Monthly Archives: March 2015

Meat boom propels China’s ecosystems into total collapse Updated for 2026

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China’s push for more intense farming has kept its city dwellers well-fed and helped lift millions of rural workers out of poverty. But it has come at a cost.

Ecosystems in what should be one of the country’s most fertile region have already been badly damaged – some beyond repair – and the consequences will be felt across the world.

This is part of a long-running trade-off between rising levels of food production and a deteriorating environment, revealed in recent research I conducted with colleagues from China and the UK.

Yields of crops and fish have risen over the past 60 years at several locations we studied in Anhui, Jiangsu and Shanghai Provinces in eastern China. But these are parallelled by long-term trends in poorer air and water quality, and reduced soil stability.

You may ask if this a bad thing. After all, increasing agricultural productivity has been one of the factors responsible for lifting millions of rural Chinese out of poverty. Does it really matter that the natural environment has taken a bit of a hit?

Well yes. For agriculture and aquaculture to be sustainable from one generation to the next, the natural processes that stabilise soils, purify water or store carbon have to be maintained in stable states. These natural processes represent benefits for society, known as ecosystem services.

‘Green revolution’ technologies tip the balance to perdition

Throughout the latter half of the last century, these services were being lost relatively slowly through the cumulative, everyday actions of individual farmers.

But the problems accelerated in the 1980s when farmers began to use more intensive methods, especially artificial fertilisers – and again after 2004 when subsidies were introduced.

Worryingly, in some localities, the slow deterioration has turned into a rapid downward spiral. Some aquatic ecosystems have dropped over tipping points into new, undesirable states where clear lakes suddenly become dominated by green algae with losses of high-value fish.

These new states are not just detrimental to the continued high-level production of crops and fish but are very difficult and expensive to restore.

These natural processes are degraded and destabilised to the point that they cannot be depended upon to support intensive agriculture in the near future. The whole region is losing its ability to withstand the impact of extreme events, from typhoons to global commodity prices.

What can be done?

National policy must prioritise sustainable agriculture. This will mean big changes on the farm: fertiliser and pesticides must be applied in the correct quantities at the right time of the year, cattle slurry and human sewage must be disposed of properly, chemicals getting into streams and rivers must be reduced, and fish feed has to be controlled.

Unfortunately, this is easier said than done. Farmers are still generally poor, badly educated and ageing. Good agricultural advice is lacking and big cities still tempt the younger farmers away from their fields. All these factors mean that rapid action is unlikely.

The recent introduction of the Land Circulation reform policy, allows farmers to rent their land to larger combines. The policy is designed to overcome the inefficiencies of small farm holdings but it may not be taken up widely in the more marginal landscapes where potential profits are low.

All the evidence points to a need for a significantly improved system of information and technology transfer to individual smallholders, probably involving a more efficient coordination between agencies.

The problem is global

But there’s a larger-scale context to this problem that may affect us all. China’s grain production has risen fivefold since the 1950s, outstripping the pace of population growth. Despite this, the nation is no longer self-sufficient.

The shift towards more meat production has placed a demand for soybean and cereal animal feed that can no longer be met internally. In 2012, China imported more than 60% of all the world’s soybeans that were available for export, and cereal imports are also on the up.

Reliance on imports to fill a shortfall in home produce is nothing new. But in China’s case, the additional risk that agriculture is increasingly unsustainable may amplify the demand. The potential scale of demand for imports is bound to have repercussions for global food production and food prices.

Unless reforms are introduced quickly, the rest of the world may well find that they are sharing China’s trade-off with nature – through the weekly shopping bill.

 

 

John Dearing is Professor of Physical Geography at the University of Southampton.

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

The Conversation

 




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After UK’s record solar year, government tries to kill the sector Updated for 2026

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Marks & Spencer (M&S) has just completed the UK’s largest single roof mounted solar panel array on its East Midlands automated distribution centre in Castle Donington.

The 6.1MWp solar array comprises 24,272 PV panels, each rated at 250W, installed on the company’s 900,000 sq.ft (84,000 sq.m) roof.

It’s yet another contribution to the record growth of the UK’s solar sector, which now boasts over 650,000 solar installations across homes, offices, schools, churches, warehouses, farms, police stations, train stations and even a bridge.

Official statistics show that total capacity reached almost 5GW at the end of 2014, up from 2.8GW at the end of 2013. At peak production, that’s enough to power 1.5 million homes, and approaching 10% of the UK’s peak power demand.

But now the government is determined to kill UK solar

Despite the manifest success of the UK’s solar industry, the government last week anounced that only five large (over 5MW) new solar installations will be supported under its new  ‘Contracts for Difference’ (CFD) system.

The CFD ‘auction’, held earlier this year, required ‘established renewables’ – a category that includes onshore wind, landfill gas, hydro and solar – to compete with each other for a share of £50m for the next year, rising to 65m allocated for future years.

Relative to support for other technologies the sum is minute. The government is spending £3.1bn for under its established Renewables Obligation (RO) support mechanism for 2014/15. And while the RO remains open until 2017 to other technologies, it specifically excludes large-scale solar.

The Solar Trade Association predicts a catastrophic decline in the sector as a consequence. It estimates that 2-3GW (2,000-3,000MW) of large-scale solar will be completed in the current financial year.

But it predicts that next financial year new installations will collapse to just 32MW for all solar PV large and small – around 1% of current levels.

‘Blatant discrimination’

Some now accuse the government of “blatant discrimination” against solar power, owing to its unique exclusion from the RO, combined with the paltry sum available under the CFD package. In addition Britain’s Green Investment Bank has so far excluded solar power from loans of £1.6 billion for renewables.

The five solar projects selected from the CFD auction came in at the lowest prices of all the 27 winners, at £50 and £79.23 per MWh. Most of the others were onshore wind projects bidding at £82.50. This provides a strong indication that solar is already the UK’s lowest cost form of renewable energy.

Making government policy especially paradoxical, say critics, is the fact that solar PV is expected to be competitive with fossil fuel power as soon as 2020, according to the recent report ‘In Sight: Unsubsidised UK Solar‘. The report recommends:

“Solar PV will be a critical technology in the 21st century, and the British government should continue to support the industry until it is fully economic without subsidies; we believe that this will be reached within the next decade across all solar markets in Britain.

“Support must be reduced progressively and predictably towards elimination over the next decade, to help build a more mature, lowcost supply chain, while maintaining value for money and preventing developers from inflating prices. Getting the right support level is critical to driving sustained cost reductions.”

Even Amber Rudd, Minister for Energy and Climate Change, had nice things to say at M&S’s solar launch yesterday: “More rooftop solar means more jobs – and will also help deliver the clean, reliable energy supplies that the country needs at the lowest possible cost to consumers.”

But in fact, the government is putting the boot in. Why? A clue may exist elsewhere in the report: “Increasing cost-competitiveness and capacity growth of solar PV in Britain will impact the British power system, including falls in wholesale power prices, as already seen in Germany.

“The growth of solar power may threaten electric utilities which fail to transition away from solely supplying electricity, to providing residential energy services.”

Could the UK government’s apparently senseless policy on solar power be written by the energy companies in direct opposition to the consumer interest in lower electricity prices? So it would appear.

But M&S sticks to its solar guns

M&S’s record-breaking PV array will help the company maintain its commitment of sourcing 100% of its electricity for UK and Ireland buildings from renewable sources, with 50% sourced from small scale renewable sources by 2020.

The energy it generates each year – estimated at 5,000 MWh – will provide nearly 25% of the energy required for the distribution centre, and lower M&S’s carbon footprint by 48,000 tonnes over 20 years.

As such M&S’s solar commitment is driven by its low carbon policy commitment rather than subsidies. Since the launch of its ‘Plan A’ in 2007, M&S has lowered its carbon emissions by 37% and is carbon neutral across its worldwide operations.

And Hugo Adams, Director of Property at M&S, confirmed that there was more in the pipeline. The completion of this project, he said, was “the first significant step in a number of solar energy initiatives we are planning this year. The scale of the project demonstrates our ambitious goals and long term commitment to onsite renewable energy.”

And it may just be that as prices fall, other companies, landlords, schools, local authorities and home-owners will just carry on installing solar anyway, driving down their power bills and carbon footprint – and foiling the attempt by the UK government, in cahoots with the Big Six power companies, to kill the sector off.

 

 

Oliver Tickell edits The Ecologist.

 




390945

Coming soon: the ‘Big Heat’ Updated for 2026

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Forget the so-called ‘pause’ in global warming-new research says we might be in for an era of deeply accelerated heating.

While the rate of atmospheric warming in recent years has, indeed, slowed due to various natural weather cycles – hence the skeptics’ droning on about ‘pauses’ – global warming, as a whole, has not stopped.

Far from it. It’s actually sped up, dramatically, as excess heat has absorbed into the oceans. We’ve only begun to realize the extent of this phenomenon in recent years, after scientists developed new technologies capable of measuring ocean temperatures with a depth and precision that was previously lacking.

In 2011, a paper in Geophysical Research Letters tallied up the total warming data from land, air, ice, and the oceans. In 2012, the lead author of that study, oceanographer John Church, updated his research. What Church found was shocking: in recent decades, climate change has been adding heat to the oceans at an average rate of 125 Terawatts (TW).

How to convey this extraordinary fact? His team came up with an analogy: it was roughly the same amount of energy that would be released by the detonation of two atomic bombs the size dropped on Hiroshima. In other words, these scientists found that anthropogenic climate is warming the oceans at a rate equivalent to around two Hiroshima bombs per second.

Or looked at another way, all the world’s coal fired power stations currently have a generation capacity a little under 2TW. As they are typically about one third efficient, working flat out they would collectively produce about 6TW of heat and power. Now multiply by 20.

Actually, it’s worse. Much worse …

But as new data came in, the situation has looked worse: over the last 17 years, the rate of warming has doubled to about four bombs per second. In 2013, the rate of warming tripled to become equivalent to 12 Hiroshima bombs every second.

So not only is warming intensifying, it is also accelerating. By burning fossil fuels, humans are effectively detonating 378 million atomic bombs in the oceans each year – this, along with the ocean’s over – absorption of carbon dioxide, has fuelled ocean acidification, and now threatens the entire marine food chain as well as animals who feed on marine species. Like, er, many humans.

According to a new paper in Science from a crack team of climate scientists, a key reason that the oceans are absorbing all this heat in recent decades so well (thus masking the extent of global warming by allowing atmospheric average temperatures to heat more slowly), is due to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), an El Nino-like weather pattern that can last anywhere between 15-30 years.

In its previous positive phase, which ran from around 1977 to 1998, the PDO meant the oceans would absorb less heat, thus operating as an accelerator on atmospheric temperatures. Since 1998, the PDO has been in a largely negative phase, during which the oceans absorb more heat from the atmosphere.

Such decadal ocean cycles have broken down recently, and become more sporadic. The last, mostly negative phase, was punctuated by a brief positive phase that lasted 3 years between 2002 and 2005.

Where’s all the heat gone? Buried in the deep ocean

The authors of the new study, Penn State climatologist Michael Mann, University of Minnesota geologist Byron Steinman, and Penn State meteorologist Sonya Miller, point out that the PDO, as well as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), have thus played a major role in temporarily dampening atmospheric warming.

So what has happened? During this period, Mann and his team show, there has been increased “heat burial” in the Pacific ocean, that is, a greater absorption of all that heat equivalent to hundreds of millions of Hiroshimas.

For some, this has created the false impression, solely from looking at global average surface air temperatures, of a ‘pause’ in warming. But as Mann said, the combination of the AMO and PDO “likely offset anthropogenic warming over the past decade.”

Therefore, the ‘pause’ doesn’t really exist, and instead is an artifact of the limitations of our different measuring instruments.

“The ‘false pause’ is explained in part by cooling in the Pacific ocean over the past one-to-two decades”, Mann told me, “but that is likely to reverse soon: in other words, the ‘slowdown’ is fleeting and will likely soon disappear.”

The disappearance of the ‘slowdown’ will, in tangible terms, mean that the oceans will absorb less atmospheric heat. While all the accumulated ocean heat “is certainly not going to pop back out”, NASA’s chief climate scientist Dr. Gavin Schmidt told me, it is likely to mean that less atmospheric heat will end up being absorbed:

“Ocean cycles can modulate the uptake of anthropogenic heat, as some have speculated for the last decade or so, but … net flux is still going to be going into the ocean.”

Next, the heat will transfer to the atmosphere …

According to Mann and his team, at some point, this will manifest as an acceleration in the rise of global average surface air temperatures. In their Science study, they observe:

“Given the pattern of past historical variation, this trend will likely reverse with internal variability, instead adding to anthropogenic warming in the coming decades.”

So at some point in the near future, the PDO will switch from its current negative phase back to positive, reducing the capacity of the oceans to accumulate heat from the atmosphere.

That positive phase of the PDO will therefore see a rapid rise in global surface air temperatures, as the oceans’ capacity to absorb all those Hiroshima bomb equivalents declines – and leaves it to accumulate in our skies. In other words, after years of slower-than-expected warming, we may suddenly feel the heat.

So when will that happen? No one knows for sure, but at the end of last year, signs emerged that the phase shift to a positive PDO could be happening right now. In the five months before November 2014, measures of surface temperature differences in the Pacific shifted to positive, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

This is the longest such positive shift detected in about 12 years. Although too soon to determine for sure whether this is, indeed, the beginning of the PDO’s switch to a new positive phase, this interpretation is consistent with current temperature variations, which during a positive PDO phase should be relatively warm in the tropical Pacific and relatively cool in regions north of about 20 degrees latitude.

In January 2015, further signs emerged that the PDO is right now in transition to a new warm phase. “Global warming is about the get a boost”, ventured meteorologist Eric Holthaus. Recent data including California’s intensifying drought and sightings of tropical fish off the Alaskan coast “are further evidence of unusual ocean warming”, suggesting that a PDO transition “may already be underway a new warm phase.”

While it’s still not clear whether the PDO is really shifting into a new phase just yet, when it does, it won’t be good. Scientists from the UK Met Office’s Hadley Center led by Dr. Chris Roberts of the Oceans and Cryosphere Group estimate in a new paper in Nature that there is an 85% chance the faux ‘pause’ will end in the next five years, followed by a burst of warming likely to consist of a decade or so of warm ocean oscillations.

Arctic faces a double warming whammy

Roberts and his team found that a ‘slow down’ period is usually (60% of the time) followed by rapid warming at twice the background rate for at least five years, and potentially longer.

And mostly, this warming would be concentrated in the Arctic, a region where temperatures are already higher than the global average, and which is widely recognized to be a barometer of the health of the global climate due to how Arctic changes dramatically alter trends elsewhere.

Recent extreme weather events around the world have been attributed to the melting Arctic ice sheets and the impact on ocean circulations and jet streams.

What this means, if the UK Met Office is right, is that we probably have five years (likely less) before we witness the ‘Big Heat’ – a supercharged surge of rapid global warming that could last a decade, further destabilizing the climate system in deeply unpredictable ways.

 

 

Dr. Nafeez Ahmed is an investigative journalist, bestselling author, and international security scholar. He is a regular contributor to The Ecologist where he writes about the geopolitics of interconnected environmental, energy and economic crises. He has also written for the Guardian, The Independent, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Scotsman, Foreign Policy, Prospect, New Statesman, Vice, Le Monde diplomatique, among many others. His new novel of the near future is ZERO POINT.

Follow him on Twitter @nafeezahmed and Facebook.

Website: www.nafeezahmed.com

This article was originally published on Vice magazine’s Motherboard.

 




390917

Confronting industrialism: if you can’t clean it up, don’t make it! Updated for 2026

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Some of the most important questions confronting us are: what should we do about this culture’s industrial wastes, from greenhouse gases to pesticides to ocean microplastics?

Can the capitalists clean up the messes they create? Or is the whole industrial system beyond reform? The answers become clear with a little context.

Let’s start the discussion of context with two riddles that aren’t very funny.

Q: What do you get when a cross a long drug habit, a quick temper, and a gun?
A: Two life terms for murder, with earliest release date 2026.

And,

Q: What do you get when you cross a large corporation, two nation states, 40 tons of poison, and at least 8,000 dead human beings?
A: Retirement with full pay and benefits. Warren Anderson, CEO of Union Carbide. Bhopal.

The point of these riddles is not merely that when it comes to murder and many other atrocities, different rules apply to the poor than to the rich. And it’s not merely that ‘economic production’ is a get-out-of-jail free card for whatever atrocities the ‘producers’ commit, whether it’s genocide, gynocide, ecocide, slaving, mass murder, mass poisoning, and so on.

Do we even care? We already know they don’t …

The point here is that this culture is clearly not particularly interested in cleaning up its toxic messes. Obviously, or it wouldn’t keep making them. It wouldn’t allow those who make these messes to do so with impunity. It certainly wouldn’t socially reward those who make them.

This may or may not be the appropriate time to mention that this culture has created, for example, 14 quadrillion (yes, quadrillion) lethal doses of Plutonium 239, which has a half-life of over 24,000 years, which means that in a mere 100,000 years that number will be all the way down to only about 3.5 quadrillion lethal doses: Yay!

And socially reward them it does. I could have used a whole host of examples other than Warren Anderson, who was playing on the back nine long after he should have been hanging by the neck (he was sentenced to death in absentia, but the US refused to extradite him).

There’s Tony Hayward, who oversaw BP’s devastation of the Gulf of Mexico and who was ‘punished’ for this with a severance package worth well over $30 million. Or we could throw another couple of riddles at you, which are really the same riddles:

Q: What do you call someone who puts poison in the subways of Tokyo?
A: A terrorist.

Q: What do you call someone who puts poison (cyanide) into groundwater?
A: A capitalist: CEO of a gold mining corporation.

We could talk about frackers, who make money as they poison groundwater. We could talk about anyone associated with Monsanto. You can add your own examples. I’d say you can ‘choose your poison’ but of course you can’t. Those are chosen for you by those doing the poisoning.

Civilization’s ability to overcome our native common sense

I keep thinking about one of the most fundamentally sound (and fundamentally disregarded) statements I’ve ever read. After Bhopal, one of the doctors trying to help survivors stated that corporations (and by extension, all organizations and individuals) “shouldn’t be permitted to make poison for which there is no antidote.”

Please note, by the way, that far from having antidotes, nine out of ten chemicals used in pesticides in the US haven’t even been thoroughly tested for (human) toxicity.

Isn’t that something we were all supposed to learn by the time we were three? Isn’t it one of the first lessons our parents are supposed to teach us? Don’t make a mess you can’t clean up!

Yet that is precisely the foundational motivator of this culture. Sure, we can use fancy phrases to describe the processes of creating messes we have no intention of cleaning up, and in many cases cannot clean up.

And so we get phrases like ‘developing natural resources’, or ‘sustainable development’, or ‘technological progress’ (like the invention and production of plastics, the bathing of the world in endocrine disruptors, and so on), or ‘mining’, or ‘agriculture’, or ‘the Green Revolution’, or ‘fueling growth’, or ‘creating jobs’, or ‘building empire’, or ‘global trade’.

But physical reality is always more important than what we call it or how we rationalize it. And the truth is that this culture has been based from the beginning to the present on privatizing benefits and externalizing costs. In other words, on exploiting others and leaving messes behind.

Hell, they call them ‘limited liability corporations’ because a primary purpose is to limit the legal and financial liability of those who benefit from the actions of corporations for the harm these actions cause.

Internalizing insanity

This is no way to run a childhood, and it’s an even worse way to run a culture. It’s killing the planet. Part of the problem is that most of us are insane, having been made so by this culture. We should never forget what RD Laing wrote about this insanity:

“In order to rationalize our industrial-military complex [and I would say this entire way of life, including the creation of messes we have neither the interest nor capacity to clean up], we have to destroy our capacity to see clearly any more what is in front of, and to imagine what is beyond, our noses. Long before a thermonuclear war can come about, we have had to lay waste to our own sanity.

“We begin with the children. It is imperative to catch them in time. Without the most thorough and rapid brainwashing their dirty minds would see through our dirty tricks. Children are not yet fools, but we shall turn them into imbeciles like ourselves, with high IQs, if possible.”

We’ve all seen this too many times. If you ask any reasonably intelligent seven-year-old how to stop global warming caused in great measure by the burning of oil and gas and by the destruction of forests and prairies and wetlands, this child might well say, “Stop burning oil and gas, and stop destroying forests and prairies and wetlands!”

If you ask a reasonably intelligent thirty-year-old who works for a ‘green’ high tech industry, you’ll probably get an answer that primarily helps the industry that pays his or her salary.

Part of the brainwashing process of turning us into imbeciles consists of getting us to identify more closely with-and care more about the fate of-this culture rather than the real physical world. We are taught that the economy is the ‘real world’, and the real world is merely a place from which to steal and on which to dump externalities.

Does nature have to adapt to us? Or us to nature?

Most of us internalize this lesson so completely that it becomes entirely transparent to us. Even most environmentalists internalize this. What do most mainstream solutions to global warming have in common? They all take industrialism as a given, and the natural world as having to conform to industrialism.

They all take empire as a given. They all take overshoot as a given. All of this is literally insane, in terms of being out of touch with physical reality. The real world must always be more important than our social system, in part because without a real world you can’t have any social system whatsoever. It’s embarrassing to have to write this.

Upton Sinclair famously said that it’s hard to make a man understand something, when his job depends on him not understanding it.

I would add that it’s hard to make people understand something when the benefits they accrue through their exploitative and destructive way of life depend on it. So we suddenly get really stupid about the waste products produced by this culture.

When people ask how we can stop polluting the oceans with plastic, they don’t really mean, “How can we stop polluting the oceans with plastic?” They mean, “How can we stop polluting the oceans with plastic and still have this way of life?”

And when they ask how we can stop global warming, they really mean, “How can we stop global warming without stopping this level of energy usage?”. When they ask how we can have clean groundwater, they really mean, “How can we have clean groundwater while we continue to use and spread all over the environment thousands of useful but toxic chemicals that end up in groundwater?”

The answer to all of these is: you can’t.

First we must recover our sanity. Then we must act

As I’ve been writing this essay about the messes caused by this culture, there’s an allegorical image I can’t get out of my mind. It’s of a half-dozen Emergency Medical Technicians putting bandages on a person who has been assaulted by a knife-wielding psychopath.

The EMTs are trying desperately to stop this person from bleeding out. It’s all very tense and suspenseful as to whether they’ll be able to staunch the flow of blood before the person dies.

But here’s the problem: as these EMTs are applying bandages as fast as they can, the psychopath is continuing to stab the victim. Worse, the psychopath is making wounds faster than the EMTs are able to bandage them. And the psychopath is paid very well for stabbing the victim, while most of the EMTs are bandaging in their spare time.

And in fact the health of the economy is based on how much blood the victim loses – as in this culture, where economic production is measured by the conversion of living landbase into raw materials, e.g., living forests into two-by-fours, living mountains into coal.

How do we stop the victim from bleeding out? Any child can tell you. And any sane person who cares more about the health of the victim than the health of the economy that is based on dismembering the victim can tell you. The first thing you need to do is stop the stabbing. No amount of bandages will make up for an assault that is ongoing, indeed, one that is accelerating.

What do we do about this culture’s fabrication of industrial wastes? The first step is stop their production. Actually the first step is that we regain our sanity, that is, we transfer our loyalty away from the psychopaths, and toward the victim, toward, in this case, the planet that is our only home.

Once we do that, everything else is technical. How do we stop them? We stop them.

 

 

Derrick Jensen is Member of the Steering Committee of Deep Green Resistance. See more details. Read Derrick Jensen’s blog.

Also on The Ecologist: ‘Reclaim Environmentalism!’ by Derrick Jensen & Lierre Keith.

 

 




390964

Meat boom propels China’s ecosystems into total collapse Updated for 2026

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China’s push for more intense farming has kept its city dwellers well-fed and helped lift millions of rural workers out of poverty. But it has come at a cost.

Ecosystems in what should be one of the country’s most fertile region have already been badly damaged – some beyond repair – and the consequences will be felt across the world.

This is part of a long-running trade-off between rising levels of food production and a deteriorating environment, revealed in recent research I conducted with colleagues from China and the UK.

Yields of crops and fish have risen over the past 60 years at several locations we studied in Anhui, Jiangsu and Shanghai Provinces in eastern China. But these are parallelled by long-term trends in poorer air and water quality, and reduced soil stability.

You may ask if this a bad thing. After all, increasing agricultural productivity has been one of the factors responsible for lifting millions of rural Chinese out of poverty. Does it really matter that the natural environment has taken a bit of a hit?

Well yes. For agriculture and aquaculture to be sustainable from one generation to the next, the natural processes that stabilise soils, purify water or store carbon have to be maintained in stable states. These natural processes represent benefits for society, known as ecosystem services.

‘Green revolution’ technologies tip the balance to perdition

Throughout the latter half of the last century, these services were being lost relatively slowly through the cumulative, everyday actions of individual farmers.

But the problems accelerated in the 1980s when farmers began to use more intensive methods, especially artificial fertilisers – and again after 2004 when subsidies were introduced.

Worryingly, in some localities, the slow deterioration has turned into a rapid downward spiral. Some aquatic ecosystems have dropped over tipping points into new, undesirable states where clear lakes suddenly become dominated by green algae with losses of high-value fish.

These new states are not just detrimental to the continued high-level production of crops and fish but are very difficult and expensive to restore.

These natural processes are degraded and destabilised to the point that they cannot be depended upon to support intensive agriculture in the near future. The whole region is losing its ability to withstand the impact of extreme events, from typhoons to global commodity prices.

What can be done?

National policy must prioritise sustainable agriculture. This will mean big changes on the farm: fertiliser and pesticides must be applied in the correct quantities at the right time of the year, cattle slurry and human sewage must be disposed of properly, chemicals getting into streams and rivers must be reduced, and fish feed has to be controlled.

Unfortunately, this is easier said than done. Farmers are still generally poor, badly educated and ageing. Good agricultural advice is lacking and big cities still tempt the younger farmers away from their fields. All these factors mean that rapid action is unlikely.

The recent introduction of the Land Circulation reform policy, allows farmers to rent their land to larger combines. The policy is designed to overcome the inefficiencies of small farm holdings but it may not be taken up widely in the more marginal landscapes where potential profits are low.

All the evidence points to a need for a significantly improved system of information and technology transfer to individual smallholders, probably involving a more efficient coordination between agencies.

The problem is global

But there’s a larger-scale context to this problem that may affect us all. China’s grain production has risen fivefold since the 1950s, outstripping the pace of population growth. Despite this, the nation is no longer self-sufficient.

The shift towards more meat production has placed a demand for soybean and cereal animal feed that can no longer be met internally. In 2012, China imported more than 60% of all the world’s soybeans that were available for export, and cereal imports are also on the up.

Reliance on imports to fill a shortfall in home produce is nothing new. But in China’s case, the additional risk that agriculture is increasingly unsustainable may amplify the demand. The potential scale of demand for imports is bound to have repercussions for global food production and food prices.

Unless reforms are introduced quickly, the rest of the world may well find that they are sharing China’s trade-off with nature – through the weekly shopping bill.

 

 

John Dearing is Professor of Physical Geography at the University of Southampton.

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

The Conversation

 




390879

Indigenous Peoples destroyed for misguided ‘conservation’ Updated for 2026

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Wildlife law enforcement almost always has a negative impact on tribal communities. It has a negative impact on their personal safety, their health, their culture, their privacy and their family life.

Above all it has a negative impact on their relationship with the land and on their ability to sustain themselves. Why is this? It’s because the wrong laws are being enforced by the wrong people – against the wrong people.

The laws are wrong because they usually fail to distinguish ‘wildlife crime’ from subsistence hunting, and tribal peoples are criminalised without just cause.

The laws are wrong because, even where they recognise subsistence rights, they often leave too much power in the hands of Government Ministers – who can and do use their power to overturn tribal rights when it suits them to do so.

The law is ‘enforced’ by the wrong people because it is enforced by wildlife scouts or ecoguards who administer justice as they see it, on the spot. There is no due process. Innocence or guilt does not come into it. The more militarised these forces become, the less accountable they are when they overstep the mark.

Indigenous Peoples bear the brunt

Tribal peoples are often at the sharp end of wildlife law enforcement, not because they themselves pose a serious threat to wildlife but because they are a soft option. They are far less able to defend themselves than the well-resourced and well-connected elite who manipulate them.

The results are entirely predictable. Communities do not respect laws which do not respect them. They do not co-operate with authorities which regard them with hostility and suspicion. If they are to be punished whatever they do, some believe they may just as well throw in their lot with the poachers.

The London Declaration does not address these issues. It refers in its Preamble to “the importance of reducing human-wildlife conflict and supporting community efforts to advance their rights”, but says nothing more about these rights.

A properly drawn Declaration would recognise three or four basic principles:

  1. The hunting rights of tribal communities should be fully respected, unless and until they are lawfully extinguished.
  2. The power of the State to manage wildlife does not equal state ownership, and does not of itself extinguish tribal rights
  3. This power may be exercised only to the extent that it is necessary to protect an overriding conservation interest.
  4. The power to ‘manage’ cannot be used to deprive a community of their means of subsistence, which is guaranteed by human rights law; or to coerce tribal peoples into changing their way of life against their will.

Botswana, Cameroon and India illustrate in different ways what happens when wildlife laws are ‘enforced’ in defiance of these principles.

Botswana – paramilitary force deployed against Bushmen

In Botswana, the law allows those who are “principally dependent” on hunting and gathering to apply for ‘special game licenses’. Regulations explicitly refer to “persons who can rightly lay claim to hunting rights in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR).”

But no ‘special game licences’ have been issued for the CKGR since 2002, and since 2014 hunting has been banned almost everywhere in Botswana. The ban was renewed for another year only last month. It pays no heed at all to the rights or needs of the Bushmen of the CKGR.

The Minister of Wildlife drew up and signed the ban at his desk, in the exercise of his statutory powers. He did not have to explain his decision to the National Assembly or anyone else. There were no consultations. The Minister acted entirely off his own bat, in the untested belief that ‘illegal off take’ was or might be to blame for a decline in wildlife numbers.

Responsibility for the enforcement of the ban rests with a paramilitary force called the Special Support Group. Its members are heavily armed, and in the CKGR have camped close to Bushmen communities. The Bushmen have been made to feel that they are under constant surveillance. They report that they and their homes are searched at random, and that on occasion they have been beaten or threatened.

Hunting has become more difficult but persists, because the only alternative is starvation. The Bushmen no longer eat during the day, to reduce the risk of detection, and have had to abandon hunt related customs.

Many Bushmen who have a legal right to live in the Reserve are afraid to do so. They worry that if they hunt and are caught, they will be imprisoned or assaulted or both.

They are stranded in resettlement camps outside the Reserve, where alcoholism and HIV/Aids are widespread and there is little or no work. Their previous, largely self-sufficient existence has given way to a dependence on government handouts, and an inevitable decline in their sense of identity and self-worth.

There is no evidence that the Bushmen of the CKGR hunt in any systematic way for sale, or use guns or vehicles, or hunt endangered species, or that their hunting is unsustainable. In the name of conservation they have had to pay a price out of all proportion to any threat that their subsistence hunting might pose.

Cameroon – Baka forest people expelled from their forests

In Cameroon too, many Baka communities have been evicted from their traditional territories to make way for national parks. They are now forced to spend much of their time in roadside villages that skirt the park’s edge.

With minor exceptions they are forbidden to hunt or forage in the parks; and to ensure that they do not, are forbidden even to enter them. They are entitled to hunt elsewhere only if they use so-called ‘traditional’ methods.

Rather than reform the law to recognise the Baka’s dependence on the forest for their food, medicine and incomes, the Government has focussed on the war against poachers, and the Baka have inevitably been caught in the cross-fire.

‘Enforcement’ is left to ecoguards who are employed by the Ministry of Forestry and Wildlife, but who depend on WWF and other donors for their salaries and logistical support. No or virtually no Baka have been recruited to their ranks.

When they raid Baka villages – in so-called ‘punch operations’ in which huts are searched, property is seized and suspects may be beaten – they are often joined by a military unit called the BIR (the Bataillon d’Intervention Rapide).

The ecoguards act with total impunity. The Baka do not lodge complaints against them because they are not properly investigated. They have become alienated not only from the forces of law and order but from conservationists like WWF. Many Baka regard the two as indistinguishable.

They personal safety has not been the only casualty of wildlife law enforcement. The health of the Baka has also suffered, because they are no longer able to reach many of the medicinal and other forest plants on which they have traditionally depended. Mothers can no longer retreat into the forest for childbirth. All are at risk of the malaria, HIV/AIDS and other epidemics that affect the roadside villages.

Parents are no longer able to pass their forest skills and values on to their children. Since they cannot now barter meat and other forest produce to buy essentials, many Baka work for others on starvation wages. Some are ‘paid’ with fermented sugar cane, and alcoholism has become endemic.

India – ‘tiger reserves’ used to expel the tigers’ best protectors

In India, efforts to save the tiger from both poachers and habitat loss have seen a rapid expansion of tiger reserves. In the past few years the law has also come to recognise the forest rights of scheduled tribes, but where the two interests clash it is the community that comes off worst.

The law says that tribes people may only be removed from tiger reserves on certain conditions. One is that they are shown to cause “irreversible damage” to the tiger habitat and to “threaten their existence”, and another is that there is no “reasonable option of co-existence.”

These conditions are ignored. The authorities prefer to operate on the basis that tiger habitats may be more easily protected if tribal communities are removed, and this in itself is a sufficient reason to move them.

In order to avoid their statutory duties they offer the community a ‘rehabilitation package’. Usually the offer is refused, because the community has co-existed with tigers for generations and sees no reason it should not continue to do so.

But the authorities do not take ‘no’ for an answer, and eventually wear down the resistance of communities which have no one to speak on their behalf. The legal niceties are trumped by the supposed needs of tiger conservation.

The impact of this process could hardly be more ‘negative’. In one recent example, two tribal communities in the Similipal Tiger Reserve eventually ‘agreed’ a package which involved their removal to a camp outside the Reserve. There they have had to live under polythene sheets which leak when it rains and scorch in the sun.

Child malnutrition is rife. There is no proper immunisation programme and medical help is infrequent. Once again, alcohol abuse is common. Over the coming months, other communities still in the Reserve are like to experience a similar fate.

Whatever effect it may have on the IWT, the new emphasis on law enforcement will undoubtedly require more money, at least some of which will come from the conservation movement.

The conservationists could use the extended influence that this will give them to insist that tribal communities are protected against the worst excesses of the paramilitaries. Policing efforts to control the IWT will gain far more from a positive relationship with the ‘ears and eyes’ of the land than from the current abusive and alienating approach.

The introduction of simple grievance mechanisms would be an obvious first step. If ‘enforcement’ is to be the new creed, ought not the law to protect tribal peoples be enforced with at least as much vigour as the law to protect wildlife?

 

 

Gordon Bennett is a human rights barrister at New Square Chambers.

Dr Jo Woodman is Senior campaigner, Survival International.

Jumanda Gakelebone Gana is a representative of the First People of the Kalahari, Botswana.

Sankar Pani is an environmental lawyer, India.

Dr Jerome Lewis is Co-director, Extreme Citizen Science Research Group, University College London.

This lecture was presented by Gordon Bennett to the ‘Beyond Enforcement: Communities, governance, incentives and sustainable use in combating wildlife crime‘ conference, 26-28th February at Glenburn Lodge, Muldersdrift, South Africa.

The event was organised by IUCN CEESP / SSC Sustainable Use and Livelihoods Specialist Group (SULi) / International Institute of Environment and Development (IIED) / Austrian Ministry of Environment / ARC Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions (CEED), University of Queensland / TRAFFIC – the wildlife trade monitoring network.

Music video: Live recording in the Cameroon rainforest by Martin Cradick of Baka Beyond: “Topé malangui bodé, ma’anjo ayé” – “give me one bottle, I’m thirsty.” More info at baka.gbine.com.

 




390899

After UK’s record solar year, government tries to kill the sector Updated for 2026

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Marks & Spencer (M&S) has just completed the UK’s largest single roof mounted solar panel array on its East Midlands automated distribution centre in Castle Donington.

The 6.1MWp solar array comprises 24,272 PV panels, each rated at 250W, installed on the company’s 900,000 sq.ft (84,000 sq.m) roof.

It’s yet another contribution to the record growth of the UK’s solar sector, which now boasts over 650,000 solar installations across homes, offices, schools, churches, warehouses, farms, police stations, train stations and even a bridge.

Official statistics show that total capacity reached almost 5GW at the end of 2014, up from 2.8GW at the end of 2013. At peak production, that’s enough to power 1.5 million homes, and approaching 10% of the UK’s peak power demand.

But now the government is determined to kill UK solar

Despite the manifest success of the UK’s solar industry, the government last week anounced that only five large (over 5MW) new solar installations will be supported under its new  ‘Contracts for Difference’ (CFD) system.

The CFD ‘auction’, held earlier this year, required ‘established renewables’ – a category that includes onshore wind, landfill gas, hydro and solar – to compete with each other for a share of £50m for the next year, rising to 65m allocated for future years.

Relative to support for other technologies the sum is minute. The government is spending £3.1bn for under its established Renewables Obligation (RO) support mechanism for 2014/15. And while the RO remains open until 2017 to other technologies, it specifically excludes large-scale solar.

The Solar Trade Association predicts a catastrophic decline in the sector as a consequence. It estimates that 2-3GW (2,000-3,000MW) of large-scale solar will be completed in the current financial year.

But it predicts that next financial year new installations will collapse to just 32MW for all solar PV large and small – around 1% of current levels.

‘Blatant discrimination’

Some now accuse the government of “blatant discrimination” against solar power, owing to its unique exclusion from the RO, combined with the paltry sum available under the CFD package. In addition Britain’s Green Investment Bank has so far excluded solar power from loans of £1.6 billion for renewables.

The five solar projects selected from the CFD auction came in at the lowest prices of all the 27 winners, at £50 and £79.23 per MWh. Most of the others were onshore wind projects bidding at £82.50. This provides a strong indication that solar is already the UK’s lowest cost form of renewable energy.

Making government policy especially paradoxical, say critics, is the fact that solar PV is expected to be competitive with fossil fuel power as soon as 2020, according to the recent report ‘In Sight: Unsubsidised UK Solar‘. The report recommends:

“Solar PV will be a critical technology in the 21st century, and the British government should continue to support the industry until it is fully economic without subsidies; we believe that this will be reached within the next decade across all solar markets in Britain.

“Support must be reduced progressively and predictably towards elimination over the next decade, to help build a more mature, lowcost supply chain, while maintaining value for money and preventing developers from inflating prices. Getting the right support level is critical to driving sustained cost reductions.”

Even Amber Rudd, Minister for Energy and Climate Change, had nice things to say at M&S’s solar launch yesterday: “More rooftop solar means more jobs – and will also help deliver the clean, reliable energy supplies that the country needs at the lowest possible cost to consumers.”

But in fact, the government is putting the boot in. Why? A clue may exist elsewhere in the report: “Increasing cost-competitiveness and capacity growth of solar PV in Britain will impact the British power system, including falls in wholesale power prices, as already seen in Germany.

“The growth of solar power may threaten electric utilities which fail to transition away from solely supplying electricity, to providing residential energy services.”

Could the UK government’s apparently senseless policy on solar power be written by the energy companies in direct opposition to the consumer interest in lower electricity prices? So it would appear.

But M&S sticks to its solar guns

M&S’s record-breaking PV array will help the company maintain its commitment of sourcing 100% of its electricity for UK and Ireland buildings from renewable sources, with 50% sourced from small scale renewable sources by 2020.

The energy it generates each year – estimated at 5,000 MWh – will provide nearly 25% of the energy required for the distribution centre, and lower M&S’s carbon footprint by 48,000 tonnes over 20 years.

As such M&S’s solar commitment is driven by its low carbon policy commitment rather than subsidies. Since the launch of its ‘Plan A’ in 2007, M&S has lowered its carbon emissions by 37% and is carbon neutral across its worldwide operations.

And Hugo Adams, Director of Property at M&S, confirmed that there was more in the pipeline. The completion of this project, he said, was “the first significant step in a number of solar energy initiatives we are planning this year. The scale of the project demonstrates our ambitious goals and long term commitment to onsite renewable energy.”

And it may just be that as prices fall, other companies, landlords, schools, local authorities and home-owners will just carry on installing solar anyway, driving down their power bills and carbon footprint – and foiling the attempt by the UK government, in cahoots with the Big Six power companies, to kill the sector off.

 

 

Oliver Tickell edits The Ecologist.

 




390945

Coming soon: the ‘Big Heat’ Updated for 2026

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Forget the so-called ‘pause’ in global warming-new research says we might be in for an era of deeply accelerated heating.

While the rate of atmospheric warming in recent years has, indeed, slowed due to various natural weather cycles – hence the skeptics’ droning on about ‘pauses’ – global warming, as a whole, has not stopped.

Far from it. It’s actually sped up, dramatically, as excess heat has absorbed into the oceans. We’ve only begun to realize the extent of this phenomenon in recent years, after scientists developed new technologies capable of measuring ocean temperatures with a depth and precision that was previously lacking.

In 2011, a paper in Geophysical Research Letters tallied up the total warming data from land, air, ice, and the oceans. In 2012, the lead author of that study, oceanographer John Church, updated his research. What Church found was shocking: in recent decades, climate change has been adding heat to the oceans at an average rate of 125 Terawatts (TW).

How to convey this extraordinary fact? His team came up with an analogy: it was roughly the same amount of energy that would be released by the detonation of two atomic bombs the size dropped on Hiroshima. In other words, these scientists found that anthropogenic climate is warming the oceans at a rate equivalent to around two Hiroshima bombs per second.

Or looked at another way, all the world’s coal fired power stations currently have a generation capacity a little under 2TW. As they are typically about one third efficient, working flat out they would collectively produce about 6TW of heat and power. Now multiply by 20.

Actually, it’s worse. Much worse …

But as new data came in, the situation has looked worse: over the last 17 years, the rate of warming has doubled to about four bombs per second. In 2013, the rate of warming tripled to become equivalent to 12 Hiroshima bombs every second.

So not only is warming intensifying, it is also accelerating. By burning fossil fuels, humans are effectively detonating 378 million atomic bombs in the oceans each year – this, along with the ocean’s over – absorption of carbon dioxide, has fuelled ocean acidification, and now threatens the entire marine food chain as well as animals who feed on marine species. Like, er, many humans.

According to a new paper in Science from a crack team of climate scientists, a key reason that the oceans are absorbing all this heat in recent decades so well (thus masking the extent of global warming by allowing atmospheric average temperatures to heat more slowly), is due to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), an El Nino-like weather pattern that can last anywhere between 15-30 years.

In its previous positive phase, which ran from around 1977 to 1998, the PDO meant the oceans would absorb less heat, thus operating as an accelerator on atmospheric temperatures. Since 1998, the PDO has been in a largely negative phase, during which the oceans absorb more heat from the atmosphere.

Such decadal ocean cycles have broken down recently, and become more sporadic. The last, mostly negative phase, was punctuated by a brief positive phase that lasted 3 years between 2002 and 2005.

Where’s all the heat gone? Buried in the deep ocean

The authors of the new study, Penn State climatologist Michael Mann, University of Minnesota geologist Byron Steinman, and Penn State meteorologist Sonya Miller, point out that the PDO, as well as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), have thus played a major role in temporarily dampening atmospheric warming.

So what has happened? During this period, Mann and his team show, there has been increased “heat burial” in the Pacific ocean, that is, a greater absorption of all that heat equivalent to hundreds of millions of Hiroshimas.

For some, this has created the false impression, solely from looking at global average surface air temperatures, of a ‘pause’ in warming. But as Mann said, the combination of the AMO and PDO “likely offset anthropogenic warming over the past decade.”

Therefore, the ‘pause’ doesn’t really exist, and instead is an artifact of the limitations of our different measuring instruments.

“The ‘false pause’ is explained in part by cooling in the Pacific ocean over the past one-to-two decades”, Mann told me, “but that is likely to reverse soon: in other words, the ‘slowdown’ is fleeting and will likely soon disappear.”

The disappearance of the ‘slowdown’ will, in tangible terms, mean that the oceans will absorb less atmospheric heat. While all the accumulated ocean heat “is certainly not going to pop back out”, NASA’s chief climate scientist Dr. Gavin Schmidt told me, it is likely to mean that less atmospheric heat will end up being absorbed:

“Ocean cycles can modulate the uptake of anthropogenic heat, as some have speculated for the last decade or so, but … net flux is still going to be going into the ocean.”

Next, the heat will transfer to the atmosphere …

According to Mann and his team, at some point, this will manifest as an acceleration in the rise of global average surface air temperatures. In their Science study, they observe:

“Given the pattern of past historical variation, this trend will likely reverse with internal variability, instead adding to anthropogenic warming in the coming decades.”

So at some point in the near future, the PDO will switch from its current negative phase back to positive, reducing the capacity of the oceans to accumulate heat from the atmosphere.

That positive phase of the PDO will therefore see a rapid rise in global surface air temperatures, as the oceans’ capacity to absorb all those Hiroshima bomb equivalents declines – and leaves it to accumulate in our skies. In other words, after years of slower-than-expected warming, we may suddenly feel the heat.

So when will that happen? No one knows for sure, but at the end of last year, signs emerged that the phase shift to a positive PDO could be happening right now. In the five months before November 2014, measures of surface temperature differences in the Pacific shifted to positive, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

This is the longest such positive shift detected in about 12 years. Although too soon to determine for sure whether this is, indeed, the beginning of the PDO’s switch to a new positive phase, this interpretation is consistent with current temperature variations, which during a positive PDO phase should be relatively warm in the tropical Pacific and relatively cool in regions north of about 20 degrees latitude.

In January 2015, further signs emerged that the PDO is right now in transition to a new warm phase. “Global warming is about the get a boost”, ventured meteorologist Eric Holthaus. Recent data including California’s intensifying drought and sightings of tropical fish off the Alaskan coast “are further evidence of unusual ocean warming”, suggesting that a PDO transition “may already be underway a new warm phase.”

While it’s still not clear whether the PDO is really shifting into a new phase just yet, when it does, it won’t be good. Scientists from the UK Met Office’s Hadley Center led by Dr. Chris Roberts of the Oceans and Cryosphere Group estimate in a new paper in Nature that there is an 85% chance the faux ‘pause’ will end in the next five years, followed by a burst of warming likely to consist of a decade or so of warm ocean oscillations.

Arctic faces a double warming whammy

Roberts and his team found that a ‘slow down’ period is usually (60% of the time) followed by rapid warming at twice the background rate for at least five years, and potentially longer.

And mostly, this warming would be concentrated in the Arctic, a region where temperatures are already higher than the global average, and which is widely recognized to be a barometer of the health of the global climate due to how Arctic changes dramatically alter trends elsewhere.

Recent extreme weather events around the world have been attributed to the melting Arctic ice sheets and the impact on ocean circulations and jet streams.

What this means, if the UK Met Office is right, is that we probably have five years (likely less) before we witness the ‘Big Heat’ – a supercharged surge of rapid global warming that could last a decade, further destabilizing the climate system in deeply unpredictable ways.

 

 

Dr. Nafeez Ahmed is an investigative journalist, bestselling author, and international security scholar. He is a regular contributor to The Ecologist where he writes about the geopolitics of interconnected environmental, energy and economic crises. He has also written for the Guardian, The Independent, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Scotsman, Foreign Policy, Prospect, New Statesman, Vice, Le Monde diplomatique, among many others. His new novel of the near future is ZERO POINT.

Follow him on Twitter @nafeezahmed and Facebook.

Website: www.nafeezahmed.com

This article was originally published on Vice magazine’s Motherboard.

 




390917

Meat boom propels China’s ecosystems into total collapse Updated for 2026

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China’s push for more intense farming has kept its city dwellers well-fed and helped lift millions of rural workers out of poverty. But it has come at a cost.

Ecosystems in what should be one of the country’s most fertile region have already been badly damaged – some beyond repair – and the consequences will be felt across the world.

This is part of a long-running trade-off between rising levels of food production and a deteriorating environment, revealed in recent research I conducted with colleagues from China and the UK.

Yields of crops and fish have risen over the past 60 years at several locations we studied in Anhui, Jiangsu and Shanghai Provinces in eastern China. But these are parallelled by long-term trends in poorer air and water quality, and reduced soil stability.

You may ask if this a bad thing. After all, increasing agricultural productivity has been one of the factors responsible for lifting millions of rural Chinese out of poverty. Does it really matter that the natural environment has taken a bit of a hit?

Well yes. For agriculture and aquaculture to be sustainable from one generation to the next, the natural processes that stabilise soils, purify water or store carbon have to be maintained in stable states. These natural processes represent benefits for society, known as ecosystem services.

‘Green revolution’ technologies tip the balance to perdition

Throughout the latter half of the last century, these services were being lost relatively slowly through the cumulative, everyday actions of individual farmers.

But the problems accelerated in the 1980s when farmers began to use more intensive methods, especially artificial fertilisers – and again after 2004 when subsidies were introduced.

Worryingly, in some localities, the slow deterioration has turned into a rapid downward spiral. Some aquatic ecosystems have dropped over tipping points into new, undesirable states where clear lakes suddenly become dominated by green algae with losses of high-value fish.

These new states are not just detrimental to the continued high-level production of crops and fish but are very difficult and expensive to restore.

These natural processes are degraded and destabilised to the point that they cannot be depended upon to support intensive agriculture in the near future. The whole region is losing its ability to withstand the impact of extreme events, from typhoons to global commodity prices.

What can be done?

National policy must prioritise sustainable agriculture. This will mean big changes on the farm: fertiliser and pesticides must be applied in the correct quantities at the right time of the year, cattle slurry and human sewage must be disposed of properly, chemicals getting into streams and rivers must be reduced, and fish feed has to be controlled.

Unfortunately, this is easier said than done. Farmers are still generally poor, badly educated and ageing. Good agricultural advice is lacking and big cities still tempt the younger farmers away from their fields. All these factors mean that rapid action is unlikely.

The recent introduction of the Land Circulation reform policy, allows farmers to rent their land to larger combines. The policy is designed to overcome the inefficiencies of small farm holdings but it may not be taken up widely in the more marginal landscapes where potential profits are low.

All the evidence points to a need for a significantly improved system of information and technology transfer to individual smallholders, probably involving a more efficient coordination between agencies.

The problem is global

But there’s a larger-scale context to this problem that may affect us all. China’s grain production has risen fivefold since the 1950s, outstripping the pace of population growth. Despite this, the nation is no longer self-sufficient.

The shift towards more meat production has placed a demand for soybean and cereal animal feed that can no longer be met internally. In 2012, China imported more than 60% of all the world’s soybeans that were available for export, and cereal imports are also on the up.

Reliance on imports to fill a shortfall in home produce is nothing new. But in China’s case, the additional risk that agriculture is increasingly unsustainable may amplify the demand. The potential scale of demand for imports is bound to have repercussions for global food production and food prices.

Unless reforms are introduced quickly, the rest of the world may well find that they are sharing China’s trade-off with nature – through the weekly shopping bill.

 

 

John Dearing is Professor of Physical Geography at the University of Southampton.

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

The Conversation

 




390879

Indigenous Peoples destroyed for misguided ‘conservation’ Updated for 2026

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Wildlife law enforcement almost always has a negative impact on tribal communities. It has a negative impact on their personal safety, their health, their culture, their privacy and their family life.

Above all it has a negative impact on their relationship with the land and on their ability to sustain themselves. Why is this? It’s because the wrong laws are being enforced by the wrong people – against the wrong people.

The laws are wrong because they usually fail to distinguish ‘wildlife crime’ from subsistence hunting, and tribal peoples are criminalised without just cause.

The laws are wrong because, even where they recognise subsistence rights, they often leave too much power in the hands of Government Ministers – who can and do use their power to overturn tribal rights when it suits them to do so.

The law is ‘enforced’ by the wrong people because it is enforced by wildlife scouts or ecoguards who administer justice as they see it, on the spot. There is no due process. Innocence or guilt does not come into it. The more militarised these forces become, the less accountable they are when they overstep the mark.

Indigenous Peoples bear the brunt

Tribal peoples are often at the sharp end of wildlife law enforcement, not because they themselves pose a serious threat to wildlife but because they are a soft option. They are far less able to defend themselves than the well-resourced and well-connected elite who manipulate them.

The results are entirely predictable. Communities do not respect laws which do not respect them. They do not co-operate with authorities which regard them with hostility and suspicion. If they are to be punished whatever they do, some believe they may just as well throw in their lot with the poachers.

The London Declaration does not address these issues. It refers in its Preamble to “the importance of reducing human-wildlife conflict and supporting community efforts to advance their rights”, but says nothing more about these rights.

A properly drawn Declaration would recognise three or four basic principles:

  1. The hunting rights of tribal communities should be fully respected, unless and until they are lawfully extinguished.
  2. The power of the State to manage wildlife does not equal state ownership, and does not of itself extinguish tribal rights
  3. This power may be exercised only to the extent that it is necessary to protect an overriding conservation interest.
  4. The power to ‘manage’ cannot be used to deprive a community of their means of subsistence, which is guaranteed by human rights law; or to coerce tribal peoples into changing their way of life against their will.

Botswana, Cameroon and India illustrate in different ways what happens when wildlife laws are ‘enforced’ in defiance of these principles.

Botswana – paramilitary force deployed against Bushmen

In Botswana, the law allows those who are “principally dependent” on hunting and gathering to apply for ‘special game licenses’. Regulations explicitly refer to “persons who can rightly lay claim to hunting rights in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR).”

But no ‘special game licences’ have been issued for the CKGR since 2002, and since 2014 hunting has been banned almost everywhere in Botswana. The ban was renewed for another year only last month. It pays no heed at all to the rights or needs of the Bushmen of the CKGR.

The Minister of Wildlife drew up and signed the ban at his desk, in the exercise of his statutory powers. He did not have to explain his decision to the National Assembly or anyone else. There were no consultations. The Minister acted entirely off his own bat, in the untested belief that ‘illegal off take’ was or might be to blame for a decline in wildlife numbers.

Responsibility for the enforcement of the ban rests with a paramilitary force called the Special Support Group. Its members are heavily armed, and in the CKGR have camped close to Bushmen communities. The Bushmen have been made to feel that they are under constant surveillance. They report that they and their homes are searched at random, and that on occasion they have been beaten or threatened.

Hunting has become more difficult but persists, because the only alternative is starvation. The Bushmen no longer eat during the day, to reduce the risk of detection, and have had to abandon hunt related customs.

Many Bushmen who have a legal right to live in the Reserve are afraid to do so. They worry that if they hunt and are caught, they will be imprisoned or assaulted or both.

They are stranded in resettlement camps outside the Reserve, where alcoholism and HIV/Aids are widespread and there is little or no work. Their previous, largely self-sufficient existence has given way to a dependence on government handouts, and an inevitable decline in their sense of identity and self-worth.

There is no evidence that the Bushmen of the CKGR hunt in any systematic way for sale, or use guns or vehicles, or hunt endangered species, or that their hunting is unsustainable. In the name of conservation they have had to pay a price out of all proportion to any threat that their subsistence hunting might pose.

Cameroon – Baka forest people expelled from their forests

In Cameroon too, many Baka communities have been evicted from their traditional territories to make way for national parks. They are now forced to spend much of their time in roadside villages that skirt the park’s edge.

With minor exceptions they are forbidden to hunt or forage in the parks; and to ensure that they do not, are forbidden even to enter them. They are entitled to hunt elsewhere only if they use so-called ‘traditional’ methods.

Rather than reform the law to recognise the Baka’s dependence on the forest for their food, medicine and incomes, the Government has focussed on the war against poachers, and the Baka have inevitably been caught in the cross-fire.

‘Enforcement’ is left to ecoguards who are employed by the Ministry of Forestry and Wildlife, but who depend on WWF and other donors for their salaries and logistical support. No or virtually no Baka have been recruited to their ranks.

When they raid Baka villages – in so-called ‘punch operations’ in which huts are searched, property is seized and suspects may be beaten – they are often joined by a military unit called the BIR (the Bataillon d’Intervention Rapide).

The ecoguards act with total impunity. The Baka do not lodge complaints against them because they are not properly investigated. They have become alienated not only from the forces of law and order but from conservationists like WWF. Many Baka regard the two as indistinguishable.

They personal safety has not been the only casualty of wildlife law enforcement. The health of the Baka has also suffered, because they are no longer able to reach many of the medicinal and other forest plants on which they have traditionally depended. Mothers can no longer retreat into the forest for childbirth. All are at risk of the malaria, HIV/AIDS and other epidemics that affect the roadside villages.

Parents are no longer able to pass their forest skills and values on to their children. Since they cannot now barter meat and other forest produce to buy essentials, many Baka work for others on starvation wages. Some are ‘paid’ with fermented sugar cane, and alcoholism has become endemic.

India – ‘tiger reserves’ used to expel the tigers’ best protectors

In India, efforts to save the tiger from both poachers and habitat loss have seen a rapid expansion of tiger reserves. In the past few years the law has also come to recognise the forest rights of scheduled tribes, but where the two interests clash it is the community that comes off worst.

The law says that tribes people may only be removed from tiger reserves on certain conditions. One is that they are shown to cause “irreversible damage” to the tiger habitat and to “threaten their existence”, and another is that there is no “reasonable option of co-existence.”

These conditions are ignored. The authorities prefer to operate on the basis that tiger habitats may be more easily protected if tribal communities are removed, and this in itself is a sufficient reason to move them.

In order to avoid their statutory duties they offer the community a ‘rehabilitation package’. Usually the offer is refused, because the community has co-existed with tigers for generations and sees no reason it should not continue to do so.

But the authorities do not take ‘no’ for an answer, and eventually wear down the resistance of communities which have no one to speak on their behalf. The legal niceties are trumped by the supposed needs of tiger conservation.

The impact of this process could hardly be more ‘negative’. In one recent example, two tribal communities in the Similipal Tiger Reserve eventually ‘agreed’ a package which involved their removal to a camp outside the Reserve. There they have had to live under polythene sheets which leak when it rains and scorch in the sun.

Child malnutrition is rife. There is no proper immunisation programme and medical help is infrequent. Once again, alcohol abuse is common. Over the coming months, other communities still in the Reserve are like to experience a similar fate.

Whatever effect it may have on the IWT, the new emphasis on law enforcement will undoubtedly require more money, at least some of which will come from the conservation movement.

The conservationists could use the extended influence that this will give them to insist that tribal communities are protected against the worst excesses of the paramilitaries. Policing efforts to control the IWT will gain far more from a positive relationship with the ‘ears and eyes’ of the land than from the current abusive and alienating approach.

The introduction of simple grievance mechanisms would be an obvious first step. If ‘enforcement’ is to be the new creed, ought not the law to protect tribal peoples be enforced with at least as much vigour as the law to protect wildlife?

 

 

Gordon Bennett is a human rights barrister at New Square Chambers.

Dr Jo Woodman is Senior campaigner, Survival International.

Jumanda Gakelebone Gana is a representative of the First People of the Kalahari, Botswana.

Sankar Pani is an environmental lawyer, India.

Dr Jerome Lewis is Co-director, Extreme Citizen Science Research Group, University College London.

This lecture was presented by Gordon Bennett to the ‘Beyond Enforcement: Communities, governance, incentives and sustainable use in combating wildlife crime‘ conference, 26-28th February at Glenburn Lodge, Muldersdrift, South Africa.

The event was organised by IUCN CEESP / SSC Sustainable Use and Livelihoods Specialist Group (SULi) / International Institute of Environment and Development (IIED) / Austrian Ministry of Environment / ARC Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions (CEED), University of Queensland / TRAFFIC – the wildlife trade monitoring network.

Music video: Live recording in the Cameroon rainforest by Martin Cradick of Baka Beyond: “Topé malangui bodé, ma’anjo ayé” – “give me one bottle, I’m thirsty.” More info at baka.gbine.com.

 




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