Indonesia, the largest archipelago in the world, holds some stunning coastal and deep-water resources. With more than 17,500 islands straddling two oceans, the sea is not only a way of life, but also a source of it. 

Fisheries account for a significant part of Indonesia’s trillion-dollar economy – the largest in Southeast Asia. More than 30 percent of global maritime trade finds its way through the Strait of Malacca, which is among the busiest of international shipping lanes. Tourist havens are seemingly everywhere, from the palm-fringed beaches of Bali, to the abundant shallow-water reefs of the Coral Triangle. 

Managing marine ecosystems is therefore an unsurprising priority for the vast number of actors that have a stake in Indonesia’s coastal economy. At once unexplored and overexploited, the oceans represent neoliberal development’s final frontier. The twin processes of ocean acidification and global warming, and related international political responses further complicate matters. 

Blue economy 

New analysis was recently published in the journal Science, indicating that oceans are heating up 40 percent faster than a United Nation panel of experts predicted in a study carried out five years ago. 

The study further concluded that in 2018, seawater temperatures reached an all time high and were expected to escalate further in the coming years. Theses studies mirror those on land, where combined data from NASA and NOAA show that the five hottest years ever have occurred in the 2010s.  

For many, marine ecosystem management, fisheries management, and climate change mitigation strategy are embodied in a redoubled commitment to the blue economy – the idea that the financialisation of oceans can reap economic profit and save the environment at once. 

But what kind of development does the blue economy seek, and for whom? In Indonesia, small-scale fishers and their communities are holding fast to various manifestations of traditional knowledge that they see as key to ensuring the survival of the seas and of future generations.

Whose Oceans?

The Indonesian islands have long been at the forefront of oceanic policy and development circles, in large part because of their sheer numbers and strategic location. 

One such high-level process held recently was the Our Ocean conference, which took place in late October in Bali. The meeting brought together a large number of powerful actors to debate some of the most pressing oceanic issues: climate change, fisheries, the blue economy, pollution, maritime security, and marine protected areas. 

As is the case in many top decision-making spaces, representatives of governments, corporations, and intergovernmental institutions were given a seat at the table. Notably absent, however, were those closest to the sea – fishers. 

Marthin Hadiwinata, Chief Executive of the Indonesia Traditional Fisherfolk’s Union (KNTI), said: “Policies on marine issues cannot be addressed in the absence of fishing communities who have direct linkages to the ocean”. 

Hadiwinata explained that the issue of marine pollution, for instance, most deeply affects people living around the coastal areas and small islands: “Rather than inviting fishers to share their solutions,” he added, “companies who are involved in mining and other forms of extractive industry that dump their waste into the sea are regarded as corporate partners in cleaning up dirty waters”. 

Blue carbon 

Likewise, climate change mitigation and adaptation projects often turn to the problems that caused the environmental crisis in the first place as a way of responding to it. Take for example Blue Carbon, where, as with other carbon sequestration programs such as REDD+ (reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation), polluters are allowed to continue their practices so long as they purchase ‘offsets’ in ecosystems elsewhere. 

Most often, the burden falls on the shoulders of peasant and indigenous rural working communities, converting their crops and gathering spaces into monocultures such as industrial tree plantations.

Blue Carbon applies this logic to mangrove, coral, and seagrass ecosystems, while small-scale fishers who work in these areas are treated as nuisances and prohibited from future access to their fishing grounds. 

Blue Carbon has been championed in high-level policy spaces such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) processes, as well as through ‘big green’ organisations like the Nature Conservancy. It is currently being pioneered in Indonesia.

People’s movements 

Indonesian social movements and grassroots organisations have long been in the business of carefully protecting the islands’ cornucopia of natural resources. In the rapidly evolving marine sector, fishers are forced to be quick on their feet when putting their solutions on the national agenda. 

KNTI, the small-scale fisher’s movement that is present in nearly all of Indonesia’s 34 provinces, is playing a leadership role in turning the tide of both discourse and policy towards justice and sovereignty for fishers. This task is done at scale, targeting national and transnational political dynamics. 

When word of the Our Ocean conference and its lack of grassroots representation reached KNTI’s members, they were quick to clap back by organising their own participatory meeting: the Ocean’s People Conference. Unlike its ‘official’ counterpart, the parallel meeting reflected the diversity of Indonesia’s small-scale fisheries sector.  

The gathering strategically took place in Jakarta – not just to make it more accessible, but also to shed light on marine mega-projects encroaching on the busy capital. The most notorious of these has been a land reclamation projectsupported by Indonesia’s former colonisers, the Dutch. 

This project has been centred on protecting Jakarta from floods by installing a network of fake islands and a giant seawall in Jakarta Bay. While the Governor of Jakarta finally revoked some of the permits necessary to complete the project – thanks, in large part, to a strategic battle fought at the hands of social movements like KNTI – much of the damage has been done.

Local activists 

Ipah Saripah, a fishworker from North Jakarta, explained that the reclamation issue has profoundly impacted her family’s livelihood: “Even though the reclamation stopped, they’ve already constructed four islands,” she said, “and that development is right in the middle of our fishing areas. 

“We have been bribed, intimidated, displaced, and even tortured to make way for this reclamation,” she added.  

Saripah and other activists from the fishing communities feel that big reclamation projects like the one stalled in Jakarta Bay serve as a blueprint for coastal development in Indonesia. Similar mega projects are being rolled out in other parts of the country, and they are woven together with the common thread of replacing traditional fishing practices with profit-seeking industries backed by big Asian and European capital. 

That’s what the Ocean’s People Conference and related gatherings of people’s movements are attempting to shut down. Ibu Rofi’ah, a representative of a peasant organization in East Nusa Tengarra, Indonesia’s southernmost province, said: “We are not looking for money, but for means to spread our knowledge.”

Ibu Rofi’ah travelled to Jakarta to explain how she played a leadership role when her community put an end to an iron-mining operation. Today she is working with fisheries cooperatives that find themselves in standoffs with corporations in the mining and tourism sectors. 

Movement building

Members of KNTI recognise that their struggles reflect those of fishing communities elsewhere. To this end, the movement is an active member of the World Forum of Fisher Peoples (WFFP), a transnational social justice movement dedicated to serving the unique needs of fishers and fishworkers. 

Since the issues affecting fishers have become increasingly entangled – for instance, when climate change adaptation policies meet big capital – WFFP has doubled down on its attack strategies to protect the communities it represents. 

A key part of that is actively promoting the Small Scale Fisheries Guidelines, which is the only comprehensive global governance instrument intended to protect fishers and traditional fisheries. KNTI has been doing this work across Indonesia, and making its demands global through social movement gatherings and even United Nations processes. 

Marthin Hadiwinata said: “Here in Indonesia, we are pushing the government to immediately recognise and protect fishers’ rights. And at the same time, we are building the global movement to resist financialisation and privatisation of the world’s oceans.” 

This Author 

Salena Tramel is a journalist and PhD researcher at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in The Hague, where her work is centered on the intersections of resource grabs, climate change mitigation, and the intertwining of (trans)national agrarian/social justice movements.

Our edible forest garden experiment in Budapest is part of a doctoral research project on urban agroforestry. It was constructed in partnership with Budapest’s 14th District Council and the social Degrowth cooperative Cargonomia.  

The garden opened with its first tree planting event last November. The event the result of a year’s of work in networking, cooperating with different partners and actors. 

Our goal is to bring together planners, decision makers and experts in agroforestry and permaculture to rethink the use of public spaces in the city and democratise urban agriculture through citizens initiatives and involvement.

Dynamic network 

We met with several researchers in agroforestry, and exchanged ideas with local NGOs whose work focuses on environment and permaculture in Budapest and with local farmers. We also connected our project with a dynamic network of community gardens in Budapest.

In October 2017 we presented the project to local authorities and decision makers and found support for implementing agroforestry in the city of Budapest. 

Agroforestry is an ancestral practice that is being re-introduced in the European rural areas. The practice is based on the ecological interactions between woody perennials and annual plants and breaks with monocultural practice.

The benefits of this practice go beyond performance and yields. The plot is structured to create a resilient and autonomous ecosystem. By valuing biodiversity, the risk of epidemics is lower, diversity of seeds is preserved, water management is more economical and ecological, and the use of pesticides is unnecessary and avoided.

Agroforestry respects the seasons, the cycles of plants and the soil. Food production is then better integrated within the rural landscape and the existing ecosystems. The benefits are also social because this reconversion of land has potential to create new job opportunities and a new era of experimentation.

Overcoming skepticism 

The public forest garden project in Budapest was inspired by several Tropical countries that have maintained a strong agroforestry practice in urban areas and forest garden practices in their homegardens.

In temperate countries, the concept of forest garden was introduced by the English botanist Robert Hart in the 1960s. Inspired by this model, we created a plantation plan with a diversity of endemic plant strata: wide canopy trees, fruit trees, berries, shrubs and vines.

The project was built in consultation with the partners, in particular the municipality. The use of visuals helped in understanding the purposes of agroforestry and presenting a vision. It was useful to overcome skepticism around growing edibles in an open public space: it felt necessary to explain the choice in species, their function in the land, the reasons behind the choice of agroecology principles, the benefits for the users and the prevalent support of the people mobilized behind the project.

The project is also about enhancing the local culture and adapting to the context by including a convivial dimension.

The land allocated by the district was a dried-out wetland in a residential area. It was mainly used by residents to walk their dogs and as an illegal parking lot. Thanks to an in-depth study of the terrain and the context, we chose plants adapted to the micro-environment, which are resilient to urban pollution and to drought, in order to limit the pressure on the ecosystems.

Public space

The garden will host a large variety of species, with free plantation areas for the people. Based on the principles of permaculture, other plants will be chosen according to their benefits for pollinators, their repellent characteristic, and their contribution to airing the soil, the nutrient supply and the retention of water. The project will evolve throughout a number of years.

Another challenge is to renew the ecosystem by planting edibles directly into the ground, without the need for materials, bins or planters, which can be very expensive.

The project was established on a low budget and relies on the networks of know-how and mutual aid, in lines with the philosophy of Cargonomia and based on the principles of degrowth. Accordingly, we did not apply for a grant. Instead, the tools and basic materials are shared between our partners and the neighbors.

With a long-term contract, the project leads to a new appropriation of the public space and another form of governance by the commons.

Ecological transition 

Frequent visitors to the garden felt the space gradually change. We began the plantation with four fruit trees. The mayor and members of his team along with neighbors and local media participated in this first day.

The management of the edible forest is based on spontaneous initiatives and self-management. On the first day the neighborhood participants showed interest in the practice and attachment to the new trees. They brought water to the trees, and a volunteer gave out leaflets that we had prepared about the project.

The next day, one of the neighbors prepared and installed stakes by himself with pride. 

We must adapt and understand the changes of ecosystems, limit loss in biodiversity and prepare for extreme periods in order to balance our climate. Decision makers, planners and landscape architects have the power to allocate public lands as common property. Reducing the consumption of urban spaces to open green and edible spaces reduces our vulnerability to climate change.

Botanists, ecologists, biologists, landscape architects and gardeners have a role to play in ecological transition and environmental education.

City planning 

Through educational programs and consultations with horticultural experts it is possible to plan the city on the basis of natural ecosystems and to support individuals in developing their resources and depending less on market products.

We must rethink cities with a variety of vegetation and public green spaces, and enhance exchanges between the cities and the countryside to reduce the pressures on organic farms and rural agriculture.

Food industrialization should only be used in times of crisis because it consumes more energy and damages biodiversity. This raises the question of the conversion and conviviality of public spaces otherwise used to house parked cars. 

Creating a public edible space enables social emancipation. Gardening creates a spontaneous relationship between individuals: people gather together and meet; the gardens create a space to initiate communication and exchange ideas.

This initiative encourages a new way of appropriating public space. We use simple tools which are better for the soil and the environment but also for the intellect. Manual work stimulates reflection and gives us time to feel and observe, just as hand-drawing allows the artist to discover and create.

We can imagine the public space differently and create another form of occupation; encourage change in land use for an ecological city and social well-being. 

–

By supporting the re-appropriation and self-management of spaces, we can open or reconvert spaces and allow users to rebuild their environment, bring services closer and reduce expenses.

We must diversify the functions of public green spaces and vegetation and connect them with greenways and corridors. The connection between these places allows the exchange of resources and services. This pilot project is an experiment that aims to influence city policy. 

The latest and most alarming IPCC report called for an end to deforestation. We think that this also concerns the city, or how to rethink a fertile, organic, autonomous and friendly city. This is vital as we face the collapse of our thermo-industrial civilization, but also we develop new means for living together peacefully, empowering democracy, and supporting relationships between people and the commons.

These Authors

Paloma de Linares is coordinator of the agroforestry project. Vincent Liegey is co-author of “Degrowth Project” (Utopia, 2013) and a Cargonomia coordinator.

The Conservative-controlled Scarborough council has formally declared a climate emergency. It’s the eleventh council in England to do so and joins an international movement that began with the Australian council of Darebin in suburban Melbourne. Bradford recently became the biggest council in England to yet follow suit, just as nearby Kirklees did the same.

At the same time as Tory councillors – following the lead of two Greens – were backing the motion in Scarborough, locals outside a little village called Mission, near Doncaster, were joined by people from across the North and Midlands to show their opposition to a fracking operation that started right beside a Site of Special Scientific interest. 

A little to the east, the people of another tiny community – Biscathorpe, in Lincolnshire – were being arrested. I’m told one of the protestors was a local man in his 70s who’s just had a pacemaker fitted – he had been opposing the proposed extreme oil drilling beside another natural wonder, a rare pristine chalk stream. 

Local government

This week I joined protest groups as Cheshire West and Chester Council and a local campaign group fought to defend a decision, made partly on climate change grounds, to reject iGas’s plan to test a gas well at Ellesmere Port.

Together, these events highlighted the way in which Britain is following the pattern of the US, Australia and Brazil, where local authorities are joining the global push for climate action, while their national government fiddles as the planet burns.

At the climate talks in Katowice last month, Sydney and Melbourne joined the Powering Past Coal Alliance (as did Scottish Power), despite having a national government seeking to push ahead with a scheme for expansion that could wreck the Great Barrier Reef. At the Oxford Real Farming Conference, I heard about how the Welsh government scheme for One Planet Developments is starting to be put into effect.

The demonstrators in Mission Springs, Biscathorpe, and at many other sites around England, demonstrate a key difference between the UK and other parts of the world where local governments have real power and resources. Even the actions of the Welsh (and Scottish) governments can have only limited effects.

In Britain, the powers of local government and devolved national governments are limited, even in the case of the London Assembly, where Green member Caroline Russell led the successful push to declare a climate emergency (the Tories abstained). 

Taking back control 

In Scarborough, the council agreed to aim to be carbon-neutral by 2030, and to bid for £80,000 to fund a sustainability officer work towards that ambition, but that’s about the total of action the council could agree.

Most councils now are so severely stretched by austerity that their ability to take any action beyond their basic statutory responsibilities (decided in Westminster) are severely limited.

The Welsh government was backing the Swansea Bay tidal lagoon project, but Westminster effectively blocked it. As the slogan goes, “Lancashire Said No” (to fracking), but distant Westminster casually overrode it. 

That’s a contrast to the US and many parts of continental Europe, where local, regional and other sub-sovereign governments have real power of decision and resources to act on those decisions.*

The powerlessness of local government is one of the reasons why people are right to want to “take back control” in our non-democracy. 

Wider reform

Local communities are clearly committed to action on climate change and just need to be allowed (or to take) the power and resources to act.

That’s also an argument for wider reform. It is noticeable that two of the world’s most climate-destructive national governments – in Washington and Canberra – are two of the countries in the world with the most archaic, non-proportional electoral systems (much like the UK’s) 

Countries with fairer (proportional) voting systems – where the views of parliament reflect those of the people and everyone’s vote counts – are, not coincidentally, those with significantly lower carbon emissions than majoritarian systems.

So if you’re campaigning with Extinction Rebellion, or on the gate at Biscathorpe or Mission Springs, it is worth sparing a little time and effort to back Make Votes Matter.

With a government in Westminster that reflects our views, and truly devolved power in local communities, we can stop having to do battle with faraway MPs, and work together to tackle our environmental, social, economic and educational emergencies together, democratically, cooperatively.

This Author 

Natalie Bennett is a member of Sheffield Green Party and former Green Party leader.

Just nine percent of the 92.8 billion tonnes of minerals, fossil fuels, metals and biomass that enter the economy are re-used annually, according to the latest Circularity Gap Report.

As much as 62 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions – excluding those from land use and forestry – is released during the extraction, processing and manufacturing of goods.

Despite the fact that we already live on a planet that is 1°C warmer than pre-industrial levels, global use of materials is still accelerating.

Unprecedented changes

We live in a linear, Take-Make-Waste economy. Materials extraction has more than tripled since 1970 and could double again by 2050 without action, according to the UN International Resource Panel.

This is a bad place to be – but the remedies are easy to grasp. We can see the climate risk in ‘business-as-usual’. The ingrained habits of unchecked consumption are not sustainable.

Cutting waste is part of the answer to tackling climate change. The circular economy is potentially the missing piece of the jigsaw.

If we are to bridge the Emissions Gap and get back on track towards a target limit of 1.5°C, then closing the Circularity Gap is not merely desirable. A 1.5° world can only be a circular world.

That transition to a circular economy is the paradigm shift that can help us achieve “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society”, as called for in the Paris Climate Agreement.

Resources for governments

For a low-carbon future, we need a circular economy; there is no other way. Our world must become more than 9 percent circular. 

To date, most governments have focused their green agenda on renewable energy, energy efficiency and avoiding deforestation.

Policy-makers have overlooked the vast potential of the circular economy to achieve the Paris goals. Re-use, re-manufacturing and recycling, greater resource efficiency and circular business models offer huge scope not only reduce emissions, but also to boost growth through efficiency gains.

The Report calls on governments to take action to move from a linear economy to a circular model that maximises the use of existing assets, while reducing dependence on new raw materials and minimising waste.

Innovation to extend the lifespan of existing resources will not only curb emissions but also reduce social inequality and foster low-carbon growth.

Practical examples 

The Netherlands has set itself a target of becoming 50 percent circular by 2030, and 100 percent by 2050.

Governments control the levers to drive change through direct fiscal tax-and-spend measures. They should start by abolishing incentives which encourage overuse of scarce natural resources, such as subsidies for fossil fuels.

It makes sense to raise taxes on emissions, extraction and waste;at the same time, lower taxes on labour, knowledge and innovation would help cleaner industry and investment.

In our report, we highlight three key circular strategies and give practical examples. First, we must optimise the utility of products by maximising their use and extending their lifetime. Ridesharing and carsharing already make it less important to own a car.

Autonomous driving will accelerate this trend, potentially increasing the usage of each vehicle by a factor of eight. At the same time electric powertrains, intelligent maintenance programmes and software integration can extend lifetimes of cars.

Secondly, we must enhance recycling by using waste as a resource. By 2050 there will be an estimated 78 million tonnes of decommissioned solar panels.

Modular design would enable products to be disassembled, components to be re-used and valuable materials to be recovered to extend their economic value and reduce waste.

Finally, we could reduce material consumption, use lower-carbon alternatives and incorporate circular design methods. Bamboo, wood and other natural materials have the potential to reduce dependence on carbon-intensive alternatives such as cement and metals in construction.

Instead of emitting carbon, these materials store it and will last for decades. They can be burnt to generate energy at the end of their life.

New metrics

The Report introduces new metrics and data analysis to identify the best prospects for impactful change. We found that circular strategies to reduce waste are particularly important in the built environment, which accounts for a fifth of all global emissions. 

Our calculations show that nearly half of all new materials going into the world economy – 42.4 billion tonnes a year – are for the construction and maintenance of houses, offices, roads and infrastructure.

Another example is Capital Equipment. This broad spectrum of products, from cars to medical scanners and solar panels, consumes half of all metals. Advances in digital technologies and innovations in smart design, however, are already creating new circular business models.

The opportunities for investment in these new markets is real. The opportunity is greater, where shared understanding of circularity metrics brings more transparency to decision-making.

Global development

Moving society away from the Take-Make-Waste pattern of consumption, ingrained in our linear economy, requires a paradigm shift. The circular model serves to separate things we do want from our economic system, from those we do not want.

For example, we want fairer distribution of prosperity and a bright future for the next generations. We do not want to squander scarce natural resources, nor to suffer adverse effects on our environment and society.

Ultimately, a circular economy is a practical strategy to decouple economic growth from unsustainable resource extraction and emissions. It aims to bring prosperity, whilst intelligently managing resources within the boundaries of our planet.

Circular thinking is compatible – in fact, dependent – on policies that foster social equity and mitigate climate breakdown.  A 1.5-degree world can only be circular: the time to close the Circularity Gap is now.

This Author 

Harald Friedl is chief executive of Circle Economy. Before joining Circle Economy in 2017, Harald spent five years in Myanmar, during which he co-founded Impact Hub Myanmar; led national market development of electro-mechanical hydropower projects in the country; and co-founded Myanmar’s first pre-incubation programme for social enterprises. 

You are offered a position to work in a forest oversight authority – let’s call it OSINFOR. Your job involves going to the field to document whether logging operations are being conducted according to the law.

You discover extensive cases of illegal logging and take to meticulously documenting them. You publish your findings. Within hours, you get an angry call. The next day, you get your first threat. Soon after, you’re fired.

Why? Because the truth is, if you work for OSINFOR, doing a good job can land you in serious trouble.

Fierce backlash

Over the last decade, OSINFOR has taken the lead in inspecting timber harvest areas in the Amazon. Some of the inspections they’ve made are truly heroic and have shed much-needed light on the way loggers get away with logging illegally.

At Global Witness, we wanted to get a better sense of just how effective OSINFOR’s work has been. So we made official requests for huge amounts of data that they have been producing over the last decade.

We recently published our findings. They turn out to be pretty sobering: between 2008 and 2018, of all the harvest areas OSINFOR inspected in the three main timber producing regions in Peru, over 60 percent came from areas where widespread illegalities had been reported, including the laundering of a massive 2.5 million cubic meters of timber. 

But far from being praised for uncovering such illegalities, OSINFOR has faced a fierce backlash from the private sector and some government officials – our short video gives a good sense of this.

OSINFOR has been subject to protests and attacks on its offices in major Amazon cities. Some inspectors have been barred from entering harvest areas.

In 2016, the then director was sacked and forced to flee Peru in fear for his life. He had played a key role in exposing the biggest timber export scandal in Peruvian history, which has also been the subject of a Global Witness investigation.

Ministerial control 

Just last month, OSINFOR’s independence was seriously weakened by being placed under the Ministry of the Environment, where it is more vulnerable to political meddling and conflicts of interest. This caused its director to hand in his notice, in protest at the move.

Rather than clipping the wings of such an effective institution by weakening its independence, the government of Peru should ensure that OSINFOR can continue to operate independently and give it appropriate resources to do so.

The US government has also expressed concern about the recent weakening, as it has signed a Trade Promotion Agreement with Peru that requires OSINFOR to be “independent and separate”.  

The United States Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said about the situation: “Since its creation in 2008, OSINFOR has played a critical role in Peru detecting and combatting illegal logging, and we are gravely concerned that its independence is threatened. I urge Peru to abide by its obligations and restore OSINFOR’s separateness and independence, as called for in the PTPA.”

Prior to the agreement, OSINFOR had been under ministerial control, and was ineffective and starved of resources. It had no control over its own budget and was responsible for only one type of harvest area. Inspections were rarely undertaken, if at all, staff was poorly trained and corruption was said to be rife.

Illegal timber 

Only after OSINFOR’s reincarnation as an independent agency free of control by any one ministry did its oversight operations dramatically improve. Placing OSINFOR under ministerial control once again risks taking the Peruvian logging sector back to the past.

There is a strong case to be made for OSINFOR’s mandate to be expanded: our analysis also reveals how some of Peru’s biggest sawmills consistently process high quantities of illegal timber without asking any questions as to the origin of the timber. Yet sawmills are areas where OSINFOR cannot make inspections.

Plantations and land cleared for agriculture are also beyond OSINFOR’s remit, so it is perhaps not a coincidence that these areas have recently begun to be used as laundering vehicles to make illegal timber appear as legal.

No one should be reprimanded, threatened or fired for doing a good job. And, in Peru, no one has played a more important role than OSINFOR in exposing what really goes on in Peru’s timber sector.

Given the scale of the plunder revealed in our investigation, Peru should make sure that it does not in any way undermine its forests’ eyes and ears. 

This Author 

Laura Furones, head of the Peru campaign at Global Witness.

Weeks after the Indian government unveiled the country’s first ever air pollution reduction targets, new data has revealed the number of cities violating the country’s air quality standards is more than twice as high as previously thought.

The National Clean Air Programme, published earlier this month after months of waiting and years of campaigning by Indian civil society, set a target of reducing levels of toxic particle pollution by 20 to 30% by 2024, from 2017 levels.

The plan includes a list of 102 cities violating the country’s air quality standards that are required to prepare city-level action plans and expected to achieve the reduction targets.

Quality standards

But a new map of regional air pollution levels, produced and analysed by Greenpeace India, shows that the number of cities where air quality standards are being violated is more than twice as high as the cities that are required to take action as a part of the national plan.

Out of the 313 cities for which there is data, 241 had PM10 levels exceeding the standards, with data for nearly 400 other cities still missing.

In recent years India’s air quality has deteriorated to the point where it has become the most consistently smoggy country in the world, with pollution levels even exceeding those in neighbouring China.

Not only do the new numbers show the need for urgency in reducing particle pollution levels across the country, they also highlight that even a 30% reduction would just be the beginning.

Even if a 30% reduction was achieved across the country, more than 150 cities would still violate India’s national air quality standards, and these standards themselves are four times as lenient for PM2.5 as those recommended by the World Health Organization (40 micrograms per cubic meter in India vs. WHO guideline of 10).

Rising trend

Not a single city among the 313 cities with data met the WHO guideline.

India’s clean air programme includes a long list of recommended measures, but leaves implementation largely in the hands of each of the 102 cities that are supposed to come up with their own action plans.

The programme, however, currently lacks a legal status, specific city-level targets and an implementation budget commensurate to the challenge, which leaves a lot of work to be done before the recommendations and targets are made into reality.

The government has come a long way from first promising a national-level action plan a year ago to setting at least tentative, measurable targets for which it can be held accountable.

China’s National Air Pollution Prevention Action plan, released in 2013, turned around a rising trend and achieved record reductions over the four-year period to 2017.

India’s air pollution levels continued to climb over the period, with the average Indian being exposed to more particle pollution than the average resident of China, for the first time on record, in 2015.

Greenpeace India compiled the data from government websites and through numerous right-to-information requests to state and city Pollution Control Boards which monitor air pollution levels but have been sluggish in publishing the data.

This Article

This article first appeared at Unearthed, from Greenpeace.

Martin Kaiser from Greenpeace was a member of a 24-person commission convened by the German government which advised last week that the country abandon coal entirely by 2038.

He spoked to Unearthed, the environment charity’s investigative journalism platform, about the commission’s proposal – and whether it will help avert catastrophic climate change.

So what has Germany’s coal commission decided?

First of all, the commission can’t decide anything. It was set up to work out a proposal for how Germany can quit coal in a socially responsible way whilst also making sure the country can meet its 2030 climate target and close the gap to its 2020 goal as quickly as possible.

That said, after the enormous efforts of the commission over the past seven months to find an agreement between parties as diverse as unions, industry reps, energy utilities, mining regions and environmentalists, it’s hard to imagine that the government won’t adopt its recommendations.

The most important part of the proposal – and the commission’s very existence – is that Germany, home of the Energiewende, but also world-champion in lignite burning, has finally decided to get off coal for good.

The deadline for that phase-out is 2038, with several opportunities to review the plan and see if it can be accelerated.

The phase out will start immediately: Over the next three years (until 2022) coal capacity of more than 12GW (5 of lignite, 7.7 of hard coal) will be removed from the grid. That’s about a third of Germany’s entire fleet.

Now obviously – since the commission needed everyone on board – there are some pretty significant problems with the proposal’s goals.

The 2038 phase-out date fails to meet the Paris Agreement’s 1.5C target and was voted against by the environmental groups on the commission (including Greenpeace).

And the speed of the phase out between 2022 and 2030 is far too slow, which again the three NGOs within the commission voted against.

Finally, although Hambacher forest can finally be spared from RWE’s mining plans due to the planned lignite reductions, there was a glaring absence of any statement about how all threatened villages must be saved.

How is Germany planning to close these plants?

The proposal does not speak about individual plants, it only mentions capacity reductions.

It’s now up to the government to figure out which plants will deliver the needed GW-reductions. There will be compensations for the utilities, but again the details will be determined by the government.

Why is this announcement significant?

Germany hasn’t been making any progress in reducing its carbon emissions for close to a decade, but with the coal phase-out in place this is almost certain to change. It will add the much-needed second leg to the energy transition.

The country’s stalling emissions showed that it’s not enough to boost renewables if you leave an aging brown coal fleet untouched. These plants are cheap, old(some are more than 50 yrs old) and hard to compete with economically, but also very dirty (a brown coal plant emits about three times more CO2 compared to a modern gas power plant.) Now the renewables boom can start to become a success for the climate.

Germany, the world’s fourth-largest economy, is moving into a decarbonized future without relying on nukes and that’s obviously a big deal.

With the coal phase out in place the path is cleared to eventually focus on other key areas of decarbonisation such as transport.

But the commission’s proposal is not in line with the Paris Agreement…

The commission’s proposal ensures that the energy sector reaches its 2030 target which was modeled on a 2° trajectory. So it is not in line with 1.5 and that is a big problem.

Ending coal only in 2038 is unacceptable and sets a bad example to other countries – which is why environmental NGOs voted against it.

Is there anything people can do to try to accelerate the phase out?

As much as this proposal leaves to be desired, the important progress it does make could only have been achieved with the tens of thousands of demonstrators marching for Hambacher Forest, asking for more climate action, and the pupils and students who have gone on strike on Fridays. Similarly I believe that a loud voice of civil society is crucial to accelerating the phaseout.

This voice should first be heard during the legislative process ahead when the proposal will be put into law by the government. Here, the climate movement needs to ensure that there must not be any weakening of the proposal and contrary to emphasise the urgency to move ahead faster.

The proposal includes a number of assessments (in 2023, 2026, 2029 and 2032) to look at things like electricity prices and the necessary structural changes in the mining regions as well as progress in climate protections and I’m certain that the Paris Agreement goals and the need for a faster decline in emissions can and must be taken into account here.

This Article

This article first appeared at Unearthed, from Greenpeace.

A UK wide student strike has been called on Friday 15 February 2019 to protest against climate inaction, with a global strike following on Friday 15 March.

There have been escalating young people’s school strikes across the globe, with tens of thousands coming onto the streets to demand action to stop global warming and environmental destruction.

All have been inspired by Greta Thunberg, who began a solo climate protest by striking from school in Sweden in August 2018. Since then, thousands of school students around the world have joined her.

Climate action

The school strikes have spread to at least 270 towns and cities in countries across the world, including Australia, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, the US, Canada and Japan.

The picture above shows young people in Belgium taking part in a strike organised by an independent youth movement, not affiliated to any parties or organisations. 

In November 2018, thousands of Australian children struck school in defiance of the prime minister to protest for greater action on climate change.

Organisers estimated around 15,000 left their classrooms in 30 locations across the country, including Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth, carrying signs reading “procrastinating is our job not yours” and “I’ve seen smarter Cabinets at Ikea”. There were similar protests in Canberra and Hobart also.

Youth

On 10 January, 3000 young people took to the streets of Brussels, calling for climate action outside the the European Parliament.

A week later on 17 January, 12,500 came out (part of the crowd shown in pictures below). On 24 January, over 32,000 took part, with another 5000 coming out in other Belgian cities.

The following day, there were climate strikes in Switzerland, where more than 20,000 students from schools and colleges in 15 cities took part, and in Germany, where similar numbers joined events in at least 56 towns and cities.

For the February 15th youth strike in the UK, events have so far been set up in cities including London, Manchester, Glasgow, Bristol and Brighton.

New phase

We are now in a new phase of climate action in the UK. More and more of us are deciding to make our voices heard over climate change.

Young people are not waiting for adults to do something for them – instead, they are leading the way in taking action for themselves. 

The UK Students’ Climate Network said on their Facebook page: “Exciting stuff is happening here!! Let’s keep 2019 going the way it has started: full of determination to do everything we can to make our voices heard and save the planet from mass extinction before it is too late.”

This Article 

This article was first published on the Campaign Against Climate Change blog. 

The global wave of student strikes for climate action has come to the UK. We should unequivocally support these young people to have their voices heard, especially as the clock ticks in the 12-year countdown to implement measures to avoid runaway climate breakdown.

Holly Gillibrand, 13, has already instigated protests in Scotland and there are plans for a nationwide day of action on 15 February 2019. These actions come as tens of thousands of students have held similar strikes in countries across the world.

Students from Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, Finland, Denmark, Japan, Switzerland, the UK and the United States have taken part, having been inspired by sixteen-year-old Greta Thunberg’s protests outside the Swedish Parliament.

Strong words

Thunberg’s protests coincided with the World Economic Forum 2019 in Davos, where elites gather to discuss how to keep markets ‘free’. Days before, 35,000 teenagers marched in Brussels, while students in Basel and Berlin planned sit-ins. 

The narrative of the student-led protests has straddled two compelling lines. Naturally, they convey a strong sense of intergenerational injustice. The protests also lay blame for climate injustice primarily at the feet of the rich and powerful.

At the demo after thousands of Australian students brought Melbourne traffic to a standstill, 11-year-old Lucie Atkin-Bolton told crowds, “When kids make a mess, adults tell us to clean it up and that’s fair. But when our leaders make a mess, they’re leaving it to us to clean up.”

Greta Thunberg challenged UN leaders telling them, “you say you love your children above all else, and yet you are stealing their future in front of their very eyes.” These are strong words that leaders need to hear. They decisively expose the hypocrisy between their moral intuitions and the consequences of their political choices.

From Davos, Thunberg told the BBC: “My message was that most emissions are caused by a few people, the very rich people, who are here in Davos.” She goes on to assign them “huge responsibility” for safeguarding future living conditions.

Holly Gillibrand of the Scotland protests recently said: “I am striking because we are running out of time. Thousands of children around the world should not be having to miss classes because of our leaders’ inability to treat the climate crisis as a crisis.”

Holly’s right. It’s indicative of the scale of climate breakdown’s injustices that children are forced to become activists. It shows how severely they’ve been let down by our current decision makers and those that have come before.

Intergenerational activism 

These messages show how successfully the analysis of climate change as injustice has become entrenched. It is most starkly understood by disenfranchised children that we are already enduring the impacts of climate breakdown distributed disproportionately along the lines of race and class, experienced by those who contributed least to the crisis.

When climate justice narratives focus on intergenerational injustice, we distract from some of the contemporary realities of the crisis.

When winters get colder and fuel remains expensive, its older people who die. Landgrabs driven by capital’s desire for more coal mines or the displacement of people by flooding, drought and food insecurity are all harms afflicting people disproportionately in the global South today.

As well as her more radical messaging, Thunberg says, “We need to hold the older generations accountable for the mess they have created, and expect us to live with. It is not fair that we have to pay for what they have caused.”

But “older generations” have not acted – or have failed to act – as a homogenous bloc. It is a generation of the wealthy and powerful that have inflicted climate harms on the poor and colonised of their own generation as well as the next.

The younger generation too is not homogenously righteous. Those of it who inherit capital and end up running our society are equally likely to continue the bad work of those who precede them.

We should embrace the energy brought by students taking radical action and use it to catalyse taking our wider organising to the next level. We also mustn’t lose sight of the primary antagonism in the climate crisis.

The rich are waging a class war on the poor and climate change is the symptom. It is not the older versus the young. Intergenerational solidarity is the way forward.   

This Author

Chris Saltmarsh is co-director of Climate Change Campaigns at student activist network People & Planet. He tweets at @chris_saltmarsh. 

The government is on course to ditch a landmark EU legal commitment to end overfishing by 2020 – despite the prime minister’s promise not to reduce UK environmental standards after Brexit.

The move represents a dilution of ambitions outlined in the government’s own fisheries white paper, according to MPs and conservationists. It comes after some in the fishing industry called on ministers not to adopt the 2020 target into post-Brexit law.

Under the common fisheries policy, EU ministers will be legally bound – from next year on – to set fishing quotas within a “maximum sustainable yield” (MSY). This is the greatest amount of fish that scientists say can be caught without depleting the stock long-term.

Watering down

The deadline was agreed by EU member states, including the UK, in a bid to finally end the annual spectacle of fisheries ministers caving to industry pressure to set allowable catches at levels their scientific advisors say are unsustainable.

Prime minister Theresa May has promised to incorporate all EU environmental regulations into domestic law, and to ensure “Brexit will not mean a lowering of environmental standards”.

But the government bill intended to replace the EU’s common fisheries policy includes no legal duty to limit catches in line with the scientific advice – and ministers have so far rebuffed attempts to introduce one.

Instead, the fisheries bill – which will return to the House of Commons soon – includes only an “objective” to ensure fishing within MSY. Environmentalists warn this will leave ministers vulnerable to continued industry pressure to overfish.

“It would really be a step backwards and a watering down of existing commitments,” said Sam Stone, head of fisheries and aquaculture at the Marine Conservation Society.

Set catches

“The government has said several times that there should be a green Brexit, and said they want to improve environmental standards. Removing this commitment would certainly not achieve that.”

Liberal Democrat MP Alastair Carmichael, whose Shetland and Orkney constituency plays a major role in UK fishing, told Unearthed that the costs of getting the fisheries bill wrong “would be huge”.

“Fishing unsustainably is in no one’s interests, especially not the interests of the fishing industry and the communities that depend on it,” he said.  

“Maximum Sustainable Yield is a piece of jargon that really means common sense. Fishing is an industry that goes down generations and fishermen themselves want an industry to pass on to their children.”

Mr Carmichael sat on the committee of MPs that examined the bill, and tabled an amendment – blocked by Conservative MPs – that would have introduced a duty to set catches in line with scientific advice. “The absence of MSY from the bill is disappointing,” he said.

Scientific advice

“The white paper that came ahead of the bill was much stronger. The bill looks to me like a botched job coming from a government department that, seized by the challenges of Brexit, has lost sight of what is important.”

But he added: “This Government does not have a majority in the Commons and is in an even weaker position in the Lords. I believe we shall see a lot more changes to the bill and am determined to keep fighting on this issue.”

Fisheries minister George Eustice has offered various arguments for not including a binding MSY duty in the bill.

He has argued it would rob the UK of “flexibility” needed to manage fish stocks shared with countries like Norway, which does not always use scientific advice based on MSY; that it is impossible to set all catch limits at MSY in “mixed fisheries”, where more than one species is caught in the same area; and that “it makes no sense” to include a 2020 deadline in a bill that probably will not take effect before 2021.

He has also said the fisheries bill will require the UK’s four nations to produce a joint statement explaining how they will meet the bill’s objectives. He argues this statement would be the right place to make a commitment to set catches in line with scientific advice.

Safety net

A Department for Food Agriculture and Rural Affairs spokesman told Unearthed: “The UK’s four Fisheries Administrations will set out in a statutory joint statement how they will work together to achieve the Bill’s sustainability objectives, including maximum sustainable yield (MSY).

“The UK Government remains committed to continuing to work under the principle of MSY and restore stocks to healthy conditions as quickly as possible.”

However, Mr Carmichael says there is “no guarantee” that MSY will be “enshrined” in the joint fisheries statement. He told the bill committee: “The fisheries statement will be subject to a negotiation between four administrations.

“There might be any number of reasons why maximum sustainable yield might fall from that particular safety net.”

The MCS’s Sam Stone told Unearthed that in most cases it would be the secretary of state determining “fishing opportunities” – the amount of fish that can be caught – and there was “no requirement anywhere” in the bill for the secretary of state to “ensure that catches are only set up  to the maximum sustainable yield”.

Unachievable

Conservationists say uncertainty about when the bill will take effect does not prevent the inclusion of a legal duty to set catch limits according to scientific advice. They argue this duty could be combined with an allowance for flexibility in negotiations with “third countries” like Norway.

The July 2018 white paper in which ministers set out their principles for post-Brexit fishing regulation boasts about the UK’s role in securing a legally binding commitment to MSY in the most recent reforms of the EU’s fishing policy.

It promises that after Brexit the government “will continue to work with our European partners to regulate fishing and to set harvest rates that restore and maintain fish stocks at least to levels that can produce MSY”.

It adds: “This will mean agreeing catch rates that are based on the best available science. In mixed fisheries, that will include taking account of the interactions between harvested species and with the wider ecosystem.”

Defra consulted on this paper last summer. According to the department’s summary of the results, most respondents backed the objective to fish at or below levels that support MSY. “However,” it added, “some respondents from the fishing industry expressed concern that the [EU] CFP target to achieve MSY for all stocks by 2020 was unachievable.

Fishing mortality

“Industry responses in particular suggested that a more general commitment to work towards achieving MSY in line with the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) would be preferable.”

Unearthed asked Defra if the decision not to include a binding MSY duty had been taken in response to fishing industry concerns but it did not directly respond.

A legal duty to set quotas within MSY is backed by NGOs including the Marine Conservation Society, the Pew Trusts, Greener UK, Greenpeace – which funds Unearthed, and the Angling Trust.

Helen McLachlan, of the World Wildlife Fund and Greener UK, told MPs the 2014 common fisheries policy reforms that set a binding deadline for MSY had marked a turning point. “Prior to that, we consistently set limits over and above that recommended by scientists. Since that binding commitment was brought in, we have started to see those trends going the right way: biomass increasing, fishing mortality decreasing…”

According to the Pew Trusts, in 2018 about 44 percent of EU fishing limits were set higher than the scientific advice, but for stocks with an MSY recommendation around 75 percent were set in line with that advice.

Sustainable fisheries

Giving evidence on the bill, Angling Trust campaigns coordinator Martin Salter – a former Labour MP – told Mr Eustice that if “I were in your shoes, I would want a binding duty.

“I would want to make it crystal clear that we are going to end the discredited system that has operated under the common fisheries policy and replace it with a legally backed duty to fish at sustainable levels, just as we have legally backed targets for climate change and emissions.”

He added: “[It] is easy to claim that we are going to be an independent coastal state, but that does not deliver sustainable fisheries.

“Senegal is an independent coastal state, and its fisheries have been wiped out by super-trawlers, which are mainly European and have used their economic power to destroy the livelihoods of artisanal fishermen in independent coastal states.

“You will deliver sustainable fisheries management by having world-leading sustainable fisheries policy.”

This Article

This article first appeared at Unearthed, from Greenpeace.