With vast sunbaked, windswept deserts and 2.5 million people, the southern African nation has plenty of renewable resources to go around. 

Meanwhile rich, densely populated Europe, South Korea and Japan are crying out for clean fuel to decarbonise hard-to-electrify sectors like fertilisers, steel and shipping. Their net zero plans depend on it. 

Keen to secure pole position in the global race for green hydrogen, last year the EU began reaching agreements with prospective producers. One of the most trumpeted deals was signed with Namibia on the sidelines of Cop27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. 

“We want to fight climate change. We want to have clean energy. And as I said, you have all the resources in abundance. So let us team up,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in the direction of her Namibian counterpart, hailing the partnership as a “big win-win situation for all of us”. 

Tapping into solar and wind energy for export is central to President Hage Geingob’s economic strategy. Namibia is seeking $20 billion of investment in green hydrogen – more than its entire GDP of $12 billion in 2022. Government authorities are negotiating funding options with the EU. 

As with any heavy industry, though, the hoped-for boom will come at a cost to local communities and ecosystems. The benefits to ordinary Namibians are less certain. 

Namibia is planning a series of projects to catapult the country into becoming a major green hydrogen exporter. (Credit: Fanis Kollias/Spoovio)

In a months-long investigation, Climate Home News and Oxpeckers visited the site of the flagship project, a $10 billion complex near the southern coastal town of Lüderitz, which is being developed by a Namibia-based company called Hyphen Hydrogen Energy.

The reporter on the ground found a community largely in the dark about the development and nervous about the impact on fishing and tourism. Experts shared frustration at the secretive tender process, scepticism about job prospects for Namibians and concerns for the area’s unique wildlife. 

The green hydrogen complex 

Perched between the Namib desert and the Atlantic Ocean, Lüderitz is named after a German colonist. It was the centre of a diamond rush in 20th century and of a colonial history that repressed indigenous Africans. Germany officially apologised in 2021 for colonial-era atrocities, recognising them as “genocide”. 

Today, its Art Nouveau architecture, fresh seafood and wildlife draws a modest number of tourists, who can visit ghost towns abandoned after the diamond rush. The town is surrounded by the Tsau//Khaeb National Park, home to seals, penguins, flamingoes and ostriches. The park and surrounding lands are off-limits to residents to prevent illegal diamond mining. 

Green hydrogen is set to to transform the character of this small enclave once again. 

Hyphen’s plans show an initial 5GW of wind turbines and solar panels to supply power, according to the project’s factsheet published by the Namibian government. In this arid region, a desalination plant is needed to supply fresh water. An electrolysis plant will split the water into hydrogen and oxygen, before the hydrogen gas is converted into liquid ammonia. A new deepwater port will accommodate tankers to ship the end product around the world. The company aims to produce 300,000 tons of ammonia a year, commissioning the first phase by 2026, Hyphen’s website says. 

To build all this, Hyphen expects to bring in 15,000 workers, roughly doubling Lüderitz’s population. Lüderitz Town Council is planning a new town in the desert to house the influx, immediately south of the historic Kolmanskuppe ghost town. 

An opaque tender process 

“We were a little surprised at the government’s choice of a partner,” said Phil Balhao, an opposition party member of the Lüderitz Town Council.  

Other bidders like South Africa’s Sasol and Australian Fortescue Future Industries had an “established track record” that “seemingly just got ignored”, he said. 

The tender process was overseen by the Namibia Investments Development & Promotions Board (NIDPB), which sits in the president’s office. In September 2020, the board appointed James Mnyupe as green hydrogen commissioner. It launched the first call for proposals in early 2021. 

In a televised speech, Mnyupe said the tender was exempt from public procurement rules. Instead, he cited tourism and conservation laws as the basis to hold a closed selection process. 

Graham Hopwood, director of the Institute of Public Policy Research, a public-interest think-tank based in Windhoek, was not impressed.

“With such a major and strategic project, there needs to be transparency and accountability from the outset. The fact that this project is mired in secrecy is raising red flags,” he said.

The Namibian government published a list of six bidders, who submitted nine bids between them. However, the content of the bids was not made public, nor the reasoning for Hyphen’s selection. 

Hyphen said this was standard practice, given the commercially sensitive data contained in the bids. They added the process was “competitive”. 

“It would be irresponsible and to the detriment to the development of the Hyphen project and Namibia’s broader green hydrogen industry for it to publish commercially sensitive agreements in the public domain that competitor projects/countries could use to compete against Namibia,” Hyphen said in a statement. 

The Namibian government said the tender was “conducted with the utmost transparency and fairness”. 

They said that the three-person bid evaluation committee did a “detailed and comprehensive evaluation” of the proposals, supported by independent experts from the US government’s national renewable energy laboratory and the EU’s technical assistance facility on sustainable energy.

Who is Hyphen? 

Hyphen is a joint venture between two companies – Enertrag and Nicholas Holdings Limited. 

Enertrag, owned by a 59-year-old East German nuclear physicist called Jörg Müller has a long track record of building renewables. It is pursuing green hydrogen projects across the world in Uruguay, Vietnam and South Africa. 

Nicholas Holdings Limited is a company registered in the British Virgin Islands, which owns its stake in Hyphen through a special purpose vehicle based in Mauritius. The ultimate owner of the company is a South African investor called Brian Myerson.

The CEO of Hyphen is South African businessman Marco Raffinetti. 

Myerson is a South African who spent decades as an investor in the UK, where he made headlines for battling the business establishment.

In 2010, Myerson was found by a panel of top UK lawyers to have behaved dishonestly in averting a takeover of Principle Capital, the investment firm he co-founded.

The Takeover Appeal Board found that Myerson and co-conspirators made a “deliberate attempt to circumvent” rules around taking over companies and then attempted to cover up their rule-breaking when the authorities began to investigate. He was banned from getting involved in mergers for three years. 

Dishing out the punishment, the panel said it was only the second time it had done so, which it said, “is some indication of the extreme nature of the sanction”. 

A spokesperson for Hyphen, Enertrag and Nicholas Holdings Limited described this incident as a “historic matter” over “an alleged technical infringement” which “remains contested”. It should not be used to draw conclusions about Myerson’s character, they argued. 

They added that the Takeover Appeal Board had no formal regulatory powers and UK financial regulators took no action in respect of the alleged breach of the rules. 

A spokesperson for the Namibian government said it these were “historical legal matters, that to best of our knowledge have since been resolved”. 

Myerson’s previous ventures on the African continent include a failed bid to scale up bioethanol production in Mozambique. Like today’s green hydrogen push, this was driven by EU demand: in 2007, the bloc set a to blend a percentage of biofuels into petrol. Investors piled into Mozambique, touting it as a “biofuels superpower”.

Myerson set up Principle Energy, based on the Isle of Man. It made bold promises to plant sugarcane over 20,000 hectares of land, build one of the top production facilities in the world and employ 1,600 people. Then the global bioethanol market collapsed and by 2013 the company closed, having planted just 136 hectares, according to a report by GRAIN. 

His involvement in Hyphen is likely to be of concern, said IPPR’s Hopwood, adding Hyphen’s leadership was “questionable”.

Use of tax havens

Myerson’s investment in Hyphen is structured through the British Virgin Islands and Mauritius. Both rank poorly in the Tax Justice Network’s financial secrecy and corporate tax haven indexes. 

Raffinetti said that Mauritius and the British Virgin Islands were “tax neutral jurisdictions with efficient financial markets”. A lot of infrastructure investment in Africa goes through Mauritius, he said, and investors are subject to tax in the countries where they are registered. 

Tax Justice Network analyst Bob Michel said that investment into Africa goes through Mauritius because of its tax rules. “Mauritius is a corporate tax haven,” he said.

“(Mauritius’) domestic tax regime combined with its vast tax treaty network allow third country investors to use it to siphon profits from operations in Africa with the least of taxes paid in the countries where the operations take place,” Michel said by email.

A spokesperson for the Namibian government said it was “aware of the jurisdictions through which certain Hyphen shareholders hold their equity in Hyphen”.  

The spokesperson added: “Should [the Namibian government] come across any conduct that is unbecoming of its laws and global best practice, rest assured [we] will take the necessary swift corrective action.”

Great expectations 

Raffinetti, Hyphen’s CEO, previously developed gas power and rooftop solar bids in South Africa. The Richard Bay gas project he co-led is facing legal challenge by environmental activists due to its climate impact.

Wearing glasses and a black turtleneck, Raffinetti joined a video call with Climate Home in late October. He warned interviewers the internet might cut out due to the power cuts his native South Africa is plagued with.

The interview was granted, through a PR agency, on condition Hyphen could vet the quotes used. Some of the more colloquial soundbites reporters transcribed came back replaced with cautious jargon, and an admonition to put everything in its full context. Hyphen separately responded in writing to detailed concerns raised by sources.

“There’s an enormous amount of expectation in Namibia around this project. So there’s a huge amount of media attention,” Raffinetti said in one approved quote. “As the first large-scale project in Namibia’s green industrialisation strategy, we have an enormous obligation to get it right.”

Biodiversity concerns 

Dr Jean-Paul Roux, a retired marine biologist working in the area for decades, pointed to where the Luderitz peninsula ends at Angra Point. It is the northernmost tip of the Karoo ecosystem, he explained, unique to southern Africa.

In the dry summer season, the desert landscape looks drab and lifeless. Winter rains bring a green explosion of rare plants such as the endemic Lithops optica, a tiny succulent that gets as old as 90 years. 

“Here you can find up to 1,000 different plant species in just one square kilometre, some so small no bulldozer operator will even notice them,” he said. He spots signs of hyenas and porcupines. 

This is the area earmarked for the deepwater port, desalination and ammonia plants. 

Roux said the development would have a massive impact on Shearwater Bay and the adjacent Sturmvogelbucht, a lagoon teeming with flamingos and a heavy-sided dolphin population that he has been studying for years and visits every day. 

“This is the only place along the southern African coast where you can watch them from your car,” he said as this smallest of all dolphin species approached to within a few meters of the beach. He fears that once developers start blasting rock for the port construction, dolphins will leave and never return. 

The Tsau//Khaeb National Park is classified by Namibia’s Ministry of Environment and Tourism as a biodiversity hotspot. (Credit: Fanis Kollias/Spoovio/Luderitz Marine Research)

Dr Antje Burke, a veteran botanist, is working as a consultant to Hyphen. She said at a conference of the Namibian Scientific Society in July that Hyphen was trying to avoid the most sensitive areas, but “one big problem” is that a species of parsley “overlaps almost completely with the concession area”. 

She added that “even more concerning” was the future development plans. “The Hyphen project is developing the service infrastructure really keeping the future developments in mind… That means the entire area will be developed.”

Burke indicated some adjustments that could mitigate the environmental impact.

“No green energy project can be implemented without some environmental impact and Hyphen’s objective is to minimise environmental impacts to the largest extent possible,” Hyphen CEO Marco Raffinetti said in an interview with Climate Home. 

The company has hired consultancy SLR to prepare an environmental and social impact report and lead a “comprehensive stakeholder engagement process”, Hyphen added in a written statement.

Consultants are currently gathering meteorological data and reporting a baseline of wildlife and plants in the area, SLR reports say. The formal environmental impact study is expected to start next year, the official documents add.

A group of Flamingoes at a lagoon within the Tsau//Khaeb National Park in Namibia, where green hydrogen developments are meant to ship the gas to the EU. (Photo: John Grobler)

Loss of access 

Aside from the northern end of the bay, the peninsula is the only publicly accessible area of the Lüderitz region. The rest is Sperrgebiet or “forbidden area” – a legacy of the diamond rush. 

Some of Hyphen’s infrastructure will reduce public access to the peninsula. Hyphen’s Raffinetti said this was “unavoidable” as it was “the only location feasible for a deepwater port”. 

The other access to the sea is the four-kilometre Agate Beach to the north of the enclave, downwind from the last few local fishing factories and an overflowing municipal sewage plant. 

Residents fear this would impact lobster fishing and rock angling. Crayfish fisheries, one of the area’s tourism attractions and an informal source of income would also be affected, locals said. 

“The people in the township’s poorest areas [have] got nowhere else to go. They are going to strip this bay [Agate beach] clean of everything,” said Gerd Kessler, a fourth-generation Buchter as locals call themselves, referring to a potential concentration of fisheries in the area.  

As owner of Five Roses Aquaculture and three smaller oyster-breeding operations, Kessler employs 100 people. 

Felsenkirche, a Lutheran church built in 1912 in Lüderitz. (Photo: SkyPixels/Wikimedia Commons)

A massive new seawall and harbour at Angra Point could have unpredictable impacts on currents in the bay, he cautioned. When the existing shallow port was expanded in the late 1960s by filling in the channel between the town and Shark Island, the sea quickly stripped away the town’s little beach inside Robert Harbour. 

Kessler’s biggest concern was how Hyphen planned to dispose of the brine from their desalination plant. “You can’t just dump that anywhere, you have to make sure you use the currents to disperse it,” Kessler said. 

Questionable job prospects 

Hyphen expects to create 15,000 jobs in the construction phase and 3,000 to operate the finished complex. It is aiming for 90% of these jobs to go to Namibians, and 30% to youth. 

There is a huge skills gap, Namibian business groups warned. 

“We do not even have a category for petrochemical or petroleum engineers at the moment,” said Sophia Tekie, chairperson of the Engineering Council of Namibia (ECN). “If we have any, they are registered as [one of 40] chemical engineers.” 

“Although the ECN has 2,015 registered engineers in eight disciplines at present, about 30 to 40% of them were already retired and only did part-time consultancy work,” said her predecessor, Markus von Jeney. 

Local construction capacity did not look much better: according to Bärbel Kircher, director of the Construction Industry Federation (CIF), their membership had declined from 480 companies in 2015 to 240 member companies, operating at only 50% capacity, she said.  

“Currently, our local contractors are largely displaced by foreign contractors, excluding them from opportunities. This is often due to conditions set by external financiers,” said Kircher.  

In the past, the country has struggled to complete large projects due to corruption charges.  

Since 2013, the Namibian Ports Authority, the National Petroleum Corporation of Namibia and the Ministry of Agriculture have borrowed over N$21 billion (about US$400 million each, mostly from the African Development Bank) for infrastructure projects, including the 3MW Neckartal dam.  

The Namibian High Court declared the dam was commissioned in 2008 under corrupted circumstances. The project was eventually completed at three times the original price in 2017. 

Namibian construction companies were not likely to benefit from the green hydrogen projects, the CiF said. “The current procurement methods and trends do not provide a promising outlook for the future,” said Kirchner. 

Hyphen said the company would implement “targeted training interventions at various levels” including “specialized Masters’ programs, internships and apprenticeships”. 

The Karoo ecosystem is unique to Southern Africa. The Tsau//Khaeb National Park is a biodiversity hotspot hosting a part of this ecosystem. (Photo: John Grobler)

European support 

Under the memorandum of understanding signed in Sharm el-Sheikh, the EU will provide technical expertise, trade incentives and, crucially, help to secure infrastructure finance. 

Moments after von der Leyen and Geingob inked their deal, the European Investment Bank promised loans of up to €500 million ($528m) for renewable hydrogen investments in Namibia. “Let’s bring flesh to the bone,” the bank’s chief Werner Hoyer told the audience. 

Shortly after the event, Hyphen announced that it had “signed a €35 million agreement with the European Investment Bank to finance the early development of our project”. This was somewhat premature. The bank had supplied a letter of intent, not a firm commitment of funding. 

Since the initial announcement, European institutions, Namibian government officials and private actors have been working out the details of the partnership. 

Hyphen is looking for €100 million to start work on the project.

“We have been very grateful to the EIB and the European Commission for making available the initial funding to share the early development risk,” said Raffinetti in late September, suggesting a firm commitment from the European backers. 

The Hyphen CEO went on to outline what the deal with the EIB should look like: a €10 million ($10.5 million) grant – “still to be finalised,” he added – and a €25 million ($26.4 million) “soft loan”, meaning it would come with favourable terms for the company.

An EIB spokesperson said no agreement has been signed yet. “We are in the process of completing our due diligence, after which the project will be presented to the EIB’s governing bodies for approval,” they said.

“Potential financial support at this early stage would be for site studies and feasibility studies. Any support for implementation will be conditional to the project complying with the Bank’s environmental and social (E&S), procurement, compliance and other standards,” they added.

Namibia’s president Hage Geingob, EIB president Werner Hoyer, Belgian prime minister Alexander de Croco and EU president Ursula von der Leyen announcing the EU green hydrogen partnership with Namibia at Cop27. (Photo: EIB)

On top of the cash injection, the EU’s international partnership division could provide a first-loss guarantee. If the project does not go to plan and the borrower cannot pay back its debt, the EU will pick up the tab – or at least part of it. 

Without the “bedrock” of public money it would be impossible to lure in commercial lenders and leave a huge funding gap, Raffinetti said. 

A European Commission spokesperson told Climate Home that “at present, there is not yet any financial assistance under the EU budget mobilised in favour of the Hyphen project”.

The Netherlands is also supporting the project. Dutch companies like the Port of Rotterdam and gas pipeline operator Gasunie see a business opportunity to offload the green ammonia from ships and pipe it to industry inland.

In June, green hydrogen commissioner Mnyupe told a national newspaper that the Dutch government had given Namibia a €40m grant to develop green hydrogen. He said the government would use €23m of this to buy a stake in Hyphen.

The Dutch said the money was not Namibia’s to spend. The €40m grant comes from Invest International, a public fund set up in 2019 to advance Dutch interests abroad and promote economic growth in the developing world. 

Invest International’s lead on hydrogen Bart De Smet told Climate Home that the €40m grant will be distributed by a fund manager independent of the Namibian government and won’t necessarily go to Hyphen. 

Who benefits? 

The big question for Namibians is whether the inevitable disturbance of a unique ecosystem and small-town culture will be worth it. 

The Namibian government is taking a 24% stake in Hyphen through its sovereign wealth fund. It is expected to raise further revenues through taxes, royalties, land rental and environmental levies on the project, Hyphen said. 

“The benefit for the country in terms of economic upliftment is enormous. Because Namibia is only 2.5 million people. So if you’re successful, your impact on each human being’s life can be enormous,” Raffinetti said. 

Patrick Neib, an unemployed resident of the Nautilus township behind Luderitz, could certainly use some upliftment. He moved to the area in 2015 in search of a better job that has yet to materialise. 

Like many residents, he found out about Hyphen from social media. Most of Hyphen’s public meetings took place in Keetmanshoop, the regional capital 350 km away. 

The secrecy and technical jargon used by Hyphen and its consultants made it impossible for the ordinary layman to understand or access any opportunities, Neib said.  

“There is just no public discussion about the benefits for ordinary people like me, or what price we are to pay for green hydrogen development,” he said. “My question is, who or what is really behind all of this?” 

This story was reported in collaboration with Oxpeckers Investigative Journalism Centre and was supported by a grant from Journalismfund Europe.

The post Shades of green hydrogen: EU demand set to transform Namibia appeared first on Climate Home News.

Norway’s supreme court in 2021 ruled that two wind farms built at Fosen in central Norway violated Sami human rights under international conventions, but the turbines remain in operation more than 16 months later.

Police began removing a handful of demonstrators from outside the building housing most of the finance ministry – a new target for demonstrators – while over a hundred demonstrators chanted “C, S, V”, the abbreviation of a 1970s Sami slogan meaning “Show Sami spirit”.

The removals took place on Supreme Court Square, across the street from the court that ruled in favour of reindeer herders in the Fosen case.

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Meanwhile, campaigners pressed on with a demonstration at the nearby energy ministry, which also houses the transport and family ministries and parts of the finance ministry.

Thunberg, an advocate for ending the world’s reliance on carbon-based power, has argued that governments should not allow a transition to green energy to come at the expense of Indigenous Sami rights.

“They should have seen it coming for violating human rights,” Thunberg told Reuters when asked about the need for the protests, while she was sitting outside the energy ministry.

One of the campaigners said they would “close down the state, ministry by ministry” for as long as necessary.

South Africa tried to weaken corruption safeguards in coal phase out deal, says CEO

“The state has let the Sami people down,” Ella Marie Haetta Isaksen told Reuters.

“I hope some ministers will soon understand that the only way out of this human rights violation is to tear town the wind turbines.”

The finance ministry said it had asked staff to work from home if they are able.

Reindeer herders in the Nordic country say the sight and sound of the giant wind power machinery frighten their animals and disrupt age-old traditions.

“Quandary”

The energy ministry has said the fate of the wind farms is a complex legal quandary despite the supreme court ruling and is hoping to find a compromise.

Owners of the Roan Vind and Fosen Vind farms include Germany’s Stadtwerke Muenchen, Norwegian utilities Statkraft and TroenderEnergi, as well as Swiss firms Energy Infrastructure Partners and BKW.

“We seek to find … mitigation measures in dialogue with the reindeer herders and the ministry that ensure the operating basis and the Sami opportunity for cultural expression,” Statkraft said in a statement to Reuters.

US backs Ajay Banga to lead World Bank in climate fight

Roan Vind on Monday told Reuters it trusted the energy ministry would find solutions allowing production of renewable energy to continue.

Utility BKW said it expected the wind turbines to remain in place, with compensatory measures to ensure the rights of the herders.

Stadtwerke Muenchen declined to comment.

The post Greta Thunberg protests wind farm “violating human rights” in Norway appeared first on Climate Home News.

The fund will help implement the goal of protecting 30% of the world’s land and water ecosystems by 2030, also featured as the central target of the biodiversity agreement. 

In the final text, countries agreed to mobilize $200 billion from different sources (including direct grants, philanthropy and private funds), while ending at least $500 billion worth of harmful subsidies. 

To channel some of that money, countries adopted an initiative by Brazil and African countries to establish a new trust fund. The Global Environmental Facility (GEF) will establish the fund by 2023 and it will later have its own governing body. 

EU president Ursula von der Leyen said in a statement it was “very positive” that countries adopted measurable targets to protect nature, “as well as a mechanism to finance their implementation with the Global Biodiversity Fund.” 

The Plenary: Adoption of Decisions has officially started!

Watch live in order to learn what is happening at #COP15

: https://t.co/ZjGOFDkUTM pic.twitter.com/2oU1BIwrbs

— UN Biodiversity (@UNBiodiversity) December 19, 2022

In Montreal, delegates from every country in the world except for the US negotiated a deal to reverse the loss of biodiversity by 2030. Governments agreed to protect 30% of the world’s land and water ecosystems by that date.

To achieve this goal, backing it with proper finance was a key lesson from last decade’s Aichi biodiversity agreement, which failed to deliver on every target set. The funding gap for biodiversity has been estimated at $700 billion per year.

Lina Barrera, vice-president for international policy at Conservation International, said the creation of the new biodiversity fund is a “necessary step”, but added “there is still farther to go” to close the funding gap. 

Quick cash 

One Latin American negotiator told Climate Home the initiative for a new fund emerged from the need of some developing countries to access cooperation funds quickly, which was often not possible through the GEF.

“It takes too long from the moment you apply (to GEF funds) until the money gets to the field. The risk is implementing (the Kunming-Montreal deal) quickly, given we have only eight years left until 2030,” the delegate said.

Cop15 global nature deal passes despite DR Congo’s objection

Early in the negotiations, a group of 20 countries harbouring 70% of the world’s biodiversity called for a “supplementary global biodiversity fund” to be set up in order to “overcome the concerns regarding accessibility of funds”.

The final text reflects some of these concerns, as it calls on the GEF to set up a fund “with a simple and effective application and approval process, providing easy and efficient access to resources.” 

Carlos Manuel Rodríguez, CEO of the GEF, welcomed the adoption of the Global Biodiversity Fund and said the facility would work to operationalise the fund “in a timely manner”. “Today’s agreement is wonderful news, and it creates real momentum as we push toward 2030 and the critical goals ahead of us,” he added in a statement. 

Who pays? 

Donors to the fund will include developed countries and developing “countries that voluntarily assume obligations of developed country parties.”  

However, most of the fund’s money will come from other sources such as private sector or philanthropy, as developed nations only committed to directly provide $20 billion a year by 2025 and $30 billion by 2030.

Megaforested nations such as Brazil and the Democratic Republic of the Congo both criticised this financial pledge, with the DRC threatening to veto the whole agreement over this. In the final plenary, the country’s vice-minister Ève Bazaiba welcomed the Kunming-Montreal deal while “expressing reservations” on the financial target.

Cop15: Governments split on ditching nature-harming subsidies in Montreal

Observers welcomed the creation of the Global Biodiversity Fund as well as the targets from the Kunming-Montreal biodiversity deal, while stressing the need for broader reforms.

“[The biodiversity fund] will not be sufficient to solve the biodiversity finance challenge: we need deep reforms in financial institutions, in particular the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank,” said the human rights NGO Avaaz in a statement. 

Just a month ago, at the UN climate change talks in Sharm el-Sheikh, the world’s governments also agreed to set up a new fund to aid victims of extreme weather events. 

This was regarded as a big breakthrough, but there are still questions on how to get it running, which countries will contribute to it and which countries will be eligible for support. 

The post ‘Kunming-Montreal’ deal sets up new fund for biodiversity by 2023 appeared first on Climate Home News.

At around 1am on Wednesday, more than 60 developing countries including India, Indonesia and all African countries walked out of the negotiations on finance. They claimed there was a lack of commitment from developed countries to fund efforts to protect nature. 

“We feel that resource mobilization has been left behind,” one delegate who walked out told CTV News. “It’s everyone’s problem, but we are not equally responsible for the drivers that have led to the destruction of biodiversity.”

Rising tensions have put talks “on the edge of a full breakdown,” WWF campaigner Innocent Maloba said. So ministers will have to rescue a last-minute agreement before the talks end on Monday.  

Cop15: Governments split on ditching nature-harming subsidies in Montreal

During the high-level plenary, which marks the last part of the negotiations, hosts Canada said they were “ready to engage on discussions on the scale of funding” needed to achieve a successful agreement. 

“Many of you have made it clear that ambition must be supported by an increase in funding, as well as improvements in the predictability, transparency, comprehensiveness and accessibility of funding,” said the country’s environment minister, Steven Guilbeault.

The #COP15HighLevelSegment has kicked off!
Xi Jinping, President of delivered a video message to #COP15 @Csaba_Korosi_ president of @UNGA, @AminaJMohammed DSG @UN, @s_guilbeault Minister of @environmentca, Mr. Wang Xiangxiang, @francoislegault, & @mremae delivered remarks pic.twitter.com/EyOrGlC9MF

— UN Biodiversity (@UNBiodiversity) December 15, 2022

China is co-hosting the talks, which were originally supposed to be in the city of Kunming. Its government was less specific about the actions needed.

During the plenary, the country’s president Xi Jinping sent a video message urging countries to “push forward the global process of biodiversity protection, turn ambitions into action” and “support developing countries in capacity building”.

Where is the money? 

Countries are negotiating a plan to reverse nature destruction this decade. A 2017 study shows that immediate action is needed to halt mass extinctions, which threaten essential ecosystem services for humanity.

To achieve this, finance “is critical”, but negotiations around it have stalled and they currently have more issues up for debate than other sections of the text, observers said.  

“As in prior Cops for both climate and biodiversity, the hardest parts get left to the very end,” said Mark Opel, finance lead for the observer NGO Campaign for Nature. 

The world needs to mobilize around $700 billion per year to reverse the destruction of nature, a 2019 report by The Nature Conservancy, the Paulson Institute and the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability estimated.

The latest draft of Montreal’s “nature pact” proposes $200 billion in direct funding and $500 billion by eliminating and redirecting subsidies that harm nature, for example by promoting overfishing, monocultures or fossil fuel expansion.

Brazil and African countries have pushed to create a new fund for biodiversity separate from the Global Environmental Facility (GEF), the leading UN financial mechanism for nature. 

UN nature pact nears its ‘Copenhagen or Paris’ moment

One Latin American negotiator told Climate Home many developing countries have faced difficulties accessing GEF funds.

Developed countries want to strengthen the GEF and mobilise non-government sources of funding instead of creating a new fund. “We need to unlock private and philanthropic support, development bank modernisation and subsidies realignment,” said Guilbeault. 

Realigning subsidies plays an important role in getting new funds for biodiversity but negotiations around this topic have also proved difficult. The world spends an estimated $1.1 trillion per year subsidising nature-harming activities. 

Maloba said funds from developed countries would be crucial for a successful outcome in Montreal. “It is particularly concerning that donor countries don’t look to be ready to step up on international biodiversity finance, despite some welcome commitments in the lead in,” Maloba said. 

The post After developing country walkout, ministers arrive to rescue nature talks appeared first on Climate Home News.

A report commissioned by Business for Nature estimates $1.8 trillion is spent each year on subsidising destructive activities for nature such as the growth of fossil fuels, monocultures and overfishing.

The European Union has backed a proposal at the Cop15 biodiversity summit to redirect harmful subsidies towards activities that protect nature, as well as eliminating harmful subsidies by 2025.  

“As a priority, existing resources need to be used more effectively, including by aligning all financial flows with nature-positive objectives and by addressing harmful subsidies,” said the European bloc in a statement. 

UN nature pact nears its ‘Copenhagen or Paris’ moment

Countries like India and Japan have opposed entirely eradicating subsidies. India’s lead negotiator, Vinod Matur, told Carbon Copy the country’s farmers “who are poor and disadvantaged need both social and economic support”. Japan pushed to remove references to agricultural and fishing subsidies in the lead up to the negotiations.

Argentina, one of the world’s largest meat producers, supported the elimination of harmful subsidies but questioned the world’s capacity to actually redirect them, considering it a form of “creative accounting” to justify current subsidies. 

One Latin American negotiator, who wished to remain anonymous criticised the EU’s position. “We think the situation is concerning. We think the lack of flexibility of some developed countries is particularly worrying,” they said.

Sweating the small stuff

It is a key battleground this week when the issue is formally discussed in plenary negotiations, said Costa Rica’s lead negotiator Eugenia Arguedas. Costa Rica is chairing a coalition to protect 30% of the planet’s land and water ecosystems by 2030.

Li Lin, senior director of policy and advocacy at WWF, added that countries focused on “minutiae” during the first week of talks, leaving the “big-ticket items” to the second week. “They have left themselves a lot to do in the next few days,” he said.

Almost 200 countries have gathered in Montreal to negotiate the world’s strategy to reverse biodiversity loss and protect the globe’s frail remaining ecosystems, which are key to stopping climate change.

A recent UN scientific report warned that at least a million species are threatened with extinction, an “unprecedented” decline in all of human history.  

Opening the talks, UN secretary general Antonio Guterres said that divesting harmful subsidies is one of the key outcomes expected.

“[We need a deal] that addresses the root causes of this destruction — harmful subsidies, misdirected investment, unsustainable food systems, and wider patterns of consumption and production,” Guterres said.

Observers agreed that this will be one of the main clashing points, as it has been during the previous negotiations leading up to the Montreal summit. But the head of IUCN’s forests and land team Carole Saint-Laurent said these redirected subsidies could be a fresh source of resources.

“We see tremendous potential in redirecting harmful subsidies to investments in restoration of ecosystems,” said Saint-Laurent, who added this could become a “win-win” for all countries.

Overfishing breakthrough

Countries made some progress in June, when the World Trade Organization (WTO) reached an agreement to ban certain kinds of unsustainable fishing subsidies, an issue that had stalled since 2011.

For the first time, countries agreed to ban subsidies for unregulated fisheries, fisheries targeting overfished stocks and fisheries in the “unregulated” high seas. Now, two thirds of WTO member states need to formally accept the agreement and start implementing it.

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But after almost two years of online and in-person negotiations and with only a week left to reach a successful outcome, observers have also warned of the risk of not reaching an agreement in Montreal.

Campaigners have also called out delegates on the slow progress in other topics, such as a mechanism to monitor each country’s actions to meet the targets.

“Negotiators look to be taking a hatchet to the ratchet here in Montreal. We are sleepwalking into repeating the mistakes we made in Aichi [where the last deal was struck in 2010]. We are at risk of having vague commitments with no substance,” said Guido Broekhoven, Head of Policy Research and Development at WWF.

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After a two-year delay and a change of location, the UN biodiversity summit aims to halt nature loss by 2030 and restore ecosystems. It could either be a success like the signing of the Paris Agreement or a dramatic failure like the 2009 climate summit in Copenhagen.

“Anything can happen. It would be terrible if we had a ‘Copenhagen’ because we would lose a golden opportunity to protect nature,” said Carlos Manuel Rodríguez, CEO of the Global Environmental Facility, the largest funder of biodiversity protection. 

Countries are set to define targets to stop biodiversity loss for the next ten years, with a coalition of more than a hundred nations calling to protect 30% of all land and ocean ecosystems by 2030. Big forested countries such as China, Brazil and Indonesia are yet to join the coalition.

A draft prepared in the lead up to the event remains disputed. Initially the text was “technically quite good” said Brian O’Donnell, director of the advocacy organization Campaign for Nature. But “we’ve had two years of online negotiations. What started as a very good framework has ended up almost all in square brackets” – indicating a lack of consensus.

Leadership vacuum

The meeting was originally scheduled to take place in 2020 in Kunming, China, but was repeatedly delayed over Covid concerns. Eventually Montreal offered to take over as host city. China keeps the presidency of the talks.

China has not officially invited world leaders. It fell to UN biodiversity chief Elizabeth Maruma Mrema to urge them to attend the event instead of the football World Cup, which is taking place in Qatar at the same time.

Scientists warn that a million species are threatened with extinction, due to the climate crisis and other threats like pollution and deforestation.

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Addressing the issue, however, is also a form of climate action, said Kiliparti Ramakrishna, senior advisor on ocean and climate policy at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. “Nature-based solutions are directly connected with biodiversity and yet we treat [climate and biodiversity] separately. That is not good,” he said.

There were some signs of that changing when Cop27 talks concluded in Egypt on Sunday. In a first for the UN climate process, the Sharm el-Sheikh Implentation Plan encouraged countries to consider “nature-based solutions or ecosystem-based approaches” to climate action.

In the past decade, countries agreed to a ten-year plan called the Aichi targets, aimed at halting biodiversity loss. A UN summary report shows countries failed to meet a single one of those targets.

“(Countries) set these strategies only once a decade. The past strategy failed and so this is the time to get it right. Biodiversity is declining too rapidly,” said O’Donnell. 

Funding gap

Rodríguez explained the lack of sufficient funds was one of the main reasons for the failure of the Aichi targets. That will be key this time around, both in setting up the agreement but also in its implementation.

Even if an agreement is reached, “it’s still just paper”, said Rodriguez. “Implementing (the targets) requires public policies and strong institutions. But many countries require investments to build those capacities in the first place,” he added.

The latest draft includes the target of mobilizing $200 billion per year, “including new, additional and effective financial resources”. To Ramakrishna, the Montreal summit “could be a Paris moment if we get the resolution on finance”. 

Crucially, a deal on finance must phase out subsidies for nature-destructive practices, Rodriguez said. This was also one of the Aichi targets, but “relatively few countries have taken steps even to identify incentives that harm biodiversity,” the UN summary report says. 

“Harmful subsidies far outweigh positive incentives in areas such as fisheries and the control of deforestation,” adds the report. The draft deal includes the goal of reducing these subsidies by $500 billion per year.

Other critical issues remain contested, among them the use of genetic resources. African countries have called on developed nations to pay for genetic information on their biodiversity, which is used in industries such as pharmaceutical companies.  

However, in the preliminary round of negotiations in Nairobi this year, countries did not agree on this issue.

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The launch comes after countries failed to meet internationally agreed 2020 targets to prevent the destruction of plants and wildlife. 

The Legacy Landscapes Fund aims to mobilise enough funding from private and public donors to provide 15 years of financial support for 30 conservation areas. 

At a launch event on Wednesday, Germany’s finance minister Gerd Muller said the fund would “provide lasting, reliable core funding for at least 30 biodiversity hotspots in Africa, Asia and Latin America”. 

The German government and several private donors have invested the first $100 million in the fund which will be used for seven pilot projects in four African countries, Indonesia, Cambodia, and Bolivia. Funding will be used to pay park rangers, support local communities, fund surveillance and monitoring and maintain infrastructure. 

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US climate envoy John Kerry and UN climate chief Patricia Espinosa both spoke at the event. “Nature is our best line of defence against the climate crisis,” Kerry said, stressing its important role as a carbon sink. “When given the chance, nature often recovers.”

“Mother nature does not work in a silo,” said Espinosa, noting that the destruction of nature can lead to a deadly chain of events and have severe impacts on human health.

Other speakers emphasised the link between biodiversity loss and the spread of diseases such as coronavirus. 

Stefanie Lang, the fund’s director, said that French president Emmanuel Macron has expressed his support and aims to make a financial contribution by 2022. 

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“We hope to attract other governments to join the initiative. This needs to be a global movement,” she said. “By ensuring that the costs of nature protection are covered, the Legacy Landscapes Fund addresses a key threat for the survival of species and of humankind.” 

The fund was established ahead of a global biodiversity summit in Kunming, China in October where the UN will seek to secure an agreement on protecting 30% of the Earth’s land and water by 2030.

Over 50 countries, including the US, UK and France, have said they will support the plan. To date just 17% of land and 8% of oceans are protected. According to a new report published on Wednesday, the number of protected areas has increased by 42% since 2010. 

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The 17% land conservation target was just one part of Aichi target 11 – a 10-year conservation goal. Governments have not fully met any of 20 Aichi biodiversity targets set at a meeting in Japan in 2010. Funding shortfalls and harmful subsidies significantly hindered progress. 

The 30 by 30 plan has been criticised by campaigners who are concerned that it will result in indigenous communities losing their land and livelihoods. Survival International recently launched a campaign describing it as the “biggest land grab in history”

Lang said the fund would work closely with indigenous communities and support their legal rights. 

“In some cases, it is only because of indigenous people that we still have areas that are worth protecting,” she said.

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The decision was met with widespread anger by environmental campaigners, who say that it will increase greenhouse gas emissions, destroy biodiversity in the Pilliga forest and damage groundwater supplies used by farmers.

It comes as the Australian government pursues a “gas-fired recovery” from the coronavirus crisis. In September, prime minister Scott Morrison described gas as a “critical enabler of Australia’s economy”.

“To help fire our economic recovery, the next plank in our JobMaker plan is to deliver more Australian gas where it is needed at an internationally competitive price,” he said. 

After a decade-long campaign, Santos was given the green light by NSW’s independent planning commission on Wednesday. “Following its detailed deliberations, the commission concludes the project is in the public interest and that any negative impacts can be effectively mitigated with strict conditions,” the commission said. 

In its pitch to the commission, Santos said the A$3.6bn project ($2.6bn) would deliver “more affordable, secure, cleaner energy” and supply up to half of the energy needs in New South Wales, the country’s most populous state.

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Around half of Australia’s gas reserves need to stay in the ground if global warming is to stay below 2C this century, according to analysis from the Australian National University.

Gas is commonly touted as a cleaner fuel than coal, because it emits around half the carbon dioxide when burned for energy. But methane leaks – or fugitive emissions – during extraction, processing and transport can worsen the fuel’s climate impact.

Glen Klatovsky, energy strategist at Climate Action Network Australia, told CHN that fugitive emissions are a big concern. “If fugitive emissions are around 3%, then gas becomes as bad as coal,” he said.

The Narrabri project, which involves drilling down on around 850 coal seam gas wells across a 95,000 hectare area, could lead to large volumes of saline, contaminated water, and the destruction of native vegetation, Klatovsky said. Gas drilling also introduces weeds and pest species to the region, he added. 

Richard Denniss, chief economist at The Australia Institute, told Climate Home that plans for a gas-driven recovery are driven by “the government’s political need to simultaneously signal that it is moving away from coal but not moving away from the extractive industries more generally”.

In August, minister of energy and emissions reduction Angus Taylor introduced a bill to change the investment mandate of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) which would enable Australia’s green bank to use its Grid Reliability Fund for gas power projects by defining them as “low-emissions technologies”.

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In Morrison’s national energy address in September, he said there was “no credible energy transition plan for an economy like Australia that does not involve the greater use of gas”. Morrison said that Australia would expand its renewable capacity by adding 12.6 GW but the primary focus of the recovery would be unlocking more gas, describing it as “the perfect complement to solar and wind”.

The government continues to back controversial coal mine expansion, with Morrison saying in his address that “coal will continue to play an important role in our economy for decades to come”.

Coal is Australia’s second-largest export industry – in 2019 the country exported A$14bn ($10bn) worth of coal to China alone. But China’s recent carbon neutrality pledge leaves Australia economically vulnerable, Australia’s former top climate diplomat Howard Bamsey told the Sydney Morning Herald.

This week the Queensland government announced that it had signed a deal with mining company Adani to defer royalty payments of A$271 million ($195 million) on a mine in central Queensland.

“Yet again we see Adani being given a free ride and a secret deal,” said Rod Campbell, research Director at The Australia Institute, said in a statement on Thursday. “Subsidising new coal is the last thing Queensland should be doing as global coal demand declines in the wake of the pandemic and in response to climate action.”

Australia came under fire earlier this week for not taking part in the UN biodiversity summit or signing a leaders’ nature pledge which outlined a 10-point plan to halt global biodiversity destruction. A government spokesperson said Australia would not agree to environmental targets “unless we can tell the Australian people what they will cost to achieve and how we will achieve it”.

“Australia is in a biodiversity crisis. The recent bushfires resulted in the death of approximately 3 billion native animals. Australia refuses to be held responsible for our global responsibility,” said Klatovsky.

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Those expecting a repeat of President Xi Jinping’s surprise announcement last week that China was aiming to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060 were left disappointed.

Xi outlined no grand plan for reversing nature loss and environmental destruction when he addressed the high-level biodiversity event on Wednesday. 

“The goal is to seek a kind of modernisation that promotes harmonious coexistence of man and nature,” he told political leaders in a pre-recorded message, insisting that economic development could take place while preserving the environment.

“It falls to all of us to act together and turn the earth into a beautiful homeland,” he added, calling on countries to strike an agreement during major biodiversity talks in Kunming, provisionally scheduled for May 2021, when governments are due to agree on a new framework to halt the decline of biodiversity beyond 2020. 

The UN summit on biodiversity convened by UN secretary general António Guterres on the sidelines of the general assembly aimed to build political momentum and bolster financial commitments ahead of the talks in Kunming. 

The UN hoped the event would be a platform for countries to announce concrete action to stem the decline of the planet’s biodiversity. But beyond speeches, few leaders came with a plan.

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“If the summit is nothing but rhetoric, then we are repeating the mistakes made in Aichi,” Li Shuo, Beijing-based senior energy and climate officer at Greenpeace, told Climate Home. 

“The lack of substance can’t hide the fact that political will on global nature protection is low,” Li tweeted during the summit. 

On Monday, 64 political leaders and the European Union launched a “leader’s pledge for nature” with a 10-point plan to halt global biodiversity destruction.

The pledge has now been signed by more than 70 countries, but China is not one of them. Australia, Brazil, Russia and the US, whose governments all control vast swathes of land and oceans, have not signed up either. 

Campaigners say that without concrete commitments, next year’s talks will fall flat.

A UN report earlier this month concluded that the world has missed all 20 biodiversity targets for 2020 agreed in Aichi, Japan, in 2010. Funding shortfalls were highlighted as a significant barrier to meeting the targets and campaigners fear the failure could repeat itself if countries do not raise more funds ahead of the talks in Kunming.

UN agencies have warned that countries needed to commit an additional $700 billion per year to reverse the destruction of nature. But at a funding conference on Monday, only Germany made a firm commitment to increase its funding for protecting biodiversity in developing countries.

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“China should provide stronger leadership in the current Kunming process. It is crystal clear that the negotiations are heading to an Aichi 2.0. If one looks at the Aichi round, it is essentially a rhetorical boom in 2010 followed by an implementation bust over the subsequent decade,” Li told CHN. 

Other major emitters have also been criticised for their lack of commitment.

The US did not even send a representative to the UN event. And Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro told the UN in a statement last week the country was already subject to “the best environmental legislation on the planet”. 

On Tuesday, Bolsonaro revoked regulations that protect tropical mangroves and other coastal ecosystems. 

“Their deliberate plans to actively destroy nature makes both the Trump and Bolsonaro administrations climate villains,” said Arlo Hemphill, oceans campaigner at Greenpeace US.

Australia was also noticeably absent from the UN biodiversity summit. A government spokesperson said Australia would not agree to environmental targets “unless we can tell the Australian people what they will cost to achieve and how we will achieve it”.

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The proposed biodiversity strategy, initially due to be released late March and delayed by the coronavirus pandemic, was published on Wednesday.

The document outlines a 10-year vision to restore and protect the union’s ecosystems with a budget of at least €20 billion a year.

It lays out measures to transform the agriculture sector – one of the EU’s largest drivers of biodiversity loss – by promoting agroecology practices and making a quarter of all EU agricultural land organic in the next decade.

The Commission said the strategy would be “a central element” of the EU’s recovery efforts to Covid-19, which is believed to have been transmitted to humans by animals.

Scientists have linked the increasing frequency of infectious disease outbreaks to biodiversity loss, deforestation, the destruction of habitats and the illegal wildlife trade.

In a 27-page document, the Commission argued that protecting and restoring biodiversity can have a positive economic impact on a number of sectors such as farming, fishing and tourism and boost job creation at a time when countries are reeling from the economic impacts of the pandemic.

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The strategy aligns with a 2030 target to protect at least 30% of land and seas proposed in the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in January. Subject to negotiation, the target was set to be finalised in Kunming, China this October, but the summit has been postponed due to coronavirus.

A third of that area should be covered by “strict protection”, under a proposal in the CBD draft text, leaving it undisturbed by human intervention. Today, only 3% of EU land and less than 1% of seas are designated as highly protected areas.

Last year, a major independent report warned ecosystems were deteriorating at rates unprecedented in human history, with climate change the third biggest driver of animal and plant species decline, after land and sea use change and overexploitation of resources and organisms.

So far, it is unclear what type of activity would be allowed to take place in different types of protected areas, prompting conservation experts to call for clarification. The Commission said it would publish further guidance and criteria, including a definition of “strict protection”, later this year.

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EU member states will be asked to legally designate new protected zones and ecological corridors by 2023. The strategy encourages governments to designate as “strictly protected” ecosystems that store carbon and other greenhouse gases, such as primary and old-growth forests, peatlands and wetlands.

The plan also identified agroecology as a key principle to increase production of healthy food while reducing agriculture’s environmental impact and increase soil fertility and biodiversity.

At least 25% of the EU’s agricultural land would need to be farmed organically by 2030. Organic farming attracts younger workers and helps create 10-20% more jobs per land area than conventional farms, according to the Commission, while creating added value products.

David Cleary, global agriculture director at The Nature Conservancy, said organic farming had a role to play in addressing biodiversity and environmental issues but that it was also less efficient in terms of land use, which at scale could also put pressure on habitats.

“Organic is best thought of as a niche answer,” he told Climate Home News. “You can expand the niche a bit but it is not an across the board solution.”

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Other proposed measures to promote sustainable farming practices include halving the use of chemical pesticides in the next 10 years, reversing the decline of crop genetic diversity, and ensuring at least 10% of utilised agriculture land includes diverse landscapes such as hedges, trees and ponds that enhance carbon sequestration, prevent soil erosion and water depletion.

Such examples of regenerative agriculture, which limit the use of chemicals and put strong emphasis on soil health, can be scaled up, Cleary said.

The EU’s revised Common Agriculture Policy and its Farm-to-Fork strategy will be used to complement the policy framework to transform the agriculture sector.  A separate plan to protect marine ecosystems and conserve fisheries resources is expected in 2021.

Other proposed nature-based solutions that could help absorb carbon from the atmosphere while restoring biodiversity include planting trees and vegetation in both rural and urban areas.

The Commission promised to develop a roadmap to plant at least three billion additional trees across the EU by 2030 compared with current projections.

Meanwhile, it committed to promote green infrastructure into urban planning, including urban forests, parks and gardens, green roofs and walls, urban meadows and connections between green spaces that could help reduce urban heat caused by global warming.

Cleary, of The Nature Conservancy, said the Commission’s programme was “strong on ambition” but “less so on the detail and implementation” which is to be expected at this stage.

“This is a great vision of what positive change would look like on the ground, but to bring that about you have to finance it, and provide an enabling regulatory framework. A lot is still to be done on both of those,” he said.

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The EU Commission recognised there had been “clear implementation gaps” in the past for translating biodiversity strategies into action.

It committed to strengthen the enforcement of biodiversity objectives among member states with binding nature restoration targets – a move welcomed by The Campaign for Nature, which is calling on governments to protect 30% of the planet by 2030.

The Commission also pledged to promote the EU’s ambition on biodiversity using its Green Deal diplomacy and trade policy, for example promoting deforestation-free supply chains. The bloc is considering regulation on imported commodities like palm oil, soy and timber that are driving forest clearance abroad.

The union promised to “show leadership” during the delayed biodiversity talks in Kunming, China, when governments are due to adopt a new set of biodiversity targets to replace the 2020 goals agreed in Aichi, Japan, in 2010 – most of which have been missed.

The Commission said it would support calls for 30% of the world’s land and seas to be protected by 2030 and work to strengthen implementation  at the global level through increased finance and technology support.

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Representatives of more than 30 different gene banks around the world will visit the Svalbard Seed Vault, on a Norwegian island 1,000 kilometres from the North Pole, to deposit samples including Peruvian potatoes, English wildflowers and Cherokee corn.

The Seed Vault “is the ultimate insurance policy for the world’s food supply, offering options for future generations to face the challenges of climate change and the need for nutritious food to feed a growing global population,” organisers said.

The vault will receive more than 60,000 seed varieties, packaged in around 170 boxes. The number of varieties in the vault – from wheat to rice, from beans to maize – will rise to about 1,050,000 from 992,032. The vault has space for about 4.5 million samples.

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The vault had been above one million before but Syria’s civil far forced a withdrawal 50,000 samples in 2017 to replace a destroyed collection in the Syrian city of Aleppo, Hannes Dempewolf, of the Crop Trust which is a partner in running the vault, told Climate Home News.

Among new seeds are 27 wild plant species from meadows  at Highgrove in England, an estate owned by Britain’s Prince Charles.

“It has proved to be an exhausting and often demoralising task to persuade people of the utterly essential role played by all this diversity in maintaining vibrant, healthy ecosystems that sustain both people and our planet,” he said in a statement.

“It’s more urgent than ever that we act now to protect this diversity before it really is too late,” he added.

Among other new contributors on Tuesday are the Cherokee Nation, the first US-based indigenous tribe to deposit seeds including Cherokee White Eagle Corn and Cherokee Candy Roaster Squash.

And Peru’s International Potato Center will deposit seeds including those of wild relatives of potatoes. “There are estimations that as much as 20% of plant species are in danger of extinction, losses that will be accelerated by climate change,” it said.

Blasted into a mountainside in permafrost, the vault is designed to stay frozen even if the power fails and seas rise in coming centuries. It is managed and operated in a partnership between the Norwegian ministry of agriculture and food, the Nordic Genetic Resource Centre and the Crop Trust, an international group based in Germany.

Protect 30% of Earth to avert ‘irreversible’ biodiversity loss – former ministers

The Crop Trust has shifted from publicising the vault as a backup able to survive the worst cataclysms such as nuclear war. The headline on its media release announcing the opening in 2008 said: “’Doomsday Seed Vault’ to Open in Arctic Circle.”

Now it focuses on less apocalyptic roles.

“It’s not for doomsday, it’s not for the end of of the world,” said Dempewolf, the trust’s senior scientist. “It’s about an earthquake or an electrical fire that can wipe out a collection, or civil war like in Aleppo.”

He said there were examples of universities simply destroying seed collections, for instance if a professor retired.

Such losses “are like a stab in the heart,” he said.

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The 23 ex-ministers from six continents, a group founded by former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, also urged governments to complete a UN treaty this year to safeguard life in the high seas, the area beyond the legal jurisdiction of coastal states that makes up two-thirds of the ocean.

“We endorse setting a global target of strongly protecting at least 30% of the land and 30% of the ocean by 2030,” the group, known as the Aspen Ministers Forum, said in a statement about goals for expanding parks and other protected areas for wildlife.

Signatories included Germany’s Joschka Fischer, Britain’s Malcolm Rifkind, Egypt’s Amre Moussa, Argentina’s Susana Malcorra, Israel’s Tzipi Livni and Australia’s Alexander Downer.

Governments are due to meet in Kunming, China, in October, to set new targets for 2030 to try to avert what scientists say is the worst extinction crisis since the dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago. One million species are now at risk from human activities, a UN report said last year.

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The 2030 goals are meant to build on goals set a decade ago to protect at least 17% of the land and 10% of the seas by 2020.

So far, about 15.1% of terrestrial areas and 7.9% of the seas are protected, according to an overview by the UN Environment World Conservation Monitoring Centre. But the Brazilian Amazon, for instance, is under renewed threat from economic development and many fish stocks are at risk.

On land, the loss of habitats, over-exploitation, pollution, climate change and invasive species are among threats to creatures ranging from giraffes to beetles. Over-fishing, plastic pollution and acidification of caused by carbon dioxide emissions are undermining life in the seas.

“Humanity sits on the precipice of irreversible loss of biodiversity and a climate crisis that imperils the future for our grandchildren and generations to come,” the former ministers wrote.

“The world must act boldly, and it must act now,” they wrote.

In documents released last month by the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, one proposed goal is for protected areas and other conservation measures to cover “at least [30%] of land and sea areas with at least [10%] under strict protection” by 2030.

The brackets signal that the numbers are not yet agreed.

“It’s good news that biodiversity is being recognised at a higher priority,” Alex Rogers, Science Director for REV Ocean and a visiting professor of zoology at Oxford University, told Climate Home News of the ministers’ appeal.

“The loss of biodiversity is hair-raising,” he said.

But he said government definitions of protected areas, including the 2020 UN targets, are often vague with loopholes that allow continued activities such as deforestation, road-building, hunting and fishing.

He said he hoped Tuesday’s call for “strongly protecting” the seas, for instance, would mean areas where fishing is banned or highly restricted.

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Rogers said that he recently took part in a yet-to-be published scientific report for a high level panel of world leaders that recommends that 30-40% of the ocean should be protected.

It also said that fisheries policies, such as setting catch quotas, should try to assess the wider risks on biodiversity. Catching too much herring, for instance, can undermine the amount of food available for predators such as seabirds or tuna which also feed on the fish.

(Corrected on 18 February to update Alex Rogers’ affiliation and to show that the high level scientific panel is of world leaders, not limited to the UK)

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Mangroves support diverse ecosystems and help protect coastal communities from tsunamis
(Pic: Flickr/Nick Leonard)

By Megan Darby

Biodiversity and climate change negotiations both started as environmental concerns.

But while climate change is increasingly recognised as an issue of fundamental economic significance, biodiversity remains a fringe concern.

As the UN’s latest two-week biodiversity summit draws to a close in South Korea, two attendees tell RTCC why ecosystem protection needs to go mainstream.

“The fundamental problem – not just in biodiversity – is that so much value is left out of the equation,” says Yvo de Boer.

“If your value definition in life is so narrow that you put much of what is essential to life outside the equation, then survival becomes very difficult.”

Now director-general of the Global Green Growth Institute, de Boer spent four “miserable” years heading up the UN’s climate negotiations (ending with the ill-fated Copenhagen summit).

“It took a long time for people to understand that addressing climate change is yes, very much about the environment, but perhaps even more about hard economics.”

Now he wants to see “a much stronger conversation” between the different international bodies, investors and businesses on how to value nature.

It wasn’t all bad: Yvo de Boer in a lighter moment at the UN climate negotiations
(Pic: Flickr/greens_climate)

Unfortunately, the talks in Pyeongchang have been dominated by ecologists, says de Boer.

“There are a lot of beards and slippers and kaftans… a pinstriped suit here or there would not do any harm.”

Government ministers, too, were thin on the ground.

The environmental problems are real and there has been an increasing focus on the economic consequences.

WWF reported last month wildlife populations have halved in the past 40 years.

Mangrove forests are being destroyed at a cost to society of US$2 billion a year, according to the UN environment body.

Ocean acidification is doing nearly US$1 trillion worth of damage a year to coral reefs, found a report launched in Pyeongchang last week.

To protect biodiversity specifically, there are the Aichi targets for 2020 – but a research paper highlighted in the journal Science reports we are not on course to meet them.

To help reach these targets, negotiators agreed in Hyderabad two years ago to double funding from rich to poor countries by 2015. But de Boer says the baseline is still “unclear”.

In any case, the sums under discussion are an order of magnitude or two less than for climate initiatives.

“Biodiversity negotiations are very much the stepchild of the international process,” says de Boer.

“Climate seems to get all of the attention and biodiversity almost none.”

Janez Potocnik argues nature can solve a lot of the world’s problems
(Pic: Flickr/TEDxFlanders2014 NAKED)

Janez Potocnik, the EU’s environment commissioner, says US$150-440 billion a year is needed to meet the Aichi targets.

“Funding will have to come from a variety of sources – not all can come from environment budgets,” he says.

“A lot of emphasis should be on mainstreaming biodiversity in all sectors…

“It won’t be possible to fully close the funding gap as long as we continue to fund developments that drive biodiversity loss.”

Europe is doing its bit, he says, contributing €300 million from a central budget in 2013, on top of member state initiatives.

It is not all about finance, Potocnik adds, but valuing natural capital throughout the economy.

His sees his major achievement in his 5-year term as environment commissioner, which comes to an end next month, as the “reconciliation of economic development and environmental protection”.

Natural resources are fundamental to Europe’s competitiveness, says Potcnik, and must be used wisely.

“Europe is a relatively vulnerable continent. We are locked into old industrial resource-intensive models.”

In a speech to the conference, Potocnik promotes “nature-based solutions” to environmental problems, such as replanting forests or mangroves.

These have wider social and economic benefits, he argues.

As biodiversity talks grind on to little apparent effect, it looks like joining up with these wider agendas offers the best chance of rescue for disappearing species.

The post Biodiversity: the ‘stepchild’ of international talks appeared first on Climate Home News.

Tropical coral reefs support some 400 million livelihoods
(Pic: Andrew K/Flickr)

By Megan Darby

As well as warming the atmosphere, carbon dioxide emissions from power stations and cars dissolve in the ocean, making it more acidic.

While it is driven by the same human activities as climate change, ocean acidification tends to have a lower profile, perhaps because the economic impacts are less well understood.

But the phenomenon causes nearly US$1 trillion worth of damage to coral reefs a year, in tandem with other human-caused environmental changes.

That is according to a report collated by British scientists from the work of thirty experts worldwide, to be launched at a UN biodiversity conference on Wednesday.

Murray Roberts, co-editor of the report and professor at Edinburgh’s Heriot-Watt University, said: “At the end of the day, the only way to deal with ocean acidification is to reduce CO2 emissions.

“But for this to happen people first need to be aware that ocean acidification is an important issue.”

Report: Extra heat found in oceans explains global warming ‘pause’

Oceans cover two thirds of the planet and absorb much of the impact of greenhouse gas emissions, both through direct warming and acidification.

Yet they were largely absent from the high-level UN climate summit in New York last month, to the dismay of Global Ocean Commission co-chair David Miliband.

“There can be no solution to the climate challenge without a healthy ocean,” Miliband warned.

Today’s report brings together the latest modelling, laboratory and field studies in an attempt to focus attention on the issues.

It will be presented in Pyeongchang, South Korea, where scientists, policymakers and politicians are meeting to consider some of the global threats to biodiversity.

Ocean acidification has increased by around 26% since pre-industrial times, according to the report.

Marine fossil records show such trends have occurred before, but the speed at which it is happening is unprecedented in at least 66 million years.

And it is “nearly inevitable” that carbon dioxide emissions will further increase the ocean’s acidity, with a “deleterious” impact on wildlife.

Coral reefs are particularly sensitive to the changing pH level.

Some 400 million people depend on tropical coral reefs for their livelihoods, the report said, while cold-water corals in Europe support endangered sharks and commercially valuable fish species.

Sebastian Hennige, lead editor of the report, said research carried out from Edinburgh’s Heriot-Watt University had shown the vulnerability of cold-water corals.

“There is a risk that their habitat will literally dissolve away, since living corals grow on structures made by their dead ancestors,” said Hennige.

“These structures will be subject to chemical erosion over very large ocean areas if current trends continue.”

The post Ocean acidification causes US$1trn of damage a year – study appeared first on Climate Home News.

Pic: Sumeet Moghe/Flickr

By Sophie Yeo

Over half of the world’s wildlife has disappeared in 40 years, due to exploitation, habitat degradation and climate change.

African lions, hoolock gibbons and snakes are examples of species that have declined dramatically since 1970, according to a new report from WWF, compiled using data from the Zoological Society of London.

“Imagine if half the animals in London zoo died in the next week, that’d be front page news, right?” said Professor Ken Norris, ZSL’s director of science.

“People in London and elsewhere would be seriously upset by that, yet that’s been going on in my lifetime in the great outdoors and we’re not upset and annoyed about that, so we’ve failed partly to get out the message to the public.”

Climate change has been a major factor in 7.1% of the species whose numbers have declined – a threefold increase from 1970. It may also have indirectly affected other species, by contributing to habitat degradation.

And it’s a figure which the experts who crunched the data say will rise as the planet warms further.

“While the current number is quite low, as we go forward we’re going to see a massive increase of the impact of climate change,” said Jonathan Baille, conservation programmes director at ZSL.

“It’s just the beginning phase, but we know there’s going to be a large number of species crashing due to climate change very soon.”

Decline

Of the vertebrate species whose decline was measured by the Living Planet Index, freshwater species fared the worst, their numbers having fallen by 76% since 1970.

Land and ocean creatures both declined 39% over the same period.

The drop is greater in the tropics than in temperate regions, although both are affected by losses in biodiversity. Latin America has seen the greatest reductions, with a fall of 86%.

Scientists gathered the data by monitoring 10,380 populations of over 3,038 vertebrate species over many years, also using the input of the general public in their research.

“Climate change is a huge threat from WWF’s perspective to the work we’ve being doing for more than 50 years now to protect endangered species and their habitats and to enable humanity to live on this planet in a sustainable manner,” said David Nussbaum, head of WWF-UK.

Regional variations

Low income countries have seen a greater decline in animal populations than their rich counterparts, but experts warned against seeing this as purely the result of better conservation practices.

The report says that the data, which has only been collected since the 1970s, masks large scale biodiversity loss in Europe, North America and Australia before this period, leaving more resilient species better able to cope with the impact of mankind.

It also disguises how rich countries are able to outsource their resource needs abroad, the experts added. “When we talk about Europe or America or any country, we’re going to have to be much more aware of that impact,” said Baille.

The decline requires a more rigorous response from governments, but in particular from the general public. The report suggests preserving natural resources, producing more renewable energy and consuming more wisely as ways to halt the rapid decline in wildlife.

Forthcoming conferences of the UN’s biodiversity and climate, as well as the forming of the new Sustainable Development Goals, provide an opportunity to address the problem at an international scale.

The post WWF: Wildlife populations down 50% in last 40 years appeared first on Climate Home News.

Sir David Attenborough: whether climate change is man-made is “yesterday’s argument”
(Pic: RSPB)

By Megan Darby

Britain must embrace foreign animals and plants migrating northwards due to climate change, Sir David Attenborough said at a conference on Wednesday.

The veteran naturalist and broadcaster said those concerned about protecting the natural environment must look forward, not backward.

Whether climate change is man-made is “yesterday’s argument”, Sir David said. “It is happening. Today’s argument is how we deal with it.”

He was addressing conservationists, business and political leaders at the invitation-only Conference for Nature in London, hosted by birdlife charity RSPB.

The meeting followed a stock-take of Britain’s wildlife compiled by 25 charities. Of more than 3,000 native species studied, 60% had declined in recent decades. Climate change was seen to have an increasing impact.

Met Office figures show temperatures and rainfall are rising across the UK. The thirty-year average temperature for 1981-2010 was 8.84C, an increase of 0.52C from 1961-1990. Rainfall increased by 5%.

The shift in weather conditions is prompting a number of plant and animal species to move northwards, into cooler regions.

“Crying wolf”

As a TV presenter, Sir David brought nature documentaries to a mainstream audience for decades.

He was largely silent on climate change until 2006, when he made two programmes on the subject.

Explaining his position, he said he had been “cautious of crying wolf” and waited until “the proof was conclusive”.

Giving the keynote speech on Wednesday, Sir David acknowledged the role of climate change in shifting the distribution of wildlife.

“We know that climate change is happening; there can be no doubt about that,” he said.

“It is of course to be regretted from some points of view but it is also to be embraced.”

That meant allowing for climate immigrants from continental Europe, such as butterflies and moths.

“Instead of thinking every new arrival is an exotic foreigner that ought to be repelled, we should recognise and cater for them.”

Nature reserves are “by no means enough”, Sir David argued: the whole countryside and urban environment should be made available to wildlife.

Roadside verges, for example, can provide “wildlife corridors” to help species find new habitats as the climate changes.

“We, homo sapiens, are dependent on the natural world. We are part of the natural world.” Sir David Attenborough at #naturesintrouble

— Megan Shersby (@MeganShersby) September 3, 2014

#naturesintrouble “children develop something extraordinary for their souls when engaging with nature” pic.twitter.com/LZ6ML79FOB

— Mark Gough (@Mark_Gough) September 3, 2014

Sir David urged delegates not to take a “backward attitude”. The global population has trebled in the past 50 years, he noted, and conservationists could not bring back a “paradisiacal inter-war landscape”.

“We certainly aren’t proposing we go back to a kind of pristine Britain, when there were forests and mountains and seashores that were unsullied by man.

“No part of the British countryside, apart from perhaps a few square metres at the summits of the Cairngorm mountains, has been unaffected by human activity.”

And he said protecting the environment could “on occasion make things more expensive”.

But he said humans depend on the natural world “for their very sanity”, concluding: “Those problems have to be grappled with. If they are not, there will certainly be great impoverishment: physically, spiritually and emotionally.”

The post David Attenborough: UK must embrace climate migrants appeared first on Climate Home News.

Source: Flickr / Lisa Jacobs

Today’s climate extremes will be the “new normal” for the tropics within a decade, say scientists from the University of Hawaii.

Diverse tropical regions will face unprecedented damage to its climate system ten years earlier than anywhere else on Earth, say the scientists, since they are unaccustomed to climate variability, and are therefore vulnerable to relatively small changes.

Published in the journal Nature, scientists found that, under a ‘business-as-usual’ scenario, the average climate system would be radically altered by 2047.

Even under a scenario where greenhouse gas emissions are stabilised, the world can expect this altered climate to set in by 2069.

“The results shocked us. Regardless of the scenario, changes will be coming soon,” said lead author Camilo Mora. “Within my generation, whatever climate we were used to will be a thing of the past.”

Such disruption will tamper with the Earth’s biological systems. Species will be forced to either move to a different location as they chase after suitable climates, or stay in their region and try to adapt to the changes.

Failure to adapt to the new environment could cause extinctions, says Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution for Science‘s Department of Global Ecology.

“This work demonstrates that we are pushing the ecosystems of the world out of the environment in which they evolved into wholly new conditions that they may not be able to cope with. Extinctions are likely to result,” he said..

“Some ecosystems may be able to adapt, but for others, such as coral reefs, complete loss of not only individual species but their entire integrity is likely.”

Previous studies have shown that corals and other tropical species are already near their physiological limits. The fact that most of these areas of rich biodiversity are located in developing countries poses a further challenge to conservation efforts.

The post Tropics set to face critical climate change within decade appeared first on Climate Home News.

Pic: Flickr / Cesar Aponte

By Sophie Yeo

Peru’s cloud forests could face near extinction as their fragile ecology means they are ill equipped to deal with the changing climate.

The forests, home to a third of Peru’s mammal, bird and frog species, are highly sensitive to changes in the temperature.

Scientists say those species could lose between 53-96% of their populations.

This is the conclusion of a study by researchers at Wake Forest University, North Carolina, who published their findings this week in PLoS ONE.

The habitats of most of the plants in the Andes – and therefore of the animals that live off them – are determined largely by temperature.

But the steep terrain means that temperature can change rapidly on the mountains’ slopes, and therefore the majority of tree and plant varieties can only live in an area extending a few hundred metres.

“I could be standing among a group of one tree species and throw a rock completely across their ranges,” says David Lutz, the paper’s lead author.

Cloud forest seedlings have so far coped with the problem by sprouting at higher elevations. But the rapid levels of projected change over the course of the century means that the plants will have to migrate faster than ever before.

This means they need to be at around 3,000 feet by 2100 if they are to remain in equilibrium with the climate if it continues to warm at its current rate.

The problem is, the grasslands at the highest elevations on the mountains act as a barrier, preventing the trees from moving further upslope.

The transition between trees and grassland, called an ecotone, has so far been stationery over most of the landscape, even where temperature changes mean that it should have moved 200m higher.

“Previous work we’ve done shows that the trees in the forest are migrating upwards, but this work shows the ecotone isn’t,” says Miles Silman, professor of Biology at Wake Forest University. “The ecotone presents a wall to species migration.”

While conservationists conventionally stay away from an interventionist approach, a hands on approach may be required if the cloud forests are to remain into the next century, says Lutz.

“Intervention is a strategy conservationists seldom use in this ecosystem but it may be the only way to save it,” he says.

“Our next step is working with local, and international conservationists to come up a plan to help cloud forests keep moving upslope.”

The post Peru’s cloud forests could be wiped out by 2100 appeared first on Climate Home News.

Speaking at the launch of the Global Ocean Commission (GOC), of which he will be a co-chair, Miliband said there were grave environmental, economic and governance challenges facing the oceans.

The Commission will address biodiversity loss and overfishing as well as tackling a management vacuum on the high seas, an area 200 miles beyond national coasts.

“This commission is concerned by the severe loss of habitat and biodiversity. All the indicators are flashing red,” said Miliband.

The GOC will seek to find practical policies to protect the ocean’s environmental and economic value. (Source: Flickr/NOAA)

“High seas are the next frontier in development policy,” said Miliband who says there are implications for global security, biodiversity, food security

Miliband will be joined as co-chair by Jose Maria Figueres, former President of Costa Rica and South African Minister Trevor Manuel.

Good governance of the ocean will be critical to development, said Miliband who warned that the failure of the UN Convention on the High Seas could bring multilateralism into disrepute.

“We know that the economics of high seas exploitation are no longer sustainable.The World Bank estimated a $50bn annual cost for current practices across the seas, that was five years ago. That costs the earth and its poorest people dearly,” he said, adding that the world’s poorest rely on fish for 50% of their protein intake.

The GOC will spend three years assessing the current state of the oceans before making recommendations that bring the economics of their protection up to date with the environmental and developmental challenges of the 21st century.

Climate change

The oceans also have an important role to play as a carbon sink and in transferring heat around the earth’s surface.

Rising ocean temperatures can lead to extreme storms, while melting freshwater stores at the poles could interfere with ocean circulation. Both changes have knock-on effects for weather patterns and local marine life.

Increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations also lead to more acidic waters with some of the carbon dioxide reacting with water to form carbonic acid.

This can have grave consequences on ecosystems, particularly coral reefs and life that relies on the reefs.

RTCC Video: UNESCO’s Wendy Watson-Wright on the dangers of acidification

The post David Miliband: Ocean indicators are all flashing red appeared first on Climate Home News.

Understanding how biodiversity can contribute to sustainable urban development will be vital as 70% of the world’s population moves into cities, an expert from the Stockholm Resilience Centre has warned.

Thomas Elmqvist, a Professor at the University of Stockholm told RTCC that an area the size of South Africa is expected to be lost to rapid urbanisation over the next couple of decades.

He said this could pose a number of challenges, which a focus on biodiversity could help to solve.

“This will be primarily agricultural land,” he said. “This will have knock on effects because at the same time we have an increase in population and an increase in the need for food, so we will need to increase production.

“If we manage to make this urbanisation sustainable, there are so many things we could win for human well-being and for biodiversity and ecosystem services.”

Along with 120 scientists worldwide, Elmqvist helped put together an assessment of the potential impacts and opportunities of urbanisation.

The Cities and Biodiversity Outlook highlights a wide range of successful examples of sustainable urban development, initiated by cities and local and sub-national governments around the world.

With 60% of the projected urban land in 2030 yet to be built, the is a major opportunity to improve the way countries do urban development, promoting low carbon solutions and resource efficiency, said Elmqvist.

This will then also bring environmental benefits and improve the quality of life for people living in cities, he added.

“Cities are facing enormous challenges; climate change is one,” he said. “We know that climate change will increase the frequency of heatwaves. It will also cause much higher variation in precipitation. Here is an opportunity for cities to embrace what we know about ecosystems and how they could reduce vulnerability.

“You can use vegetation and tress to cool the city, then you don’t have to invest in systems that will demand a lot of energy for cooling. You can also use ecosystems and vegetation to reduce the risk of flooding too.”

Elmqvist said the study highlights 50 plus examples of where this type of thinking is already happening. He said Curitiba in Brazil is an important example of where local governments are investing in green infrastructure.

“I think for a city in the global south they actually provide a role model for how cities could develop,” he said. “It is important to have those in tropical countries and countries in the global south because that is where we will have the most rapid urbanisation in the future.”

The post Biodiversity must be built into urban development to make future cities sustainable appeared first on Climate Home News.

REDD+ should not reduce forests to merely carbon stocks, warns report (Source: Taunting Panda/Flickr)

Efforts to reduce emissions through deforestation must take into account the biodiversity and livelihood benefits of forests and view them as more than “carbon warehouses”, a new report has warned.

Researchers from the International Union of Forest Research Organisations (IUFRO) found biodiversity to be critical to a forest’s ability to absorb greenhouse gases. They called on policy makers to address the potential co-benefits of REDD+ for ecosystems and climate change.

REDD+ is the UN’s scheme aimed at reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation. It offers financial incentives to developing countries to protect their tropical forests.

The call comes just over a week before countries head to the UN’s climate summit in Doha, Qatar, where they will discuss ways to move forward with REDD+ agreements reached at the last conference in Doha.

Environmental benefits and safeguards, good governance and financing the scheme will all be on the agenda at this year’s conference.

The IUFRO report found that globally there are around two billion hectares of land that are potentially available for forest restoration – an area larger than South America.

But finding the balance between carbon and biodiversity goals could be difficult, it warns. For example, restoring this land with a variety of native trees would bring better biodiversity benefits, while extensive monocultures of trees with higher rates of carbon absorption could benefit climate aims.

The report also warned that those people in tropical and sub-tropical rainforest regions, dependant on the forests could be vulnerable to the changes brought about by REDD+.

It says including these people in the scheme – addressing tenure and property rights, access, use and ownership – will also strengthen the scheme and lead to a higher chance of success.

“There is clear evidence that including objectives to improve the livelihoods of forest-dependant people and local communities will strengthen local involvement and acceptance, and thereby support REDD+ goals,” said Christoph Wildburger, from IUFRO.

Without the inclusion of these biodiversity and social concerns, REDD+ programmes will not succeed, even in conserving carbon, warns the report.

The report will be presented at the COP18 conference during Forest Day on 2 December.

The post REDD+ should value forests as more than “carbon warehouses” appeared first on Climate Home News.

If environmental and biodiversity conservation methods do not boost the livelihoods of the very poorest, a sustainable future will not be possible, according to Indian development charity the Naandi Foundation.

“Poverty and prosperity are the greatest polluters,” Manoj Kumar, CEO of the Naandi Foundation told RTCC. “We are talking about an average American citizen living today thinking there are four planets for him, and the average European citizen thinking there are two planets for him,” said Kumar referring to the number of Earth’s required to provide sufficient natural resources to sustain their way of life.

“Then there is someone in poverty who thinks there is only a quarter of a planet left and that too is owned by someone else and he can barely move around.”

He said the challenge of conservation, for countries such as India, was not a fight with those who realise that they are over using the planets resources but trying to negotiate this with the poor farmer who is using resources and degrading the environment in order to earn a living.

Kumar warned if you can not convince the poor farmer that conservation will help boost his livelihood then a sustainable solution would not be possible.

“The issue is not about luxury, it is not about the relative quality of life that the West can claim is important,” he said. “Here it is an issue of survival.

“We need to tell them, your livelihoods can be taken care of by being connected to the biodiversity and agroforestry needs of the larger Earth, and then we might have a win-win solution.”

But for Kumar, the biggest problem in India comes from the growing middle classes. He said few in this bracket really understand the importance of biodiversity.

By 2030, around 50% of the Indian population is expected to live in cities. As the urban areas of the country expand, the biodiversity is under increasing threat.

Kumar warned that little is being done to protect this threatened biodiversity in India. For example, he said while there is legislation in many cities for new apartment blocks to include rainwater harvesting, very few follow through with this requirement.

“I would say that the growing middle class to me is a larger concern than the poor,” he said. “The poor are very conscious, very strongly worried about conservation, and they are trying their best, but there is a need for more than awareness.

“I think there is a need for stronger enforcement when you violate the needs of conservation as you try and expand inner cities and try to go through a different sort of consumerist expansion. That is the missing point if you ask me.”

The post Poverty and prosperity are the two greatest polluters, says Indian NGO appeared first on Climate Home News.

In the 1940s a highly invasive species of snake – the brown treesnake – was accidentally introduced to the Pacific Island of Guam.

In just four decades, the snakes have wiped out 10 of 12 native bird species, killed various other animals that once roamed the island and caused a fortyfold increase in the Guam’s spider population.

“Most of the time you will probably never see [the snakes],” Cheryl Calaustro, a wildlife biologist at the Guam Department of Agriculture tells RTCC. “But when you go out into our forests you will notice a number of different things.

“You will not hear any birds, it is very silent, you will probably see and walk into many cobwebs because we do have a lot of spiders, because we do not have any birds to eat the insects and the spiders; and you will notice that our forests are somewhat monotypic, there’s one kind of tree.

“Those are all things that the snake has actually caused.”

Most people will only see a brown treesnake once or twice in their lifetime. They are nocturnal and hard to spot as their colour allows them to camouflage themselves. They can also move very fast.

But Calaustro says that there are between one and two million snakes on the island. Just 30 miles long and 7 miles wide, that amounts to around 12,000 snakes per acre.

And while you may not see the snakes themselves, residents of Guam will experience their impact.

“If you experience brown-outs or black-outs on Guam it could be because of the snake because they do climb very high,” says Calaustro. “If you have prey items in your back yard, like chickens or small puppies or kittens they will come into your yard and take those out.”

According to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) invasive species are the most significant cause of extinction worldwide after habitat destruction.

On islands, they are predominately the most significant cause.

The spread of these invasive, or alien species, increased dramatically as the world opened up in terms of trade, travel and the transportation of goods.

They often hitchhike on ships, in containers or in cars.

Calaustro warns that this problem must be tackled quickly after the introduction of a new species, to ensure the experience of Guam is not replicated elsewhere.

“Invasive species are incredibly harmful to the ecosystem and to people, it hurts livelihoods, it hurts native species,” she says. “If it can be stopped before there’s a problem, then that is what you should do.”

The post How alien snakes left Guam infested with spiders appeared first on Climate Home News.

Countries must tackle the mistrust surrounding forest finance to ensure the success of REDD+, a leading forest conservationist has warned.

Andrew Mitchell, Executive Director of the Global Canopy Programme, the organisation behind The Little Forest Finance Book, told RTCC that the complexity of the language used when talking about forest finance has created a culture of fear and doubt in developing countries.

He warned that this is holding back the UN’s REDD+ scheme.

“The problem is that there are very different languages that people use at every part of the supply chain from forests to finance,” he said. “If you are a forest chief you think very differently than if you are a boardroom chief in a big ivory tower in London.

“In many countries I go to, if you talk to [forest] ranchers or people in the government they say ‘oh we don’t want anything to do with these capitalists and these carbon cowboys that come around. They are going to rip us off.’

“If you understand a bit about the finance then you can see who is the cowboy and who is not. And you will begin to understand when these big financiers come in; what their language is.”

The Little Forest Finance Book aims to breakdown the complex language of forest funding into a simple and easily digestible format.

Forests are the world’s largest carbon sink absorbing 2.4 billion tonnes of CO2 each year and storing billions more. The UN’s REDD+ initiative aims to offer financial incentives to governments and communities in developing countries to conserve their forests for this purpose.

The Global Canopy Programme estimates that around $30 billion will be needed annually to protect the world’s forests, following an initial spending of $81 billion.

Mitchell says this is a small price to pay to ensure the vast services the forests provide, not only as carbon stores but benefits in terms of clean water, energy, timber and health, continue to be protected.

“This is an investment in the stocks of biodiversity which produce the flows of ecosystem services which we all depend on. Those ecosystem services are massive, they are probably worth anything up to $4-5 trillion a year,” he said.

The post Mistrust and confusion holds back REDD+ finance appeared first on Climate Home News.

The value of biodiversity to the poor must be taken into account when measuring economic wealth, influential environmental economist Pavan Sukhdev has warned.

The economic value of ecosystem services – for example clean air, water, food and timber – has risen to prominence in recent years but the concept of natural capital should not just be for big corporations.

The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) programme, which Sukhdev leads, aims to build a compelling economic case for the conservation of ecosystems and biodiversity.

Sukhdev said the TEEB study underlines the importance of protecting biodiversity for the poorest communities around the world.

“If you lose nature it is the poor farmer whose fields suffer from a lack of nutrients and fresh water; it is the poor farmer’s wife who can not go and collect fuel wood from the forest and it is the farmer’s cattle and goats that can not go and feed on the leaf litter in the forest,” he said.

“When you start to account for the invisible and unaccountable services, which do not enter GDP, then you can understand the nature of the livelihoods of the poor.

“I think it underlines the underlying understanding we must have for biodiversity, which is that biodiversity is not merely a luxury for the rich, it is a necessity for the poor.”

The TEEB report highlights that for countries including India, Indonesia and Brazil poor, rural and forest communities all depend on biodiversity.

In India for example 350 million people live in households where 45% of the income was dependant on nature, while in Brazil 20 million people live with incomes 89% dependant on biodiversity.

He warned that a more inclusive way of measuring wealth must be found that takes into account natural, social and human wealth and acknowledges the role natural wealth has in driving development.

“You can not manage what you do not measure and unfortunately our accounts across all nations use a current system of national accounting that does not reflect the value of ecosystem services. It does not reflect the loss of this value, when we lose forests, when we lose wetlands and when we lose the quality of nature,” he said.

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Last week, as part of a fortnight of marathon negotiations in Hyderabad, India, CBD members convened in a bid to reconcile species conservation with the “carbon sink” approach.

How to value a forest? As a frontline of ongoing evolution, a complex, functioning network of interdependent species? Or as a collection of fungible trees, a “carbon sink” to mitigate the urgent threat of climate change?

The United Nations Organization has signed on to both views, through its UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and its Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC). Both conventions have the same 193 members, with the glaring exception of the United States, which has yet to sign the CBD.

The working group session on Climate Change in Hyderabad pitted the development agendas of the “global south” against the environmental concerns of the “north.”

To understand why forests are linked to the carbon market in the first place, you need look back to the 1990s, when the Cold War ended and the term ‘boy band’ was coined.

In 1997, under a treaty called the Kyoto Protocol, 193 countries committed to reduce their annual rate of emissions by 4% in comparison to 1990 standards. They gave themselves the goal of achieving this between 2008 and 2012. In 2007, they committed to a market scheme that might help them implement this.

The premise of the scheme is to put a “value” or price tag on the carbon held in trees in developing world countries. People and governments in the developed world then pay for “carbon offsets”, i.e. the forests left standing.

Forests play a key role supporting biodiversity and as carbon sink. Maximising both of these in tandem is a difficult balance to achieve. (Source: Flickr/tauntingpanda)

Conservationists say that there is a perverse incentive in basing these rewards on sheer tree tallies or tonnage of carbon sequestered. Diverse forests can all-too-readily give way to vast plantation swaths, mono-cropped to high-value carbon-absorbing trees like eucalyptus or rubber.

That helps burnish the macroeconomic bottom line for developing countries and agribusiness, Finnish delegate Heikki Toivonen concedes. But it does little to incorporate “the view point of biodiversity or that of indigenous and local communities who are very much dependent on the ecosystem of these REDD areas,” says Toivonen.

After a numbing 12 straight hours in windowless hotel conference rooms negotiating nuances of the CBD declaration’s language, Toivonen grabs his bird-watching binoculars for a stroll around the cyan blue lake outside the Hyderabad convention centre, “just to remind myself what it is that we’re in there talking about”.

He relates that one morning here, he managed to spot drongos, some kites and a couple of egrets – species unseen in his Baltic homeland. He marvels at the rich tropical bird-life.

But such riches can also be a “curse” according to a Brazilian government delegate (who declined to be named due to the “sensitivity” of the negotiations). He notes the cruel irony that the most tropically biodiverse countries are often also the poorest, where over-concern from abroad for threatened species only impedes urgently needed economic development.

The REDD+ programme seeks to create financial incentives for developing nations to protect their local carbon stocks. (Source: Neil Palmer/International Centre for Tropical Agriculture)

Trading trade-offs

The current carbon-trading arrangement rewards countries for reaching specific targets towards Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD). The scheme was later expanded to “REDD+”, which includes such reforestation goals as conservation, sustainable forest management and enhanced carbon sequestration.

The new CBD guidelines go even further, adding in clauses on that “conservation” and enhancement done at the national level must “guard” against “converting natural forests to plantations and other land uses of low biodiversity value and low resilience;” and deploring “deforestation and forest degradation in areas of lower carbon [sequestration yet] high biodiversity value”.

As far as the Brazilian government delegate is concerned, all this amounts to just an unfair rewrite of the carbon-trading terms. “Now they want to add another layer of conditionality and that we cannot allow.”

He adds that Brazil has strong support from the host-country India, as well as Colombia, Malaysia, South Africa and Argentina.

Together, this bloc of countries managed to render toothless the working group’s final resolution by purging it of all references to such terms as concrete “indicators” or “monitoring”.

The resulting document, according to the Brazilian delegation’s parting press release, “recognizes the contribution of REDD+ activities to biodiversity, while maintaining coherence between both [the CBD and FCCC] conventions”. In other words, a reversion to status quo.

No surprise there, notes Vania Viana of the Brazil branch of the International Trade Union Confederation.

She sees the Brazilian government is overly beholden to the country’s large agribusiness corporations. In addition to tree plantations for carbon credits, these companies are also investing in prime drivers of deforestation like soya-bean farming and cattle grazing land, she says.

Rather than turning over forest policy to such vested interests, Viana urges that REDD be achieved with public funding.

Whether publicly or privately implemented, Tim Christopherson of the UN REDD Programme sees no fundamental conflict between biodiversity and climate change mitigation. “Of course some countries were apprehensive, seeing this as a possible additional burden,” he concedes.

After all, “we are dealing with saving tropical forests – a complex issue with multitude of pressures. These are matters that go to the heart of a country’s development vision, governance and land tenure systems.

“There is no one program – forest biodiversity, forest governance…there are various initiatives addressing the same issue – but all of these have to pull in the same direction. It is a complex issue and we cannot address it through one avenue alone.”

RTCC VIDEO: Tim Christopherson of the UN REDD Programme explains why despite the hype, its implementation must be done with caution

The post Conservation or carbon sinks: Can the UN see the forest for the trees? appeared first on Climate Home News.

Biodiversity and climate change are often described as two sides of the same coin.

Protecting biodiversity is often the best answer to both mitigating and adapting to climate change – oceans and forests absorb carbon while mangroves can protect coastal regions from storm surges and rising sea levels.

On the flip side, biodiversity is under increasing threat from advancing climate change.

And if we look at some of the figures on biodiversity loss we see our natural world is deteriorating just as quickly as our climate.

REDD+ negotiations in India focused on the role the CBD could play in supporting the work of the climate convention

The world is losing species at a growing rate. 13% of birds, 25% of mammals, 33% of corals and 41% of amphibians are currently under threat.

So when I arrived in Hyderabad, India for the UN Convention on Biological Diversity’s (CBD) biannual conference, I was shocked to find so little interest in biodiversity loss – particularly compared to the interest I saw at the UN climate convention (UNFCCC) talks in Durban, South Africa last year.

Very few journalists, a small youth activist constituency and a smaller venue all helped to make the last two weeks a much quieter affair.

But are people really less interested in biodiversity? If so, why?

Biodiversity loss is an abstract concept for most people. While most of us would notice if the woods we enjoy walking in were chopped down, we would not necessarily equate this to a global problem.

And while we understand deforestation, for example, the degradation of the oceans or the loss of wetlands are much harder issues for us to comprehend, particularly in the developed world.

A public consultation organised by the Danish Environment Ministry in 25 countries found 70% of respondents had little idea of what biodiversity meant. But when the study was over, 84% of those taking part believed that most people are seriously affected by biodiversity loss.

So perhaps it is not that people do not care about biodiversity; maybe we just do not know enough about it.

“I think it is about how tangible the issue is to people. In the climate convention the discussion is about reducing the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere,” Trevor Sandwith, Director of IUCN’s Global Programme on Protected Areas told me. “You can put a very specific number to that in the sense that this is the emission level, this is where it needs to go and this is the rate of change.

“When you talk about protected areas globally and how they have to represent biodiversity we have literally hundreds of thousands of things to measure – all the threatened species in the world and how they are doing.”

All about climate change

Along with the UN Convention on Desertification, the CBD and the UNFCCC make up the three Rio Conventions. Established at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, they each tackle a different aspect of sustainable development.

The CBD and the UNFCCC have both existed for 20 years and in many respects work on the same issues; forests, oceans, agriculture. But the climate change convention has been raised to a prominence the CBD seems unable to match.

Even the term Conference of the Parties is now so associated with the UNFCCC – particularly since COP15 in Copenhagen – that when I told people I was heading to India for COP11 I was met with blank faces.

Climate change at the CBD

REDD+, geoengineering, biofuels and agriculture are all topics discussed in both UN forums.

But rather than the conversation at the CBD building on those already had, conversations seemed stuck on concerns that work under this convention could somehow counteract the work done in the climate discussions.

Patrick Mulvany from the CBD Alliance, a collection of NGOs following the work of the convention, says the conventions both play a vital role but he warned the crossover between the two is wasting time.

“It is essentially counter-productive; it uses up a lot of negotiating time,” he said. “What may be achieved in one forum could get lost in another. The transaction cost of doing all of these discussions become significant and really reduces the opportunity for finance for implementation.”

While certain topics seem to move between one convention and another, a more joined up approach could provide positive results.

David Ainsworth, Information Officer at the CBD warned that while a lot of work had already been done on connecting the science between the two conventions, the politics need to be strengthened.

“It is the policy interface we have to work on. We share the same data but how do we make sure that the same ministries are involved in both discussions?” he said.

Take REDD+ as an example. Brazil were particularly vocal when discussing the biodiversity safeguards of this much-hyped mechanism.

In the years since the last CBD meeting, countries had met twice under the climate convention, and had discussed the safeguards of REDD+ within this forum. In some ways this made the discussions taking place in India outdated.

Brazil also raised concerns that by limiting forestry discussions within the convention to REDD+ – essentially a climate change initiative looking at forests for their carbon stocks – they could ignore what should be a much deeper discussion on forests in terms of biodiversity and the drivers of deforestation.

While REDD+ is limited to the developed world, deforestation is a global issue and focusing too much on the REDD+ initiative could see this forgotten.

With climate change the issue at the forefront on the global environment debate, there’s a worry that the biodiversity conference could become a second climate conference. Some attendees at this year’s meeting warned it had already become the climate adaptation conference.

If all ecosystems are reduced to their role in storing carbon, or holding back rising sea-waters, there is a danger all the other vital services that these natural environments have been playing in the world for thousands of years will be forgotten.

Hope for biodiversity

But there is a note of hope for biodiversity. While the latest conference was small, the COP10 meeting in Nagoya, Japan two years ago had gained more interest from around the globe.

Mulvany said these talks – which were tipped as the talks where a new deal on biodiversity would be agreed – received much more attention. As countries look towards implementation, interest has died back.

We must also be careful not to mistake a huge turn-out for productive involvement.

It is so easy to be swept up in the circus of the UN climate convention. And while civil society engagement is vital in holding governments and negotiating teams to account, the large numbers of participants does not necessarily mean they are taken any more seriously than a smaller group.

Mulvany said that while the participation in India may have been smaller than in Durban, their was a positive feeling of cooperation between governments, civil society and the CBD Secretariat.

Achim Steiner, Executive Director of the UN Environment Programme said he felt there was a growing interest in biodiversity.

The Rio+20 summit in June saw the concept of ecosystem services – the role natural environments play in our lives – given a lot of attention, as delegations and observers alike looked at how to better value out natural world.

“This convention is one that for quite a while was viewed as a long side climate change as being sort of a convention focusing on second priorities,” Steiner said. “I think the world is coming very close now to realising in fact how dramatic the loss of biodiversity and ecosystems is.

“I think the insertion of an economic perspective – the TEEB work but also the green economy discussions – have elevated a scientific phenomenon into a very practical set of risk and opportunities to minimise those risks.”

Balancing act 

With climate change and biodiversity so intrinsically linked, the lack of a joined up approach between conventions is worrying. Combating climate change would be impossible with tackling biodiversity loss and vice versa.

The growing presence of the climate change in the CBD discussions could be both a good and bad thing. On the one hand it could help raise the issue in people’s consciousness.

On the other hand it is important that we do not get too swept up in the climate discussions and forget biodiversity for biodiversity’s sake.

Maybe it is time for negotiators at these conferences to take a step back and remember the overarching aims of all three of the Rio Conventions. With the next climate conference now just a month away, countries should make sure those negotiators heading out to Doha, Qatar take the lessons from India with them.

Finally just because people do not attend biodiversity conferences in large numbers, it does not mean that there is a large constituency of interested parties.

Sandwith believes that while many people may feel the only way to deal with the climate change issue is to lobby their government to make the significant changes needed – by reducing the emissions of all of the major polluting sectors – with biodiversity there is so much more they could be doing on the ground.

“The energy of people involved in climate discussions is to put pressure on the people who can make these decisions,” he said. “What is so interesting in the biodiversity world is that everybody can do this, you can go in your own town and look at the stream belt or go and protect your forest…there is a much greater sense of empowerment on the real issues.”

The post Fight club: Who wins when climate change takes on biodiversity? appeared first on Climate Home News.

The Seychelles’ lead climate negotiator says the COP18 summit in Doha will be difficult, and wants more cooperation between the three “Rio Conventions” dealing with climate, desertification and biodiversity.

Speaking at the Convention on Biological Diversity’s (CBD) Conference of the Parties (COP11) in Hyderabad, Ronny Jumeau bemoaned the progress at the UN climate talks so far as preparations continue for the next climate meeting, COP18, in Doha this November.

“Give me the CBD COP any time! We’re leaving here very happy,” said Jumeau after a number of marine protection agreements were made at the summit.

“Compare that situation to the climate change talks. We rarely leave climate change talks with a smile. It’s relaxing to come to this COP before I go to Doha in November. That one is going to be difficult,” he said.

Jumeau, the Seychelles’ UN, US and climate change ambassador, told RTCC that the three UN conventions formed at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, needed to work more closely together because of the strong links between the subjects they dealt with.

“Climate change is rearing its ugly head everywhere. I look forward to the day when we have a joint meeting between the conventions and putting all these issues on the table. The three Rio Conventions, desertification, biodiversity and climate change should all be working together,” he said.

RTCC VIDEO: Ronny Jumeau, the Seychelles’ climate change ambassador, tells RTCC there should be more cooperation between the three UN Rio Conventions

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UN biodiversity talks end with finance deal as countries double funding to $10bn

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Climate change, desertification and migration: Connecting the dots

The post UN climate talks a miserable experience says negotiator appeared first on Climate Home News.

The UN Biodiversity summit in Hyderabad has ended with a compromise on finance that sees developed countries double their funding from $5bn to $10bn.

The agreement came following intense negotiations that lasted until the late hours of Friday night (October 19), well past the 6pm deadline set by the COP.

Developed countries agreed to double their financial assistance to the developing world by 2015 and then keep it steady to 2020, the year the Aichi targets are set to conclude.

Parties also agreed that 75% of the developing countries should integrate biodiversity conservation into their national agendas – with the exception of the least developed countries (LDCs) – and adopt measures for improving financing for conservation and restoration of biodiversity.

Discussions on resource mobilisation went on long into the night, as countries struggled to reach agreement (Source: CBD/Flickr)

Francisco Gaetani, head of the Brazilian delegation to COP11 and Executive Secretary of Brazil’s Ministry of Environment says good progress was made in Hyderabad.

“We are satisfied with the final agreements developed at COP11 and while we believe that the documents could be more ambitious, this conference has facilitated significant progress towards long-term commitments on biodiversity preservation,” he said.

The focal point of the debate had been about setting baselines – how much finance is required for biodiversity protection – in every nation, setting out the starting point for targets on how much should be pledged by richer countries.

Developed nations said these were essential before any concrete pledges were made, particularly as they continued to be restricted by the global financial crisis.

Lasse Gustavsson, WWF International’s Executive Director of Conservation says the $10bn pledge is still insufficient.

“WWF came to Hyderabad asking governments to set the world on a course that would help prevent further declines in some of the world’s most valuable resources, and we have seen some success here,” he said. “But the deal reached on financing at COP11 Hyderabad is a disappointing result, because it is not nearly enough money to reach the ambitious targets to protect biodiversity the world set two years ago in Nagoya.”

WWF estimates that $200 billion needs to invested every year if governments are going to live up to their commitments set out in the Aichi Targets.

Estimates by the CBD given earlier in the conference are even higher at $300 billion per year.

Obstructions

RTCC understands that the UK and Canada were instrumental to blocking talks on finance, causing the discussions to continue after hours. By yesterday afternoon it was the only agenda item left unresolved.

At certain points during the final hours of the talks there were even concerns that no consensus would be reached at all. But countries were able to find an agreement that allowed the final piece of the text to be agreed, completing the Hyderabad outcome.

“This is good but it’s not enough,” says Jane Smart, Global Director of IUCN’s Biodiversity Conservation Group. “If we want to respond to the growing biodiversity crisis, we need more concrete action. We must engage with all levels of society, including the private sector, and look into conserving all levels of biological diversity: the diversity of genes, species and ecosystems. We are two years into the International Decade of Biodiversity now and this is more urgent than ever.”

Despite last minute funding disagreements, COP11 can be seen as a success story in many ways.

Many people have noted during the last two weeks the positive atmosphere of the discussions. While this may not be true in the intense negotiations on finance, in other areas this has certainly been apparent.

“Those meetings are relentless,” Areeba Hamid, Ocean Campaigner at Greenpeace India told RTCC. “[In the oceans discussions] for example, Japan wasn’t happy with a lot of the text, China wasn’t happy with a lot of text.

“But kudos to the chair, she was really, really pushing the countries to find common ground and I think that is great to see. There was generally an acceptance that we need to move forward and not deadlock ourselves over words.”

The phrase “in the spirit of compromise” were often used by countries as they tried to come to some agreement.

Climate change

The outcome sees consensus on several climate change issues that have been discussed over the last two weeks.

Issues in this area were hotly debated, as countries weighed up the potential negative biodiversity consequences of initiatives and the huge climate mitigation benefits they could bring.

The text on biofuels was agreed fairly early on in the conference, acknowledging that they could ‘aggravate biodiversity loss’ while recognising their role in mitigating carbon emissions.

The decision calls on all parties to give biofuels consideration when setting out their national biodiversity strategies.

Geoengineering and REDD+ were both more heavily debated, and additional groups were formed to deal with these issues.

Both were finally agreed yesterday. On geoengineering countries acknowledged the potential cross-border consequences of geoengineering.

The agreement also reaffirmed commitments from Nagoya that called for scientific evidence for the need for geoengineering before any experiments take place.

On REDD+, perhaps the most contentious of the climate issues, countries discussed how far the initiative should be discussed under the CBD and how much they should be left to the UN climate convention, the UNFCCC.

The text went some way to addressing these concerns, laying out the potential synergies between the two conventions.

WWF’s Gustavsson, however, told me that they would like to have seen an even stronger connection made.

“We would like to see a stronger link between he CBD and the UNFCCC,” he said. “Just as we don’t want biodiversity experts to solve climate change, we don’t want climate change experts to solve biodiversity challenges.

“Coherence between different UN processes here is really important. I don’t think we established as strong a link as we need, in order to be as effective as we have to be.”

Oceans

Another area, which saw significant attention at COP11, was oceans, and there were strong signals that this issue is moving up the global agenda.

One of the main decisions agreed in Hyderabad was over Ecological and Biological Significant Areas (EBSAs). Based on agreements made at COP10 in Nagoya, regional workshops over the last two years have collected the best scientific information to identify the most important areas in the oceans.

They are evaluated on such things as their rarity, their productivity, their naturalness and their importance for threatened species.

After a lengthy discussion, across the two weeks of the conference, it was agreed that countries would “take note” of these areas – despite the EU bloc calling for the stronger word “endorse”.

The decision means the CBD will now take the text to the UN General Assembly (UNGA) next year.

“We have got a result which for the time being we can be happy with,” said Greenpeace’s Hamid. “This means the nations have agreed to identify these areas and submit them to the UNGA where there is a deadlock moving forward because there was no scientific information available. If that block has been removed, effectively there is no excuse for inaction now.”

Gustavsson, however, says it is now up to WWF and other organisations to follow the decisions to the UNGA and make sure that what was agreed here is actually taken into account on the ground.

Agreements on marine ecosystems also looked at fisheries management, coral bleaching, ocean acidification and underwater noise.

The next COP meeting of the CBD will take place in South Korea in 2014.

More from COP11

UN biodiversity talks heading to tense final day

UN agreement urges caution over geoengineering tests

UK and Canada win ‘Dodo’ award for blocking biodiversity talks

Video: Head of IUCN’s Global Business and Biodiversity Programme tells RTCC that the lack of public finance will drive more private investment in global biodiversity

The post UN biodiversity talks end with finance deal as countries double funding to $10bn appeared first on Climate Home News.

RTCC in Hyderabad 

– Live coverage from CBD COP11
– TV interviews from RTCC studio in Hyderabad
– Tweet @RTCCnewswire and use #CBD and #COP11 hashtags
– Email ts@rtcc.org or message @rtcc_tierney

Finance: A final text on financial mechanisms was been sent for approval early today. No news as yet. On resource mobilisation, a text has also been produced, but it is now being scrutinised by ministers for approval. It is thought the final text will be discussed later this afternoon in the main plenary session.

G77: A letter from one of the most influential developing nation groups, the G77, warns that they will not undertake significant conservation activities unless funding is provided.

Progress: Texts on Geoengineering and biofuels are expected to be signed off today. Talks over REDD+ have been tortuous but should also be agreed on – Tim Christopherson from UN-REDD explained why this subject had caused so much controversy here.

Missing ministers: It appears only 77 of the 192 parties sent ministers to Hyderabad. Of these few appear to be attending High Level Segment meetings. In this morning’s press briefing, CBD communications officer David Ainsworth said the number of ministers attending is within the range they would normally expect for a conference. They also say the lack of ministers in the High-Level discussions is because many will be splitting their time between there and other negotiations.

Picking cotton: UK Minister for Environment Richard Benyon visited cotton fields in the remote village of Nurjahanpalli yesterday. Marks & Spencer (M&S) sources its cotton from. Benyon told the workers at the cotton field that he would not be able to buy another t-shirt from the outlet without thinking of India.

Tiger database: The National Tiger Conservation Authority of India is set to create a national database for tigers, to help aid their protection. Each tiger will be given a unique identification number and code. Experts say it will help enhance monitoring of the species and give better estimates of the population in the country.

Video of the day:  IUCN’s Gerard Bos outlines main positions in COP11 finance negotiations

Gerard Bos from Responding to Climate Change on Vimeo.

The post Hyderabad biodiversity talks: day 11 diary appeared first on Climate Home News.

Guidelines on the deployment of geoengineering have been agreed at the UN biodiversity summit in Hyderabad following intense negotiations.

Countries agreed on a text that specifies what geoengineering means, outlines when it should be used, acknowledges its potential impacts on biodiversity and the potential cross-border consequences of its use.

The document stresses the priority of addressing climate change through mitigation measures, such as increasing natural carbon sinks, and calls on all experiments to take into account international laws and conventions, including the UNFCCC, the UN’s climate change convention.

It also reaffirms the decisions taken at COP10 in Nagoya that called for scientific evidence for the need of geoengineering before any experiments take place.

Geoengineering is designed to tackle the effects of climate change by either removing CO2 from the air – by pulling gas from the atmosphere or increasing absorption in the sea – or limiting the amount of sunlight reaching the earth’s surface.

Large scale projects are still largely in the concept phase but given the deadlocked state of mitigation efforts, many think geoengineering will be essential for the world to avoid dangerous climate change.

The document aims to address the potential impacts to biodiversity from large scale geoengineering projects aimed at mitigating climate change (Source: CBD/Flickr)

This agreement  will come as unwanted to news to the companies and countries wanting to invest in these technologies as climate change predictions worsen. This year there have been two major efforts to test methods of sucking CO2 from the atmosphere.

In May a UK-backed project that planned to inject 150 litres of water into the atmosphere to create a cooling effect was cancelled at the last minute over concerns that certain researchers had a conflict of interest.

But in July, the largest experiment to date took place off the west coast of Canada when 100 tonnes of iron sulphate was dumped into the ocean. Iron in the sea can create a ‘bloom’ of plankton that absorbs carbon dioxide and then sinks to the ocean bed – storing the carbon there.

Scientists have, however, raised concerns that it can harm ecosystems, produce lifeless waters and worsen ocean acidification. It was also revealed earlier this week that the Canadian government may have known of the plans before they went ahead.

The test was criticised by the international community who said the experiments breached moratoriums of two UN conventions, one under the CBD – set out in the Nagoya outcome – and the other in the 1972 London Convention that prohibits the for-profit dumping of iron into the sea.

Test ban

Ahead of the conference, groups including Bolivia, the Philippines and African nations, as well as indigenous peoples groups called for an enforceable test ban on geoengineering experiments.

However, the paragraph calling on parties to ensure all tests of geoengineering technologies take place in “controlled laboratory conditions” was removed from the text, despite protests from countries including Peru and Argentina.

Countries traded giving up the paragraph with text that ‘reaffirms’ – over a weaker ‘recalls’ – decisions agreed in Nagoya:

“No climate-related geo-engineering activities that may affect biodiversity take place, until there is an adequate scientific basis on which to justify such…with the exception of small scale scientific research studies that would be conducted in a controlled setting.”

Under a separate paragraph the parties also noted that a ‘precautionary approach as well as international customary law’ should be considered when geoengineering plans are being made, as well as other conventions work in this area, including the London Convention.

Geoengineering?

There was also some discussion between parties about what constitutes geoengineering. The outcome text called parties to be aware of all existing definitions, and the ongoing work in this area.

It also lists several broad descriptions of such methods including reducing solar insolation, carbon sequestration from the atmosphere and large-scale manipulation of the global environment.

The sub-point on the ‘deliberate intervention in the planetary environment of nature’ caused some concerns between countries.

Brazil warned that this text could be interpreted to include projects such as REDD+ or Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), which could also be considered as ‘deliberate interventions’.

The document will now be absorbed into the final outcome document to be approved on the last day of the conference tomorrow.

The post UN agreement urges caution over geoengineering tests appeared first on Climate Home News.

A healthy environment is crucial to poverty eradication and economic growth, the World Bank’s sustainable development chief has said.

Sustainable development does not pit environment protection against poverty eradication Kyte said. (Source: UN/Ba Trang)

Speaking yesterday at the UN Convention on Biological Diversity’s (CBD) summit in Hyderabad, Rachel Kyte, World Bank vice president for the Sustainable Development Network said that environmental protection could not be separated from the type of growth the world aspires to.

“Sustainable development is not a choice between poverty eradication and environmental protection,” said Kyte. “Shared prosperity will depend on nature and the services it provides.”

Quoting a World Bank report she said that environmental degradation was costing some countries as much as 8% of their GDP.

“Protecting, maintaining and investing in the natural resource space is essential for sustained economic success. Without clean air, land, food, water, without healthy oceans, the basis of life and economic prosperity is, and will be gone,” she added.

Kyte was speaking during the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty.

Video: The World Bank’s Rachel Kyte on the ties between economic growth and environmental protection

The post Environmental degradation holds back growth, says World Bank appeared first on Climate Home News.

– Live coverage from CBD COP11
– TV interviews from RTCC studio in Hyderabad
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Busy Bees: The Global Youth Biodiveristy Network, followed yesterday’s Dodo awards, with a Busy Bee award for countries have played a particularly crucial role in discussions. The African Group won one award for their work on finance mobilisation, and Gabon the other for their engagement with stakeholders.

Youth Declaration: Go4BioDiv, another youth forum at the conference, shared their declaration with parties yesterday in the form of a theatrical performance. Under the theme of coastal and marine conservation their declaration includes ensuring policy is guided by science and allowing youth more participation in the decision making process.

High-level discussions: The high-level segment of the conference began yesterday with a call from CBD Executive Secretary Braulio Ferreira de Souza Dias, on behalf of the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, for innovative solutions; urging particular attention to be given to oceans.

Protected areas: More progress was made yesterday at the CBD talks with working groups agreeing on texts relating to marine protected areas – ecological and biological significant areas (EBSAs) – and invasive species.

Finance: Delegates in the contact group on finance mobilisation yesterday, continued with the first reading of the current text up for discussion. They discussed whether the target of doubling biodiversity finance, to be given to developing countries from developed countries, was a meaningful target for 2015.

UNEP chief Achim Steiner said we should not give up hope on a positive outcome on finance just yet and said the group were working to reconcile differences.

National Investment Board: The row continues in India today over the proposed National Investment Board – aimed to streamline the development process. India’s Finance Ministery has HIT back at Environment Minister Jayanthi Natarajan’s criticIsm for the board saying they are misguided. He said the board would not take power away from the Ministry of Environment.

India’s nuclear aims: India is set to hold talks with Australia about civil-nuclear cooperation. The Indian government aims to buy uranium from Australia for their domestic nuclear plans. Negotiations over a safeguards agreement could be lengthy though and it could be two years before any actual sales of uranium take place.

Picture of the Day: The Go4BioDiv group performed yesterday for delegates as they revealed their declaration…

The post Hyderabad biodiversity talks: day 10 diary appeared first on Climate Home News.

Madagascar’s palm trees are nearing extinction, according to the latest update of the IUCN’s Red List of Threatened Species. 

The island’s palms have huge economic and biological significance, and are used for food, house building, crafts and medicines. Most are found in no other part of the world.

Land clearances for agriculture, logging and seed collection mean 83% of the palms could be lost within the decade, threatening a huge carbon sink and affecting the country’s resilience to climate change.

“The fact is most of what is in Madagascar will be gone if we don’t act in the next five to ten years. We won’t have to worry about climate change because there will be nothing left,” said Russell Mittermeier, President of Conservation International. “Climate change could have impacts down the line but the game right now is making sure that we conserve every remaining patch of forest because every forest that remains is of global importance.

“I am not even thinking about climate change expect in terms of REDD+, that could be a very significant thing because every little bit of forest counts there, and it is one of the models we have for that sort of thing.”

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Red List is the world’s largest information source on the global conservation status of plant, animal and fungi species. It is based on the risk of extinction of a species should no conservation action be taken, and each species on the list is re-assessed on a decadal basis.

This update reveals 65,518 species are currently endangered, with 20,219 threatened with extinction. IUCN have called on delegates to the UN biodiversity talks to bear these figures in mind during talks over financing the Aichi Targets.

The 20 Targets aim to halves biodiversity loss by 2020 and increase nature conservation areas by 17% by 2020.

IUCN’s Global Director Jane Smart said this latest update demonstrated the need for national governments to enforce strict regulations on logging and mining.

“When we carry out conservation work on the ground, stop the logging, stop the mining, we can rescue species if they are not yet extinct,” she said. “This information that we are bringing to you is not good news but we also have enough information to know that when we do conservation work, it works.”

Aichi target 12 states that by 2020 the extinction of known threatened species should have been prevented and their conservation status improved. Conservation groups say this is pivotal to all other targets.

18 metres tall, the Tahina palm can be seen by Google Earth (Source: J Dransfield/IUCN)

“Target 11 and 12 for me are central to everything we are trying to achieve because you cant really do all of the other things unless you conserve the basic biodiversity resource base, which is dealt with in target 12, species,” said Mittermeier.

“And target 11, setting aside all of the areas you need, is not only important for biodiversity. These are the places what provide the vital ecosystem services.”

The IUCN estimate that the extinction rate is currently between 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than it would be naturally.

The main drivers for this loss are habitat destruction, land conversion for agriculture and development, pollution and the spread of alien species.

Climate change is also contributing to the loss of species with many species that are not currently under threat being at risk of climate impacts.

25% of the world’s mammals, 13% of birds, 41% of amphibians and 33% of reef building corals are under already threat from extinction.

Less is known about plant species, says IUCN.

This latest update comes following an assessment carried out on all of the palm species in Madagascar, as part of a wider project to assess palms worldwide.

Madagascan Palms

192 palm species were assessed – all of which are unique to the island – and are vital to the livelihoods of those on the island.

Many populations of palm species are at risk as land is cleared for agriculture and logging.

Unsustainable seed collection  is also a threat. The Tahina palm, listed for the first time, has been assessed as critically endangered, with much of its habitat being converted for agriculture. Only 30 remain in the wild.

This palm is so high, at 18 metres, that it can be viewed on Google Earth. It’s also known as the suicide palm, as it has a habit of self destructing after flowering. “It is called the suicide palm but it is going to be a case of murder is we do not do anything about it,” said Smart.

COP11 VIDEO: Conservation International’s Russell Mittermeier outlines need to expand protected areas around world.

 More from COP11

Welcome to the UN’s secret climate adaptation summit

UK and Canada win ‘Dodo’ award for blocking biodiversity talks

Amnesty and Greenpeace call on India to stop coal violations

The post Madagascar close to losing 83% of palm trees in next decade – IUCN appeared first on Climate Home News.

The head of the UN Environment Programme Achim Steiner has called on observers to remain positive about finance discussions at the UN biodiversity talks.

Speaking at a press conference at the Convention of Biological Diversity’s COP11 summit, Steiner dismissed suggestions that there was deadlock, arguing that it was typical of international finance negotiations to run to the last day.

“Negotiations are ongoing. I would not characterise them as stuck, because a COP is there to reconcile different positions’, he said.

“What is happening right now is rational, logical and chronologically correct – I would say this COP is at work and that is exactly what it should be doing.”

He said that every signal so far, from both the Indian Presidency and the regional groupings suggested a deep commitment to resolve outstanding issues before the end of the conference on Friday.

On Wednesday India pledged $50 million to fund biodiversity projects within the country, but wider discussions on finance have proved to be the most contentious issue for parties.

Yesterday saw the contact group on finance mobilisation meet to discuss a draft text. They discussed whether a target to double biodiversity finance from developed to developing countries by 2015 was adequate. Developed countries noted that ‘baselines’ would be necessary to determine if this target was needed. Baselines refer to how much each country needs to achieve its own biodiversity plans.

Developed nations led by the EU argue that baselines must be put in place before discussions can move on to the targets for funding.

EU commissioner for Environment, Janez Potočnik told RTCC: “The condition that was agreed in Nagoya was that we would have a good baseline, that means that we understand what are the needs. We would need to have a good reporting system which means of course we would like to know how that money was spent and for what purpose.

“All of that also makes sense. That is why here in Hyderabad our firm belief in the EU is that until those things are met it is difficult to agree about definite targets. But we are also aware to meet our 2020-biodiversity targets, our Aichi Targets that we agree in Nagoya to be reached, it is coming closer so we need to discuss also how we step up our efforts.”

Developing nations say that to fulfill the mandate set in Japan in 2010 targets must be agreed here in Hyderabad. They say discussions on this should take precedence over those on frameworks and baselines.

Last week one developing nation said countries should start with the targets and then figure out how they will meet them. This sentiment was echoed in the country statements made in the High Level Segment of negotiations yesterday.

A delegate from Mozambique for example reminded the room that “when we adopted the strategic plan and the Nagoya Protocol in 2010 we appealed that only with the financial resources can we avoid repeating the mistakes” of the 2010 targets.

Thailand’s representative concurred, arguing his country: “has already worked to achieve Aichi Target 20 [on finance]. We have set up an environmental fund to support conservation activities.”

With the prospect of angry scenes at the end of COP11 if finance targets are not agreed, Steiner warned that the success of the conference could not be measured by one number.

“If you narrow it down to in Hyderabad you are only negotiating one financial amount and you reduce it to what is the international community willing to pay in order to move forward in the Aichi and Nagoya outcomes,” he said.

“You are ignoring the vast investment and the far larger investment that are part of the national and regional investment in biodiversity already.”

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Video: EU commissioner talks about the need for strong baselines and a reliable framework on finance…

Janez Potočnik, EU Commissioner for the Environment from Responding to Climate Change on Vimeo.

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Protecting the environmental foundations of the world’s food systems will be crucial to feeding a growing population, according to a new report from the UN Environment Programme (UNEP).

Last year, the world population hit seven billion and is expected to rise to nine billion by 2050.

One billion people continue to go hungry, while two billion suffer from ‘hidden hunger’ where they do not get the nutrients needed for a healthy diet.

The latest report, Avoiding Future Famines, warns that unless nature-based services, such as fertile land, freshwater supplies and nutrient recycling, are built into agriculture and fishery planning the world will not be able to feed the growing population.

Overfishing, unsustainable water use, environmentally degrading agricultural practices and other human activities are all putting the security of our food system under threat.

Agriculture provides 90% of the world’s caloric intake, but the industry faces threats from unsustainable practices.

Food shortages are not just a future problem. Drought in the US this summer caused rises in food prices across the world, as grain crops failed.

The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) estimate that by 2030, agricultural land in the developing world will increase by 120 million hectares. Climate change will continue to exacerbate the threats facing agriculture however.

Over-use of water in irrigation systems, poor land management and the use of fertilisers could all threaten future agricultural systems.

In the oceans, 32% of fish stocks are either over exploited, depleted or recovering from depletion, while 35% of mangroves and 40% corals are also destroyed and degraded.

Unsustainable fishing practices, including bottom trawling and dredging, continue to threaten fish stocks.

“The era of seemingly ever-lasting production based on maximising inputs such as fertilisers and pesticides, mining supplies of freshwater and fertile arable land and advancements linked to mechanisation are hitting their limits, if indeed they have not already hit them,” said UNEP Executive Director, Achim Steiner.

“The world needs a green revolution but with a capital G: one that better understands how food is actually grown and produced in terms of the nature-based inputs provided by forests, freshwater and biodiversity.”

Eight recommendations to feed the world

The report offers recommendations to shore-up the natural foundations and improve food security:

– Build centralised storage and cooling facilities for small-scale farmers to get produce to market quicker and avoid waste.

– Promote sustainable diets, in particular the lower consumption of meat and dairy products in the developed world.

– Re-consider food quality standards that lead to unnecessary waste.

– Design sustainable agriculture not only at local, but national level including improved soil management and efficient water use.

– Develop economic strategies including eliminating subsides which contribute to over-fishing and habitat destruction, providing incentive for sustainable fisheries and increasing taxation on harvest volume and fines on illegal fishing.

– Introduce maximum yields of marine fishing.

– Create networks of Aquatic Protected Areas.

– Reduce land-based pollution that lead to dead-zones in coastal areas.

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Singh reminded delegates that it is often the poorest who are hardest hit by biodiversity loss (Source: World Economic Forum/Creative Commons)

India Prime Minister Manmohan Singh says parties to the UN biodiversity talks must demonstrate their commitment by agreeing a financial framework at COP11 in Hyderabad.

Addressing the opening plenary session of the high-level part of the talks, Singh said his government had already “earmarked” $50 million to deliver strong institutional mechanisms for conservation in India.

The Prime Minister also called on attending states to follow India’s lead in ratifying the Nagoya Protocol, which was agreed in 2010 and focuses on sharing exploitation benefits of biodiversity with local communities.

Ninety-two countries have signed the protocol, but only six ratified it ahead of this year’s conference.

Taking the podium after a series of long and often rambling speeches by various dignatories, Singh said that despite being a developing country, he had set an example, and it was now up to others to follow.

“India has recently ratified the Nagoya Protocol and formalised our commitment to it. I would urge all the Parties to do likewise because concerted global action is imperative and cannot brook any further delay,” he said.

“Despite global efforts, the 2010 biodiversity target that we had set for ourselves under the Convention on Biological Diversity was not fully met. This situation needs to change.”

Local pressure groups were quick to point out that the $50 million pledged was tiny compared to what is required, amounting to just 0.1% of what is called India’s coal scam, where coal fields were allegedly handed to public and private groups for a fraction of their true price.

Brij Mohan Sing Rathore from the Ministry of Environment and Forests told RTCC that the $50 million is a symbolic sign of the government’s support for this conference, and would be used to drive further investment in India.

“It is an upfront pledge – this is very, very upfront support – and through other kinds of schemes and programmes there would be other money given but this is upfront support. It is a very, very useful thing saying, ‘here we are committing for biodiversity conservation, supporting the institutions which actually help’,” he said.

“It is hugely symbolic and it will inspire actions in many other countries like ours as well as commitments from the state governments and many stakeholders including the private sector. When a government comes in upfront and puts up the money on biodiversity it sends the signal that this is important.”

The pledge was greeted with thanks from the CBD Executive Secretary Braulio Dias who said India would become the first ‘Green Champion’ of the conference.

Resource mobilisation

While many texts at COP11 have already been agreed, some issues remain contentious, notably financing biodiversity initiatives over the coming decade.

Speaking alongside Singh, Jayanthi Natarajan, Minister for Environment and Forests in India and Achim Steiner, Executive Director of the UN Environment Programme called for movement on finance before the end of the week.

“If we are not able to agree on resource mobilisation, four years of the decade long plan would have been gone already and we will not be able to meet the Aichi Targets,” said Natarajan. “This will be our collective failure. We have already failed on biodiversity in 2010, future generations would not forgive us if we failed again.”

Steiner added that it was too easy for countries in economic crisis to see biodiversity as a distraction, but that they should come to a consensus in India.

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RTCC in Hyderabad 

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PM Singh’s visit: The local papers are filled this morning with news of the Prime Minister’s visit to COP11 yesterday. He addressed the main plenary where he reaffirmed India’s commitment to the Nagoya Protocol which he said the Indian government had recently ratified. He also pledged $50 million for biodiversity here in India over the next two year’s while the country holds the COP Presidency.

Fire at the HICC: My personal favourite of the PM Singh stories this morning is that a small fire broke out near the spot where the Prime Minister was set to make his speech. It is said to have been caused by a short circuit and interrupted the meeting of the working group taking place at the time. It was small enough not to be noticed by any attendee outside of the hall though and was quickly extinguished.

Banned from the proceedings: There are also a couple of reports of those who were banned from the proceedings. Firstly, not all journalists were given access to the main hall, with rumours that those not emitted entry were from publications who openly sympathise with the Telangana cause. Three Greenpeace activists wearing tiger suits were also refused entry. They staged a small protest outside, where lots of pictures were taken of them and their banners – possibly their aim in the first place.

Power shortages: The Central Power Distribution Company Limited in Hyderabad has warned the power situation is going from bad to worse, as the gap between demand and supply widens. They say the power crisis could continue till May 2013.

REDD+:  It was REDD+ Day at the Rio Conventions Pavilion here in Hyderabad yesterday. The main event was the launch of the Little Forest Finance Book which offers different options to scale-up forest financing. Speakers at the event discussed the importance of forest financing to achieving the Aichi Biodiversity Targets and called for the mobilisation of the private sector to provide sustainable forest funding.

Geoengineering: The Contact group on geoengineering met again yesterday and continued to discuss how to ensure geoengineering techniques take place in controlled laboratory conditions, within national jurisdiction and in accordance with international law – without having negative impacts outside a country’s own exclusive economic zone.

Video of the day: Andrew Mitchell, Executive Director of the Global Canopy Programme talks about the Little Forest Finance Book and how it is aims to make complicated topics understandable…

Andrew Mitchell from Responding to Climate Change on Vimeo.

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COP11 in Hyderabad is probably the biggest climate adaptation conference you have never heard of.

Representatives from 192+ countries have travelled to India, drawing a crowd of 14,000 delegates to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity’s (CBD) bi-annual summit.

But aside from a solitary New York Times journalist who arrived on Monday, media coverage outside India is fairly low-key. This is a pity, as the subjects up for discussion are fascinating, and directly relevant to the climate debate.

In the past week geo-engineering, biofuels, REDD+, coastal protection strategies and increased environmental finance commitments have all been on the agenda.

For delegates here it is simple. The future of the oceans, forests and endangered species all depend on how high global temperatures will rise.

At this morning’s press conference CBD communications officer David Ainsworth told me climate science informs and influences this process, although he stressed the CBD has no mandate to directly address carbon emissions.

That’s a matter for the UN climate talks in Doha later this year, but what I am hearing in Hyderabad is the world planning for a world 2°C+ above pre-industrial levels.

There is little of the forced optimism I have witnessed in the climate arena, where a culture of diplomatic omerta obliges delegates to talk of a 1.5°C target. That’s not to say this isn’t worth aiming for or achievable, but few people I have spoken to believe it is realistic.

Instead, in the autumnal Indian heat, there is a brutal realism that what we call the environment is slowly disintegrating, and that global warming will speed up that process.

Planting mangroves can sequester carbon, create new wildlife habitats and improve resilience to coastal erosion. (Source: Flickr/Apes_Abroad)

Take the Aichi Targets, which underpin the current CBD negotiation process.

These are 20 goals agreed in Nagoya two years ago, ranging from increasing biodiversity awareness to preventing extinctions. By my calculations 16 are directly related to climate change.

For example, a heavy emphasis is placed on cultivating mangrove forests and maintaining sand stocks on beaches to provide cost-effective flood defences.

Agroforestry (where farmers plant specific trees in and around their crops) is the new buzzword when it comes to building a climate resilient food supply chain.

The genetic identities of rice and other plant species that grow in dry and extremely wet conditions are being safeguarded. Talks on how these varieties could be shared are reportedly going well.

A renewed focus on the plight of the great apes in Africa, Borneo and Indonesia could also ensure forests in these regions are protected, ensuring huge carbon sinks are not lost.

And perhaps most significantly, renewed pressure to incorporate biodiversity values into national accounting and reporting systems by 2020 will provide states a better understanding of how they can cope with increased incidences of extreme weather.

No one talks about climate change. They don’t need to. It’s not the elephant in the room. It is the room.

Onwards to Qatar

This raises questions about the UN’s environmental strategy. Many participants have gently expressed their frustration that a summit with similar ambitions will convene in Doha later this year.

The UN climate talks do of course have a different personality and agenda of their own, with a clear focus on urgently cutting the rate of greenhouse gas emissions.

But I am hearing there may come a time in the not too distant future when the three Rio Conventions, all founded in 1992, merge into a larger environmental body.

For one, the pressures conferences of this size put on developing nations are immense. Uganda has three delegates covering the talks here, as opposed to an EU mission ten times that number. The USA is not even a party to the CBD, yet has a group of 20+ experts observing the talks.

And while the US and EU have different teams working on the biodiversity and climate negotiations, poorer nations do not.

Ibrahim Thiaw, Director of the Division of Environmental Policy Implementation at UNEP outlined this dilemma at a meeting on Saturday, saying duplication was an “intergovernmental issue that needs to be discussed”.

“60% of the same people will meet in Doha in just over a month to talk about climate change,” he said. “It is very difficult to take that back home for the ministers when they have 4-5 reports dealing with the same issue but coming from different angles.”

Perhaps that can wait. What seems apparent from a week at CBD COP11 is that adaptation planning for climate change cannot.

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UN poised to protect 120 marine ‘hotspots’

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The post Welcome to the UN’s secret climate adaptation summit appeared first on Climate Home News.

– Live coverage from CBD COP11
– TV interviews from RTCC studio in Hyderabad
– Tweet @RTCCnewswire and use #CBD and #COP11 hashtags
– Email ts@rtcc.org or message @rtcc_tierney

Food security: Eight conditions must be met to feed the world’s growing population, according to a new UNEP report launched today, to coincide with World Food Day 2012. The report warns that the ecological and natural foundations that support our food systems are being undermined by human activity, and call on measures to be put in place to ensure more sustainable agriculture and fisheries.

Finance: Delegates were still unable to agree on preliminary targets for increased biodiversity funding, reporting of domestic expenditures and funding needs and preparation of national financial plans for biodiversity when they met yesterday. The contact group is now closed to give countries time to make additional, regional consultations.

Marine protected areas: Parties discussed the summary reports of ecologically and biodiversity significant areas (EBSAs) produced in regional workshops.  Chair of the group González Posse said that, as a compromise, parties could request the secretariat pass on the summary reports to the UN General Assembly. While many supported this suggestion, some countries highlighted the need for the COP’s endorsement of the summaries first.

Conservation lab: One lab in India has developed a way to conserve endangered species. The Laboratory for the Conservation of Endangered Species (LaCONES) aims to artificially inseminate leopards. The initiative was ready last year, but researchers hit a problem when the female leopards were not biologically fit for the process.

PM’s arrival: Security is high ahead of Prime Minister’s Singh’s visit to the COP later today. He will arrive shortly before 3pm this afternoon and will open the High-level Segment of the talks. Journalists and observers have been warned to get their seats early as the plenary is expected to fill fast for his address.

High-level attendees: It is not only the PM joining the debates today. Many more ministers can be spotted around the HICC this morning as they turn out for the final days of the talks. Hopefully now they are here, progress will be seen on some of the talks more contentious issues.

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