Costa Rica, Leader in Green Economic Development

Costa Rica has tripled its GDP over the past 25 years while doubling the size of its forests, and its goal is to be the world's first carbon-neutral country by 2021.

The country is preparing for a cap-and-trade program and is one of eight countries to receive a $350,000 grant from the World Bank to assist in its design and implementation. 

Also considered as part of its green economic development, a marine protected area larger than Yellowstone National Park ensures that fisheries are managed sustainably.

Carlos Manuel Rodriguez, a vice president with Conservation International (CI) and former environment and energy minister of Costa Rica, tells us how they are doing it: 

 

As global economic and environmental struggles continue to make headlines, perhaps the world should look toward Costa Rica for answers. In the last 25 years, my home country has tripled its GDP while doubling the size of its forests; it has also pledged to become the world's first carbon-neutral nation by 2021.

These unique and wonderful achievements reveal that shifting our global patterns of consumption and production into a greener economy is not only possible, but necessary. 

In 1996 Costa Rica created its Payment for Environmental Services (PES) program partially in response to deforestation pressures. The program was established to compensate landowners for protecting the ecosystems that supply fresh water, absorb carbon and provide other services for people.

At the time, it took those of us working in the Ministry of Environment many years to truly understand the economics of conservation, but as Costa Rica's environment and energy minister, I led this innovative program with high expectations. 

More than 15 years later, this program benefits 8,000 landowners in a territory covering 10 percent of the country, all outside national parks. The payment averages $78 per hectare per year, with most compensation focusing on carbon and water services. 

Since 2005, CI's Global Conservation Fund (GCF) has supported Costa Rica in engaging key landowners in the Osa Peninsula to enter into long-term payment for ecosystem services (PES) agreements. The region contains one of the best examples of lowland tropical rainforest remaining in Central America, featuring a range of distinct tropical ecosystems that are home to 50 percent of all species found in Costa Rica, including jaguars, harpy eagles, peccaries and giant anteaters.

Support from CI and many others has helped achieve unprecedented conservation objectives here, including halting the loss of tropical forest, restoring degraded forest and establishing innovative economic instruments to value biodiversity. 

Building on the success of this program, GCF is a funding partner in an innovative new fund for Costa Rica that will support biodiversity services under a PES scheme targeting private landholders in valuable conservation areas. The Trust for the Sustainable Biodiversity Fund is also financed by the German Development Bank and the Global Environment Facility. Currently totaling $17 million, it is expected to reach $20 million by the end of 2012. 

This new fund will complement Costa Rica's existing PES program, compensating private landowners for conserving forests not currently included in protected areas. This is the first conservation fund in the world designed to provide PES specifically for biodiversity services such as pollination, tourism and resources for future medicines. 

As someone who has worked on these issues for many years, I'm proud of the long-term engagement between CI and the Costa Rican government, and hope this success will be replicated throughout the tropics.

Costa Rica, Leader in Green Economic Development

Dr. Vandana Shiva: The Connection Between Global Economic Policy and Violence Against Women

*Abridged version

 

The brave and courageous Delhi gang rape victim breathed her last on December 30, 2012. This article is a tribute to her and other victims of violence against women.

Violence against women is as old as patriarchy. But it has intensified and become more pervasive in the recent past. It has taken on more brutal forms, like the death of the Delhi gang rape victim and the suicide of the 17-year-old rape victim in Chandigarh.

Could there be a connection between the growth of violent, undemocratically imposed, unjust and unfair economic policies and the growth of crimes against women?

I believe there is.

Firstly, the economic model focusing myopically on "growth" begins with violence against women by discounting their contribution to the economy.

The more the government talks ad nauseam about "inclusive growth" and "financial inclusion", the more it excludes the contributions of women to the economy and society.  According to patriarchal economic models, production for sustenance is counted as "non-production". The transformation of value into disvalue, labour into non-labour, knowledge into non-knowledge, is achieved by the most powerful number that rules our lives, the patriarchal construct of GDP, Gross Domestic Product, which commentators have started to call the Gross Domestic Problem.

National accounting systems which are used for calculating growth as GDP are based on the assumption that if producers consume what they produce, they do not in fact produce at all, because they fall outside the production boundary.

The production boundary is a political creation that, in its workings, excludes regenerative and renewable production cycles from the area of production. Hence, all women who produce for their families, children, community and society are treated as "non-productive" and "economically" inactive. When economies are confined to the market place, economic self-sufficiency is perceived as economic deficiency. The devaluation of women's work, and of work done in subsistence economies of the South, is the natural outcome of a production boundary constructed by capitalist patriarchy.

By restricting itself to the values of the market economy, as defined by capitalist patriarchy, the production boundary ignores economic value in the two vital economies which are necessary to ecological and human survival. They are the areas of nature's economy and sustenance economy. In nature's economy and sustenance economy, economic value is a measure of how the earth's life and human life are protected. Its currency is life giving processes, not cash or the market price.

Secondly, a model of capitalist patriarchy which excludes women's work and wealth creation in the mind deepens the violence by displacing women from their livelihoods and alienating them from the natural resources on which their livelihoods depend - their land, their forests, their water, their seeds and biodiversity. Economic reforms based on the idea of limitless growth in a limited world can only be maintained by the powerful grabbing the resources of the vulnerable. The resource grab that is essential for "growth" creates a culture of rape - the rape of the earth, of local self-reliant economies, the rape of women. The only way in which this "growth" is "inclusive" is by its inclusion of ever larger numbers in its circle of violence.

Read the full article from: Dr. Vandana Shiva: The Connection Between Global Economic Policy and Violence Against Women

Mauritania bans plastic bag use

Mauritania has banned the use of plastic bags to protect the environment and the lives of animals and fish.

More than 70% of cattle and sheep who die in the capital, Nouakchott, are killed by eating plastic bags, environment ministry official Mohamed Yahya told BBC Afrique.

Plastic bag manufacturers could be jailed for up to a year.

Plastic makes up a quarter of 56,000 tonnes of waste produced annually in Nouakchott, official statistics show.

Mauritania's Organization of Consumer Protection head Moctar Ould Tauf said he welcomed the ban, Efe news agency reports.

It was of "particular importance" given the negative impact of plastic bags on the environment, animals and marine species, he said.

Environment Minister Amedi Camara said that nearly all of the plastic package waste is not "collected and is found in the natural environment - land and sea - where they are sometimes ingested by marine species and livestock, causing their death".

The government, local non-governmental organisations and the UN Programme for Development (UNDP) have been promoting the use of new biodegradable bags, the Mauritanian Information Agency reports.
Anyone using, manufacturing or importing plastic bags could be fined or sentenced to a year in prison, Mr Camara said.

Several African countries, including Rwanda, have already banned the use of plastic bags.

Mauritania bans plastic bag use

Green Economy and Sustainable Development

How We Can Finally Get a Worldwide Climate Resolution for 2013

By Joel Boyce

Another year is gone and we still lack a binding international agreement on how to deal with our world’s changing climate. As the effects of our atmospheric changes have become more pronounced, I’ve noticed a sea change in climate denialism in just the past year or two. Despite the increasing extremism amongst the political right, almost everybody now admits that climate change is real.

What I haven’t seen is very many political leaders stepping up to the plate to make changes to mitigate the problem. This year, in fact, it’s been quite the opposite. The United States and China are two major players that really need to take a leadership role if one of these myriad climate summits is going to accomplish anything of significance. But politically and economically, both nations are currently in a position where sweeping changes are a challenge.

At the recent Doha conference, the most the U.S. and China would agree to is that everyone would meet again in 2015 and set binding measures then. This was all that could be salvaged from, by all accounts, a frustrating and wheel-spinning meeting. But our climate disaster is an approaching asteroid. It gets harder to push out of the way the longer we wait. Every time someone passes the buck to the next administration, the next generation, the problem grows.

My own country, a major home to the world’s doomed climate change mascot, the polar bear, is doing even worse. Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper has officially walked out on the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Despite the fact that more than half of Canadians feel the country is not doing enough in addressing climate change, the Harper government is taking us backwards. Besides making liars of all of us, this fossil fuel crony has been pushing the dirtiest, most reprehensible energy projects with as little oversight as possible.

These actions (or inaction) by leading nations are a real concern, not only for their major contribution to the problem (the opulent energy usage of North America and the large population of a rapidly-industrializing China make for huge greenhouse gas contributions), but the effect it will have on energy policies throughout the world. While island nations are fighting hard for significant action, small fossil-fuel reliant states are afraid of bearing the economic brunt of energy infrastructure changes. Belarus is currently leading the charge to bail on saving the world, and it’s hard to say boo if our richer countries aren’t doing any better.

We even see hypocrisy amongst those who should be setting an example. The World Bank, after just releasing a report on the danger of the world’s average temperature increase reaching four degrees Celsius, is now looking into funding a mine with a coal-fired plant.

Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC, tries to put it all into perspective. In her op-ed she reminds readers that any major energy transition takes time. We can still get an agreement, and, not to put too fine a point on it, we really have to.

But is it time for a different approach? Some experts are saying there are just too many players involved for this process to work. The mathematics of combinations make for too many intersecting relationships and interests when groups get very large, let alone the 194 countries represented in the United Nations. Too many cooks spoil the broth — the broth in this case being a binding international agreement.

In this view, it’s time to put an end to these summits entirely. Instead, perhaps the U.S. and China, as the leading emitters, should come up with a technology-sharing green development agreement that includes major emission reductions on a cooperative basis. With U.S. technology and Chinese manpower, transforming the industrial economies of both nations might suddenly seem very doable.

The agreement made, other nations might then join in, remaking the world in a truly collaborative process. That’s my proposed New Year’s Resolution for the world’s political leaders, in particular those of the above-mentioned nations.

It sounds easy, doesn’t it? Why do we lack the political will when the threat is so dire? Perhaps we need a resolution for the rest of us, as well. As voting citizens and outspoken activists, why don’t we make inaction on this issue completely untenable politically? Someone like Stephen Harper should frankly have no chance of getting into political office. If we can’t manage to vote someone in who won’t doom the world, how can our species possibly endure?

How We Can Finally Get a Worldwide Climate Resolution for 2013

Do global summits help to tackle poverty?

Disappointment at the collective performance of our leaders at global summits goes far beyond the development movement. Eight hundred or more journalists attend the average G20, to shine a spotlight on the failure of the group to fulfil its self-proclaimed mandate to manage the global economy.

These disappointments have deep roots, and there's nothing unique about the current position. They are the product of long-standing weaknesses in the multilateral process, exacerbated by recent shifts in power relations that are present in pretty much every global negotiation.

Few NGOs found much to celebrate at December's COP18 climate talks in Doha. The G8 and the G20 have produced similarly disappointing results in recent years. The Rio+20 summit in June was a particularly egregious example. With 50,000 delegates and campaigners present, not one meaningful new commitment was made other than agreement to develop new global goals. It was agreed after much intensive negotiation that these would be developed by an inter-governmental committee of 30 countries. Six months later it has not yet met, because there is no agreement about who should be on it.

So if you're concerned about global poverty, why bother with global summits?

Summits exist to negotiate global goals and policies, and our view of their utility should depend on their success at doing so. Meaningful commitments are getting rarer; but they do still emerge. Last year, a deal was agreed in Busan, South Korea, on how to make aid more effective by co-operating with new players such as Mexico. The deal was followed this year by a set of agreed indicators for a global monitoring framework for development assistance. And a new set of voluntary guidelines on land tenure was decided by the committee for food security; positive steps that came about in large part as a result of sustained civil society pressure.

As always, this success was a result of influencing negotiations over many months, culminating in the final round of talks in the media spotlight. But there are too few of these advances. Oxfam recently chronicled four years of text but no substantial progress from the G20 on food.

But there's far more to summits than the formal communique. Sometimes the text can obscure the real story and the long-term significance of the meetings. There are three other very good reasons why summits matter. 

Read More:   Do global summits help to tackle poverty?

Turning Israeli roofs into green habitats | ISRAEL21c

Anybody can plunk down some potted trees and pretty planters on a roof, but a rooftop garden does not offer the same environmental and ecological benefits as a “green roof” – a layer of low-maintenance vegetation that insulates the building underneath and reduces flash flooding on paved streets below by acting as a sponge for rainfall.

Prof. Leon Blaustein, director of the University of Haifa’s new Green Roofs Ecology Center, says the Israeli center is the first of its kind in the Middle East and one of the first worldwide to focus specifically on how to conserve biodiversity in an urban setting.

“When you create a city, you’re destroying much of the natural habitat for plants and animals, and we want to mitigate this as much as possible with our rooftop habitats,” Blaustein tells ISRAEL21c.

Blaustein and his team have installed 48 experimental modules on top of the university’s Student Union, each with a different growing material, drainage configuration and plant grouping.

Ecology researchers around the world will be watching as the Israelis monitor how well each of the modules thrives and attracts insects, birds and other fauna, in the hope of determining the most successful recipe for developing biodiverse green roofs in arid climates.

Eventually, they hope to create experimental green roof plots on additional buildings on the campus and around the city of Haifa, as well as other Israeli cities.

Turning Israeli roofs into green habitats | ISRAEL21c