While solar power has investors on Wall Street seeing green, countries in the developing world also see a bright future in solar technology.

They believe solar power systems that convert sunlight into electricity can help power developing areas without going the route of dirty coal-fired power plants.

Solar companies like China’s solar panel maker Suntech and California-based eSolar, have recently announced forays into the developing world.

Suntech is teaming up with Pakistan’s alternative energy development board, which the company’s chairman and chief executive Zhengrong Shi called “a clear example of the promise of solar energy.”

Solar thermal company eSolar said last week that it is expanding in Africa and earlier this year it partnered with an Indian company to build solar power plants in India over the next 10 years.

And a $400 billion euro plan is gaining steam to power Europe with Sahara sunlight, despite critics.

Today’s top solar market — and lots of profits — are found in Germany while the United States and China are fast-growing alternative energy sectors. Will countries like South Africa join their ranks one day? How will countries and governments make good on the promise of solar energy for the developing world?

Photo: Workers build a thermo-solar power plant in Beni Mathar August 20, 2009. Photo credit:REUTERS/Rafael Marchante

Some politicians may be accused of dragging their heels when it comes to dealing with climate change, but you can't say members of the United Nations' Clean Development Mechanism's executive board aren't clocking in the hours.

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), an emissions trading scheme under the Kyoto Protocol worth $33 billion last year according to the World Bank, allows companies and countries to outsource their greenhouse gas reduction efforts by investing in clean energy projects in emerging countries like China and India, where making emissions cuts costs less.

Projects are submitted to the CDM for registration and a staff of over 100 examine and scrutinize each one to ensure environmental integrity.

The whole scheme is supervised by a 20-member executive board, chaired by Lex de Jonge of the Netherlands' environment ministry.

"The members are all employed by governments and assigned to the board. They don't get a salary from the UN but they receive a daily subsistence allowance to pay for meals, hotel and travel costs," de Jonge said at the Reuters Climate and Alternative Energy Summit.

"As chair of the board, I spend 75% of my time on CDM issues and 25% on domestic issues relating to my actual job," he added.

The CDM's executive board holds some 7 to 8 week-long meetings a year, up from 5 meetings in 2005, the year international emissions trading really began to take shape.

"They're quite long days. We start at 9am and it's seldom that we finish before 7 or 8pm. The worst I've ever seen was we worked until 3am," de Jonge said.

Between board meetings, de Jonge said members must attend meetings for other related panels or working groups to which they belong. These extra-curricular duties can take an additional 6-8 weeks a year. Factor in the additional work required to prepare for these meetings and you're looking at months, not weeks.

"If you add it all up, between 25 and 40 percent of a member's working year is devoted to the board, and that is sometimes difficult for board members because they have other jobs to attend to," de Jonge explained.

Would you work this much for climate change?

To read our Summit interview with Lex de Jonge, click here

(Photo: Procession with Ganesha statue in Mumbai, 15 Aug, 2009/Punit Paranjpe)

Few events can rival the ancient rituals and riotous color of India's religious festivals. This year, the months-long celebration season is also becoming eco-friendly.  Alarmed by the high levels of pollution caused by firecrackers, toxic paints and idols made of non-recyclable material, schools, environmentalists and some states are encouraging "greener" celebrations.

In Mumbai, where the 10-day festival for the elephant-headed Ganesha (the Hindu deity of prosperity) is underway with giant, colored idols and noisy street parties, radio and TV stations are airing environmental messages and school children are learning to make eco-friendly idols.

The statues, made of brightly painted plaster of Paris, are usually immersed in the sea or a lake after a lively procession that can sometimes take half a day to navigate the choked streets, and which ultimately leaves dismembered idols strewn along the shore.

But a growing number of Indians are opting for smaller clay idols which they immerse in water at home.

"An idol that doesn't dissolve in the sea is just a tragic end for something you have worshipped for so many days," said Abhijit Karandikar, a creative director at an advertising agency. "More people are realizing they can be more eco-friendly in our festivals. It's something that's in our control."

Read the whole story here.

(Photo: Devotees touch the feet of Ganesha statie in Hyderabad, 23 Aug 2009/Krishnendu Halder)

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After one of the briefest honeymoons in history, developing nations at U.N. climate change talks in Poland are saying that President-elect Barack Obama’s goals for cutting greenhouse gas emissions don’t go far enough.

Delegates from China and India told Reuters at the Dec. 1-12 talks that they welcomed Obama’s plan to cut emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 compared to less ambitious goals set by President George W. Bush. (Emissions are now about 14 percent above 1990 ).

But they say Obama isn’t going far enough. See story here.

Developing nations want all developed nations to cut greenhouse gas emissions by far more. That, they say, is the condition for the poor to start slowing their own rising emissions from factories, power plants and cars.

Is that realistic? Can the United States cut emissions to 1990 levels by 2020? And how far should developing nations curb their own emissions as part of a new deal on global warming meant to be agreed by the end of 2009?

If Pakistan is to dig itself out of its current crisis it needs two things to happen.  It needs strong economic growth to tackle poverty and undercut the appeal of hardline Islamists; and it needs peace with India if it is to permanently cut its ties with militants it has traditionally seen as a reserve force to be used against its much bigger neighbour.  Or so goes the prevailing view.

This week's United Nations report on pollution in Asia -- and the melting of glaciers which feed the rivers of India and Pakistan -- suggest there are serious risks to that scenario of an ultimately prosperous Pakistan at peace with its neighbours. In other words, can it achieve the economic growth it needs without worsening pollution further? And can it make peace with India if the two countries end up at loggerheads over dwindling supplies of water?

According to the U.N. report (see full pdf document here), thick clouds of brown soot and other pollutants are hanging over Asia, darkening cities, disrupting the monsoon and accelerating the melting of the mountain glaciers. These atmospheric brown clouds exacerbate the effect of global warming by depositing soot on the glaciers, which captures more solar heat than white snow and ice. "If the current rate of retreat continues unabated, these glaciers and snow packs are expected to shrink by as much as 75 percent before the year 2050, posing grave danger to the region's water security," it says.

Pakistan depends on the Indus river, which starts in Tibet and runs through Ladakh on the Indian side of Jammu and Kashmir, before reaching Pakistan, where, fed by numerous tributaries from the mountain glaciers, it swells out as it flows down towards the Arabian Sea. The U.N. report notes that more than three-quarters of Pakistanis live in the Indus basin and its water irrigates 80 percent of the nation's cropland.

It is already struggling with food shortages, and the report says that the pollution may undermine Asian food security by reducing crop yields and increasing the risk of flooding. At the same time there are signs of strain between India and Pakistan over their shared use of rivers in Kashmir, regulated until now by the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty, as I have discussed in posts here and here.

Another headache for the Pakistan government: Is worrying about pollution one step too far for a country that faces near economic collapse and frequent bombings in its cities?  And what happens to the scenario of peace and prosperity -- a long-term game-plan that may take years to achieve -- if the problem is not addressed?

We seem to hear more and more about natural weather disasters – are these signs of global warming? 

Or do they just illustrate the unpredictability of the weather?

Luckily, Hurricane Gustav doesn’t seem to have inflicted devastation on the U.S. Gulf coast comparable to Katrina in 2005. On the other side of the world, the worst floods in India’s Bihar province in 50 years have displaced about three million people and killed at least 90.

Achim Steiner, head of the U.N. Environment Programme, says that more powerful hurricanes and more floods are in line with predictions by the U.N. Climate Panel of ever more disruptions linked to a build-up of greenhouse gases.   

The panel said in a 2007 report that global warming was already “unequivocal” and that it was at least 90 percent likely that human activities — led by burning fossil fuels — were the main cause of warming in the past 50 years.

It said observed shifts include “changes in arctic temperatures and ice, widespread changes in precipitation amounts, ocean salinity, wind patterns and aspects of extreme weather including droughts, heavy precipitation, heatwaves and the intensity of tropical cyclones.”

And insurer Munich Re says there were 400 natural catastrophes worldwide in the first six months of 2008 – the most recorded in any single year was 960, in 2007. Some of course are unrelated to the weather — such as the devastating earthquake in Sichuan, China, in May in which 70,000 people died.

It’s of course a stretch to turn such insurance statistics into ’smoking gun’ evidence of global warming caused by human activities. Devastating floods and hurricanes have happened since long before people were burning coal or oil.

Still, most governments say that it makes sense to invest now to try to fix the problem of climate change than wait for consequences that may be a lot worse. Should extreme weather events be a wake-up call for more action?

What do you think? 

About 1.6 billion people still rely on kerosene lanterns to read, work or study after dark, according to a fledgling company that hopes its LED lights will replace those lanterns, eliminating both pollution and fires. 

d.light design, the brainchild of Stanford Business School graduates Sam Goldman and Ned Tozun, last month began selling its lights in India, where they say 72 million households use kerosene lanterns. 

The company’s products, some of which are charged by sunlight, range between $10 and $30, d.light President Tozun said in a recent interview. The Chinese-made lights all burn brighter than kerosene, and are safer and cleaner, he said.

The problem? Most of the people who use kerosene lanterns earn less than $1 a day, making one of d.light design’s products a seriously big ticket item.

 ”It would be like me buying a car or something,” Tozun said. “It’s a substantial investment for people to make.”

Nevertheless, d.light is betting that people will indeed save up to make that investment, especially with kerosene prices on the rise.

d.light, meanwhile, is keeping its profit margins low to make the lights affordable to more people. The key to making the business a success, Tozun said, is “getting to a massive scale.”

He declined to specify how many lights d.light would have to sell to become profitable, except to say: “Thousands is not going to cut it. It has to be millions of lights.”