Environment

World must share, not war over water

ROME – With climate change now adding to the pressures, sharing rather than warring over the world’s fresh-water resources represents the “challenge of the 21st century,” the United Nations said March 22 as it marked World Water Day. “The bulk of that challenge lies in finding more effective ways to conserve, use and protect the world’s water resources,” the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said in a statement.

In a report on the state of the world’s water resources, the FAO stated that “climate change is expected to account for about 20 percent of the global increase in water scarcity. Countries that already suffer from water shortages will be hit hardest.” Already 1.1-billion people lack access to adequate clean water. And with the world’s population set to grow from the current 6.5 billion to 8 billion by 2030, 1.8 billion people will face water scarcity by then, the FAO estimates. Cities in Texas, California and Australia are already building or planning desalination plants to provide more potable water.

The FAO added that “climate change has raised the stakes,” since some studies indicate warming temperatures might cause more frequent droughts as well as more intense storms and flooding, “which destroy crops, contaminate freshwater, and damage the facilities used to store and carry that water.”

“Particularly vulnerable to climate variability,” the FAO said, are the world’s poorest farmers, who “often occupy marginal lands and rely on rainfall to sustain their livelihoods.”

FAO Director Jacques Diouf said the repercussions of not meeting the challenge would be enormous. “Water conflicts can arise in water-stressed areas among local communities and between countries, he told a conference marking World Water Day. “The lack of adequate institutional and legal instruments for water sharing exacerbates already difficult conditions. In the absence of clear and well-established rules, chaos tends to dominate and power plays an excessive role,” he said.

To improve cross-border cooperation on water use, the ten countries on the Nile River are already negotiating a water sharing agreement that the FAO hopes will be a model for other areas where the scarce resource can be shared peacefully.

– edited from MSNBC and The New York Times
PeaceMeal, March/April 2008

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Tensions rise as world faces food shortage

Food prices are soaring, a wealthier Asia is demanding better food, and farmers can’t keep up. In short, the world faces a food crisis, and in some places it’s already boiling over. Around the globe, people are protesting and governments are responding with often counterproductive controls on prices and exports — a new politics of scarcity in which ensuring food supplies is becoming a major challenge for the 21st century. Global food prices, based on United Nations records, rose 35 percent in the year to the end of January, markedly accelerating an upturn that began in 2002. Since then, prices have risen 65 percent. In 2007 alone, according to the U.N. FAO’s world food index, dairy prices rose nearly 80 percent and grain 42 percent.

Plundered by severe weather in producing countries and by a boom in demand from fast-developing nations, the world’s wheat stocks are at 30-year lows. Grain prices have been on the rise for five years, ending decades of cheap food. Drought, a declining dollar, a shift of investment money into commodities, and use of farm land to grow fuel have all contributed to food woes. But population growth and the growing wealth of China and other emerging countries are likely to be more enduring factors.

World population is set to hit 9 billion by 2050, and most of the extra 2.5 billion people will live in the developing world. It is in these countries that the population is demanding dairy and meat, which require more land to produce. Each pound of beef takes about seven pounds of grain to produce, which means land that could be used to grow food for humans is being diverted to growing animal feed.

Governments, including Egypt, Argentina and China, have imposed restrictions to limit grain exports and keep more of their food at home. This response to food emergencies can result in farmers producing less food and threatens to undermine years of effort to open up international trade. “If one country after the other adopts a ‘starve-your-neighbor’ policy, then eventually you trade smaller shares of total world production of agricultural products, and that in turn makes the prices more volatile,” said Joachim von Braun, director general of the International Food Policy Research Institute.

Waves of discontent are already starting to be felt. In Mexico, tens of thousands took to the streets last year over the cost of tortillas, whose price skyrocketed with the price of corn. Mexico’s government, after long opposition, is considering lifting a ban on genetically modified crops, to allow its farmers to compete with the United States, where high-yield, genetically modified corn is the norm.

The industrialization of China, with 1.3 billion people, and the emergence of China’s middle class is adding hugely to demand for meat, milk and other high-protein foods. The Chinese ate just 44 pounds of meat per capita in 1985. They now eat 110 pounds a year.

Moreover, as the West seeks to tackle the risk of global warming, a drive toward greener fuels is compounding the world’s food problems. It is estimated that one in four bushels of corn from this year’s U.S. corn crop will be diverted to make ethanol for fuel.

“Turning food into fuel for cars is a major mistake on many fronts,” said Janet Larsen, director of research at the Earth Policy Institute, an environmental group based in Washington. “One, we’re already seeing higher food prices in the American supermarket. Two, perhaps more serious from a global perspective, we’re seeing higher food prices in developing countries, where it’s escalated as far as people rioting in the streets.” Violent protests hit Cameroon and Burkina Faso in February. Protesters also rallied in Indonesia recently and news media reported deaths by starvation.

But despite the rising criticism of biofuels, the U.S. corn-fed ethanol industry enjoys wide political support because it boosts farmers, who suffered years of low prices.

Because of the rising food prices, the director of the U.N. World Food Program, Josette Sheeran, is on a global tour in search of donations to fill a $500-million funding gap. The largest U.S. aid program, Food for Peace, has seen its commodity prices jump 40 percent and may have to curtail donations.

Around the beginning of the 19th century, British political economist Thomas Malthus said population had the potential to grow much faster than food supply, a prediction that efficient farming consistently proved wrong. Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, some are revisiting his predictions.

– edited from Reuters, March 31, 2008
PeaceMeal, March/April 2008

Climate change outlook is bleak

In a bleak and powerful assessment of the future of the planet, the leading international network of climate change scientists has concluded for the first time that global warming is “unequivocal” and that human activity has almost certainly caused most of the rise in temperatures since 1950. In a draft report released February 2, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the United Nations said the world is already destined to centuries of warming, shifting weather patterns and rising seas, resulting from the buildup of gases in the atmosphere that trap heat. However, the warming can be substantially blunted by prompt action.

The report summarizes the fourth assessment since 1990 by the IPCC, sizing up the causes and consequences of climate change. But it is the first in which the panel — a U.N. network of 2,000 scientists as authors and reviewers — asserts with more than 90 percent confidence that carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases from human activities have been the main causes of warming during the past half-century. In its last report in 2001, the panel put the confidence level at 66-90 percent.

“Since 2001 there has been a torrent of new scientific evidence on the magnitude, human origins and growing impacts of the climatic changes that are underway,” according to John Holdren, an energy and climate expert at Harvard University. “In overwhelming proportions, this evidence has been in the direction of showing faster change, more danger and greater confidence about the dominant role of fossil fuel burning and tropical deforestation in causing the changes that are being observed,” he said.

A key element of the final document, released April 6 in Belgium, is a projection of the effects of global warming: with every degree of temperature rise, the number of species going extinct rises, as does the number of people who may starve or face water shortages or floods. University of Victoria climate scientist Andrew Weaver, one of the lead authors of the draft report, called the projections “a highway to extinction.”

The report says it has become increasingly clear that worldwide precipitation is shifting away from the equator and toward the poles. That will nourish crops in warming regions like Canada and Siberia while parching countries, such as in sub-Saharan Africa, which are already prone to drought. Hence, it might be necessary to abandon the notion that all places might someday feed themselves.

As the world’s average temperature warms from 1990 levels, the projections get more serious. Add 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) and between 400 million and 1.7 billion extra people can’t get enough water, some infectious diseases and allergenic pollens rise, and some amphibians go extinct. But the world’s food supply could increase, due to longer growing seasons in northern areas. That’s the likely outcome around 2020.

Add another 1°C and as many as 2 billion people could be without water and about 20-30 percent of the world’s species near extinction. Also, more people start dying because of malnutrition, disease, heat waves, floods and droughts. That would happen around 2050, depending on the level of greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels.

At the extreme end of the projections with even higher temperature increases, the effects are far more dire. And while humanity will survive, hundreds of millions — perhaps billions — of people may not, if the worst scenarios happen.

The conclusions came after a three-year review of hundreds of studies of past climate shifts, observations of retreating ice, warming and rising seas, and other global changes, and greatly expanded supercomputer simulations used to test how earth will respond to a growing blanket of gases that hold heat in the atmosphere.

Rise in sea level, due to thermal expansion of the oceans caused by global warming, has already for the first time washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth. The obliteration of Lohachara island in India reported in December, where the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true.

Researchers at Calcutta’s Jadavpur University first learned of the island’s submergence when they saw it had vanished from satellite pictures. The disappearance of Lohachara, once home to 10,000 people, is unprecedented. Two-thirds of nearby populated Ghoramara Island has also been permanently inundated and refugees have fled to Sagar, an island that has already lost 7,500 acres of land to the sea. Dr Sugata Hazra, director of the university’s School of Oceanographic Studies, says there are now a dozen islands in India’s part of the delta, home to 70,000 people, in danger of being submerged by the rising seas. The area’s 400 tigers are also threatened.

While the new report projects a modest rise in seas of between 7 and 23 inches by 2100, it also concludes that seas would continue to rise and crowded coasts retreat for at least 1,000 years to come. By comparison, seas rose about 6 to 9 inches in the 20th century.

Big questions remain about the speed and extent of some impending changes, both because of uncertainty about future population and pollution trends and the complex interrelationships of the greenhouse gases, clouds, dusty kinds of pollution, the oceans and Earth’s veneer of life, which both emits and soaks up carbon dioxide and other such gases. But a broad array of scientists, including authors of the report and independent experts, said the latest analysis was the most sobering view yet of a century of transition — after thousands of years of relatively stable climate conditions — to a new norm of continual change.

Achim Steiner, the executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, which oversees the IPCC along with the meteorological group, said society now has plenty of information on which to act. “The implications of global warming over the coming decades for our industrial economy, water supplies, agriculture, biological diversity and even geopolitics are massive,” he said. “This new report should spur policymakers to get off the fence and put strong and effective policies in place to tackle greenhouse gas emissions.”

The full IPCC report, thousands of pages of technical background, will be released in four sections through the year, concluding with a synthesis of all of the findings near year’s end. Both the 2001 and 2007 reports of the IPCC are online at http://www.ipcc.ch

– edited from The New York Times, The Associated Press and The Independent (U.K.)
PeaceMeal, March/April 2007