Red, Green, and Blue

While you may never have heard of it, in Britain the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) carries a big stick. The Government of the day takes notice of its reports and individual ministers are called to account over failures in their departments if the PAC points them out. This month the PAC has applied its big stick to the British government’s initiatives in addressing the collapse of bee colonies and basically it said that the government’s failure was as catastrophic as the collapses it was meant to resolve.

Despite public awareness and media attention to the problem, less than half Britain’s beekeepers are registered for regular inspection. Furthermore, the research funding meant to help solve the problem is not having the expected effect because the way the funding stream was set up means it has to be shared with other research projects into other insects.

Bees matter in a recession

The situation is economically serious as well as environmentally – the PAC estimate that British agriculture could lose £200 million of crop production if bees continue their current rate of decline. Bees, and specifically honey bees, pollinate some of Britain’s major staple foods including the glaring yellow oilseed rape that fills most fields every summer, apples, pears, beans and raspberries.

The loss of bees in the past two decades has been in part due to varroa mite: a parasite that attaches itself to the drone bees that move from hive to hive. The varroa mite was transmitted to Europe via imports of the Asian honeybee – because the European honeybee does not groom as often as its Asian counterpart, the mite has the opportunity to expand numbers rapidly once it obtains a foothold. These mites then feed off the bees, weakening them and transmitting pathogens and viruses into the bees’ bodies. Untreated colonies die out fairly swiftly unless control measures are undertaken, which is why registering beekeepers is so important. But there are other factors too: loss of habitats such as wild flower meadows, roadside verges and orchards, climate change, multiple pesticides used on pollinated crops and Colony Collapse Disorder. Around 30% of bees disappeared in the 2007/2008 winter and this year’s figures could be as bad, meaning that the UK has only a third of the bees it had four years ago.

Bee schemes don’t please old beekeepers

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has set up a National Bee Unit to provide advice to beekeepers, and created a Healthy Bees Scheme which has resulted in the registration of 1,500 beekeepers with BeeBase, the National Bee Unit’s beekeeper database. Most of these beekeepers are new converts though, rather than those already keeping bees.

There is no answer in sight to Colony Collapse Disorder which is the one cause that might bring those old school beekeepers into a registration scheme. As things currently stand, they fear government intervention and ‘meddling’, being told to move or destroy hives if they are seen as potentially infected or too old to meet current standards, and they can’t see why they should sign up for a scheme that has no discernable benefit to the beekeeper.

Rural beehive courtesy of strife at Flickr under a creative commons licence

This week’s environmental protests are all focused around a key theme that leads to public protest: political failure. Often this is because of competing interests like the Indonesian example, but in the Spanish case it seems to be a deeply rooted political antipathy that’s putting the ocean at risk, while in Canada, the problem is that local people want to preserve an ancient resource against potential, rather than actual, harm while political powers want jobs and income for the immediate future. Read the rest of this entry »

Nigerian forces have been fighting on the Niger delta since May, but international awareness of the problem seems slight. The military have been attacking resistance fighters hiding there, and around thirty thousand civilians are caught in impossible circumstances. They have little food and water, and very little opportunity to get information about their situation out to the wider world.

Are oil companies causing humanitarian crises?

Nigeria has a large population and is also a major oil producer, with over 90% of the oil it exports coming from the Niger delta region. Last week, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) claimed to have cut both the Shell and Agip pipelines in Beyelsa state, but the Nigerian military says this is not true. Shell stated that it was investigating the claim and Agip refused to comment.

An independent report, commissioned by the Nigerian Conservation Foundation in 2006, says that the Niger delta region is one of the five most polluted places on the planet, in large part due to oil spillages. An untestable assertion is that, in the past decade, more than a million tones of oil have been spilled in the delta, damaging the mangrove eco-system that is the fragile margin between saline and freshwater environments in this part of the world. It is also claimed, but unverifiable, that gas flaring from petroleum extraction has led to a level of airborne toxicity that causes acid rain, cancers and birth defects.

These claims cannot be tested because access to the delta is difficult to obtain. For many years the Nigerian government, whether elected or otherwise, has been fighting against a variety of groups who have found the delta an ideal hiding-ground as well as the place in which the government in Lagos is easiest to hurt – you could say that the delta is Nigeria’s wallet. There are further, somewhat more testable claims that oil companies have provided finance and weapons to successive Nigerian governments to help them quash opposition to their regimes. US Subcommittees have heard that US oil company sites in the delta were given police and military protection, often resulting in deaths of local people and razing of local housing to provide ‘safe operation zones’.

Mangroves polluted, fisheries failing?

Because it’s almost impossible to get into some parts of the delta, both environmental and human rights organisations struggle to assess the true extent of the human suffering and environmental degradation that is happening in one of the most oil-rich regions of Africa.  What is certain is that what was once a fertile region of rotational farming and small scale aquaculture is now no longer agriculturally productive – while around 50% of fish eaten across Nigeria is harvested in the delta, the higher value shrimp and other crustacean fisheries have well nigh collapsed.  The planet cannot afford to lose fisheries: as the developed world struggles with the collapsed cod stocks, and the imminent collapse of the blue-fin tuna fishery, it’s disturbing to discover that complex ecosystems in Africa, including fisheries, maybe disappearing without public recognition or much attempt to save them and the people who depend on them.

Niger delta courtesy of 300td.org at Flickr under a creative commons licence

Caribbean organisations have said that the environmental tax that the British Government is planning to impose on all flights will cause immense damage to the Caribbean economy. The tax is expected to be in the region of £100 pounds per passenger and will be levied on departure from British airports.

The Caribbean Tourism Organisation has written to many organisations and individuals ranging from the BBC to the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, pointing out that the system used to define the tax level is unfair to the Caribbean. Because it works on a distance basis, measured between the British capital and the capital of the destination country, the Caribbean (defined in this case as Kingston Jamaica) ends up in a more expensive levy band that the USA.  The chair of the Caribbean Tourism Organisation, speaking for many of the small islands, said, ‘Our countries’ economies are hugely dependent on tourism. But the British government plans to place us in a more expensive tax category compared to the whole of the USA. This puts us at a considerable disadvantage. To suggest this is a green tax and that the environmental impact of flying to California or Hawaii is less then flying to the Caribbean is patently untrue. Our holidaymakers and the overseas friends and relatives of Caribbean nationals who live in Britain are being heavily penalised and our countries call on Britain to do the right thing and change this injustice.’ Read the rest of this entry »

German Reactor ‘Accident-Prone’

July 6th Berlin: The Kruemmel nuclear power plant was described as ‘accident-prone’ following an automatic shut-down on Saturday. The shut-down was caused by a transformer failure. The plant only re-opened in June, after a two year period of closure following a fire. Greenpeace activists demonstrated in front of the site, near Hamburg on Monday to highlight both the number of issues that the plant has experienced since it opened in 1984, and the reopening of the ‘nuclear question’ by the German government. Kruemmel should  close in 2018 and at present there is no replacement nuclear reactor planned, but this could change if the government chooses to follow the lead of several other European countries and either extend the life of its reactors or build new ones.

Banning bottled water environmentally sound, economically stupid?

The New South Wales government in Australia has decided to boycott the use of bottled water. Following the lead of the town of Bundanoon in NSW, the federal government has said that it will cease to use bottled water in government offices. But the decision, made on the grounds of transport, energy used to bottle the water, and environmental costs of plastic packaging for it, is being criticised on several levels.

The bottled water industry, and retailers, are protesting. They complain that the ban could not only lead to redundancies and job losses, but also cause adverse health results, as consumers turn to sugar-rich soft drinks because water is not available to them. The Director of the Australasian Bottled Water Institute said that there could be economic impacts if the ban becomes widespread, “In a month when Australia shed 22,000 full-time jobs the NSW government should be encouraging small business not hurting it.”

Mount Rushmore Protest for G-8 summit

On 8th July eleven Greenpeace activists were charged under federal law after they displayed a banner on Mount Rushmore. They claimed they were not guilty, and that their two thousand square foot sign would not damage Mount Rushmore.  The arrested protestors were charged with illegal climbing and trespassing. They came from eight states across the USA, including California and New York. The banner, which read ‘America honors leaders not politicians: stop global warming’  is being held by the National Parks Authority as evidence.

Mount Rushmore courtesy of jimbowen0306 at Flickr under a creative commons licence

The Arctic Council has recently reported that global warming is causing more shipping to travel through the Arctic region, resulting in actual and potential harm to marine wildlife. As is already well known, marine based birds and seal pups are highly sensitive to oil and frequently die of hypothermia if oil pollution damages their feathers or fur. As more shipping—ranging from container vessels to oil tankers to cruise ships—is using Arctic waters, the risk of major oil spillages increases but the actual incidence of minor spills resulting from trimming vessels or flushing tanks is growing and remains largely unreported by shipping lines. Read the rest of this entry »

During a recent UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) meeting, the spokesman for the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) said that the current global recession was simply ‘masking the next storm’.  Akinwumi Adesina reported that global food supplies were far from secure and that market speculation, climate change and crop diversity were all major threats in the near future. While global grain reserves had been replenished in the last couple of years, this was simply a short-term achievement, but global food security, he said ‘remains a goal, not a reality’.

Food protests decline but food security doesn’t improve

Staple crop prices have declined rapidly from the 2008 peaks, which saw protests across the developing world at the unaffordable prices being charged for necessary foodstuffs, but this hasn’t solved an underlying problem which AGRA says is the lack of investment, infrastructure and markets for African farmers.  The ‘green revolution’ they seek is one that has already happened in Europe and America and is happening in Asia and Latin America where crop yields have become higher, but Africa continues to produce a quarter of the world’s global crops – an average that has been maintained for more than thirty years. Read the rest of this entry »

Environmental Protest or YouTube Stunt?

In New South Wales, Australia on 29th June, wood-chipping company, Eden says that an anti-logging protest was staged on its premises, for reasons that weren’t worthwhile.

Environmental protestors chained themselves to a conveyor belt, protesting that environmental legislation neglected the needs of local wildlife but a spokesman for the plant said ‘… It didn’t affect us in any way and we just left them there until they decided that they felt like going home and they did. These days it’s as much about the show as it is about the reasons, so I guess the show must go on and sometimes the reasons are worthwhile and sometimes they are not.’

If it was worth having, we wouldn’t be getting it, says Judge

In a mordant comment on where polluting substances end up, County Municipal Court Judge Julie Monnin expressed concerns about a plan to sequester carbon dioxide 3,000 feet under Greenville Ohio. She fears the likely decline in property values and pointed out that the plant could lead to people need, and failing to get, man-made earthquake insurance. In her own words, ‘Folks, if it were a good thing, Greenville wouldn’t be getting it.’

The carbon dioxide comes from a nearby ethanol plant and will be injected underground, but before this can happen, large trucks would need to travel local roads, creating seismic shockwaves to test the ground, but these tests have been postponed for fear they would damage local agricultural drainage systems.

Guilty of unlawful protest, campaigners believe they did nothing illegal

In the UK today, 22 environmental protestors have been found guilty of unlawful protest. In June 2008 they boarded a train carrying coal into Drax Coal-Fired Power Station in Yorkshire, after two of their number posed as railway staff to flag it down, allowing others to mount the train and prevent it moving for 16 hours.  During their protest they poured coal on the tracks to stop the train moving.  The campaigners claimed in court that they had not done anything illegal because they were trying to prevent climate change, but the judge—who has said they will not face a custodial sentence—decided that their actions, and the £30,000 clean up operation that followed the protest, were illegal.

Drax power station courtesy of leedsyorkshire at flickr under a creative commons licence

Last week’s confirmation of climate change by the White House has only further raised the stakes for the Arctic. As detailed in former posts, one of the significant effects of our changing climate is the thinning of the ice pack in the Arctic, and the subsequent opening of the Northwest Passage. As the Northwest Passage opens, so too will we see an upsurge in the demand for shipping and the rush to access oil, gas, and mineral resources. [More...]

Significantly for observers, commercial fleets are beginning to view the Northwest Passage as a viable option for getting from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

“The ice is more favourable than in past decades,” said Capt. Georges Tousignant of Nunavut Eastern Arctic Shipping, “It’s navigable, it’s not that high-risk.”

And it’s not just Nunavut Eastern Arctic Shipping that is interested in navigating the Northwest Passage, the Canadian Coast Guard has seen an increase in the number of ships that entered the Northwest Passage. The longer that good shipping conditions continue, the more companies that will view the Passage as a viable transit route.

Unfortunately for the polar bears and infrastructure built reliant on permanent ice in the north, the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center reported that ice melt rates have increased. In May of 2009, ice melted at a rate of about 54,000 square kilometers per day throughout the Arctic. Average May ice melt has traditionally been closer to 47,000 kilometers per day.

The implications of all this ice melt is that similar to the long-term melting of permafrost, there will be less of the dangerous multi-year ice that impedes shipping every year. And therefore every year there will be increased shipping, and increasing attention to the viability of the Northwest Passage.

With increasing attention being paid to the Northwest Passage, watch for its status under international law to become a point of contention along with other northern concerns such sovereignty and related territorial claims.

Image: ashatsea (Creative Commons)

While multinational corporations are not the first thing that pops into mind thinking about climate change, chances are that they’re going to be part of the solution. So, how do we work with these organizations?

If we’re working with multinational companies to help them reduce their impacts on the environment, we have to make them see what’s in it for them. At heart, two things – a risk of greater costs, and an opportunity to generate new revenue streams. With the proliferation of local, inter-regional programs as well as federal programs designed to combat climate change, the most immediate implication for the multinational industry will be the cost of doing business.

One can see how regional cap and trade programs on carbon emitters, as well as carbon taxes in certain jurisdictions are without a doubt going to have an impact on the bottom line. The key challenge (and, more importantly from a business perspective, opportunity) is for multinational firms to plan for these changes, therefore giving them the opportunity to turn climate change related challenges into long-term competitive advantages.

Why is this of interest to the environmental community? The quickest way to move a business organization is by helping them determine that the path you are suggesting is one that will provide them with a business advantage, greater profits, and increased shareholder value. By speaking their language, “opportunity, risk, and fiduciary duty” environmentalists will have a much easier time working with the business community, instead of against.

Image credit: iStockPhoto