Ban calls for greater industrialization in Africa to integrate it into world economy

Armed conflict, inadequate infrastructure, weak governance, limited financing and technological abilities, and policies that stifle entrepreneurship, limit competition and raise the cost of doing business are hindering the industrialization that Africa needs to fully join the global economy, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned today.

Libya and UN agency enter pact to boost food security, sustainable development

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and Libya have agreed on a $71 million programme to boost cooperation over the next five years to strengthen food security and sustainable development in the country.

Stitch-up

See here for Open Europe’s reaction to the outcome of yesterday’s EU summit.

According to the Telegraph the UK’s Cathy Ashton was told at 5pm yesterday that she had been put forward for the job. Two hours later she had bagged the job and was celebrating with the other EU leaders, with Jose Barroso handing a Rubiks cube to Sweden’s Fredrik Reinfeldt to congratulate him for engineering the whole stitch-up.

Can anyone remember the Laeken Declaration, the original impetus behind the original EU Constitution, which later became the Lisbon Treaty? It talked about bringing the EU decision-making process closer to its citizens. What a terrible joke that has turned out to be.

Industrialization will help Africa fully join world economy, says Ban

Armed conflict, inadequate infrastructure, weak governance, limited financing and technological abilities, and policies that stifle entrepreneurship, limit competition and raise the cost of doing business are hindering the industrialization that Africa needs to fully join the global economy, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned today.

Ghost Trees bring deforestation to central London

An installation featuring giant tropical tree stumps in Trafalgar square is designed to symbolise threatened rainforest trees throughout the world. From the Ecologist, part of the Guardian Environment Network
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 19 November 2009 12.26 GMT
Whether you perceive them as beautiful sculptural objects or a scene of devastation, giant tree stumps from an African rainforest are the last thing you expect to see in London’s tourist (and traffic) trap, Trafalgar Square.
Unveiled this week on a rainy Monday morning, the tree stumps, many complete with their buttress roots, have been transported from a regulated, commercially logged tropical primary forest in Ghana.
It’s a surreal sight - the stumps lie on their sides on plinths placed around Nelson’s Column which towers above them at a height of 50 metres. Had the trees been left in the forest, these stumps that once had trunks would have stood at around the same height.
Entitled ‘Ghost Forest’, the installation is the vision of British artist Angela Palmer, and its intention is to inspire and provoke debate about the future of the world’s rainforests.
Missing: trunks
‘The concept is to present the series of rainforest tree stumps as a ‘ghost forest’ - using the negative space created by the missing trunks as a metaphor for climate change,’ says Palmer, ‘the absence representing the removal of the world’s ‘lungs’ through continual deforestation.’
The artist originally planned to exhibit the tree stumps upright, but on seeing the roots exposed and cleaned of soil decided ‘it was like seeing the nerve endings of the planet’.
Palmer chose to source the tree stumps from Ghana, which over the last 50 years has lost 90 per cent of its primary rainforest.
But instead of being ‘yet another message about climate change doom and gloom,’ says the artist, Ghost Forest ‘carries a message of hope and optimism for the future.’
She maintains that Ghana is now at the vanguard of responsible and sustainable forestry.
Last year it became the first country in Africa to enter the VPA (Voluntary Partnership Agreement) with the European Union in an effort to outlaw illegal logging.
Its remaining concessions are all selectively logged, which means the retention, crucially, of the forest canopy; the natural regeneration of the forest; and a viable and sustainable timber industry for the local workforce.
Carbon conscious
Palmer carefully considered the carbon cost of the project but felt that its potential message to millions of people on the impacts of deforestation would outweigh the carbon ’spend’.
There are also plans to offset the carbon footprint through a ClimateCare project which has introduced more energy efficient cooking stoves to Ghana, meaning fewer trees are needed to provide cooking.
The installation, whose main sponsor is Deutsche Bank, will stand in Trafalgar Square for one week, between 16-22 November, before moving to Thorvaldsens Plads - a city centre square in Copenhagen - to coincide with the UN Climate Change Conference from December 7-18.
In Copenhagen, Ghost Forest will stand as a symbol of threatened rainforest trees throughout the world.
Follow the progress of the project at www.ghostforest.org
Laura Sevier is the Ecologist’s Green Living Editor

Prince Charles announces funding scheme to protect rainforests

Karen McVeigh
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 19 November 2009 20.17 GMT
A global emergency funding scheme to drastically reduce the destruction of tropical rainforests over the next five years was announced by the Prince of Wales today, with the US pledging $275m (£165m) towards rainforest protection.
The plan relies on developed countries paying rainforest nations such as Brazil and Indonesia to reduce rates of deforestation and thereby cut carbon emissions.
Currently, the lucrative trade in logging, cattle grazing and palm oil, means tropical forests are worth substantially more dead than alive to developing countries. The plan, agreed by 35 governments of the Informal Working Group (IWG) and published at a meeting at St James’s Palace, aims to make trees worth more alive. The group hopes to achieve a 25% reduction in annual deforestation rates by 2015. The felling of forests causes almost a fifth of global carbon emissions.
However, environment groups last night said the “devil was in the detail” and expressed concern over whether the scheme could achieve its aims. There were calls for the UK government to pledge money to the scheme.Tony Juniper, special adviser to the Prince’s Rainforests Project (PRP) and former director of Friends of the Earth, described the agreement as a breakthrough and said: “This is the first time there has been a consensus among governments on a mechanism to deal with the underlying causes of deforestation, which are mainly economic.”
Funding for the plan, which was set up by world leaders after a meeting convened by Prince Charles in London in April, would cost between £13.5bn and £22bn over the next five years. The money will initially be sought from governments.
Addressing delegates, including Ed Miliband, the energy and climate change secretary, and Guyana’s president, Bharrat Jagdeo, Prince Charles said: “I have been enormously encouraged to hear the findings from the IWG report. It does seem that we have arrived at a consensus on how emergency funding might be deployed in the near future.”
Miliband said a deal at next month’s crunch UN climate talks in Copenhagen on funding for reducing deforestation – a key theme – was “now closer than it’s ever been”.
Issues of land rights, indigenous people, risk of corruption and verification have dogged the deforestation talks.
An example of how the scheme could work was given as the historic agreement between Norway and Guyana last week, in which Oslo pledged $250m to the forest nation by 2015 to continue to prevent deforestation.
Simon Counsell, executive director of the Rainforest Foundation, said: “We have to be very careful that any emergency funding will result in a real reduction in deforestation or forest damage.”

China’s CIC to invest in 2 clean-energy firms

By YVONNE LEE
HONG KONG—Sovereign-wealth fund China Investment Corp. aims to tap rising demand for clean energy in the country by investing as much as $1.21 billion in two companies in the renewable-energy sector, people familiar with the matter say.
The transactions are among the US$300 billion sovereign-wealth fund’s first equity investments in a domestic power producer and underscore China’s support for renewable energy.
Hong Kong-listed GCL-Poly Energy Holdings Ltd. said CIC would buy a 20% stake in the co-generation power-plant operator in a deal valued at 5.56 billion Hong Kong dollars (US$717 million).
The company also said it agreed to set up a joint venture company with CIC to develop solar-energy projects.
Additionally, CIC agreed to buy US$300 million to US$500 million of shares in China Longyuan Power Group Corp.’s initial public offering, two people familiar with the situation told Dow Jones Newswires on Thursday.
CIC said it declined to comment on market speculation.
China Longyuan Power, a wind energy company, is seeking to raise US$1.3 billion in an IPO ahead of a Hong Kong listing Dec. 10, the people said. Premarketing of the deal began Monday, they added.
Longyuan is China’s largest producer of electricity generated by wind power and is the renewable-energy arm of China Guodian Corp., one of the five biggest state-owned power generators in China in terms of capacity.
China is a major center for renewable-energy development, as the government seeks to diversify its fuel mix with investments in renewables infrastructure as part of its four trillion yuan (US$586 billion) economic-stimulus plan.
CIC’s plans to invest in GCL-Poly Energy and Longyuan are seen as efforts by the Chinese government to support the development of the domestic clean-energy sector, analysts said.
“As the government is focused on supporting renewable energy, it is no surprise that CIC will announce more investments in this sector in the near term,” said Lee Yuk Kei, an analyst at Core-Pacific Yamaichi International Ltd.
At the same time, CIC is rapidly deploying capital to take advantage of the global economic recovery by buying into natural resources and property assets.
CIC Chairman Lou Jiwei said in October that the sovereign-wealth fund had allocated US$110 billion for overseas investments and had deployed around half that sum. Commodities have been a focus of the fund’s investing strategy and asset allocation, he said.

Boris Johnson: electric car reverse

Autocar’s Hilton Holloway:
The news that BMW has won the bid to become to official vehicle supplier to the 2012 London Olympics is a serious disappointment. Not because there’s likely to be much wrong with the next-generation 1-series and 3-series, but because the Blue Propeller has succeeded in crowding out a much more innovative rival.
Nissan was one of the 2012 bidders, promising to supply a fleet of 4000 vehicles, at least 2000 of which would have been the Nissan LEAF electric hatch. Had Nissan won, French electricity supplier EDF would have helped install charging points through the capital. The upshot would have been a huge boost for electric car infrastructure in the capital – a city with some of the worst diesel-fired pollution in Europe.
A disappointment but not a Locog U-turn, according to another Autocar piece:
London’s 2012 Olympic organising team have claimed it was never their intention for electric cars to appear at the games on a large scale. London 2012 had widely been expected to be a launch pad for the capital to create an electric infrastructure and a lasting legacy for electric cars, encouraging their uptake and getting them on the road in large volumes.
But Paul Deighton, chief executive of London’s organising committee, said time was against the capital if it wanted to create an electric network in time for the games. “We didn’t want a big fleet of electric vehicles,” Deighton told Autocar. “We’re only just over two years or so away from the games and time is running out to create a viable network.”
If I were Mayor Johnson I’d be concerned to read that Locog has never intended the Olympic fleet to contain lots of electric vehicles. As recently as May Boris was hoping it would add high profile momentum to his Electric Vehicles Delivery Plan:
The eyes of the world will be on London during the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. The London Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (Locog) is responsible for procuring the fleet of several thousand vehicles. One of the key ways to demonstrate our commitment to the “greenest games ever” is for a substantial proportion of the Olympic fleet to be comprised of EVs. We will work with and support the London Organising Committee for the Olympic Games Olympics (LOCOG) to include EVs as part of Olympic fleet.
It now appears that Locog and the Mayor have been travelling in different directions. City Hall has provided me with a statement in response to the BMW news. A spokesperson said:
We hope that BMW, through this sponsorship agreement, will take the opportunity to demonstrate their long term commitment to electric vehicles and showcase their new MegaCity car at the 2012 Games.
We will continue to work with all car manufacturers to deliver the Mayor’s plan for 1000 vehicles in the GLA fleet as soon as possible and 25,000 charging points in the capital by 2015.
Do I detect a note of, well, disappointment?

Q&A: Copenhagen climate change conference 2009

The world is on the brink of an environmental calamity of Biblical proportions, scientists believe. So what can 11 days in Copenhagen do about it?

By By Julian KossoffPublished: 4:42PM GMT 19 Nov 2009

Hu Jintao and Barack Obama must attend the Copenhagen summit it is to be successful
What is the Copenhagen climate change summit?
From 7 December 2009, the leaders of the world’s 180 countries -backed by a 20,000-strong army of officials, advisors, experts and journalists - will attend a United Nations meeting in Copenhagen to thrash out a new international deal to tackle climate change.

Whatever is agreed at Copenhagen will come into force on 1st January 2013, and supersede the last attempt to save the environment, the Kyoto protocol.
Who are the key players?
US President Barack Obama and President Hu Jintao of China must attend if there the chance of something significant being agreed.
Other important figures will be the representatives from the developing economies of India and China. It is feared that the newly industrialised nations are on course to repeat the mistake of over-reliance on fossil-fuel energy begun in Europe, North America and the former Soviet Union.
Gordon Brown was the first world leader to announce in September that he was ready to go to Copenhagen to help secure a deal.
Do summits work?
Kyoto in 1997 was considered a qualified success.
The Treaty signed there bound by law the world’s 37 richest countries to cut their emissions by 5.2 per cent from 1990 levels by 2012.
America bailed out of the negotiations (and subsequently went on increasing emissions by 20 per cent) but as a group the target should be achieved, helped by the one-off bonus of the collpase of heavy industrial output in the former Soviet Union.
What are the main aims of the summit?
In the long term, wealthy countries are under pressure to agree to emission cuts of greenhouse gases of up to 80 per cent by 2050 (Britain has already signed up to this) and limit global climate change to 2C.
Copenhagen must bring the USA on board. Its 250-million strong population (less than 5 per cent of the world total) gorges itself on energy producing up to 30 per cent of all emissions.
Convincing developing nations they must not follow the West’s profitable mistakes, which means billions of dollars and a fair share of the latest green technology.
Is doing nothing an option?
If we do nothing, scientists predict climate change will rise by 6C by the end of the century triggering a catastrophe including: extreme weather, sea level rise, water shortages, food shortages and the extinction of up to a third of known plant and animal species.
However, climate change sceptics dismiss the arguments of human interviention in climate change and argue that natural phenomenon, for example volcanoes erupting , are to blame for the increase in carbon dioxide since the industrial revolution.

Climate change deal must aim to help women: U.N.

Women bear the brunt of drought, rising seas, melting glaciers and other effects of climate change but are mostly ignored in the debate over how to halt it, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) said on Wednesday.

In its 2009 state of the world population report, the agency said the world’s poor are the most vulnerable to climate change and the majority of the 1.5 billion people living on $1.0 a day or less are women.

“Poor women in poor countries are among the hardest hit by climate change, even though they contributed the least to it,” said UNFPA executive director Thoraya Ahmed Obaid.

World leaders are due to meet at a U.N. global warming summit in Copenhagen in December and the U.N. agency urged them to think about how much women are harmed by climate change and how much they could be engaged in the fight against it.

“With the possibility of a climate catastrophe on the horizon, we cannot afford to relegate the world’s 3.4 billion women and girls to the role of victim,” Obaid said in a commentary on the report. “Wouldn’t it make more sense to have 3.4 billion agents for change?”

Obaid said that because the poor are more likely to depend on agriculture for a living, they risk going hungry or losing their livelihood when droughts, floods or hurricanes strike. They also tend to live in marginal areas, more vulnerable to floods, rising seas and storms.

Because women are often the poorest in society and have less power over their lives, less recognition of economic worth and bear the brunt of raising children, they suffer more, she said.

The UNFPA report cited research which showed that women are more likely than men to die in natural disasters and that the gap is widest in poorer societies where women have low status.

It called for investments aimed at empowering women and girls — particularly in education and health — and said the international community’s fight against climate change was more likely to succeed if policies and treaties take into account the needs, rights and potential of women.

“Girls with more education, for example, tend to have smaller and healthier families as adults,” it said. “Women with access to reproductive health services, including family planning, have lower fertility rates that contribute to slower growth in greenhouse-gas emissions in the long run.”

Source:
Reuters, “Climate change deal must aim to help women: U.N.“, accessed November 18, 2009