Israelis, Palestinians continue to commit serious rights violations - UN

Strong evidence indicates that all parties in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in different ways and with different effects, have committed and continue to commit serious violations of international human rights, a top United Nations official said today.

UN goodwill ambassadors pay visit to traumatized children in Gaza

United States actress Mia Farrow and Egyptian actor Mahmoud Kabil, both UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Goodwill Ambassadors, today ended a two-day visit to Gaza where they witnessed first-hand the hardships children still face nine months after the three-week war between Israel and Hamas.

Problems with judiciary hampering fight against impunity in Guatemala - UN

Weaknesses within Guatemala’s judicial system continue to hamper the fight against impunity, according to a new United Nations report which points to a lack of independence among some judges as one of the key problems.

Ban pledges to strengthen UN culture of accountability and transparency

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today pledged that the United Nations will do all it can to deepen a culture of accountability and transparency, highlighting the progress made so far and stressing that the process of reform continues.

Lebanon: UN envoy upbeat on chances of forming unity government

The United Nations Special Coordinator for Lebanon said today that the country had entered “a crucial week” for efforts to end the deadlock over the formation of a national unity government, four months after general elections took place.

Iran: Ban troubled by reports of violent extinction of election protests in latest report

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said he was “deeply troubled” by reports of excessive force, arbitrary arrests and possible torture in the suppression of protests over the disputed Iranian presidential elections, in a report to the General Assembly on the country’s human rights situation that was released today.

Israelis, Palestinians continue to commit serious rights violations - UN official

Strong evidence indicates that all parties in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in different ways and with different effects, have committed and continue to commit serious violations of international human rights, a top United Nations official said today.

UN goodwill ambassadors visit traumatized children in Gaza

United States actress Mia Farrow and Egyptian actor Mahmoud Kabil, both UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Goodwill Ambassadors, today ended a two-day visit to Gaza where they witnessed first-hand the hardships children still face nine months after the three-week war between Israel and Hamas.

Carbon capture plans won’t be derailed by Kingsnorth, insists Miliband

Energy and climate secretary Ed Miliband has insisted that the delay to the new coal-fired power plant at Kingsnorth would not derail Britain’s drive to prove the viability of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology, seen as vital to ensuring energy security while also curbing carbon emissions.

The comments come as the International Energy Agency (IEA) released a report saying that at least 850 full-scale CCS plants need to be built by 2030 – 100 of them by 2020 – if the world is to avoid dangerous climate change by halving global carbon emissions by 2050. To date, no plant has been shown to be able to trap and bury the emissions from a power station on a commercial scale.

Last week, power company E.ON said the recession had cut demand for electricity, forcing it to postpone its Kingsnorth plans. Kingsnorth had been seen as a frontrunner in the UK government’s competition to build a CCS demonstration. Plans for clean coal were dealt a further blow this week when the Danish energy company Dong Energy announced it was pulling out of plans for another major new coal-fired plant in Ayrshire.

But Miliband said: “The recession and decisions of individual companies will not push us back from driving CCS forward with great urgency. There are no shortage of companies that want to come forward with projects and we are determined [to make sure] CCS happens quickly.”

E.ON is technically still taking part in the UK competition, which aims to see up to four CCS demonstration plants running by the middle of the next decade, but it is unclear if its revised plans for Kingsnorth would fit in that timeframe. Friends of the Earth’s head of climate, Mike Childs, said: “Trials of carbon capture and storage need to be fast-tracked so that the technology can be applied to existing industry as soon as possible. New coal-fired power plants without full CCS from the beginning are not an option.”

Miliband was speaking at a meeting of the Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum (CSLF), a group of major energy companies and 22 coal-consuming countries – including the US, China, Australia and the UK – in London. The group issued a statement insisting that the “viability of CCS as a key mitigation technology should be recognised” at the UN climate summit talks in December, and encouraged major economies to accelerate deployment of CCS around the world.

Nobuo Tanaka, head of the IEA, said the economic crisis, and the consequent fall in emissions, had given the world a “window of opportunity” to halve the world’s CO2 emissions by mid-century. He said CCS must play a major role, delivering a fifth of all cuts, with increases in energy efficiency and renewable energy making up most of the remainder. “Our road map says we’ll need 100 large-scale projects by 2020, 850 by 2030 and 3400 in 2050.” This is consistent with the G8 leaders’ call in Hokkaido to announce 20 large-scale demonstration projects identified by 2010 with a view towards commercialisation by 2020.

The IEA report said the majority of the CCS demonstrations will have to be built, in the first instance, in developed countries, but then “quickly expanded to the developing world, such as China and India, where the vast majority of emissions growth will be seen”.

The IEA’s road map requires global investment of about $56bn (£35bn) per year for CCS in the next decade in developed countries, with up to a further $2.5bn in developing countries. In total, the IEA has estimated that the world needs to invest $45tn in low-carbon technologies by 2050 to make the required cuts.

At the meeting, Norway said it will raise annual investment in CCS to a record $621m in 2010. Norway is well placed for CCS, having large, depleted oil and gas fields for burial of CO2. Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg said his country wanted to lead international efforts to develop CCS, and has compared the challenge to the Apollo space programme of the 1960s.

But finance might not be the biggest problem for CCS, according to some speakers at the CSLF, who stressed the need to gain public acceptance of projects. “There is still a lot of work needed to explain to citizens why we do this and that this is not dangerous to health and that this will not decrease their property value,” said Andris Piebalgs, EU energy commissioner. A pilot project at Schwarze Pumpe in Germany has had to vent trapped CO2 to the atmosphere following local objections to its burial underground.

“In the end you have to take specific projects forward and have to have an acceptable public reception to those projects,” said Nick Otter of the Global CCS Institute. “We’ve seen some of the difficulties of getting these projects through the planning phase. All the work we’ve done shows that when people know what it’s about, they have more confidence in it. There’s a real awareness issue there, which could be a real big stopper on the whole way forward. This must be addressed.”

Marine plant life holds the secret to preventing global warming

Mangrove forests, salt marshes and seagrass beds, above, cover less than 1 per cent of the world’s seabed, but lock away well over half of all carbon to be buried in the ocean floor

Recommend? (2) Life in the ocean has the potential to help to prevent global warming, according to a report published today.

Marine plant life sucks 2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year, but most of the plankton responsible never reaches the seabed to become a permanent carbon store.

Mangrove forests, salt marshes and seagrass beds are a different matter. Although together they cover less than 1 per cent of the world’s seabed, they lock away well over half of all carbon to be buried in the ocean floor. They are estimated to store 1,650 million tonnes of carbon dioxide every year — nearly half of global transport emissions — making them one of the most intense carbon sinks on Earth.

Their capacity to absorb the emissions is under threat, however: the habitats are being lost at a rate of up to 7 per cent a year, up to 15 times faster than the tropical rainforests. A third have already been lost.

Halting their destruction could be one of the easiest ways of reducing future emissions, says report, Blue Carbon, a UN collaboration.

With 50 per cent of the world’s population living within 65 miles of the sea, human pressures on nearshore waters are powerful. Since the 1940s, parts of Asia have lost up to 90 per cent of their mangrove forests, robbing both spawning fish and local people of sanctuary from storms.

The salt marshes near estuaries and deltas have suffered a similar fate as they are drained to make room for development. Rich in animal life, they harbour a huge biomass of carbon-fixing vegetation. Seagrass beds often raise the level of the seabed by up to three metres as they bury mats of dead grass but turbid water is threatening their access to sunlight.

“We already know that marine ecosystems are multi-trillion-dollar assets linked to sectors such as tourism, coastal defence, fisheries and water purification services. Now it is emerging that they are natural allies against climate change,” said Achin Steiner, UN Under-Secretary General.

The potential contribution of blue carbon sinks has been ignored up to now, says the report, which was a collaboration between the United Nations Environment Programme, the Food and Agriculture Organisation and Unesco. Accurate figures for the extent of these habitats are hard to obtain, and may be more than twice the lower estimates used in the report.

“The carbon burial capacity of marine vegetated habitats is phenomenal, 180 times greater than the average burial rate in the open ocean,” say the authors. As a result they lock away between 50 and 70 per cent of the organic carbon in the ocean.

To protect them the authors suggest that a Blue Carbon Fund be launched to help developing nations to protect the habitats. Oceanic carbon sinks should also be traded in the same fashion as terrestrial forests, they say. Together with the UN’s scheme to reduce deforestation, they could deliver up to 25 per cent of emission reductions needed to keep global warming below 2C (36F).

Christian Nellemann, the editor of the report said:“On current trends they [ecosystems] may be all largely lost within a couple of decades.”

From The Times October 14, 2009