Green Earth Africa

As vital to life as oxygen, soil is rapidly depleting, says Ashok Khosla, President of IUCN and chairman of the New Delhi-based Development Alternatives Group, an IUCN Member.

Ashok Khosla

Photo: IUCN

On the status of soil and land

Land is a major resource. Its importance is under-recognized and it’s under great threat. There’s considerable evidence that the quantity of soil now being lost to erosion, urbanization, roads, agriculture and so on is far greater than the quantity being regenerated by nature. The amount lost each year could be as much as a factor of one hundred times greater than the amount being created. It’s pretty awful, no matter what the exact numbers are.

The issue, of course, is that feeding the nine-odd billion people that we’re likely to have soon unless we change our development strategies is not the only thing that soil is essential for. Bricks for our buildings are made entirely of soil. None of our forests, grazing lands and productive ecosystems could survive without healthy soils. Soil is as essential to sustain life as water. The waste of good soil is no less a crime, both in the present and against the future, than destroying the oxygen we need to breathe.

Why is the value of soil so widely ignored? No farmer or Third World villager could ever forget its fundamental importance to daily survival. But one big reason for our ignorance is that, ever since humans started moving away from agricultural livelihoods to industry and from rural settlements to the cities, we’ve just stopped seeing it. Even for those of us who do see the erosion of soil, we often do not recognize the other equally important invisible things that go with it, like the breakdown of bio-geochemical cycles. I mean the depletion of nitrogen and phosphorus, the loss of humus, carbon and moisture in soil, the loss of trace elements and other micronutrients and the accumulation of salt, alkalis and toxic chemicals.

Things like this hit us all of a sudden. It’s sort of like falling off a cliff. We’re driving merrily along and by the time we realise the road ends in a sheer drop into the abyss, it’s too late to stop. Our soils lose their vitality, slowly at first and then all of a sudden, we find that it’s all gone. This is what happened in the 1930s with the Dust Bowl in the United States, and more recently as a result of the Green Revolution in the Punjab in India.

Nutrient depletion, salinization and degradation of soil are now going to haunt us for the foreseeable future. Given that the population of the world is outstripping the capacity of the soil to produce food, our present systems for providing nourishment to citizens in almost any part of the world are showing signs of severe strain. If we don’t radically change our cropping patterns, our constructions methods, our use of ground water and our use of soil, and do it now, we are creating a very big mess for all.

On the UNCCD

The UNCCD has a long-standing mandate from governments – a mandate that goes right to the heart of the environmental problematique the world faces today. Yet, it is one of the global environmental conventions that is most neglected, particularly by the rich and powerful. By their actions, and often by even their words, those who dominate decision making in such arenas don’t seem to understand that soils and land productivity are the most stark examples of the old maxim ‘anyone’s problem is everyone’s problem’. While the rich have been able – temporarily – to deal with their soil and productivity problems by measures such as remediation or even removing land from use, the poor cannot afford such measures.

Despite the fact that soil loss in one place will have a huge impact in all other places as the world’s population has access to less and less food, the affluent have been reluctant to endorse the importance of these issues because they fear the additional financial demands they will face. This is really short-sighted because it’s going to rebound on them very badly. UNCCD has a mandate to bring back the rapidly degrading and desertifying lands on the planet. And if we are losing land at the rate of 60 or 70 thousand square kilometers a year, that cannot but be a threat to the wellbeing of everyone on the planet.

The subject addressed by UNCCD, restoration of land and ecosystems, could well be the number one environmental issue facing the planet. One of humanity’s biggest challenges is the regeneration of forests, the revival of grasslands and the rehabilitation of wastelands. It’s essentially about bringing nature back to its former health. Such activities do cost money. You’ve got to prepare the ground, you’ve got to bring the water in, you’ve got to be able to do the kinds of things that any new venture needs, including capital investment up-front. But the pay-offs are so huge, the return on investment is so high, that it’s a no-brainer. It’s where the first money should be going, and it’s much more important for human survival than building more shopping malls, factories and airports that serve the greed and passing desires of a relative minority.

On the need for new indicators of poverty and development

To understand where we are in terms of the really important things in life, and where we are going, gross domestic product (GDP) is a very poor indicator. It has its limited uses, but we certainly can do a lot better. Economic indicators are needed that include factors that normal GDP calculations leave out entirely: the unpaid work of women, the earnings of informal sector industries, the large number of goods and services that are bartered. In the global south, such transactions may well add up to more than the entire formal economy, which is all that is measured by GDP.

And then there is the huge subsidy provided by ecosystem services. These factors are not only omitted from GDP but treated as income when they are often actually increased liabilities in the form of lost capital. And then what does GDP have to say about the things that really matter – human fulfillment, security and happiness? We seem to have got stuck with tools for decision making that were OK for the middle of the 20th century but have completely outlived their usefulness.

Bobby Kennedy once said, GDP measures everything except what we really value. I think the idea of the former king of Bhutan to create the National Happiness Index was a great way of responding to that problem. But, again, it’s pretty obvious: if you’re going to use an indicator that is so flawed as to give the wrong signals, you’re going to do the wrong things. GDP does not take account of the fact that we are using up our material resources at an abnormal rate and that we’re in serious trouble, now. So basically, GDP is going to have to be revised considerably.

The fact that after 14 years of deliberation, the UNCCD’s Committee on Science and Technology has come up with only two indicators, neither of which means very much because of its generality and relatively low importance, shows that our international policy making structures are broken and need urgently to be fixed. They have to be made more democratic, participative and interested in results. Our present systems seem unable to hear the anguish of three billion people who remain outside the mainstream economy, one billion of whom go to bed hungry every night.

It’s sad that we continue to be represented in international forums by people with little sensitivity, few ideas and inadequate authority to make the commitments needed, sitting around the table saying, ‘No, no, no, you can’t say that!’, either because they’re afraid to put more money into the kitty or because they can’t see that a sustainable future for the privileged few is only possible if there’s a better world for all.

On aid and development efforts

After about 60 years of so-called international development, it should amaze the powers that be that we’ve ended up with 3 billion people left outside. This is as thorough an indictment of the trickle-down theory as one can imagine. But the powers that be seem to be quite oblivious to all this. If policies are based, as they almost always are today, on what is good for the rich, what is good for the stock markets, what is good for foreign direct investment, if they are designed to make more money on defense, on wars, on exploiting the earth, then it is only logical that the world will end up with three billion poor people. There’s just no way around that. Even if you believed that neo-classical economics had any meaning in the 1950s or 1960s, you cannot believe in it now. Much less [can you believe in] neo-liberalism, which dominates the world of decision making today

There are people going around saying that climate change is the biggest market failure. What the hell, then, is poverty, for goodness sake? If there’s one market failure that humanity ought to be ashamed of, it’s the massive poverty that exists. Our entire focus today ought to be, how to remove poverty, because poverty is not only degrading for the poor, even the rich are paying a heavy cost for it. The bigger the population, the more the resources it needs.

On civil society and the role of business

I don’t know of many countries that nurture civil society any more. India, like the US and, to some extent, the UK, had a vibrant, huge civil society. The whole freedom movement in India was a civil society movement, and for thousands of years, philanthropic and voluntary work has been the basis of Indian society as much as it has been, more recently, in the US, a country that one can admire greatly for its commitment to voluntarism. But this is now under threat both in the US and in India. There are some very large countries, like China, that don’t even have civil society movements, and their future generations will pay a heavy price because of that. All sectors are needed: government, business, civil society, but unfortunately, the mix has lost its balance. The big corporations are now so influential, so heavy, in most countries that even governments don’t have much say any more, and civil society has virtually none.

I have devoted a lot of time and effort trying to convince businessmen to see things differently. Every time I talk to business about socially responsible investment, however, the response I get is, “Yes, but our first responsibility is to our shareholders.” I don’t know of any businessman who takes the long view, unless that long view happens to mean very good profits within the tenure of that particular CEO.

This article was published in UNCCD News - a bi-monthly update on the work of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD).

Interactive tool layering climate data over Google Earth maps shows the impact of an average global temperature rise of 4C

A new interactive Google Earth map was developed using peer-reviewed science from the Met Office Hadley Centre and other leading impact scientists.

Photograph: earth.google.co.uk

Think it’s hot this summer? Wait until you see Google’s simulation of a world with an average global temperature rise of 4C.

Using a map that was first launched by the former Labour administration in October 2009, the coalition government has taken temperature data from the Met Office Hadley Centre and other climate research centres and imposed it on to a Google Earth layer.

It’s a timely arrival, with warnings this month that current international carbon pledges will lead to a rise of nearly 4C and the Muir Russell report censuring some climate scientists for not being more open with their data (but exonerating them of manipulating the scientific evidence).

Unlike a similar tool using IPCC data that was launched by Google in the run-up to the Copenhagen climate conference last year, this map will be updated regularly with new data. It also has a series of YouTube videos of experts across the globe, with Met Office staff talking about forest fires in sub-Saharan Africa and researchers at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research explaining sea level rises. To go more in-depth you can follow links to government sites, such as this one on water availability in a warming world.

Playing with the layer is surprisingly addictive, mainly thanks to Google Earth’s draggable interface. Unlike the static map of last year, it also has the bonus of showing more obviously how temperature rises will differ drastically around the world. The poles glow a red (a potential rise of around 10C) while most of northern Europe escapes with light orange 2-3C rises. Other hotspots, such as Alaska, the Amazon and central Asia, also stand out.

Neatly, you can turn different climate “impacts” on and off. If you just want to see which regions will be worst affected by sea level rises – such as the UK and Netherlands as well as low-lying island states – you can. One limitation is that you have to zoom out to continental level to see the layer: if you’re zoomed on your street, you can’t see it.

Climate change minister Greg Barker launched the map today alongside the government’s chief scientist, Prof John Beddington. Barker said: “This map reinforces our determination to act against dangerous man-made climate change. We know the stakes are high and that’s why we want to help secure an ambitious global climate change deal.”

The layer, of course, isn’t the only one with an environmental theme to land on Google Earth. The UN’s environment programme has one showing deforestation, WWF has a layer highlighting its projects across the globe and Google even has its own climate change “tours” for Google Earth. What other good green Earth layers have you stumbled across? And how do you rate the newest addition from the UK government?

• The government’s map, ‘The impact of a global temperature rise of 4C’, is here (you’ll need a browser plug-in or the Google Earth app installed to view it)

In addition to all its other impacts, the Iraq war has caused huge amount of carbon pollution.

A huge cloud of smoke rises up from a blaze on Iraq’s key oil export pipeline to Turkey.

 Photograph: Maxim Marmur/AFP/Getty

The carbon footprint of war:
690 million tonnes CO2e: a ‘limited’ nuclear exchange
250–600 million tonnes CO2e: the Iraq war since 2003

The direct human costs of wars are so great that it might seem flippant to think about their environmental impacts. But modern armed forces are rapacious consumers of energy and kick out vast quantities of carbon – emissions that may contribute towards human harm well beyond the battlefield.

All carbon footprints are virtually impossible to pin down accurately, and this is especially the case for something as complex and chaotic as war. Indeed, the best that can be done in this case is to give some very crude numbers to provide a sense of scale.

Perhaps the only academic estimate of the carbon footprint of an atomic war concluded that even a ‘small nuclear exchange’ of just fifty 15-kilotonne warheads would cause 690 million tonnes of CO2 emissions through the burning of cities – more than the current annual emissions of the UK.

But a war doesn’t need to be nuclear to have a large carbon footprint. At the time of writing the financial cost of the US military operation in Iraq since 2003 has been estimated at $1.3 trillion, with a further $600 billion anticipated for the lifetime healthcare costs of injured troops. Extrapolating from the carbon intensity of the health and defence industries in the UK, it’s possible to have a rough stab at converting this expenditure into carbon. This approach suggests that the US military operation in Iraq may have clocked up around 160–500 million tonnes of CO2e, plus a further 80 million tonnes for the healthcare of troops.

Add on a few per cent to both numbers to include the coalition forces and, say, another 1% for the footprint of the much more poorly resourced insurgency, and we might be looking at 250–600 million tonnes – roughly equivalent to everyone in the UK flying to Hong Kong and back between one and three times. And that’s excluding the direct emissions from explosions.

The war-and-carbon discussion starts to get distinctly uncomfortable (and methodologically just about impossible) at the point where we start factoring in the indirect emissions impact caused by the human and economic impacts of the war. In the nuclear example, the report in question estimates 17 million deaths – equivalent to around one-quarter of the UK population. Looked at in the starkest and simplest possible terms, if each of these people had a typical UK footprint, then the carbon saving of their ceasing to exist might make up for the direct emissions from the war in just a few years. In other words, mass annihilation turns out to be an effective way of curbing emissions – though of course it also defeats the object.

ScienceDaily (June 4, 2010) — Fire occurrence rates in the Amazon have increased in 59% of areas with reduced deforestation and risks cancelling part of the carbon savings achieved by UN measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation and degradation.

New research led by the University of Exeter, published on June 4, inScience, analysed satellite deforestation and fire data from the Brazilian Amazon to understand the influence of United Nation’s REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) policy on fire patterns in Amazonia. The NERC (National Environment Research Council) funded research shows that fire incidences may increase even with a decrease in deforestation rates.

Amazonian farmers are prone to keeping agricultural land free of new growth by ‘slash and burn’ methods, usually on a three to five yearly cycle. The extra carbon emitted by the leakage of fires from farms into surrounding forests edges and forest fragments as well as deforestation of forest regrowth, which are not accounted by the Brazilian’s deforestation monitoring system may therefore be partially negating carbon savings achieved through the UN REDD programme.

The research suggests that if sustainable fire-free land-management of deforested areas is not adopted in the UN-REDD programme, any carbon savings achieved by avoiding deforestation would be partially offset by increased emissions from fires.

The UN-REDD programme is a multi donor trust fund which provides appropriate revenue streams to the right people, making it worth their while to change their forest resources behaviour. The efficiency of the UN-REDD programme as a climate change mitigation strategy depends upon the stabilisation of deforestation and degradation of the world’s largest rainforest, the Amazon.

Dr Luiz Aragão an Environmental Scientist at the School of Geography, University of Exeter said, ‘Changes in fire frequency could jeopardise the benefits achieved through UN-REDD as trends in fires are the opposite to trends in deforestation. However despite UN-REDD’s vital importance in this region, fire is currently neglected in the emerging UN framework.’

Naturally occurring fires are very rare in the Amazon. Fires are normally caused by humans who farm the land. Burning deforested areas on a three to five year rotational basis improves the nutrients in the soil keeping it fertile and at a level that can produce food. Predications that climate change will create a drier area across the Amazon adds to the concern, as it is a difficult to control the spread of fires in such vast areas. The best option is to stop fires from occurring in the first place.

Dr Aragao explained, ‘We need to change the way Amazonian people use and manage their land so that they can do this without fire. They would need financial assistance for machinery, training and technical support to enable them to comply with implementation and maintenance of fire-free management of their land.’

He added, ‘By changing land management practices in already deforested areas to fallow management and introducing more diversified and sustainable agricultural practices at a co-operative community level, it is possible to drastically reduce fires and carbon emissions. It would be expensive but it would protect the stability of Amazonian carbon stocks and diversity.

Community interest companies are providing ethical investment opportunities in projects that give long-term benefits to communities and the environment

Tired of watching the value of your shares falling? Looking for an alternative investment that puts money back into your local community and which has tax advantages? And one that promotes renewable energy while at the same time paying a reasonable rate of return?

If this strikes a chord with you, it might be worth investing in one of the growing band of “community interest companies” (CICs) that are now vying with the banks for your money.

CICs are a new-style type of limited company designed for those wishing to operate for the benefit of the community rather than owners or individuals. Their number has boomed in recent years – and if the new coalition government increases capital gains tax, as is widely expected, the sector will get a further shot in the arm as wealthy investors seek new ways to avoid handing over large sums to the Treasury.

Many CICs are tiny outfits not seeking external investors. But others are open to investors from around the country. An interesting example isWater Power Enterprises (h2oPE), which is seeking investors for its ground-breaking renewable hydroelectricity schemes that will provide clean, green electricity for the next 40 years or more.

It has already helped set up two community hydro schemes and has now launched a £1m social share offer to finance a further two. If all goes well, investors will get a return of around 3% per annum after the first two years, rising to 5% per annum in later years.

Minimum investment is just £250 and the maximum is £20,000, and because it comes under the Enterprise Investment Scheme rules, investors can claim back 20% of their initial investment against their income tax. Given how low interest rates are on deposit accounts, it adds up to an attractive package.

The community-hydro company first featured in Guardian Money in September 2008, when it appealed for investors to come up with £100,000 to help build a small-scale hydro scheme in Settle, North Yorkshire.

That scheme was oversubscribed. Construction was completed last year and it started generating its first power last December. Now the organisation has two new schemes on the go – one at Bainbridge, in the heart of the Yorkshire Dales, and another bigger, two-site scheme in Stockport, Manchester.

The concept is relatively simple. In each case the money will be used to purchase and install a generating plant, which uses a modernised version of a 2,000-year-old Greek invention – the Archimedean screw – whereby power is generated by water flowing over and rotating a large metal screw. The green electricity is sold, giving the company an income, which eventually provides a return for investors.

At the Bainbridge site (above), h2oPE has teamed up with River Bain Hydro to build a 45Kw system that will generate enough electricity to power 40 houses, saving 80 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, or 3,000 tonnes over an expected lifetime of 40 years.

The aim is to raise £250,000 through a share offer to part-fund the scheme. Work is due to start on site in the summer and the scheme will be generating electricity by the end of the year. The rest of the money will be raised through loans from the Charity Bank and in grants. The Yorkshire Dales National Park has donated £50,000, and other donations are in the pipeline.

Meanwhile, Stockport Hydro has been created to develop a number of hydroelectric schemes. Two sites on the River Goyt have been identified for development. Initially, there will be Archimedean screws at Otterspool Weir and one at Stringer, with the possibility of more at a later date.

Investors will be asked to come up with £750,000 to fund this combined 130Kw scheme. The electricity generated is the equivalent to that required to power around 130 homes.

Ideally, the organisers say, investors should be prepared to lock their money away for at least 10 years – and preferably longer. This is not like investing in shares, which can be traded on the stock market at any time. Investors who want to get out at a later date must sell them back to the owning society.

The organisers stress that money raised from the share issue will fund a not-for-profit organisation and investors should perhaps see it as a social rather than financial investment.

If you put your money in, you are unlikely to see any return at all for the first two years. In the third, fourth and fifth years, you can expect a 3% return and around 5% in all future years assuming all goes well. The dividends are taxed in the normal way. Ideally, the organisers hope that the shares will be passed on to children, or relatives. Any excess profits will be used to fund other green projects in the areas concerned.

Steve Welsh, MD of h2oPE, says they are increasingly looking to the ethical investment community to help fund the projects. The Charity Bank, Joseph Rowntree Trust and the Co-op Fund are among its supporters.

“We’re looking for people who want a blended return on their investment; people who are serious about ethical investments and are interested in long-term benefits. Shareholders will take an active part in deciding how surplus monies will be spent, so investing in community hydro is a unique way to demonstrate commitment and support for sustainable environmental projects,” Welsh says.

H2oPE says the share offers qualify for the Enterprise Investment Scheme, enabling individuals to get tax relief on investments of at least £500. Shares must be held for three years and 20% of the value of the investment can be used as an “income tax reducer” in the year that the shares are purchased.

Before you reach for your cheque book, be aware that investing in such schemes is not without risk, and you could lose your money if the schemes go disastrously wrong. Future returns will largely depend on the price the scheme can get for the electricity – difficult to predict when the project has a 40-year lifespan. It will also depend on water flows. Last summer’s washout would have been great for such a scheme, but a lack of rain in the Dales in recent weeks has left the Bainbridge weir too dry to generate electricity, although the organisers have factored in a set number of dry days.

Welsh says the “model” has been developed each time, and those operating the new schemes have benefited from the experience of those who ran the first two