Red, Green, and Blue

Recently the Food and Agriculture organisation (FAO) of the UN reported that millions more people may find themselves facing long term hunger and even starvation, in east Africa.

Climate change affects Africa

El Nino is blamed for changing rainfall patterns, and that, combined with inadequate harvests and increasing conflict has led to a drop in cereal production already affecting Uganda, Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia. This could lead to an increase in the number of people relying on food aid.

Already more than 20 million people are receiving food assistance in the Horn of Africa region and their numbers are only likely to increase further towards the end of the year as El Nino drives heavy rains across the region, leading to mudslides on tree-denuded hillsides and the destruction of crops close to harvest time. The same rains often destroy roads and other infrastructure required to bring food aid and medicine into the region and can kill livestock or cause epidemic diseases in animals or human populations, all of which add to the complexity of managing food security in a region where conflict is endemic and border raids and ‘tribal’ disagreements are a standard response to poverty.

Horn of Africa countries badly hit

The worst hit country at present is Somalia, where the FAO claims that around half the population already need some form of aid; either food or medical supplies or both. Ethiopia is also expected to tip into reliance on emergency aid, as the second harvest of the year has failed and that means that food aid reliance could rise from 1.3 million to over six million people.

Kenya and Uganda are both expecting poor harvests, and Uganda has an even more disastrous prognosis as the ongoing unrest between government forces and rebels has forced people off their land or led them to stay barricaded in their compounds, resulting in less cultivation and a probably halving of the harvest of staple food crops. The current violence has left more than a million people in Uganda struggling with food security and the number is expected to rise steadily throughout the next twelve months, according to FAO experts.

Somali roadside wreckage courtesy of Carl Montgomery at Flickr under a creative commons licence

Recent forest fires resulted in a quarter of the Angeles National Forest being burned to a crisp. More than 160,000 acres of wood and chaparral were destroyed.  Impassioned editorials are calling for the restoration of the forest’s beauty spots and trails, but what is the political cost of restoring the environment at a pace faster than nature’s, or of failing to do so?

Natural regenaration causes its own problems

The chaparral will reappear within a couple of seasons,  and the trees will begin to regenerate although for some species, seed germination won’t be possible until years of rain-water leaching remove the carbonised layer of ash and debris from the soil surface. While pines are willing to push through anything, oak is less rugged, and seedling trees don’t tolerate soil acidity as nearly as well, tending to fail before the end of their first year if they can’t get their roots down into rich humus.

Without tree cover, there is more damage on the way. If there are strong winter rains, then landslides will sluice fallen branches and trees down the steep slopes, pushing over remaining plants and creating debris jams in the watercourses with two results: denuded hillsides and flooded lower lands. Jams mean that water can’t run cleanly or well and that means that fish like trout, which rely on clear, fast running streams, die.

Recreation versus regenaration

But The Angeles is not just an area of forest – it’s a massive escape route for the people who live near it. From Patrick Swayze, who owned the five acre Rancho Bizarro at the foot of the forest, through to the poorest Angeleno who hitches to the Angeles to backpack the forest trails, the National Forest is both a green lung and a vast playground.

Not all visitors are enthralled by the beauty of the landscape: biker gangs frequently cut new trails through the woodland, and are hunted in turn by rangers, while gangs growing marijuana find or create clearings in which they can establish their crops. One of the strangest illegal activities in The Angeles is the searching out of hidden Native American sites, often to be found in caves hidden in the hills, and the looting of sacred items left there by previous generations of shamans and artists.

Another area of conflict that will appear very rapidly is that when a quarter of a habitat disappears, many animals need to relocate. They will move into other areas of the forest, but because human habitation now presses right up to the edges of the forest, they will also move into backyards and gardens, and while the odd rabbit or raccoon might not present too much of a problem, the migration of rattlesnakes will present many families with nightmares and mule deer stripping suburban yards of all their carefully nurtured plants will be very unpopular. And that’s without the mountain lions and bears …

Managing habitats requires funding and people

So funding the restoration of the habitat has to be a priority, for several reasons – the tourism factor, the need to ensure Los Angeles has enough greenery to act as a pollution soak, and the simple fact that failing to remedy the effects of fire will lead to greater problems later as invasive species, both plant and animal, take over the scorched spaces.

The great problem is that the earliest re-growth is the ecosystem that requires most management. Chaparral is a mixture of hardy small trees and shrubs such as scrub oak and ceanothus, Manzanita and bush rue, many of which will, in seven to twelve years, have become largely old, dead wood. This wood acts as a tinder to forest fires. And managing chaparral is a labour-intensive business – it has to be stripped out by hand or grazed by goats or mountain sheep, and the Forest has been understaffed by rangers, let alone foresters, for years.

However, there’s no obvious political will as yet to establish a large-scale reinvestment programme for the Forest and until some substantial replanning of the Forestry resources occurs, it will continue to be a fire risk.

National Forest courtesy of Rennet Stowe at Flickr under a creative commons licence

After months of staunch resistance to mandatory emission reduction targets the Indian government has hinted that it is willing to consider a national legislation on voluntary emission reduction targets.

India’s environment minister Mr. Jairam Ramesh acknowledged for the first time that his country needs to take up bold responsibilities in order to mitigate the adverse impacts of climate change. The proposed legislation could include emission reduction targets for the year 2030 for the most polluting and carbon intensive industrial sectors.

India has been against mandatory emission reduction targets putting forward two main arguments - one, its per capita emissions are among the lowest in the world and two, taking bold measures to reduce its carbon emissions would adversely impact its endeavor to eradicate poverty. The proposed bill would address both these issues and could serve as a path breaking legislation striking a balance between the economic and social costs and the mitigation measures. Read the rest of this entry »

Mean Joe Green #73: When Climate Change and Health Care Reform Collide

Can “We the People” who got us into this mess be counted on to get us out of it?

…not looking good.

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The European Union has proposed a climate change funding of €2-15 billion every year for developing countries to help them make transition from fossil fuel based energy systems to clean energy based systems. However, EU does not see the advanced developing counties like India and China eligible for this financial help.

EU in its Global Finance Blueprint for Ambitious Action by Developing Nations paper stated that advanced developing countries should contribute to the climate adaptation fund instead of expecting funds for themselves. According to the paper, advanced developing countries posses ample financial resources to initiate and sustain emission reduction programs.

The Commission said that from 2013, it would depend on the carbon market to fund 40% of the money required for climate change mitigation and adaptation in developing nations. The emerging economies should be able to generate 20-40% of the proposed global fund, it said. The remaining—around $22-50 billion a year—will be paid for by the European Union and the rest of the developed nations.

Developing countries have been at loggerheads with the developed countries on the issue of funding for adaptation to clean fuel technologies. Decision to set up an adaptation fund for helping poor and developing countries was taken at the Bali climate conference in 2007. However, the developed countries are yet to act on their promises of aid as they find themselves constrained by the global economic crisis and objections by their own people. Read the rest of this entry »

Oh, they call him a communist. They call him a Red. But the actual problem is that President Obama is too Green. Barack Obama is our first truly Green President.

This is the real reason the fossil industries whose profits are threatened by renewable energy go after him - and stir up emotional opposition groups to threaten him with outlandish attacks. Because he has already implemented or funded an extraordinary string of renewable energy initiatives.

He will likely be remembered as an FDR figure; the president who powered the nation with solar and wind.
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Back in late spring, critics on the left attacked the Waxman-Markey bill for compromising on carbon credits even as the right slapped on the “energy tax” label, and - at least if early September is any indication - that label has stuck.

It is not clear that President Obama and Majority Leader Harry Reid (pictured left with New Mexico Democrat Jeff Bingaman - another key climate voice) can win a simple majority for carbon-capping climate change legislation this year, with industrial state Dems already defecting, but the lift for Reid and his whips will be even tougher: they cannot overcome a GOP filibuster without a 60 vote super-majority.

If those Senators in favor of climate legislation get the 60 votes they need to block a filibuster and pass a climate bill, they likely can’t do it without a little help from these six. These are the six Senators that lobbyists will be courting, the White House will be pressing, and you should be watching in the coming days and weeks as the Senate addresses climate change. Read the rest of this entry »

The Indian government released a report recently which predicted a fourfold increase in carbon emissions output in the next two decades. According to the government report, India’s carbon emissions would increase to 4 to 7 billion tonnes from last year’s level of 1.4 billion tonnes by 2031.

India’s environment minister, however, preferred to point out another finding in the report. The report predicts almost 100 percent increase in per capita emissions but the minister noted that even with a 3.5 to 4 tonnes per capita output it would remain below the global average. The globally agreed limit of per capita emission for sustainable development is 2 tonnes.

That is the argument that the Indian government has put forward frequently in order to dodge international pressure to reduce its carbon emissions. India maintains that its per capita carbon emissions are way below those of the developed countries and thus it would be unfair to ask it to set mandatory emission reduction targets. Read the rest of this entry »

Condors are native to California, and their numbers there are dropping, but San Diego Zoo is sponsoring a condor reintroduction programme based in Colombia. Seventy birds have been released in the Colombian highlands in the past two decades, most of them from San Diego’s breeding project, although twenty zoos in the US have been involved in the scheme.

The reintroduction programme has doubled the condor population in the Colombian Andes, although at one point before the project began, it looked as if extinction was certain, with less than twenty birds living in the area and most of them failing to rear young.

Reintroduction requires re-education

One reason for the death rate was that local people often killed the birds, either because they thought condors were prey seekers who killed livestock or to take feathers and bones for folk medicine. Another reason was that young birds, which like all condors, survive on carrion, found it more difficult to locate dead animals once they left the nest and didn’t have an adult to guide them to food sources. Finally, because condors mate for life, when one bird dies, the other doesn’t often find a new partner once the population starts to decline.

However, the new programme focuses on education as much as reintroduction. Local villagers are appointed as ‘condor keepers’ and given uniforms and receivers that pick up signals from the radio transmitters that the released birds carry. This helps them to track the birds, as well as allowing them to act as ambassadors to the local community, pointing out that the birds bring tourist money, as well as serving as environmental rubbish clearers by consuming carcases that could spread disease to livestock. The condor keepers also teach young people about the cultural and folk significance of the condor which appears on the Colombian flag. Although one released bird has been killed by a hunter, another was found near a town, disoriented and hungry, and the locals knew who to call to get the bird taken back to its territory where food can be provided if necessary.

Big birds make big dollars arrive

Captive breeding, raising, transporting and outfitting a condor with the radio costs thousands of dollars. But the local economy recoups a lot of this cost because the park in which many of the released birds live now receives around a hundred tourists a month: all of them looking for condors. San Diego Zoo says  ‘… we do it because we can, as stewards of the planet, and … to take care of the ecosystem and the wildlife within it.’

While the Zoo may focus on ecosystems, the rural Colombian communities which co-exist with the birds see something very different – the interrelationship between large mammals and developed nations which has become an increasing driver of tourism – simply put, when most people in the developed world can’t see large mammals in their towns, they include animal watching in their holidays, and that takes them to remote, often underdeveloped regions, where those creatures still exist. Infrastructure arrives swiftly: better roads, radio masts and refrigeration, to support the tourists. It’s still an open question as to whether tourist development proves sustainable, but as far as many in the Andes are concerned, the condors, and the money they bring, are here to stay.

Condor courtesy of Benedict Adam at Flickr under a creative commons license

Americans of a certain age grew up with a very common stock political caricature as part of our culture: he (invariably a man) was a Southern Gentleman with a quick wit and syrupy drawl, never without his vested suit and pocket watch, and—at least in popular satire—always with one hand cradling a well-chomped cigar and the other out for a bribe. To some extent, he was epitomized by Boss Hog. But, that was then.

Today, one political caricature resonates in American pop culture like no other, and he is the Simpsons’ Mayor Quimby. Rarely if ever has an animated character drawn so many of traits, mannerisms and context from one living person so directly. Mayor Quimby is Senator Edward Kennedy, making the late Liberal Lion from Massachusetts the most well-known and widely-recognized political figure in generations.

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