation and hygiene indicators to flow directly through key climate adaptation frameworks, especially the Global Goal on Adaptation and the Loss and Damage Fund – both of which will change the course of the future for those living on the frontlines of the climate crisis. 

Support lacking for those on the frontline

Yet countries at Bonn have hit a roadblock on the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA), with discussions struggling to go beyond a shared acknowledgement of the value of including the support of experts to progress on areas of concern. Progress on GGA targets remains stagnant as parties grapple over country-specific concerns instead of coming to a collective outcome, with less than two days left of the conference. 

Meanwhile, the most recent talks on the Loss and Damage Fund failed to consider the urgency of the escalating climate crisis at hand and the scale of financing needed to ensure frontline nations can recover and rebuild from impacts of climate change. 

North Africa’s disappearing nomads: Why my community needs climate finance

The new collective quantified goal on climate finance (NCQG) – a new and larger target that is expected to replace the current $100bn climate finance goal – is also high on the Bonn agenda. Many core elements of this new climate fund goal are yet to be agreed.

WaterAid is calling for the NCQG to have sub-goals for adaptation and loss and damage, as well as for the finance pot to have a direct channel to vulnerable communities so they can be involved in ensuring the funds go to where the support is most needed.  

Too much or too little water

Whilst conversations at Bonn have been lukewarm, the climate crisis has remained red hot. Right now, countries around the world are watching it unfold in real time. From flooding and cyclones to drought and deadly heatwaves, communities are dealing with the terrifying reality of living with too much or too little water.  

Southern Asia is being exposed in particular to a dangerous and chaotic cocktail of unpredictable weather, making life unbearable for those on the climate frontline. 

In late May, Cyclone Remal hit coastal parts of southern Bangladesh with gale speeds of up to 110km/h causing devastation across the country for 8.4 million people, leaving many without power, damaging crops and making tube wells and latrines unusable.  

Meanwhile, record temperatures were recorded in Bangladesh through April and May where temperatures soared above 43 degrees Celsius, scorching 80% of the country and leaving thousands without power. 

At the same time, Pakistan witnessed its wettest April since 1961, with the south-western province of Punjab experiencing a staggering 437 percent more rainfall than usual, fuelling the malnourishment of 1.5 million children and damaging 3,500 homes.  

Water infrastructure key to adaptation

Water, sanitation and hygiene equip communities like those across South Asia with the ability to adapt to climate change, protecting livelihoods and farms. These basic essentials ensure people are not subject to the spread of waterborne diseases while preventing families from being forced to migrate due to sea level rises.  

From flood defences to drought resistance, water also acts as a guiding light as to where donors should direct climate finance, ensuring long-term support reaches the people who need it most. Investment in water-related infrastructure in low and middle-income countries is expected to deliver at least $500 billion a year in economic value, protecting countless lives and boosting economic prosperity. 

Bonn talks on climate finance goal end in stalemate on numbers

Now is the time for global leaders to put pen to paper and set plans in motion to ensure that we see real progress on how we achieve the GGA targets at the grassroots and that the necessary level of climate funding reaches those who need it most, without further delay.  

This truly is a matter of life and death – and prioritising action on water, sanitation and hygiene across global adaptation goals may be our only hope to prevent climate change from washing away people’s futures.  

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This week, the UN climate change body (UNFCCC) confirmed that this year’s Regional Climate Weeks will be cancelled until further notice due to lack of funding.

The update comes shortly after UNFCCC chief Simon Stiell made an urgent plea at the Copenhagen Climate Ministerial last week to plug the body’s funding gap, stating that it is facing “severe financial challenges” – putting a rising workload at risk due to “governments’ failure to provide enough money”.

The suspension of the Regional Climate Weeks is hugely disappointing news.

It means that a vital platform to express the concerns of people and communities most affected by climate change has been taken away.

UN’s climate body faces “severe financial challenges” which put work at risk

The climate weeks are a vital opportunity to bring a stronger regional voice – those who are footing the bill in developing countries for a crisis they have done the least to cause – to the international table in the lead-up to the UN COP climate summits.

Last year we saw four regional climate weeks: Africa Climate Week in Nairobi, Kenya; Middle East and North Africa Climate Week in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; Latin America and the Caribbean Climate Week in Panama City, Panama; and Asia-Pacific Climate Week in Johor Bahru, Malaysia.

These attracted 26,000 participants in 900 sessions and brought together policymakers, scientists and other experts from the multiple regions, with fundamental contributions feeding into the COP28 agenda. 

At Africa Climate Summit alone, over 20 commitments were made by African heads of state – commitments and announcements that equated to a combined investment of nearly $26 billion from public, private sector and multilateral development banks, philanthropic foundations and other financing partners.

This is the right way forward because, while extreme weather events affect all of us, we know their impacts are not felt equally.

Shrinking water access

Extremes of both drought and floods are threatening people’s access to the three essentials they need to survive – clean water, decent toilets and good hygiene – as boreholes run dry, floods wash away latrines, and supplies are contaminated by silt and debris.

Around the world, ordinary people – farmers, community leaders, family members – are doing everything they can to adapt to the realities of life on the frontlines of climate change.

They’re working together to monitor water reserves, conserving supplies to make every drop last. They’re sowing crops that can withstand droughts, and planting trees to protect them from floods. And they’re building with future threats in mind, raising homes and toilets off the ground and making them safe from floodwaters.

Expectations mount as loss and damage fund staggers to its feet

Each Regional Climate Week provides a vital platform for those shouldering the heaviest burden of the climate crisis – such as women and girls, people experiencing marginalisation, and Indigenous communities – to share their experiences, expertise, and unique perspectives.  

The climate crisis is a water crisis, and the people on the frontlines of this crisis are vital to solving it. 

With leadership and participation from those vulnerable communities and groups, we are all better equipped to adapt to our changing climate – and to ensure that everyone, everywhere has climate-resilient water, sanitation and hygiene.

Each and every UN climate conference matters. We urgently need global governments to fuel their words with action, open their wallets and prioritise the voices, experiences and solutions of those most affected by the climate crisis. If not, we’ll continue to see climate change wash away people’s futures.

Dulce Marrumbe is head of partnerships and advocacy at WaterAid’s regional office for Southern Africa.

The post Cancellation of UN climate weeks removes platform for worst-hit communities appeared first on Climate Home News.

Debt-laden growers want an existing government procurement system to be made legally binding and to raise the minimum price for a wider range of crops – which could help them move away from thirsty rice and wheat farming.

But some agricultural analysts argue that bolstering the Minimum Support Price (MSP) for produce would not resolve the wider climate problems farmers face, nor ease demand for scarce water resources.

Expectations mount as loss and damage fund staggers to its feet

Deedar Singh, a 50-year-old farmer from Patiala, joined a march towards Delhi in mid-February and spoke to Climate Home at a camp on the Punjab-Haryana border, 200 km from Delhi. He participated in a similar mobilisation back in 2020 that lasted for just over a year.

With a family of nine to support, he complained that his five-acre landholding and meagre income of 200,000 rupees per year ($2,400) cannot provide a decent quality of life, especially as weather extremes worsen.

“If untimely rain destroys our rice or hot temperatures shrink the wheat grain, our crops are ruined, leaving us unable to even cover the costs of the next cropping season,” said Singh. Most people in his village rely on financial support sent by their children who have migrated abroad, he added.

Farmers gather at the Shambhu border, between Punjab and Haryana, to burn effigies of political leaders and shout slogans in support of the protest, February 27 2024 (Photo: Kanika Gupta)

Globally, India accounts for 10% of agricultural output and is the second-largest producer of rice and wheat. It is also the biggest consumer of groundwater. Its 260 million farmers depend heavily on depleting water reserves to irrigate their crops.

That means they are also struggling with climate change, as about 65% of the country’s cropped area depends on rainwater. Erratic rainfall and shorter winters are harming yields, with heavy downpours causing flooding and a sudden spike in temperatures a year ago causing wheat grain to shrink.

The Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) reports that for every 1C increase in temperature, wheat production suffers a significant decline of 4-5 million tonnes.

Debt drives suicides

Water resources are running low and farmers’ input costs have soared – yet the government-administered minimum support price (MSP) has not risen accordingly, said Ramandeep Singh Mann, an agriculturist and member of Kisan Mazdoor Morcha, an umbrella body spearheading the current protest.

That has left farmers with no money to pay for contingencies and has forced many to take on high levels of debt, he said.

“At some point your back breaks. When that happens, there is no other solution but to take extreme steps,” he added, referring to suicides among indebted farmers.

To boost falling yields, farmers are using more inputs like water and fertilisers, leaving them with higher production costs and lower profit margins.

Some states have provided free or subsidised electricity, as well as loan forgiveness for debt-strapped farmers, but since 2014, only half of the intended waiver recipients have benefited, according to a study by the State Bank of India.

These woes have fuelled a growing wave of protest, as farmers feel they have no other recourse.

Nonetheless, Sardara Singh Johl, a 97-year-old agricultural economist from Ludhiana and former vice-chancellor at Punjab Agricultural University, said the latest mobilisation was unlikely to result in the dialogue required to address the broader problems facing farmers.

“They already have MSP for wheat and rice, and these are high-paying crops. Even if you reduce the price risk with MSP, what can you do about the other uncertainties?” he asked.

In mid-February, at the last round of talks with the government, ministers proposed to purchase five additional crops – moong dal, urad dal, tur dal, maize and cotton – from farmers at an MSP for five years through central agencies, but farmers rejected the offer.

Jagjit Singh Dallewal, leader of the non-political Samyukta Kisan Morcha group, which is also involved in organising the farmers’ protest, said the proposal would mainly benefit farmers willing to switch from paddy or wheat to other crops and would not ensure a stable income.

Farmer leaders give a press conference at Shambhu border, between Punjab and Haryana, on February 27 2024. Photo: Kanika Gupta)

Water reserves shrink amid over-use

Economist Johl argued that, irrespective of its profitability, rice is no longer a suitable crop for Punjab as its water table recedes to a dangerously low level.

A study by Punjab Agricultural University found that between 1998 and 2018, groundwater levels in the region had dropped drastically, from 10 metres below ground to 30 metres, largely due to a shift from traditional canal irrigation to widespread adoption of tube wells for water extraction.

Farmers are aware of Punjab’s dwindling water resources, said Mann, but they need guaranteed price support for more crops in order to shift away from water-intensive rice cultivation.

“They know that if they are able to earn as much as they do from paddy, they will grow other crops. But without fair support of MSP, it is hard to make that switch,” he said.

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Uday Chandra, a professor of government at the Georgetown University in Qatar, said key food-supplying states like Punjab have struggled to get their problems heard and dealt with by the national government.

“The problem is that what the Punjab farmer wants isn’t sustainable,” he said, referring to the state’s shrinking water supplies. “The best way would be to bring them into discussion and find a solution that is specific to them.”

Trucks lined up at the Shambhu border, 200 km from Delhi, after being stopped by the central government from advancing to the Indian capital, February 27 2024 (Photo: Kanika Gupta)

Thousands of farmers who were initially stopped by heavy police control outside Delhi have now made it to the capital after receiving permission to protest at the Ramlila Maidan ground. They are determined to maintain their mobilisation during the general elections – which will take place over several weeks from late April until the start of June – if their MSP demands go unmet.

In 2021, angry farmers backed down after the government rowed back on laws that had sparked huge protests. But they have now returned to direct action, calling on the government to fulfill its promises, including demands for pensions, debt waivers, penalties for selling counterfeit agricultural inputs, and withdrawal from the World Trade Organization.

Call for high-tech solutions

Mann said climate change is compounding their woes – yet while the government acknowledges the problem, it is doing little to help the sector deal with it.

The Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

However, at the ICAR’s Annual General Meeting last month, Arjun Munda, Union Minister of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, said the Modi government is committed to bolstering the agricultural sector and supporting farmers, including with high-yielding, resilient seed varieties released by ICAR in the past decade.

It also issues Agromet weather-based crop advisories with the India Meteorological Department to about 60 million farmers twice a week and promotes practices for more efficient use of water and nutrients.

But protesting farmers said the government’s measures are failing to help them adapt adequately to a changing climate and water shortages.

Bhupinder Singh, a farmer in Punjab’s Mohali district, discusses his transition to organic farming methods as a means to prevent the burning of stubble remaining after rice cultivation, November 26 2023. (Photo: Kanika Gupta)

Haranjeet Singh, 53, of Ludhiana in Punjab, said the rice variety farmers are now planting gives smaller harvests, after the government suspended use of a more productive but thirstier variety which also took longer to mature and produced more stubble – a major cause of air pollution when burned.

“Unfortunately, these new seeds don’t give us as much yield,” he said. “We are spending the same amount of money and getting less in return.”

Madhura Swaminathan, daughter of the late MS Swaminathan – the architect of India’s Green Revolution which boosted crop yields and tackled the nation’s food scarcity issues in the 1970s – believes greater use of technology could help.

The professor at the Indian Statistical Institute in Bangalore pointed to an example she encountered in Amritsar a few years ago, where groundwater sensors were connected to mobile apps, enabling users to remotely control water pumps and conserve water.

“We must embrace new technologies, farming practices, and techniques to tackle the challenges brought by climate change,” she said.

The post What will it take to protect India’s angry farmers from climate threats? appeared first on Climate Home News.

The shrinking water levels can even be seen from space. An analysis of satellite imagery by Climate Home News, with the support from the monitoring platform Planet, shows significant impacts to freshwater ecosystems around the world.

“What we have experienced this summer is what climate scientists tell us is going to happen in the future. This summer matches the predictions that we have for a hotter, drier future,” said Christine Colvin, advocacy director of the nonprofit The Rivers Trust.

Climate change is now becoming one of the “key drivers” of degrading freshwater ecosystems worldwide, according to the latest report by the UN’s panel of climate scientists. These ecosystems are fundamental for water access.

In China’s case, a month-long heatwave preceded the country’s worst drought in history. In a matter of weeks, some of the Asian country’s largest water bodies began to shrink, leading to economic and even cultural impacts.

“We are clearly witnessing the impacts of climate change,” said Wenjian Zhang, WMO assistant secretary-general.The situation in China is “complex”, he said, and has tested the country’s disaster prevention and relief work.

Although many of these water bodies —such as Lake Poyang— drop seasonally, this year’s drought was the worst in recorded history, Chinese officials said.

Attribution to climate change can be different depending on the region and can only be determined by conducting local studies, said Andrew Hoell, co-lead of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Drought Task Force.

However, Hoell added that “almost all regions of the globe have observed a trend to increasing temperatures that have led to more intense and longer duration heat events.”

In Europe, for example, the UK’s heatwave would have been almost impossible without current climate change, which has already warmed the planet by 1,2°C. After this event, drought was declared in large parts of the country.

Along the same lines, Europe’s Global Drought Observatory stated in its August report that low precipitation levels combined with “a sequence of heatwaves from May onwards”. As a result, water levels dropped in some major European rivers such as the Rhine in Germany, the Loire in France and the Tagus in Portugal.

In the Rhine, for example, some parts of the river were running at 45% of their average level for August, said Germany’s Federal Institute of Hydrology. Cargo ships were forced to carry lighter loads, increasing transport costs.

The impacts were even more significant because most of the continent’s wetlands were also depleted, said Colvin. This has left many freshwater ecosystems without their natural “buffer areas,” she added.

The post Seen from space: Extreme drought dries up rivers across the globe appeared first on Climate Home News.

In his right hand, he held up to the camera a black mineral concretion about the size of a potato, known as a polymetallic nodule.

Found on the deep sea floor, these nodules are rich in nickel, cobalt, copper and manganese: minerals critical for manufacturing electric vehicles.

The Australian entrepreneur, who cast himself as the face of the nascent deep sea mining industry, has pitched these nodules as the only sustainable option to meet the world’s electrification needs.

His company argues that “the world’s largest estimated source of battery metals” lies untouched on the ocean’s floor – enough to electrify 280 million vehicles.

“Whether you invest in a company like DeepGreen or not, everyone is a sucker for the story,” Barron said.

Three years on, the story Barron has to tell is one of struggle, verging on collapse. His company, which triggered a rush to open the deep seabed to mining, is in dire straits. Its share price is sinking, funds are dwindling and it’s embroiled in multiple lawsuits against investors.

The Metal Company’s (TMC’s) survival is staked on receiving a green light from the international regulator to mine the ocean’s deep. As the company flounders, the pressure on nations to agree mining rules hasn’t eased and other prospectors are waiting in the wings.

Did you know that #Polymetallic nodules sitting on top of the seabed are made of almost 100% usable minerals? These nodules are from the latest collection on our current #DeepGreenExpeditions pic.twitter.com/699vV80Ydw

— gerard barron (@gtbgtb) December 16, 2019

Countries have been discussing mining the bottom of the oceans for years. While some exploratory activities are under way, no commercial extraction has started in international waters.

Scientists have warned that far too little is known about the deep ocean, its biodiversity and the role it plays in storing carbon to allow companies to mine the seabed. Mining would result in biodiversity loss “that would be irreversible on multi-generational timescales,” they say. Calls for a ban on the practice are growing.

In many ways, Barron has put the spotlight on the frontier mining sector. He was a major investor of Nautilus Minerals, which aimed to carry out the world’s first commercial deep sea mining around hydrothermal vents off the coast of Papua New Guinea. Barron pulled out before the company went bust.

As CEO of Vancouver-based TMC, Barron continued to argue that deep sea nodules were a more scalable and sustainable option than mining battery minerals on land.

A rush to mine the deep ocean has environmentalists worried

His public interventions drew attention to the International Seabed Authority (ISA), the UN body which regulates mining activities in international waters which, until then, had operated under little scrutiny.

TMC had one objective: accelerating the approval of a mining code for the deep seas.

The company struck deals with Nauru, Tonga and Kiribati to explore an area of the Pacific Ocean known as the Clarion Clipperton Zone, where a high concentration of nodules has been found.

In 2021, Nauru, a vocal supporter of the emerging industry, triggered a never-before-used procedure giving the ISA two years, until July 2023, to fast-track deep sea mining exploitation rules. If the rules aren’t finalised by July 2023, the ISA will have to “consider and provisionally approve” licencing requests regardless.

The ultimatum allows Nauru Ocean Resources Incorporated (Nori), a TMC subsidiary sponsored by the Nauru government, to apply for a mining permit as soon as next year.

It sent the ISA into overdrive. But as the ISA council is meeting this month, in Kingston, Jamaica, to progress the rules, it is uncertain that TMC will have the financial backing to take advantage of the resulting opportunities.

TMC listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange in New York in September 2021 gambling that it could start mining the deep sea in 2024.

Things got off to a bad start. Two large investors withheld $220m of promised investment. TMC is suing the investors to recuperate the money.

A month later, a shareholder filed a class action against TMC and its CEO Barron. It accused the company of making “materially false and misleading statements” and having failed to disclose information about its operations.

The allegations include that TMC “significantly overpaid… undisclosed insiders” for the acquisition of an exploration permit for its Tonga-sponsored company.

The plaintiff claims that the company “artificially inflated” the expenditures of its subsidiary in Nauru ”to give investors a false scale of its operations” and “significantly downplayed the environmental risks”. They added that TMC “would not have the cash necessary for large scale production”.

A second shareholder case with the same allegations was filed and the two suits are being addressed together.

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The allegations were made based on a report by market research firm Bonitas Research. It alleges that TMC siphoned $43m in cash during its acquisition of its Tonga subsidiary.

TMC denied all allegations of wrongdoing and is defending itself in court. But it did clarify to investors the risks associated with the enterprise.

In its recent filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), TMC details 25 risks to investors buying into the company, taking up 24 pages of the 179-page document.

Among them: environmental liabilities, the absence of guarantees that the nodules will be suitable for commercialisation, the risk of having overestimated the quality and quantity of nodules, the negative reputation the industry is gaining and the company’s lack of funds.

Farreid glass sponges found at about 2,360 meters deep pictured at the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument (Photo: NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research)

This hasn’t contributed to investor confidence.

Earlier this month, the United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative published a briefing paper arguing that the practice cannot be considered sustainable and that investors should avoid the industry.

TMC’s share price collapsed from a high of $12 at its launch last September to less than a $1 since the start of July.

Under Nasdaq rules, if the share price doesn’t rebound above $1 for 30 consecutive days, the company faces delisting – a significant reputational blow to the company.

“There is not a lot of confidence in the marketplace that TMC can deliver what it has hyped it can do. Investors are not buying it,” Matthew Gianni, co-founder of the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, told Climate Home.

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Last months’ filing with the SEC shows that as of March 2022, TMC had $69m in cash in the bank. In 2021, the company estimated it needed $7bn for large-scale production.

TMC recognises that “failure to obtain additional financing on a timely basis could cause us to reduce or terminate our operations”.

For Duncan Currie, a legal advisor to the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, the firm’s dwindling funds pose another issue.

“The company is obviously undercapitalised. If there is environmental damage, who will end up paying for that?” he asked.

The ISA is discussing a proposal for a compensation fund to address damages to the marine environment which would be funded from the proceeds of mining. “But that means there will be no money in the fund on the first day of mining and that is when damage is likely to be caused,” said Currie.

Rolling in the deep! Allseas engineers have successfully driven the pilot nodule collector across the seafloor at depths of ~2,500m, bringing us ever closer to responsibly unlocking the world’s largest undeveloped source of battery metals.

Learn more: https://t.co/ush2xTeaDj pic.twitter.com/fqG0RMBybG

— The Metals Company (@themetalsco) May 5, 2022

Publicly, TMC remains bullish about its financial situation. The money in its account “will be sufficient to meet our working capital and capital expenditure requirements for at least the next twelve months from today,” it said about its quarterly results.

It added that it was still testing its nodule collection system and exploring a potential processing plant in India.

But the management has been avoiding tough questions. Its online annual general meeting at the end of May lasted a mere 13 minutes. A question about when the company’s cash might run out was ignored.

Andy Whitmore, finance advocacy officer at the Deep Sea Mining Campaign, told Climate Home the company is “running out of money” and is “closer than they admit” to bankruptcy.

“They have an ambitious plan, which requires moving forward at speed” to start mining, he said. But “the loss of share value both indicates that investors are not sure about this, and also makes their position more precarious.”

“It’s sort of like the Wizard of Oz, you have to look behind the curtain,” said Catherine Coumans, of MiningWatch Canada.

Coumans said CEO Barron, had cast himself as “the hipster dude who is going to save the world with this cool new thing” and put himself forward as “poster boy” for the frontier industry.

As a result, TMC’s fate could reflect badly on the nascent sector, she said.

A yellow glass sponge observed at a depth of 2.5km in the Sibelius Seamount in the Pacific (Photo: NOAA Ocean Exploration/Flickr)

But public attention has highlighted its potential as a lucrative industry. An MIT cost-benefit analysis found that mining nodules could generate annual revenues of $2.3bn a year.

“It’s like getting between the wolf and its food,” Coumans told Climate Home. “One company may go down but another will come back.”

Belgian company Global Sea Mineral Resources (GSR), which is sponsored by Belgium and the Cook Islands, is already testing technology to collect nodules from the sea floor 4.5 kilometres beneath the surface.

The UK Seabed Resources, a subsidiary of the US arms conglomerate Lockheed Martin sponsored by Britain, is another frontrunner in the field.

“There’s a whole bunch of big companies that have very deep pockets and the patience to wait this one out,” said Coumans. “They don’t want to rock the boat and would have perhaps preferred [for the issue] to be way more under the radar than it’s become.”

Fiji has banned deep sea mining in this Decade of #OceanScience because we’ve chosen discovery over destruction.

We know more about the moon’s surface than the deep seabed. Until we learn more, short-term profits can’t win out over priceless ocean-based knowledge.

— Frank Bainimarama (@FijiPM) October 5, 2021

While the industry is gearing up for mining to start in the next few years, a growing number of countries have expressed reservations about opening up the world’s most remote ecosystem to mining.

During a UN conference on the Oceans in Portugal last month, Palau and Fiji launched an alliance of countries calling for a moratorium on deep sea mining endorsed by Samoa, Tuvalu, Solomon Islands and the Federal States of Micronesia.

French president Emmanuel Macron called for the creation of “the legal framework to stop the high-sea mining and not to allow new activities putting in danger these ecosystems”. While France sponsors two exploration contracts, these activities should remain “pure scientific missions,” he said.

More than 210 lawmakers from 47 countries have joined a parliamentarian alliance supporting a ban.

And recently, the EU Commission said it intended to “prohibit deep-sea mining” until scientific gaps are filled and show it can be done without harmful effects.

Gianni said despite signs that a large number of nations are not ready to allow deep sea mining from next year, how this translates in the technical negotiations remain unclear.

“If mining starts, it will prove nearly impossible to rein it in,” he said.

The Metals Company did not respond to Climate Home’s request for comment.

The post Between a wolf and its food: as one deep sea miner flops, others eye the prize appeared first on Climate Home News.

After a visit to the Jordan river which divides Palestine’s West Bank region from Jordan, Robert Habeck posted on Instagram about his support for the EcoPeace NGO and its proposed “Green Blue Deal for the Middle East”.

In particular, he supported the plan by an Emirati company to build a solar farm in Jordan to power a desalination plant in Israel. “The idea,” he said, “is to include the Palestinians and the Gaza strip in this regional water-energy community.”

 

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A post shared by Robert Habeck (@robert.habeck)

A related proposal is to build a solar farm in the West Bank to power a desalination plant bringing water to Gaza’s two million people.

But for Palestinians to benefit from these projects, Israel will have to be persuaded to allow them to go ahead and to limit the amount of water it takes for its own population.

Israeli control of Palestine’s scarce water supplies has been a driver of the long-running conflict and climate change has made this problem worse.

Average monthly rainfall in the West Bank is expected to decrease 8-10 mm by the end of the century and Israeli companies and illegal settlements control much of that increasingly scarce water.

While Palestinians in the West Bank struggle to grow crops and collect rainwater in black containers on their roofs, neighbouring Israeli settlements often enjoy swimming pools, gardens and water-intensive agriculture.

The average Israeli uses over three times more water than the average Palestinian which has led to resentment.

Amnesty International researcher Kristyan Benedict told Climate Home: “Israel’s control of water resources and water-related infrastructure in the [West Bank] has resulted in striking inequalities between Palestinians and Jewish settlers.”

Based on EcoPeace's proposals, a UAE-based company plans to build solar panels in neighbouring Jordan and export the electricity generated to a desalination plant in Israel which will turn sea water into drinking water. No company has promised to build that plant yet but the idea is that the drinking water will be sold to Jordan. Habeck said this project is "an example of how some Arab states are now beginning to cooperate with Israel".

While this water is unlikely to go to Palestine, EcoPeace's founder Gidon Bromberg said it would improve relations between Israel and Jordan. For Palestine, he said that desalination technology means that water is "no longer a zero sum game". Negotiations on water have been fraught for decades because allowing Palestinians to have more water means less water for Israeli farmers, he said.

But desalination and the treatment of sewage water so that it can be used on crops have increased the total amount of water available. "Water is no longer a difficult issue to solve," Bromberg said. "Palestinians can get their fair share of natural water which means Israel needs to reduce its pumping of sheer groundwater but Israel can replace that source at competitve prices by mostly increasing desalination".

A map of Israel (blue) and the West Bank's military-controlled (green) and more Palestinian-controlled (grey) areas. (Photo: Wikicommons)

Asked why Israel would give up groundwater to the Palestinians, Bromberg said: "An agreement needs to be reached so Israel would have to sign it and agree so." He added: "There will be an expectation that also as part of the agreement that the sewage from mostly the Palestinian side would be prioritised to be treated and not flow untreated into shared water basins."

The other aspect of EcoPeace's plan relates to the Palestinian region of Gaza, an enclave ten times the size of New York's Central Park which houses two million people.

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Unlike the West Bank, it is not occupied by the Israeli military but is under siege with Israel and Egypt controlling who and what can enter. Gaza suffers from water scarcity made worse by climate change and by Egypt and Israel's restrictions on materials needed to repair its water infrastructure.

To fix this water crisis, EcoPeace wants a 55m cubic metre desalination plant in Gaza powered by renewable energy from the West Bank. They discussed this proposal with Habeck and with the president of the European Investment Bank, Bromberg said.

Under EcoPeace's plans, the solar farm would be run by a Palestinian company and the desalinated water would be used by the people of Gaza. But the proposal is still at an early stage.

One obstacle is that the area of the West Bank on which they want to build solar panels is the part most stringently controlled by the occupying Israeli military, known as "area C". So they need the Israeli Ministry of Defence's permission. "We're hopeful that this is going to move forward," Bromberg said.

As the West Bank and Gaza are geographically separated by Israel, the electricity that connects the solar farm and the desalination plant would have to run through the Israeli grid and could be cut by the Israeli government. "But the track record is that everyone understand it's not in anyone's interest to stop the flow of electricity or stop the flow of water," said Bromberg.

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Benjamin Pohl, head of Adelphi's climate diplomacy and security programme, said the Israeli government would be under pressure to extract concessions from the Palestinians in return for allowing this project to go ahead.

"There's a long history of, for example, border crossings into Gaza, being used as a lever to try to get political developments into a certain direction," he said. On the other hand, he said, "from a very cynical perspective, Israel has an interest in not increasing desperation in Palestinian territories because that would be a huge challenge to Israeli security."

The post German minister backs Middle East ‘peace through water’ plan appeared first on Climate Home News.

Thirty-five year old leftist Gabriel Boric defeated the far-right’s Jose Antonio Kast, sparking “relief” and renewed “hope” from climate campaigners and Chileans who lack access to drinking water.

Maisa Rojas, a climate scientist who advised the last government before resigning to campaign for Boric, said she was “very pleased and very relieved as well”.

Environmental lawyer Patsy Contardo said her reaction was “hope”. She added: “Boric represents the start of a new era after four years of darkness, human rights violations and impunity.”

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Nationwide, Boric won 56% of the vote to Kast’s 44%. In Petorca, which has become the poster child for the nation’s climate change driven, 10 year mega-drought, he gained 73% of the vote – one of his strongest showings in the country.

In a televised election debate, Boric said he would consider taking Petorca’s water away from avocado growers and giving it to people. “When we see a ‘blocking’ of water , for example, what is happening in Petorca, where avocado monocultures are preventing water from getting to the schools, it is something that we will have to ‘unblock’”, he said in Spanish.

Barbara Astudillo Delgado, an ecofeminist activist from Petorca, said it was “imperative” that he prioritised water for human consumption. She told Climate Home News: “We live in times where life is at risk, schools and health centres have been closed for not having access to drinking water, food production is scarce and agribusiness has only favoured a few while generating water poverty.”

A convention is drawing up a new constitution for Chile and delegates have proposed inserting a human right to water. Boric’s presidency would financially and logistically support the convention, while Kast had opposed drawing up a new constitution.

Water rights activist Veronica Vilches stands by a dry canal which used to channel water to her community in Petorca (Photo: Camilo Escobar Nuñez)

Boric has promised to install water basin councils where different water-using groups like mining, agriculture and local communities can discuss water access.

The last Chilean government under centre-right billionaire Sebastian Pinera had driven climate change up the political agenda and offered to host the Cop25 climate talks in Santiago. But, after mass protests sparked by a hike in public transport costs, the talks were held in Spain instead.

Amnesty International accused the state of human rights violations in its response to the protests, citing thousands of complaints of police brutality and hundreds of eye injuries from the use of tear gas.

On climate, Pinera set a net zero by 2050 target, a coal exit plan and sought to establish a green hydrogen industry powered by the country’s abundant sun and wind.

The cost of producing green hydrogen. Red is the cheapest and blue is the most expensive (Photo: International Energy Agency)

Rojas said she expected Boric to continue and speed up that climate work. The last government published an improved national climate plan in April 2020 and a long-term strategy in November. Boric’s government will seek to enshrine the targets in a climate law.

Kast, who Rojas compared to Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and the US’s Donald Trump, questioned in 2019 whether humans had caused climate change. In this election campaign, he sought to win centrist voters, accepting that climate change is caused by humans and requires action although neglecting to set out detailed policies on the issue.

Kast’s solution to water scarcity was to build desalination plants which turn salt water into drinking water. These use a lot of energy and can damage aquatic ecosystems as waste salt is discharged into rivers and seas. Rojas said they may be necessary but were not the main solution.

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Experts say drought and severe water shortages have compounded instability and conflict in Afghanistan for decades and are worsening a humanitarian crisis precipitated by the withdrawal of US and allied troops.

Afghanistan is in the grips of its second drought in four years. Since 1950, Afghanistan’s average annual temperature has increased by 1.8C, according to the climate security expert network. Heavy rainfall events have increased by between 10-25% over the past 30 years.

14 million people, around 35% of Afghanistan’s population, were already facing acute food insecurity before the Taliban takeover, according to the World Food Programme (WFP). Half of all Afghan children under the age of five suffer from malnutrition.

The UN’s humanitarian coordinator for Afghanistan Ramiz Alakbarov told Reuters last week that Afghans are facing a double threat: conflict and drought. “You have a kind of combination effect of displacement caused by war and by military hostilities compounded with displacement caused by drought and by the difficult economic conditions,” Alakbarov said.

Oli Brown, associate fellow at Chatham House, told Climate Home News that food insecurity will increase in the next few months as snow makes roads in parts of the country completely impassable. “Unless you have a working system of governance to provide a safety net before the snow comes in, people will get stuck,” he said.

Afghans have found themselves caught in a vicious cycle of climate change and conflict for over 40 years. “One creates conditions for the other,” said Brown. Water and land scarcity have increased community-level conflict, poverty and instability, which in turn have driven environmental degradation and the depletion of resources.

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Climate change is expected to bring more frequent and intense extreme events, such as droughts and flash flooding, to the country in upcoming decades. More frequent droughts could boost the drug economy as opium poppies flourish in warm, dry climates.

Opium poppies are drought-resistant, easy to grow and transport, according to Brown. “Where wheat fails,  opium poppies often survive,” he said. 

“Increased opium revenues continue to fuel armed opposition groups and encourage corruption among government officials,” said Janani Vivekananda, a senior advisor on climate change and peacebuilding at thinktank Adelphi.

Afghanistan’s climate plan, submitted to the UN in 2015, outlines that all the country’s 34 provinces are highly vulnerable to climate impacts, including drought, heatwaves and glacial lake melts. Water stress is a major concern as 80% of the country’s population relies on rainfed agriculture for their livelihoods. 

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The climate plan said $2.5 billion was needed for watershed management and $4.5 billion for the restoration of irrigation systems by 2030. But investments in boosting water and climate resilience over the past decade have been insufficient, experts say.

Vivekananda said that this issue is likely to be “kicked into the long grass” as development aid is suspended and the immediate focus shifts to humanitarian aid. “It is incredibly critical that this is not seen as a long-term issue, but rather as a priority issue for stabilising the situation now,” she said. “It underlies any hope of addressing the longer term humanitarian needs of the Afghanistan population.”

Brown said international partners, including the US, did invest in building new irrigation channels, but that it is unclear how many of these were properly maintained. 

Improvements to irrigation systems in some cases increased poppy cultivation and opium production, according to a report by the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction (SIGAR).

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President Joe Biden has decided to finish evacuating US troops from Afghanistan by 31 August, an administration official said on Tuesday.

In the past week since the Taliban took the capital Kabul, thousands of Afghans have fled the country, including government officials, journalists and translators for western forces. Thousands more are camped in Kabul airport hoping to get a seat on a plane.

As western powers lose their appetite for foreign intervention, a return to Taliban rule for the country looks all but inevitable. The hardline Islamist group, which enforces a strict version of sharia law, was removed from power by US-led forces in 2001.

Ensuring water access and protecting people from severe climate impacts is critical to the governance of Afghanistan, said Vivekananda. “Providing safe, predictable and regular water would be an opportunity for the Taliban to prove their legitimacy and show good governance.”

“It is the essential resource for agriculture, which is essential for the economy and provides the vast majority of livelihoods,” said Brown. “If the Taliban care about the Afghan people, they are going to have to care about water.”

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Heavy rainfall triggered severe flooding, landslides and sinkholes across western Germany, destroying houses and sweeping away cars. “The German language hardly knows any words for the devastation that has been caused here,” chancellor Angela Merkel said.

The government is facing mounting criticism that it was unprepared for the fatal floods. While the intense rainfall was forecast, many residents of affected areas did not get the message about how dangerous the impacts could be.

Michael Theurer, a member of the opposition centre-right Free Democrats Party, told German media that the death toll highlighted a “systemic failure” in the emergency response.

Ministers have played down the federal government’s responsibility for the disaster.

“It would be completely inconceivable for such a catastrophe to be managed centrally from any one place – you need local knowledge,” interior minister Horst Seehoffer said, rejecting the criticism.

The river Rhine burst its banks in Bonn, home to UN Climate Change headquarters (Photo: Ays Espiritu)

Climate scientists told Climate Home News that there was clearly a disconnect between the weather forecasts and the warnings communicated to residents in Germany.  

“More than 100 fatalities in a flood is a fair sign of a failure. Authorities should have put in action plans to evacuate people who were in the path of the water, and individuals needed to know what to do to protect themselves,” said Hannah Cloke, professor of hydrology at the University of Reading, who set up and advises the European Flood Awareness System.

In many areas authorities acted in time, evacuating people, erecting temporary flood defences, and moving vehicles to higher ground, Cloke told Climate Home News. 

“But if people did not hear the warnings, or failed to see the danger they or their communities were in, then the warning system has failed. It is like a smoke alarm in a fire that fails to go off because it has no batteries.”

Chileans look to new constitution to return water to communities

“There was some kind of breakdown in communication,” Hayley Fowler, professor of climate change impacts at Newcastle University, told Climate Home News. 

“It’s shocking that so many people lost their lives in a developed western economy like Germany in this event which was well forecast. I hope that a much better system is put in place for warnings in the future,” she said, adding that in many countries it is unclear where the responsibility lies for dealing with severe flooding and other extreme weather events.  

Roads, houses and bridges were unable to withstand the severe floods in Rhineland-Palatinate and North Rhine-Westphalia, two of the worst hit states. 

“Our infrastructure appears unable to change as fast as the climate is changing. This is the crux of the problem. We need to create agility and flexibility in how we design, manage, finance, and govern infrastructure,” Mikhail Chester, environmental engineering professor at Arizona State University, told Climate Home News.  

Examples of effective infrastructure built to withstand flooding include Kuala Lumpur’s Smart Tunnel, which doubles as a traffic and stormwater tunnel, and The Netherlands’ Room for the River programme which restores natural floodplains, he said.

Severe flooding in Meckenheim, near Bonn in Germany, on 14 July 2021 (Photo: Lars Lowinski/Twitter)

It is critical that governments incorporate climate risks, including increased rainfall and rising river levels, into planning regulations and infrastructure design, Fowler said. According to a recent review, efforts to do this remain in their infancy around the world.

One country that has adopted this mindset is the Netherlands, according to Fowler. The country’s southern provinces experienced extreme rainfall, but towns were not completely submerged and there were no fatalities.

“They have really thought about both climate change and preparing for flooding events. They have managed their systems so that they anticipate changes a decade ahead and ensure that they reduce the risk to the population from flooding,” Fowler said.

To increase their resilience to floods, countries could look to construct additional reservoirs and lakes upstream or natural flood management features, such as leaky dams, which slow down the flow of water. It is not as simple as raising the river banks, Fowler said. “If they do overtop, the flooding becomes more severe. You can only protect up to a point.”

The post Fatal floods expose gaps in Germany’s disaster preparedness appeared first on Climate Home News.

Vilches, who grew up next to the river, is an activist for Mujeres Modatima, a Chilean organisation that fights to protect the water for local communities and exposes its illegal extraction by businesses and politicians.

“Here it is,” she said, as she stopped by a messy pile of dry branches. Underneath it lies an illegal well.   “Be careful,” she warned, looking in the direction of a nearby house, where people are watching. A hose can be seen going out in direction to the hills, which are covered in avocado plantations. Vilches knows these installations very well; agricultural companies use them to steal water from the river’s groundwater course.

She has reported water theft in Petorca to the authorities for years and has received death threats as a result. “People have followed me to my house to intimidate me, and painted death threats in the place where I work. They can paint over every wall they want because they’ll never paint over my dignity!” she told Climate Home News.

Dry wells

Vilches’ home province of Petorca, which is located 200 kilometres north of the Chilean capital Santiago, is facing a severe water crisis due to the explosive growth of large-scale avocado farming. This water-intensive production has dried up local rivers and forced many smallholder farmers to leave the area.

“Here I used to have all sorts of fruit trees. And we traded them for cheese or milk from our neighbours who had goats. When we were sick, we didn’t go to the pharmacy. We strolled down to the riverside to pick up medicinal herbs. Now we have to buy everything from the stores,” said Vilches.

In the midst of a 10-year drought, the longest ever to hit the country, most of the available water in the rural areas of Petorca goes towards avocado production [source?], while the provincial government has to buy and deliver water to more than 6.000 people in rural communities by truck, 20% of the province’s population. The quality of this water is not guaranteed. Petorca residents have reported an increase in diseases such as gastritis or urinary infections, which they attribute to the lack of water and its unreliable quality. [Source? Can you include some links to studies that highlight a link between these diseases and inadequate water supply]

The root of this distribution problem lies in Chile’s Constitution and Water Code, both written in 1981 under a military dictatorship. Under this legislation, water was privatised and tradeable water rights were granted for free and in perpetuity.

This system distributed water without taking into account future hydrologic scenarios and climate challenges. Chile is on a clear desertification path, with dry weather advancing south every year.

“The decrease of rain and snowfall is a clear trend in this part of Chile. But if we combine it with the unplanned overuse of water for agricultural exports, we are accelerating a process of desertification that advances south, and Petorca is starting to show signs of a semi-arid climate,” Ariel Muñoz, investigator in the Centre for Climate and Resilience Research (CR2), told Climate Home News.

“If we keep extracting water, the reserves will end, and similar scenarios are developing in other parts of the country,” said Muñoz. “Petorca is an example of how critical it can get if we don’t redistribute water and plan with every need and scenario in mind.”

Currently in Petorca, big agricultural companies control more water rights, than what is currently available. When avocado producers require more than their current water allotment, they take it illegally [source].

A new constitution

Communities are hopeful that a new constitution will dismantle water privatisation in Chile and ensure fair distribution.

4 July 2021 will be remembered as a historic day in Chile. An indigenous woman, Elisa Loncon, assumed the presidency of a convention to write Chile’s new constitution. 155 citizens were elected to the constitutional convention earlier this year, following massive protests demanding structural changes.

While Loncon gave her inaugural speech, water rights activist Carolina Vilches, one of the elected citizens, watched in the audience. “Water for everyone! Justice for Petorca!” she shouted as her name was called.

Carolina Vilches works along with Verónica at Mujeres Modatima. She, and representatives from other communities facing water rights challenges, managed to secure a seat in the convention, which started work immediately. They hope that the new foundational text will help abolish the current model of water privatisation, and establish access to water as a human right under the Chilean constitution.

“It’s important that voices which have never been listened to, have a space in the construction of a new country. I will give my all to convey the voice of my community in the convention,” she told Climate Home News.

She said she will work to ensure that no private water scenarios remain in the new constitution, and that the right to water and the rights of nature are recognised.

“In this constitutional convention, we see a new opportunity to trigger other necessary changes in the way that water is managed, and to establish the access to water as a human rights issue. Our colleague Carolina Vilches is representing us in that space, while we keep our work on the ground which is where we set the foundations for our demands,” Lorena Donaire, another Mujeres Modatima activist, told Climate Home News.

The case for 100 litres

Rural communities in Petorca were already facing severe water shortages when the coronavirus pandemic hit. While the World Health Organization (WHO) recommends a minimum of between 50 and 100 litres of water per day per person, people in Petorca received just 20 litres of water a day, according to a report by the National Human Rights Institute.

Communities and human rights institutions started taking legal action in May 2020, to demand the 100 litres recommended by the WHO.

One of the lawsuits got as far as the Supreme Court, which, in March 2021, ordered the government to meet the requirement. The ruling was seen to set an important legal precedent, but not as a permanent solution.

“In Chile, it’s difficult to enforce a ruling as there is no established mechanism, or organism in charge of following up”, said Pilar Moraga, deputy director at the Centre for Environmental Law at the University of Chile. In a similar case regarding contamination and health issues in the same region, the government is yet to obey a two-year-old Supreme Court ruling.

“In addition, delivering water by truck is not a sustainable way to provide water to the community, and there is no mention of the required quality of the water delivered,” said Moraga.

For many, the Constitution has to change, in order for there to be real transformation.

On the ground in Petorca, activists fight on, despite experiencing death threats and intimidation. Modatima women continue reporting water theft, and planning actions to seek climate justice abroad [where and how?], as many people still get less than 100 litres of water a day despite the Supreme Court ruling.

Verónica Vilches and her colleagues created a distribution network during the pandemic, to bring water to those who live in isolated regions. Other localities have raised funds and organised collaborative initiatives to finance temporary water solutions.

“We help each other out and invent what we can to survive. But there is no support, everything comes from our own willpower, and every day is a struggle. We need real change. This is no drought. The water has been stolen from us and we need it to be returned to the land and to the people,” she said.

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Pemex said a lightning storm ignited a gas leak from an underwater pipeline. “There was no oil spill and the immediate action taken to control the surface fire avoided environmental damage,” the company said in a statement.

Campaigners disagree, demanding an investigation into the environmental and climate damage caused by the fire. But with little faith in the Mexican authorities, they are looking to regional allies to hold Pemex to account.

Greenpeace Mexico accused Pemex, the state-owned company operating the pipeline, of causing “ecocide” in the Gulf of Mexico, citing the toxic properties and climate impact of methane gas. It blamed the rupture on ageing, poorly maintained infrastructure.

Pablo Ramirez, an energy and climate campaigner for Greenpeace Mexico, told Climate Home News that it was impossible to calculate the carbon footprint of the gas leak because there is no public information about the amount of gas usually transported by the pipeline. He described the lack of transparency in Mexico’s energy sector as “very problematic”.

Lorne Stockman, senior research analyst at Oil Change International, said the pipeline could have been leaking for a while before the gas caught fire. The global heating impact of methane is 84 time higher over 20 years than that of carbon dioxide, which is produced when it is burned. “Until and unless we get more information from Pemex, we won’t know how bad this was,” he said.

“This is just the latest example of how the oil and gas industry pollutes with impunity, and why we must work to shut it down as soon as possible,” said Stockman. “If this gas had not caught fire and caused this visual spectacle, most people would not have heard about it… But it’s clear that we cannot end the fossil fuel age quickly enough to mitigate the damage it is causing.”

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At a local level, Greenpeace raised concerns about the harm leaked methane could have caused to marine life. 

“The gas can rapidly penetrate the bodies of fish, doing direct damage to gills, skin, chemoreceptors and eyes, and filling up the gas bladder, making the fish unable to control its buoyancy,” Ramirez said. “Shellfish are also killed by exposure to gas.”

If fish are exposed to gas concentrations of 1 mg per litre they show signs of acute poisoning within 20 minutes and die within two days, he added.

Shocking footage of the enormous fireball, dubbed “eye of the fire”, sparked international criticism on social media, including from youth activist Greta Thunberg. 

“Meanwhile the people in power call themselves ‘climate leaders’ as they open up new oilfields, pipelines and coal power plants – granting new oil licenses exploring future oil drilling sites. This is the world they are leaving for us,” she wrote on Twitter.  

Mexico’s president Andrés Manuel López Obrador has bet heavily on the fossil fuel industry, describing oil as “the best business in the world.” He has dismissed renewable energy sources, referring to wind turbines as “visual pollution.”

The head of Mexico’s oil and gas safety regulator ASEA, Angel Carrizales, tweeted that the incident “did not generate any spillage”.

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Energy analyst Poppy Kalesi told Climate Home News that it was unlikely that Pemex would be held accountable by Obrador’s government or ASEA. 

Mexico has one of the most comprehensive regulatory frameworks for methane emissions on paper, but in practice it remains difficult to implement, Kalesi said. “ASEA has neither the authority nor the competence or capacity to conduct environmental audits on Pemex’s platforms and equipment.”

As a state-owned company with close ties to the government and without investor pressure, Pemex has no interest in building up competence to evaluate its methane performance, she added. 

Kalesi said the US and Canada could exert pressure on the Mexican government to hold Pemex accountable under the 2016 “three amigos” energy deal, in which the three countries pledge to produce 50% of their power by 2025 from renewable energy sources. 

“What the US and Canada can and should do is to use both their purchasing power and political pressure to give a hook to the Mexican government to hold Pemex accountable,” Kalesi said.

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“Honestly, if I were a fish, I wouldn’t stay in this mess. We have been in this trouble for four months,” Duman adds.

Turkey is facing a major outbreak of “sea snot”: a thick, slimy substance also known as marine mucilage that floats on the surface.

Outbreaks have become increasingly common in recent decades, linked to rising ocean temperatures, untreated waste, and stagnant water. Mucilage is made up of overgrown phytoplankton, a microscopic algae. It contains microorganisms that harm marine life by sucking up oxygen in the water.

The authorities launched a 22-point action plan last week to clean up the sea in seven provinces along the coast of Marmara.

A thousand people and over 70 ships have taken part in the cleaning operation at 77 different locations. The workers have vacuumed up tonnes of the stuff from the sea surface since last week. The collected mucilage is sent for disposal.

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But the sea snot keeps coming, making it impossible to fish, says fisher Turgay Ozcan. “Not only the surface but the seabed has also been fully covered by the mucilage. The mucilage has clogged up our nets so we cannot catch fish. It takes us days to clean our nets from this slimy substance. It has almost brought an end to the fishing industry here.”

Ali Sari, the head of the fisheries cooperative in Izmit province, tells Climate Home: “We noticed smaller amounts of mucilage for many years. However, we have seen these extreme amounts since 2007. It affects the fishing industry adversely. Vessels couldn’t fish this year due to the massive amount of pollution in the sea. I can say that the fishermen made a loss of 80%. We need the government’s help.”

Scientists say the outbreak could have a longer term effect on fish stocks.

“In recent months, many fish died from the lack of oxygen in the Marmara, because the sea snot sucks up the oxygen in the water and suffocates marine life. Fish and other sea animals are not able to live there, “ says Meric Albay, professor at the faculty of aquatic sciences at Istanbul University.

“The large diversity of the sea creatures were really affected by this, even fish were unable to complete their migration. I think that there will be a serious problem especially in fish stocks next year due to their inability to lay eggs and reproduce,” says Albay.

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Ilayda Zorlu, a 22-year-old law student who lives on the southern coast of the Marmara Sea, tells Climate Home that the entire sea is covered by a white substance.

“The ships seemed to be standing on land. Nobody understood what happened to our sea. We threw a pebble into the sea, it didn’t sink and lay on the surface of the layer of white substance. I took a photo and tagged Greenpeace in order to do something,” Zorlu says.

“We don’t eat fish from the sea any longer. Normally we swim in the sea every day at this time of year but now we don’t. We fear getting skin cancer due to the polluted water and we think the water we swallow while swimming might damage our visceral organs. It’s good to stay away from the sea and sea products for a while, I think,” she adds.

Italian researchers have found large volumes of bacteria in mucilage, including pathogenic strains not found in the surrounding seawater.

The Turkish government plans to designate the entire Marmara Sea as a protected area by the end of the year. Environment and urbanisation minister Murat Kurum said that after hundreds of inspections, a thermal facility, a fertiliser factory, and three shipyards have been closed. Fines totalling 10 million Turkish lira ($1.16 million) have been imposed on 55 facilities and nine ships that discharged pollution and untreated waste into the sea.

The cleanup operation, which will take three to five years, provides hope for the future of the Marmara Sea, marine scientist Albay says: “If you give a chance to the ecosystem by preventing pollution, overfishing, and protecting the area, the sea will recover itself.”

The post An outbreak of ‘sea snot’ is killing Turkey’s fishing industry 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.

Ministers from 11 African countries in the Sahel region met virtually on Monday to take stock of progress in implementing the Great Green Wall, an ambitious vision to create a 15 kilometre wide and 8,000 kilometre long strip of vegetation across Africa.

In recent decades, severe droughts and overgrazing have turned the edge of the semi-arid Sahel – one of the poorest regions in the world – into a desert. Launched in 2007, the Great Green Wall aims to reverse the trend.

But the initiative’s first comprehensive status report found the pace of land restoration needs to more than quadruple over the next decade to meet its goal of restoring 100 million hectares of land and creating 10 million green jobs.

In a statement, ministers from Burkina Faso, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sudan and Chad said the initiative was “one of the levers for achieving the post-Covid economic recovery”.

“Now is the time to reinvigorate the Great Green Wall to stimulate the economy that has been ravaged by the pandemic,” Nigerian environment minister Mohammad Mahmood Abubakar told reporters in a press conference. Nigeria, he said, had committed additional funding to the imitative as part of its recovery package.

The ministers called on the private sector to “significantly contribute” to implementing the initiative and for the support of international organisations such as the Green Climate Fund, the Global Environment Facility and the African Development Bank Group.

Countries promise green recovery at Japanese virtual summit, keep quiet on fossil bailouts

The progress report by French firm Climatekos found that, since 2007, nearly 18 million hectares of land have been restored in the wider Sahel region, with around two thirds of that located in Ethiopia. That is expected to store an estimated 300 million tonnes of carbon in the soil and in woody biomass to 2030.

However, most of the restored land is located outside the Great Green Wall demarcation area. Only 4 million hectares of the 154 million hectares of the Great Green Wall’s intervention zone have so far been restored – accounting for only 4% of the 2030 target to restore 100 million hectares of land.

Progress on other objectives is also falling behind. In the decade to 2018, the report found the initiative generated $90 million of revenues and created 335,000 direct and indirect jobs in agriculture and pastoral activities, water and soil conservation – meeting just over 3% of 2030 objective.

Amina Mohammed, deputy secretary general of the United Nations, said the Great Green Wall should have yielded more results in the 13 years since the initiative has been running.

“This has been a great initiative that has not seen the investments that we should have had,” she told reporters.

“The Great Green Wall is a huge economic corridor of opportunity… it provides the solution to properly respond and recover” from the economic fallout of Covid-19 “by turning this time of crisis into a time of large-scale investments,” she said. She added the UN would help leverage funding from other international partners.

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Jonathan Davies, global drylands coordinator at the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), told Climate Home News the high-level backing for reversing land degradation was “remarkable”. “Now the trick is to translate that political support into action. There is an opportunity to act now,” he said.

To achieve the Great Green Wall’s 2030 goals, the report found that 8.2 million hectares needed to be restored every year at a cost of up to $4.3 billion annually.

“These are enormous amounts,” said Louis Perroy, partner at Climatekos and author of the report. Insufficient coordination at the regional and national levels, concerns about tree survival rates and a lack of funding from the private sector are barriers to progress, he said.

Speaking to reporters ahead of the ministerial event, Perroy said funding had been “overall insufficient and unpredictable” with 90% of the money committed so far coming though international organisations and only 10% from member states.

“There is a need to go beyond traditional grant-based, short-term development intervention. It is also important to slowly get the private sector involved,” he said.

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Security is a concern in large parts of the Sahel, including in Mali, which together with Niger accounts for half of the Great Green Wall’s total area. In Mali, soldiers ousted president Ibrahim Boubacar Keita last month amid escalating violence in the country’s north.

Nigerian minister Abubakar added that the lack of jobs and economic opportunities for young people in the Sahel made them more likely to be recruited by extremists groups.

To address security issues, Marieme Bekaye, Mauritania’s minister of the environment, said the Great Green Wall needed to become part of the economic strategy of each Sahel countries and a national priority.

“The challenge to implement the Great Green Wall is to integrate it in all sectors… at the international, national and regional level. We really need to stop working in silos,” she said.

The post African ministers call for investment in Great Green Wall to aid Covid-19 recovery appeared first on Climate Home News.

The subsistence farmers and their families collect the urine they pass – most even keep a plastic vessel in their bedroom for use at night – and store it in containers where it matures and turns into a fertiliser worth about $0.47 a litre, cheaper than chemical rivals.

The system is a shift from the use of pit latrines where the urine seeps away into the ground.

“This fertiliser is very effective on crops, it works just like most of the chemical fertilisers and it quickly reacts on the crops as opposed to the chemical fertilisers,” said Mark Folopenzi, a 45-year old farmer at Neno who lives with his wife and three children.

Malawi has a largely agricultural economy, with more than 80% of its population in rural areas and earning a living through subsistence, rain-fed crops including maize, sorghum, pulses and millet. The country is the sixth poorest in the world.

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In a bid to improve agricultural productivity among subsistence farmers, the government of Malawi has since 2005 been implementing the Farm Input Subsidy Programme (FISP), which has been lauded for increasing maize yields and rural incomes.

The programme, which targets around one million of the country’s 11 million smallholder farmers, has cost 288.9 billion kwacha ($393.6 million). However, despite this expenditure, the programme has not necessarily empowered subsistence farmers, as year in and year out they seek relief from government due to hunger as a result of unpredictable weather patterns.

High population growth, deforestation and erosion make the economy especially vulnerable to worsening climate change. The impact of erratic rains, prolonged dry spells and severe floods has been aggravated by a lack of agricultural resources, including fertilisers.

While farmers face many challenges, the biggest cause of crop failure is low rainfall and low nutrients in the soil. Maize, the country’s staple crop, demands lots of nutrients, and growing the plant without fertilisers is difficult.

A study by the International Food Policy Research Institute found that while subsidising fertiliser prices increases use, yields, and household income, it discourages use of organic-based materials and methods to maintain soil fertility.

With the ever-rising cost of chemical fertilisers, subsistence farmers in Malawi have been finding it hard to afford chemical fertilisers, and they have been trying to find affordable and sustainable alternatives – such as urine.

(Photo: Madalitso Kateta)

Folopenzi said the introduction of Bionitrate fertiliser, which is made by maturing human urine in plastic containers, has helped farmers amid the ever-rising costs.

“We can’t grow crops without applying fertilisers as we used to some fifteen years ago. The soil has over the years lost its fertility and growing crops without fertiliser results in bad harvest and hunger,” said Folopenzi.

“This [Bionitrate] fertiliser is very good and we are excited that we can also save a lot of money if we can produce our own fertiliser from the urine we can collect at home,” he said.

Sabawo Chikuni, another farmer from Neno, was previously worried the Bionitrate fertiliser was unhygienic and could be infected with parasites. But having seen its effects, he now plans to use the fertiliser in the winter cropping season.

“I previously had negative feelings on the use of human urine on crops. I felt like this could not be a better alternative to chemical fertilisers. But looking at how the maize in the gardens of farmers that are using this fertiliser has grown, I believe government could be doing us justice if it promoted this fertiliser,” he said.

Bionitrate fertiliser is being championed by Environmental Industries, a private non-profit company that has been working with different local and international organisations in Malawi to promote the use of biotechnology and produce fertilisers which are economically sustainable, environmentally friendly, and safe to use.

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Goodfellow Phiri, director at Environmental Industries, said Bionitrate fertilisers are safe to use and do not pose any health hazards, despite health and ethical questions raised by some farmers.

He told Climate Home News that before the urine is turned into fertiliser, it ages and the chemical processes in the urine turn it from an acid to an alkaline, making the product very salty and not habitable for germs.

“In the alkaline state, the PH is beyond seven and the product is salty. In this salty state, all the germs are dead and the fertiliser is odorless and free from germs. However, if mishandled during use, it can be contaminated,” said Phiri.

The fertiliser also helps conserve the soil by raising its PH through its chemical composition, giving it the same effect as agricultural lime on acidic soils.

Phiri’s company collects 40 litres of urine a day and matures 14,600 litres of Bionitrate urine per year. The Bionitrate urine is sold at K350.00 ($0.47) per litre as opposed to the K470.00 ($0.64) per kilo for chemical fertiliser. For an acre of maize, a farmer needs 50 litres of Bionitrate urine.

Urinals at “urine harvesters” are equipped with a urine trap which collects the urine into a 20-litre container, and the urine is later transferred into a 200-litre maturing tank before being packaged into 20-litre and five-litre containers.

(Photo: Madalitso Kateta)

Phiri said the company was currently training farmers on how to process their own urine rather than buy the liquid.

“Our goal is to train farmers on how to construct urine harvesters which can enable them to collect enough urine which they can turn into Bionitrate fertiliser. This is the only way we can make the farmers self-reliant as the cost of fertiliser keeps rising,” he said.

Apart from harvesting urine for fertiliser production, the farmers can create business opportunities by constructing public urine harvesting toilets, which they could charge to use, he said.

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“We are training farmers on how they can get maximum results from this natural fertiliser. However, the challenge that we are currently facing is low adoption because of mindset change towards fertilisers made from human waste,” he said, before adding that demand for Bionitrate fertiliser was steadily rising among subsistence farmers.

Environmental Industries has been working with the Global Environment Facility (GEF) and several non-governmental organisations. It is currently cooperating with the government of Malawi and seed companies to popularise Bionitrate fertiliser across the country.

“This is the right path for Malawi to follow, as the 42 billion Kwacha we spend annually on the Farm Input Subsidy Programme is too much considering that it only benefits one million farmers out of the 11 million active farmers,” said Phiri.

Masauko Dzumani, the Agricultural Extension Development Officer (AEDO) for Neno Extension Planning Area (EPA), said Bionitrate fertilisers were working on crops just as well as chemical fertilisers, and his office has been recommending farmers start using this natural fertiliser.

“We have been doing a trial of the effectiveness of the Bionitrate fertiliser and we have observed that the farmers that have been using it are having the same crops as those that have applied chemical fertilisers like calcium ammonium nitrate and nitrogen phosphorus and potassium,” said Dzumani.

For the farmers using Bionitrate, they have found an effective, cheap, way to sustain their crops.

And it all starts with a plastic pot by the bed.

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

The post Malawi’s farmers grow crops with ‘magic liquid’ fertiliser appeared first on Climate Home News.

Governments had been due to agree a global treaty in April to safeguard life in seas beyond the national jurisdiction of coastal states, a poorly regulated region accounting for two-thirds of the global ocean.

Over-fishing, shipping, plastic pollution and the potential of seabed mining are among the threats already affecting marine ecosystems. Meanwhile, climate impacts such as warming waters, rising acidity and shifting current patterns are also undermining the resilience of marine biodiversity.

A resolution adopted by consensus by the plenary meeting of the UN General Assembly on Wednesday agreed to postpone the talks to “the earliest possible available date” because of the coronavirus outbreak.

The fourth and final round of government negotiations had been due to take place at the UN headquarters in New York from 23 March to 3 April.

“Very sad but this is the right thing to do. We will be back and conclude our negotiations of this important new treaty to protect our oceans,” Catherine Boucher, legal advisor to Canada’s mission to the UN, wrote in a tweet.

Coronavirus delays global efforts for climate and biodiversity action

This is the latest of a number of climate and biodiversity meeting to be cancelled or postponed because of the virus.

Observers and delegates previously expressed concerns the March session would be unable to break deadlock between nations and that at least one more negotiating round would be needed. A UN document from February listing governments’ proposed changes to a draft treaty text runs to 350 pages.

There are currently few guidelines, for instance, for setting up marine protected areas in the high seas, which conservation experts say are necessary to prevent biodiversity losses. The Marine Conservation Institute estimates that only 1.2% of the high seas are in protected areas.

The negotiations, which started in September 2018, have so far made little progress on some of the most important issues. This includes the governance process to ensure rules on state and companies’ activities in the high seas are respected.

Sandra Schoettne, of Greenpeace’s Protect the Oceans campaign, told Climate Home News she hoped the postponement “doesn’t slow political momentum” and urged governments to “use the additional time wisely to adopt a treaty as robust as possible”.

“A bit more time to resolve some of the differences on the more tricky aspects of the negotiations is not a bad thing,” Callum Roberts, professor of marine conservation at the University of York, UK, told CHN.

“We don’t want to botch it by rushing,” he said. “And a poorly attended meeting wouldn’t help.”

Power structures over gender make women more vulnerable to climate change

One of the sticking points in the negotiations is about how to share any benefits from genetic resources found in the high seas, such as health supplements developed from Antarctic krill, or cosmetics from creatures found around thermal vents on the floor of the Pacific Ocean.

Developed nations generally favour allowing companies to benefit most from the findings since they are the ones taking the investment risks. Poorer nations say they should get a share of the benefits.

For Peggy Kalas, director of the High Seas Alliance, a network of organisations working to protect the high seas, one of the key questions is who will be responsible for taking management decisions in protected areas in the high seas.

“We cannot even predict or expect what will happen in the high seas in the future,” she said, citing a number of geoengineering activities and plans. “We want this agreement to be future-proof.”

“We would like the Conference of the Parties to take these decisions,” she told CHN, adding some countries preferred for sectoral authorities to be responsible for governance.

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Despite the number of issues left unresolved, Kalas said that if governments are able to advance their positions before the talks resume later this year, “this fourth meeting could be the final one”.

But the delay also means the re-scheduled meetings risks running into an already packed UN timetable on biodiversity this year.

This includes preparations for UN biodiversity talks in Kunming, China, in October when countries are due to agree on a global framework to protect the world’s plants and wildlife beyond 2020.

A number of countries have backed calls to protect at least 30% of the Earth’s lands and seas to halt the destruction of the planet’s biodiversity.

“The way to protect at least 30% of global oceans is by including the high seas,” Kalas said. “And to do that, you need this global ocean treaty.”

The post Coronavirus: UN delays talks on global ocean biodiversity treaty appeared first on Climate Home News.

At the outset of yam planting season in February last year, he secured a loan of 60,000 Naira ($166) to make up his budget for yam farming. The loan came with a commitment to repay after harvest in a few months’ time.

He prepared nearby land and hired labourers to raise 316 heaps in readiness for the early rains of March that mark the start of the planting season. The rain softens the land so the yam tubers can take root and not dry up.

But the rains didn’t come in March, except for a few drops that quickly evaporated. Confused, Okorie planted in early April – praying his work would succeed.

The rain came in May, but it was too heavy and frequent. Flash floods followed, submerging his farm, dissolving the ridges, and scattering the yam seedlings in the nearby bushes.

“I lost a lot last year and got into heavy debt,” says Okorie. “It wasn’t this way in the past. Rain came in its time. Sunshine came in its season. Same as harmattan [seasonal winds]. But the seasons are becoming mysterious.”

Michael Okorie says rural farmers lack knowledge of how to deal with weather variability driven by climate change

Okorie’s experience mirrors that of millions of other farmers, suffering from a sudden twist in weather conditions. Farmers report the late onset of rains and dry spells, rises in temperatures, heavy downpours and other unseasonable weather events – all potential consequences of climate change.

These changes have thrown out the normal seasons for planting, harvesting, weeding, applying fertilizers and storage.

The cost, experts warn, could be very high – particularly against the backdrop of an expected population boom, with Africa’s population set to double by 2050.

Feeding the population right now are smallholder farmers like Okorie, who produce around 90% of food in Nigeria, the most populous nation in Africa, according to figures from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. The changing seasons and population growth will put an incredible pressure on the continent’s food production.

While times are tough, there are technological solutions on the horizon. The innovations can’t come quick enough for Nigeria’s farmers like Okorie, and those they feed.

In many rural communities like Okorie’s Ohofia, 40 kilometers from the southeastern state-city of Enugu, a blend of foresight, intuition, natural experience and – many believe – consultation with deities, has ensured survival for decades.

In Nigeria, farming is largely based on natural conditions. Crops and livestock have their ideal weather and seasons. Okorie says he could look at the overcast sky and predict perfectly how the weather would go, and plan his farming activities accordingly. Information is key – shaping when to sow, store or reap.

“Because the natural conditions were perfect and predictable,” says smallholder farmer of 40 years, Elizabeth Ukah, “farmers were in control of what came out of their seasons.” Recent conditions mean there hasn’t been any other time in her life that she felt so helpless about the outcomes of her farms, she says.

Elizabeth Ukah

The farmers are working hard to adapt. When the weather started becoming mysterious, new farming, storage and farm practices were tested. The use of chemicals and fertilizers became widespread. Some left their crops longer in the ground. Others gambled with new planting, weeding and storage approaches.

There were some short-term successes, but the results were inconsistent, says Ukah, so people still felt helpless. The risks associated with the changing seasons are enormous.

A new study by Oxfam Nigeria and the West Africa Network for Peace-building Nigeria (WANEP) NGO has shown Nigeria’s economic productivity could decrease by up to 11% by 2020 and up to 30% by 2050 as a result of climate change.

“The truth is no farmers are safe in this land. We use to have enough harvest to feed our homes and sell abroad. But I am afraid that in the next ten years we may start importing food,” Okorie says.

Experts warn that rural farmers are poorly equipped to adapt to climate change. Many still don’t link the changing weather conditions to the climate crisis.

For Sunday Mpu, a local rice farmer from Ohofia’s neighbouring community, there can only be one explanation for all that’s happening to the weather – the end of times when God promised punishment upon a sinful world.

Other farmers agree, pointing to examples such as widespread conflicts and famine, as their pastor quotes from the book of Matthew nearby. “We are seeing the end of times” says Mpu, a key member of a local Pentecostal church in Nigeria.

Many farmers also think the solutions can only be spiritual.

“It is upon God to change control these things (the weather variations)” says Ukah. “For man cannot say when it would rain or stop. Or when the sun should shine.”

In part due to these entrenched views, the transition from traditional to more scientific approaches in dealing with how the climate is changing have been slow.

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Heavy dependence on nature driven agricultural practices – like rain-feeding crops – are the result of both a lack of alternatives and absence of technical know-how and infrastructure, according to Professor Balogun Ahmed of the Department of Meteorology and Climate Science at the Federal University of Technology, Akure.

This is because low-income groups, and rural communities lack access to “critical resources and decision-making processes,” he says, leaving people with “fewer options and more risk in the face of climate impacts.”

But there are some solutions on the horizon, with small-scale technology-focused programs already having some impact.

Terrence Ovie is working to help both farmers and traders deal with post-harvest losses connected to climate change.

Terrence Ovie of ColdHubs inspects vegetables stored in cool temperatures at a market in Owerri, Nigeria

His civil society organization, ColdHubs, helps rural farmers avoid post-harvest losses. Ovie has created over 30 cold storage facilities – the ‘cold hubs’ after which the NGO is named – across markets and villages.

Running on solar power, these storage facilities serve many smallholder farmers who can deposit their products for storage at low rate subscriptions, cutting post-harvest losses by 80% and extending the lifespan of fruits and vegetables from 2 to 21 days.

Coldhubs also raises awareness around issues affecting farmers, providing a model to deal with losses associated with food storage issues linked to climate change.

“The drive is to minimize the losses associated with farming at various food chain,” says Ovie. “Though it’s difficult because local people are used to the old ways. It is like changing a culture.”

Two years ago, 28-year-old Abdul Aminu subscribed to Coldhubs at one of their stations at a vegetable market on the outskirts of Owerri, the capital city of Imo state, in south-eastern Nigeria. For a crate of fruit or vegetable, he pays a daily fee is 100 Naira (about 30 US cents).

“I lost a lot of money in the past. Now, I buy in larger quantities because there is a suitable storage facility in the market,” says Aminu. “I make twice the amount I could have gotten from my sales. The preservation facility allows me to avoid losses associated with panic sales, common with vegetables because of their short span.”

Coldhubs is helping farmers cut post-harvest losses by 80 percent

While private initiatives like Coldhubs are working, Professor Ahmed says reviving Nigeria’s fortunes depends on a far more robust approach that would see the government partner the private sector in investing in climate adaption technologies, massive awareness programs, training for farmers, and addressing the underlying factors driving climate change.

According to Ahmed, Nigeria needs to double “investment in local capacity and infrastructure to support people harmed by climate impacts as they rethink or rebuild their lives and businesses.”

Nigeria needs to “develop new crop varieties, livestock breeds, and farm practices specifically designed to help farmers adapt to evolving climate realities,” he says.

Climatic realities that are changing by the year, and need many more innovations like Coldhubs to avoid farmers being left in the dust.

ColdHubs is helping farmers to store vegetables to keep them fresh

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

The post ‘Mysterious’ seasons harm Nigeria’s farmers who need help with climate change appeared first on Climate Home News.

The culprit, called sargassum, turns clear-blue sea water a murky brown and smells like rotten eggs when it washes ashore and starts to rot.

The seaweed is a natural occurrence on beaches in the Caribbean and elsewhere. It’s part of an ecosystem for fish, crabs and birds.

But it has proliferated dramatically in recent years, covering shores with thick layers of the weed and forcing tourism officials to clean it up so visitors keep coming.

It is an icky nuisance for tourists and an economic and environmental disaster.

“We came from over there, looking for a spot that is cleaner. But it is this way everywhere,” said Maria Guadalupe Vazquez, 70, pointing off into the horizon as she lounges in a beach chair in Miami Beach.

Authorities brought in trucks and front-loaders Friday to scoop the stuff up and haul it away. They know this is no long-term solution, however.

Bolsonaro under fire for deforestation denial, after sacking space agency chief

One problem is global warming – the hotter the ocean, the more these weeds reproduce, said Steve Leatherman, an environmental expert at Florida International University.

But the bigger problem is the Amazon river, he added.

Scientists say that starting around 2011, much more land along that mighty waterway was cleared for farming.

But it yields a poor, muddy red soil so farmers use a lot of fertiliser, which rains wash into the river, where it flows into the Atlantic. And the fertiliser ends up fertilising the sargassum.

“Now there’s 20, or 30, 50 times more, 100 times more than we’ve ever had before,” said Leatherman.

“We think this is going to be the new normal so we are going to have to find a way to deal with this, and it’s going to be difficult,” said Leatherman, aka Dr Beach, as he drove by piles of sargassum on Miami Beach.

The stuff is nothing new. When Christopher Columbus saw a bloom of sargassum to the east of the Bahamas, it was so thick he thought it was an island.

That was out at sea, however.

“What happens out in the Atlantic Ocean, it’s fine. But now this is an economic and environmental disaster,” said Leatherman.

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The pernicious effects are many: fishing boats have trouble starting their engines. Beaches are disgusting for tourists. Fish choke because the seaweed absorbs too much oxygen. Turtles struggle to find a place to lay eggs. When they do, the babies cannot make it from the shore out to sea. And dead seaweed sinks, smothering coral reefs.

No one has calculated how much damage is being done to countries’ fishing and tourism industries.

In the British Virgin Islands, the layer of seaweed is two meters thick. Punta Cana, a beach in the Dominican Republic that is famous for its clear water, has turned brown.

Barbados recently declared a national emergency. Mexico has called in the navy to restore the beauty of tourist hub Cancun.

“I don’t know what’s going on but it’s really not a good sight to see, you know what I’m saying? We’re tourists,” said Sed Walker, 48, who was visiting from Los Angeles.

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A study published in July by the University of South Florida in the journal Science concluded that the seaweed problem, which started in 2001 and showed peaks in 2015 and 2018, is here to stay.

Satellite imagery shows blooms of sargassum form at the mouth of the Amazon. From there it spreads across the Atlantic, from the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico to Africa.

Scientists named it the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt (GASB). In 2015 and 2018, it stretched over nearly 5,592 miles. In June of last year, its biomass exceeded 20 million tons.

The study blamed the sargassum explosion on discharges of fertiliser in the Amazon and natural nutrients along the coast of Africa.

“A critical question is whether we have reached the point where recurrent GASB and beaching events may become the new norm,” wrote Chuanmin Hu, the lead author of the study and a professor of optical oceanography at the university.

“Under continued nutrient enrichment due to deforestation and fertiliser use in agriculture,” Hu wrote, “the answer is likely positive.”

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“I can’t remember water levels being as low as what we’ve seen in recent years, it’s tragic”, says the pensioner, sporting a fisherman’s vest and cap for protection against the blazing sun.

“Further north, it’s even worse, the Vistula looks like puddles,” he told AFP on a part of the waterway passing through the capital Warsaw.

Hundreds of rivers in Poland are drying up little by little.

According to experts, the central European country of 38 million people risks a serious water crisis in the coming years.

Poland’s Supreme Audit Office (NIK) warned in a recent report that already there is only 1,600 cubic metres of water available for each Pole per year, which is only slightly more than the EU average.

“Our (water) resources are comparable to those of Egypt,” it said in the report bearing the ominous title: “Poland, European Desert”.

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Contrary to popular belief, Poland, which is located at the confluence of oceanic and continental climate zones, has never had much water.

It receives less rainfall than countries further west, while the rate of evaporation is comparable. Warmer winters with less snow mean that groundwater is not being replenished by spring melts.

And Poland captures little of this water, which experts say is a big part of the problem.

The result is that a vast strip of land across the country is slowly turning into steppe – semi-arid grass-covered plains, that threatens agriculture, forests and wildlife.

With climate change, more frequent droughts and only brief and often violent rainstorms, experts insist the situation is reaching a critical threshold.

“In 2018, a very, very dry year, water levels fell to 1,100 cubic metres per capita, per year, nearly below the safety threshold,” says Sergiusz Kiergiel, spokesperson for Wody polskie (Polish waters), the state institution responsible for water policy.

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The situation is likely to be even worse this year.

The Polish Hydrological Service sounded the alarm in July, warning that groundwater levels in 12 out of 16 Polish provinces could be too low to fill shallow wells.

Over 320 municipalities have already imposed water restrictions carrying heavy fines. Some have banned filling swimming pools, watering gardens or washing cars.

Skierniewice, a town of 47,000 people some 80 kilometres southwest of Warsaw, had to cut water in some districts in early June. For days, water was only available to ground-floor flats.

With no running water on upper floors, municipal authorities were forced to distribute ten-litre water bags to furious residents.

The shortages are triggering social conflict.

Residents of Sulmierzyce in central Poland accuse a local open pit brown coal mine of syphoning off water.

Harare: Two million in Zimbabwe’s capital have no water as city turns off taps

In Podkowa Lesna, a small leafy town near Warsaw, resident are up in arms against their neighbours in nearby Zolwin, whom they accuse of using too much water from a common source to water their gardens.

“Parts of the country are already experiencing hydrogeological drought – a situation when water doesn’t enter the deep layers of the soil and is not filtered in springs,” says Wody polskie’s Kiergiel.

Experts insist that capturing more water is crucial.

Lacking sufficient reservoirs, Poland retains only 6.5% of the water that passes through its territory, while Spain manages to keep nearly half.

To ward off a crisis, the government plans to spend 14 billion zlotys ($3.6 billion) to build around 30 holding tanks. These should double Poland’s water retention capacity by 2027.

Farmers will be able to build small tanks up to 1,000 cubic metres without special permits.

“We’re only just discovering that Poland has an issue with water… We thought it was a sub-Saharan Africa problem, not a European one,” says Leszek Pazderski, an environmental expert with Greenpeace Poland.

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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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Berlin-based think tank adelphi debunked the widely held idea that the lake is currently shrinking. While severe droughts in the 1970s and 80s shrunk the lake from a high-point of 25,000 sq km to 2,000 sq km in the 1990s, it has since grown to 14,000 sq km and remained relatively stable in the past two decades.

The findings draw on new analysis of 20 years of satellite imagery and long-term hydrological data from the Lake Chad basin, including ground measurements.

UN security council members mount new push to address climate threat

Previous satellite images underestimated the amount of water in the lake, in part because of the growth of plants that stood in the water, lead author Janani Vivekananda told Climate Home News.

“Different satellites give you different kind of information, and have limitations,” Vivekananda said. “Very often when you’re looking down from 30,000 feet, you miss information such as the water that’s under vegetation cover.” Researchers looked at laser satellite images to probe into the volume of water, she said.

The conflict and humanitarian crisis driven by the “shrinking” lake is often cited as a textbook example of climate change affecting security. But warming remains an important factor, according to the study, which also drew on 200 interviews with local communities.

Rising temperatures – up to one and a half times faster than the global average – and increasingly erratic rain patterns have created food insecurity, ultimately pushing communities into the arms of terrorist groups like Boko Haram or Islamic State West Africa Province.

“The unpredictability of rains means that people are just giving up,” Vivekananda said. “After the third or fourth failed harvest, not knowing when to switch from fishing to farming, the offer of a livelihood of food every day and business loans becomes more attractive.”

Lake Chad, which straddles Nigeria, Niger, Chad and Cameroon, is home to 17.4 million people. Around 10.7 million people require humanitarian assistance, with 5 million suffering from food insecurity. Some 2.5 million people have fled their homes.

Since 2009, violence in northeast Nigeria has boiled over into neighbouring Cameroon, Chad and Niger. A range of factors were feeding the region’s instability. Successive economic crises, divisive reforms and weak governance in the region, coupled with rising inequality and dismay at corruption among the ruling elite have created a hotbed for tensions.

Climate change, the report found, both worsened the conditions at the root of conflicts, and undermined communities’ ability to deal with them.

Where elders once used to serve as mediators in disputes, recurring war and heat waves have shredded the social fabric to such a point that this is no longer possible.

In the past, “two parties might go to an elder and agree to some kind of restitution,” Vivekananda said. “They might make amends by giving them a share of their next harvest. But these don’t work any more, because the influx of people – because of the conflicts and displacement – make it a very transient society.”

Competition over natural resources has also flared, as fertile land becomes scarcer.

Authors urged governments to incorporate climate resilience into their strategy for peacebuilding in the region. Among an array of solutions, the report suggested policymakers provide better hydrological information to communities so that they could plan around rain-falls. Also essential were investments into long-term infrastructure and better resource management.

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On the other hand, heavy-handed military responses, such as blanket bans to certain areas in an attempt to root out terrorist groups, have failed the region, provoking further displacement.

Lake Chad has long been the poster child of climate security. In 2015, Barack Obama urged military officials to “understand climate change did not cause the conflicts we see around the world. Yet, what we also know is that severe drought helped to create the instability in Nigeria that was exploited by the terrorist group Boko Haram.”

The United Nations Security Council is increasingly recognising the role of climate change in exacerbating conflict, particularly in West Africa and the Sahel region, where Lake Chad lies.

At a meeting of the security council in January, France and the UK were joined by Germany, Peru, Poland and Belgium in a call for a system to help them respond to climate security threats. France also called for the UN secretary general to deliver an annual report to the security council on the issue. Only Russia explicitly opposed the development of new UN capabilities.

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The government’s 25-year environment plan, published a year ago, sets out goals to clean the country’s air and water, increase its woodland, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and minimise waste, among other things. Now London is preparing an environment bill to replace European Union laws and regulation after it leaves the bloc.

That legislation will be key to making sure Britain doesn’t dilute its environmental protections from EU levels, and to replacing the European Commission’s policing role with a national watchdog, the independent audit office said.

Stoke’s potteries backed remain, now they want May’s deal to reshape climate policy

While agreeing with the government’s argument that Brexit offers opportunities to boost environmental protections, the NAO pointed to causes for concern too.

The upside is that Brexit could allow the government’s department for environment, food and rural affairs (Defra) to review the way performance is reported and monitored and assess whether it “all adds value” to broader UK goals, it said. The downside: Defra still needs to talk to other parts of the government to coordinate the approach.

“There is no clear, single point of ownership for performance as a whole across government on the 25-year environment plan, and more work is needed to embed environmental metrics into government’s core planning and performance monitoring,” the NAO said.

The prospect of the UK crashing out without a deal that would cover continued environmental stewardship was increased on Tuesday after prime minister Theresa May lost a vote in the parliament on the deal she had negotiated with the EU.

The new environmental watchdog is needed to fill a potential governance gap after Britain leaves the EU, since the European Commission has played a role in holding the government to account on environmental measures including air quality. However, indications in the government’s draft of the environment bill – that Defra would fund the watchdog and appoint its chair – raise questions about its independence, the auditors said.

Labour MP Mary Creagh, chair of the parliament’s Environmental Audit Committee, welcomed the NAO’s warning that environmental protections should not be weakened after Brexit.

“The 25-year environment plan must work across government departments to ensure transport, business and local government take their responsibility on the environment,” she said.

Brazil downgrades climate diplomacy in Bolsonaro shake-up

Environment secretary Michael Gove and May have both said the UK will have more power to fund and protect its environment after it leaves the EU. “We will use this opportunity to strengthen and enhance the protections our countryside, rivers, coastline and wildlife habitats enjoy, and develop new methods of agricultural and fisheries support which put the environment first,” May said in the 25-year plan.

Environmental advocates, however, worry the UK will lose backup measures and oversight from Brussels – which London is free to build upon – and that the environmental watchdog will lack the power to penalise any shortfalls.

The NAO said the UK’s track record and future outlook on environmental protections are mixed.

It’s a leader in developing data sources to report on progress towards the UN’s sustainable development goals, and its 2008 climate change law established a “robust framework” for measuring both the reduction of emissions and adaptation to changes in climate, it said. However, there is still a timelag in the data the government publishes on the sustainable development goals and there are questions about how well this information feeds into decision-making.

Climate Home News’ reporting on Brexit is supported by a grant from the European Climate Foundation. Please read our editorial guidelines for more details.

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An idea first mooted in 2010, the “hydromet” system has been slow to materialize, due to funding shortfalls and political tensions.

Officials at the Nile Basin Initiative told Climate Home News they are ready to start installing equipment in late 2019, subject to resolving legal issues.

“The system will help us to know how much water is available and where, to enable us have a water accountability system,” NB river basin management specialist Mohsen Alarabawy said. “This will help to enrich the dialogue we are having on cooperation.”

The plan, according to a draft work programme, is to establish 53 hydrological stations in select areas in the 10 countries, plus a central database for capturing and storing the observations.

This information will be shared with all the governments, to help them monitor changes in rainfall and water consumption, improve climate change adaptation plans, and prepare for climate-linked hazards like floods and droughts.

Valley dams offer half a hope to drought-hit Ugandan herders

The longest river in the world, the Nile drains around 10% of the African continent. Its catchment area is shared by Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, Burundi and Tanzania, and DR Congo.

That makes the river a theme for political interaction and more than once has jolted relations of riparian states that share the river with distinct variations, uses and interests.

Egypt and Ethiopia, and sometimes Sudan are the usual warring parties over the river’s waters; they have been at loggerheads since 2011, when Ethiopia started building the 6.5-gigawatt Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, set to be the largest dam in Africa.

While each country along the river has some hydromet capacity, NBI studies have found substantial gaps in the monitoring infrastructure.

“There are hydrologically important areas of the basin that are poorly monitored due to inadequate monitoring network; many monitoring stations are poorly equipped – some not operational for quite substantial periods of their history since establishment; many stations are not equipped with modern instruments that ensure more precise data collection and continuous and timely transmission of data,” one NBI brief reads.

Alarabawy said the system installation is expected to start later next year after officials from all countries have met to thrash out issues like how the regional database will communicate with national systems. A summit was planned in Kampala late last month but was indefinitely deferred due to organisational hiccups.

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The pressures over the river are rising every day, with high population growth, climate change, infrastructure development, and environmental degradation.

The World Bank and European Union are funding establishment of the hydromet system.

The two development partners have also been pushing the riparian countries to strike a middle ground on the new Cooperative Framework Agreement (CFA) that espouses equitable utilisation of the river, and seeks to replace the colonial agreements that granted Egypt and Sudan veto powers on how other countries use the river’s waters. The CFA was adopted in Entebbe in 2010.

The CFA was signed by Rwanda, Uganda, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Burundi and Kenya to work towards attaining a greater share of the Nile shares, but Egypt and Sudan declined, insisting on the colonial-era agreements which grants them bigger shares of the Nile water.

In 1929 Britain (then colonizing, and on behalf of Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania) negotiated an agreement granting Egypt 75% share (55.5 billion cubic meters), and in 1959 negotiated another agreement granting Sudan 25% (18.5 billion cubic meters) of the river’s total flow, on the assumption that the upstream countries can rely on other sources like rain or underground aquifers.

According to these older deals, upstream countries cannot undertake any activities, say irrigation or dam construction, which could significantly affect Egypt’s or Sudan’s allocated water quotas without first notifying and presenting detailed impact studies to Cairo.

Why UN climate science reports have Africa-shaped gaps

Uganda’s permanent secretary in the ministry of water and environment, Alfred Okot Okidi, described the hydromet as “a step in the right direction”. It will help to build on the ongoing discussions for a better water-sharing regime and better prepare of climatic variations like floods and drought, which are prevalent in the basin, he said.

According to the last published State of the Nile Basin report, the Nile Basin is highly vulnerable to the impacts of global warming owing to a multiplicity of factors, and the basin communities have limited ability to cope with the negative impacts of climate variability.

“Nile flows are very sensitive to small changes in average basin rainfall, but the Nile Basin consists of a number of distinct sub-basins that each respond quite differently to possible climatic variations,” the 2012 report says.

The senior regional climate changer advisor on trans-boundary water cooperation in the Nile basin at the German development agency, Michael Menker Girma told CHN: “You can look at the hydromet in two aspects: one, the climate change variability, and two we don’t have a regional/African model for climate change projects so having such data can help us to have a starting point, like in this case specifically on the Nile.”

While climate variability is an issue of concern, Girma said the basin’s main problem is the booming population in all countries, which means pressure on available water means in the not-so-distant future, and the decline in water quality due to increased pollution and urbanisation.

“The system will help in knowing how much water is available: if countries work together towards how it is used, they can use it efficiently,” Girma said.

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

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The dam in Moroto district, northeastern Uganda, attracts herders with cows, goats, sheep, donkeys and camels from far and wide. Up to 5 million animals a day drink and graze nearby.

Simon Lomonyang trekked 50 kilometres here with his cattle from neighbouring Amudat district, and plans on staying for a week as he and his sons pondered their next move.

“I don’t think I will go back home soon,” the father of five says, in between barking orders to his sons as they herd their 40 head of cattle. “I came here for water, but there is not enough pasture so I have to go to another area but we don’t know where.”

With conditions getting worse, Lomonyang foresees his sons and grandsons traveling even longer distances in search of good grazing land.

This is part of Karamoja, a hotspot for climate change impacts bordering on Kenya and South Sudan. For decades, the sub-region has been stereotyped, marginalised, and ostracized, seen by the rest of the country as a no-go zone. Although that is changing, thanks in part to a steady flow of donor-funded recovery programmes, the journey to walk remains long.

Heavy rains and blocked drains: Nairobi’s recipe for floods

Far from the urban centres, bustling with aid workers, out here the people face a double tragedy: extreme climate variations and chronic poverty.

During rainy seasons rivers flood, gardens are submerged and roads are cut off for days. When the sun shines shines, pastoral communities roam – sometimes across the border to Kenya – in search of water for their animals. Competition for grazing land has often sparked conflict between rival tribes.

Since the 1960s, average temperatures in the region have risen by 1.3C, while the number of extreme hot days increased 20-28%.

In the last twenty years, a plethora of development programmes have aimed to boost Karamoja’s prospects, variously focusing on health, education, infrastructure, livelihood restoration, food security and climate change.

But they are not always well received. “Most have been carelessly implemented,” complains Francis Kiyonga, a local councillor in Amudat district.

“We cannot talk about policies while structures for implementation of the projects are lacking,” Kiyonga says.  “Most of the activities, including sensitisation of people about what needs to be done, are thriving in district towns/urban centres but you go down [in Amudat] and talk about climate change, the majority of the people are clueless, and yet they are the most at risk.”

During the recent 2017-18 drought, Kiyonga said the entire Karamoja sub-region lost 2,000 head of cattle “and if pastoralists had not moved to areas with water, more heads would have died”.

A boy herds cattle in Karimoja, Uganda (Pic: Daily Monitor)

The government promotes valley dams as a way of conserving water. They are a partial solution, but their long-term viability is doubtful.

Kobebe’s construction in 2011 certainly changed the dynamics of the area. Pastoralists who previously migrated downriver to Teso sub-region in times of drought, clashing with its regular inhabitants, can instead camp out by the reservoir. But there is another source of tension: the water source attracts herders from Turkana, across the border in Kenya. The Ugandan military is usually on standby.

While the dam offers a buffer against variable rainfall, its usefulness still depends on the weather. Already in the extreme droughts of 2014 and 2015, the 2.3 billion-litre capacity Kobebe reservoir dried up completely and the dam started cracking. As temperatures rise, water stored in this way will evaporate more quickly.

The Ugandan government has secured €20 million ($23m) from the German government, through the seven-member Intergovernmental Authority on Development (Igad), to build three large valley dams in Moroto, Kotido, and Kaabong.

Separately the €150m ($170m) multi-sectoral Development Initiative for Northern Uganda (Dinu), funded by the EU, German, British and Ugandan governments, will bring smaller “valley tanks” to each parish in Amudat and Moroto.

District officials questioned whether this was the most appropriate intervention, grumbling to CHN about a lack of consultation on the ground. Researchers from Nairobi and Makerere universities found in a 2014 study most valley dams had little community buy-in and as a result were poorly managed.

European Union officials in Kampala referred the matter to the Uganda authorities for comment. Ugandan officials insisted wide-ranging consultations were carried out in all areas set to benefit from the project. Those complaining are “selfish individuals,” they said, who want specifically tailored programmes for their areas that resources don’t permit.

Officials also indicated that consultations on the Igad-funded project are ongoing.

Climate change impacts are compounded by other environmental problems. Trees are being cut down for fuel faster than they regrow. Pastoralists periodically burn the bush as a method of pest control. Lately, there has been a surge in mining activity.

Chebet Maikut, head of climate change in the ministry of water and environment, said government and development partners were pursuing measures like tree-planting too. As temperatures continue to rise, though, it is a race against time.

“Karamoja and the entire cattle corridor (from south western Uganda to the north east) are already on the brink,” Maikut said. “Any increase in temperatures, as it is expected, however minor it gets, will just shatter livelihoods.”

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

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Over a three-year period, weather stations across the Western Cape recorded 30-50% less rainfall than average.

In the absence of human-caused global warming, the region would have been hit by a severe dry spell like this once every three centuries, according to the report from the World Weather Attribution (WWA) consortium of scientists.

Now, with the world having warmed 1C since the industrial age began, Cape Town’s 3.7 million residents and its city planners can expect a drought of this scale roughly once every century.

If the world warms to 2C – the agreed upper limit of the Paris climate deal and a likely scenario as governments drag their heels – a drought like this would happen roughly once every 33 years.

“Preparing for more of the same would be wise,” said Friederike Otto, lead author of the study and deputy director at Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute.

As reservoirs dried up, the city authorities came close to shutting off water supplies completely: “Day Zero”. But a huge civil effort to curb consumption averted that emergency measure.

Report: Pakistani senator calls for climate cooperation with India amid water crisis

During and after Cape Town’s water crisis, commentators argued that climate change may be to blame for the drought, but Cape Town’s water problems were largely of its own making.

“Too often, in Africa and globally, actions to manage risk kick in only after a drought bites,” said Maarten van Aalst, director of the Red Cross Red Crescent climate centre, which works with the WWA.

“With nearly a million and a half people added to the world’s urban population every week, city authorities need to update plans for managing water to take account of how risks are changing.”

Climate change does not cause individual weather events, but in a warmer world, certain events have long been predicted to become more likely.

The WWA group looks at real world events and runs them through climate models of warmed and un-warmed worlds. They can then compare the frequency of similar events with and without humanity’s carbon intervention.

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Leading Indian thinktank Niti Aayog warned in a report this month that 600 million citizens faced high to extreme water stress. It did not have data for Jammu & Kashmir, the state the Indus flows through into Pakistan, but drinking water shortages have been reported.

In Pakistan, the meteorological department has issued a drought warning across most of the country. In the southeastern province Sindh, The News Pakistan reports 60% of the mango harvest was damaged in the worst drought for 25 years. Reservoirs are low and farmers planting less cotton in the parched soil, reports the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Sherry Rehman, opposition leader in Pakistan’s senate, told Climate Home News the two countries should treat it as a security priority.

Sherry Rehman (Pic: Atlantic Council)

“Climate change is a threat that respects no boundaries and South Asia is now one of the most vulnerable regions. It is alarming that Pakistan and India are both way behind in formulating a comprehensive plan to tackle climate change,” she said.

“More than ever before, we must look at climate change as an issue of survival and start to understand the expansion of what security means in order to see the importance of moving beyond its traditional concepts.”

Report: Indian authorities claim progress in campaign to end heatwave deaths

Pakistan signed a national water policy in April. With pressures of Indian dam-building upriver, population growth and climate change, the agrarian economy is now stretched at a 30-day water reserve capacity compared to the 1,000-day recommended standard.

The policy promised to double the country’s storage capacity to 28 million acre-feet (34.5 billion cubic metres), securing the long-term viability of the Indus basin, its primary source of water.

Executive director of Islamabad-based thinktank SDPI, Abed Saleri, said: “In a country where we have divided opinions and polarization on almost all major issues, it is a great step forward that at least there is one central policy on water issues.

“Our per capita availability of water has already dropped; we are using 77% of our available water resources so in that context at least having a water policy is a good omen.”

Fears for water security are an ongoing source of tension with India, which controls water levels through a series of upriver dams.

Pakistani officials raised concerns with the World Bank in May about the recently inaugurated Kishanganga hydroelectric plant, claiming it violated the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty. The bank reportedly refused to refer their complaint to the international court of arbitration.

“It is particularly important for Pakistan and India to address climate change in every forum available, including the Indus Waters Treaty, considering that we both share a depleting water basin,” said Rehman, who is a member of the left-wing Pakistan People’s Party.

India’s water ministry, on the other hand, maintains it is under-using its share of the water, and Indian policy expert Brahma Chellaney has called the deal lop-sided, saying India traded away most of its water for peace.

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Bilal Khalid, head of the climate and water program at LEAD, told Climate Home News the timing of river flows was as important as the total volume of water.

“The problem is really with the temporal availability of water. For example, we are very sensitive in terms of the sowing season of our crops,” he said, with a difference of just a few days hitting crop yields by up to 20-30%.

“So those can have very major implications for the food security and also the livelihoods of the downstream population in Pakistan.”

Khalid added climate change was increasing the strain on a water treaty that has withstood three conflicts between the South Asian nations.

“There is a point which people are becoming increasingly vocal about: at the time of the formulation of the treaty, there were issues that were not there, for example, climate change. It is a very important issue that the treaty does not really talk about.”

Major Himalayan glaciers like the Kolahoi are receding, slashing the seasonal run-off into rivers that supply India and Pakistan. At the same time, more frequent and intense heat waves make water evaporate more quickly from the soil. A global record of 50.2C for the hottest April day was recorded in Nawabshah, Pakistan this year.

“There is a need to engage in dialogue with India to figure out these issues that were not there before. How can they be incorporated in to the treaty – because really, the issue is that net water will start reducing under the impact of climate change because the Indus is primarily glacial melt, then how will they treaty react to that situation?”

Researchers predict at least 4% percent of the South Asian population will experience unlivable temperatures without air conditioning by 2100, and three quarters are expected to experience dangerous level temperatures.

“The most intense hazard from extreme future heat waves is concentrated around densely populated agricultural regions of the Ganges and Indus river basins,” the authors wrote.

If the countries fail to cooperate, clashes over water could “tip over into violence,” warned Janani Vivekananda, climate security expert at consultancy Adelphi. “South Asian security policy makers need to appreciate that non-traditional security threats such as climate change pose as real a risk as traditional security threats.”

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Experiments in Australia confirm that increased temperatures driven by ever-rising atmospheric levels of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide reduce the flow of energy up the marine food web, which would be bad news for the ocean’s top predators – and some prized fish catches.

Another study finds that ever-greater levels of dissolved carbon dioxide in rivers and lakes could disrupt the dietary supply for creatures higher in the food chain.

Scientists have been warning for years that global warming and ever-increasing levels of acidification could harm ocean productivity. Researchers from the University of Adelaide report in the Public Library of Science journal PLOS Biologyde that they put the proposition directly to the test.

They built 12 huge laboratory aquaria with water temperatures and acidity levels that matched predictions of climate change, and then introduced a range of sea creatures: algae, shrimp, sponges, snails, fishes and so on.

They found that the plants flourished, largely in the form of cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae. “This increased primary productivity does not support food webs, however, because these cyanobacteria are largely unpalatable, and they are not consumed by herbivores,” said Hadayet Ullah, who led the study.

“Healthy food webs are important for the maintenance of species diversity and provide a source of income and food for millions of people worldwide. Therefore, it is important to understand how climate change is altering marine food webs in the near future.”

Alarm, too, about the impact on freshwater species is not new. German biologists had access to data collected every month at four river dams from 1981 to 2015. They report in the journal Current Biology that acidification levels in the reservoirs had steadily increased in that time.

So they tested the response of species of daphnia, the water flea – and a source of food for other freshwater creatures – to changing water chemistry. The higher the acidity, the weaker the response of the water fleas to the scent of nearby predators.

“Many freshwater organisms rely on their sense of smell. If that sense is compromised in other species due to rising CO2 levels this development might have far-reaching consequences for the entire ecosystem,” said Linda Weiss of the Ruhr University of Bochum, who led the study.

“Follow-up studies must now be carried out, in order to determine if the acidification of freshwater systems is a global phenomenon and in what way other species react to rising CO2 levels.”

This article was produced by Climate News Network

The post Rising CO2 levels threaten aquatic life, studies show appeared first on Climate Home News.

If humans continue to burn fossil fuels at an ever-increasing rate, then rainfall will diminish by 30%, average temperatures will rise by 4.5°C, and the flow from the Jordan’s most important tributary could fall by 75%. The frequency of droughts will increase threefold, to recur almost every year.

And since the kingdom of Jordan – wedged between Syria, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Iraq – is already one of the most water-poor nations of the world, the future is challenging.

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Scientists in California report in Science Advances journal that they took a look at future conditions for one of the world’s political hotspots, and focused on the problems for one state in the region.

Pressure on water supplies has been exacerbated by population growth, economic development, dramatic increases in irrigated farming, and abstraction of groundwater from the aquifers that once filled wells and topped up desert oases. Jordan also houses the world’s second largest number of refugees per head of population.

In 1946, a Jordanian citizen could count on 3,600 cubic metres of water a year. Right now, this supply has dropped to 135 cubic metres – way below the 500 cubic metres a year set by the United Nations as the threshold for “absolute scarcity”.

The scientists looked at rates of water use between 1981 and 2010, and then fed in climate scenarios – including the notorious “business-as-usual” one in which humans go on burning fossil fuels – for the decades between 2011 and 2100.

They thought about drought in different ways, such as lower rainfall, higher temperatures, greater evaporation, changes in the way land is used. The changes could happen in Jordan itself, or upstream, in territories controlled by other nations.

The Jordan River is celebrated in three of the world’s great religions, but it is now a modest stream. It rises on the slopes of Mount Hermon, on the border between Syria and Lebanon, flows south through northern Israel, through the Sea of Galilee (Lake Tiberias), whose waters are at their lowest level in a century, then meanders down a 200km valley and ends in the Dead Sea.

It runs through a region already cruelly hit by drought and by the civil war in Syria that itself may have been precipitated by the same drought.

The Jordan is just one of the world’s 278 waterways that flow across national boundaries or that divide nations – that is, rivers that deliver water to more than one set of peoples. So the study has wider lessons.

Researchers have already identified future problems connected with the Nile, one of the other great rivers of biblical history.

But the Nile, for most of its history, has flowed and has delivered annual floods. The River Jordan was never famous for its floods, and its flow is likely to diminish as less water falls in the uplands, and as more people compete for more water from the trickle that is left.

The end of the Syrian civil war upstream could mean a return to farming and even more demand for water that would otherwise flow into the Jordan.

“The ability of the Jordan to satisfy future urban and agricultural water demands will be stressed by cascading effects on its freshwater supply,” says one of the report’s authors, Steven Gorelick, the Cyrus Fisher Tolman Professor in the School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences at Stamford University, California.

“These impacts are from increasingly severe droughts and eventual agricultural land-use recovery in the aftermath of the Syrian civil war.”

This article was first published on Climate News Network.

The post Climate change threatens survival of the River Jordan appeared first on Climate Home News.

Like most farmers round here, he blames Ethiopia. They are under the impression that a massive hydropower dam being built upriver is already affecting their water supply.

In fact, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam is only half way to completion. Widely circulated satellite photos showing a lake behind the dam have sparked rumours – and denials – the dam has started to fill. The water scarcity farmers have experienced to date has other causes: climate change and the demands of a growing population.

But during the 5-15 years it is expected to take to fill the reservoir behind the 1,800 metre-wide barrage, the Nile’s fresh water flow to Egypt may be cut by up to 25%.

“Nobody is telling farmers how to mitigate and adapt to climate change,” says Magda Ghoneim, a socio-economist and professor of agricultural development at Ain Shams University. “Adding the pressure of a dam puts Egypt on the verge of catastrophe. Soon enough we won’t [find food to] eat.”

The challenges for farmers are myriad: new diseases and insects, unprecedented humidity, rising seas contaminating groundwater with salt. Indeed, when Abo Khokha tried pumping underground water to make up for reduced river flow, he found only half the usual volume, with a higher level of salinity.

A study recently published in Nature found that climate change is bringing greater variability in the Nile River flow this century compared to the last. In the Nile’s seven-year cycle of flood and drought, the former is becoming heavier, and the latter more extreme.

Egypt’s five million feddans (21,000 square kilometres) of crops consume more than 85% of the country’s share of Nile water. With an annual supply of 600 cubic metres per person, the country is approaching the UN’s “absolute water scarcity” threshold, as the population closes in on 100 million. Water is a sensitive subject.

Although Ethiopia claims to have taken climate change into consideration in the dam’s design, the government did everything at the same time: construction and civil works, financing, and social and environmental impact studies, explains Emanuele Fantini, a researcher at IHE Delft Institute for Water Education. “So by the time these studies are concluded, we are already in front of the fait accompli”.

Building was under way when the governments of Ethiopia, Egypt and Sudan – sandwiched between the two – in 2016 agreed to commission an independent study from Artelia, a French consultancy. “We are not sure if and when the results will be made public,” says Fantini. “They should be made public so that the accuracy can be checked by the international scientific community”.

“Some information, like worst case scenarios, might cause unnecessary panic”

So far, though, there has been little attempt to explain the risks to those at the mercy of the weather and geopolitics.

Alaa al-Zawahri, an Egyptian member of the tripartite committee studying the effects of the dam, tells Climate Home: “There are several scenarios, but nothing certain. Some studies predict a rise in temperature and thus little rain, and others predict more rain”. Diaa al-Qousi, a water specialist who worked for government, says the findings point to heavy rains for the next 30 years, then a huge drop the 60 years that follow.

Asked if the different conclusions have been communicated with farmers, al-Qousi says “farmers would not understand such specialists’ findings”. Government is selective about what it releases to media, adds al-Zawahri: “Some information, like worst case scenarios, might cause unnecessary panic.”

In the absence of reliable information, farmers turn to conspiracy theories and militaristic fantasies.

Qatar “is funding the dam, like it is funding terrorism” to harm Egypt, claims Mohamed Nasr, who owns three feddans in Al Gharbeyya. There is no evidence for this common rumour; the Ethiopian government says it is funding the project nationally.

Ethiopia will not be allowed to alter the balance of water supply along the river, Nasr asserts: “Egypt’s water share is internationally known. If the share is touched, the dam will be completely removed.”

Osama Saad, a farmer in the Upper Egypt governorate of Minya, is more explicit: “People talk about how the president should bomb it.” The idea is not alien to higher level discussions around the dam. Previous leaders have threatened military action.

Yet work on the 6GW dam, a prestige project for the Ethiopian government, has continued unabated.

Al-Zawahri outlines some peaceful options for responding to water stress. The government is looking into telemetry, water-saving irrigation systems, and desalination. A navigational course from Lake Victoria to the Mediterranean is on the table, which would provide eight billion cubic meters more water for Sudan and Egypt. Egypt can also manage its own High Aswan Dam more efficiently to decrease evaporation of water. “These plans are to be applied gradually,” he says.

Water expert al-Qousi is upbeat: “The Egyptian farmer has been cultivating lands for seven thousand years, and has always found a way around water shortages.”

Ghoneim begs to differ. “Farmers have traditional knowledge, which they lived by for a long time. But this knowledge is now falling short,” she says. “It is not an awareness problem that faces farmers, it is an issue of the state obstructing information.”

This article previously said the dam had started filling. It was updated to reflect that others denied this was the case.

The post Egypt faces water insecurity as Ethiopian mega-dam rumours swirl appeared first on Climate Home News.

Humanitarian assistance has helped and will be needed well into 2018. But in war-affected Somalia and South Sudan famine has emerged; in Ethiopia aid money is running short after repeated droughts; and in Kenya the shortage of resources is giving rise to land conflicts.

For these countries, the ability to plan ahead is undermined by a mystery that has climate scientists puzzled. Most models suggest that global warming should be making the Horn of Africa wetter than in pre-industrial times. But as local weather data and dry streams on the ground testify, year after year the region is getting drier.

What has become known as the ‘East African climate paradox’ is a quirk that has been exercising scientists for the best part of a decade, but is still far from being explained. Why do models project more rain while data on the ground show less and less by the year?

“It could be that the paradox is not even a paradox,” says Alessandra Giannini of the International Research Institute for Climate and Society in the US, who specialises in climate trends in monsoon regions.

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Just as one particularly cold winter doesn’t disprove the existence of long-term climate change, events such as the strong El Niño experienced in the region in 2015 could cloud the picture, she says. While in the long run the region’s climate might get wetter, in the short-term other phenomena could bring a few years of drought.

“Maybe the underlying wet trend has not emerged yet,” says Giannini. “We can’t really say that the models are wrong. What we are looking for is an explanation that includes elements of all these processes, that can explain everything, drought now and possibly long-term wetter conditions.”

“In any kind of projection it’s very important to look at the uncertainty” says John Marsham, climate scientist with the University of Leeds in the UK. Reflecting the chaotic nature of the climate system, models do not always return the same result, even when they run on the same inputs. 

“Within the wide range of models available, some will not say [the weather] is going to get wetter. In addition, the apparent mis-match between the recent drying trend and the wetting in many model projections could be due to the current trends being generated by climate drivers that our models are not capturing,” says Marsham.

Models imagine the landscapes of future climates by plotting the influence of a variety of factors affecting the Earth, known as forcings. Some are natural, such as volcanic eruptions or the energy output of the sun. Others are generated by humans, such as the increasing concentration of greenhouse gases due to our fossil fuel-based industry.

Depending on the forcings included in the blueprint and the computing power of each model, which determines it’s complexity, the results might vary. Models also deal slightly differently with factors such as clouds or climate sensitivity, namely the amount of warming for any given amount of greenhouse gas.

Report: Africa flying blind as continent tips into climate crisis

Scientists have come up with an array of different explanations for the paradox, ranging from natural variability of the climate that models struggle to capture, to patchy observational data due to poor infrastructure and records in the region.

“The current models show a trend that we project through increasing greenhouse gases, but the recent [dry] past trend could be caused by something else” says Marsham. “For example, they could be driven by a change in aerosol emissions – the tiny particles that come with burning fossil fuels that have very different behaviour from greenhouse gases.”

Dave Rowell, a scientist with the UK’s Met office whose work focuses on African climate change and models, explains that if we accept the hypothesis that the recent decline in rainfall is caused by aerosol emissions, as we start to clean up pollution and remove these tiny particles, for example with better filters, the picture may change.

“If we keep burning fossil fuels releasing more carbon into the atmosphere, greenhouse gases would become the dominant forcing, with models then suggesting increased rainfall over East Africa,” he says.

Precipitation adds a further layer of complexity, because rain is the end point of a long chain of climatic and weather processes. In planetary terms, clouds are tiny, elusive objects that move and evolve on an extremely small scale. “The available models still struggle to capture them” says Marsham, “but equally science is rapidly advancing and I am confident that in coming years we will have better information.”

Although many questions remain open, the paradox doesn’t dent the scientific community’s trust in their research methods.

“There is always the risk that someone will use the uncertainty as an excuse for not acting, and that to my mind is the opposite of what we should do,” says Marsham.

“On the contrary, we are well aware of the challenge of predicting rainfall in the tropics and this mismatch doesn’t mean that the models are wrong. This is an interesting mystery to solve, and in doing so we will understand a lot more about the climate system in East Africa.”

The post Scientists say east Africa will get wetter, so why is it drying out? appeared first on Climate Home News.

Matt Rand, director of the Pew Bertarelli Ocean Legacy project, which supported part of the research, said: “Marine reserves are climate reserves.” 

The international study found that reserves help marine ecosystems and people adapt to five harmful consequences of climate change: ocean acidification; sea-level rise; the increased intensity of storms; shifts in species distribution, and decreased productivity and availability of oxygen.

Reserves also can also help to increase the long-term storage of carbon from greenhouse gas emissions, especially in coastal wetlands, which helps to reduce the rate of climate change, the study found.

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The lead author, Professor Callum Roberts of the University of York, UK, said: “Many studies show that well-managed marine reserves can protect wildlife and support productive fisheries, but we wanted to explore this body of research through the lens of climate change to see whether these benefits could help ameliorate or slow its impacts.

“It was soon quite clear that they can offer the ocean ecosystem and people critical resilience benefits to rapid climate change.”

Only 3.5 % of the world’s oceans has so far been set aside for protection, with just 1.6 % given full protection from exploitation. International groups are working to raise the total to 10% by 2020.

Delegates to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s 2016 World Conservation Congress agreed that at least 30% of the oceans should be protected by 2030.

Comment: Ocean acidification is global warming’s forgotten crisis

Scientists say marine reserves and marine protected areas (MPAs) protect coasts from sea-level rise and can help to sustain coastal wetlands, mudflats and coral reefs that can act to absorb the impact of storms and extreme weather.

They also help to offset declines in ocean and fisheries productivity caused by climate change, for example through the growing acidification of seawater and the reduction in plankton abundance.  

The reserves protect key coastal systems – mangroves, salt marshes and seagrasses – creating localised reductions in carbon dioxide concentrations and water acidity. And they can provide refuges for fish as they adjust their rangesto changing conditions. 

Previously published research revealed that marine reserves can promote the rapid recovery of exploited species and damaged habitats while safeguarding intact ecosystems. With fishing outlawed and other human activity limited, they can create very productive areas which allow exploited stocks and degraded habitats to recover.

“This study should be proof positive to decision makers that creating effectively managed marine reserves can deliver a multitude of benefits”

These benefits are greater in large, long-established, well-managed reserves that have full protection from activities such as fishing and oil and mineral extraction. Relative isolation from damaging human activities adds further conservation benefits.

The research shows that protecting more of the ocean will also improve the outlook for environmental recovery after greenhouse gas emissions have been brought under control.

It reinforces the IUCN’s argument that the UN ocean protection target should be raised from 10% to 30% of the oceans, which will require many more large-scale MPAs and protected areas beyond national jurisdiction.

Beth O’Leary, a co-author and a research fellow at the University of York, said: “We were keenly aware that marine reserves can increase species’ abundance and help alleviate food scarcity, but our evaluation showed reserves are a viable low-tech, cost-effective adaptation strategy.”

Matt Rand of Ocean Legacy said: “This study should be proof positive to decision makers that creating effectively managed marine reserves can deliver a multitude of benefits.”

This article was produced by Climate News Network 

The post Marine reserves are helping ecosystems cope with climate change: study appeared first on Climate Home News.

The Nile is the natural world’s great gift to human history: its annual flood delivered nourishing silt and vital water for the farmers who supported a hierarchy that founded a civilisation.

So vital was the Nile flood that the first hydraulic scientists – priests of the ancient temples – built and managed a series of “nilometers” to detect, predict and monitor the size of the annual inundation.

And so important was this annual flow that it gave the world the biblical story of Joseph, the Hebrew slave who helped Pharaoh make the most of the harvests in seven fat years, to survive seven lean years of drought.

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The Nile now matters more than ever: 400 million people in 11 countries depend on the flow in the Nile basin. Many of them already live at water scarcity levels of below 1,000 cubic metres of water per person per year.

By 2050, the population of the Nile basin will double, and start heading towards a billion. So people need the river more than ever.

But, according to a new study, the Nile is about to become more unpredictable. Climate change, as a consequence of global warming driven by carbon dioxide build-up in the atmosphere, itself a consequence of ever more prodigal combustion of fossil fuels, will overall mean that more rain will fall and flow down the water courses that feed the Nile system.

But the same computer simulations, reported in Nature Climate Change, also predict that under a “business-as-usual scenario” in which humans go on exploiting fossil fuels, there will be substantially fewer “normal” years, with flows of between 70 and 100 cubic kilometres of water per year, and more years of either devastating flood or withering drought.

The Nile flow is affected by the cycle of Pacific temperature oscillations: 2015 was an intense El Niño year, which saw a drought in Egypt. The same oscillation’s obverse, La Niña in 2016, was linked to high flooding.

“It’s not abstract. This is happening now,” says Elfatih Eltahir, a civil and environmental engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US, and one of the researchers. “We think climate change is pointing to the need for more storage capacity in the future.”

Report: Groundwater recharge offers hope to drought-hit Indian farmers

Management of the river’s flow has been a political problem for decades, to be made more complex by the construction of Africa’s largest reservoir, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam near the border with Ethiopia and Sudan.

And the region faces problems that come with climate change, and, in particular, extremes of heat. Researchers have already warned that the Middle East and North Africa could become increasingly inhospitable, and in 2015 Professor Eltahir warned that the Gulf region could become so hot and humid as to be potentially lethal.

He and his co-author arrived at the unhappy forecast for the Nile by testing computer simulations of future climate change and checking flow rates and rainfall records for the past 50 years.

And they find that the average volume of flow could increase by 10% to 15%, but the flow variation from year to year – the shift towards too much or too little – is likely to increase by 50%.

This article was produced by Climate News Network

The post Rainfall extremes to become the Nile’s new normal appeared first on Climate Home News.

This time a decade ago, Kadraka would have been weeding amid the soft summer showers, ready to sow millet as soon as the monsoon arrived in early June. Now, he doesn’t start preparing the red soil until he sees the rains, which come 30 to 45 days late.

In the eastern Indian state of Odisha, monsoon season is getting more variable with climate change – and to make matters worse, groundwater sources are in decline. It leaves farmers vulnerable to crop failure, poverty and social breakdown.

Two thirds of the state’s population depend on agriculture, but only one third of farmland has access to canal irrigation. The rest must wait for rain. This lack of water infrastructure contributes to severe food insecurity in 18 of the 30 districts.

An Odisha farmer’s monthly average income is 4,976 rupees ($77), well below the national average of Rs 6,426 ($100) and less than a quarter of the Rs 18,059 ($282) earned in Punjab, India’s richest agricultural region.

Repeated crop failure is driving indebted farmers to distress, migration and even suicide. Between 2004 and 2014, close to 1,900 farmers took their own lives in Odisha, according to National Crime Records Bureau data released March.

Smallholders in Nuapada district are worried as their crops wither in the dry conditions (Pic: Manipadma Jena)

Help is at hand. A groundbreaking 10 billion rupee ($166 million) programme aims to capture rain – whenever it may fall – to recharge groundwater sources.

Under the scheme, financed by the Green Climate Fund (GCF), World Bank and Odisha state government, recharge shafts will be installed along with 10,000 storage tanks between 2017 and 2021. Dug to a depth of 3.5 metres, these are to permeate a layer of clay soil that otherwise holds water near the surface, where it is liable to evaporate.

Report: Dryland expansion to hit food crops as planet warms

The GCF, a UN-backed climate finance body, is contributing $34m in grants, focused on the groundwater recharge element. According to the project brief on its website, 5.2 million people stand to benefit from better water access.

“Seventy-five percent of the recharged groundwater can safely be used to ensure a second annual crop,” said Pradeep Kumar Jena, a water resources official in the Odisha government who conceptualized the GCF bid.

At the same time, 1,000 solar pumps are to be distributed for micro irrigation, to distribute the water efficiently. The pumps are expected to save 3.27 million kilowatt-hours of energy and avoid carbon emissions of 2,614 tonnes a year, compared to diesel-fuelled alternatives.

There will be jobs for locals to dig the wells, said Jena, plus training of 20,000 youth to monitor the system as “jaal sathis” or “water buddies” and 500 maintenance engineers.

The idea for groundwater recharge came from a 12-village pilot under India’s National Adaptation Fund for Climate Change. It has never been applied over such a wide area before, said Jena: “There has been no major effort in India for largescale recharge of groundwater.”

The government engaged CTRAN, an advisory firm based in Odisha state capital Bhubaneswar, to prepare the project proposal. It also got approval from the federal environment ministry and technical clearance from the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD), which will administer the grant. Involvement of multiple stakeholders helped to secure funds from the GCF, Jena said.

The post Groundwater recharge offers hope to drought-hit Indian farmers 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.

A tall man, Simelane works the electric pump which supplies irrigated water to Sikuvile, a smallholder farming community in the north-eastern corner of the world’s last absolute monarchy.

Last year was the third year of drought running in southern Africa, and the worst for Swaziland. In a good year, Simelane can run the pump all day for six days a week. But water levels in the Maguga Dam, upstream from the farm, dropped to 20%. Six days became three, and then only for 18 hours a day.

That was a problem for the community’s main crop, sugarcane, a lucrative but thirsty plant that accounts for 18% of Swaziland’s GDP.

The community started discussing which fields they would stop irrigating and leave to die. With scientists forecasting the country’s river flows will drop 40% this century, thanks to climate change, Sikuvile has more tough choices ahead.

This time round, the rain eventually came. Prolific rain. Hendrik Khoza’s makeshift chicken coop – three brick walls and a zinc roof – caved in. Now the cushion for his family’s food security comes from the plants around his home.

Like the yards of the 43 neighbours who share Sikuvile’s 100 hectares, Khoza’s is packed with cassava, mango, wheat, banana and sweet potato. “The drought here was so bad. But we prayed and by the grace of God now we have rain.”

The wiry man brings a set of formal chairs from inside his unplastered brick home and puts them under the single large tree in his yard. He sits on a black plastic water container. “The soil here is very, very, good but the rain is a problem. More of a problem these days.”

Swaziland’s average temperature has already risen 3C since pre-industrial times, according to the state weather agency – three times the world average.

It is affecting rainfall patterns, putting a strain on communities like Sikuvile, which has thrived on small-scale sugar growing for the past 15 years.

High and dry: South African drought leaves Lesotho parched

Works starts at 5am on Sikuvile. At 360m above sea level, Swaziland’s subtropical lowveld reaches temperatures of over 40C during the day. Combined with 80% humidity, the conditions blanket everyone in a sticky layer of sweat, making labour nigh on impossible.

At dawn, though, the temperature is a bearable 23C. Groups of workers, guided by light from the purple stabs of sunlight streaking across the sky, start moving across the farm. Once 44 individual plots – where so little food was produced that the World Food Programme was ever-present – the farm is now one business unit. Resources are pooled to buy things like the bright yellow waterproof macs and armored face masks that workers wear.

Julia Msebena climbs to the top of a 3m-tall ladder to check a team’s progress. She shouts a name and gets a faint response from inside the cane. From this vantage point she can see the spigots as they rhythmically spit water across the thirsty fields. A layer of moisture slides down down the individual reeds of each cane plant.

Having received a response, Msebena climbs back down the ladder, scraping mud off her black boots on the bottom step. “Life here is good. We have money where others struggle.”

A spigot irrigates the sugarcane (Pic: Oupa Nkosi)

Similar scenes may be seen for 400km along the Inkomati river, which flows into the Indian Ocean above Mozambique’s capital Maputo.

The sugar industry is a relative newcomer to Swaziland, arriving with the Colonial Development Corporation in 1958, when the country was still a British protectorate. Subsistence farmers were forced off their land to create vast plantations and mills. An aqueduct built above Sikuvile diverted half of the water flowing down the Inkomati into the sector.

Since the late 1990s, that extractive model has slowed down, with more control returned to the people. The Maguga Dam was completed in 2001 and water rights allocated to downstream communities for irrigation.

Tariff and quota-free access for Swazi sugar to the European common market – a measure introduced to help countries in need of development – made sugarcane the first choice for Sikuvile when it came to deciding what to do with that water. Even with last year’s drought hitting production, the accounts show each family earned 50,000 Lilangeni last year (US$3,800).

It means farmers can afford to hire a tractor. Behind her rondavel, Sarah Dlamini follows a green John Deere up and down her previously fallow field. The circular jaws of its plough have churned up sweet potato, and some big, disgruntled, ants. Her hands sift through the dark red, almost black, soil to grab the potato for tonight’s dinner. “Our family has always farmed here. You can grow anything,” she says.

Sarah Dlamini pulls a sweet potato from the rich soil (Pic: Oupa Nkosi)

Swaziland earns L1.5 billion a year ($110m) from sugar, according to the Swaziland Sugar Association. Its “Swazi gold” supports three mills and 449 sugarcane farms, of which 410 are run by associations like Sikuvile.

Policy shifts bring threats and opportunities for the cash crop. The EU, buyer of half the country’s sugar, is bringing in reforms in September that will hit incomes. A proposed sugar tax in neighbouring South Africa could also dent demand for the sweet stuff.

On the upside, rules for blending bioethanol into transport fuel could create a whole new market – as happened in Brazil.

Mike Ogg, an industry consultant living 10km away in the dilapidated colonial-era sugar town of Tshaneni, suggests Swaziland can also trade on the environmental and social benefits of community models like Sikuvile.

“It costs $12,000 to develop a hectare of sugarcane so you need a good business plan to attract investment. Something nobody else has,” he says. Corporate buyers of sugar like Coca Cola and Nestle are under increasing pressure to get sugar that is ethically produced. Removing his glasses to wipe away the sweat accumulated on their thin frame, Ogg says farms such as Sikuvile can give this. “Look, Swaziland has a good story to tell when it comes to sugar. Sikuvile has a good story to tell. It’s a good brand.”

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In the longer term, though, the challenge is to adapt to the impact of greenhouse gases Swaziland has little responsibility for generating – 0.002% of global emissions.

Simelane, the water engineer at Sikuvile, says people are already talking about how good cane will be as an investment. “We saw now what shortages can do to the crop and they say it will only get worse. Can we still grow when there is so little water, especially when you need the food crops?” Other community members echo the sentiment, saying their children will have to diversify into mango and maize.

For now, sugar is bringing wealth and control to hungry communities in Swaziland’s lowveld. As the country heats up, the sight of sprinklers spitting water across fields of towering green sugarcane could become a thing of the past.

This article was produced with the Mail & Guardian, using funding from the Climate and Development Knowledge Network (CDKN), as part of a series on climate change in southern Africa 

The post Drought sours future of Swaziland’s sugar growers appeared first on Climate Home News.

But it has a problem. The small victim is alive. Its desperate calls are attracting the attention of other predators and the cheetah has no energy left.

In the 39C heat, the cheetah needs at least half an hour to recharge after the burst of speed. That normally means hunching down so the ground compresses its chest, speeding up recovery. But two hyenas have come to see what the commotion is, driving the cheetah away.

Its failure is a temperature problem. The cheetah’s evolutionary advantage is its ability to clock 110km/h over a few hundred metres. But increasing temperatures increase the costs of these bursts. It’s such an acute obstacle that cheetah will not run when the temperature passes 50C.

In the southern section of South Africa’s Kruger National Park, the temperature has been rising for the last few decades. The park predicts that the average will rise by 3C from pre-industrial levels by mid-century, and double that by 2100. Days when the temperature passes 40C and hovers close to 50C are expected to enter the double digits each year.

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That’s not just a problem for cheetah. A few hours and a hundred kilometres later, at Skukuza – the park’s main administration hub – the temperature is 42C.

Its records show that in the first few months of this year, when the drought was at its worst, almost no rain fell. Sabie River, which forms the camp’s one boundary, shrunk to a trickle. Now Skukuza is covered in a lush green, from the grass at its golf course to the leafy acacia trees. Heavy, but intermittent, rains in the last two months have broken the back of two years of drought.

For the scientists based at the camp, it was a harrowing time but also a great chance to gather data. Izak Smit, science manager for systems ecology, GIS and remote sensing for Kruger, says drought is a common occurrence in the park – South Africa’s largest animal sanctuary. The last bad one was in 1991, when 16,000 buffalo died. “We learnt from that,” he says.

Working with people upstream on rivers like Sabie, the park made sure that everyone reduced water use so everyone had a share. But that hasn’t stopped hundreds of animals dying, particularly those that graze for their food. He says that “SANParks adheres to a limited intervention approach,” which means nature must take its course.

Rivers slowed to a trickle in the drought (Pic: Flickr/Armin Rodler)

The north of the park, which has traditionally been drier and fed by fewer rivers was worst hit. Officials killed 350 hippo and buffalo to ease the pressure on water resources. The meat was given to communities living on the boundaries of the park, who lost two maize harvests to the drought.

Temperatures at Skukuza have been monitored since 1960. The last December, January and March were among the hottest months recorded in the last five decades. Between July 2015 and June 2016, 28 days surpassed the 40C mark – only eight were that hot during the 1991 drought.

Africa files: Climate change is testing southern Africa water agreements

That increasing heat is going according to climate predictions for this north-eastern part of South Africa, bordering Mozambique and Zimbabwe.

Alarm bells started ringing in 2001, when the first comprehensive research on climate impacts for the park was done by the South African National Biodiversity Agency. This calculated that temperatures would rise by an average of 3C by mid-century. That would make the northern half drier, while the south would get wetter but would receive most of this rain in short and violent spells.

Plants and animals would be unable to move ahead of the change, the agency warned, predicting it would kill off 59% of mammals, 40% of birds, 70% of butterflies, 80% of other invertebrates, and 45% of reptiles.

In 2008, then environment and tourism minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk warned: “The damage done to one of South Africa’s most celebrated conservation areas could be shattering.”

A hippo in the Sabie river (Pic: Flickr/Michael7070)

Those projections were calculated on a business-as-usual scenario. New climate projections, factoring in adaptation plans and the possibility of lower global greenhouse gas emission, see these numbers roughly halved. But that is only if the measures are put in place.

Stefani Freitag-Ronaldson, general manager of scientific services at the park, says the observable climate change has been gathering pace at the park. “We are seeing quite fundamental changes in when it rains and what sorts of temperature we get at different parts of the year.”

While the winter in this part of the lowveld is normally mild – the park sits on the Tropic of Capricorn – it has been getting increasingly warm. “A park is necessarily an artificial boundary for species but the ones inside our fences are generally adapted to the conditions.”

That means the animals thrive in the humid heat, growing in numbers so that they survive the periodic droughts, she says. “But now the overall conditions are starting to change and where species cannot move to keep track with that, they will struggle to survive.”

High and dry: South African drought leaves Lesotho parched

For large animals, like hippo and buffalo, their sensitivity to change – especially with predictions of more frequent and prolonged drought – means they don’t do well in any of the future scenarios modelled by the park’s scientific teams.

But the people tasked with observing the incremental changes in climate in the park – its rangers – have their hands full with another task. Kruger has around 9,000 white rhino, 40% of the world’s remaining number. That makes the park an enticing target for poachers. Over 800 were killed last year.

Poaching footsoldiers are easily recruited in villages, normally across the border in Mozambique, thanks to the drought taking away their livestock and crops. Less vegetation in the park then makes their job easier, with rhino forced to use the small number of waterholes that still had water during the drought. December is the busiest month of the year, something rangers link to the poacher’s desire to have extra spending money for Christmas.

Kruger has mobilised a massive effort to curb this. Skukuza is home to helicopters, drones, spotter planes and tracking dogs. A wide area surveillance system – the Postcode Meerkat – was just launched to track human movement in the park. The army also operates in the area.

Rangers on patrol (Pic: Flickr/Bernard Dupont)

All that effort takes time away from conservation. A ranger based in Phalaborwa, five hours north, says their anti-poaching work necessarily creates blindspots. “We used to walk this park and know how everything was doing. Each ranger had their section and knew it like the back of their hand.”

That meant they could record how climactic changes were changing things as small as dung beetles. Now the rangers are being trained to use drones and conduct surveillance operations so that they can ambush and disarm poachers. This ranger says: “I feel for our park now because we obviously overlook some problems, especially when you see that things are changing in the environment.”

Their worry is one privately shared by officials in the park when they talk about the looming changes wrought by a changing climate.

Report: South Africa authorises coal splurge during UN climate summit

South Africa is, per capita, one of the 20 highest carbon emitters in the world. Its contribution to the Paris climate deal is “inadequate” and “not consistent with limiting warming below 2C” according to NGO Climate Action Tracker. The country is building the two biggest dry-cooled, coal-fired, power stations in the world.

While the Paris Agreement puts the world on a cooler trajectory than business-as-usual, the national contributions do not tot up big enough carbon cuts to stay within 2C.

For Kruger National Park, it means change will come too fast for many species to adapt.

Animals under pressure

Mountain gorilla: This is a species that should be an example of how to cover all your bases when it comes to climate change. They eat 140 different species of plant so can survive a lot of change. But their central Africa range has been overrun by human settlements, with only 800 now left in the wild. As climate change and population growth puts more pressure on these settlements, projections are that hunting will increase and their habitat will be cut and burnt.

 African elephant: Elephants have adapted well to live across the continent, surviving in nearly 40 countries. They eat all sorts of plant species and live in both wet and arid conditions. But they need 300 litres of water a day to survive and their reproduction is linked to rainfall. Populations in central Africa – where more rain means they should actually be safe from the worst of climate change – are being decimated by poaching, while their safer strongholds in southern Africa will become inhospitable with increasing drought and heatwaves.

Giraffe: The population has shrunk 40% in the last 30 years – some 60,000 giraffes – according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s latest “red list” of endangered species. The union blames habitat loss through farming and deforestation, as well as hunting for meat during armed conflict. Their demise is a study in how the less valuable a species is for tourism, the harder it is for governments to justify their survival.

Cheetah: Numbers have dropped 30% to 7,500 in the last 40-years. They used to range the continent, but have been hemmed into small areas thanks to human expansion and their perceived threat to livestock. For rural communities, cattle, sheep and goats are more valuable than wildlife and cheetah are a threat. That means they have to survive in wildlife reserves, where they must compete with lion and hyena for food. Their speed means they can get to prey quickly, but they overheat quickly and then struggle to defend their catch from other predators. They also do not run when temperatures pass 50C, a temperature that will become increasingly normal in places like the Kruger National Park.

This article was produced with the Mail & Guardian, using funding from the Climate and Development Knowledge Network (CDKN)

The post Iconic Kruger game park faces bleak climate future appeared first on Climate Home News.

Fed by the Muene River, it provides a livelihood for hundreds of fishermen as well as the small industries that support the local tourists that flock to the dam when it is full.

But the river and dam have become increasingly polluted, with locals pointing the finger at the source of the river: the Zimbabwean city of Mutare some 50 kilometres to the west.

A dumpsite in Mutare’s Nyakamete industrial area sits on the spot where the Muene starts. Waste from industries, clinics and homes in Mutare gets dumped at the site.

The up to 50C heat in that city helps break down and decompose the waste, so chemicals and other liquids seep into the river.

By the time it reaches Chicamba Dam, it is so polluted that locals blame it for cholera outbreaks and sudden deaths in the fish population.

Africa files: South African drought leaves Lesotho parched

Authorities in Mozambique’s Manica province, which contains the dam, set up a task force in 2009 to investigate the cause of the cholera and other water-related health problems. It concluded that Mutare’s dumpsite was to blame, and asked that city to fix the problem. Mutare’s city council said it didn’t have the money to find another way to dispose of the problem, so effectively ignored the complaints.

But the situation has intensified with the ongoing drought. Less water in the river means a higher concentration of pollutants. Low levels in the Chicamba Dam also mean that old concentrations of chemicals – which normally sink to the bottom of large water bodies – have mixed into the little water that is left.

That ongoing drought – the worst in southern Africa in 35 years – has created all sorts of similar conflicts. Mozambique has lodged complaints with the Southern African Development Community (SADC) about polluted water from South African mining killing crocodiles and fish. That water has also killed animals in South Africa’s iconic Kruger National Park, one of the largest wildlife sanctuaries in the world.

This is a problem in a region where rivers form borders and care little for political considerations. The colonial divvying-up of the region in the late 1800s saw rivers become convenient borders. Twelve SADC states share 21 river basins, with most of these crossing more than two countries.

Cases such as that of the Muene River are often left unresolved. If bilateral discussions do not work, states lodge their complaints with the SADC secretariat. It then recommends that the offending party stop the offending activity. But there is nothing in the way of censure.

That lack of political intervention can create decades of conflict. Botswana and Namibia still trade hostile words over the Sedudu Island, on the border between the two countries and Zambia. Stuck in the middle of the Chobe River, which then flows into the Zambezi River, its legal status was left in a grey area after the 1890 Heligoland-Zanzibar Treaty. This treaty between Germany and Great Britain settled border disputes between their colonies, but gave little in the way of detail.

It set the Chobe River as the border between Botswana, Namibia and Zambia. Both countries claimed the river, and deployed soldiers. Several firefights ensued in the 1990s, without SADC being able to resolve the dispute. Botswana went to the International Court of Justice, which ruled in 1999 that the island belongs to the country.

But the current drought has rekindled the conflict. With less water in the Chobe River, Namibian fishermen have been forced to cast their nets further towards the Botswana side and Sedudu Island. Namibia still claims access. Several Namibians have been shot by the Botswana army in recent years, with 14 arrested last year for illegal fishing. Botswana – a landlocked nation – now has small naval patrol vessels to maintain its control over the river.

Africa files: South Africa authorises coal splurge during UN climate summit

That same 1890 treaty has created over a century of deadlock between Namibia and South Africa. It set their border as the Orange River, which flows between the two countries for 600 kilometres.

South Africa holds that the border is on the highwater mark on the Namibian side, which means that country cannot use the water. In an arid region with virtually no rainfall, that means large tracts of irrigated farmland and vineyards on the South African side of the Orange and little on the northern, Namibian, side.

Namibia argues that the border is in the middle of the river, according to international best practice. But the country was a South African colony for 60-years and relies on its larger southern neighbour for trade and food imports, so has little political capital to force its way.

The dispute has, however, driven a shift in the water politics of southern Africa. In the past the country with the strongest army and economy would do what it would with water. That’s why the Limpopo River, which flows through South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Mozambique, has 44 dams with 26 of those in South Africa.

Stuck without a say in the Orange River, Namibia pushed for the creation of the Orange-Senqu Commission in the early 2000s. This brought South Africa, Botswana, Namibia and Lesotho together in a body that would discuss how water is shared along the 2 000-kilometre long river.

With a crippling drought wiping out crops and threatening its capital of Windhoek with shortages, Namibia has tried to get access to more water. But it has failed. In practice, South Africa uses its economic clout to keep the status quo.

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That status quo – and hegemony over water resources – has been decades in the making. Each agreement that the country signs on transboundary water sharing leans in its favour, ensuring more water can be used on the South African side.

To ensure enough water comes in, South Africa has spent three decades involved in Lesotho’s politics to ensure the security of the Lesotho Highlands Water Scheme. This has seen dams built in the Mountain Kingdom to collect its bountiful rainfall. That then flows to Gauteng – South Africa’s industrial heart.

But the scheme almost never existed. Negotiations in the early 1980s to allow construction to go ahead were stopped when Lesotho’s Prime Minister turned to the West for aid, something the isolated apartheid regime did not appreciate. The scheme was put on hold. But a coup in 1986 removed the Prime Minister and the highlands scheme treaty was signed 10-months later. People in Lesotho still complain about its terms, which provide cheap water to South Africa when water is the most valuable resource in the region.

Two years after the scheme started working, in 1998, a coup in Lesotho threatened the new water resource. The country’s Prime Minister, whom the army had turned on, asked SADC for help. Botswana and South Africa immediately mobilised 1,500 soldiers. Their stated goal was to “create a safe environment”, through “securing and controlling” several key facilities in Lesotho. These included “power and water supply facilities” – the highlands water scheme. Katse Dam, the centerpiece of that scheme, was the setting of intense fighting with several soldiers killed.

Water pollution threatens crocodiles (Pic: Flickr/Ramy Alaa)

That action has been used as a case study for water relationships between big and small countries. South Africa has consequently been accused of using its military to secure its water supply. International publications at the time dubbed the contested intervention a “water war”.

But a similar crisis in 2015 signaled the changing nature of SADC water and regional politics. With a drought crippling the region and South African dams dropping to record lows, South Africa intervened politically to settle the dispute. One of the threats raised during the crisis by opposition parties in Lesotho was for a renegotiation of the price at which South Africa buys water from the highlands scheme. This threat died out with the settlement.

South Africa’s armed forces have used interventions like Lesotho to create scenarios that are specifically focused on securing water resources.

In pictures: the citizen scientists tracking Kenya’s water woes

Climate projections by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and local bodies such as the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) warn that competition for this one resource will drive conflict in the future. The IPCC has said that decreasing rainfall and the changing climate will be a “threat multiplier” for armed conflict in the region. The CSIR has warned as recently as this year that more attention needs to be given to transboundary water agreements so that there are tools in place when “water scarcity forces communities to compete for resources”.

The current drought has seen this happen in isolated cases. Several instances in South Africa, Zimbabwe and Mozambique have seen people killing each other for access to scarce water resources. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation says 40 million people are “acutely food insecure” in southern Africa.

The two to three-year drought is being heralded as a window on the near future. The IPCC predicts that temperatures in the region will be up to 3C hotter than pre-industrial levels by 2050. Rainfall will increasingly come in short and violent storms, evaporating or running off quickly rather than sinking into the ground.

History says that this will drive violent contestation of water resources. But an increasing maturity in water sharing agreements in southern Africa could ensure this future does not come to pass.

This article was produced with the Mail & Guardian, using funding from the Climate and Development Knowledge Network (CDKN)

The post Climate change is testing southern Africa water agreements appeared first on Climate Home News.

They will also use up water in areas that are already water stressed, at a time when the country is toying with its third year of drought.

The minister’s decision came on the second day of the COP22 UN climate summit in Marrakech, where South Africa is negotiating on the nuts and bolts of how the UN’s Paris climate agreement will play out.

This put countries on the same path to ensuring that global warming is kept below 2C on pre-industrial levels. As part of the Africa group, South Africa has consistently argued that the goal should be 1.5C because anything more is catastrophic for the continent.

Projections by the World Bank show that average global warming is doubled in Africa’s interior, while the continent has little capacity to adapt to that change.

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But South Africa has been roundly criticised for its actions not matching up to its rhetoric. It ratified the Paris Agreement in early November, and has a wide range of local initiatives to lower emissions and help people adapt to climate change.

Its Nationally Determined Agreement – the climate plan it submitted to the UN last year – has, however, been called out as not being ambitious enough.

Analysts at Climate Action Tracker rated the contribution as “inadequate”, saying: “It is not consistent with limiting warming below 2C.” The contribution is so vague as to allow South Africa to increase its emissions by anywhere between 20% and 82% on 1990 levels. That translates to either 198-million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, or 614-million tonnes.

This goal stems from South Africa’s pledge under the Copenhagen Accord in 2009 to reduce emissions on business-as-usual levels by 42% by 2025. Climate Action Tracker said: “If most other countries follow South Africa’s approach, global warming would exceed 3-4C.”

Kriel, a small town in the Nkangala district, is located just outside of Eskom’s Kriel Power Station and several coal mines. The town is geographically located in close proximity to a dozen coal power stations. 2014/04/16 (Photo: Styler Reid)

Whether it’s the upper target, or the lower target, that is reached is down to the choices made in South Africa’s power sector. This is responsible for half of the country’s carbon emissions of just under 450-million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent a year, according to the local Council for Scientific and Industrial Research.

Those decisions are made at the Department of Energy. It has been pushing for a new nuclear build, to replace the ageing fleet of coal-fired power stations that are run by the state-owned utility Eskom.

But, at the same time, it has called for bids from private companies to build coal-fired power stations. This borrows from the platform for bids that was created for South Africa’s 6 000MW independent renewable energy build.

Once that department invites bids, it is up to companies to sketch out their environment impacts and get authorisation from the Department of Environment Affairs. It is the granting of these authorisations that civil society group groundWork objected to.

#Africa files: dedicated coverage of the continent’s climate challenge

The new coal-fired power stations are a product of an age when coal was profligate and climate agreements hadn’t made them unpalatable. Medupi and Kusile were laid down in the mid-2000’s so they could fill the gap when South Africa’s older power stations started decommissioning in the 2020s.

The need for even more stations then came about as a result of the panic from the country’s rolling blackouts in 2009. The national energy plan – the Integrated Resource Plan 2010 – envisioned more coal, built quickly, to ensure this never happened again.

But that plan has not been updated to keep track with climate agreements, and price changes for renewables. An update will be released later this year, but leaked versions show that it heavily favours an expansion of South Africa’s nuclear capacity at the cost cost of renewable options.

Most media reports link this to a political drive for nuclear, linked with the patronage that stems from large industrial builds. That would see 9 600-megawatts of nuclear capacity added to the country’s sole nuclear plant at Koeberg in the Western Cape.

That nuclear imperative is at odds with the best science for what should replace baseload in South Africa. Research released last week by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research’s Energy Centre argued for a mix of renewables and peaking plants.

Thanks to its high levels of solar radiation, and coastal wind, these two options – backed up by gas or diesel open cycle turbines – could create a stable grid. Critically, this mix would also provide electricity cheaper than nuclear or coal, saving five-billion pounds a year in energy costs.

Report: US, EU offer to help African countries deliver climate plans

A previous objection to the granting of an environmental authorisation for Thabametsi, an independent coal-fired power station, resulted in the environment minister telling the mine to do a climate change impact assessment. This was a first for South Africa.

But this time, groundWork’s objections were dismissed. If construction does go ahead, the two power plants will join two other power stations under construction in adding 90-million tonnes of carbon equivalent emissions to the atmosphere. The other two, Eskom-owned Medupi and Kusile, will be the world’s largest dry-cooled, coal-fired, power stations in the world. Each will have a capacity of 4 800-megawatts.

Government says emissions from the new plants will be reduced because of their newer technology. Their overall impact will also be reduced as Eskom’s older fleet of coal-fired plants starts to retire in the 2020s and 2030s. But the environment impact assessments of the plants does not include their wider footprint, specifically in terms of the coal mines that will be built to supply them.

Critically, serious concerns have been raised about the impact these stations will have on water availability in the already water scarce areas where they are being built. Eskom uses 2% of South Africa’s water and is the only entity guaranteed supply, regardless of circumstances.

US, EU + @WRIClimate offer to help African countries deliver #climate plans https://t.co/kMF4yh0CS3 pic.twitter.com/eV7unwr8XW

— Climate Home News (@ClimateHome) November 16, 2016

Medupi and Kusile have meant the construction of water transfer schemes to bring them water. This water comes from the Vaal river system, which means it falls hundreds of kilometres away in Lesotho and the KwaZulu-Natal province. In the case of Medupi, the Mokolo Crocodile Water Augmentation Project will take water from Gauteng, at an initial cost of R11-billion for construction.

But water is scarce in Gauteng. Official climate projections – contained in South Africa’s national climate change response strategy – show that drought will become more prevalent and more severe. Projections from the 2030 Water Resources Group show that demand for the whole country will exceed supply by 17%, a situation that will be ever-more acute in Gauteng.

Medupi’s demands will also dramatically increase when it installs flue-gas desulphurisation technology. This technology decreases sulphur emissions, but triples the plant’s water use. Farming rights in the area have been bought up to access the water rights that come with the farms, in order to supply Medupi’s demand.

Concerns over this impact on water resources were so great that the World Bank investigated it when granting a loan to help Medupi’s construction. This noted that “potential project-induced harm” included “significant water consumption raising issues of both scarcity and pollution in the local area”.

The bank went on to note that “due consideration should have been given to probable future projects in the area, e.g. additional mines and coal-fired power stations”.

That reality has come to pass, thanks to environmental authorisation for more coal-fired power stations being granted.

This article was produced with the Mail & Guardian, using funding from the Climate and Development Knowledge Network (CDKN)

The post South Africa authorises coal splurge during UN climate summit appeared first on Climate Home News.

It doesn’t mean they don’t still want to build one of the world’s biggest coal mines, but the Aussie’s didn’t turn up to the party completely empty handed. After a tricky political year back home in which the committee that ratifies treaties was shut down for months by the federal election, Australia’s parliament formally endorsed the Paris agreement on Thursday.

Prime minister Malcolm Turnbull said on Thursday: “We look forward to actively and fully implementing our obligations and commitments under the agreement… The agreement was a watershed, a turning point. And the adoption of a comprehensive strategy has galvanised the international community and spurred on global action… As you know, we are playing our part with ambitious targets.”

Dogs barking & then phone buzzing woke me from deep but troubled sleep. Outstanding. Respect. Churlish not to recognise significance https://t.co/VqD5QSJO2b

— John Connor (@jconnoroz) November 10, 2016

If only that last bit were true, said Dr Helen McGregor from the University of Wollongong.

“Australia’s commitment to cut emissions by 26-28% by 2030 will not be enough to meet the 2 degree target. I encourage our leaders to plan and implement deeper cuts, the sooner the better — the climate system waits for no politician.”

2. Forests have their day in the sun

Indonesia’s government extended its forest protections by declaring a moratorium on clearing super-high-carbon intact peatland. That adds to the number of concessions that are covered by the existing moratorium.

At the same time, Colombia announced a plan to link forest protections to its peace process. The announcement included a plan to recognise indigenous claims to huge areas of rainforest. Recognition of native land tenure protects forest from illegal loggers and gives huge boosts to carbon storage.

The Brazilian state of Mato Grosso said it had a plan to reduce deforestation in the Amazon by 90% by 2030 all while increasing agricultural production.

3. Paris pledges on course for 2.8C of warming

Climate Action Tracker (CAT) released their updated prediction of where the sum total of countries’ climate pledges will take us. The answer? The same as last year: to a 2.8C warmer than the pre-industrial normal. Actually, it’s not quite the same. Last year they predicted 2.7C, but some updated numbers from historical emissions meant the destination was tweaked slightly.

Current policies will warm the world 3.6C – the same as last year. The reason there has been no change is because since Paris, no-one has really done much. As we reported last week, apart from a few backsliders 2016 has been a year of inaction.

Major challenge for Paris Agreement to meet 1.5degC warming limit. CAT update, Marrakech #cop22 #unfccc https://t.co/A0XaCW5UbR pic.twitter.com/wE6tczJ737

— ClimateActionTracker (@climateactiontr) November 10, 2016

CAT’s Bill Hare says that’s because policies take a long time to formulate. But that there are “strong tailwinds for climate action we see today in many parts of the world, with the incredibly rapid growth of renewable technologies worldwide, the rapid acceleration of the markets for electric vehicles and plummeting battery storage costs, fundamentally change the geopolitical forces working on climate policy.”

Sigmar Gabriel. Photo: Arne Müseler

4. Germany delays releasing its 2050 climate plan because of pro-coal lobbying

German economy minister Sigmar Gabriel (who has had a big fortnight for blocking carbon-reducing initiatives) vetoed the release of Germany’s 2050 emissions reduction target on Wednesday. Reuters reported that appeals by industry and union bodies convinced Gabriel to block the draft plan.

Germany is moving towards one of its most divisive elections in years and aggravating the unions is the last thing Gabriel wants to do. But he’s also under pressure to defend Germany’s role as a climate leader. The US, Canada and Mexico are all likely to release mid-century targets next week.

“Germany is already struggling to meet its 2020 climate targets and is under additional pressure after Chancellor Merkel repeatedly said she would make climate policy a priority of Germany’s G20 presidency next year,” report Clean Energy Wire.

5. Public health threats are now high on the climate agenda

The Moroccan Health Minister, El Houssaine Louardi, highlighted the connection between climate change and air pollution in affecting Moroccan citizens’ health. He said public health should be put at the heart of COP22 negotiations. While vector borne diseases are on the rise in Morocco as a result of a warmer climate, “less than 1.5% of international finance for climate change adaptation is currently allocated to health projects”, Louardi said.

Far from affecting just the COP’s host country, the burden of climate change-related diseases is getting worse all over the world. Yves Souteyrand, representative of the World Health Organisation (WHO) in Morocco, warned that about 12.5 million people globally die each year as a result of environmental factors linked to climate change.

Representatives of a dozen member countries got together to discuss and coordinate cross-border health response as part of the Nairobi Work programme, which facilitates knowledge building and sharing on adaptation related issues.

The group released a statement highlighting that: “Climate change will have a significant impact on human health by expanding the geographic range of many diseases. In addition, the impact of extreme events, both fast and slow-onset, affect human health and health infrastructure in numerous ways and on different levels.”

African governments and businesses are seizing the opportunity to be at the forefront of the climate debate this year, with Morocco taking up the role of African climate champion.

Yesterday it was the turn of the Africa Renewable Energy initiative, which was presented to a large audience of businesspeople, activists and researchers from the continent and beyond. The initiative aims at mobilising as much money as possible by 2020, to fund a massive boost in large scale renewable energy projects. The target is an additional 10GW of clean energy capacity deployed by 2020.

But the money to change the face of Africa with solar power and lift its people out of poverty at the same time is not there. To turn big ideas into reality, the energy sector will need an investment of about US$20bn before 2020. A figure that looks increasingly unrealistic as the Republicans now in charge in the US (a major contributor to the Green Climate Fund) have promised to slash climate aid.

7. Wednesday was Water Action Day

The event that ran throughout the day was promoted by two of the most prominent figures of this year’s COP, Moroccan and French Climate Champions Hakima El Haite and Laurence Tubiana.

More than 80% of national climate plans have identified water as a key area for adaption, but according to El Haite there’s still need for greater awareness on the subject. On Wednesday, the Moroccan Government introduced the “Blue Book on Water and Climate”, which collates recommendations on how to turns promises in water-focused policies, and policies into solutions that work on the ground.

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