IPS – More Dead Than Red | Inter Press Service

By Pierre Klochendler, IPS News

The World Bank has declared the Red Sea-Dead Sea canal project feasible. Designed to “save the Dead Sea”, “desalinate water and/or generate hydroelectricity at affordable prices in Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian Authority”, and “build a symbol of peace in the Middle East”, the scheme, green groups warn, is fraught with environmental hazards. 

Currently at 426m below sea level, the Dead Sea, Earth’s lowest elevation on land, is drying and dying in the desert by roughly 1.1 metres a year. Its surface area has shrunk by a third during the last 50 years from 960 square kilometres to 620 square kilometres.

Set along the Great Rift Valley between the biblical Moab plateau and Judaean desert, the hyper-saline desert lake borders Jordan to the east, Israel and the nascent Palestinian state to the west.

As the world’s most buoyant lake, the Sea is a natural spa. Its minerals have been extracted for treatment of skin diseases since the times of Cleopatra. Today, the chemicals industry is a multibillion dollar operation, with the Israeli Dead Sea Works and the Jordanian Arab Potash Company exploiting the water as raw material.

The total inflow to the Dead Sea has reduced from 1.25 billion cubic metres a year to 260 million cubic metres a year within 60 years as a result of the diversion of water for agriculture from the Jordan River, its main tributary to the north.

Add to that a changing climate and the Sea is an ever receding horizon trapped in a man-induced dead zone. Route 90 used to wind its way along it. Now the shore is over a kilometre away.

Over 300 square kilometres of seabed have been exposed since the 1960s with some five square kilometres a year currently being exposed.

Bared mudflats have thus caved in without warning, and led to the formation of over 3,000 sinkholes which slowly swallow land, roads, buildings; posing a significant hazard to agricultural, industrial, and touristic infrastructures.

No wonder then that the three waterside neighbours failed last year to have the Dead Sea crowned as one of the Seven Wonders of Nature, and the probability of having the Dead Sea listed as a World Heritage Site is a sinking dream.

“We don’t want the Dead Sea to die; we want to revive it,” Israel’s minister for regional development Silvan Shalom tells IPS. “That’s our main goal – to bring more water to an arid region. The best option is a canal to pump 2 cubic billion metres a year from the Red Sea.”

What could save the Dead Sea from death foretold is a 180-km development project called the ‘Red Sea-Dead Sea Water Conveyance’.

This is how it would work: marine water would be pumped from the Red Sea. A pipeline conveyance system with six pipes and a tunnel would then flow the water by gravity, exploiting the difference in elevation at and below sea level, to a high-level desalination plant and two hydroelectric plants.

The high-salinity brine reject would be discharged to the Dead Sea to halt and, eventually, reverse its decline.

After a decade-long argument, the World Bank released a series of studies last month which deem the proposed ‘Red-Dead Canal’ (as the ambitious scheme is dubbed) technically, environmentally and socio-economically feasible.

The main objectives would thus be fulfilled, the World Bank assesses. All that for a total capital cost of 9.97 billion dollars, the World Bank estimates; half of it amortized by selling desalinated water and hydroelectricity, the other half financed out of international aid to development – “a win-win situation,” hails Shalom.

“The project doesn’t hold water,” counters Gidon Bromberg, director of Friends of the Earth Middle East-Israel (FoEME-Israel), a unique NGO which brings together Israeli, Jordanian and Palestinian eco-peace activists.

“The mixing of the Red Sea marine water with the unique brine of the Dead Sea is likely to lead to gypsum (a sedimentary deposit) excretions, to red algae bloom and will slime the water’s purity. The two bodies of water won’t mix, like oil and water. The Red Sea water will float on top.”

Indeed, World Bank experts note that massive intakes of Red Sea water might durably whiten the otherwise royal blue colour of the Dead Sea, but that “this problem could be mitigated by adding gypsum crystals at the discharge location allowing a faster sedimentation of the precipitated gypsum.”

Another concern lies with contamination of groundwater resulting from potential leakage of seawater while operating the pipeline conveyance system along the Arava Valley, an area classified as a “highly active seismic zone”.

“Pipes could explode in the midst of an earthquake, and we’d see millions of cubic metres of water polluting groundwater,” Bromberg tells IPS.

The World Bank suggests special arrangements like concrete boxes enclosing the pipes, isolation valves, and wave joints. A control system will close the valves in case of seismic stress on the pipes.

Addressing the fear that the pumping station might impact on the Red Sea coral reef, a modelling study commissioned by the Word Bank recommends that the intake be located at a depth of at least 140 metres. “The deeper the intake the less likely will be the impact.”

“There were many hearings and these redundant arguments were rejected by the World Bank. Green groups don’t want the project no matter what, that’s the bottom line,” says Shalom.

Prior to issuing a final report, the World Bank is currently holding a last series of hearings in Israel, Palestine and Jordan.

If the project is endorsed by the World Bank, intergovernmental negotiations will decide on how best to proceed. “There’ll be a need to obtain finances, from our respective governments, from the World Bank itself, or from the private sector,” Shalom clarifies.

“Then, tenders will be issued, contracts awarded for the design, procurement and construction of the canal. This should be discussed between the parties.”

The World Bank’s forecast is that the canal could be built within six years and start operating in 2020, reaching its maturity stage by 2060.

IPS – More Dead Than Red | Inter Press Service

Give grassroot groups a real say on what comes next in development

 Mark Dearn, The Guardian - UK

Civil society's voice is being drowned out by northern-led, top-down policymakers. When will David Cameron and co listen?

For 13 years international development policy has rested on a set of goals written in "relative casualness". So casual was the manner of the small team working out of a basement office of the UN in New York that they initially "forgot" to include an environment goal – what became millennium development goal (MDG) seven on environmental sustainability.

Those targeted by the MDGs, and from 2015 by their successor when the MDGs expire, do not forget the importance of the environment. More than 100 million people could die by 2030 from the impact of climate change without an immediate shift in our consumption and production. According to a report commissioned by 20 governments, 90% of those deaths would be in developing countries.

This is just one example of how the poorest people are most affected by international development concerns. But their voice continues to be largely absent from the northern-led, top-down way of creating policy and practice. This process operates at two levels: one is the dominance of northern governments in international institutions and official decision-making processes; the other, the continuing exclusion of civil society organisations (CSOs) and social movements from government processes.

This is of particular concern for global south groups, many of which remain closer to their grassroots constituencies than some big northern NGOs, which hold privileged access to and close ties with northern governments, and have the resources to maintain an international lobbying presence.

Soon after the final meeting next month in Bali of the UN high-level panel (HLP) on the post-2015 development agenda – co-chaired by UK prime minister David Cameron, Liberia president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Indonesian president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono – a report on how to move beyond the MDGs will be submitted to UN member states.

It is expected that a set of sustainable development goals (SDGs) – an outcome of the Rio+20 conference – will replace the MDGs. Hope remains that where the MDGs failed, the SDGs may succeed such as replacing a focus on outcomes with prioritising processes to address the causes of poverty, inequality and environmental destruction. An overarching aim, expressed by the "people-centred agenda" described in the Monrovia communique, will be placing grassroots voices at the centre of the procedure to determine new goals.

This time round, far more effort seems to be being made on consulting with civil society. But appearances can be deceptive.

Clearly, it is impracticable to expect the nearly 2 billion people living in poverty to be reached by consultations, online or otherwise. And if not reflected in policies, consultations will be no more than symbolic. A clearer marker would be the inclusion of southern CSOs and social movements working with grassroots constituencies in the official process that continues long after the HLP.

The UN's roadmap for post-2015 outlines a phase to build "intergovernmental consensus" beginning after the UN general assembly in September and continuing until 2015. It is here that the new agenda will be determined. And it is from this process that civil society voices remain marginalised.

It is because of this that movements such as the Campaign for People's Goals, comprising a diverse group of CSOs, movements and networks from across the south, have arisen not to simply feed into consultations but to wage a campaign including engagement at official meetings and protests to demand government commitments that reflect people's concerns. At the forefront of these are issues including participation, redistribution and human rights, and an overarching assurance of grassroots participation in decision-making.

At the HLP meeting in Monrovia in January, Cameron said pursuing growth superseded tackling inequality. His words were at odds with the call for "socio-economic transformation" in both the official and civil society communiques, and from southern CSOs, which believe it is relentless pursuit of growth through profit that creates and entrenches inequality. A fear for grassroots groups is that if Cameron won't listen to his fellow panel members, will he listen to them?

Rather than inclusion as stakeholders in decision-making processes, the most "civil" of civil society voices are at best tolerated at international conferences. Against such a backdrop, how realistic is it that the grassroots can drive the post-2015 agenda and its anticipated goals? The UK government has not been shy to profess its self-interest in helping developing countries prosper. But the extent to which such governments will relinquish their role in determining the boundaries of that prosperity is questionable, and may largely depend on a global reconstitution of political-economic power.

There is much fanfare on civil society engagement in the post-2015 agenda. But the months to September and beyond will reveal if the next generation of policy will pay more than lip-service to a supposed new era of people-centred international development.

Give grassroot groups a real say on what comes next in development

Not a bankable strategy

By Richard Mahapatra,  DownToEarth


World Bank's forestry projects have not helped reduce poverty, says its own evaluator

In the past one decade, the World Bank lent a whopping US $4.1 billion for forestry-related projects with an aim to alleviate poverty. But the objective remains a pipe dream as the Bank failed to involve communities in the projects. This has been revealed by the Bank’s own evaluator, Independent Evaluation Group (IEG), which analysed all forestry projects funded by the Bank between 2001 and 2011. The Bank, the largest multilateral lender for forestry, funded 345 major forestry projects in 75 countries during the period.

The Bank’s Committee on Development Effectiveness debated the IEG report on February 4. Prior to this, the Bank’s management had disagreed on most of the points raised in the report (see ‘IEG recommends ...’).

IEG’s evaluation coincides with the 10th anniversary of the Bank’s change in strategy for forestry projects adopted in 2002. Poverty reduction and increasing community participation are two of the Bank’s key objectives. But its finance was mostly concentrated in protected areas that bypass community participation and ownership over forests, says the report available with Down To Earth.

The IEG report refers to the experience of India’s Joint Forest Management (JFM) as a failure on part of the Bank in ensuring transfer of power to communities. It says: “Only three of the 32 participatory forest management projects (across the globe) addressed the need for simplification of regulatory procedures or otherwise addressed the factors that create an unequal playing field for community forest enterprises.” This is evident from the Bank’s preference to work in only officially managed forests across the globe, the IEG report argues.

Of the total forestry projects, 43 per cent are for protected areas. This has bypassed large areas of community-managed forests. “By neglecting the informal sector (community managed forests), the World Bank has missed an opportunity to reach more forest-dependent rural poor,” says the report. In fact, in protected areas the Bank’s projects have negatively impacted communities. Only two of 37 projects that the Bank funded in protected areas achieved their aims to help people find work, while three-quarters of these projects forced people to move out. These projects hardly recognised community’s rights and interests over forests, it says.

“Poverty reduction, for the most part, has not been adequately addressed,” wrote Caroline Heider, director general and senior vice-president of IEG, in a memo to the Bank’s president and directors. “The World Bank-supported participatory or community forest management projects focus largely on state-local relations with measures to reduce government corruption, eliminate perverse regulations, and decentralise management authority presented as solutions.” The report says 75 per cent of the projects may not be sustainable in the long run due to this disconnect.

“The evaluation speaks of the overall failure of the Bank in its stated objectives,” says Joe Athialy of Bank Information Centre, a non-profit in Washington that monitors multilateral development banks. 

The evaluation comes at a time when the Bank is realigning its forestry projects to climate change issues and fundings.

Not a bankable strategy

Palm oil expansion threatens Congo Basin forests - report - AlertNet

Adapted from AlertNews

Industrial cultivation of oil palm has "wreaked havoc" on rainforests and forest peoples in Southeast Asia and now threatens to do the same in the Congo Basin, a report from the Rainforest Foundation UK warned on Thursday.

Research commissioned by the forest protection group found that half a million hectares of new palm oil projects are getting underway in the Congo Basin rainforest, which will result in a fivefold increase in the area of large-scale palm plantations in the region.

"This is a stark new threat to the second largest contiguous rainforest in the world," the report said.

Around 1.6 million hectares of new developments have been announced in the central African region since 2009, and palm oil companies are actively searching for bigger areas, the report said. Some 115 million hectares, or two thirds of the total Congo Basin forest area, is believed to have suitable soil and climate for growing oil palms, it noted.

Simon Counsell, the Rainforest Foundation UK's executive director, said African governments are handing out large tracts of rainforest for palm oil development with little or no attention to the likely impacts on the environment or the people who depend on the forest.

"There is a need for regional agreement to ensure that best practices are mandatory for any new oil palm development, including avoiding high conservation-value forests and ensuring the rights of existing forest dwellers are respected,” he urged.

The report provides case studies of three large palm oil developments in the Republic of Congo, Gabon and Cameroon.

Palm oil expansion threatens Congo Basin forests - report - AlertNet

What does the ‘Doha Climate Gateway’ mean for Africa? | Africa Renewal Online

 By Richard Munang and Zhen Han

A UN climate change conference in Doha, Qatar, concluded in December 2012 with a new agreement called the “Doha Climate Gateway.” Its major achievements include the further extension until 2020 of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, as well as a work plan for negotiating a new global climate pact by 2015, to be implemented from 2020.

Despite these commitments, the Doha conference made only limited progress in advancing international talks on climate change and failed to set more ambitious goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

That failure increases the risk of a rise in average global temperatures by 2 degrees Celsius by the end of this century.The Emissions Gap Report 2012 of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) stresses that if the world does not accelerate action on climate change, total greenhouse gas emissions could rise to 58 gigatonnes by 2020 (compared to 40 gigatonnes in 2000), far above the level scientists say would likely keep temperature rises below 2°C.

Studies by the World Bank indicate that even with the current commitments and pledges fully implemented, there is roughly a 20 per cent likelihood that temperature increases would top 4°C by the end of this century, triggering a cascade of cataclysmic changes including extreme heat-waves, declining global food stocks and a rising sea level, affecting hundreds of millions of people.

All regions of the world would suffer, but the poor will suffer the most, seriously setting back the prospects for sustainable development in Africa. Severe droughts in the Horn of Africa in 2011 and in the Sahel region in 2012 alarmingly highlighted Africa’s vulnerability.

Not-so-fast finance

African countries are among those least likely to have the resources needed to withstand adverse impacts from climate change. At the 2009 Copenhagen negotiations, developed countries committed to pay $100 billion per year by 2020 (Green Climate Fund) to assist developing countries in adaptation and mitigation practices to counter climate change. They also pledged to deliver $30 billion as “fast start finance” by 2012.

Disappointedly, a report by the African Climate Policy Centre of the UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) shows that of the $29.2 billion pledged since 2009, only 45 per cent has been “committed,” 33 per cent “allocated” and about 7 per cent actually “disbursed.”

At the Doha conference, Germany, the UK, France, Denmark, Sweden and the EU Commission announced financial pledges for the period up to 2015 totaling approximately $6 billion. Most developed countries did not make pledges. African countries thus left Doha with little more than they already had.

Positive steps

Despite the limited advances on financing, African countries registered five positive developments from the Doha conference:

• The formal extension of the Kyoto Protocol, with continued access to carbon-trading market mechanisms such as the Clean Development Mechanism.
• Financing for the formulation and implementation of national adaptation plans for all particularly vulnerable countries, not just the small-island developing states and least developed countries, as previously.
• Agreement to develop an international mechanism to address loss and damage, which would support countries affected by slow-onset events such as droughts, glacial melting and rising sea levels.
• A programme for climate change education and training and the creation of public awareness to enable the public to participate better in climate change decision-making.
• Agreement to assess developing countries’ needs for green technology, as well as a pledge that no unilateral measures will be taken on the development and transfer of technologies.

Effectively meeting the challenge of climate change will require a compromise of monumental proportions by all countries. But climate change will not wait for the adoption of binding international climate change agreements. Nor should individual governments, businesses and others hesitate to take bottom-up action and support local grassroots initiatives.

What does the ‘Doha Climate Gateway’ mean for Africa? | Africa Renewal Online

New Green Economy Partnership Responds to Rio+20 Call for Action - AlertNet

A new partnership launched today by four UN agencies aims to support 30 countries over the next seven years in building national green economy strategies that will generate new jobs and skills, promote clean technologies, and reduce environmental risks and poverty.

The new Partnership for Action on Green Economy, or PAGE, is a response to the outcomedocument of the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20), entitled The Future We Want, which recognizes the green economy as a vehicle for sustainable development and poverty eradication.

The four UN agencies - the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the International Labour Organization (ILO), the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) and the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) - will provide a comprehensive suite of green economy services that will enable countries to transform their national economic structures to meet the growing demands and challenges of the 21st century.

“This is yet another example of how UNEP with partners is implementing the outcomes of Rio+20. The Partnership for Action on Green Economy will work with countries to catalyze change at the national level, assisting  them with targeted economic and policy instruments and training that will accelerate their green economy transition across sectors ranging from clean energy to sustainable agriculture,” said Achim Steiner, UN Under Secretary-General and UNEP Executive Director. “With the support of PAGE, developing countries in particular can put in place the policies needed to reap the economic and environmental benefits of an inclusive, resource-efficient, low-carbon pathway, and avoid the risks and shocks of carbon-intensive infrastructures.”

The four agencies have previously undertaken joint green initiatives. However, this is the first time that all four partners have come together to coordinate their support, expertise and resources at the national level. During the first two years of the partnership, PAGE will focus on seven pilot countries, yet to be named, and scale up this support to a total of 30 countries by 2020. 

Adapted from: New Green Economy Partnership Responds to Rio+20 Call for Action - AlertNet

Can the green economy save us?

By Rina Saeed Khan, Dawn.com

The world is not in a good shape at the moment – food prices are rising, fresh water is depleting, energy prices are soaring, biodiversity is dying out, intense storms are damaging towns and cities, while floods and droughts are threatening the livelihoods of millions. Clearly, climate change is playing a major role in taking its toll on human populations, just as the scientists had predicted it would. And the rate of change is accelerating. 

That means the chance of keeping global temperatures below 2 degrees Celsius by the end of the century is getting slimmer. Scientists say that if the earth warms more than 2 degrees then we will not be able to avoid runaway climate change that will be catastrophic. In Pakistan, climate change is not a future prediction but a present reality with devastating consequences given the extensive flooding that is beginning to occur annually during the monsoon season. For the past two years, Pakistan has topped the list of the Global Climate Risk Index produced by Germanwatch, a non-governmental organisation that works on global equity issues.

In 2010, Pakistan was listed as the number one country in the world affected by climate related disasters; in 2011 it was ranked as number three.

The United Nations-led negotiations on a new global agreement to curb climate change have stalled after the massive momentum that was built up just before the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit held in 2009. The summit proved to be a major disappointment and soon after the week the Copenhagen Accord was signed, the urgency was gone from the talks. There is a worldwide recession at the moment and affluent countries, especially the US, don’t want to take any actions that they think will slow down their economies further. “I see multilateralism going nowhere,” remarked Barbara Unmuessig, the President of the Heinrich Boll Stiftung (HBS), a German green political foundation. Barbara, who has been involved with environmental issues for more than 20 years, was visiting Pakistan recently. “We need to rethink our strategy at the local and national level, and put pressure on our politicians to go in the right direction”. She gave the example of how German citizens put pressure on their political leadership to get rid of nuclear power and substitute it with renewable energy. Today Germany, which is a highly industrialised country, has an extensive renewable energy system. 

Her advice to Pakistan, especially given its current energy crisis: “What are the solutions? Try to build your own green economy. In such a large country you can build your own renewable energy industry”.

Green economy is the new buzzword that is replacing “sustainable development” in the global arena. The concept of the green economy was first created in 2008 to get governments to spend money on the environment and in 2009 it was presented by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), as a way forward in response to the global financial crisis. The idea behind it was to shift investments away from business as usual to green activities making economic sense. Scientists have been calling for a major shift to clean energy technologies and energy efficiency in order to curb carbon emissions causing climate change. 

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in their special report on renewable energy sources and climate change mitigation called for nations around the globe to invest heavily in renewable energy to bring down prices and make it more affordable to everyone.

Many experts had pinned high hopes on last year’s UN Conference on Sustainable Development held in Rio de Janeiro, which had a theme of “green economy”. The Rio+20 conference (it had been 20 years since the last Earth Summit was held in Rio) failed to deliver anything substantive, however. Barbara had warned in a paper published just before the Rio conference, “Rio+20 must be more than just a repetition of previous international conferences – it must offer a true breakthrough to a social, just, low-carbon and resource efficient world”. Unfortunately, there was no sincere political will, either in the North or the South to do this and today the “business as usual, the ‘brown’ resource intensive development path, prevails”. Hence, Barbara questions whether the green economy is “the new magic bullet”? In her view, “UNEP’s green economy concept contains nothing that could revolutionise the (global) economy”.

Perhaps the solution is that: “We don’t have to follow big business, we can implement good solutions along with less consumption of resources”. She is clear that the green economy must benefit people and not big businesses and that wasteful consumption patterns and lifestyles (especially in the North) must change. “We need to rethink development to preserve nature, feed people and make lives better”. She is clear, however, that it is politics that has to set the standards, limits and goals. We urgently need institutions and decision makers who can make planet Earth deliver for the future.

Can the green economy save us?