Pakistan pushes ahead on climate policy but action still lags

Rina Saeed Khan in AlertNet: Pakistan faces a range of threatening climate change impacts: changing monsoon patterns, melting glaciers, seasonal flooding, rising sea levels, desertification and increasing water scarcity.

How bad are things? For the past two years, Pakistan has topped the list of the Global Climate Risk Index produced by Germanwatch, a non-governmental organisation that works on global equity issues. In 2010, Pakistan was listed as the number one country in the world affected by climate related disasters; in 2011 it was ranked as number three.

But concrete action to address climate threats has been relatively slow, critics say, and a convoluted process of devolution of power to Pakistan’s provinces and then the reorganisation of federal ministries hasn’t helped speed up the process – though a new federal Ministry of Climate Change may help change that.

“The time for talking is long past,” said Shafqat Kakakhel, a former U.N. Environment Programme official and a member of Pakistan’s original task force on climate change set up by the government in 2008. “What we need to see are projects on the ground. Pakistan is lagging far behind other countries in the South Asian region that are already addressing climate change through concrete actions.”

Pakistan’s federal Ministry of Environment, already struggling to address growing climate-related disasters, ran into problems in June 2011, when an amendment to the country’s constitution suddenly devolved increased power to provincial governments, despite fears that provincial-level officials might lack the capacity and competency to deal with pressing environmental issues....

The Indus River, shot by Guilhem Vellut, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Science key to reducing impacts of future natural hazards in developing countries

University of Cambridge Enterprise: The use of science to reduce the effects of future natural hazards such as floods, droughts and earthquakes must be stepped up and adopted more widely, according to a newly published Foresight report.

The report, 'Reducing Risks of Future Disasters: Priorities for Decision Makers' sets out how the threat of future disasters resulting from natural hazards can be stabilised if decision makers make better use of technological developments and existing risk assessment methods. This will save lives, livelihoods and resources in developing countries.

The report also urges that disaster risk reduction is routinely built in to developments as diverse as urban infrastructure, ecosystem protection and mobile telephone regulation. These measures would help reduce the cost of disasters, which has outstripped the total international aid investment over the past 20 years and has led to the loss of 1.3 million lives and $2 trillion of damage.

Professor Peter Guthrie, Thalia Konaris and former PhD student Faye Karababa, all from the Department of Engineering, have been involved in the report. The work was undertaken through Consultancy Services at Cambridge Enterprise.

“Death and destruction are not the inevitable consequences of natural hazards,” said Government Chief Scientific Adviser Sir John Beddington, who led the research. “We need to grasp this. Urbanisation over the next three decades, particularly in Africa and Asia, will continue. While this could lead to greater exposure and vulnerability, it also presents the greatest opportunity to protect large concentrations of people....

A fatal gap between science and policy?

David Dickson in SciDev.net: little more than 30 years ago, a major UN conference on science and technology for development held in Vienna, Austria, ended on an upbeat note with an agreement in principle to set up a US$250-million fund to finance capacity-building projects.

Sadly, the heady optimism among delegates, which I remember vividly, was short lived. No major donations were received and science slipped off the international aid agenda for the next two decades, during which time the gap in scientific capacity between rich and poor nations grew larger.

The latest negotiations, COP 18, ended in Doha, Qatar, earlier this month with a similar agreement to establish a mechanism to transfer money from rich to poor nations to compensate for the "loss and damage" caused by rich countries' addiction to carbon-based fuels. Judging from media reports, this decision was met with an enthusiasm similar to that at the 1979 Vienna conference.

But there is no binding commitment, and the possibility of significant money becoming available looks remote given that rich nations have so far failed to act on the 2010 promise to raise US$100 billion a year by 2020 to help developing nations cope with climate change.

The otherwise disappointing outcome of COP 18 reflects the growing gap between the science and the politics of climate change. While the scientific case for action hardens, the ability politicians to act appropriately — by replacing the soon-to-terminate Kyoto Protocol, for example — appears to be diminishing, creating a scenario for global disaster.

Science communicators in general — and science journalists in particular — have a key role in bridging this gap. We must present scientific evidence to politicians and the public in a way that means such evidence becomes the basis for sound decisions....

Reading a newspaper in Addis Ababa, shot by Terje Skjerdal, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr,  under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Climate funds must help integrate climate into policy

Simon Anderson in SciDev.net: At last year's conference of parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), countries decided that "comprehensive, iterative assessments of development needs and climate vulnerabilities" should form the basis for national climate adaptation programmes.

Processes are already underway to achieve this aim. At a workshop in Tanzania last month, policymakers from Bangladesh, Eritrea, Ethiopia, the Gambia, Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Tanzania and Uganda discussed progress on integrating climate change strategies into their country's development plans.

For example, Kenya's Climate Change Action Plan — validated on 22 November and being presented at the current 18th session of the conference of parties (COP 18) in Doha, Qatar (26 November–7 December) — spans adaptation, finance, institutional arrangements, mitigation, technology, capacity development and knowledge management.

Ethiopia's Climate-Resilient Green Economy strategy supports an array of investments, including electric power generation from renewable sources, scaling up the use of more efficient stoves, and increasing the efficiency of the livestock sector.

Similarly, Ghana and Mozambique have national climate change strategies and the Gambia is integrating climate change responses into its Program for Accelerated Growth and Employment.

The integration of cross-cutting issues into policy and planning has been called 'mainstreaming'. This matters because climate change is a special kind of policy problem — a moving and growing target.

Should we label genetically modified food?

Bhaskar Vira and David Nally in the "PovertyMatters" blog in the Guardian (UK): On the sidelines of the US presidential election, battle lines were drawn on a Californian ballot that has potential implications for broader debates about the challenges of global food security. Proposition 37, which was narrowly defeated (52.8% of voters opposed the measure), would have required mandatory labelling for all genetically engineered food sold to consumers in California.

...There seems little doubt that achieving food security will involve biotechnology. What is more contentious is the way in which these technologies are rolled out and, more to the point, who stands to benefit. The development, deployment and control of agricultural biotechnology is likely to result in winners and losers. There is no such thing as socially neutral or apolitical technology.

There are, for example, considerable differences between publicly funded genetic research, which is made freely available to farmers and other producers, and patented and protected technologies that are distributed under the proprietary control of private companies. In reality, biotechnological development is likely to involve compromise between the need to provide adequate incentives for research and development within the private sector, including allowing patents and intellectual property to protect profitability, and the need for these technologies to be used on a sufficient scale to offer sustainable solutions to the challenge of feeding 7 billion people.

Concerns about biosafety are equally important. For proponents of genetic technologies to dismiss these as the irrational fears of misinformed consumers is short-sighted, and potentially underestimates the power of consumer voice, especially in the digital age. It's also patronising, suggesting consumers should have choice on the shelves but not on the labels....

Uganda to get a climate change policy

Ronald Musoke in AllAfrica.com via the Independent (Kampala): The Climate Change Unit in the Ministry of Water and Environment is in the process of initiating a national Climate Change Policy before the end of the year according to a top Ministry of Water and Environment official. The Climate Change Unit was created by the government in 2008 although it started work in 2009 following its endorsement by the Cabinet.

Paul Isabirye, the Co-ordinator of the Climate Change Unit and the national focal person for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) said the policy will be accompanied by an implementation and communication strategy to avoid falling prey to the usual folly where well written national policies often fail to realize their goals because they lack an 'implementation strategy.'

In an exclusive interview with The Independent at the Climate Change Unit offices in Kampala on Nov. 9, Isabirye said the unit was working hard to have both the 'costed implementation' and communication strategies accompany the policy. "By the end of the year, these two will be out (and) these will help Uganda's climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts," Isabirye said....