Drowning Nations
Developing World Stands Up To Developed Nations
Published October 16, 2009 @ 11:00AM PT
I'm currently on the Greenpeace ship Esperanza in the South Pacific. We're on the Defending Our Pacific tour, which is a campaign to establish a global network of marine reserves, stop overfishing of Pacific fisheries, and support Pacific island nations efforts to stop Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated (IUU) fishing in their waters.
Crewman aboard the Japanese vessel Koyu Maru 3, fishing in Cook Islands waters illegally, haul a tuna onboard. Like climate change, overfishing of the world's fisheries is threatening the livelihood of developing countries who are not contributing significantly to the source of the problem. Image © Paul Hilton/Greenpeace
Last week, we caught the Japanese ship Koyu Maru 3 fishing in Cook Islands waters without a license, which is obviously illegal. When I blogged a bout it on the Greenpeace website, I made the point that this was not just illegal but also immoral. So why is it immoral?
Last week, a new study was released by The Commonwealth that underscores the drastic need for government action on overfishing and climate change in order to stave off a collapse of global fisheries. The report warns that the oceans could soon become “deserts” and goes on to say:
The study reveals that those least responsible for the state of the oceans are most likely to suffer the consequences of poor management and climate change. Small island states in particular are vulnerable to illegal and unfair fishing by foreign fleets and to migration of fish away from warming seas.
The Esperanza has been in the Pacific region since May to support Pacific Island countries on issues ranging from climate change to fisheries collapse and marine conservation. But of course Greenpeace’s history in the Pacific Ocean goes back much further than that — all the way back to the early 1970s when we were protesting the French nuclear blasts at Moruroa. The fallout from these blasts also disproportionately affected those Pacific islanders living downwind from the blast sites — another instance of those not responsible for a problem suffering the most. While there was nothing technically illegal about these blasts, the total disregard for human health and welfare is egregious.
The industrialized commercial fishing vessels that are literally stealing fish from Pacific island nations' waters is just another example of the developed world doing as they please and disregarding the well-being of the people affected by their actions. That's why it’s very encouraging that eight Pacific island nations have come together and are standing up for their rights against these invading international commercial fishing fleets.
Pacific island states are not the only developing nations that are banding together to force the developed world to live up to their other moral obligations: “Africa will demand billions of dollars in compensation from rich polluting nations at a UN climate summit for the harm caused by global warming on the continent, African officials said Sunday.”
Lest we doubt that there is any need for this stand by African nations, even the World Bank, generally no friend to the developing world, is warning of the threats those nations are facing as the climate crisis looms: “The World Bank estimates that the developing world will suffer about 80 percent of the damage of climate change despite accounting for only around one third of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.”
So the real question we must be asking ourselves is: Will the developed world stand up and do the right thing in regard to these moral obligations?
Videos to Watch: Climate week highlights, what's next in int'l talks
Published September 27, 2009 @ 02:43PM PT
Above: Climate advocates are striving to contain growing worries that the December climate talks in Copenhagen will be a bust. In this video made just as the G20 summit wrapped up, Kumi Naidoo, chair of the Tck Tck Tck climate mobilization campaign (and incumbent director of Greenpeace), encourages people to get active in their communities, churches, mosques, temples, and clubs. Naidoo and others believe it's crucial that citizens to contact their leaders and demand that they reach a "fair, ambitious and binding" climate treaty agreement in December.
It has been an inconclusive "Climate Week." The world's major economic powers made few significant moves on curbing global warming, and produced no major public breakthroughs in deadlocked climate treaty negotations.
On the activist side, things were a good deal more inspiring:
The Global Wake-up Call saw thousands of people worldwide performing creative, cheerful street actions and calling their political leaders to support a strong climate treaty. This "Human Countdown" in New York City last Sunday kicked off the week's activist events:
The film "The Age of Stupid" had a star-studded evening opening in New York City. The film takes a black-humored backwards look at our era, when no one acted fast enough to stave off global warming. Gillian Anderson! Moby! Heather Graham! Stephen Baldwin!
[[There, my SEO for the week is accomplished.]]
The Yes Men pranked New York City and the media with their mock "climate change edition" of the Rupert "Fox News" Murdoch-owned tabloid, The New York Post:
"SPECIAL EDITION" NEW YORK POST from The Yes Men on Vimeo.
More activist moments, and the anti-climatic policy roundup, after the jump.
In DC, Activist Tent City Evokes Plight of Climate Refugees
Published August 20, 2009 @ 07:26PM PT
Above: Video about climate refugee tent city action in Washington DC, Aug. 2009
Young climate activists built a settlement of tents and tarps near the State Department on Monday, and lived in it for 24 hours. Their goal was to dramatize the plight of climate refugees: people who have been uprooted from their homes and livelihoods by the environmental degradation caused by global warming.
A banner propped up next to the huddle of tarps propped up on sticks urged Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to "recognize and protect climate refugees at COP 15," the international climate treaty meeting in December.
"Climate change is not only a great opportunity to create jobs and new prosperity. It is also an urgent crisis that is already impacting many individual human lives and perpetuating current injustices," writes activist Julie Morgan, who put herself "in the shoes of people displaced by climate change for over 24 hours" by living in the makeshift settlement. She was joined by several fellow members of DC Action Factory, the group that's been spending the summer staging creative actions in support of strong, effective climate action by the US.
Our action gave us a brief taste of what it would feel like to be Katrina refugees forced to leave their flooded homes ... Sudanese refugees who have no choice but to flee from the violent Darfur conflict, which has it’s [sic] roots in drought caused by climate change ... Alaskan villagers forced to relocate as the permafrost that used to support their houses thaws..
Morgan acknowledges that with easy access to cold water, coffee, food, and air-conditioned shops to duck into for a break, she and fellow activists weren't at anywhere near the loose ends of real refugees.
But the modest discomforts of living displaced for just 24 hours gave her a dawning perspective on the experience of those with no end in sight to their forced migration. "It was hot, exhausting, and uncomfortable. I lay on my back awake on the pavement at 4:00 am and longed for my bed at home or even a light blanket to protect me from the early morning chill," she writes.
The tent city action was also a "wake-up call," she says, shifting her perspective on climate activism out of the heady heights of Capitol Hill, federal legislation, and international diplomacy, and into the sometimes-devastating impacts the unstable climate is having on the ground.
"Putting myself in the shoes of those forced to leave their homes due to flooding, contamination, drought, melting ice and war," she writes, "was crucial in bringing my focus to the individual and community level where climate impacts are felt."
This year saw the world's first widely acknowledged climate change population movement, when the 2,000 - odd Carteret Islanders of Papua New Guinea evacuated their homes and farms for good.
As Change.org Immigration blogger Dave Bennion noted recently, the International Organisation for Migration thinks there will be 200 million people uprooted by global warming by 2050 (when population is expected to be around 9 million people).
The recent report “In Search of Shelter, ” by the United Nations University, the charity CARE and Columbia University, names the likely “hot spots” of climate-driven displacement as: the dry areas of Africa; river systems in Asia; both the interior and coast of Mexico, as well as the Caribbean; and low-laying islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. (Which we blog about here under the rubric of "Drowning Nations.")
And forced migration due to climate change is also seen as a growing threat to national security.
World Powers Play Politics While Island Nations Drown
Published August 07, 2009 @ 08:09AM PT
Portraits of climate refugees from the cyclone that hit Sunderbans are testimony to the unpredictability and dangers of global warming, which are already being felt in coastal India. They were intended to urge visiting U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Rodham Clinton, along with U.S. President Barack Obama, to take bold steps to stop global warming. © Greenpeace
UPDATE, Aug. 7: The 16-nation Pacific Islands Forum this week called for international help to protect vulnerable island states from rising sea levels and warmer temperatures.
The industrialized nations of the world are largely responsible for creating the climate crisis. But so far they're playing politics instead of making real commitments to cut their greenhouse gas pollution. So it's not surprising that small island states, which are facing almost certain doom, are discussing some drastic options for survival.
As reported on this blog in the past, these "drowning nations" are trying to cope with the looming climate crisis:
- Mohamed Nasheed, president of the lowlying archipelago nation of Maldives, has announced that he intends his homeland to become the world's first carbon-neutral nation. But given how small the country is, that will do very little to mitigate the problem. So Mr. Nasheed is also apparently prepared to move all of his countrymen to a new home – one that won’t be easily inundated by rising sea levels.
- Indonesia sought and received a dismissal of some $30 million in debt that it owed to the US. In return, the government of the Southeast Asian archipelago nation has agreed to spend the money on protecting the rainforests of Sumatra, the sixth largest island in the world. Indonesia is the world’s third largest greenhouse gas emitter thanks to the incredible amount of deforestation that occurs there.
- Tuvalu, the fourth smallest nation in the world, is already feeling the effects of global warming: the tiny archipelago nation has experienced much worse periodic high tides (called king tides) than normal in the past decade, causing increasingly destructive flooding. Tuvalu has vowed to totally remove fossil fuels from its energy mix by 2020, hoping to set an example that the world's major greenhouse polluters will follow.
Prospects for a strong successor to the Kyoto Protocol emissions reductions agreement, set to expire in 2012, are looking grim. Opportunities for the world’s richest nations to make some preliminary agreements, like the Obama administration-sponsored Major Economies Forum, or the preliminary UN climate talks in Bonn, Germany, have so far been squandered.
In July, the G8 group of industrialized nations failed to make real progress on agreements to slash greenhouse gas emissions. While proudly trumpeting their commitment to limiting global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius, they laid out absolutely no roadmap for how they plan to get there. (Afterwards, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, as well as the chairman of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Rajendra Pachauri, did not hesitate to criticize the G8 for their failure. )
In response, the leaders of seven tiny Pacific island nations recently renewed their call for the developed world to commit to greenhouse gas emissions reductions of 45 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, and 85 percent by 2050. These are the targets many climate scientists say we must meet, if we're to avert the worst effects of global warming.
While the leaders of developed nations seem to feel they have the luxury of ignoring the reality of the crisis and the best recommendations on how to avert its worst effects, developing nations are not so lucky.
Another round of UN talks in Bonn are about to begin. There’s little reason to think the developed world will get as serious about climate change as the developing world, but here’s hoping...
Drowning Nations: Tuvulu vows to kick fossil energy by 2020
Published July 23, 2009 @ 08:16PM PT
Above: The first major solar system in Tuvalu, atop the stadium roof in the capital, Funafuti, is the first step towards a national goal of being powered entirely by renewable energy sources by 2020. Credit: e8
Tiny archipelago nation Tuvalu, the fourth smallest nation in the world, sits in the middle of the South Pacific. Composed of four coral reef islands and five atolls, most of Tuvalu is less than one meter (three feet) above sea level. Periodic high tides (called king tides) have gotten notably worse in the past decade, causing increasingly destructive flooding. It's confronting the government and its 12,000 citizens with the reality of global warming.
Tuvalu was settled around 3,000 years ago. If global business as usual continues, Tuvaluans might have to abandon their 10 square miles of home well before the end of this century.
So as China, India, the United States and other major emitters of greenhouse gas pollution jockey for position on the road to Copenhagen, Tuvalu has vowed to totally break with fossil energy by 2020.
Well okay: with no heavy industry and almost no natural resources, Tuvalu's carbon footprint is extremely small, both per capita and in absolute terms. But the point is to make a point. "We look forward to the day when our nation offers an example to all," Public Utilities Minister Kausea Natano told the BBC this week, "powered entirely by natural resources such as the sun and the wind."
The government believes it will take around $20 million to convert the entire archipelago to renewable energy.
So far, with the logistical assistance of e8 (a non-profit consortium of utilities from G8 nations) and funding from two Japanese utilities, it's installed a $410,000, 40 kilowatt solar power system on the roof of the country's largest soccer stadium in the capital, Funafuti. In operation for around 14 months, the array is estimated to have cut Tuvalu's consumption of fuel oil (which is shipped in from New Zealand) by about 17,000 litres, and its CO2 emissions by about 50 tons.
The government now aims to bring solar power to Tuvalu's outer islands. Later this year, it's planning to erect an $800,000, 46 kilowatt solar power system for a secondary school on Vaitupu.
"There may be other larger solar power installations in the world, but none could be more meaningful to customers than this one," Takao Shiraishi, general manager of Japan's Kansai Electric Power Company, told reporters.
Said Nick Nuttall, spokesman for the United Nations Environment Programme: "In a sense, they are paving the way for medium and larger economies which have to move if we are going combat climate change."
Related articles:
Tuvalu plots world's first zero carbon output by 2020 (The Telegraph)
At risk from rising seas, Tuvalu seeks clean power (Reuters)
Tuvalu vows to go carbon neutral (BBC News)
Drowning island pins hopes on clean energy (CNN)
Tiny Tuvalu: If we can do it, so can you (Carbon News)
Fatalistic Friday: Crumbling Arctic glacier, 43 new coal plants, more
Published July 17, 2009 @ 05:45PM PT
Above: Researcher Alun Hubbard discusses the break up of the ice at the edge of the Petermann glacier, Greenland
Breaking Bad: A 5-billion-metric-ton hunk of ice is "poised" to break away from the largest glacier in the northern hemisphere, say independent scientists working with enviro-advocacy group Greenpeace. The researchers are observing the glacier from the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise.
If and when the Manhattan-sized "tongue" of ice detaches from the Petermann glacier, on Greenland's northwest coast, the mass of land-bound ice behind it may flow downhill and melt more quickly. It's the introduction of this landbound freshwater ice into the world's seas that will likely lead to rises in sea levels.
"Ocean warming currents are circulating around the fjord here and eroding the underbelly of Petermann glacier at an incredible rate, which is 25 times that of the surface melt," Dr Alun Hubbard, a glaciologist at the University Of Wales. (The Sydney Morning Herald, New Scientist)
Coooooooal! A coal plant construction "bubble" will result in 43 new coal plants in the US in the next five years -- and none of them will be regulated by the climate legislation currently being debated in Congress. The 43 are permitted, near construction, or already being built, and thus will fall under the federal designation "progressing projects," and evade caps on their carbon dioxide pollution. "The 43 progressing plants are projected to add four times that generating capacity – 22,236 MW – in the coming five years. Collectively, they will produce more than 150 million tons of new CO2 emissions every year for many decades." (SolveClimate)
Pond Scum of the Earth: Depending on your point of view, it's either great news or awful news that petro-giant ExxonMobil is investing more than half a million dollars in developing biofuel from algae. In a partnership with biotech entrepreneur Craig Ventner's Synthetic Genomics, Exxon will sink $600 million into deriving biofuel from the slimy green stuff. Algae is considered a hot prospect for biofuel development, since no one eats it. (Associated Press)
A View to a Risk: The head of the Nigerian equivalent of FEMA says that the nation is extremely vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Mohammed Audu-Bida "said the climate change had already manifested in the country with sea level rise leading to coastal and marine erosion and flooding, particularly in South- South and South-West, and bleaching of coral reefs along the coastal zone. The NEMA boss warned that with certain percentage of the population living within the coast and most cities concentrated along the coastline, the vulnerability to marine-induced disasters from tidal waves and storm surges would also increase." (This Day online)
The Vanishing:"The song of the skylark is the quintessential sound of an English summer," reports the Daily Mail. "But now, because of global warming, it faces being drowned out - by the chirrup of crickets." Skylark populations in England have dropped by 53%, since 1970. Populations two species of crickets once found only on the Sceptered Isle's southernmost tips have grown sixfold, meanwhile, and extended their range northward. (Daily Mail)
Sink or Swim Sink: Indonesia's Environment Minister says that developing nations like India, Brazil and China will destroy archepelagic nations if they don't agree to binding 2020 targets for cutting heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions. ""The countries have even been unable to set the target for emission reduction in 2050," said Rachmat Witoelar this past Tuesday. "While these countries are hesitant to take real action, island countries will probably disappear from the world map." (Jakarta Post)
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Published July 10, 2009 @ 08:01AM PT
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