Recorded video message by Mr. Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, Minister of the
Environment of Peru, and President Designate of UNFCCC COP 20/CMP 10.
Saturday, November 29, 2014
Friday, November 28, 2014
CSO and social movements forum declaration to Second International Conference on Nutrition (ICN2)
Source: Forum Alert - Society for International Development
From November 16-18, we, social movements representing peasants, small-scale fishers and fishing communities, pastoralists, urban poor, consumers, women, youth, Indigenous Peoples and agricultural and food workers, came together with the representatives of public interest civil society organizations that have actively engaged in the preparatory process of the Second International Conference on Nutrition (ICN2), to share our values, and aspirations, to join forces in our common vision on how to eradicate malnutrition in all its forms, and to hold governments and intergovernmental organizations to account on their obligations and commitments.
Listen to the CSO statement presentation to the ICN2 plenary by Munkhbolor Gungaa in English
Listen to the CSO statement presentation to the ICN2 plenary by Munkhbolor Gungaa in English
Thursday, November 27, 2014
Ecuador Recognized by UN for Poverty Reduction | News | teleSUR
The Good Living development model has led to a significant reduction in poverty in Ecuador, which has been recognized by the United Nations.
Ecuador was recognized at the 11th Annual Meeting of the United Nations for its drastic reduction in inequality and poverty which has been occurring since the beginning of President Rafael Correa's first term in 2007.
The Good Living, or Buen Vivir, development goals of Correa's government have been attributed as a cause for this success.
“We do believe in the concept of Buen Vivir adopted policies and implementing those policies in a way which are centered on the human being and which are sustainable with the environment … the basic premise of Buen Vivir is actually very very close to a proposal that can get us closer to the Millennium Development Goals,” said Diego Zorrilla, the Director of the United Nations Development Program in Ecuador, in an interview with teleSUR English.
Ecuador has the highest public investment in the region, at 15 percent of its gross domestic product. This investment has had favorable results, as the poverty rate has dropped from 38 percent to 26 percent and extreme poverty from 17 percent to 8 percent since 2006.
National Secretary for Planning and Development Pabel Muñoz said, “The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean made it known that Ecuador is among the three countries where poverty has most dropped, that it was the country where the GINI coefficient most rapidly decreased. So that citizens have an idea, the GINI coefficient in Ecuador dropped 8 points, while during the same period the average in Latin America only dropped 2 points.”
Along with reducing poverty and inequality, Ecuador was recognized by the U.N. as being a model for sustainable development. Under Good Living, the country has invested more than US$9 billion in renewable energy sources. It is estimated that 92 percent of all energy used for internal consumption will be renewable by 2016, as the country continues to work towards a type of development that can be felt by all citizens.
The 11th Annual Meeting of the United Nations was attendend by representatives of the World Bank, the World Health Organization, the Organization of the American States, and the International Monetary Fund, among other international organizations.
Ecuador was recognized at the 11th Annual Meeting of the United Nations for its drastic reduction in inequality and poverty which has been occurring since the beginning of President Rafael Correa's first term in 2007.
The Good Living, or Buen Vivir, development goals of Correa's government have been attributed as a cause for this success.
“We do believe in the concept of Buen Vivir adopted policies and implementing those policies in a way which are centered on the human being and which are sustainable with the environment … the basic premise of Buen Vivir is actually very very close to a proposal that can get us closer to the Millennium Development Goals,” said Diego Zorrilla, the Director of the United Nations Development Program in Ecuador, in an interview with teleSUR English.
Ecuador has the highest public investment in the region, at 15 percent of its gross domestic product. This investment has had favorable results, as the poverty rate has dropped from 38 percent to 26 percent and extreme poverty from 17 percent to 8 percent since 2006.
National Secretary for Planning and Development Pabel Muñoz said, “The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean made it known that Ecuador is among the three countries where poverty has most dropped, that it was the country where the GINI coefficient most rapidly decreased. So that citizens have an idea, the GINI coefficient in Ecuador dropped 8 points, while during the same period the average in Latin America only dropped 2 points.”
Along with reducing poverty and inequality, Ecuador was recognized by the U.N. as being a model for sustainable development. Under Good Living, the country has invested more than US$9 billion in renewable energy sources. It is estimated that 92 percent of all energy used for internal consumption will be renewable by 2016, as the country continues to work towards a type of development that can be felt by all citizens.
The 11th Annual Meeting of the United Nations was attendend by representatives of the World Bank, the World Health Organization, the Organization of the American States, and the International Monetary Fund, among other international organizations.
Tuesday, November 25, 2014
Living Life: Man abandons comfort of home to live in a tree in Uganda | NTV Uganda
An elderly man living in Wakiso district in Uganda has stunned many of his village-mates for abandoning his relatively comfortable home to start a new life in a house he built on a tree. The man, Godfrey Kato, is an environmentalist who has been staying in the tree house for one and half years now.
Monday, November 24, 2014
Want to double world food production? Return the land to small farmers! - The Ecologist
By GRAIN, The Ecologist
All over the world, small farmers are being forced off their land to make way for corporate agriculture, writes GRAIN - and it's justified by the need to 'feed the world'. But it's the small farmers that are the most productive, and the more their land is grabbed, the more global hunger increases. We must give them their land back!
The United Nations declared 2014 as the International Year of Family Farming. As part of the celebrations, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) released its annual 'State of Food and Agriculture', which this year is dedicated to family farming.
Family farmers, FAO say, manage 70-80% of the world's farmland and produce 80% of the world's food.
But on the ground - whether in Kenya, Brazil, China or Spain - rural people are being marginalised and threatened, displaced, beaten and even killed by a variety of powerful actors who want their land.
A recent comprehensive survey by GRAIN, examining data from around the world, finds that while small farmers feed the world, they are doing so with just 24% of the world's farmland - or 17% if you leave out China and India. GRAIN's report also shows that this meagre share is shrinking fast.
How, then, can FAO claim that family farms occupy 70 to 80% of the world's farmland? In the same report, FAO claims that only 1% of all farms in the world are larger than 50 hectares, and that these few farms control 65% of the world's farmland, a figure much more in line with GRAIN's findings.
Just what is a 'family farm'
The confusion stems from the way FAO deal with the concept of family farming, which they roughly define as any farm managed by an individual or a household. (They admit there is no precise definition. Various countries, like Mali, have their own.)
Thus, a huge industrial soya bean farm in rural Argentina, whose family owners live in Buenos Aires, is included in FAO's count of 'family farms'.
What about sprawling Hacienda Luisita, owned by the powerful Cojuanco family in the Philippines and epicentre of the country's battle for agrarian reform since decades. Is that a family farm?
Looking at ownership to determine what is and is not a family farm masks all the inequities, injustices and struggles that peasants and other small scale food producers across the world are mired in.
It allows FAO to paint a rosy picture and conveniently ignore perhaps the most crucial factor affecting the capacity of small farmers to produce food: lack of access to land. Instead, the FAO focuses its message on how family farmers should innovate and be more productive.
Small farmers are ever more squeezed in
Small food producers' access to land is shrinking due a range of forces. One is that because of population pressure, farms are getting divided up amongst family members. Another is the vertiginous expansion of monoculture plantations.
In the last 50 years, a staggering 140 million hectares - the size of almost all the farmland in India - has been taken over by four industrial crops: soya bean, oil palm, rapeseed and sugar cane. And this trend is accelerating.
In the next few decades, experts predict that the global area planted to oil palm will double, while the soybean area will grow by a third. These crops don't feed people. They are grown to feed the agro-industrial complex.
Other pressures pushing small food producers off their land include the runaway plague of large-scale land grabs by corporate interests. In the last few years alone, according to the World Bank, some 60 million hectares of fertile farmland have been leased, on a long-term basis, to foreign investors and local elites, mostly in the global South.
While some of this is for energy production, a big part of it is to produce food commodities for the global market, instead of family farming.
Small is beautiful - and productive
The paradox, however, and one of the reasons why despite having so little land, small producers are feeding the planet, is that small farms are often more productive than large ones.
If the yields achieved by Kenya's small farmers were matched by the country's large-scale operations, the country's agricultural output would double. In Central America, the region's food production would triple. If Russia's big farms were as productive as its small ones, output would increase by a factor of six.
Another reason why small farms are the feeding the planet is because they prioritise food production. They tend to focus on local and national markets and their own families. In fact, much of what they produce doesn't enter into trade statistics - but it does reach those who need it most: the rural and urban poor.
If the current processes of land concentration continue, then no matter how hard-working, efficient and productive they are, small farmers will simply not be able to carry on.
The data show that the concentration of farmland in fewer and fewer hands is directly related to the increasing number of people going hungry every day.
According to one UN study, active policies supporting small producers and agro-ecological farming methods could double global food production in a decade and enable small farmers to continue to produce and utilise biodiversity, maintain ecosystems and local economies, while multiplying and strengthening meaningful work opportunities and social cohesion in rural areas.
Agrarian reforms can and should be the springboard to moving in this direction.
To double global food production, we must support the small farmers
Experts and development agencies are constantly saying that we need to double food production in the coming decades. To achieve that, they usually recommend a combination of trade and investment liberalisation plus new technologies.
But this will only empower corporate interests and create more inequality. The real solution is to turn control and resources over to small producers themselves and enact agricultural policies to support them.
The message is clear. We need to urgently put land back in the hands of small farmers and make the struggle for genuine and comprehensive agrarian reform central to the fight for better food systems worldwide.
FAO's lip service to family farming just confuses the matter and avoids putting the real issues on the table.
All over the world, small farmers are being forced off their land to make way for corporate agriculture, writes GRAIN - and it's justified by the need to 'feed the world'. But it's the small farmers that are the most productive, and the more their land is grabbed, the more global hunger increases. We must give them their land back!
The United Nations declared 2014 as the International Year of Family Farming. As part of the celebrations, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) released its annual 'State of Food and Agriculture', which this year is dedicated to family farming.
Family farmers, FAO say, manage 70-80% of the world's farmland and produce 80% of the world's food.
But on the ground - whether in Kenya, Brazil, China or Spain - rural people are being marginalised and threatened, displaced, beaten and even killed by a variety of powerful actors who want their land.
A recent comprehensive survey by GRAIN, examining data from around the world, finds that while small farmers feed the world, they are doing so with just 24% of the world's farmland - or 17% if you leave out China and India. GRAIN's report also shows that this meagre share is shrinking fast.
How, then, can FAO claim that family farms occupy 70 to 80% of the world's farmland? In the same report, FAO claims that only 1% of all farms in the world are larger than 50 hectares, and that these few farms control 65% of the world's farmland, a figure much more in line with GRAIN's findings.
Just what is a 'family farm'
The confusion stems from the way FAO deal with the concept of family farming, which they roughly define as any farm managed by an individual or a household. (They admit there is no precise definition. Various countries, like Mali, have their own.)
Thus, a huge industrial soya bean farm in rural Argentina, whose family owners live in Buenos Aires, is included in FAO's count of 'family farms'.
What about sprawling Hacienda Luisita, owned by the powerful Cojuanco family in the Philippines and epicentre of the country's battle for agrarian reform since decades. Is that a family farm?
Looking at ownership to determine what is and is not a family farm masks all the inequities, injustices and struggles that peasants and other small scale food producers across the world are mired in.
It allows FAO to paint a rosy picture and conveniently ignore perhaps the most crucial factor affecting the capacity of small farmers to produce food: lack of access to land. Instead, the FAO focuses its message on how family farmers should innovate and be more productive.
Small farmers are ever more squeezed in
Small food producers' access to land is shrinking due a range of forces. One is that because of population pressure, farms are getting divided up amongst family members. Another is the vertiginous expansion of monoculture plantations.
In the last 50 years, a staggering 140 million hectares - the size of almost all the farmland in India - has been taken over by four industrial crops: soya bean, oil palm, rapeseed and sugar cane. And this trend is accelerating.
In the next few decades, experts predict that the global area planted to oil palm will double, while the soybean area will grow by a third. These crops don't feed people. They are grown to feed the agro-industrial complex.
Other pressures pushing small food producers off their land include the runaway plague of large-scale land grabs by corporate interests. In the last few years alone, according to the World Bank, some 60 million hectares of fertile farmland have been leased, on a long-term basis, to foreign investors and local elites, mostly in the global South.
While some of this is for energy production, a big part of it is to produce food commodities for the global market, instead of family farming.
Small is beautiful - and productive
The paradox, however, and one of the reasons why despite having so little land, small producers are feeding the planet, is that small farms are often more productive than large ones.
If the yields achieved by Kenya's small farmers were matched by the country's large-scale operations, the country's agricultural output would double. In Central America, the region's food production would triple. If Russia's big farms were as productive as its small ones, output would increase by a factor of six.
Another reason why small farms are the feeding the planet is because they prioritise food production. They tend to focus on local and national markets and their own families. In fact, much of what they produce doesn't enter into trade statistics - but it does reach those who need it most: the rural and urban poor.
If the current processes of land concentration continue, then no matter how hard-working, efficient and productive they are, small farmers will simply not be able to carry on.
The data show that the concentration of farmland in fewer and fewer hands is directly related to the increasing number of people going hungry every day.
According to one UN study, active policies supporting small producers and agro-ecological farming methods could double global food production in a decade and enable small farmers to continue to produce and utilise biodiversity, maintain ecosystems and local economies, while multiplying and strengthening meaningful work opportunities and social cohesion in rural areas.
Agrarian reforms can and should be the springboard to moving in this direction.
To double global food production, we must support the small farmers
Experts and development agencies are constantly saying that we need to double food production in the coming decades. To achieve that, they usually recommend a combination of trade and investment liberalisation plus new technologies.
But this will only empower corporate interests and create more inequality. The real solution is to turn control and resources over to small producers themselves and enact agricultural policies to support them.
The message is clear. We need to urgently put land back in the hands of small farmers and make the struggle for genuine and comprehensive agrarian reform central to the fight for better food systems worldwide.
FAO's lip service to family farming just confuses the matter and avoids putting the real issues on the table.
Sunday, November 23, 2014
Pope Opposes Food Speculation | News | teleSUR
By TeleSUR
The Pontiff criticized the global economic system and made reference to the importance of a fair distribution of the world’s food supply.
Pope Francis, at the Second International Conference on Nutrition taking place in Rome, Italy, condemned Thursday food speculation and corporate greed as mechanisms which undermine the global struggle against poverty and hunger.
During his speech, the Pope urged the wealthy countries to share with the disadvantaged nations, while criticizing the squandering, consumption and unequal distribution of the world’s wealth.
"It is also painful to see the struggle against hunger and malnutrition hindered by 'market priorities,' the 'primacy of profit', which reduce foodstuffs to a commodity like any other, subject to speculation and financial speculation in particular," the Pope said.
"The hungry remain at the street corner... and ask for a healthy diet. We ask for dignity, not for charity," he said. At the same time, he condemned the “paradox of abundance,” where there is plenty of food for everyone, but not everyone can eat.
Leaders and representatives of more than 190 countries and international organizations have been meeting since yesterday in Rome at the conference organized by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization.
The FAO stated that the conference proposed by the World Health Organization seeks to respond to current “nutritional challenges” and to identify priorities for improving international cooperation concerning nutrition.
According to the FAO’s data, around 2 billion people, a third of the world’s population, lack sufficient nutrition, and are deficient in vitamin A, salt, iodine, iron and zinc. Nearly 161 million children exhibit delays in their growth due to lack of nutrition.
Pope Opposes Food Speculation | News | teleSUR
The Pontiff criticized the global economic system and made reference to the importance of a fair distribution of the world’s food supply.
Pope Francis, at the Second International Conference on Nutrition taking place in Rome, Italy, condemned Thursday food speculation and corporate greed as mechanisms which undermine the global struggle against poverty and hunger.
During his speech, the Pope urged the wealthy countries to share with the disadvantaged nations, while criticizing the squandering, consumption and unequal distribution of the world’s wealth.
"It is also painful to see the struggle against hunger and malnutrition hindered by 'market priorities,' the 'primacy of profit', which reduce foodstuffs to a commodity like any other, subject to speculation and financial speculation in particular," the Pope said.
"The hungry remain at the street corner... and ask for a healthy diet. We ask for dignity, not for charity," he said. At the same time, he condemned the “paradox of abundance,” where there is plenty of food for everyone, but not everyone can eat.
Leaders and representatives of more than 190 countries and international organizations have been meeting since yesterday in Rome at the conference organized by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization.
The FAO stated that the conference proposed by the World Health Organization seeks to respond to current “nutritional challenges” and to identify priorities for improving international cooperation concerning nutrition.
According to the FAO’s data, around 2 billion people, a third of the world’s population, lack sufficient nutrition, and are deficient in vitamin A, salt, iodine, iron and zinc. Nearly 161 million children exhibit delays in their growth due to lack of nutrition.
Pope Opposes Food Speculation | News | teleSUR
Thursday, November 20, 2014
World Fisheries Day 2014 for Lake Victoria: Some questions on the proposed Nile perch fishing ban
The Lake Victoria fishery has come under increasing pressure in the last two decades. Fish production peaked in the early 1990s and currently catches of most species are showing downward trends. Despite this, there is greater demand for fish of Lake Victoria, chiefly Nile perch (Lates niloticus) and ‘dagaa’ (Rastrineobola argentea), in the export market and for fishmeal respectively, as well as for domestic consumption.
The current proposal to implement a periodic ban on fishing of Nile Perch on Lake Victoria, raises certain fundamental questions that need to be confronted by Partner States:
The current proposal to implement a periodic ban on fishing of Nile Perch on Lake Victoria, raises certain fundamental questions that need to be confronted by Partner States:
- What will happen to millions of people whose livelihoods depend on fish and related resource from Lake Victoria?
- What will happen to the communities who rely on fish as the core part of their nutrition?
- Before the ban is effected, how far will it incorporate the lessons from the current Lake Victoria Monitoring Control and Surveillance (MCS) efforts?
- How will the proposed fishing ban be enforced to avoid pitfalls met in implementation of existing MCS measures?
- What steps are in place to cultivate full support from Beach Management Units (BMUs), communities / fishers, local leadership and opinion leaders who are key to success of this intervention?
Specifically, EA SusWatch Network urges the East African Community Partner states of Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda to show commitment towards the conservation of fishery resources in Lake Victoria by addressing key salient issues:
1. EAC Partner States should lead the way in compliance: Partner States should without any further delay fulfil their financial obligation to ensure that the ‘Operation Save Nile Perch (OSNP)’ takes off.
2. Fast-track harmonisation of fisheries and fisheries resource management legislation: The EAC Partner States need to fast track the harmonisation of existing fisheries and fisheries resource management laws in order to pave way for smooth implementation of existing regional action policies and plans, for example the Regional Plan of Action for Management of Fishing Capacity on Lake Victoria, and the Strategy and Action Plan for Monitoring, Control and Surveillance of Fisheries on Lake Victoria
3. Facilitate Community compliance: There is an urgent need to facilitate the medium to long-term operations of Beach Management Units in view of their clear mandates as enshrined in the BMU legislations, as well as regularly involving them in planning, decision – making and regular interface with other actors related to fisheries and fisheries resources management in Lake Victoria (for example through the National Committee for Lake Victoria as directed by the LVFO Council of Ministers (Dar es Salaam, June 26, 1999).
4. Scale-up alternative livelihood opportunities: Individual and collective EAC interventions in the Lake Victoria should prioritise investment and support scale-up of tried and tested alternative livelihoods for communities. For example, support for successful aquaculture models, income generation activities through lending schemes and replicable conservation models like the LVEMPII Community Driven Development subprojects and from the Mount Elgon Region Ecosystem Conservation Programme (MERECP).
Read the full statement from here:
Wednesday, November 19, 2014
Saturday, November 15, 2014
U.S. Pledge to Green Climate Fund Could Build Climate Action Momentum
and
On Wednesday, side by side, the United States and China announced an historic effort to fight climate change. The move built a wave of momentum toward the Lima climate talks this December, and toward a new international climate agreement in 2015.
To keep the momentum building, a crucial moment is rapidly approaching that will make or break U.S. credibility on the world stage, with a big impact on whether developing countries come to the table for an international agreement: a U.S. pledge to the Green Climate Fund.
Why is a U.S. pledge to the Green Climate Fund important for a 2015 climate agreement? One of the most challenging and important sticking points in the international climate negotiations is the money to help poor countries adapt to the impacts of climate change, and to reduce their emissions of climate pollution. The Green Climate Fund (GCF) sits at the center of this discussion. As China’s recent announcement showed, developing countries are already acting on climate change. But poorer countries need support to take stronger action. Globally, addressing the problem is not possible without all major emitters at the table; if the United States sees climate change as a risk – which the Department of Defense certainly does – then the United States benefits by doing its part to ensure coordinated global action.
An ambitious set of initial pledges to the Fund will build on the momentum from the US-China announcement. In particular, the United States has an important role to play, and a serious commitment could generate more goodwill and international action on climate change.
The cornerstones of the Fund are firmly in place, and countries have already announced nearly $3 billion in contributions, including $1 billion each from France and Germany, $550 million from Sweden, and $125 million from the Netherlands just announced on Thursday. With only one week to go until a pledging conference on November 20, we should expect news from the major players who have yet to pledge, including the United States, United Kingdom and Japan. These players, led by the U.S., need to step up to the plate in a big way to keep global climate negotiations on track.
While it’s not clear how much these three major powers might pledge, Washington has signaled that it is prepared to make a very significant commitment.
There is precedent for ambitious climate finance contributions from the United States: under a Republican administration in 2008, the United States pledged $2 billion to the Climate Investment Funds. Six years later, the urgency of climate action has only grown, and so we should expect a more ambitious US contribution.
Such a contribution would bring a double benefit, by encouraging other countries like the U.K. and Japan to pledge more, and by helping to mobilize additional resources through the Green Climate Fund, which will help to catalyze investments in climate solutions from other sources.
The GCF stands to give clean technology firms – including leading U.S. firms – more opportunities to contribute to global climate solutions like clean energy. The United States is home to more publicly traded pure-play clean energy companies than any country in the world. These U.S. companies stand to benefit from new markets for their climate solutions. It’s happened before, with previous climate funds. For example, the Climate Investment Funds supported Iowa-based Clipper Windpower, helping the company expand to new markets with a project in Mexico, representing Clipper’s first export sale.
Think of the case of using energy more efficiently. The GCF, through its partners, could support new policies in developing countries that encourage companies to reduce their energy consumption, combined with loan guarantees that give local banks the comfort to provide new loans for energy efficient technologies and services. In a twist that should compel major developed countries to show even more ambition in their pledges, countries that have already made commitments go beyond the usual suspects: South Korea has pledged $100 million, Mexico $10 million, and Indonesia, Colombia and Peru have also indicated that they will pledge resources to the Fund. And developing countries are already using considerable sums of their own money to combat climate change, spending billions to both reduce their emissions and to adapt to a changing climate. With more international support, they could go much further.
To secure an international climate agreement in 2015, and to safeguard U.S. interests and expand U.S. economic opportunity, an ambitious U.S. pledge to the Green Climate Fund will be crucial.
U.S. Pledge to Green Climate Fund Could Build Climate Action Momentum
On Wednesday, side by side, the United States and China announced an historic effort to fight climate change. The move built a wave of momentum toward the Lima climate talks this December, and toward a new international climate agreement in 2015.
To keep the momentum building, a crucial moment is rapidly approaching that will make or break U.S. credibility on the world stage, with a big impact on whether developing countries come to the table for an international agreement: a U.S. pledge to the Green Climate Fund.
Why is a U.S. pledge to the Green Climate Fund important for a 2015 climate agreement? One of the most challenging and important sticking points in the international climate negotiations is the money to help poor countries adapt to the impacts of climate change, and to reduce their emissions of climate pollution. The Green Climate Fund (GCF) sits at the center of this discussion. As China’s recent announcement showed, developing countries are already acting on climate change. But poorer countries need support to take stronger action. Globally, addressing the problem is not possible without all major emitters at the table; if the United States sees climate change as a risk – which the Department of Defense certainly does – then the United States benefits by doing its part to ensure coordinated global action.
An ambitious set of initial pledges to the Fund will build on the momentum from the US-China announcement. In particular, the United States has an important role to play, and a serious commitment could generate more goodwill and international action on climate change.
The cornerstones of the Fund are firmly in place, and countries have already announced nearly $3 billion in contributions, including $1 billion each from France and Germany, $550 million from Sweden, and $125 million from the Netherlands just announced on Thursday. With only one week to go until a pledging conference on November 20, we should expect news from the major players who have yet to pledge, including the United States, United Kingdom and Japan. These players, led by the U.S., need to step up to the plate in a big way to keep global climate negotiations on track.
While it’s not clear how much these three major powers might pledge, Washington has signaled that it is prepared to make a very significant commitment.
There is precedent for ambitious climate finance contributions from the United States: under a Republican administration in 2008, the United States pledged $2 billion to the Climate Investment Funds. Six years later, the urgency of climate action has only grown, and so we should expect a more ambitious US contribution.
Such a contribution would bring a double benefit, by encouraging other countries like the U.K. and Japan to pledge more, and by helping to mobilize additional resources through the Green Climate Fund, which will help to catalyze investments in climate solutions from other sources.
The GCF stands to give clean technology firms – including leading U.S. firms – more opportunities to contribute to global climate solutions like clean energy. The United States is home to more publicly traded pure-play clean energy companies than any country in the world. These U.S. companies stand to benefit from new markets for their climate solutions. It’s happened before, with previous climate funds. For example, the Climate Investment Funds supported Iowa-based Clipper Windpower, helping the company expand to new markets with a project in Mexico, representing Clipper’s first export sale.
Think of the case of using energy more efficiently. The GCF, through its partners, could support new policies in developing countries that encourage companies to reduce their energy consumption, combined with loan guarantees that give local banks the comfort to provide new loans for energy efficient technologies and services. In a twist that should compel major developed countries to show even more ambition in their pledges, countries that have already made commitments go beyond the usual suspects: South Korea has pledged $100 million, Mexico $10 million, and Indonesia, Colombia and Peru have also indicated that they will pledge resources to the Fund. And developing countries are already using considerable sums of their own money to combat climate change, spending billions to both reduce their emissions and to adapt to a changing climate. With more international support, they could go much further.
To secure an international climate agreement in 2015, and to safeguard U.S. interests and expand U.S. economic opportunity, an ambitious U.S. pledge to the Green Climate Fund will be crucial.
U.S. Pledge to Green Climate Fund Could Build Climate Action Momentum
Friday, November 14, 2014
WHO-FAO: Second International Conference on Nutrition (ICN2)
The global food system is broken. Millions of people aren’t getting enough to eat, and millions of others are eating too much of the wrong foods. Many families can’t afford enough nutrient rich foods like fresh fruit and vegetables, beans, meat and milk, while foods and drinks high in fat, sugar and salt are cheap and readily available. Undernutrition and overweight are now problems affecting people within the same communities.
Country leaders from around the world gather at the Second International Conference on Nutrition in Rome in November 2014 to commit to action needed to fix the global food system.
Tuesday, November 11, 2014
Join the Call to Action on Sanitation | UN
The United Nations is leading a call to action on sanitation:
2.5 billion people worldwide lack access to basic sanitation.
Recognizing
that greater progress on sanitation is essential for fighting poverty
and disease, the United Nations Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson
has initiated, on behalf of UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, a renewed
effort to drive progress on sanitation and water goals towards the 2015
target date of the Millennium Development goals and beyond.
To break the silence on open defection and improve sanitation for all, join the UN's call to action on sanitation.
Ahead of the World Toilet Day on November 19, 2014, share the video and join the conversation online using #Toilets4All | #OpenDefecation
2.5 billion people worldwide lack access to basic sanitation.
Recognizing
that greater progress on sanitation is essential for fighting poverty
and disease, the United Nations Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson
has initiated, on behalf of UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, a renewed
effort to drive progress on sanitation and water goals towards the 2015
target date of the Millennium Development goals and beyond.
To break the silence on open defection and improve sanitation for all, join the UN's call to action on sanitation.
Ahead of the World Toilet Day on November 19, 2014, share the video and join the conversation online using #Toilets4All | #OpenDefecation
Friday, November 7, 2014
Monday, November 3, 2014
IPCC climate report: “conclusive evidence” humans warming planet | RTCC
Climate change is unequivocal, affects all continents and
will continue to the end of the century regardless of even the toughest
emissions cuts, warned a landmark UN science report today.
Greenhouse gases released by human activity have caused
sea levels to rise, Arctic ice to melt and oceans to become more acidic, the
report said.
One of climate science’s greatest controversies, the
15-year pause in global warming, is described as an example of natural
variability which does “not in general reflect long-term climate trends”.
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC]
released the fourth and final installment of its latest assessment on global
warming in Copenhagen on Sunday after a week of intense discussions between
scientists and politicians.
Sleep deprived delegates stayed up to 5am on Saturday
morning to finalise the document, which will form the scientific basis of the
UN’s negotiations for a new international climate change agreement, set to be
signed off in in Paris next year.
“We have the means to limit climate change,” said
Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the IPCC.
“The solutions are many and allow for continued economic
and human development. All we need is the will to change, which we trust will
be motivated by knowledge and an understanding of the science of climate
change.”
Human influence
The 116-page report brings together six years of work by
830 scientists, who have synthesized over 30,000 scientific papers on the
cause, effects and possible solutions to climate change.
The IPCC’s last report came out in 2007.
Since then, the evidence of human influence on the
atmosphere has increased, the scientists announced.
And despite more policies designed to limit greenhouse
gases, the last decade has seen greater volumes of emissions than ever before,
the report warned.
“The longer we wait to take action, the more it will cost
to adapt and mitigate climate change,” said Youba Sokona, who chaired the
IPCC’s report on options to reduce greenhouse gases.
“Compared to the imminent risk of irreversible climate
change impacts, the risks of mitigation are manageable.”
Burning coal, oil and gas has been responsible for 78% of
the increase in emissions since 1970, with growing populations and economies
driving activity.
Greater use of coal – the dirtiest fossil fuel – has
undermined attempts to create a cleaner energy system, it says. It warns that
that the impacts have been felt across all continents and the oceans.
The burden on the global economy and sectors such as
agriculture is expected to increase as the planet gets warmer.
Even with aggressive emissions reductions designed to
keep the world from heating beyond the dangerous threshold of 2C, warming is
inevitable until the end of the century, scientists said.
“A large fraction” of this will be irreversible for
centuries, they warn, with impacts continuing to be felt across the natural
world thousands of years after temperatures have stabilised.
“To keep a good chance of staying below 2C, and at
manageable costs, our emissions should drop by 40 to 70% globally between 2010
and 2050, falling to zero or below by 2100,” said Pachauri.
To limit global warming to safe levels, humans can emit
no more than 2900 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide. Of this budget, only around
1000 Gt remains.
Current fossil fuel reserves—the bedrock of the global
economy—contain enough carbon dioxide to exceed this budget by up to seven
times, the report said.
Dividing it up among countries will prove politically
difficult.
The concept of the carbon budget was omitted from the
IPCC’s “summary for policymakers”, the 40-page summary which politicians will
read, after lobbying from a number of countries including the US and India.
Leading climate economist Lord Nicholas Stern said that
the report should be “essential reading” for political leaders across the
world.
Solutions
Options are available to combat climate change, the
scientists say. Reducing emissions now and in the future can “substantially
reduce climate change impacts in the latter decades of the 21st century and
beyond”.
To keep warming below dangerous levels, emissions will
have to drop to near zero by the end of the century, the report says.
The solutions are not financially crippling. Economists
involved in the report say that the policies and technologies required to keep
global temperatures below 2C will reduce economic growth by around 0.06% every
year over the century.
As growth itself is projected to be between 1.6-3%, this
means that humans will still be richer in the future, even under the most
stringent climate policies. And this doesn’t include the benefits of stopping
climate change.
Since their previous 2007 report, there has been a
“considerable increase” in national and sub-national governments implementing
policies to both adapt to climate change and cut emissions.
The report released today will form the scientific basis
of UN negotiations, as politicians prepare to sign off a new deal to address
climate change in Paris next year.
“If we fail to act, we jeopardise efforts to reduce
poverty and endanger food, water and livelihoods for many of the world’s poor,”
said Samantha Smith, head of WWF’s climate and energy initiative.
“We also leave today’s youth and future generations with
a nearly insurmountable challenge.”
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