Environment Forum

The World Bank’s $6 billion man on climate change

As the special envoy on climate change for the World Bank, Andrew Steer might be thought of as the $6 billion man of environmental finance. He oversees more than that amount for projects to fight the effects of global warming.

“More funds flow through us to help adaptation and mitigation than anyone else,” Steer said in a conversation at the bank’s Washington headquarters. Named to the newly created position in June, Steer said one of his priorities is to marshall more than $6 billion in the organization’s Climate Investment Funds to move from smaller pilot projects to large-scale efforts.

While the World Bank is not a party to global climate talks set for Cancun, Mexico, later this year, it is deeply engaged in this issue, Steer said. Acknowledging that an international agreement on climate change is a long shot this year, he said there are still opportunities to make changes to cut the greenhouse gas emissions that spur climate change.

“We do see there are opportunities,” Steer said. “The mistake would be if it’s sort of all or nothing.” The bank is strongly supporting action to limit deforestation, offer quick financing to start climate projects and reform carbon markets to extend them to countries that have been left out so far.

Even though the World Bank won’t be at the negotiating table in Cancun, its members will be there, and 80 percent of them want the bank to focus on climate change, Steer said. It’s all part of a what he sees as a fundamental shift in the international attitude toward dealing with this problem.

“There is a new revolution that’s going on now,” he said . “It’s not only driven by personal commitment, like it would have been 15 years ago … Now it’s driven by just the sheer logic … If you care about long-term poverty reduction, you simply cannot avoid this issue.”

Photo credits: REUTERS/Supri Supri (Andrew Steer (right) then the World Bank’s Indonesia country director, with World Health Organization’s Georg Peterson at a news conference in Jakarta, August 24, 2006)

Haiti’s tragedy belongs to the environment

This commentary by Stephan Faris originally appeared in GlobalPost. The views expressed are his own.

Most people wouldn’t consider an earthquake to be an environmental issue. But while the tremors that shattered Haiti early this month have nothing to do with the island’s degradation, the extent of the suffering they unleashed is a direct result of the country’s ecological woes.

The reason can be seen from the sky. The devastated nation shares its island with the Dominican Republic, but misfortune always seems to strike on its side of a border that is demarcated by an abrupt shift from lush green to bare brown. While the Dominican Republic has largely managed to preserve its trees, Haiti has lost 98 percent of its forest cover.

In 2004, Hurricane Jeanne struck the Dominican Republic, and killed 18 people. In Haiti, where the storm didn’t even make landfall, more than 3,000 lives were lost under floodwater and mudslides. Deforestation had left the slopes too weak to be able to retain the downpour. But while some of the extra body count can be attributed to barren hillsides giving way, the true cause goes deeper. The country’s environmental troubles have become entangled in its economic and political problems, making all of them harder to fix.

It’s no coincidence that Haiti is both the poorest country in the western hemisphere and the most environmentally devastated. Decades of poverty, population growth and near anarchy have stripped the countryside of its forests and split farms into small, infertile plots. “What you see in Port-au-Prince — the concentration of people in the slums, which creates violence, which creates disease — it’s because the people cannot produce more in the countryside,” Max Antoine, executive director of Haiti’s Presidential Commission on Border Development, told me when I visited the country in 2007.

If deforestation has made the country poor, the resulting destitution exasperates the environmental degradation. Forests disappear. The slopes lose their soil. Farm land slips away. Entire villages disappear under mudslides. Roads and bridges are wiped away. The slums continue to swell. The country sinks deeper into poverty. Pressed to survive, another farmer chops down another tree to sell in the city as charcoal. “It’s not a vicious circle,” said Philippe Mathieu, the Haiti director for the Canadian charity Oxfam-Quebec. “It is a spiral. Each time you make a turn, you have less space.”

In dengue-infested Indonesian village: clinic or trees?

It was as I lay in a Singapore hospital bed — ablaze with dengue fever but shivering in a sweat that chilled my aching bones — that I began to understand why villagers in a remote part of Indonesia would trade their forest for decent health services.

Teluk Meranti is a tiny, 800-family fishing hamlet in Riau province of Sumatra island in Indonesia, where dengue is common but health services are poor and infrastructure is very basic.

With a monthly income of around $200, the average Teluk Meranti dweller doesn’t have much — but they do have customary rights to an enormous tract of rainforest in the lush Kampar Peninsula, home to rare flora and fauna.

It’s this forest that Asia Pacific Resources International Holdings Limited (APRIL), one of the biggest logging firms in Asia, wants to log and replant with fast-growing acacia trees. The firm has a government concession to operate in Kampar but needs cooperation from local villagers before work can begin.

In a campaign, the company is offering to build a road, repair a mosque, organise clinics — even traditional Islamic circumcisions for boys — in exchange for rights to their forest.

Some villagers want to protect their traditional forests but others would happily trade if it meant that the next time their child gets dengue, there will be a good local clinic and a road leading to it.

Can farms and forests mix?

Forests and farms don’t mix, according to conventional wisdom.

Farmers are often portrayed as the villains, slashing and burning trees to clear land for crops and wrecking forests from the Amazon to Indonesia (…not to mention Europe, where people cleared most forests thousands of years ago).

But a report today by the World Agroforestry Centre indicates that farms aren’t such enemies of trees as usually thought - it says tree canopies cover at least 10 percent of almost half the world’s farmland.  That is a gigantic area the size of China, or Canada. (For a story, click here).

Ten percent doesn’t sound much but one common definition of a “forest” by the U.N.s’ Food and Agriculture Organisation is an area where tree canopies cover at least 10 percent. It excludes farmland or urban areas (– otherwise your local supermarket car park might qualify if it’s got a few trees dotted around the tarmac).

Farmers sometimes keep trees as a backup if their main crops fail — with their deeper roots, trees producing fruit or nuts, for instance, can withstand droughts or floods better than many crops. Farmers also keep trees for uses such as a source of building materials, medicines or shade.

So trees are more common on farms than thought — and a home to a wider variety of insects or animals than a swathe of grassland, maize or wheat. They may also be a bigger store of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide than expected, with a role in limiting global warming.

So have farmers got too bad a rap for deforestation?

Peru clashes raise green issues

Clashes in the Amazon between indigenous protestors and Peru’s army that killed some 60 people last week throw some old issues into sharp new relief: development versus the environment and local versus foreign control of natural resources.

Indigenous tribes, worried they will lose control over natural resources, have protested since April seeking to force Peru’s Congress to repeal new laws that encourage foreign mining and energy companies to invest billions of dollars in huge tracts of pristine rain forest.

In the developing world, extractive industries have a bad record of bringing benefits to local people. Prime examples include the oil-rich Niger Delta in Nigeria and mineral-rich South Africa under apartheid.

Equally bad is their record on the environment. The despoiled Niger Delta also springs immediately to mind (and it is probably no coincidence that it has also been wracked by conflict and insurgency).

The tensions in Peru also highlight the on-going debate about the environment versus development — especially when that development involves the planet’s dwindling rain forests.

A seven-year economic boom has failed to significantly reduce poverty in Peru, which is where about 36 percent of the population remains mired.

Spotting the difference in the spots

The Bronx Zoo-based Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) has released some pictures from the first large-scale census of jaguars in the Amazon region of Ecuador—one of the most biologically rich regions on the planet.

One of the pictures, shown here, was taken with a  “camera trap” that photographs animals remotely when they trip a sensor that detects body heat.

“The ongoing census, which began in 2007, is working to establish baseline population numbers as oil exploration and subsequent development puts growing pressure on wildlife in Ecuador’s Yasuni National Park and adjacent Waorani Ethnic Reserve,” WCS said in a statement.   

“So far the team has taken 75 pictures of jaguars, which can be individually identified through their unique pattern of spots,” it said. The research is being carried out by a team led by WCS research fellow Santiago Espinosa and his work is funded by WCS, WWF and the University of Florida.

(Photo: Santiago Espinosa, courtesy of WCS)

Will Obama see the forest for the trees?

A Chinese campaigner has urged U.S. President-elect Barack Obama to prove his green credentials, asking him to offset the emissions generated by his inauguration by funding a forest in China.

A carbon fund named “Obama, future” could invest in increased forest coverage in another country and Obama himself could plant a tree there, Lin Hui said in an open letter, published on www.ditan360.com. Lin hopes that country will be China.

Lin’s appeal is based on estimates by conservative U.S. think-tank, the Institute for Liberty, that people travelling to attend Tuesday’s inauguration would generate 220,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide.

“Obama’s presidency is a big opportunity. The whole world is pinning their hopes on him, even the greens, believing he’ll be different than Bush,” Lin told Reuters.

The website, run by a team of volunteers, contains news articles and information designed to educate Chinese about a low-carbon lifestyle.

The Chinese government, which has been active in encouraging Western firms to invest in carbon-offset projects in China, approved the website in April, Lin said.

Lin’s posting in Chinese is illustrated with photos of Obama’s “whistle-stop tour”, his itinerary for Tuesday, and pictures from the inauguration of predecessor George W. Bush. He tried sending a copy of the open letter, which is in English, through Obama’s public email address, “but I doubt he’ll receive it.”