Global governance the need

Some 32 social scientists and researchers from around the world have concluded that fundamental reforms of global environmental governance are needed to avoid dangerous changes in the Earth system.

The group argued for the creation of a Sustainable Development Council that would better integrate sustainability concerns across the United Nations system. Consultations should not take place only at the global scale, where the broadest policies are created, but also at local scales, smaller scales, all scales where the 'smallest' are consulted.

Research now indicates that the world is nearing critical tipping points in the Earth system, including on climate and biodiversity, which if not addressed through a new framework of governance could lead to rapid and irreversible change. Science assessments indicate that human activities are moving several of Earth's sub-systems outside the range of natural variability typical for the previous 500,000 years.

The team warned that emerging technologies "need an international institutional arrangement-such as one or several multilateral framework conventions" to support forecasting and transparency, and to ensure that environmental risks are taken into account.

Will it work or end up as yet another council of members who meet, discuss crucial issues and disperse? DO we need more entities, or more willingness to acknowledge the problem facing humanity?

The diesel-cancer link established

Concern about lung cancers caused by diesel exhaust is old. The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classifies diesel engine exhausts as "probably carcinogenic to humans," the middle classification between known human carcinogens and possible human carcinogens. But a conclusive study done in the US was suppressed by the automobile lobby. It has finally been published.

US government agencies began considering regulation of worker exposure to diesel particulates, especially in the mining industry where operation of diesel machinery in the confined spaces underground results in some of the highest exposures. The existing data was challenged.

So in 1992, the National Cancer Institute began developing a study (the Diesel Exhaust in Miners Study) intended to finally review a large enough population with enough quantitative exposure data. The Diesel Coalition of the Methane Awareness Resource Group (MARG), an organization representing the mining industry, successfully derailed publication of the study data and results for a decade and a half.

Finally in early part of this century, the study resurfaced. The Diesel Exhaust in Miners Study reviewed the cases of 12,315 workers at eight non-metal mining facilities,the largest population ever studied. Researchers looked at the available data from two angles: a Cohort Mortality Study with Emphasis on Lung Cancer, and a Nested Case-Control Study of Lung Cancer and Diesel Exhaust.

It has confirmed the link between working in mines and getting lung cancer, strengthening the suspicion that diesel exhaust could be causing cancer. Cause for city-zens to be alarmed? Yes. With more private vehicles plying on the highly-subsidised diesel, imagine the exposure to exhaust for every city resident.

Nuclear big designs

We just crossed the first anniversary of the massive earthquake and tsunami that left approximately 20,000 dead or missing and triggered a meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan. It was the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl. About 326,000 Japanese residents remain homeless, including 80,000 evacuated from the vicinity of the Fukushima facility. Residents evacuated from the zone set up in a 12-mile radius around the nuclear plant are still struggling to rebuild their lives.

In the Fukushima area—in Fukushima, there are two million people living in the prefecture, the state, and about three-quarters of those people are living under levels of very serious radioactive contamination. There are prefectures in—hot spots in surrounding areas that also have high levels. About 350,000 children are living under these conditions. The decontamination has started, but how effective it can be—some areas have been decontaminated only levels—the radiation went down 10 percent, 20 percent.

And yet, nations (except Germany) are scrambling to up their nuclear energy tally. In the UK it is the current season favourite with the ruling party. At the time of the Fukushima disaster, only four countries (China, Russia, India and South Korea) were building more than two reactors. In these four nations, citizens pay for the new reactors the government chooses to build through direct subsidies or energy price hikes.

That is because nuclear power is a private investor's nightmare. Given its long gestation period, no new nuclear-power project has ever bid successfully in a competitive energy market anywhere in the world. As said by an expert in The Guardian, 'big nuclear programmes only happen when citizens sign blank cheques..'

French company Areva working on a new Olkiluoto 3 reactor in Finland without government support is four years behind schedule and more than €2 billion over budget!

Will a price on carbon help level the playing field? Not really, as solar and wind would turn out cheaper and faster than nuclear.

Yet why are governments like the UK, US and India backing nuclear?

Delhi can lead the way

Delhi seems to be on way to shelving an ambitious house-top solar project. The idea was to have 1 MW of solar systems up on roof-tops of buildings in the capital but there are now fears that people with solar PV systems may run diesel or gas generators instead to feed power into the grid and profit from any difference!

This is a land where people resort to all means foul and fair to survive. Blame it on poverty or simply beating the system, people have found ways to tamper with meters or even steal them. If diesel, which is heavily subsidised - set at 32 percent below market value - can be used to make money, people will!

But surely there are ways to check such malpractices, as the India Environmental portal notes. 'It would not be impossible to at least check once when a system is installed as new meters would anyway have to be installed by utilities. Since the cost of solar is almost all in the investment of buying the actual module there would be little incentive for producing from diesel when the cost is already sunk in the solar module.'

A cap on how much can be fed, calculated on the basis of the capacity of the solar module (and its efficiency), would make any gains from cheating and using diesel miniscule. Periodical checks on the solar modules when the utilities are checking the meter could perhaps deter people from buying the modules and then selling them on. Panels that cannot be disconnected without the net-meter switching off could be a possibility as well.

With solar fast getting cheaper than diesel, things will change. India is producing power from solar cells more cheaply than by burning diesel, said a Bloomberg report in Jan. The cost of solar energy in India declined by 28 percent since December 2010, mainly due to a 51 percent drop in panel prices last year as the world’s 10 largest manufacturers, led by China’s Suntech Power Holdings Co., doubled output capacity.

By 2013, solar power will be as chep as Rs 8.78 a KWh compared to Rs 17 from diesel generators.

Time more cities came up with such projects and backed them with clear intention and will. Time also to lift subsidies on fossil fuels but (sigh) that's easier said than done. Let's hope Delhi will buck up and set up solar panels on housetops and lead the way for the rest of the nation.

Farming wisely

It’s getting very difficult to meet water needs in more than half of the river basins in the world—potentially affecting some 2.7 billion people.

What is the reason for water depletion in our river basins? Growing urban populations? No. It is agriculture that is the culprit. The same candidate who has been in the spotlight for growing contribution to climate change!

Yes, cities use a lot of water, but 80-90% of that water is returned to the original water source after use. If it’s returned in good quality, it doesn’t deplete the water source and the water is available for others to use and to sustain aquatic life.

A new study in the journal PLoS ONE and coauthored by Nature Conservancy found that 92% of this water depletion globally is tied to agriculture. Unlike cities, most water used to irrigate farms is not returned to the ecosystem. On average, more than half of that water is lost to the atmosphere—it either passes through the plant during growth or evaporates from the soil. So cities use more water than crops on a per-area basis, but it’s important to note that irrigated agriculture occupies 4 times as much land as cities do.

But obviously we can't do away with agriculture! But we need to help farmers implement state-of-the-science irrigation methods and improve the productivity of rain-fed farms as soon as possible.

We need to adopt pragmatic choices to what and where we buy from. Buying everything locally simply isn’t possible for everyone. Why not import a water-intensive good from a water-rich area? Make sure that the water used to produce it is being used sustainably.

Climate change will make it tough for rain-fed farmlands where rains can become intense and severe. It is time the farmer got water-wise.

Peak of all things

The global mining, oil and gas industries have expanded so fast in the last decade they are now leading to large-scale "landgrabbing" and threatening farming and water supplies, according to a report in The Guardian.

"The catalogue of devastation is growing. We are no longer talking about isolated pockets of destruction and pollution. In just 10 years, iron ore production has more than doubled, coal has risen 45% and metals like lithium by 125%. Across Africa, Latin America and Asia, more and more lands, rivers and aquifers are being devoured by mining activities.

"Industrial wastelands are being formed by vast open-pit mines and mountain top removal, and the poisoning of water systems, deforestation, and the contamination of topsoil," says the report by the Gaia foundation and groups including Friends of the Earth International, Grain, Oilwatch and Navdanya in India.

The dramatic increase in large-scale mining, clearly seen in places such as the Amazon for gold and oil, India's tribal forest lands for bauxite, South Africa for coal and Ghana for gold, is being fuelled by the rising price of metals and oil. These have acted as an incentive to exploit new areas and less pure deposits, says the report.

"Technologies are becoming more sophisticated to extract materials from areas which were previously inaccessible, uneconomic or designated of 'lower' quality," it says. "That means more removal of soil, sand and rock and the gouging out of much larger areas of land, as seen with the Alberta tar sands in Canada."

Economies are getting better at reducing the intensity of the use of raw materials but the sheer increase in their absolute consumption is now staggering, say the authors. According to the US Mineral Information Institute, the average American will use close to 1,300 tonnes of minerals in a lifetime.

Not good! For sure, but is anyone going to stop? Especially today when our lives are so closely wedded to umpteen gadgets woven out of all those metals!

Clean energy is the way

Check out this stark contrast. In the developed west, people are used to mood lighting,microwave ovens and fast-freeze ice makers, allergy-reducing vacuum cleaners to high-speed broadband connected computers in their homes. And now they are realising the environmental costs of such comforts and looking for new alternatives. In sub-Saharan Africa, just 8% of the rural population has access to electricity. About a quarter of the world's population, particularly those in rural parts of the developing world do not have access to electricity in their homes.

Can the former expect the latter to forego the comforts? But without a change, the planet's climate is headed for a disastrous end. Even to secure temperature reductions in the second half of the century, a rapid transition to clean energy needs to begin immediately. Achieving substantial reductions in temperatures relative to the coal-based system will take the better part of a century, and will depend on rapid and massive deployment of some mix of conservation, wind, solar, and nuclear, and possibly carbon capture and storage.

Benedict Ilozor and Mohammed Kama of the Eastern Michigan University, in Ypsilanti, USA, suggest that renewable energy is a viable option for electrical power in developing and emerging nations. Writing in the inaugural issue of the African Journal of Economic and Sustainable Development, they point out that in most of these nations, the demand for energy far exceeds the generating capacity. They suggests that a rapid response to this huge demand that is informed by social, political, economic, climatic and environmental factors must be put in place so that renewable, sustainable energy supply can be identified.

They suggest that cost is the limiting factor and that communities and governments would be unable to subsidize neither the one-time installation costs nor the ongoing maintenance however low, for most renewable energy solutions. It is, hence up to the private sector and commercial banks, and perhaps charitable organizations, to pitch in.

There are many approaches to solar power, for instance, that could be implemented by individual households or small communities for domestic electricity as well as on a larger scale, while geothermal systems could be run to provide the power for cooling.

Decentralised energy and a mix of locally available energy sources hold the solution to the energy security, climate chage tangle.