Energy lies at the heart – Clean Energy Ministerial
I’ve just put up a blog railing at poor communicators – now my team have come back to me and said I need to include some figures – without them people can’t get an idea of the scale of the problem. Always happy to be critiqued – don’t … if you can’t take it etc.
One in every 5 people on our planet lives without electricity. Nearly 3 billion people use wood, charcoal or dung to cook. According to the UN fumes from these cook stoves damage health and kill nearly two million people every year. I’ve also heard it said that 85% of those who die are under 5.
95% of the people who lack energy and/or cook on deadly cook stoves are in sub-Saharan Africa or developing Asia.
Scientists warn that if we continue on our current energy path our world could warm by on average 4 degrees this century – maybe more. Poor people will be hit first and hardest.
We can continue along this path – we can gamble with our planet and push even more people into poverty.
Or we can do something different – we can commit to tackling climate change, we can commit to sustainable energy for all – we can commit to technology justice.
The Clean Energy Ministerial is important. Lets encourage our politicians to give a lead.
No Comments » | Add your commentWalking for water made its mark
I’ve never entertained the idea of getting a tattoo…until last year, at the age of 33, when I went to Mandera in north east Kenya during the height of the drought.
What I saw there shocked me.
People walking an average of 20 miles a day in 40°C just to go and fetch water. And this journey is one fraught with danger. Water is in such short supply that violence regularly breaks out at the few remaining wells – with many innocent women and children wounded or killed.
Most of the time, the water they get isn’t even clean. It’s water like this from a polluted, dirty, hand-dug well that’s infested with all kinds of visible things…worms, tadpoles, bugs:
Unsafe water like this kills 4,000 children every day…and it will continue. With climate change, the incidence of drought is increasing. People will continue to take desperate measures to get water – any water.
Practical Action is reducing the trek that people have to make to fetch water by rehabilitating shallow wells dug into seasonal river beds and building sand filters to purify the water further.
I spoke to Nadifa at one of the rehabilitated shallow wells who said she now only has to walk two kilometres to fetch water and feels much safer.
“The well helps my family so much. The water is good because it is fresh. I can drink it and use it for my cooking”.
This month, the UN announced that the international target to halve the number of people who do not have access to safe drinking water has been met, five years before the 2015 deadline.
Yet 783 million people still live without safe water.
Today, Thursday 22 March, is World Water Day – a day of the year when we spotlight the global safe water and sanitation issue and the collective efforts underway to get solutions to those struggling and in need.
The issue has made a permanent impression on me. So, here it is:
It’s my own way of honouring a cause that is close to my heart. Any nervousness or reasons to not get it done are easily overcome by the reminder that at the end of the day, I have clean water to drink.
What has made a permanent impression on you?
5 Comments » | Add your commentA handbook for building resilience
Promoting resilience is a growing area of interest in development. The UK Government’s Humanitarian Policy ‘Saving Lives, Preventing Suffering and Building Resilience’, puts resilience at the heart of their approach. Building on this, DFID have committed to embedding resilience building in all of its country programmes by 2015 and integrating resilience into all of their work on climate change and conflict prevention.
So what is resilience?
Practical Action sees resilience as the ability of a system, community or society to resist, absorb, cope with and recover from shocks and stresses. A resilient community is one in which people can manage risk and recover from shocks such as floods, droughts and violent conflict. It also means people have the ability to adapt to long term trends such as climate change in a timely and efficient manner without undermining their wellbeing.
So how do we achieve resilience?
How to operationalise concepts of resilience is a challenge for many organisations. Practical Action has developed an approach called From Vulnerability to Resilience (V2R). This is a framework that analyses the causes of vulnerability and how disaster risk reduction, climate change impacts, governance and livelihoods interact and affect resilient outcomes.
The handbook
This new handbook is aimed at practitioners who seek examples of how the V2R framework can be used in practice, based on examples from Nepal. It offers a step process, workbooks and tools. It includes guidance on how to include long-term trends in programming with a focus on climate change.
It is essential that organisations working on poverty reduction take into account the impact of climate change on the communities and sectors where they are working. In so doing, they will be better able to support community members and government officials to adapt to the adverse effects and take advantage of any opportunities presented. This requires a detailed analysis of the impacts of climate change at the local level in order to build adaptive capacity to withstand both sudden shocks and incremental changes in the climate. Participatory tools have been updated for use of uncovering community perceptions of changes, alongside identifying historical climate data.
No Comments » | Add your commentSustainability or quick fix?
Temporary restrictions to energy supply, nationally or internationally are a frequent occurrence. I can recall energy shortages caused by striking miners in the 1970s, the OPEC embargo of 1973, the Iran/Iraq war in 1980, the 1990 invasion of Kuwait and last year’s Fukushima nuclear reactor shutdown in Japan to name just a few.
Renewable technologies use freely available resources such as wind, water and sunshine and are not dependent on the fluctuating world price of carbon intensive fossil fuels. It seems an obvious solution to focus our investment on these.
But the prevailing wisdom amongst developed countries is that quick fix high tech ‘geo-engineering’ solutions will solve the problem of global warming.
There is a history of environmental disasters associated with meddling with our planet’s ecosystems in unproven ways. Cane toads were introduced to the sugar plantations of Queensland, Australia in 1935 to control a pest called cane beetles. Over the years, with no natural predators, these toads have become a much greater pest than the original beetle. 
The Nile perch was introduced into Africa’s Lake Victoria for food and sport fishing. It has already eaten its way through 200 native fish species, and is still going. I could go on….
Developed countries already make too many demands on the resources of our fragile planet while a third of humanity lacks access to modern energy. We should surely be concentrating our scarce resources on improving this situation rather than lavishing time, money and scientific expertise on unproven vanity projects. Practical Action has a wealth of experience to show that small scale renewable energy drives development.
2012 is the UN year of sustainable energy for all – we must ensure that is exactly what is does.
2 Comments » | Add your commentClimate change should be prioritized by the media as a critical concern
As Kenya prepares for the first general elections in 2012 under the new Constitution, the media’s focus has been on politics. While this is important, the media should not forget other critical and pressing issues that need urgent attention. As agenda setters and opinion shapers, the media should not be swayed by politicians and their aggressive campaigns to get votes and gain favor among the electorate.
Climate change is one key issue that the media should focus on. The Horn of Africa experienced the worst famine in four decades this year and people are still reeling under its effects. It is laudable that the East African Community (EAC), the Common Market for Eastern Africa (COMESA) and Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) launched a joint five-year programme on climate change adaptation and mitigation in early December, 2011. Aimed at addressing the impacts of climate change in the EAC, COMESA and SADC region through successful adaptation and mitigation actions to enhance economic and social resilience, member states need to urgently create policies to implement the programme. It is worth noting that the EAC has taken the lead and established the Climate Change Fund and the Climate Change Coordination Unit.
The media should come in to set the agenda and shape public opinion on climate change. For starters, the media needs to raise awareness about the impacts of climate change among the citizenry, development partners, the private sector and the government. Secondly, the media should provide a platform upon which the citizenry can engage the government on climate change, demanding and claiming their rights to cushion them from climate change impacts such as the famine and floods. Last but not least, the media should find a way of generating debate among key stakeholders on climate change including the government, development partners, the private sector, the civil society and the citizenry
The impacts of climate change and the need for urgent attention cannot be overemphasized. According to a report by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) (Climate Change: Impacts, Vulnerabilities and Adaptation in Developing Countries) the impacts of climate change in Africa are many. In regard to water, many countries will face water stress with 75-220 million people facing severe water shortages by 2020. In as far as agriculture and food security are concerned, agricultural production will be severely compromised due to uncertainty about what and when to plant as weather patterns will be unpredictable. Worse still, the report predicts that yields from rain-fed crops could be halved by 2020 in some countries with net revenues from crops falling by 90% by 2100. Last but not least, an increase in frequency and intensity of extreme events, including droughts and floods are likely to occur.
Given that Africa and East Africa in particular have low adaptive capacity to both climate variability and climate change, it is important that the mass media use their power to help address these issues. This is urgent and important because the situation is exacerbated by the existing challenges including endemic widespread poverty, limited access to capital, including markets, infrastructure and technology, complex disasters and conflicts.
No Comments » | Add your commentFood sovereignty as solution to climate change
New Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) launches to African beats
It certainly wasn’t an event typically seen during the fortnight of UN climate negotiations here in Durban. An audience singing joyfully along with women farmers, Southern African youth grinning as they performed traditional dances, and the whooping and ululations ringing around the room, would have been enough to make you remember this day as something rather special and different.
But what really made the 4th of December launch of the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) stand out, was the feeling of inspiration, optimism and empowerment, as 14 Pan-African networks joined together to demand and implement Food Sovereignty for Africa. After a week of increasingly depressing climate negotiations, with corporate false solutions, and a steady grinding down of expectations, AFSA’s launch and message reminded us all that we are together, we have the solutions, and there is nothing to stop us making them happen.
Of course, it is precisely because of the multiple threats to Africa’s food systems, farmers, communities and ecoystems, that this alliance has come together. “There are so many challenges facing our continent,” said Anne Maina of the African Biodiversity Network (ABN), one of AFSA’s member networks. “Together AFSA’s member networks represent a huge constituency and we are all in agreement that Food Sovereignty is the way forward to ensure resilient food systems and ecosystems in the face of climate change and destructive development.”
Million Belay of Melca Mahiber, an Ethiopian member of ABN, explained that “food Sovereignty is an approach to agriculture that is radical, but self-evident too. It holds the interests of small-scale food producers, their communities and ecosystems, as critical to strengthening resilient food systems. For too long, food policy has focused on yield at any cost – and undermined the very systems and people on which food production depends. Food Sovereignty is a powerful concept and framework that is clear about embracing solutions, and challenging the threats.”
Agnes Yawe of Participatory Ecological Land Use Management (PELUM), a network with members in 10 countries elaborated further: “The Alliance for Food Sovereignty is working to promote agroecology as a solution for climate change, feeding people, biodiversity, livelihoods and healing the soils. It is about using and conserving the resources that are freely available to communities. These are appropriate for our economies, and our small scale farmers, who don’t need the expensive chemical inputs that are being pushed on us.”
Food Sovereignty also recognises the enormous value of indigenous knowledge about agriculture and ecosystems. Mphatheleni Makaulule, an indigenous community leader from Venda in the North of South Africa, expresses the clarity with which her people see climate change and industrialised food systems: “We cannot have health in a sick climate. In our territories, the soil, water and indigenous forest is already in disorder, and that affects the ecosystem. The indigenous seeds from the indigenous knowledge are our hope to adapt with this climate change, and this is why we want food sovereignty.”
Amid the celebrations, the groups shared sobering information about the way that false solutions to climate change and hunger are actually a key cause of Africa’s problems. Simon Mwamba of the East African Farmers’ Federation (ESAFF) told the room “The COP17 negotiations should not be used to advance the push for the Green Revolution in Africa, which traps farmers into cycles of debt and poverty. The green revolution will just enhance the corporate grip over agriculture and farmers, thereby threatening food sovereignty. Such practices force smallholder farmers to be dependent on agrochemicals, while eroding the seed diversity that Africa needs for resilience to climate change and a food secure future. Genetically Modified (GM) crops will be even worse ”
Nnimmo Bassey of Friends of the Earth Africa added “Climate Change is killing our continent and peoples, but so are the so-called solutions proposed by profit-hungry corporations. This is why we are coming together as AFSA, to speak out for African solutions to the problems caused by the industrialised North.”
As the gathering sang their last round of the rousing South African soul song “that’s why I’m a farmer now,” we all knew that the challenges ahead are many. But the energy that swelled around the room has filled all with the optimism that Food Sovereignty can show us the way.
AFSA outline their vision and the need for Food Sovereignty in Africa, in their new report “Food Sovereignty Systems: Feeding the world, regenerating ecosystems, rebuilding local economies, and cooling the Planet – all at the same time”.
1 Comment » | Add your commentTechnologies in a changing climate
Climate change for a long time now has stopped being a question of ‘if…’ and more a matter of ‘how much’ (and the answer to that currently isn’t very nice).
To deal with this, enter technologies. They fall into three categories:
1) Mitigation – reducing emission from human activities, from home efficiency devices to renewables and nuclear energy;
2) Adaptation – ways of dealing with the impacts of varying rainfall, temperature, sea level rise and increased frequency and magnitude of disaster events. Most urgent for the poorest groups and those in low lying states where the most vulnerability lies, but planning is also under way for London, Durban, and other developed cities.
3) Geo-engineering – large and unproven projects to remove carbon from the atmosphere or reflect the solar radiation. Includes; ocean iron fertilization projects; mirrors in space; pipes; dreams.
Arguably, the most iconic climate change related technology is the wind turbine, used for clean energy generation. Less is known about the possibility of mirrors in space, and probably for the best. But adaptation technologies are equally mysterious for many people in developed countries. This is springs from a lack of awareness that people in developing countries feel climate change most acutely – “first and worst”.
Nevertheless, adaptation is happening spontaneously as people respond to the altered conditions they find in their area. Technologies, whether used to diversify livelihoods or protect assets, can make this easier, but people will also have to adapt their technologies in order to keep them appropriate.
Enter climate uncertainty – not knowing precisely how climate change will manifest in a specific area over the next two-three decades – and you have a problem that requires new ways of thinking about technology and a new way of doing development.
Today’s Geek Club (Practical Action’s online discussion forum) from 10am to 4pm will discuss the issues of technology for adaptation. This is set against the back drop of the current round of climate negotiations in Durban, South Africa, where countries are discussing proposals for ‘technology transfer’ to developing countries to support adaptation. Come and join us as we consider the how, what, and why not of adapting to climate change.
No Comments » | Add your commentSome positive progress
This week I have been following closely the negotiations on adaptation – discussing a number of issues that though they sound remote from the realities of how climate change is affecting people’s daily lives around the world, do have the potential for helping governments support their vulnerable populations. And the signs, on Friday night, are that the draft decisions look quite promising. These decisions are on issues such as the content of National Adaptation Plans, the nature of the support body that will guide developing country governments, and the extension of a programme of workshops and reports on different topics important for adaptation. Negotiations will go on through much of tonight, and probably most of tomorrow. I’m not staying up all night – but I will be back at the conference centre tomorrow to see how things have progressed.
No Comments » | Add your commentAgro-ecology, a climate solace
EF Schumacher said that one can “call a thing immoral or ugly, soul-destroying or a degradation of man, a peril to the peace of the world or to the well-being of future generations; as long as you have not shown it to be uneconomic you have not really questioned its right to exist, grow, and prosper”. Certain powerful countries at the climate change conference have clearly read this straight and not sensed the irony, taking it as carte blanche to let the ugly face of climate change continue because its immediate costs will be hidden amongst the most vulnerable groups in Africa and Southern Asia.
This is all very depressing. What is not, however, is hearing about the solutions already being put into practice on the ground in many countries. Ecological food provision is featuring quite high in discussions around and outside the convention centre, primarily because farmers, fishers, and herders have found it to be a successful approach for dealing with climate change and meeting food needs. Unlike the industrial food system that contributes up to thirty percent of global emissions through chemical inputs, international transport, and use of heavy machinery, and deforestation for cash cropping, agro-ecology has very low emissions and can store GHGs in plant and soil matter. At the same time, it is also more resilient to the impacts of climate change, protecting biodiversity, replenishing the natural environment, and promoting local seeds, rather than creating dependence on one or two costly varieties.
In a side event yesterday, people from South Africa, Ethiopia, Kenya and Nepal spoke of the specific techniques. Many were building on the traditional knowledge and varieties nearly lost in the race to commercialised farming. As Mphathe Makaulule, a farmer from the South Africa’s Limpopo region said “the coming generation will realise that money cannot be breathed or chewed”. Her community pooled its knowledge of the surrounding resources in calendars and maps that express the changes they’ve experienced over the past decades. Today was Practical Action’s turn, and our work with farmers in Sri Lanka and Zimbabwe was introduced alongside some of our renewable energy projects by Ranga Pallawala and Lasten Mika respectively.
These initiatives may sound a long way from the staid international climate negotiations, and that’s precisely why La Via Campesina is calling on all farmers’ movements and organizations, rural workers, landless people to join them for an international day of mass action this Saturday. In Nepal, they’ve already managed to connect existing community actions with the international discussions as the national plan for adaptation was produced in connection with local plans. As Nepal receives global support to help it adapt to climate change, it goes to fund actions such as the conservation of Lake Rupa by farmer associations and fisher groups (see video).
So, it seems that “to exist, grow, and prosper” you don’t have to degrade or threaten future of generations, you just have to step out of the conference impasse and follow the fields.
Earning from Nature to Pay for its Upkeep from Mahesh Shrestha on Vimeo.
No Comments » | Add your commentInvesting in agriculture to alleviate hunger
2011 Blog Action Day on 16 October – World Food Day – is, naturally, themed around food
Food is a basic human need. Yet for many people across the world, this basic human need is not that easy to come by.
Putting food on the table is a struggle for small scale farmers and pastoralists with little income or natural resources. It seems ridiculous, doesn’t it, that the very people who grow food or rear livestock for food are those that go hungry? Why? Lack of agricultural knowledge and investment, little access to credit, little access to markets, growing competition for land and price volatility.
What is more, where the climate is changing year on year, there are no spare resources to adjust or adapt practices in order to reduce the impacts of droughts, floods and other extreme weather events.
Mothers queue for hours at Mandera District Hospital to get food
I was recently in Mandera, north western Kenya, where I came face-to-face with the terrible reality of drought, and the devastating impact it’s having on families and children.
People hadn’t eaten for days, yet when asked what they needed, not one person said they needed food. In fact, any food aid they received went to their livestock. What they needed was rain so they could grow their crops and feed their livestock.
So it was good to see Practical Action working with agricultural communities to cope with drought by helping to develop drought resistant crops, protect livestock and conserve precious water.
High up in the Andes in Peru, the temperature can drop to as low as -35 degrees centigrade and there is practically no vegetation. Practical Action works with communities to grow food that will survive these harsh conditions.
And in flood prone places like Bangladesh where it’s impossible to grow crops, Practical Action has developed a technology to allow farmers to grow food on flooded land.
We work with entire market systems, often focusing on helping poor farmers and producers to build their abilities to engage with people they do business with and get better deals for themselves and their communities.
Investing in farmers and pastoralists like this ensures not only can they put food on the table but they can also earn more money – working themselves out of poverty.
4 Comments » | Add your comment
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