In the run-up to the General Election last year, it looked like the Green Party would be shut out of the televised debates.

After a fantastic grassroots campaign online, both ITV and the BBC bowed to popular demand and made the decision to give Green Party Leader Natalie Bennett a place on the rostrum.

The result was spectacular: the tag team of Bennett, the SNP’s Nicola Sturgeon and Plaid Cymru’s Leanne Wood were together seen by many as the winners of the debates (though Sturgeon was certainly the individual winner).

The humanity of the three straight-talking women made Cameron, Clegg, Miliband and Farage seem even more alien and out of touch, and inspired voters to believe an alternative was possible.

In 2013, the Green Party’s membership stood at 13,000; after the election, it was in excess of 60,000, making it the third-largest party in England and Wales. The Green Surge was rightly hailed as a landmark in British Politics, and it seemed the Greens had won their place as a permanent feature of the political landscape.

As the world moves forward the BBC moves backward

We are now approaching the mayoral, London Assembly, local council, PCC, Scottish Parliament, Northern Ireland Assembly and Welsh Assembly elections in May – most of these elections being proportional representation contests, in which the Greens stand a great chance.

To its credit Ofcom has announced that the Green Party will be entitled to a minimum number of Party Political Broadcasts (PPBs) on the commercial channels it regulates, reflecting the Greens’ place as a well-established player.

In a perplexing move, however, the BBC has recently declared it will not give the Green Party any airtime whatsoever. Flying in the face of the standards established last year, and those their rivals must follow, they have decided that the Greens will be the only national Party in Parliament to be denied a voice on our screens.

In January, the BBC published the result of a consultation process into its criteria for allocating airtime for PPBs. On the current guidelines, to be eligible for a broadcast parties must hold at least one seat in a relevant parliament (including the European Parliament), and must “demonstrate substantial levels of past and current electoral support.”

As the Greens have one MP, three MEPs (a number increased at the last election), and a great many local councillors all over the country, the Greens easily fulfil the first criterion. We can only assume, therefore, that the party was deemed not to measure up to the rather more nebulous second condition. But this judgment simply doesn’t add up.

The BBC Trust has also blandly dismissed the Greens’ appeal against the decision: “After careful examination of the evidence, Trustees found the BBC Executive had properly applied the Party Political Broadcast (PPB) allocation criteria when it determined the Party was not eligible for a broadcast on the BBC in England. The appeal was therefore not upheld.”

The BBC has granted UKIP three PPBs, the Greens have none

UKIP and the Greens are both considered political outsiders, and both enjoyed their first major election success at the same time, winning seats in the European Parliament in 1999. Although the parties are poles apart politically, it is useful to compare them as a measure of the corporation’s hypocrisy on the issue of PPBs.

The BBC’s criteria mention past support. While both parties had their first MEPs elected together, Caroline Lucas has been in Westminster since 2010, while UKIP had their first MP elected only in 2014.

And while Lucas worked tirelessly for many years to build up the Green Party’s support base, UKIP’s Douglas Carswell merely crossed the floor from the Tory Party, managing to take his voters with him in the subsequent by-election.

And current support? In 2015, the Green Party gained over a million votes, increasing their vote share by nearly three percentage points. It will be pointed out that UKIP gained rather more votes than the Greens. Yet before the last election, UKIP’s position was considerably stronger than it is today.

UKIP a lame duck?

Even then, Cameron’s pledge of an EU referendum had taken much of the wind from their sails. Yet he had made the pledge precisely for this reason, and UKIP voters knew it – he was no Eurosceptic. UKIP could therefore convince supporters that Cameron couldn’t be trusted to make good on his promise in a straightforward way.

Now, with June’s impeding referendum casting a long shadow over the May elections, Eurosceptics are in no doubt they will have their vote, and soon. UKIP risks becoming an irrelevant lame duck.

After the election, it was reported the party was in financial meltdown as members left in their droves. Last week Suzanne Evans, one of UKIP’s few semi-credible figures, was virtually drummed out of the party – incredibly, she has been suspended for 6 months from membership – amid massive internal divisions.

The Green Party’s support base, meanwhile, is the product of years of careful work. Jenny Jones served the London Assembly since 2000, before being made a working Peer in 2013. Sian Berry, the party’s candidate for London Mayor, one of the key battles to be fought in May, already holds elected office in London on Camden Council, and gained the backing of the Independent and Observer newspapers in her 2008 Mayoral Campaign.

In Scotland, the Greens are poised to massively increase their numbers of MSPs. The Greens are on the NI Assembly already, and have their best ever chance of breaking through onto the Welsh Assembly.

But all this might in effect be denied, by the BBC’s unwarranted move.

The good news?

The success of the SNP at the last election showed the appetite for a more pluralistic politics, and their MPs have so far been a breath of fresh air at Westminster. In shutting out the Greens, the BBC has chosen once again to take a conservative stance, standing against this much-needed shift towards greater political diversity.

The good news is that last year, the efforts by broadcasters to exclude the Green Party backfired: it was one of the factors that led to its surge in membership. People were rightly outraged that alternative voices were not being heard, and ironically, the controversy created a platform that allowed the party to get its message across.

With your help, the BBC’s backward failure to consider the Green point of view could backfire again this year:

Over 25,000 people have already signed the petition demanding the BBC fulfill its obligation of impartiality, and #InviteTheGreens to have Party Political Broadcasts. With the public on their side, the decision to shut out the Greens may again blow up in the Corporation’s face – as our new video (see embed, above) argues.

Just as with the previous controversy, this is emphatically not just an issue for Green sympathisers: it’s about creating the opportunity for a genuine debate that does not shy away from radical alternative views. It’s about a proper debate at these important elections. It’s about real freedom of speech.

The BBC should quickly reconsider its position. Please help it to do so.

Petition: ‘BBC: Don’t shut out the Greens!‘

Twitter: #InvitetheGreens

Rupert Read was Green Party candidate for Cambridge in the 2015 General Election.

Bennet Francis is an MPhil Research Student in Philosophy at University College London.

Editor’s note: readers may be wondering why we have not linked to the actual BBC Trust decision on the 2016 election broadcasts. It is because the BBC Trust has, to all appearances, not published its decision. There is no record of the decison on its press release archive (only of its decision to uphold its decision). No article on the topic links through to the decision. Attempts to telephone the BBC Trust press office also failed: no press office number is published; the office can only be accessed via the main BBC switchboard which, if the number is busy, refuses to allow the caller to hold; the number is always busy; operators refuse to divulge the direct number. For a public institution this is astonishing: the BBC Trust has built a wall of steel around itself.

Coffee is the drink of choice for millions of us. But the world’s second-most traded commodity originates in Ethiopia – and its home is under threat.

Ethiopia isn’t all dusty deserts – far from it. The country also contains rugged highlands and lush, tropical forests. Coffea arabica grows here in its original, wild form.

The forests of south-west Ethiopia are considered to be the birthplace of coffee and the centre of its genetic diversity.

But these forests and this gene pool are under pressure. It is already one of the last major woodlands remaining in Ethiopia, and deforestation over the past 40 years has resulted in the loss of one-third of the south-west’s forest cover. We risk losing the forests entirely in coming decades.

It is critical that these forests are protected. Commercially grown coffee has been bred over the years to ensure high yields and other useful characteristics. But it is descended from a small number of individual plants, and so relies on a relatively narrow genetic range – just 10% of the diversity found in the wild. This makes it vulnerable to pests – and climate change is an additional threat.

Wild coffee on the other hand exhibits much greater genetic diversity, which increases its chances of adapting to new challenges and reduces the possibility of extinction. It represents an insurance policy for plantation coffee, in case commercial strains are ever badly damaged.

These forests also play a critical role as a ‘water tower’ for the river Nile – serving lowland Ethiopia, South Sudan and Egypt, storing carbon to stabilise the climate and enhancing rainfall upwind in the often drought-affected, northern highlands of Ethiopia.

Ample rainfall, fertile soils, littel protection

But maintaining these forests is difficult. Rainfall in the south-west is good and the soil fertile and there is a long history of people moving here for farming, including from the drier and more densely settled north of the country. This, alongside investor interest in commercial coffee and tea plantations, has seen agricultural land encroach on the forest.

Without adequate resources to police such a large area, the forest became ‘open access’ – anyone could go in and take what they wanted and they rarely got apprehended.

In an effort to protect the country’s forest resources, the Ethiopian government adopted a nationwide policy of Participatory Forest Management (PFM), which bestows management responsibilities on communities that live near the forest and have had traditional rights to it.

Communities elect ‘forest management groups’, which include women, to administer their bit of forest for which they have secured tenured rights from the government. This helps them control access to the forest and stop deforestation. In return for the secure tenure and usage rights, the community has to ensure that the natural forest is maintained, which they do through regular monitoring.

This all takes time – a precious resource if you are a subsistence farmer. Rights to use coffee, honey, spices and other forest products provides an additional livelihood for people and compensation for looking after the forest. By making the forest pay it becomes a competitive land use, better able to compete with agriculture and motivating people to protect it and its valuable resources.

Forest people are the solution!

Over the past six years, the Wild Coffee Conservation Project has worked with 55 forest management groups to secure more than 60,000 hectares of forest under these PFM agreements. Results to date look promising – deforestation in the project area has been reduced to a twelfth of that in non-project areas.

Furthermore, cooperatives set up to market forest products collected by locals have succeeded in producing a high-quality coffee from the wild strands in the forest. This has sold on the international market for the highest price ever for Ethiopian sun-dried coffee – three times the average non-wild price.

This is encouraging, but the project and communities need to do more to get a competitive edge over agriculture. We need carbon and other ecosystem payments (payment to landowners in exchange for managing their land in a way that conserves natural resouces), all of which help with the maintenance of biodiversity. And we need to develop market links for forest spices and honey.

Securing the future of wild coffee and the forests it lives in needs local people to maintain and use these forests, to earn a living from them so they can afford to protect them in the long term and want to do so. Such a system is sustainable – unlike many of the protectionist approaches such as Biosphere Reserves which rely on fluctuating government funds and which exclude people from the forest.

Forest people are the solution to this problem: we need to give them the responsibility for the forest, so that they can save it – and the wild coffee gene pool within it – if we want to continue to enjoy our lattes and cappuccinos in the future.

Fiona Hesselden is Researcher, Centre for Sustainable and Resilient Communities, University of Huddersfield.

Adrian Wood is Professor of Sustainability, University of Huddersfield.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

In an inspired take on the forked tongue of American Indian lore, JP Morgan has just announced that it will stop direct financing of all new coal mines and new coal power plants in rich countries. 

There are at least three major holes in that plan. 

What JP Morgan really means is that it will not stop ‘indirectly’ funding coal – the bulk of what it and every other bank does – through, for instance, intermediation in capital markets. 

Neither will it stop funding existing coal mines and power plants around the globe. The world’s entire existing coal infrastructure can take a deep breath because it may still benefit from JP Morgan’s largesse.

And it will not stop funding coal in developing countries where as it happens pretty much all new coal plants are being built.

One wonders what it is that JP Morgan is in fact stopping. Funding new coal mines in the UK? There aren’t any. Funding new coal-fired power plants in France? There aren’t any either. 

As luck would have it though, the JP Morgan bankers are by no means alone.

They’re all at it!

Delegates from a European development bank (which must remain nameless to protect sources) were recently visiting the Philippines, excited to back its clean energy sector. 

The South East Asian country is endowed with lots of free sun and free wind as well as large water resources. With its over 7,000 islands, it is the perfect setting for a decentralized energy system built around clean energy and reaching every one of its rich and poor.

Furthermore, it is on the frontlines of suffering from climate change, which Filipinos know of first-hand and experience year-round.

Imagine the surprise of the European bankers when they heard from their Filipino counterparts how much the latter were excited about backing, you guessed it … coal-fired power plants. Their excitement extended to recompensing projects destroying the Filipinos’ health, and contributing to dangerous climate change, with cheaper money than what they were prepared to provide to new solar or wind power plants. 

And the same holds true in all corners of the world. Earlier this year, Korea’s green growth strategy was downgraded while the country increases its new coal capacity 65%. 

Australia’s biggest banks are cheering coal by pumping billions into it, having signed off on $5.5bn worth of dirty energy deals in 2015. 

China has 210 coal power projects in the pipeline, despite its battle against pollution, and seems to be accelerating net increases in coal-fired generating capacity. 

In Indonesia, the Japanese are having a coal-fest with Sumitomo Corp alone sponsoring an additional 2,000MW of coal capacity, aided and abetted by French and local banks.

Bangladesh, sinking because of rising sea levels, is increasing the share of coal in its energy generation (with the help of international donors) from 2% to 50% by 2030. The generously named Bangladesh-India Friendship Company is building a 1,320 megawatt coal plant close to a UNESCO heritage site, the Sundarbans mangrove forest, at incalculable risks to a world biodiversity treasure and the health of everyone worldwide. 

The situation is much the same everywhere one bothers to look. 

Cancel plans for all new coal power 

Worldwide, 2,440 new coal-fired power plants are planned. That’s a staggeringly large number and a potential financial investment of over $5 trillion. 

Even if only half of these planned plants are built, we will exceed the 1.5C warming limit the world agreed only three months ago at the Paris climate talks by 200% or more – bringing us closer to an extinction level event. The entire world – even JP Morgan – knows that holding warming below 2C, or below 1.5C by 2100, requires a rapid decarbonisation of the global power sector, and much else besides.

Among other requirements, this means that emissions from coal should be phased out by 2050. It is, however, hard to escape the impression that the climate commitments of 195 nations at the November Paris UN meet weren’t but a choreographed sham. 

If the world is serious about combating climate change, planned new coal power plants should be simply cancelled. This happens to be good for the climate and our health but also good finance: Renewable energy and heightened pollution standards in countries such as India and China are stranding coal assets. The sooner existing coal plants are closed and plans for new coal are scrapped, the less money we will collectively lose and the fewer lives will be destroyed.

Banks in particular must play their part in a forthright manner. JP Morgan could opt to show some leadership by issuing a correction to its announcement – clarifying that it will stop financing all new or old coal mines and coal power plants, wherever they may be. 

Assaad Razzouk is the CEO and co-founder of Sindicatum Sustainable Resources, a clean energy company based in Singapore, and an expert in climate and clean energy policy and markets. He tweets @AssaadRazzouk.

Twitter: #CancelCoal

Coffee is the drink of choice for millions of us. But the world’s second-most traded commodity originates in Ethiopia – and its home is under threat.

Ethiopia isn’t all dusty deserts – far from it. The country also contains rugged highlands and lush, tropical forests. Coffea arabica grows here in its original, wild form.

The forests of south-west Ethiopia are considered to be the birthplace of coffee and the centre of its genetic diversity.

But these forests and this gene pool are under pressure. It is already one of the last major woodlands remaining in Ethiopia, and deforestation over the past 40 years has resulted in the loss of one-third of the south-west’s forest cover. We risk losing the forests entirely in coming decades.

It is critical that these forests are protected. Commercially grown coffee has been bred over the years to ensure high yields and other useful characteristics. But it is descended from a small number of individual plants, and so relies on a relatively narrow genetic range – just 10% of the diversity found in the wild. This makes it vulnerable to pests – and climate change is an additional threat.

Wild coffee on the other hand exhibits much greater genetic diversity, which increases its chances of adapting to new challenges and reduces the possibility of extinction. It represents an insurance policy for plantation coffee, in case commercial strains are ever badly damaged.

These forests also play a critical role as a ‘water tower’ for the river Nile – serving lowland Ethiopia, South Sudan and Egypt, storing carbon to stabilise the climate and enhancing rainfall upwind in the often drought-affected, northern highlands of Ethiopia.

Ample rainfall, fertile soils, littel protection

But maintaining these forests is difficult. Rainfall in the south-west is good and the soil fertile and there is a long history of people moving here for farming, including from the drier and more densely settled north of the country. This, alongside investor interest in commercial coffee and tea plantations, has seen agricultural land encroach on the forest.

Without adequate resources to police such a large area, the forest became ‘open access’ – anyone could go in and take what they wanted and they rarely got apprehended.

In an effort to protect the country’s forest resources, the Ethiopian government adopted a nationwide policy of Participatory Forest Management (PFM), which bestows management responsibilities on communities that live near the forest and have had traditional rights to it.

Communities elect ‘forest management groups’, which include women, to administer their bit of forest for which they have secured tenured rights from the government. This helps them control access to the forest and stop deforestation. In return for the secure tenure and usage rights, the community has to ensure that the natural forest is maintained, which they do through regular monitoring.

This all takes time – a precious resource if you are a subsistence farmer. Rights to use coffee, honey, spices and other forest products provides an additional livelihood for people and compensation for looking after the forest. By making the forest pay it becomes a competitive land use, better able to compete with agriculture and motivating people to protect it and its valuable resources.

Forest people are the solution!

Over the past six years, the Wild Coffee Conservation Project has worked with 55 forest management groups to secure more than 60,000 hectares of forest under these PFM agreements. Results to date look promising – deforestation in the project area has been reduced to a twelfth of that in non-project areas.

Furthermore, cooperatives set up to market forest products collected by locals have succeeded in producing a high-quality coffee from the wild strands in the forest. This has sold on the international market for the highest price ever for Ethiopian sun-dried coffee – three times the average non-wild price.

This is encouraging, but the project and communities need to do more to get a competitive edge over agriculture. We need carbon and other ecosystem payments (payment to landowners in exchange for managing their land in a way that conserves natural resouces), all of which help with the maintenance of biodiversity. And we need to develop market links for forest spices and honey.

Securing the future of wild coffee and the forests it lives in needs local people to maintain and use these forests, to earn a living from them so they can afford to protect them in the long term and want to do so. Such a system is sustainable – unlike many of the protectionist approaches such as Biosphere Reserves which rely on fluctuating government funds and which exclude people from the forest.

Forest people are the solution to this problem: we need to give them the responsibility for the forest, so that they can save it – and the wild coffee gene pool within it – if we want to continue to enjoy our lattes and cappuccinos in the future.

Fiona Hesselden is Researcher, Centre for Sustainable and Resilient Communities, University of Huddersfield.

Adrian Wood is Professor of Sustainability, University of Huddersfield.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

In an inspired take on the forked tongue of American Indian lore, JP Morgan has just announced that it will stop direct financing of all new coal mines and new coal power plants in rich countries. 

There are at least three major holes in that plan. 

What JP Morgan really means is that it will not stop ‘indirectly’ funding coal – the bulk of what it and every other bank does – through, for instance, intermediation in capital markets. 

Neither will it stop funding existing coal mines and power plants around the globe. The world’s entire existing coal infrastructure can take a deep breath because it may still benefit from JP Morgan’s largesse.

And it will not stop funding coal in developing countries where as it happens pretty much all new coal plants are being built.

One wonders what it is that JP Morgan is in fact stopping. Funding new coal mines in the UK? There aren’t any. Funding new coal-fired power plants in France? There aren’t any either. 

As luck would have it though, the JP Morgan bankers are by no means alone.

They’re all at it!

Delegates from a European development bank (which must remain nameless to protect sources) were recently visiting the Philippines, excited to back its clean energy sector. 

The South East Asian country is endowed with lots of free sun and free wind as well as large water resources. With its over 7,000 islands, it is the perfect setting for a decentralized energy system built around clean energy and reaching every one of its rich and poor.

Furthermore, it is on the frontlines of suffering from climate change, which Filipinos know of first-hand and experience year-round.

Imagine the surprise of the European bankers when they heard from their Filipino counterparts how much the latter were excited about backing, you guessed it … coal-fired power plants. Their excitement extended to recompensing projects destroying the Filipinos’ health, and contributing to dangerous climate change, with cheaper money than what they were prepared to provide to new solar or wind power plants. 

And the same holds true in all corners of the world. Earlier this year, Korea’s green growth strategy was downgraded while the country increases its new coal capacity 65%. 

Australia’s biggest banks are cheering coal by pumping billions into it, having signed off on $5.5bn worth of dirty energy deals in 2015. 

China has 210 coal power projects in the pipeline, despite its battle against pollution, and seems to be accelerating net increases in coal-fired generating capacity. 

In Indonesia, the Japanese are having a coal-fest with Sumitomo Corp alone sponsoring an additional 2,000MW of coal capacity, aided and abetted by French and local banks.

Bangladesh, sinking because of rising sea levels, is increasing the share of coal in its energy generation (with the help of international donors) from 2% to 50% by 2030. The generously named Bangladesh-India Friendship Company is building a 1,320 megawatt coal plant close to a UNESCO heritage site, the Sundarbans mangrove forest, at incalculable risks to a world biodiversity treasure and the health of everyone worldwide. 

The situation is much the same everywhere one bothers to look. 

Cancel plans for all new coal power 

Worldwide, 2,440 new coal-fired power plants are planned. That’s a staggeringly large number and a potential financial investment of over $5 trillion. 

Even if only half of these planned plants are built, we will exceed the 1.5C warming limit the world agreed only three months ago at the Paris climate talks by 200% or more – bringing us closer to an extinction level event. The entire world – even JP Morgan – knows that holding warming below 2C, or below 1.5C by 2100, requires a rapid decarbonisation of the global power sector, and much else besides.

Among other requirements, this means that emissions from coal should be phased out by 2050. It is, however, hard to escape the impression that the climate commitments of 195 nations at the November Paris UN meet weren’t but a choreographed sham. 

If the world is serious about combating climate change, planned new coal power plants should be simply cancelled. This happens to be good for the climate and our health but also good finance: Renewable energy and heightened pollution standards in countries such as India and China are stranding coal assets. The sooner existing coal plants are closed and plans for new coal are scrapped, the less money we will collectively lose and the fewer lives will be destroyed.

Banks in particular must play their part in a forthright manner. JP Morgan could opt to show some leadership by issuing a correction to its announcement – clarifying that it will stop financing all new or old coal mines and coal power plants, wherever they may be. 

Assaad Razzouk is the CEO and co-founder of Sindicatum Sustainable Resources, a clean energy company based in Singapore, and an expert in climate and clean energy policy and markets. He tweets @AssaadRazzouk.

Twitter: #CancelCoal

Coffee is the drink of choice for millions of us. But the world’s second-most traded commodity originates in Ethiopia – and its home is under threat.

Ethiopia isn’t all dusty deserts – far from it. The country also contains rugged highlands and lush, tropical forests. Coffea arabica grows here in its original, wild form.

The forests of south-west Ethiopia are considered to be the birthplace of coffee and the centre of its genetic diversity.

But these forests and this gene pool are under pressure. It is already one of the last major woodlands remaining in Ethiopia, and deforestation over the past 40 years has resulted in the loss of one-third of the south-west’s forest cover. We risk losing the forests entirely in coming decades.

It is critical that these forests are protected. Commercially grown coffee has been bred over the years to ensure high yields and other useful characteristics. But it is descended from a small number of individual plants, and so relies on a relatively narrow genetic range – just 10% of the diversity found in the wild. This makes it vulnerable to pests – and climate change is an additional threat.

Wild coffee on the other hand exhibits much greater genetic diversity, which increases its chances of adapting to new challenges and reduces the possibility of extinction. It represents an insurance policy for plantation coffee, in case commercial strains are ever badly damaged.

These forests also play a critical role as a ‘water tower’ for the river Nile – serving lowland Ethiopia, South Sudan and Egypt, storing carbon to stabilise the climate and enhancing rainfall upwind in the often drought-affected, northern highlands of Ethiopia.

Ample rainfall, fertile soils, littel protection

But maintaining these forests is difficult. Rainfall in the south-west is good and the soil fertile and there is a long history of people moving here for farming, including from the drier and more densely settled north of the country. This, alongside investor interest in commercial coffee and tea plantations, has seen agricultural land encroach on the forest.

Without adequate resources to police such a large area, the forest became ‘open access’ – anyone could go in and take what they wanted and they rarely got apprehended.

In an effort to protect the country’s forest resources, the Ethiopian government adopted a nationwide policy of Participatory Forest Management (PFM), which bestows management responsibilities on communities that live near the forest and have had traditional rights to it.

Communities elect ‘forest management groups’, which include women, to administer their bit of forest for which they have secured tenured rights from the government. This helps them control access to the forest and stop deforestation. In return for the secure tenure and usage rights, the community has to ensure that the natural forest is maintained, which they do through regular monitoring.

This all takes time – a precious resource if you are a subsistence farmer. Rights to use coffee, honey, spices and other forest products provides an additional livelihood for people and compensation for looking after the forest. By making the forest pay it becomes a competitive land use, better able to compete with agriculture and motivating people to protect it and its valuable resources.

Forest people are the solution!

Over the past six years, the Wild Coffee Conservation Project has worked with 55 forest management groups to secure more than 60,000 hectares of forest under these PFM agreements. Results to date look promising – deforestation in the project area has been reduced to a twelfth of that in non-project areas.

Furthermore, cooperatives set up to market forest products collected by locals have succeeded in producing a high-quality coffee from the wild strands in the forest. This has sold on the international market for the highest price ever for Ethiopian sun-dried coffee – three times the average non-wild price.

This is encouraging, but the project and communities need to do more to get a competitive edge over agriculture. We need carbon and other ecosystem payments (payment to landowners in exchange for managing their land in a way that conserves natural resouces), all of which help with the maintenance of biodiversity. And we need to develop market links for forest spices and honey.

Securing the future of wild coffee and the forests it lives in needs local people to maintain and use these forests, to earn a living from them so they can afford to protect them in the long term and want to do so. Such a system is sustainable – unlike many of the protectionist approaches such as Biosphere Reserves which rely on fluctuating government funds and which exclude people from the forest.

Forest people are the solution to this problem: we need to give them the responsibility for the forest, so that they can save it – and the wild coffee gene pool within it – if we want to continue to enjoy our lattes and cappuccinos in the future.

Fiona Hesselden is Researcher, Centre for Sustainable and Resilient Communities, University of Huddersfield.

Adrian Wood is Professor of Sustainability, University of Huddersfield.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

In an inspired take on the forked tongue of American Indian lore, JP Morgan has just announced that it will stop direct financing of all new coal mines and new coal power plants in rich countries. 

There are at least three major holes in that plan. 

What JP Morgan really means is that it will not stop ‘indirectly’ funding coal – the bulk of what it and every other bank does – through, for instance, intermediation in capital markets. 

Neither will it stop funding existing coal mines and power plants around the globe. The world’s entire existing coal infrastructure can take a deep breath because it may still benefit from JP Morgan’s largesse.

And it will not stop funding coal in developing countries where as it happens pretty much all new coal plants are being built.

One wonders what it is that JP Morgan is in fact stopping. Funding new coal mines in the UK? There aren’t any. Funding new coal-fired power plants in France? There aren’t any either. 

As luck would have it though, the JP Morgan bankers are by no means alone.

They’re all at it!

Delegates from a European development bank (which must remain nameless to protect sources) were recently visiting the Philippines, excited to back its clean energy sector. 

The South East Asian country is endowed with lots of free sun and free wind as well as large water resources. With its over 7,000 islands, it is the perfect setting for a decentralized energy system built around clean energy and reaching every one of its rich and poor.

Furthermore, it is on the frontlines of suffering from climate change, which Filipinos know of first-hand and experience year-round.

Imagine the surprise of the European bankers when they heard from their Filipino counterparts how much the latter were excited about backing, you guessed it … coal-fired power plants. Their excitement extended to recompensing projects destroying the Filipinos’ health, and contributing to dangerous climate change, with cheaper money than what they were prepared to provide to new solar or wind power plants. 

And the same holds true in all corners of the world. Earlier this year, Korea’s green growth strategy was downgraded while the country increases its new coal capacity 65%. 

Australia’s biggest banks are cheering coal by pumping billions into it, having signed off on $5.5bn worth of dirty energy deals in 2015. 

China has 210 coal power projects in the pipeline, despite its battle against pollution, and seems to be accelerating net increases in coal-fired generating capacity. 

In Indonesia, the Japanese are having a coal-fest with Sumitomo Corp alone sponsoring an additional 2,000MW of coal capacity, aided and abetted by French and local banks.

Bangladesh, sinking because of rising sea levels, is increasing the share of coal in its energy generation (with the help of international donors) from 2% to 50% by 2030. The generously named Bangladesh-India Friendship Company is building a 1,320 megawatt coal plant close to a UNESCO heritage site, the Sundarbans mangrove forest, at incalculable risks to a world biodiversity treasure and the health of everyone worldwide. 

The situation is much the same everywhere one bothers to look. 

Cancel plans for all new coal power 

Worldwide, 2,440 new coal-fired power plants are planned. That’s a staggeringly large number and a potential financial investment of over $5 trillion. 

Even if only half of these planned plants are built, we will exceed the 1.5C warming limit the world agreed only three months ago at the Paris climate talks by 200% or more – bringing us closer to an extinction level event. The entire world – even JP Morgan – knows that holding warming below 2C, or below 1.5C by 2100, requires a rapid decarbonisation of the global power sector, and much else besides.

Among other requirements, this means that emissions from coal should be phased out by 2050. It is, however, hard to escape the impression that the climate commitments of 195 nations at the November Paris UN meet weren’t but a choreographed sham. 

If the world is serious about combating climate change, planned new coal power plants should be simply cancelled. This happens to be good for the climate and our health but also good finance: Renewable energy and heightened pollution standards in countries such as India and China are stranding coal assets. The sooner existing coal plants are closed and plans for new coal are scrapped, the less money we will collectively lose and the fewer lives will be destroyed.

Banks in particular must play their part in a forthright manner. JP Morgan could opt to show some leadership by issuing a correction to its announcement – clarifying that it will stop financing all new or old coal mines and coal power plants, wherever they may be. 

Assaad Razzouk is the CEO and co-founder of Sindicatum Sustainable Resources, a clean energy company based in Singapore, and an expert in climate and clean energy policy and markets. He tweets @AssaadRazzouk.

Twitter: #CancelCoal

Coffee is the drink of choice for millions of us. But the world’s second-most traded commodity originates in Ethiopia – and its home is under threat.

Ethiopia isn’t all dusty deserts – far from it. The country also contains rugged highlands and lush, tropical forests. Coffea arabica grows here in its original, wild form.

The forests of south-west Ethiopia are considered to be the birthplace of coffee and the centre of its genetic diversity.

But these forests and this gene pool are under pressure. It is already one of the last major woodlands remaining in Ethiopia, and deforestation over the past 40 years has resulted in the loss of one-third of the south-west’s forest cover. We risk losing the forests entirely in coming decades.

It is critical that these forests are protected. Commercially grown coffee has been bred over the years to ensure high yields and other useful characteristics. But it is descended from a small number of individual plants, and so relies on a relatively narrow genetic range – just 10% of the diversity found in the wild. This makes it vulnerable to pests – and climate change is an additional threat.

Wild coffee on the other hand exhibits much greater genetic diversity, which increases its chances of adapting to new challenges and reduces the possibility of extinction. It represents an insurance policy for plantation coffee, in case commercial strains are ever badly damaged.

These forests also play a critical role as a ‘water tower’ for the river Nile – serving lowland Ethiopia, South Sudan and Egypt, storing carbon to stabilise the climate and enhancing rainfall upwind in the often drought-affected, northern highlands of Ethiopia.

Ample rainfall, fertile soils, littel protection

But maintaining these forests is difficult. Rainfall in the south-west is good and the soil fertile and there is a long history of people moving here for farming, including from the drier and more densely settled north of the country. This, alongside investor interest in commercial coffee and tea plantations, has seen agricultural land encroach on the forest.

Without adequate resources to police such a large area, the forest became ‘open access’ – anyone could go in and take what they wanted and they rarely got apprehended.

In an effort to protect the country’s forest resources, the Ethiopian government adopted a nationwide policy of Participatory Forest Management (PFM), which bestows management responsibilities on communities that live near the forest and have had traditional rights to it.

Communities elect ‘forest management groups’, which include women, to administer their bit of forest for which they have secured tenured rights from the government. This helps them control access to the forest and stop deforestation. In return for the secure tenure and usage rights, the community has to ensure that the natural forest is maintained, which they do through regular monitoring.

This all takes time – a precious resource if you are a subsistence farmer. Rights to use coffee, honey, spices and other forest products provides an additional livelihood for people and compensation for looking after the forest. By making the forest pay it becomes a competitive land use, better able to compete with agriculture and motivating people to protect it and its valuable resources.

Forest people are the solution!

Over the past six years, the Wild Coffee Conservation Project has worked with 55 forest management groups to secure more than 60,000 hectares of forest under these PFM agreements. Results to date look promising – deforestation in the project area has been reduced to a twelfth of that in non-project areas.

Furthermore, cooperatives set up to market forest products collected by locals have succeeded in producing a high-quality coffee from the wild strands in the forest. This has sold on the international market for the highest price ever for Ethiopian sun-dried coffee – three times the average non-wild price.

This is encouraging, but the project and communities need to do more to get a competitive edge over agriculture. We need carbon and other ecosystem payments (payment to landowners in exchange for managing their land in a way that conserves natural resouces), all of which help with the maintenance of biodiversity. And we need to develop market links for forest spices and honey.

Securing the future of wild coffee and the forests it lives in needs local people to maintain and use these forests, to earn a living from them so they can afford to protect them in the long term and want to do so. Such a system is sustainable – unlike many of the protectionist approaches such as Biosphere Reserves which rely on fluctuating government funds and which exclude people from the forest.

Forest people are the solution to this problem: we need to give them the responsibility for the forest, so that they can save it – and the wild coffee gene pool within it – if we want to continue to enjoy our lattes and cappuccinos in the future.

Fiona Hesselden is Researcher, Centre for Sustainable and Resilient Communities, University of Huddersfield.

Adrian Wood is Professor of Sustainability, University of Huddersfield.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

In an inspired take on the forked tongue of American Indian lore, JP Morgan has just announced that it will stop direct financing of all new coal mines and new coal power plants in rich countries. 

There are at least three major holes in that plan. 

What JP Morgan really means is that it will not stop ‘indirectly’ funding coal – the bulk of what it and every other bank does – through, for instance, intermediation in capital markets. 

Neither will it stop funding existing coal mines and power plants around the globe. The world’s entire existing coal infrastructure can take a deep breath because it may still benefit from JP Morgan’s largesse.

And it will not stop funding coal in developing countries where as it happens pretty much all new coal plants are being built.

One wonders what it is that JP Morgan is in fact stopping. Funding new coal mines in the UK? There aren’t any. Funding new coal-fired power plants in France? There aren’t any either. 

As luck would have it though, the JP Morgan bankers are by no means alone.

They’re all at it!

Delegates from a European development bank (which must remain nameless to protect sources) were recently visiting the Philippines, excited to back its clean energy sector. 

The South East Asian country is endowed with lots of free sun and free wind as well as large water resources. With its over 7,000 islands, it is the perfect setting for a decentralized energy system built around clean energy and reaching every one of its rich and poor.

Furthermore, it is on the frontlines of suffering from climate change, which Filipinos know of first-hand and experience year-round.

Imagine the surprise of the European bankers when they heard from their Filipino counterparts how much the latter were excited about backing, you guessed it … coal-fired power plants. Their excitement extended to recompensing projects destroying the Filipinos’ health, and contributing to dangerous climate change, with cheaper money than what they were prepared to provide to new solar or wind power plants. 

And the same holds true in all corners of the world. Earlier this year, Korea’s green growth strategy was downgraded while the country increases its new coal capacity 65%. 

Australia’s biggest banks are cheering coal by pumping billions into it, having signed off on $5.5bn worth of dirty energy deals in 2015. 

China has 210 coal power projects in the pipeline, despite its battle against pollution, and seems to be accelerating net increases in coal-fired generating capacity. 

In Indonesia, the Japanese are having a coal-fest with Sumitomo Corp alone sponsoring an additional 2,000MW of coal capacity, aided and abetted by French and local banks.

Bangladesh, sinking because of rising sea levels, is increasing the share of coal in its energy generation (with the help of international donors) from 2% to 50% by 2030. The generously named Bangladesh-India Friendship Company is building a 1,320 megawatt coal plant close to a UNESCO heritage site, the Sundarbans mangrove forest, at incalculable risks to a world biodiversity treasure and the health of everyone worldwide. 

The situation is much the same everywhere one bothers to look. 

Cancel plans for all new coal power 

Worldwide, 2,440 new coal-fired power plants are planned. That’s a staggeringly large number and a potential financial investment of over $5 trillion. 

Even if only half of these planned plants are built, we will exceed the 1.5C warming limit the world agreed only three months ago at the Paris climate talks by 200% or more – bringing us closer to an extinction level event. The entire world – even JP Morgan – knows that holding warming below 2C, or below 1.5C by 2100, requires a rapid decarbonisation of the global power sector, and much else besides.

Among other requirements, this means that emissions from coal should be phased out by 2050. It is, however, hard to escape the impression that the climate commitments of 195 nations at the November Paris UN meet weren’t but a choreographed sham. 

If the world is serious about combating climate change, planned new coal power plants should be simply cancelled. This happens to be good for the climate and our health but also good finance: Renewable energy and heightened pollution standards in countries such as India and China are stranding coal assets. The sooner existing coal plants are closed and plans for new coal are scrapped, the less money we will collectively lose and the fewer lives will be destroyed.

Banks in particular must play their part in a forthright manner. JP Morgan could opt to show some leadership by issuing a correction to its announcement – clarifying that it will stop financing all new or old coal mines and coal power plants, wherever they may be. 

Assaad Razzouk is the CEO and co-founder of Sindicatum Sustainable Resources, a clean energy company based in Singapore, and an expert in climate and clean energy policy and markets. He tweets @AssaadRazzouk.

Twitter: #CancelCoal

Coffee is the drink of choice for millions of us. But the world’s second-most traded commodity originates in Ethiopia – and its home is under threat.

Ethiopia isn’t all dusty deserts – far from it. The country also contains rugged highlands and lush, tropical forests. Coffea arabica grows here in its original, wild form.

The forests of south-west Ethiopia are considered to be the birthplace of coffee and the centre of its genetic diversity.

But these forests and this gene pool are under pressure. It is already one of the last major woodlands remaining in Ethiopia, and deforestation over the past 40 years has resulted in the loss of one-third of the south-west’s forest cover. We risk losing the forests entirely in coming decades.

It is critical that these forests are protected. Commercially grown coffee has been bred over the years to ensure high yields and other useful characteristics. But it is descended from a small number of individual plants, and so relies on a relatively narrow genetic range – just 10% of the diversity found in the wild. This makes it vulnerable to pests – and climate change is an additional threat.

Wild coffee on the other hand exhibits much greater genetic diversity, which increases its chances of adapting to new challenges and reduces the possibility of extinction. It represents an insurance policy for plantation coffee, in case commercial strains are ever badly damaged.

These forests also play a critical role as a ‘water tower’ for the river Nile – serving lowland Ethiopia, South Sudan and Egypt, storing carbon to stabilise the climate and enhancing rainfall upwind in the often drought-affected, northern highlands of Ethiopia.

Ample rainfall, fertile soils, littel protection

But maintaining these forests is difficult. Rainfall in the south-west is good and the soil fertile and there is a long history of people moving here for farming, including from the drier and more densely settled north of the country. This, alongside investor interest in commercial coffee and tea plantations, has seen agricultural land encroach on the forest.

Without adequate resources to police such a large area, the forest became ‘open access’ – anyone could go in and take what they wanted and they rarely got apprehended.

In an effort to protect the country’s forest resources, the Ethiopian government adopted a nationwide policy of Participatory Forest Management (PFM), which bestows management responsibilities on communities that live near the forest and have had traditional rights to it.

Communities elect ‘forest management groups’, which include women, to administer their bit of forest for which they have secured tenured rights from the government. This helps them control access to the forest and stop deforestation. In return for the secure tenure and usage rights, the community has to ensure that the natural forest is maintained, which they do through regular monitoring.

This all takes time – a precious resource if you are a subsistence farmer. Rights to use coffee, honey, spices and other forest products provides an additional livelihood for people and compensation for looking after the forest. By making the forest pay it becomes a competitive land use, better able to compete with agriculture and motivating people to protect it and its valuable resources.

Forest people are the solution!

Over the past six years, the Wild Coffee Conservation Project has worked with 55 forest management groups to secure more than 60,000 hectares of forest under these PFM agreements. Results to date look promising – deforestation in the project area has been reduced to a twelfth of that in non-project areas.

Furthermore, cooperatives set up to market forest products collected by locals have succeeded in producing a high-quality coffee from the wild strands in the forest. This has sold on the international market for the highest price ever for Ethiopian sun-dried coffee – three times the average non-wild price.

This is encouraging, but the project and communities need to do more to get a competitive edge over agriculture. We need carbon and other ecosystem payments (payment to landowners in exchange for managing their land in a way that conserves natural resouces), all of which help with the maintenance of biodiversity. And we need to develop market links for forest spices and honey.

Securing the future of wild coffee and the forests it lives in needs local people to maintain and use these forests, to earn a living from them so they can afford to protect them in the long term and want to do so. Such a system is sustainable – unlike many of the protectionist approaches such as Biosphere Reserves which rely on fluctuating government funds and which exclude people from the forest.

Forest people are the solution to this problem: we need to give them the responsibility for the forest, so that they can save it – and the wild coffee gene pool within it – if we want to continue to enjoy our lattes and cappuccinos in the future.

Fiona Hesselden is Researcher, Centre for Sustainable and Resilient Communities, University of Huddersfield.

Adrian Wood is Professor of Sustainability, University of Huddersfield.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.