High Potential for CDM Markets in Africa

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) program, developed under the Kyoto Protocol, is a method of combating climate change by encouraging sustainable development through market incentives. It is essentially a compromise allowing industrialized countries needing to meet Kyoto standards to invest in projects in developing countries, in order to offset their own emissions. CDMs allow industrialized nations to reduce emissions in a more cost-effective way, as projects in the developing world tend to be less expensive.

This approach is controversial, with some critics believing that it can be considered a “cop-out” to instituting real change. Whether this is true or not, CDMs have the potential to largely benefit sustainable development, if the funds are administered and distributed intelligently and efficiently.

Physicist Robert Van Buskirk, from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, is an expert in developing solar power and ovens in rural African villages.  He proposes the Super CDM idea, which uses the idea of markets to engineer combined solutions in climate change, poverty, and health. Van Buskirk proposes that the funds that are making their way into NGOs, government and other organizations administering CDM projects be used in a more efficient manner by creating self-sustaining markets that will outlast the terms of the initial project. These markets would function like carbon markets, but

encompass environment, poverty, and heath problems together. For example a village working on developing clean water would be offered incentives from the market to develop the most sustainable model.

The premise behind this is that when the local people promote the project themselves, the outcome tends to be more successful and more durable. The developers of the market mechanism should look at ways to incorporate poverty alleviation and health, as well as greenhouse gas reductions. The market should function to economically develop the area, working to maintain a vibrant and thriving environment and social network.

A mangrove-planting project in Senegal, started by the non-profit Oceanium, has been highly successful due to its combination of economic, social and environmental benefits. The mangroves provide a vital ecosystem for the Senegalese coast. The mangroves have been deforested severely in Senegal due to human encroachment, resulting in a tremendous loss of habitat

The villages surrounding the mangrove habitat rely heavily on the ecosystem for their fishing livelihoods, thus the Oceanium project initiated a village-run project to replant the mangroves. The project was initially successful, because the people had an economic interest in protecting the habitat. Some of the increased revenue from fishing stocks increase then goes to re-planting more mangroves. Thus, the cycle continues on a local-run level.

Van Buskirk has spent most of his working career promoting new technologies in solar power and solar ovens in rural West Africa. He has come to realize that the best and most sustainable solutions come from the bottom-up, and not from an imposing outside entity. This is where he became convinced of the power of localized markets to encourage sustainable development. The funds for these markets can come from outside entities like foundations, or from CDM offsets. Buskirk acknowledges that to ensure a market and project’s success, however, rigorous evaluation must be applied, to ensure that funding is well allocated. There is already simply too much money that is wasted on seemingly altruistic environmental and humanitarian projects.

Van Buskirk stresses that money is saved, and the project is vastly more successful, if the local people administer and manage the project. Outside help is about 100 times more expensive to employ than the local people, in places like rural Africa. From Van Buskirk’s personal experience a project is only successful if at least 90 percent of the work is delegated to the local community. This is why it is important to figure out incentives to encourage local involvement. If local markets were developed where needed, to fund projects promoting clean water or lower infant mortality rates, the village invests in these projects independently for their own economic livelihood and future.

Local skills and labor are crucial for sustainable development. The missing piece in most underdeveloped rural regions is the funding for these local projects, a problem which could be solved by the intelligent application of localized CDM markets.

Pacific Northwest Trees Dying as Climate Warms

Global Warming Threatens Forests, study says

A new study conducted over a 50 year period in the coniferous forests of the American West, reports that forest trees are dying at a rate twice as fast as they were 17 years ago. The scientists are blaming this phenomenon on warming temperatures.

The data was gathered at multiple sites over Oregon, Washington, California, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, and southwestern British Columbia. All the sites under study were over 200 years old, and suffered rising mortality rates across the board. The main species studies were pines, firs, and hemlocks, with pines suffering the highest rise in mortality rates. Most of the data was collected from rudimentary tree counting.

The scientists ruled out other causes like ozone pollution, fire prevention, and forestry management, because the mortality rates went up across the board in the old growth forests.

Rising temperatures mean less snowpack, thus bringing an earlier summer drought. Warmer climate can also encourage harmful insects and invasive species, which cause more damage to the already drought-stressed population. Species like the bark beetle are known for attacking trees that are already weakened by environmental factors.

Some scientists believe the trees will migrate to cooler areas if necessary, but the question remains if they can do this quickly enough to save the species.

The report is disconcerting because forests have the potential to be carbon sinks, as they take in carbon dioxide to produce oxygen. If the trees are dying they can no longer perform this function, therefore further increasing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.

Approaches to Conservation in China

There are sufficient reasons why China gets a bad reputation in regards to its environmental policy, yet there is cause to be optimistic about the future of ecological conservation in China. Professor Lu Zhi’s lecture at UC Berkeley entitled “Seeking Solutions to China’s Environmental Crisis”, presented the ways that China is meeting the growing environmental demands of outside entities as well as realizing its own interest in conserving the country’s valuable biodiversity and ecosystems.  

Lu Zhi is a professor of conservation biology and Executive director of the Center for Nature and Society at Peking University, in Beijing. She is also the founder of the Shan-Shui Conservation Center, a Chinese NGO that demonstrates approaches on how Chinese society can live with nature. She spent most of her career living and researching the Giant Panda. Zhi’s role at the university is to conduct the research that then hopefully will be implemented into conservation policy.

China contains about 10% of the world’s biodiversity, and still has significant portions of pristine nature in its Western regions. China contains four ecological “hotspots”, out of the 34 spots designated worldwide. Also, due to its portions of the Himalayan Mountains and the Tibetan plateau, it also holds the watershed that serves most of Asia.

This wealth of environmental diversity and resources has suffered significant damage in the last 30 years of China’s fast-paced development. Water sources face over-exhaustion and pollution. The country also faces desert encroachment, increased erosion due to logging, agricultural soil pollution, as well as severe air pollution problems. Mostly due to its large population, China’s ecological footprint has been far exceeding the country’s bio-capacity since the 1970s.

Many Chinese still to hold the belief that they should have the luxury of unrestricted development, as developed nations had before them. The government, for the most part, thinks that the environment can only be dealt with after the country gets richer.

Beginning in 1985, Zhi conducted about 11 years worth of work studying the Giant Panda and viable conservation methods. The rumors of the Giant Panda’s problems with mating are not true in the wild; this issue only occurs in captivity. Zhi said that it turns out, “The problem is not the panda, it’s us”. It’s the logging of the forests in Southern China that was propelling the Panda close to extinction. When the free market opened up in the 90s, profit became more powerful than existing regulations, and the Panda’s habitat was being rapidly destroyed.  The logging only finally stopped when it sparked massive erosion problems, flooding of many people’s homes, and taking numerous lives. It was only with this addition of the human element into the equation that the government began to regulate logging and subsidize reforestation. This program turned out to not only help out the loggers, but the Giant Panda as well. This coupled with imposing the death penalty to Panda poachers, has saved the Giant Panda from extinction.

It is these kinds of economic incentives that have proved to have a big impact in changing China’s environmental issues. These market schemes look at the value of Earth’s ecosystems in monetary terms, which fits with the capitalistic mindset in China. Mechanisms like carbon trading could have a very big influence in protecting habitat and biodiversity in rural Chinese villages. If the local communities received additional income from planting trees, they would be improving their economic situation, as well as saving the forest. To reach a win-win solution, 

Zhi believes that one has to take law, policy, and market all into account together.

Zhi cited the city of Lijiang as an example of market incentives in regards to its experience with water use and agriculture. The city is marked as a cultural heritage town, attract

ing many tourists to its freshwater canals and waterways running throughout the city. This water was originally provided by the glacier melt above the city, but recently the glacier has almost all but melted, and the water has been coming from a nearby lake. The lake, however, is located next to agricultural lands and contains great amounts of pesticide traces, hurting the cities’ reputation as a clean water haven, as well as the people’s health. A solution was reached where the

tourists pay a very small amount of money upon visiting Lijiang, and this money goes toward assisting local farmers to switch to more sustainable organic agricultural methods. This creative and collective approach benefits the tourist industry, the farmers, and the health of the local people

Lu Zhi also discussed the role of Tibetan sacred lands, containing large portions of China’s pristine wilderness areas. One third of the land in Tibet is viewed as sacred, thus these lands are being protected by the local people without market incentives, but rather by traditional belief systems. Local organizations, like the volunteer-based “Friend of the Wild Yak” organization take great pride in protecting wild species. The members of this group are local Tibetans that realized the importance of the wild yak for grazing and making fertile grasslands, thus set out to voluntarily protect the Wild Yak. This method of conservation is effective and cheap. The problem is that the Chinese still look at the Tibetans as backwards and poverty-stricken, because they live by traditional religious beliefs. Rather, it is the case that the Chinese have something to learn from the Tibetans in valuing the land intrinsically, not merely for its monetary value.

In the topics of Giant Panda conservation, market incentives, and Tibetan sacred lands, Zhi expressed great optimism for the future of conservation in China. Yet there are still loads of issues the government must deal with. The national policy framework is changing, from an emphasis on rapid development, to development that will create a more sustainable, viable country. The problem lies in that change is slow in a country with over a billion people. The environment does not know borders, however, and “China’s dilemma is the world’s dilemma”, Zhi said. It is the research and ideas in the academic world, as well as raising public awareness, that will influence smart growth and policy in China, and worldwide.

Envisioning the Approaching Future

It’s 2009 and the world is changing…and fast. I say this not because of the constant infiltration of apocalyptic messages of our current fear-mongering media, but because I can truly feel it. There is just something in the air that tells me so. The conversations around me are changing, and more people are beginning to see the future as a very different world than we live in now. It is hard to pinpoint exactly what the future will entail, but most people agree it will be drastically different. Personal philosophies are becoming more global in scale, and while this could be a product of my post-college age group, I choose to believe that it is more of a shift in global consciousness. 

 

The very idea that we live in a finite world is relatively new. I think that it can be traced back to the first image of the Earth as taken from the moon in the 1960s. This image caused a shift in collective consciousness, and people began to think of the Earth as a finite place. Earth really is like a spaceship, the one inhabitable known planet floating in the dark desolate reality of outer space. It is our home, and our survival depends on maintaining and protecting it. The concept is simple: We need the clean air, water, and ecosystem functions, which it provides for us. The problem becomes more convoluted and complex with the great diversity of the human race, and the inability to grasp the immediacy of the problems.

The image of the Earth sparked the environmental movements of the 1960s, but I would argue that collectively we did not grasp a holistic view of the Earth back then. We had the image but we were lacking the critical and immediate global problem. That is until climate change. It is indisputable now and has infiltrated into our consciousness, like a heavy breathing smoker breathing down our backs in a dark movie theatre. It cannot be ignored or shut out any longer. It is becoming impossible to simply “Watch the movie”, or live out our daily life, without coming face-to-face with climate change, and its associated problems.

Climate change is affecting the global consciousness in the idea that we are all citizens of the world, not only of countries, and we are all involved in this problem together. The challenge is that together we simply must create new social and economic systems that both ameliorate and accommodate climate change in an expedient and co-operative manner.
 

Concepts of earth systems and inter-relatedness of species, once only relevant to ecologists and others studying ecosystems, are now being thought about on a general level. I believe that the global population is beginning to see the underlying inter-connectivity of our social spheres as well as our Earth in general. When one human being buys a T-shirt in San Francisco, there is a corresponding human in China manufacturing that shirt for dismal amounts of money. The very idea that this thought would enter our consciousness before we buying a T-shirt is remarkable. When we are forced to actually think before we buy or do something, when we just take that extra second to realize how our actions influence and are part of the overlying system, we are already changing the world. I envision a future where it becomes almost impossible to do something mindlessly, a world where intellectually people have been conditioned to consider how their daily actions influence the larger systems on a global scale.

I also envision a future where the idea of community becomes once again essential. We simply cannot face these global pressing problems without it. Community means helping out your neighbors and others close-by unconditionally, free of judgments and pre-conceived notions. While community is alive and well in many parts of the world, I feel that it is dead in other areas, superseded by the notion of the successful isolated nuclear family and individual. The point is: we simply need others around us to prosper. It is our human condition. The famous anthropologist Margaret Mead stated that 99% of the time human beings have been on the planet we have lived in tribes or groups. It is only in times of war that the nuclear family prevails, as it is more mobile, promising more survival in times of uncertainty. The isolated individual only feels that he is prospering in times of fear.

To face the problems and changes of our current world we cannot live in fear. Mead states that, “For the full flowering of the human spirit we need groups, tribes”. It is with the support of community that creativity and human innovation will thrive, and these are humanities saving graces. Our capacity for empathy and compassion sets us apart from other species, and will greatly help us in times of change and uncertainty, if we learn to quell the feeling of fear. Instead of relying on institutions like government-provided childcare and welfare food stamps, let us instead develop our own childcare-sharing duties among the neighborhood and community gardens to provide fresh food for those in need. Communities create a lattice, or network, of support, a safety net that pulls us back up when we temporarily fall.

I envision a future where individual prosperity and happiness relies and flourishes on the network of neighbors, family, and friends around you. I envision a future where children are taught the nature of systems thinking in schools, fostering critical thinking and creative innovations to heal the earth. I envision a future where we make decisions based on the collective, not on fleeting feelings of happiness. I envision a future where we are first and foremost global, rather than national, citizens.