Tag: Environment

Upset with the Opulence of the Rich? But the World’s Children Are Paying the Bill — Global Issues

“The world’s richest countries are providing healthier environments for children within their borders, yet are disproportionately contributing to the destruction of the global environment”. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS
  • by Baher Kamal (madrid)
  • Inter Press Service

MADRID, May 30 (IPS) – The excesses committed by rich people can be deadly–and in fact they are. Be it about food, energy or overall waste, such excesses have been depleting the world’s natural resources and pushing both current and future generations towards the edge of a predictable abyss.

See how

Over-consumption in the world’s richest countries is destroying children’s environments globally, explains UNICEF (the UN Children Fund) in its report Innocenti Report Card 17: Places and Spaces.

“The world’s richest countries are providing healthier environments for children within their borders, yet are disproportionately contributing to the destruction of the global environment.”

In fact, if everybody in the world consumed resources at the rate people do in Economic Cooperation and Development OECD (38 countries), and the European Union (EU) States (27), the equivalent of 3.3 Earths would be needed to keep up with consumption levels.

But if everyone were to consume resources at the rate at which people in Canada, Luxembourg and the United States do, at least five Earths would be needed

UNICEF compares how both OECD and the EU countries fare in providing healthy environments for children.

For this purpose, it features indicators such as exposure to harmful pollutants including toxic air, pesticides, damp and lead; access to light, green spaces and safe roads; and countries’ contributions to the climate crisis, consumption of resources, and the dumping of e-waste.

Destroying children’s environment.. And lives

“Not only are the majority of rich countries failing to provide healthy environments for children within their borders, they are also contributing to the destruction of children’s environments in other parts of the world,” said Gunilla Olsson, Director of UNICEF Office of Research – Innocenti.

“Mounting waste, harmful pollutants and exhausted natural resources are taking a toll on our children’s physical and mental health and threatening our planet’s sustainability.

Learn more, please

The Innocenti Report includes other key findings. See some of them:

  • Over 20 million children have elevated levels of lead in their blood. Lead is one of the most dangerous environmental toxic substances.
  • Finland, Iceland and Norway rank in the top third for providing a healthy environment for their children yet rank in the bottom third for the world at large, with high rates of emissions, e-waste and consumption.
  • In Iceland, Latvia, Portugal and the United Kingdom 1 in 5 children is exposed to damp and mould at home; while in Cyprus, Hungary and Turkey more than 1 in 4 children is exposed.
  • Many children are breathing toxic air both outside and inside their homes. Mexico has among the highest number of years of healthy life lost due to air pollution at 3.7 years per thousand children, while Finland and Japan have the lowest at 0.2 years.
  • In Belgium, Czech Republic, Israel, the Netherlands, Poland and Switzerland more than 1 in 12 children are exposed to high pesticide pollution.
  • Pesticide pollution has been linked with cancer, including childhood leukaemia and can harm children’s nervous, cardiovascular, digestive, reproductive, endocrine, blood and immune systems.

But there is more, much more…

Sadly enough, all the above is not the sole cause that damages the present and future of children. See, for example:

  • The shocking extent of exploitative baby formula milk marketing. The world’s leading health specialised body (WHO) revealed the “… insidious, exploitative, aggressive, misleading and pervasive” marketing tricks used by the baby formula milk business with the sole aim of increasing, even more, their already high profits.
  • Severe wasting: UNICEF warns that the number of children with severe wasting is rising and getting worse. Its report Severe wasting: An overlooked child survival emergency shows that in spite of rising levels of severe wasting in children and rising costs for life-saving treatment, global financing to save the lives of children suffering from wasting is also under threat.
  • Severe wasting – where children are too thin for their height resulting in weakened immune systems – is the most immediate, visible and life-threatening form of malnutrition. Worldwide, at least 13.6 million children under five suffer from severe wasting, resulting in 1 in 5 deaths among this age group.
  • Migrant children: Around the world, migrant children are facing alarming levels of xenophobia, the socioeconomic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, and limited access to essential services, according to UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell.
  • Children in war: Nearly 90% of people in Syria live in poverty. More than 6.5 million children need urgent assistance – the greatest number of Syrian children in need since the conflict began. There, only one in four young children get the diets they need to grow healthy. The price of the average food basket has nearly doubled in 2021 alone. In Yemen, 45% of children are stunted and over 86% have anaemia; In other Middle East countries, like Lebanon, 94% of young children are not receiving the diets they need, while over 40% of women and children under the age of five have anaemia;
  • Child soldiers: Thousands of children are recruited and used in armed conflicts across the world. Between 2005 and 2020, more than 93,000 children were verified as recruited and used by parties to conflict, although the actual number of cases is believed to be much higher.These boys and girls suffer extensive forms of exploitation and abuse that are not fully captured by that term. Warring parties use children not only as fighters, but as scouts, cooks, porters, guards, messengers and more. Many, especially girls, are also subjected to gender-based violence.
  • Child forced labour: There are more than 160 million children forced in labour. They are children washing clothes in rivers, begging on the streets, hawking, walking for kilometres in search of water and firewood, their tiny hands competing with older, experienced hands to pick coffee or tea, or as child soldiers are familiar sights in Africa and Asia, explains IPS journalist Joyce Chimbi.

Resources are scarce

There are too many other crimes being committed against the world’s children.

One of them is really staggering: the very organisation: UNICEF, which was created 75 years ago to cover the emergencies of European children who fell victims of the Europe-launched II World War, is now bady short of vitally needed funding to save the lives of millions of world’s children.

Not only, a good part of these scarce resources is justifiably devoted to saving children of yet another European war.

© Inter Press Service (2022) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service

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The Motto of Their Defenders in Peru — Global Issues

Community organizing is a lynchpin in the lives of environmental defenders in Peru, as in the case of Mirtha Villanueva, pictured here with other activists from the Cajamarca region also involved in the defense of rivers and Mother Earth. CREDIT: Courtesy of Mirtha Villanueva
  • by Mariela Jara (lima)
  • Inter Press Service

LIMA, May 30 (IPS) – “Water is part of our culture, it is intrinsic to the Amazon,” said José Manuyama, a member of a river defense committee in his native Requena, a town located in the department of Loreto, the largest in Peru, covering 28 percent of the national territory.

Despite the large size of this Amazon rainforest department or province located in the northeast of the country, data from 2020 indicated that it barely exceeded one million inhabitants, including some 220,000 indigenous people, in a country with a total population of 32.7 million.

A teacher by profession and a member of the Kukama indigenous people, one of the 51 officially recognized in Peru’s Amazon rainforest region, Manuyama reminisced about his childhood near a small river in a conversation with IPS during the Second Interregional Meeting of Defenders of Rivers and Territories, held in Lima on May 25.

“We would wait for the high water season and the floods, because that was our world. When the water comes, it’s used for bathing, for fishing, it’s a whole world adapted to water,” he said.

And he added: “We also waited for the floods to pass, which left us enormous areas of land where the forest would grow and where my mother would plant her cucumbers, her corn. Seeing the river, the transparent water, that beautiful, fertile world: that’s where I grew up.”

Today, approaching the age of 50, Manuyama is also an activist in defense of nature and rivers in the face of continuous aggressions from extractive economic activities that threaten the different forms of life in his home region.

Manuyama is a member of a collective in defense of the Nanay River that runs through the department of Loreto. It is one of the tributaries of the Amazon River that originates in the Andes highlands in southern Peru and which is considered the longest and the biggest in terms of volume in the world, running through eight South American countries.

“We started out as the Water Defense Committee in 2012 when the Nanay watershed was threatened by oil activity,” he said. “Together with other collectives and organizations we managed to block that initiative, but since 2018 there has been a second extractive industry wave, with mining that is damaging the basin and seems to be the latest brutal calamity in the Amazon.”

José Manuyama, a member of the Kukama indigenous people and a teacher committed to the protection of nature, stands in front of the Momón River, a tributary of the Nanay River, which environmental activists have been defending from extractive activities that threaten its very existence in the department of Loreto, in Peru’s Amazon jungle region. CREDIT: Courtesy of José Manuyama
José Manuyama, a member of the Kukama indigenous people and a teacher committed to the protection of nature, stands in front of the Momón River, a tributary of the Nanay River, which environmental activists have been defending from extractive activities that threaten its very existence in the department of Loreto, in Peru’s Amazon jungle region. CREDIT: Courtesy of José Manuyama

Their struggle was weakened during the pandemic, when the “millionaire polluting illegal mining industry” – as he describes it – remained active. Their complaints have gone unheeded by the authorities despite the harmful impacts of the pollution, such as on people’s food, which depends to a large extent on the fish they catch.

However, he is hopeful about the new national network of defenders of rivers and territories, an effort that emerged in 2019 and that on May 25 organized its second national meeting in Lima, with the participation of 60 representatives from the Amazon, Andes and Pacific coast regions of the country.

“It is important because we strengthen ourselves in a common objective of defending territories and rights, confronting the various predatory extractive waves that exist in this dominant social economic system that uses different factors in a chain to achieve its purpose. The battle is not equal, but this is how resistance works,” Manuyama said.

Like the watersheds of a river

Ricardo Jiménez, director of the non-governmental Peru Solidarity Forum, an institution that works with the network of organizations for the protection and defense of rivers, said it emerged as a response to the demand of various sectors in the face of depredation and expanding illegal mining and logging activities detrimental to water sources.

The convergence process began in 2019, he recalled, with the participation, among others, of the Amazonian Wampis and Awajún indigenous peoples, “women defenders of life and the Pachamama” of the northeastern Andes highlands department of Cajamarca, and “rondas campesinas” (rural social organizations) in various regions of the country.

Mirtha Villanueva, defender of life and Pachamama in the Cajamarca region of northeastern Peru, is seen here participating in one of the sessions of the Second Interregional Meeting of Defenders of Rivers and Territories, which brought together 60 participants from different parts of the country. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

The first important milestone of the initiative occurred in 2021, when they held their first national meeting, in which a National Promotional Committee of Defenders of Rivers and Territories was formed.

They approved an agenda that they sent to the then minister of culture, Gisela Ortiz, who remained in office for only four months and was unable to meet the request to form the Multisectoral Roundtable for dialogue to address issues such as environmental remediation of legal and illegal extractive activities.

The proposed roundtable also mentioned the development of criteria for the protection of the headwaters of river basins, and the protection of river defenders from the criminalization of their protests and initiatives.

At this second national meeting, the Promotional Committee updated its agenda and created synergies with the National River Protection Network, made up of non-governmental organizations.

It also joined the river action initiative of the Pan-Amazonian Social Forum (Fospa), whose tenth edition will be held Jul. 28-31 in Belem do Pará, in Brazil’s Amazon region, and whose national chapter met on May 27.

Three days of activity were organized in the Peruvian capital by the defenders of the rivers and their riverside communities, who on May 26 participated in a march of indigenous peoples, organized by the Interethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Rainforest.

“There is a coming together of the social collectives at the national level and also with their peers at the Pan-Amazonian level; we have a shared path with particularities but which coincides,” Jiménez told IPS.

A group of villagers participates in the monitoring and surveillance of the Chimín river in the Condebamba valley, in the Cajamarca region of northeastern Peru. The river is contaminated by illegal mining activity, which harms all the communities along its banks, as it irrigates 40 percent of the crops in the area. CREDIT: Courtesy of Mirtha Villanueva

Rivers have no borders

Mirtha Villanueva is an activist who defends life and Pachamama (Mother Earth, in the Quechua indigenous language) in Cajamarca, a northeastern department of Peru, where more than a decade ago the slogan “water yes, gold no!” was coined as part of the struggles of the local population in defense of their lakes and wetlands against the Conga mining project of the U.S.-owned Yanacocha gold mine.

The project was suspended, but only temporarily, after years of social protests against the open-pit gold mine, which in 2012 caused several deaths and led to the declaration of a state of emergency in the region for several months, in one of the most critical episodes in the communities’ struggle against the impact of extractivism on their environment and their lives.

A large part of Villanueva’s 66 years has been dedicated to the defense of nature’s assets, of rivers, to guarantee decent lives for people, in a struggle that she knows is extremely unequal in the face of the economic power of the mining companies.

“We, the defenders of the rivers, have to grow in strength and I hope that at the Fospa Peru meeting we will approve a plan of action agreed with our brothers and sisters in Ecuador, Bolivia and Brazil, because our rivers are also connected, they have no borders,” she told IPS during an interview at the meeting in Lima.

“We need to strengthen ourselves from the local to the international level to have an impact with our actions. We receive 60 percent of our rainfall from the Amazon forest. How can we not take care of the Amazon?” she said.

José Manuyama stands to the right of the poster during one of his presentations at the Second Interregional Meeting of Defenders of Rivers and Territories, which brought together activists from different parts of Peru in Lima. His group analyzed power relations in the context of the risks surrounding the country’s rivers, especially those in the Amazon rainforest. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

The work she carries out with the environmental committees is titanic. She recalled the image of poor rural families protesting the change in the rivers and how it has caused rashes on their children’s skin.

And when they went to the mine to complain, they were told: “When I came, your river was already like this. Why do you want to blame me? Prove it.”

“In this situation, the farmer remains silent, which is why it is important to work in the communities to promote oversight and monitoring of ecosystems and resources. We work with macroinvertebrates, beings present in the rivers that are indicators of clean or polluted waters, gradually training the population,” she explained.

This is an urgent task. She gave as an example the case of the district of Bambamarca, in Loreto, which has the highest number of mining environmental liabilities in the country: 1118. “Only one river is still alive, the Yaucán River,” Villanueva lamented.

She also mentioned the Condebamba valley, “with the second highest level of diversity in Peru,” and 40 percent of whose farmland is being irrigated by water from the Chimín river polluted by the mines.

“In Cajamarca we have 11 committees monitoring the state of the rivers, we all suffer reprisals, but we cannot stop doing what we do because people’s health and lives are at stake,” both present and future, she said.

© Inter Press Service (2022) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service

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Gender Sensitivity Key to Achieving Climate Justice — Global Issues

Women attend an event on solutions for implementing gender-responsive climate action at the United Nations in 2019. Credit: UN Women/Ryan Brown.
  • by Juliet Morrison (toronto)
  • Inter Press Service

Toronto, May 27 (IPS) – While the climate crisis affects virtually every aspect of life, its impacts are not felt equally.

A person’s vulnerability to climate change varies depending on their position in society, such as socioeconomic status, dependence on natural resources, and capacity to respond to natural hazards. Since different genders often experience different social standings, gender has emerged as a key element to consider for effective climate planning and adaptation.

Angie Dazé, Gender Equality and Social Inclusion lead at the International Institute of Sustainable Development (IISD), says social norms linked to gender in their communities and households influence people’s different roles.

“Gender influences how people experience the impacts of climate change, and it also influences their capacity to respond,” Dazé told IPS in an interview. “Because people play different roles, they’re differently impacted by the same effects of climate change.”

While climate change experiences are context-specific and varied, a growing body of research suggests that women are more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. The higher poverty level and lower socioeconomic power make recovery from natural disasters more difficult for women. UN figures also show that women and girls make up 80 percent of those displaced by climate change.

“Gender inequalities create barriers that can exacerbate people’s vulnerability to climate change. And this most often affects women and girls,” Dazé said.

Because social groups experience climate change differently, gender has become more central to the United Nations (UN) climate process and the international discourse around climate action.

Target 13.b of the UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) on climate actionrecognizes the gender-environment nexus. It states that focusing on women is key for increasing climate change planning and management capacity.

Key frameworks encouraging the integration of gender considerations for climate action, such as the enhanced Lima Work Programme on Gender and its Gender Action Plan, have also been established at recent UN Climate Change Conferences. Agreed upon at COP 25 in 2019, these frameworks promote gender mainstreaming for the parties and the integration of gender considerations throughout the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) work and processes.

Still, gender representation remains limited in climate decision-making spaces, and considerations of gender in national policy are inconsistent.

Despite men being just over half of the registered government delegates at UNFCCC plenary meetings from May to June 2021, according to a UNFCCC analysis, they spoke for 74 percent of the time. Attendance at COP gender-related events is also low.

On the national level, only 15 percent of environmental ministries are headed by women, and only a third of national energy frameworks contain considerations of gender. A study from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) of 89 nationally determined contributions revealed that nearly a quarter have no references to gender.

Pointing to the harm of gender-blind approaches to climate policy, Christina Kwauk, a gender, education, and climate change specialist, told IPS, “the policies that we create could have unintended consequences that perpetuate structures of discrimination or inequality, or gender norms and harmful gender-based practices.

“Current policies or solutions or actions could exacerbate time poverty for women or exclude access to women. Maybe women might not have as much access to these different solutions because of existing gender norms.”

Kwauk credits the progress toward gender mainstreaming as significant but believes it has not reached the pace needed to see a significant impact.

Current gender-responsive climate policies, Kwauk explained, “are all pointing in the right direction. But the underlying systems of inequality and the underlying structures of inequality remain. And as long as those issues are still there, the policy, the discourse, these are good moves in the right direction, but they’re not enough. They’re not changing actual lived experiences the social norms, and the social barriers to participation.”

As an eco-feminist and climate change activist working on land access for women, Adenike Oladosu is familiar with the intersections of gender and the environment. In an interview with IPS, she stressed the need for countries to integrate gender throughout various sectors better and—pointing to her home country of Nigeria—the need for governments to legalize and implement their gender action plan throughout all sectors.

Oladosu believes that this action is paramount to improving the representation of women in global fora.

“When we see that gender is important in different sectors, it improves the representation of women in conferences because we are able to execute every action we take in a gender-sensitive manner,” Oladosu said. “It all has to start from individual countries, trying to improve gender sensitivity in their barriers, or trying to integrate gender-sensitive approaches in their various sectors.”

Empowering women can also help create new solutions to mitigate the climate crisis. Drawing upon her advocacy work, Oladosu emphasized that tapping into women’s indigenous knowledge as caretakers of the land and facilitating land access for women leads to new solutions for mitigating the climate crisis.

UN data shows that when women are provided with the same resources as men, they can increase agricultural yields by 20-30%, reducing hunger.

Overall, gender is key to consider—and women are paramount to involve—for a just and equitable fight against climate change.

“Women make up half of the population of the world,” Oladosu said. “So, if you take them away or leave them behind in solving the defining issue of our time, it definitely is going to affect the solutions that are brought up, or by now, we would have achieved climate justice.”

IPS UN Bureau Report


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Not Enough Clean Water in Europe? Who Cares… — Global Issues

It is estimated that more than one third of the European Union will be under “high water stress” by the 2070. Credit: Bigstock
  • by Baher Kamal (madrid)
  • Inter Press Service

MADRID, May 26 (IPS) – So busy as they are with strengthening military alliances and devoting billions of taxpayers’ money to double their war budgets and subsidise fossil fuels, European Governments seem not to care about the reiterated alerts that their continent faces a serious risk: the reduced availability -and more polluted– drinking water.

Two specialised bodies –the UN Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE), and the European branch of the World Health Organization (WHO)– have warned that plans to make water access possible in the face of climate pressures “are absent” in the pan-European region.

And “in most cases” throughout the region there has also been a lack of coordination on drinking water, sanitation and health during the Thirteenth meeting of the Working Group on Water and Health held on 19-20 May 2022 in Geneva.

Water-related disease

From insufficient drinking water supply to contamination by sewage overflow and disease outbreaks from improper wastewater treatment, existing risks from climate change to water, sanitation and hygiene in the pan-European region are set to increase significantly, UNECE/WHO-Europe warned.

On this, a previous report: Drugged Water: A New Global Pandemic Hiding in Plain Sight? informs that people around the world are unknowingly being exposed to water laced with antibiotics, which could spark the rise of drug-resistant pathogens and potentially fuel another global pandemic.

A study elaborated by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), found that, globally, not enough attention is being focused on the threat posed by antimicrobial resistance with most antibiotics being excreted into the environment via toilets or through open defecation.

While 80 percent of wastewater in the world is not treated, even in developed countries treatment facilities are often unable to filter out dangerous bugs.

Already in 2015, 34.8 billion daily doses of antibiotics were consumed, with up to 90 percent of them excreted into the environment as active substances. Since then the amount of daily consumed antibiotics has been increasing considerably.

Dangers are real

“Climate change is already posing serious challenges to water and sanitation systems in countries around the world,” said Thomas Croll-Knight, spokesperson for the UN Economic Commission for Europe.

“From reduced water availability and contamination of water supplies to damage to sewerage infrastructure, these risks are set to increase significantly unless countries step up measures to increase resilience now,” warned Thomas Croll-Knight.

It is estimated that more than one third of the European Union will be under “high water stress” by the 2070s, by which time the number of additional people affected (compared to 2007) is expected to surge to 16–44 million.

Bad news

Meanwhile, as governments prepare for the next UN climate conference (COP 27) in November 2022 in Egypt and the UN 2023 Water Conference, UNECE painted a potentially grim picture moving forward in parts of Europe.

“From water supply and sewerage infrastructure damage to water quality degradation and sewage spillage, impacts are already being felt.”

For example, increased energy demand and disruption to treatment plants in Hungary are threatening significant additional operational costs for wastewater treatment.

And challenges in ensuring adequate water supply in the Netherlands have increased, while Spain struggles to maintain a minimum drinking water supply during drought periods.

Huge risk of water shortage

But if the Governments of wealthy and industrially and technologically advanced Europe are not dedicating enough attention to the looming drinking water shortage, imagine the case of the overwhelming majority of developing regions.

In fact, it is estimated that, globally, over two billion people live in countries that experience high water stress.

Four billion people facing severe water stress

The UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) reports that other estimates are even more pessimistic, with up to four billion people – over half the population of the planet – already facing severe water stress for at least one month of the year while half a billion suffer from permanent water stress.”

The situation has been worsening as more than half the global population will be at risk by 2050, due to stress on the world’s water resources.

700 million of people displaced…

“Desertification alone threatens the livelihoods of nearly one billion people in 100 countries. Intense water scarcity may displace as many as 700 million people by 2030,” said Munir Akram, president of the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) during a UN meeting held already over a year ago.

On that occasion, the UN Deputy Secretary-General, Amina Mohammed, told the meeting the current rate of progress would have to quadruple to meet the 2030 deadline.

“Moreover, the planetary crisis, including the interlinked threats of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution, will increase water scarcity”, she added.

… and 600 million children impacted

“By 2040, one in four of the world’s children under 18 – some 600 million – will be living in areas of extremely high-water stress.”

The UN estimates more than two billion people worldwide still do not have access to safely managed drinking water, while 4.2 billion lack safely managed sanitation.

Meanwhile, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) during the same meeting reported that one in five children worldwide do not have enough water to meet their daily needs.

“The world’s water crisis is not simply coming, it is here, and climate change will only make it worse”, said UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta Fore.

“Children are the biggest victims. When wells dry up, children are the ones missing school to fetch water. When droughts diminish food supplies, children suffer from malnutrition and stunting. When floods hit, children fall ill from waterborne illnesses…”

Africa, Asia, Middle East…

A UNICEF report found that Eastern and Southern Africa have the highest incidence of children living in “water poverty”, with nearly 60 percent facing difficulty in accessing water every day.

Meanwhile, humanitarian organisations continue to call for scaling up assistance in the Horn of Africa, where the worst drought in 40 years is affecting some 15 million people across Kenya, Ethiopia, and Somalia.

The drought follows four consecutive failed rainy seasons, and the fear is the number could jump to 20 million if the current below-average rains fail.

UNICEF informes that South Asia is home to the largest number of children living in areas of high or extremely high vulnerability, or more than 155 million.

Meanwhile, the Middle East and North Africa is reported to be the most water-scarce region in the world, as it is home to 15 out of the 20 of the world’s most water-scarce countries.

What’s wrong with the world’s Governments?

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Cuban Farmers Fight Land Degradation with Sustainable Management — Global Issues

Farmer José Antonio Sosa, known as Ché, stresses the importance of taking into account the direction of the land for planting, and the use of live or dead barriers to prevent rains from washing away the topsoil to lower areas, thus combating soil degradation in Cuba. CREDIT: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS
  • by Luis Brizuela (havana)
  • Inter Press Service

HAVANA, May 23 (IPS) – Thorny bushes and barren soil made it look like a bad bet, but Cuban farmer José Antonio Sosa ignored other people’s objections about the land and gave life to what is now the thriving La Villa farm on the outskirts of Havana.

“The land was a mess, covered with sweet acacia (Vachellia farnesiana) and sickle bush (Dichrostachys cinérea), with little vegetation and many stones. People asked me how I was going to deal with it. With an axe and machete I gradually cleared the undergrowth, in sections,” Sosa told IPS.

Now there are plots of different varieties of fruit trees, vegetables and tubers on the 14 hectares that this farmer received from the State in usufruct in 2010, as part of a government policy to reduce unproductive land and boost food production.

The crops feed his family, while contributing to social programs and sales to the community, after part of the produce is delivered to the Juan Oramas Credit and Services Cooperative, to which the farm located in the municipality of Guanabacoa, one of the 15 municipalities of the Cuban capital, belongs.

On the farm, where he works with his family and an assistant, Sosa produces cow and goat milk, raises pigs and poultry, and is dreaming of farming freshwater fish in a small pond in the not too distant future.

La Villa is in the process of receiving “sustainably managed farm” certification. The farm and Sosa represent a growing effort by small Cuban farmers to recuperate degraded land and use environmentally friendly techniques.

The restoration of unproductive and/or degraded lands is also connected to the need to increase domestic food security, in a country highly dependent on food imports, whose rising prices mean a domestic market with unsatisfied needs and cycles of shortages such as the current one.

At the end of 2021, Cuba had 226,597 farms, 1202 of which had agroecological status while 64 percent of the total – some 146,000 – were working towards gaining agroecological certification, according to official statistics.

Sosa, who has been known as “Che” since he was a child, said the use of natural fertilizers and animal manure has made a difference in the recovery and transformation of the soil.

“It is also important to pay attention to the way crops are cultivated or harvested, to avoid compaction,” the farmer said.

Studies show that changes in land use, inadequate agricultural practices (including the intensive use of agricultural machinery and irrigation), the increase in human settlements and infrastructure and the effects of climate change are factors that are accelerating desertification and soil degradation in this Caribbean island nation of 11.2 million people.

Sosa stressed the importance of paying attention to the direction of the land for planting, and the use of living or dead barriers “to prevent the water from carrying the topsoil to lower areas when it rains.”

These cucumbers were grown using agroecological techniques on the La Villa farm, located in the municipality of Guanabacoa, one of the 15 that make up Havana, Cuba. CREDIT: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

Drought and climate change

In this archipelago covering 109,884 square kilometers, 77 percent of the soils are classified as not very productive.

They are affected by one or more adverse factors such as erosion, salinity, acidity, poor drainage, low fertility and organic matter content, or poor moisture retention.

The most recent statistics show that 35 percent of the soil in Cuba presents some degree of degradation.

But at 71 years of age, Sosa, who has worked in the countryside all his life, has no doubt that climate change is hurting the soil.

“The rain cycles have changed,” Sosa said. “When I was young, in the early 1960s, my father would plant taro (Colocasia esculenta, a tuber that is widely consumed locally) in March, around the 10th or so, and by the 15th it would be raining heavily. That is no longer the case. This April was very dry, especially at the end of the month, and so was early May.”

He also referred to the decrease in crop yields and quality, “as soils become hotter and water is scarcer.”

Several studies have corroborated important changes in Cuba’s climate in recent years, related to the increase in the average annual temperature, the decrease in cloud cover and stronger droughts, among other phenomena.

According to forecasts, the country’s climate will tend towards less precipitation and longer periods without rain, and by 2100 the availability of water potential could be reduced by more than 35 percent.

But more intense hurricanes are also expected, atmospheric phenomena that can discharge in 48 hours half of the average annual rainfall, with the consequent stress and severe soil erosion.

Although the least productive lands are located in the east, and Cuba’s so-called semi-desert is limited to parts of the southern coast of Guantánamo, the easternmost of the 15 provinces, forecasts indicate that the semi-arid zones could expand towards the west of the island.

Gloria Gómez (right), director of Natural Resources, Prioritized Ecosystems and Climate Change, and Jessica Fernández, head of the Climate Change Department of the General Directorate of Environment of Cuba’s Ministry of Science, Technology and Environment, confirm the government’s intention to promote the use of credits, insurance and taxes as incentives for farmers to improve soils. CREDIT: Luis Brizuela/IPS

Goals

In addition to being a State Party to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, since 2008 Cuba has been promoting the Program for Country Partnership, also known as the National Action Program to Combat Desertification and Drought; Sustainable Land Management.

Likewise, the Cuban government is committed to the 2030 Agenda and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), agreed within the United Nations in 2015.

In SDG 15, which involves life on land, target 15.3 states that “By 2030, combat desertification, restore degraded land and soil, including land affected by desertification, drought and floods, and strive to achieve a land degradation-neutral world.”

According to Sosa, the increase in soil degrading factors requires more efforts to restructure its physical and chemical characteristics.

In addition, he said, mechanisms should be sought to prioritize irrigation, taking into account that many sources are drying up or shrinking due to climate variability.

“In my case, I irrigate the lower part of the farm with a small system connected to the pond. But in the higher areas of the farm I depend on rainfall,” he said.

The construction of tanks or ponds to collect rainwater, in addition to the traditional reservoirs, are ideal alternatives for this Caribbean country with short, low-flow rivers and highly dependent on rainfall, which is more abundant during the May to October rainy season.

But farmers like Sosa require greater incentives: there is a need for more training on the importance of sustainable management techniques, and for economic returns, as well as financial and tax support, in order to make agroecological practices more widespread.

The use of natural fertilizers and animal manure is one of the keys to the restoration and transformation of the once degraded soils covered with thorny bushes of what is now La Villa farm, in the municipality of Guanabacoa, Havana, Cuba. CREDIT: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

In 2019, Cuba approved the National Land Degradation Neutrality Target Setting Program.

“The guideline foresees implementing new financial economic instruments or improving existing ones by 2030 in order to achieve neutrality in land degradation,” Jessica Fernández, head of the Climate Change department of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Environment, told IPS.

The plan is to enhance the use of credits, insurance and taxes as economic incentives for farmers, based on soil improvement and conservation, and to account for the current expenses destined to environmental solutions to determine the total expenses for soil conservation, the official added.

“We are in talks and studies with the Central Bank of Cuba to gradually introduce green banking,” Gloria Gómez, director of natural resources, prioritized ecosystems and climate change at the ministry, told IPS.

“This service will seek to promote and finance projects that provide solutions to environmental problems through loans with lower interest rates, longer repayment periods, incentives for green products and services, or eco-labeling,” she said.

Since 2000, the Ministry of Agriculture has been developing the National Program for Soil Improvement and Conservation, and in January the Policy for Soil Conservation, Improvement and Sustainable Management and Fertilizer Use came into effect.

At the same time, the Cuban State’s plan to combat climate change, better known as Tarea Vida, in force since 2017, also includes actions to mitigate soil vulnerabilities.

In the last five years, the principles of Sustainable Land Management (SLM) were applied to more than 2525 hectares, while one million of the more than six million hectares of agricultural land in the country received some type of benefit, statistics show.

Other national priorities are related to increasing the forested area to 33 percent, extending the areas under SLM by 150,000 hectares and improving 65 percent of agricultural land by the end of the current decade.

© Inter Press Service (2022) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service

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NASA, ESA, JAXA to Soon Scale Up Documentation of Changes in Environment, Society on Earth

NASA will soon be scaling up its documentation of environmental and societal changes on Earth. The space agency will achieve this by working in collaboration with its partners in Europe and Japan, namely ESA (European Space Agency) and JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency). The collaboration will include utilising all the Earth-observing satellite data available so far. This will be used to document and expand resources and understand a wider range of changes that are taking place in the environment and human society around the globe. The dashboard will include six areas of focus — atmosphere, agriculture, biomass, water and ocean, cryosphere, and economy.

The expanded documentation will widen the scope of online resources available to us. This will in turn help in the making of more data-driven stories. The information can also be used to explore relevant datasets.

Karen St. Germain, NASA Earth Science Division director, said in a statement, “With our partners at ESA and JAXA, this is another important step to get the latest information to the public about our changing planet, in an accessible and convenient way, which can inform decisions and planning for communities around the world.”

The dashboard aims to provide an accessible and objective resource to people like public scientists and decision-makers who may not yet be familiar with satellite data. Here’s what NASA’s website has to say about this project, “It offers a precise, objective, and comprehensive view of our planet. Using accurate remote sensing observations, the dashboard shows the changes occurring in Earth‘s air, land, and water and their effects on human activities. Users can explore countries and regions around the world to see how the indicators in specific locations change over time.”

For this purpose, the collaborators need to find satellite data streams that can be rendered to simplified and objective resources. Current computing infrastructure has to be updated to share the information across the agencies. The six focus areas will deal with different aspects of life on Earth.

The atmosphere focus area looks into air pollution and climate change, while the agriculture will seek more insights into agricultural production, crop conditions, and food supply. How do trees and plants remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere? We’ll know that through the biomass focus area. Cryosphere will deal with the impact of global warming on sea ice. The water and ocean area will explore the richness of this natural resource. The economy focus area will connect Earth’s social and economic systems to the environment.

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What India Needs To Do To Achieve Net-Zero Status by 2070 — Global Issues

As India grows and develops, its economic production and energy consumption will increase. | Picture courtesy: Flickr/CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
  • Opinion by R R Rashmi (new delhi)
  • Inter Press Service

NEW DELHI, May 20 (IPS) – The recent IPCC report that came out in the month of March 2022 says that, by the end of the century, the temperature rise is likely to be 2 to 3.7 degrees if global emissions, as they stand today, are not curtailed. In fact, according to the report, carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions need to come down by 45 percent globally (compared with 2005) by the end of 2030.

And current trends show that the reduction is falling quite short, as the total impact of all the nationally determined contributions put together is still not more than 11 percent. So, there is a vast gap between what we need to be doing and where we are currently.

First, let us understand the global context

The urgency of curtailing emissions is not lost on the political class. However, what continues to be a fraught matter is the share of responsibility that different countries are willing to accept when it comes to minimising their CO2 emissions.

Developed nations, which have contributed the most to the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere and have the resources and capability to curtail emissions, are unwilling to take on the greater share of this responsibility going forward.

Most developing nations feel that this is unfair, given that they have contributed less (or minimally) to the problem and are still being forced to contribute equally. Moreover, fast-growing economies like Brazil, China, and India have ever-expanding energy needs, considering the stage of development they are at.

Their reliance on fossil fuels at this time will naturally be higher. The fundamental problem remains one of apportioning the responsibility or ownership of future efforts, as the available carbon space in the atmosphere needs to be vacated (by developed nations) for those who need it (many countries in the Global South), but that is not happening.

Against the backdrop of this global competition for capturing carbon space, at the COP 26 summit in Glasgow last year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that India will achieve net-zero status by 2070.

The focus for India will now be on increasing the share of renewable energy in energy production and generation both in relative terms and absolute volume so as to eventually phase down consumption of coal and fossil fuels taking place in the economy across various sectors, and improving the carbon sink.

Increasing the uptake of renewable energy in India

There will likely be a large degree of government mobilisation towards solar and wind energy as well as biomass. Each of these has a role to play in India’s energy transition. However, given our climate, solar will receive the largest push.

The prime minister has announced that, by 2030, India will create 500 gigawatts of solar capacity. Currently, the national peak demand for electricity is around 203 gigawatts, whereas we have a capacity of around 400 gigawatts, including the renewables already in place.

So, by creating 500 gigawatts of solar electricity capacity, we should be able to meet a large share of our electricity demand even as it continues to increase. The prime minister wanted this to be in the range of 50 percent, meaning 50 percent of the electricity needs would be met from renewables by 2030. But, in actual fact, this may need a still higher quantum of renewables electricity capacity to be created.

The difficulty is that the efficiency of renewables is low, which is why the actual uptake of solar energy in the energy system is not more than 10 percent. In other words, we are only able to use approximately 10 percent of the electricity capacity that is created with renewables.

Even if we include the generation from nuclear or large hydro power in the small renewables, the share of renewable energy in the total electricity generation is still at about 21–22 percent, as compared to 78 percent with coal, oil, and gas.

So the question before us, as we try to make an energy transition, is: How do we enhance the uptake of renewables in the electricity system and how do we stabilise the grid? And where will the funding come from?

Even if India is able to produce intermittent renewable energy at a low variable cost, there are other systemic fixed costs that need to be factored in. These include the need for meeting the baseload in the grid (that is, the minimum level of electricity demand over 24 hours), transmitting the energy, transporting it across different states and regions, and, in the case of solar, making it available when the sun is not shining.

All of these require considerable investment in infrastructure and systems. And today our domestic financial system alone is not capable of mobilising finance at this scale.

So, the primary problem in making this energy transition is twofold. First, India needs to create technology for energy storage, which can meet the baseload in the grid and stabilise it when solar or wind energy is not available.

And, second, we need to mobilise the finance at a scale that can help us create a capacity of 500 gigawatts of renewable energy by 2030, and more as we go along. Every single gigawatt of renewable energy is going to cost approximately INR 6 crore. And not only in terms of financial cost, this kind of investment in renewables requires a lot of land as well.

So, the question is: Can we really mobilise these funds and resources at this scale and overcome the technology hump of renewable energy storage?

There is another challenge that lies ahead. Certain industrial sectors in the economy—for instance, petrochemicals, steel, and cement—are extremely inflexible in terms of the kind of technology and energy that they need.

So, even if we are able to reduce the emissions intensity of our GDP by improving energy efficiency and the proportion of renewable energy in our energy system, it is not going to be enough. As India grows and develops, its economic production and energy consumption will increase.

And, for these sectors, replacing carbon will not be possible without the availability of alternative fuels, which are necessary for certain industrial production and processes. Such fuels are necessary for transport and cement and steel production, which are likely to grow by three times.

Therefore, to make the transition, we need heavy investment in alternate low-carbon fuels such as hydrogen and natural gas. We also require tech innovation at scale to bring down the cost of these fuels and enable the production of steel and cement at an affordable and competitive rate.

In summary, India’s mitigation efforts must revolve largely around mobilising funds and investing in tech innovation at scale.

What India needs to focus on when it comes to adaptation

Enhancing climate resilience is going to be critical for a country like ours. Given that many states face unique kinds of climate threats, each of them must have a climate resilience strategy, so that the productivity of the economic system does not get compromised in the process of addressing climate change.

While we focus on making changes to our energy system, we need to take simultaneous measures to ensure that agricultural productivity remains stable, water does not become scarce, coastal communities are not threatened by the rise in sea level, and so on.

One way to do this is by increasing the capacities of the communities to address climate change. Managing water resources is going to be the key to adaptation efforts, given that close to 80 percent of the water in India is consumed in agriculture.

At the same time, we need to insulate communities from climate disasters like floods, droughts, cyclones, and extreme heatwaves, which requires investment in infrastructure, for instance, roads and telecom structures.

Here, the challenge is that there are very few entities coming forward to make the kind of investments we need. In the case of mitigation efforts, there are business models that can generate returns for the investors. But, in the case of adaptation and resilient infrastructure, there are no financial returns, and it is only the government budget or public resources that we have to fall back on.

There is reason to be hopeful

While the task ahead of us entails massive systemic changes that may seem daunting, we should not lose hope.

The intensity of global discussions has permeated into national strategies, such as India’s. The successful execution of our strategies depends on political commitment, which already exists at the national and state level. State MPs and MLAs are now thinking and talking about climate change—this was not the case 10 years ago.

What we need now is for state climate action plans (many of which exist) to incorporate a framework for mobilising investments and measuring benefits and outcomes. Once this is done, it’s only a matter of time before a climate lens is fully integrated into our development policies too.

Corporate India has also woken up to their contributions to worsening climate change, and are beginning to shift their priorities accordingly. Many industry majors such as the Tatas, Mahindra & Mahindra, Wipro, Shell India, and Dalmia have announced net-zero targets by 2040 or 2050.

The SEBI has mandated 1,000 top companies listed on the stock exchange to follow a mandatory framework of business sustainability and responsibility reporting and make disclosures on some of the key environmental parameters. This is a step in the right direction, and once we develop a robust disclosure system that includes penalties and rewards for actions taken, we will begin to see a lot more movement in this area.

When it comes to citizens, there are a few things that can be done. The first is to build our own awareness, and that of those around us, when it comes to climate change impacts. We must integrate the environmental consciousness into our education system.

Doing this can help build community action against policies and actions that have adverse consequences for the environment. This is difficult but not impossible to do, given that young people today are much more environmentally conscious than the previous generations.

The second course, of action, is to develop a deeper understanding of our own resource efficiency—how much we are consuming, recycling, or restoring. Earlier we would talk about three Rs (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle); now there are six Rs (Rethink, Refuse, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Repair).

We need to move towards a circular economy, which will require participation from all citizens as well as industry. India has a head start here, given that traditionally we have had a culture of recycling and reusing. Industry needs to move in this direction too and follow the norms for extended producers’ responsibility. Improving resource efficiency, even in our own homes, will go a long way in making a difference to how climate change progresses in the coming years.

Rajani Ranjan Rashmi is a Distinguished Fellow at the Centre for Global Environmental Research, TERI, where he works on climate change, mitigation and adaptation strategies, carbon markets, and related issues

This story was originally published by India Development Review (IDR)

© Inter Press Service (2022) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service

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Caring for Water Where Mining Leads to Wealth and Tragedies in Brazil — Global Issues

A mountainous landscape in the area of the headwaters of the Velhas River, where “barraginhas”, the Portuguese name for holes dug like lunar craters in the hills and slopes, prevent erosion by swallowing a large amount of soil that sediments the upper reaches of the river, in the southeastern Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS
  • by Mario Osava (belo horizonte/itabirito, brazil)
  • Inter Press Service

BELO HORIZONTE/ITABIRITO, Brazil, May 19 (IPS) – The southeastern Brazilian state of Minas Gerais owes its name to the main economic activity throughout its history: mining – of gold since the 17th century and later iron ore, which took on an industrial scale with massive exports in the 20th century.

The so-called Iron Quadrangle, a mountainous area of some 7,000 square kilometers in the center of the state, concentrates the state’s minerals and mining activity, long questioned by environmentalists, who have been impotent in the face of the industry’s economic clout.

But the threat of water shortages in Greater Belo Horizonte, population six million, along with two horrific mining accidents, reduced the disparity of forces between the two sides. Now environmentalists can refer to actual statistics and events, not just ecological arguments.

Belo Horizonte, the capital of the state, experienced an unprecedented water crisis in 2014 and 2015, during a drought that affected the entire southeast of Brazil.

“For the first time we experienced shortages here that only the semi-arid north of the state was familiar with,” said Marcelo da Fonseca, general director of the Mining Institute of Water Management (Igam).

On Jan. 25, 2019, a tailings dam broke in Brumadinho, 35 kilometers from Belo Horizonte as the crow flies. The tragedy killed 270 people and toxic sludge contaminated more than 300 kilometers of the Paraopeba River, which provided 15 percent of the water for the Greater Belo Horizonte region (known as RMBH), whose supply has not yet recovered.

On Nov. 5, 2015, a similar accident had claimed 19 lives in Mariana, 75 kilometers from Belo Horizonte, and silted up more than 600 kilometers of the Doce River on its way to the Atlantic Ocean. (The river, whose waters run eastward, do not supply the RMBH.)

Two years of drought, in 2014 and 2015, frightened the population of Greater Belo Horizonte, the capital of the state of Minas Gerais in southeastern Brazil. For the first time the threat of water shortages was felt, said the director general of the Minas Gerais Water Management Institute, Marcelo da Fonseca. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Mining hazards

Minas Gerais has more than 700 mining tailings dams. The latest data from the State Environmental Foundation (Feam) show 33 in different degrees of emergency, four of which are at level three – high risk and mandatory evacuation of endangered residents – and nine at level 2 – recommended evacuation.

“We are hostages of the mining companies, they occupy the territory and make other economies unviable,” said Camila Alterthum, one of the founders and coordinators of the Cresce Institute and an activist with the Fechos, Eu Cuido movement, promoted by the Rio de las Velhas Watershed Committee.

Fechos is the name of an Ecological Station, a 603-hectare integral conservation area belonging to the municipality of Nova Lima, but bordering Belo Horizonte.

“There are mountains here that recharge the Cauê aquifer, which supplies more than 200,000 inhabitants of southern Belo Horizonte and a neighborhood in Nova Lima,” an adjoining municipality, said Alterthum, who lives in Vale do Sol, a neighborhood adjacent to Fechos.

Activist Camila Alterthum is opposed to mining, which she says is a permanent threat to the destruction of nature and water sources. She is fighting to expand the Fechos Ecological Station, whose forests contribute to the water supply for more than 200,000 inhabitants of Belo Horizonte, in southeastern Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Her movement presented to the Minas Gerais state legislature a bill to expand Fechos by 222 hectares, to provide more water and preserve local biodiversity.

But Vale, Brazil’s largest mining company, aims to expand its two local mines in that area.

In order to acquire the land, it is offering double the number of hectares for conservation, a counterproposal rejected by the movement because it would not meet the environmental objectives and most of it is an area that the company must preserve by law anyway.

A fiercer battle was unleashed by the decision of the Minas Gerais government’s State Environmental Policy Council, which has a majority of business and government representatives, to approve on Apr. 30 a project by the Taquaril company to extract iron ore from the Curral mountain range.

Forestry engineer Julio Carvalho, of the Itabirito municipal government, stands next to a “barraginha” on a private rural property, whose owners joined the municipal effort to contain soil loss and river sedimentation in this area of southeastern Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

This mountain range is the most prominent landscape feature of Belo Horizonte, in addition to being important in terms of water and environmental aspects for the capital, although it is located on its border, on the side of the municipality of Nova Lima. The mining threat triggered a huge outcry from environmentalists, artists and society in general.

Droughts and erosion

There are other threats to the RMBH’s water supply. “We are very close to the springs, so we depend on the rains that fall here,” Fonseca told IPS at Igam headquarters in Belo Horizonte.

Two consecutive years of drought have seriously jeopardized the water supply.

Two basins supply the six million inhabitants of the 34 municipalities making up Greater Belo Horizonte.

The Velhas River accounts for 49 percent of the water supply and the Paraopeba River for 51 percent, according to Sergio Neves, superintendent of the Metropolitan Business Unit of the Minas Gerais Sanitation Company (Copasa), which serves most of the state.

The Paraopeba River stopped supplying water after the 2019 accident, but its basin has two important reservoirs in the tributaries. The one on the Manso River, for example, supplies 34 percent of the RMBH.

The phenomenon of “voçorocas” (gullies) is repeated in several parts of Itabirito and Ouro Preto, the municipalities where the Velhas river basin originates, in southeastern Brazil. The soil is vulnerable to erosion and measures to mitigate the damage are finally beginning to proliferate in a region dominated by iron ore mining. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

The Velhas River only has a small hydroelectric power plant reservoir, with a capacity of 9.28 megawatts, but it is generating only four megawatts. It is run-of-river, that is, it does not store enough water to regulate the flow or compensate for low water levels.

In addition, sedimentation has greatly reduced its storage capacity since it began to operate in 1907. The soil upstream is vulnerable to erosion and has been affected by urban and agricultural expansion, local roads and various types of mining, not only of iron ore, which aggravate the sedimentation of the rivers, said Fonseca.

Decentralized solutions

The municipal government of Itabirito, which shares the headwaters of the Velhas basin with Ouro Preto, the gold capital in the 18th century, is promoting several actions mentioned by Fonseca to mitigate erosion and feed the aquifers that sustain the flow of the rivers.

Businessman and environmentalist Ronaldo Guerra stands on his farm where he promotes ecotourism and exhibits his proposal for a succession of small dams as a mechanism for storing water on the surface and in the water table, strengthening the forests and the hydrographic basin in a mining region of southeastern Brazil where there is growing concern about the water supply. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

It is intriguing to see craters in some rural properties in Itabirito, especially on hills or gently sloping land.

They are “barraginhas”, explained Julio Carvalho, a forestry engineer and employee of the Municipal Secretariat of Environment and Sustainable Development. They are micro-dams, holes dug to slow down the runoff of rainwater that causes erosion.

This system prevents a large part of the sediment from flowing into the rivers, as well as the phenomenon of “voçorocas” (gullies, in Portuguese), products of intense erosion that abound in several parts of Itabirito and Ouro Preto, municipalities where the first tributaries of the Velhas are born.

As these are generally private lands, the municipal government obtains financing to evaluate the properties, design the interventions and put them out to bid, in agreement with the committees that oversee the watersheds, Carvalho told IPS.

The municipality of Itabirito is the “water tank” of Belo Horizonte, the capital of the state of Minas Gerais, in southeastern Brazil. The municipal government is promoting programs aimed at revitalizing the watershed that supplies nearly half of the six million inhabitants of Greater Belo Horizonte, explains Frederico Leite, environmental secretary of the municipality, which depends on mining activity. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

For country roads, which generate a great deal of erosion in the undulating topography, “dry boxes” are used, as well as small holes in the banks to retain the torrents or at least curb their speed, he said.

Other “mechanical land use and conservation practices” include recovering water sources through reforestation and fencing to prevent animals from invading water sources and trampling the surrounding areas.

Itabirito is also seeking to dredge the river of the same name, which crosses the city, to reduce sedimentation, which was aggravated by flooding in January, when the water level in the river rose unusually high.

Environmental education, a program of payments for environmental services and the expansion of conservation areas, in the city as well, are the plans implemented by Felipe Leite, secretary of environment and sustainable development of Itabirito since 2019.

“We want to create a culture of environmental preservation,” partly because “Itabirito is the water tank of Belo Horizonte,” he told IPS.

The municipal government chose to cooperate with the mining industry, especially with the Ferro Puro company, which decided to pave a road and reforest it with flowers as part of a tourism project.

In São Bartolomeu, a town in the municipality of Ouro Preto, Ronald Guerra, an ecotourism entrepreneur, proposes a succession of small dams and reservoirs as a way of retaining water, feeding the water table and preventing erosion.

On his 120-hectare farm, half of which is recognized as a Private Natural Heritage Reserve –a private initiative conservation effort – he has 13 small dams and raises fish for his restaurant and sport fishing.

The son of a doctor from Belo Horizonte, he opted for rural life and agroecology from a young age. He was secretary of environment of Ouro Preto and today he is an activist in several watershed committees, non-governmental organizations and efforts for the promotion of local culture.

© Inter Press Service (2022) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service

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Oil Business Burns Enough Gas to Power the Whole Sub-Sahara or Two Thirds of Europe — Global Issues

Global gas flaring increased to 144 billion cubic metres (bcm) in 2021 from 142 bcm in 2020. It is estimated that each cubic metre of associated gas flared results in about 2.8 kilograms of CO2-equivalent emissions. Credit: public domain
  • by Baher Kamal (madrid)
  • Inter Press Service

MADRID, May 18 (IPS) – While the attention of mostly Western media and politicians is quasi exclusively hoarded up by the proxy war in Ukraine and its consequences on the energy sector, the world’s big oil business continues to burn Planet Earth with its underreported though highly polluting, wasteful practice of gas flaring.

This is anything but a minor issue: in fact, as much as 144 billion cubic metres of gas was flared at upstream oil and gas facilities in just one year-2021. Such an amount caused the emission of 400 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) equivalent, according to the World Bank.

Flaring is “a monumental waste of a valuable natural resource” that should either be used for productive purposes, such as generating power, or conserved.

Enough to power the whole sub-Saharan Africa…

For instance, the amount of gas that is currently flared each year – about 144 billion cubic metres – could power the whole of sub-Saharan Africa, the World Bank explains.

… And to generate 65% of Europe’s domestic power

However, the world still flared enough gas to generate approximately 1,800 Terawatt hours (TWh) of energy, almost two-thirds of the European Union’s net domestic electricity generation.

But, what is gas flaring?

Gas flaring is the burning of natural gas associated with oil extraction. The practice has persisted from the beginning of oil production over 160 years ago and takes place due to a range of issues, from market and economic constraints, to a lack of appropriate regulation and political will, explains the World Bank.

Its Global Gas Flaring Reduction Partnership (GGFR) report estimates that global gas flaring increased to 144 billion cubic metres (bcm) in 2021 from 142 bcm in 2020.

“Gas flaring contributes to climate change and impacts the environment through emission of CO2, black carbon and other pollutants. It is estimated that each cubic metre of associated gas flared results in about 2.8 kilograms of CO2-equivalent emissions.”

Ten countries account for 75% of gas flaring

In its May 2022 report, the World Bank also specifies that just ten countries account for three-quarters of gas flaring.

Out of these ten, seven oil producing countries –Russia, Iraq, Iran, the United States, Venezuela, Algeria, and Nigeria — have remained the top seven consistently over the last ten years.

Ending flaring and methane emissions is key to the energy transition, nevertheless the global progress to reduce it has stalled over the last decade, further underscoring the urgency to accelerate the decarbonisation of the world’s economies.

Subsidising climate disastres

In spite of the scientifically evidenced fact that oil, gas and carbon industry is one of the major contributors to global warming, politicians continue to subsidise the fossil fuels business with shocking amounts of taxpayers money.

In fact, in a 2021 study: Still Not Getting Energy Prices Right: A Global and Country Update of Fossil Fuel Subsidies, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) reports that globally, fossil fuel subsidies were 5.9 trillion US dollars in 2020 or about 6.8 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). And that such subsidies are expected to rise to 7.4 percent of GDP in 2025.

In the case of the United States, the government provides a heavy public subsidy to petroleum companies, with major tax breaks at virtually every stage of oil exploration and extraction, including the costs of oil field leases and drilling equipment.

The grim picture

The profit-making fossil fuels sector appears not to care about the real dangers of growing climate emergencies.

Such emergencies are already here. For instance, there is a 50:50 chance of the annual average global temperature temporarily reaching 1.5 °C above the pre-industrial level for at least one of the next five years – and the likelihood is increasing with time, according to a new climate update issued by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).

There is a 93% likelihood of at least one year between 2022-2026 becoming the warmest on record and dislodging 2016 from the top ranking.

The chance of the five-year average for 2022-2026 being higher than the last five years (2017-2021) is also 93%, according to the Global Annual to Decadal Climate Update, produced by the United Kingdom’s Met Office, the WMO lead centre for such predictions.

Not just a random statistic

The chance of temporarily exceeding 1.5°C has risen steadily since 2015, when it was close to zero. For the years between 2017 and 2021, there was a 10% chance of exceedance. That probability has increased to nearly 50% for the 2022-2026 period, the WMO on 9 May 2022 reported.

“This study shows – with a high level of scientific skill – that we are getting measurably closer to temporarily reaching the lower target of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. The 1.5°C figure is not some random statistic.

“It is rather an indicator of the point at which climate impacts will become increasingly harmful for people and indeed the entire planet,” said WMO Secretary-General Prof. Petteri Taalas.

The looming dangers

“For as long as we continue to emit greenhouse gases, temperatures will continue to rise. And alongside that, our oceans will continue to become warmer and more acidic, sea ice and glaciers will continue to melt, sea level will continue to rise and our weather will become more extreme. Arctic warming is disproportionately high and what happens in the Arctic affects all of us.”

More bla, bla, bla?

The 2015 Paris Agreement sets long-term goals to guide all nations to substantially reduce global greenhouse gas emissions to limit the global temperature increase in this century to 2 °C while pursuing efforts to limit the increase even further to 1.5 °C.

Meanwhile, under heavy pressures by big business, politicians continue to pour empty promises, fixing new never-to-be-met commitments, cackling in world sumits and international big gatherings. What for?

© Inter Press Service (2022) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service

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Floods Drive Urban Solutions in Brazilian Metropolis — Global Issues

Pollution from urban sewage is visible in the Onça (jaguar, in Portuguese) River, near its mouth, seen here from the entrance bridge in the Ribeiro de Abreu neighborhood that suffers frequent flooding when it rains heavily in Belo Horizonte, capital of the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, in southeastern Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS
  • by Mario Osava (belo horizonte, brazil)
  • Inter Press Service

BELO HORIZONTE, Brazil, May 17 (IPS) – “We do everything through parties, we don’t want power, we don’t want to take over the role of the State, but we don’t just protest and complain,” said Itamar de Paula Santos, a member of the United Community Council for Ribeiro de Abreu (Comupra), in this southeastern Brazilian city.

Ribeiro de Abreu is one of the neighborhoods most affected by recurrent flooding in Belo Horizonte, capital of the state of Minas Gerais, as it is located on the right bank of the Onça (jaguar, in Portuguese) River, on the lower stretch, into which the water drains from a 212 square kilometer basin made up of numerous streams.

Cleaning up the river and preventing its waters from continuing to flood homes requires actions that also produce social benefits.

“We have so far removed 736 families who were living in high-risk situations, on the riverbank,” Santos told IPS in the same place where precarious and frequently flooded shacks gave way to the Community Riverside Park (Parque Ciliar, in Portuguese), which has a garden, soccer field, children’s playground and fruit trees.

The project, begun by local residents together with Comupra and the local government in 2015 and gradually implemented since then, aims to extend the community park 5.5 kilometers upstream through several neighborhoods by 2025.

This includes doubling the number of families resettled, cleaning up the Onça basin and its nine beaches, three islands and three waterfalls, preserving nature and developing urban agriculture, and creating areas for sports and cultural activities. All with participatory management and execution.

Itamar de Paula Santos, an activist with the United Community Council for Ribeiro de Abreu, longs to go back to swimming and fishing in the Onça River, as he did in his childhood. But its waters, polluted by urban waste, often flood the riverside neighborhoods in the rainy season as the river flows through the city of Belo Horizonte, in southeastern Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Displaced within the same neighborhood

The families removed from the flood-prone riverbank now live mostly in safe housing in the same Ribeiro de Abreu neighborhood, which had 16,000 inhabitants at the 2010 census, but is now estimated to be home to 20,000 people.

The Belo Horizonte city government has a rule to resettle families from risky areas in places no more than three kilometers from where they used to live, Ricardo Aroeira, director of Water Management of the Municipal Secretariat of Works and Infrastructure, told IPS.

That is the case of Dirce Santana Soares, 55, who now lives with her son, her mother and four other family members in a five-bedroom house, with a yard where she grows a variety of fruit trees and vegetables.

“It’s the best thing that could have happened to us,” she said. Five years ago she lived next to the river, which flooded her shack, almost always in the wee hours of the morning, every year during the rainiest months in Belo Horizonte – December and January.

“We had bunk beds and we piled everything we wanted to save on top of them. Then we built a second floor on the house, leaving the first floor to the mud,” she told IPS. “But I didn’t want to leave the neighborhood where I had been living for 34 years.”

She was lucky. After receiving the compensation for leaving her riverside shack, an acquaintance sold her their current home, at a low price, with long-term interest-free installments.

View of a beach on the Onça River, which the movement for clean rivers wants to recuperate as a recreational area for the local population in the city of Belo Horizonte, in southeastern Brazil. At this spot, the Onça River receives the waters of the Isidoro stream. There are another eight beaches to be restored as well. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Bad luck

Soares, who is now a domestic worker, had a daycare center that started losing money in the face of the increased offer of free nursery schools by the local government, and the COVID-19 pandemic over the last two years.

Itamar Santos, a 64-year-old father of three, has also lived in the neighborhood for almost four decades. Before that, he worked as a mechanical lathe operator in other cities and for three years in Carajás, the large iron ore mine in the eastern Amazon, 1,600 km north of Belo Horizonte.

In 1983, in Carajás, he lost his right leg when he fell into a 12-meter well. “It was night-time, and there was no electricity, just dark jungle,” he explained. After the first painful impact, he learned to live with his disability and regained the joy of living, with a specially adapted car.

He became an activist and among his achievements were free bus tickets for paraplegics and a gymnasium for multiple sports. “Creating conditions that enable the disabled to leave their homes is therapeutic,” he told IPS.

View of a community garden that local residents in the Ribeiro de Abreu neighborhood cultivate on the banks of the Onça River. Some 140 families who suffered annual flooding were resettled and now live in safe housing in the same part of Belo Horizonte, a metropolis in southeastern Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

But the cause that impassions him today is the river, which in January has a heavy flow due to the heavy rains that month, but dries up in September, in the dry season.

“Let the Onça drink clean water” is the slogan of a movement also promoted by Santos, to emphasize the protection and recovery of the thousands of springs that supply the river and its tributary streams.

Every year since 2008, this movement, driven by Comupra, organizes meetings for reflection and debate on the revitalization of the river in riverside venues in different neighborhoods in the basin.

The festivities are also repeated annually, or more often. Carnival brings joy to the local population on the beaches or squares along the banks of the Onça River, and giant Christmas trees are set up for the communities to come out and celebrate the holidays.

The basin, or more precisely sub-basin, of the Onça River comprises the northern half of the territory and the population of Belo Horizonte, which totals 2.5 million inhabitants. The south, which is richer, is where the Arrudas River is located.

Both emerge in the neighboring municipality to the west, Contagem, and flow east into the Das Velhas River, the main source of water for the six million inhabitants of Greater Belo Horizonte. As they cross heavily populated areas, they are the main polluters of the Velhas basin.

Major floods in the provincial capital occur mainly in the Onça sub-basin. The steep topography of Belo Horizonte makes the soil more impermeable, leading to more disasters.

Maria José Zeferino, a retired teacher from neighboring schools, at the Our Lady of Mercy Park, which was built to clean up a stream from urban pollution that was spreading diarrhea and parasites among the students of three nearby schools, in Belo Horizonte, a city in southeastern Brazil. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

Other riverbank parks

The Belo Horizonte city government has been working on drainage plans for years and has been implementing the Program for the Environmental Recovery of the Valley and Creek Bottoms since 2001.

In April it published the Technical Instruction for the Elaboration of Drainage Studies and Projects, under the general coordination of Aroeira.

Since the end of the last century there has been a “paradigm shift,” said Aroeira. Channeling watercourses used to be the norm, but this “merely shifted the site of the floods.” Now the aim is to contain the torrents and to give new value to rivers, integrating them into the urban landscape, cleaning them up and at the same time improving the quality of life of the riverside populations, he explained.

The construction of long, narrow linear parks, which combines the clean-up of rivers or streams with environmental preservation, riverside reforestation and services for the local population, is one of the “structural” measures that can be seen in Belo Horizonte.

The participation of students and teachers from three neighboring schools stood out in the implementation in 2008 of the Nossa Senhora da Piedad Park in the Aarão Reis neighborhood, home to 8,300 inhabitants in 2010, near the lower section of the Onça River.

Cleaning up the creek that gives the park its name was the major environmental and sanitary measure.

“Sewage from the entire neighborhood contaminated the stream and caused widespread illnesses among the children, such as diarrhea, verminosis (parasites in the bronchial tubes) and nausea,” Maria José Zeferino, a retired art teacher at one of the local schools, told IPS.

The medicinal herb garden in the Primer de Mayo Ecological Park was a demand of the local population in the southern Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte. Creation of the park included the clean-up of a polluted stream and provides a gathering and recreational area for local residents. CREDIT: Mario Osava/IPS

The park, which belongs to the municipality, has an area of 58,000 square meters, a pond, three courts for different sports, a skateboarding area and a paved walkway for the elderly. A total of 143 families and one farm received compensation to vacate the area, leaving many fruit trees behind.

“A clean river was our dream. And the goal of the next stage is to have swimming, fishing and boating in the city’s streams,” said Zeferino.

The Primer de Mayo Ecological Park, in the neighborhood of the same name with 2,421 inhabitants according to the 2010 census, was built during the revitalization of the stream of the same name, covering 33,700 square meters along a winding terrain. The novelty is a medicinal herb garden, a demand of the local population.

“We discovered 70 springs here that feed the stream that runs into the Onça River,” said Paulo Carvalho de Freitas, an active member of the Community Commission that supports the municipal management of the park and carries out educational activities there.

“My fight for the future is to remove much of the concrete with which the park was built, which waterproofs the soil and goes against one of the objectives of the project,” which was inaugurated in 2008, said Freitas.

© Inter Press Service (2022) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service

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