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The new landscape of our time

Sam Geall — Fri, 09 May 2008 06:20:00 -0400

Manufactured Landscapes, an art film that brings to life Edward Burtynsky’s still photographs of China, exposes the strange intimacies of a globalised world in crisis, says Sam Geall.

The Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, whose large, majestic prints focus on human construction and industrial landscapes, says he aims “not to glorify industry, nor to damn it.” But when he turned his lens to China's rapid industrialisation, what did he find? And how can his striking images help us understand the environmental challenges facing the world's fastest growing economy? These questions are asked subtly and artfully in Manufactured Landscapes, a documentary film directed by Jennifer Baichwal, which opened in the United Kingdom on May 9.

I meet Baichwal at the British Film Institute in London and start by asking her why she was first attracted to Burtynsky's vast images of factory production lines, ship-breaking yards and mountains of electronic waste. “When I first saw Burtynsky's work,” she says, “I was struck by the capacity of the pieces to change environmental consciousness non-didactically.” Baichwal, whose previous films include a portrait of the enigmatic writer Paul Bowles, says she was drawn to the images' ambiguity and sense of mystery. “They are beautiful to look at, but you're looking at garbage. The somersaults that your mind goes through when you're confronting one of these prints – I think it takes you to a different place.”

This complexity stands in sharp contrast to the green politics of an earlier time, she says, politics which were often polarising and out of touch with the ethical imaginations of ordinary city dwellers. “Not everybody's going to move to the country and become an organic farmer and make their own clothes.” Instead, Manufactured Landscapes suggests another way to begin to think about ecology. Rather than being a documentary with a didactic political message – in the style of Al Gore's global-warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth – the film’s stately pace allows the viewer to “slow down enough to meditate on your own impact on the environment.”

Baichwal admits that Manufactured Landscapes reaches similar conclusions to Gore's film, “but through a completely different path that is much more experiential, allowing you to be in the places you are responsible for, but would never see.” The film animates these hidden places in Burtynsky's work with on-the-ground reportage, the photographer's own words and a dissonant, industrial soundscape. At its heart is the seeming contradiction between the rapid, noisy process of industrialisation in Asia and the eerie serenity of Burtynsky’s monumental photographs.

Burtynsky was inspired to shoot in China, Baichwal tells me, when he started to wonder where his computer would go to die once he had finished using it. Searching for the answer led him to China’s vast recycling yards for waste electronic equipment, where the United States sends at least half of its “e-waste”, and where substances like lead and cadmium often pose environmental and health risks to workers and local residents. His bold photographs of junked computers and televisions, therefore, aim to make the viewer aware of the consequences of his or her own consumption. “There is no 'away' to throw garbage away to,” Baichwal says, quoting the sustainability-focused American architect William McDonough. “The whole film is meant for you to reflect back on yourself. It's about all of us; it's not about people in China.”

However, the film is mostly shot in China and its subjects range from workers in the country’s booming manufacturing-for-export sector to construction at the Three Gorges Dam project, from coal mining to urban nightclubs for the country’s new middle classes. As different as these sites may seem, landscape is the film's organising principle and – as the title suggests – this is exclusively of the man-made variety. During the film, Burtynsky is heard to reflect: “The new landscape of our time is the landscape that we change, that we disrupt in the name of progress.” And Baichwal tells me, too, that she was struck by these places' unique effect. “Being in some of those landscapes, you literally can do a 360-degree turn and there is nothing natural left in the environment – nothing.”

But in concentrating on the changing landscape of China’s rapid development, does the film single out the country for criticism? “They are doing what every other industrialised country has done: industrialise; make a lot of money; get incredibly dirty; clean up later,” says Baichwal. Many in the country understand the consequences of this growth, she adds, and are working to change the way it is handled. “People in China know the cause, they know what's going on, but I think there is this constant tension between being outspoken and advocating for change, and not going too far so that you become marginalised.”

“I never wanted anyone to think this was an indictment of China, because it's not,” she continues. “This is really more about thinking about yourself and your own participation in cycles of consumption.” The film takes you to sites of frenetic transformation and environmental degradation not to excuse your own inaction, but to inspire a personal transformation. “Once you witness a place that you are responsible for but would never normally see, it changes you,” says Baichwal. And this ties you intimately to lives on the other side of the world. “I'm heartened by the fact that most audiences… look at themselves and think about their own intimate relationship to that woman [in China] who spends her life making spray mechanisms for irons.”

It is the strange intimacy of an increasingly globalised world facing a shared, looming crisis that underpins the environmental consciousness of Manufactured Landscapes. “We all have to recognise that there is no ‘far away’ anymore,” says Baichwal.

Manufactured Landscapes is released in the United Kingdom on May 9. For more information and venues, visit www.bfi.org.uk/manufactured

Sam Geall is the deputy editor of chinadialogue

Food or fuel? The policy choice becomes agonising

Ed Crooks — Thu, 08 May 2008 11:33:00 -0400

The United States and Europe could open their markets to more Brazilian ethanol made from sugar cane, writes Ed Crooks. It’s not the whole answer to the crisis, but it can help.

In 1959, after years of lobbying from Texas oil men, US president Dwight Eisenhower imposed a quota on crude oil imports by the United States. The idea of the world's biggest oil importer putting up barriers to keep out foreign crude now seems ludicrous. With fuel shortages looming, the quotas were abandoned by president Richard Nixon in spring 1973.

Yet the arguments marshalled in support of the quotas are all too familiar. Protecting the domestic industry was vital to national security, the oil men said: America needed to invest in production capacity in case foreign supplies were cut off.

Today, the US ethanol industry is running its campaign out of the same playbook. There is a lot of talk about energy security and producers are protected by a US54-cents-a-gallon import tariff. In the European Union, the focus is more on the supposed environmental impact, but the results are similar: the industry is also protected by a tariff, and further import restrictions are being talked about by EU officials in Brussels.

The combined crisis of food prices soaring as oil reached almost $120 a barrel in late April 2008 should be the decisive signal that those policies are no longer tenable.

Biofuels such as ethanol are not the only reason, or even the main reason, that food prices are rising. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) thinks the use of crops such as corn for biofuels accounts for only about 20% of the rise in prices over the past couple of years; other estimates suggest the effect is even smaller.

But it is clear we have moved into a new era, in which food prices and fuel prices are tied more closely than ever before. That realisation has led some environmental groups -- among them those, such as Friends of the Earth, which were among biofuels' biggest cheerleaders only a few years ago -- to urge policymakers to stop the growth of biofuels.

Some politicians, with Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, in the vanguard, have responded to these concerns by calling for a rethink of biofuels policy. Targets for the EU to meet 10% of its fuel demand from biofuels by 2020 and for the US to have 36 billion gallons of "renewable" fuels in its consumption by 2022 now look at risk.

Yet putting a brake on the expansion of biofuels is not an easy way out. At US$120, the oil price has almost doubled in the past year. It is an extra problem that a fragile world economy really does not need, and abandoning biofuels would make it worse.

High oil prices are a sign that the balance of supply and demand is very tight. Policymakers can help curb demand: the new fuel economy standards for cars in the US will be a step in the right direction, although their effect is likely to be modest. Higher fuel taxes would be better: the call from John McCain, the presumptive US Republican party presidential candidate, for the federal petrol tax to be suspended over the summer is entirely counterproductive.

Changing demand patterns takes time, however, and while the world gets used to a permanently higher level of energy prices, there is a need for additional supplies.

Biofuels contributed about 1.3% of world oil supplies last year: a small proportion, but still more than Indonesia, one of the earliest members of Opec, the oil producers' cartel. Over the next few years, their contribution as a share of the increase in oil supplies is expected to be much greater. If that contribution were lost, the supply-demand balance would be even tighter and the oil price even higher.

The effect of cutting biofuels production could be to make food inflation even worse: higher oil prices push up the prices of fertiliser and transport, some of the biggest components of agricultural costs.

It seems policymakers are damned if they do back biofuels, and damned if they do not.

The deus ex machina favoured by many politicians, especially in the US, is "second-generation" biofuels, such as cellulosic ethanol, which can be produced from straw or other plant waste and so do not compete with food supplies.

The pious declarations of support for cellulosic ethanol amount to pure wishful thinking, however. It is nowhere in large-scale production. There is a lot of corporate and government-supported research and development under way, but even supporters of cellulosic ethanol reckon that commercial viability could be five years off. Cynics say it always will be.

There is a solution, however: the US and Europe can open their markets to more Brazilian ethanol made from sugar cane. Brazil has the potential for huge growth in ethanol production on land today used as pasture, where the impact of expansion on either food supply or deforestation would be small.

Brazilian ethanol is not the whole answer, but it can help -- and with the right support, other low- and middle-income countries also could develop biofuels industries in ways that need not necessarily compete with food supplies.

Having opened the floodgates to foreign oil, Richard Nixon had a change of heart after the Arab oil embargo. By the end of 1973, he was evoking the spirit of the moon landings and the Second World War-era Manhattan Project as he called for the US to make itself self-sufficient in energy by the end of the decade.

That bold initiative failed, of course; as all attempts at energy independence are doomed. If there is one good thing that can come out of the food and fuel crisis, it should be the recognition of that reality.

The writer is the Financial Times energy editor

http://www.ft.com

Homepage photo by Jurvetson

One Chinese villager's view of climate change

Jianqiang Liu — Wed, 07 May 2008 07:59:00 -0400

Going home to visit his parents in rural China, Jianqiang Liu did not expect to have a discussion about global warming. But his mother's memories, he found, painted an intimate portrait of a changing country – and a changing climate.

In February I went home to visit my parents in Shandong, eastern China. It was the Chinese New Year holiday and the country was hit by the worst snow for half a century, which left tens of thousands of people stranded at train stations and airports in southern China. Fortunately, although there was some snow in Shandong, transport was not affected and I made it home in time for New Year.

As my mother fried me some traditional New Year’s cake, we chatted about the blizzards that had paralysed half the country. It was strange that the south had borne the brunt of the bad weather, she remarked, since it’s the part of the country least likely to see snow. “It must be that climate change they talk about,” she said. “The weather might get stranger, not just warmer.”

It is more customary for my mother to ask me about my wife and son and to discuss my work and my health; this was the first time she had ever mentioned climate change to me. Until then, I saw climate change as topic of conversation for scientists and environmentalists, far removed from the life of a 76-year-old woman from a small village. So, why did it interest her?

It made me think of a BBC World Service global poll from September 2007. The study, which surveyed around 1,000 people in a range of countries (and about 1,800 people in China), found that Chinese people were unusually aware of climate change, with 87% believing “human activity, including industry and transportation, is a significant cause of climate change.” This percentage was 71% in the US, 78% in the UK and 47% in India. In China, 70% of respondents thought “major steps starting very soon” should be taken to reduce the impact of human activity on the climate; as opposed to 59% in the US, 70% in the UK and 37% in India.

Readers were shocked by the results of the poll. Professor Martin Bunzl, director of the Rutgers Initiative on Climate Change and Social Policy, emailed me to ask if the Chinese respondents might have confused climate change with pollution. On checking the Chinese version of the questionnaire, I saw there was no room to make this mistake. However, the particular response in China may reflect the relatively high levels of education in Shanghai and Beijing, where the survey was carried out. In some other countries, including the UK, the US and India, the sample comprised both rural and urban residents.

The survey, therefore, probably does not mean there are such high levels of awareness across the Chinese population as a whole. Urban China and rural China are poles apart and the majority of rural residents are still unaware of climate change.

But what about my mother? She spent the first 50 years of her life in a village and moved to a small county town 20 years ago. She is not as well-educated as most city dwellers, though she is an elementary school teacher, enjoys watching the news on television and has an understanding of science.

“You’ve heard of climate change?” I said.

“Heard of it? I’m seeing it,” she replied. “It’s much warmer than it used to be. The ground used to freeze around the period of ‘light snow’ [in late November], and the river used to freeze during the ‘heavy snow’ [in early December]. Now, it’s still warm in late November and the river doesn’t freeze when it used to either. We used to wear padded-cotton jackets, trousers, shoes and hats in winter. Who wears padded-cotton shoes now? You don’t even need a hat.”

“When did you start to notice?” I asked.

“The year that Yao He was married, I think. I don’t recall the actual year. But his son is grown up and married now.” Yao He comes from our same village; my brother was at his wedding celebrations. I laughed because that would mean the warming started three decades ago. My mother said the wedding was in December or January, but it was so warm that nobody kept their jackets on. “When you were little, it got as cold as -18 degrees [Celsius], now the coldest it gets is -10. That’s a huge difference.”

My mother first heard about global warming from the television news at some point in the past few years. She doesn’t rely on the news, however, to tell her why it’s happening: she has her own opinions. “There are too many people, too many cars and too many factories. And there are fewer trees and less water.”

In the past, she said, there were more forests, with cool air under the trees. There was a pine forest near my grandmother’s village and you could hear the rustling of the trees and the cooler air as you approached. “It was cut down ages ago,” she said. “It’s all houses there now. Trees absorb carbon dioxide and release oxygen. Without forests, the temperature’s going to go up.”

My mother also blames the increased numbers of factories for the warming. “Get out of a car in summer and it’s like stepping into a furnace. Why? All that hot air has been blown out of the car. Just like factories: all those factories burning coal must be releasing hot air and carbon dioxide.”

The country’s largest paper-making group is based in the outskirts of our small town, along with a large fertiliser factory, two breweries and a great number of smaller factories. Taxes from these industries help to rank our county government as the thirtieth richest county of 2,000 counties in China.

I then asked: “Are climate change and pollution the same thing?”

“Yes,” my mother replied. Factories produce heat and emissions when they burn coal, she said. “When I was young there wasn’t any pollution. The sun was scorching hot when it shone through the clouds: we used to say it was as cruel as a stepmother. Where do you see a blue sky – or even the sun – nowadays? Step outside around here and it’s nothing but grey, like the clouds have fallen down. Even the sun appears hazy!”

The lack of water in the rivers is also worsening climate change, my mother believes. Thirty years ago, the river in our village was wide and deep, but it suddenly dried up, exacerbating the loss of groundwater. Before 1976, there was water two metres below ground level and my mother could lower her bucket down the well on its pole. But that year we dug our own well, and we had to dig five metres before hitting water. Two years later, it was nine metres. By 1980 it was 20 metres; now even 30-metre-deep wells are dry. Our village was named for its two wells; the stone edges of the wells had deep grooves that were rubbed by the ropes used to haul buckets for six centuries. In only 10 years, environmental degradation killed off a 600-year-old tradition.

The cause was the large number of salt, soda and chemical plants built kilometres away. Two pumping stations were built near our village, which sent water to the factories through metre-thick pipes. Soon, the county’s four rivers had all dried up. It was the first time the county, with a population of one million and records dating back over two millennia, was left without a single flowing river.

The rivers are dry; the forests are gone and replaced by factories and chimneys that belch smoke into the air and waste into the ground. And all for the sake of China’s GDP growth. My mother has seen it happen. Perhaps professor Bunzl is right: Chinese people do tend to confuse climate change and pollution. But for an ordinary Chinese person like my mother, the two are very closely related. Her perspective is not the same as that of scientific reports; she is responding to the decades of changes see has seen throughout her lifetime.

My mother, like the scientists and environmentalists, is aware of the threat climate change poses and supports efforts to reduce it. “We can’t close the factories. How will people put bread on the table?” she said. “But we should do something about them. We should change the black smoke to white.”

Jianqiang Liu is a reporter from Beijing, currently a visiting scholar at University of California, Berkeley

Homepage photo by Haldini

Rising tide: climate legislation in the US

Frances Beinecke — Tue, 06 May 2008 12:30:00 -0400

Despite the Bush administration’s history of intransigence on global warming, the debate within government is heating up. Frances Beinecke sees the dawning of a dramatic change in US policy on climate.

The debate on global warming in Congress, the United States’ national legislature, has shifted dramatically over the last few years. Ten years ago, Congress was unconvinced of the science and suspicious of international cooperation. In 1997, for example, the US Senate passed a resolution, known as the Byrd-Hagel resolution, which rejected the Clinton administration’s negotiations on the Kyoto Protocol. For too long, the Senate’s key environment committee was controlled by James Inhofe, a climate-change denier, who denounced global warming as the “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.”

But the congressional debate began to change earlier this decade, reflecting the strength of climate science, growing pressure for action at the state and local level and rising support for action in the US business community. In 2003, senator John McCain, now a candidate for president, introduced the first legislation to cap and reduce the country’s greenhouse-gas emissions. In 2005, the Senate adopted a new resolution (the Bingaman-Specter resolution) that effectively replaced the Senate’s rejection of action in 1997. The new resolution declared that the US needs to take the lead by adopting mandatory legislation to cap and reduce emissions, and that this step would help promote comparable action by the United States’ key trading partners.

Steadily growing public concern, coupled with the change in party control – from Republicans to Democrats – in the 2006 congressional election, has led to new momentum for federal global warming legislation in the current Congress. The findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are broadly accepted. The urgency of action has been underscored by extreme weather events such as Hurricane Katrina and widespread droughts, as well as large-scale climate impacts such as the melting of Arctic Sea ice that are unfolding at surprising speed. The question is no longer “if” global warming is happening, but “what” the country’s highest legislative body should do about it.

A major milestone was the Senate environment committee’s approval last December of the Climate Security Act (S. 2191) sponsored by senators Joe Lieberman and John Warner. This comprehensive global warming bill is expected to come to a vote in the full Senate as early as June 2008.

The bill would adopt an emissions trading system, known as a cap-and-trade system, with additional policies that together would reduce US emissions by 20% or more by 2020 and up to two-thirds by 2050, according to a joint analysis by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the World Resources Institute.

As reported by the Senate committee, the bill would:

• Create a national emissions tracking and auditing system.

• Create a cap-and-trade system run by the Environmental Protection Agency, steadily reducing emissions by nearly 2% per year between 2012 and 2050.

• Allow limited use of emissions “offsets,” which are carbon reduction credits from US entities not covered by the cap and trade system. (An individual power plant or industrial source could meet its obligations with up to 15% offsets.)

• Allow purchases of credits from foreign carbon markets that meet certain criteria.

• Use emissions trading, banking and borrowing to help manage costs while maintaining the integrity of the emissions cap.

The bill would also dedicate billions of dollars (through the allocation or auction of emissions allowances) to a variety of public purposes:

• Encouraging deployment of energy efficient and renewable energy technologies.

• Developing low-carbon energy sources, including advanced coal with carbon capture and storage.

• Accelerating deployment of cleaner vehicles and fuels.

• Promoting energy-efficient building codes and expanded public transportation.

• Minimising transitional burdens for affected industries and communities.

• Supporting domestic and international adaptation activities and international efforts to reduce deforestation.

The Senate bill is not perfect. It could demand deeper cuts in emissions and make greater investments in low-carbon technologies in the US and abroad. But, if passed, it would represent a watershed: the moment when the US finally turns the corner on confronting climate change.

In the US House of Representatives, progress is also dramatic. Early in this Congress, the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, created a new committee dedicated to raising awareness on global warming and clean energy. The powerful chair of the House Energy and Commerce committee, representative John Dingell, has turned his attention to global warming after brokering the first increase in vehicle fuel efficiency standards in close to 30 years. The House Energy and Commerce committee has produced white papers committing to reduce US emissions by 60% to 80% by 2050 and exploring various policies that would make up a federal global warming program. His staff has begun drafting mandatory cap and trade legislation.

Both the Senate and House are grappling with competitiveness concerns raised by certain energy-intensive industries, which assert that US legislation could place them at a disadvantage compared to international competitors. Several proposals have been advanced to address this problem, including the possibility, after a period of time allowing for international negotiations, of requiring importers of certain products (such as steel or cement) to purchase emissions allowances on entry to the US. These provisions would not come into effect if there is sufficient progress through international negotiations towards nationally appropriate actions in other countries.

Will strong global warming legislation make it through Congress and reach the president’s desk this year? The urgency of the climate crisis means we have no choice but to work as hard as we can to make that happen. It is expected that the full Senate will debate and vote on the bill in June. In any event, progress made in Congress this year will contribute to faster action with the new Congress and when the new US president takes office in January 2009.

It is clear that a change in US policy is coming. President Bush still opposes mandatory limits on US emissions: in April, he actually proposed to let them keep growing until 2025. But the three leading candidates to replace him (senator McCain on the Republican side and Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama on the Democratic side) all support mandatory legislation to cap US carbon emissions now and reduce them steadily in the years to come. Who ever wins, the next president will make global warming legislation a top priority in the first year of the new administration. The next president will also re-engage the United States, after an eight-year absence, in the international negotiations to reach a global climate agreement for 2012 and beyond, which began last year in Bali and will culminate in Copenhagen in late 2009.

After years of inaction, the US can hardly claim to be a global leader in carbon reduction. But when the Congress enacts national legislation to cap and reduce climate-warming pollution and when a new president takes office, the country will once more be a responsible partner with other governments in the global effort to prevent climate catastrophe.

Frances Beinecke is the president of the Natural Resources Defense Council

A quiet revolution in Brazil

Tom Phillips — Mon, 05 May 2008 10:33:00 -0400

Jaime Lerner transformed a congested, grimy, crime-ridden South American city into a world-renowned model of green living and social innovation. Any big urban area can do the same in under three years, he tells Tom Phillips.

Jaime Lerner rarely leaves home without his little black book. In between meetings with Russian senators, European diplomats, Korean politicians or Brazilian governors, the 70-year-old architect and urban planner opens the notebook and scribbles down his latest ideas.

Inside, there are sketches of the "portable street", a plan to transform deserted, rundown city centres into bustling communities. There are blueprints for the Dock-Dock, a tiny, futuristic automobile intended to cut congestion and pollution levels. And there are rap song lyrics.

"It's possible, it's possible! You can do it! You can do it," reads the most recent, entitled The Sustainable Song. "Make the transition. Cut carbon emissions!"

Leaf through the notebook and it is easy to get a sense of the audacious and often eccentric thinking that has made Lerner a hero in his native Brazil and a reference point for architects and city planners the world over. He is celebrated as the mayor who oversaw the once-unthinkable transformation of his hometown, Curitiba, turning a grimy, congested state capital into an economically viable example of green living and social responsibility.

Increasingly, Lerner is hailed as an environmental hero whose notebooks may hold some of the solutions to the problem of climate change -- a man on a crusade to improve living and environmental conditions for future generations.

Lerner, the son of Polish immigrants, was born in 1937 in Curitiba, a then-small city in the south of Brazil, which today is home to around 1.8 million people. His fascination with the city began early. As a child, he remembers watching the impoverished immigrant workers streaming off trains in the city's central station outside his house, the politicians scurrying to work in the town hall, and the clowns cavorting in the circus next door. "I did my course of both fantasy and reality on that street," he recalls.

It was a time of huge social change in Brazil, with immigrants from across the world streaming into the country in search of a better future. "I always felt a great connection with the street," he says. "My dream was to be an architect."

After dropping out of engineering school -- his local university did not offer a course in architecture at the time -- and then finally studying architecture, Lerner began putting his own fantasies into practice in order to confront the realities of his hometown. By the mid-1960s, the population of Curitiba had burgeoned to nearly 500,000 and the problems that all large cities face were starting to appear.

Frustrated by the responses of the authorities, Lerner and a group of young, idealistic architects and engineers began to set out their own designs for the city's future. "I saw things happening that I thought were wrong," he says. "They were destroying the city's history, opening up big roads that wiped out the whole memory of the city, planning the city just for cars."

In contrast, Lerner's master plan for the city involved a mix of affordable, integrated transport as well as social and environmental programmes that would help break down social divisions and bring new life to the capital of Paraná state. In 1971, aged just 33, Lerner was "appointed" mayor by the military regime that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985. The Lerner revolution, which would later be replicated in cities from Colombia and Cuba to Russia, began.

"The city of Curitiba became a reference for doing exactly the opposite of what other cities were doing," he says. "Other cities were building big bridges and freeways, and we were making pedestrian streets. Many cities were building metro systems, and we started our own transport system." Key to the transformation was stealth, Lerner believes. "I said: 'We have to do things quickly because next week we might not be here anymore [because of the dictatorship].' And you have to be quick to avoid your own bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is like a fungus that contaminates everything."

Over the following 20 years, a period during which Curitiba underwent drastic, rapid changes, Lerner was mayor three times. "We built the opera house in two months, the botanical gardens in three months, Niemeyer's museum in five months. We transformed the city's main street into a pedestrian area in 72 hours. It wasn't that we were chasing after records -- it was necessity."

In 1988 came Lerner's masterpiece, the Rede Integrada de Transporte (RIT), or integrated transport system. The network -- later reproduced in Bogotá, Los Angeles and Panama City -- involved the construction of futuristic-style "tubos", tube-like street-side bus shelters from which people could travel anywhere in the city for a flat fare. The RIT was, in effect, a low-budget overland subway.

Then there were the recycling projects. Under Lerner, Curitiba began a pioneering project, exchanging food for separated rubbish with the poor in the favelas (shanty towns) that surrounded the city. "Today, Curitiba has the highest level of rubbish separation in the world," Lerner points out with pride.

Lerner recalls: "Brazil was changing, but the population's income was dropping. We realised we had to enter more into the social field -- education, health, paying attention to the children. It was a very rich period of innovation."

The signs of Lerner's urban revolution are everywhere: in the once-abandoned quarries and landfill sites that have become parks and recreation areas; in the Lighthouses of Knowledge, educational centres where the city's youth can study and socialise free of charge; in the cultural centres and theatres; and even in the signs hanging from car garages, proudly proclaiming how many tyres they have recycled since the year began.

Curitiba is not perfect, as the wooden shanties near the airport and the rising murder rate indicate, but it is a radically different city from most others in South America. The city's gross domestic product (GDP) is the fourth highest among Brazil's cities, behind only São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and the capital, Brasília. Curitiba also boasts some of the country’s lowest illiteracy and unemployment rates. "I don't like the word 'model', but Curitiba is a reference point for the whole world," Lerner says.

Buoyed by his successes as mayor, Lerner was elected governor of Paraná state in 1994. And, with paltry resources, he was forced again to look to innovation. "We did a deal with the fisherman," he recalls. "If he fishes fish, the money goes to him. If he fishes rubbish, bottles, glass, cans, we will buy it from him. If the conditions are bad for catching fish, he'll catch rubbish. The more rubbish he gets, the more money he gets and the cleaner the bay gets. The cleaner the bay gets, the more fish he'll be able to fish. It's a win-win solution."

Such initiatives have earned Lerner many fans across the world, and his programmes are today a fixed part of many urban planning curriculums.

In 1975, he was appointed an urban planning consultant by the United Nations. Wally N'Dow, former head of the UN Centre for Human Settlements (Habitat), has described Curitiba as "a wonderful example, because cities that follow this lead can jump-start the economies, assist the poorest of their poor, and clean up their cities."

Since giving up politics in 2002, Lerner has become a kind of international ambassador for sustainable planning. Virtually every week he receives an international delegation in Curitiba at his former home, which is insulated by a grass-covered roof.

Lerner speaks of his hopes for the world's cities with an evangelical passion. All cities are capable of solving problems, he believes, be they the slums of Rio de Janeiro or Caracas or the congestion of London and Paris. "I'm optimistic about cities," he insists. "Mayors who I talk to say, 'This can't be done in my city; it's very big; it has 10, 12 or 15 million people.' Or they say, 'Oh, our country is very poor; our city doesn't have the resources.' And I always say it is not a question of scale or of resources. Any city in the world can improve, and improve a lot, in less than three years."

Lerner also believes that urban planning can be a key weapon against global warming and climate change. "As I'm a descendent of Jews, I have some commandments that we need to follow," he says. "First commandment: use your car less. Second commandment: separate your rubbish. Third: live near to your work, or work near your home. It needs to be about life, work and movement being all together."

The rest, he says, is a question of simplicity. "One of the things I have learned is that we have to be committed to simplicity. There is no need to be scared of simplicity. And we can't want to have all the answers in the world. Many cities end up putting off things because they want to understand everything. They don't understand that innovating is about starting. Taking care of a city is a process that you start, and then give the population space to respond. There is no place in a city that can't be better. There is no toad that can't be a princess, no frog that can't become a prince."

http://environment.guardian.co.uk/

Homepage photo by Guihermy

Carried away with pride

Hannah Pool — Fri, 02 May 2008 06:00:00 -0400

A year after Modbury in southwestern England became the first town in Europe to ban plastic bags, Hannah Pool pays a visit to see how life has changed for shoppers and traders. What will the residents target next?

The town of Modbury in the county of Devon, in south-west England, is an unlikely spot for a revolution. Nestled on the South Hams coast, 27 kilometres east of Plymouth, it is a blink-and-you'll-miss-it sort of place. With a population of around 1,600, it is the kind of community that considers you a newcomer unless you have several generations of family buried in the grounds of the local church. "It's fiercely rural and fiercely Devon," says Rebecca Hosking, a wildlife documentary-maker and arguably Modbury's most -- perhaps only -- famous resident.

At this time last year no one had heard of either Hosking or Modbury, but both have become synonymous worldwide with one thing: plastic bags. On May Day last year, the unassuming town rather grandly announced that it would be the first community in Europe to become "plastic shopping bag-free". Hosking, the leading force behind the ban, was horrified by the marine pollution she had seen while filming in the Pacific Ocean. After seeing her film [Message in the Waves], local traders implemented a self-imposed ban on plastic carriers. Within a fortnight the whole town was behind the project.

Twelve months on, townsfolk are keen to paint the scheme as 100% successful. Request a plastic bag these days in Modbury and you will be asked politely if you really need one, and if you absolutely do, you will be charged five pence (10 US cents) for a corn-starch alternative. The Co-op store also sells string bags, and for around $6 you can pick up a specially designed canvas Modbury "bag for life" (ethically produced, of course).

But it is clear the success has come at some cost. Modbury's shopkeepers and residents have become accustomed to satellite vans and camera crews from around the world setting up camp on their streets, and Hosking herself has grown used to being referred to as "the bag lady".

The backlash took a while, but it was fierce. First, there were descriptions of Modbury both as a radical town, full of reactionary hippies, and as a place overrun by gas-guzzling “Chelsea tractors”, as large four-wheel-drive (4x4) vehicles are increasingly being called in Britain. ("Any 4x4 you see will be a working one, and it will be covered in mud," says Sue Sturton, owner of the local gallery.) Then came the accusations that banning plastic bags was a pointless token gesture, "rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic", as the climate scientist James Lovelock called it.

"Absolutely, I agree," says a slightly exasperated Hosking. "We always said plastic bags were just the tip of the iceberg. It's a shame that message got lost."

Some traders have been criticised in the national press because they still use plastic packaging. "It's sad that people feel the need to criticise,” says Sturton. “The only claim we've made is that we were going to make Modbury plastic shopping bag-free, which it is."

But Hosking bore the brunt of the backlash. "I got called a green Stalinist, and someone wrote, 'Rebecca Hosking is a watermelon: green on the outside and red in the middle,'" she says, with a laugh. "I get embarrassed. A lot of environmentalists are so cross with the amount of time that has been given to plastic bags. There are far more important things to be talked about."

In fact, mention plastic bags in Modbury these days and you are likely to be met with a groan. Modbury has moved on: once the inhabitants had got rid of plastic bags, it became impossible for them to ignore other forms of packaging. It was a chain reaction, says Hosking, proudly. "They have woken up."

For example, the butcher, Simon Wilkinson, now packs meat in biodegradable cornstarch bags, the florist wraps bouquets in cornstarch cellophane and has replaced ribbon with paper and raffia, and Adam Searle, owner of the local delicatessen, puts sandwiches in brown paper bags rather than plastic boxes.

"Previously, I used plastic pots for clotted cream and olives, and I used plastic boxes for salad boxes, but now I've moved over to these," Searle says, holding out one of his new cartons. "They look like plastic, but are made out of corn starch. They are 100% biodegradable, so break down to nothing on your compost heap. We've also moved away from using plastic packaging for sandwiches, so now I just present them on a paper plate in a brown paper bag. Initially, we switched to white paper bags, then I realised bleach was used to make them so I moved over to the plain brown ones, which are better for the environment."

Even these are offered reluctantly: Modbury would rather we got out of the habit of using disposable bags altogether, than simply switching to paper (which still often comes with a large carbon footprint). And it is not just the evils of plastic bags that Modbury has woken up to: Wilkinson recently replaced all his fridges and vacuum packers with energy-efficient models. "We've also changed all our packaging," he says. "We've even gone back to greaseproof paper. All our packaging is biodegradable."

Go into Pip's, the greengrocer, and you will now see giant tubs of eco-sensitive detergent behind the counter. Most of the produce in the shop is also sold loose (the shop smells wonderful as a result), and brown paper bags hang by the rows, rather than the plastic bags the most greengrocers and supermarkets use. In fact, the few items that are still wrapped in plastic, such as grapes, salads and cucumbers, look out of place and unappetising because of it.

The bag ban has affected how residents think about other things. "After a month, all the traders wanted to know what they should do next," says Hosking. They have a new target: on April 27, the nearest tidal time to the first anniversary of the town going plastic-bag free, the people of Modbury scheduled a mass beach clean.

"Whatever we can recycle, we will,” says Hosking. “Whatever we can't, we'll take photos of it so we can log what is washing up. Whatever we notice is the most significant thing will be the next thing we'll work on to remove."

Does she have a hunch what the most likely contender will be? "Plastic water bottles. They really are a long-time problem," says Hosking.

The traders already have started talking to the nearest spring-water company, Devon Hills, about whether it would be willing to switch to reusable glass bottles. Searle also has been researching the viability of using cornstarch bottles. There is one being produced in Australia that he is particularly taken by: "They have a seed in each bottle, so when it breaks down on a rubbish heap, a tree will grow from your bottle. I think it's a beautiful idea."

http://environment.guardian.co.uk/

Homepage photo by Kate_A

The English town of Modbury has made a global name for itself through its campaign to be plastic-bag-free, and it has other environmental goals in mind. Like many cities and towns around the world, China has launched a campaign against plastic-bag pollution, banning the use of the thinnest bags beginning June 1.

What ecological initiatives can your town take a leading role in?

Let us know on the forum what you think.

Your right to know: a historic moment

Ma Jun — Thu, 01 May 2008 06:54:00 -0400

Today marks an important milestone for freedom of information in China. As new transparency regulations become effective, Ma Jun explains, they will provide an powerful lever for the public to monitor companies’ environmental performance.

The Measures on Open Environmental Information (for Trial Implementation) will be effective from May 1, 2008, and will provide a powerful tool to promote the public right to know in China.

As an agency that pays unusual attention to public participation, it is no surprise that China’s State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) – now the Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) – became the first ministry to respond with its own measures, based on China’s Regulations on Open Government Information, which were introduced by the State Council in January 2007 and aim to increase government transparency by allowing citizens and organisations to lawfully obtain government information.

The MEP’s measures promote pollution reduction by strengthening public involvement in environmental governance. Speaking at the release of the measures, Pan Yue, vice-minister at SEPA, reportedly said the new requirements for non-compliant enterprises to disclose environmental information and violations of discharge standards would empower the people to participate in environmental management.

The measures require environment agencies to disclose 17 different kinds of environmental information, including regional environmental quality, amounts of discharge and the records of polluters in various regions. According to the measures, the following information on polluters should be made available to the public:

• A list of enterprises violating discharge standards or exceeding discharge quota limit;

• Letters, visits and complaints filed about pollution caused by enterprises; and the result of their disposal;

• Administrative punishments, reviews, lawsuits and enforcement;

• A list of enterprises causing major and extremely large pollution accidents and incidents;

• Enterprises that refuse to comply with the effective administrative punishment decisions.

Besides the requirement on open government information, the measures made specific requirements on corporate disclosure. The measures stipulate that:

• Enterprises listed for violating discharge standards or exceeding the discharge quota limit will publish their discharge data within 30 days in the local media and register the data with the local government agency. The local agency has the right to verify data published by enterprises.

• Polluting enterprises that fail to comply with disclosure requirements will be fined up to 100,000 yuan (US$14,270) and their discharge data will be published by the relevant local government agencies.

• Environment agencies will be legally bound to disclose the list of polluters within 20 days on the agency website or through communiqués, press conferences, newspapers, radio or television.

• If environment agencies fail to publish such a list, the measures entitle the public to apply for this disclosure. Environmental agencies shall respond within 15 days, or after no more than another 15 days of extension.

• If an environment agency turns down the public application for disclosure, the public may report this to the superior environmental authorities, which shall then urge the subordinate agency to fulfill their disclosure duties. The public may apply for administrative review or file administrative suits if they believe that the rejection of disclosure has infringed upon their legal rights.

It is well-known that there is weak enforcement of laws and regulations in China. As a law that reflects new thinking, the implementation of the measures is expected to be even more challenging. Local and international environmental groups, along with agencies and the media, are making great efforts to promote awareness of the measures so that this historic chance will not be missed.

The measures make it possible for NGOs to fill in the blanks on enterprises caught violating emissions standards. Our organisation, the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE), is refining our water and air pollution database so that we can update our corporate discharge datasheet after the measures come into effect. This new data can make IPE’s database more comprehensive, and it will eventually allow users to compare the volume of discharge by listed polluters.

Besides making disclosure mandatory for listed polluters, the measures also encourage other companies to voluntarily share pollution data with the public.

IPE believes that it will make far more sense to the public if the data disclosed by companies could be published in a consistent and cross-comparable way. To facilitate a more standardised disclosure, IPE has created a discharge data disclosure form, which it has distributed to local and multinational companies.

It is highly encouraging that some leading corporate citizens have already decided to voluntarily share discharge data with the public. Esquel Group, one of the world's leading producers of cotton shirts, in March became the first company to make a voluntary disclosure of its discharge data in response to government and public requirements. The company filled out the form and provided basic water and air emissions data from its major shirt manufacturing base, including its emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas.

Data such as this will appear in the new version of IPE’s database and will serve as a de facto benchmark for the textile industry, one of the major sources of wastewater and a large energy consumer in China.

Companies operating in China need to start anticipating the need for short- and long-term measures to cope with this evolving situation. In the short term, companies in China will need to ensure that they have corporate discharge monitoring and data collection systems in place. IPE has found that many companies, including large multinational companies operating in China, have major gaps in their data collection, categorisation and documentation of discharge data.

Our activities have incentivised some companies to take action to fill this information gap. The German company Bosch, for instance, presented documents to IPE showing it has developed a database to track and compile the internal and external monitoring data of its dozen subsidiaries in China. This interaction with IPE also led Bosch (China) Investment Ltd. to commit to voluntarily disclose basic discharge and energy efficiency data from April 2008.

The US experience demonstrated that when companies improved performance under the Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) scheme, it could generate good publicity and help the company regain public trust. A more transparent environmental management system in China can be expected to increase the competitiveness of companies with a good environmental performance.

Ma Jun is director of the Institute of Public and Environment Affairs

Homepage photo by Ming Xia via Flickr

A new frontier for public participation

Friends of Nature — Thu, 01 May 2008 02:58:00 -0400

New transparency regulations will help local communities become more involved in environmental affairs. Friends of Nature, a Chinese green group, welcomes the government’s efforts.

The number of petitions lodged with the Chinese government dropped by 15.5% in 2006, according to figures from the sixth work meeting on petitioning. However, petitions and mass public protests related to environmental issues increased by 30%. The environment had become one of the five main reasons that citizens lodge petitions. Worsening pollution, along with greater environmental and rights awareness, has had a powerful effect on the public. Participation is becoming more and more widespread; it is becoming a force to be reckoned with.

In particular, the dramatic public opposition to the paraxylene (PX) petrochemical project in Xiamen, southeast China, has become a symbol of renewed public participation in the country.

During the major Chinese government sessions of 2007 (the National People’s Congress and Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, which are held simultaneously), 105 members of the CPPCC signed a motion opposing the proposed building of the PX project in Haicang district, Xiamen. Investment in the project was set to reach 10.8 billion yuan (around US$1.5 billion) and the plant would have added 80 billion yuan (US$11.5 billion) to the city’s annual economic output. But the PX plant was set to be positioned only seven kilometres from the city centre and the well-known scenic area of Gulangyu. Additionally, Haicang district was being opened up as one of the city’s new residential areas. The sensitive, high-risk location of the proposed plant stirred up fierce opposition from CPPCC members and the public in Xiamen. Countless citizens took to the streets to make their voices heard.

On 30 May, 2007, the Xiamen city government officially postponed construction on the PX plant. A week later, China’s State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) – now the Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) – demanded a comprehensive environmental appraisal of the plant’s impacts on the surrounding area. In December, the city government invited citizens to choose representatives to take part in an environmental hearing in south Haicang district. Of the 49 citizen representatives who took part in the meeting, over 40 expressed their firm opposition to the PX project. Following the meeting, the Fujian provincial government and Xiamen city government reportedly decided to respect public opinion. The plant would not be built in Haicang. The project was moved to the Gulei peninsula, in Zhangzhou.

These protests, however, were not unique to China. Another significant environmental protest took place in Beijing last year. The city government planned to build a waste-to-energy generator near a landfill site in Liulitun, in the northwest of Haidian district. The plant would have burned 1,200 tonnes of domestic waste and produced 400 tonnes of compost every day. But many residential compounds had already been built in the Liulitun area, and residents were worried about the pollution the plant would create. They repeatedly appealed to the government concerning the choice of location for the plant, and their efforts attracted widespread interest. On 12 December, 2007, SEPA suggested that the local government should conduct a deeper investigation into the potential impacts of the plant. Before the results were announced, they said, the project should be postponed. The Beijing Communist Party Committee and the city government began to pay serious attention and agreed that as long as the public were not clear on the issues, the project should not go ahead. Construction on the project was halted and the Haidian district government and Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau are now preparing an expert investigation.

These two events show not only how citizens can make a rational defence of their rights, but also how public participation is increasing in power. The response of the government – self-discipined, rational and willing to listen to public opinion – is representative of a new attitude to governance. This new stance has been extremely popular with the public. These events occurred because of inadequacies in the planning and construction process: environmental appraisals were not far-reaching enough and project appraisals lacked openness, meaning the public could not participate. Planned environmental appraisals are of great importance. Pan Yue, vice-minister at the MEP, said that new regulations on environmental appraisals, which are currently in the pipeline, will include an article that specifies an increased level of public participation in the process. According to these regulations, parties that propose projects must disclose information and seek out opinions from the public; where strong opinions exist, they must hold hearings.

Environmental law

Last year, as the government strengthened environmental legislation, enthusiasm for public participation in environmental law reached unprecedented levels. The revision of the new water pollution law is a good example. On 5 September, 2007, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress presented a draft of the law to the public and asked for suggestions, arousing widespread interest. By 10 October, the committee had received 2,400 suggestions and 67 letters. Laws on public participation in the creation of environmental legislation also became more comprehensive.

Public access to information is a prerequisite for public participation. In 2006, a temporary law on public participation in environmental appraisals was released, along with a law on public participation in environmental protection. In April 2007, SEPA announced the trial implementation of a law on public access to environmental information. As of May 1, 2008, this law becomes effective. It is the first set of regulations on open government information since the State Council passed new rules on public access to information. It is also the first set of departmental regulations on the release of environmental information and is extremely significant in promoting public participation in environmental protection. In the environmental sector, the public’s right to know now has a legal guarantee, which provides a solid foundation for the public’s right to environmental participation and supervision.

Chinese environmental regulations have always provided public access to information in principle. But there was a lack of viable regulations concerning who would release information and what would happen if they refused. This has been a huge hindrance to public participation. The new laws are more precisely targeted: they make clear who has to release information and to what extent. Environmental protection bureaus at all levels are required to publicise 17 types of information including environmental laws and regulations, policies, standards, administrative permissions and decisions. Businesses whose emissions exceed standards will be forced to publicise four types of information and will not be allowed to use corporate confidentiality as an excuse. Other businesses will be encouraged to voluntarily provide information. The law also stipulates exactly how the information should be released and outlines powers to punish those who conceal information. Companies that do not release data can be investigated and fined by environmental departments. Members of the public who feel that the environmental departments have infringed upon their rights can apply for decisions to be reconsidered or file an administrative lawsuit.

From awareness to action

Last year saw a huge rise in public interest in the environment; NGOs responded by organising a wide range of public events. On 5 June, State Council leaders held discussions on the environment in the government compound at Zhongnanhai, to which they invited representatives of community groups from the grassroots. On 9 December, a question was added to the national civil service exam concerning the discussions initiated by NGOs over the Nu River dam project.

The People’s Livelihood Index, produced by the China Environmental Culture Promotion Association, was praised as a barometer for public environmental awareness and behaviour. A survey in 2007 showed that of nine different social issues, pollution came second only to commodity prices as the issue of utmost concern to people. Of the people surveyed, 46.1% said they were concerned about pollution, up 3.8% on the previous year; 66.9% of people thought that China’s environmental situation was either “very serious” or “quite serious”, up 3.9%.

The public also agrees with government efforts on the environment: 64.4% of people thought that the central government took the question of the environment “extremely seriously” or “quite seriously”, up 3.4% on the previous year; 73.1% of people supported the introduction of green GDP; 44% thought the main cause of pollution is a “unilateral focus on economic development”; and 58.3% believe that “businesses care only about their own development” and that many companies lack social responsibility when it comes to the environment.

The 2007 People’s Livelihood Survey gave the public a score of 42.1 points for environmental awareness, 36.6 points for environmental behaviour and 44.7 points for satisfaction with the environment: failure on all three counts – and a warning that public awareness and behaviour need to be improved. Behaviour clearly fell behind awareness. Almost half of people thought that they were “not very important” or “not at all important” in environmental protection. Only 13.7% believed their role was “extremely important” or “quite important”. People feel reliant on others for environmental protection, which demonstrates the government has not done a good job in laying the foundations for public participation.

The government has seemingly recognised this problem. When talking about its “unbending commitment to developing socialist democratic governance,” the report from the 17^th Party Congress mentions the importance of “developing grassroots democracy and guaranteeing more substantial and more numerous democratic rights…bringing into play social organisations and public participation in order to reflect public demands and improving the ability of society to self-govern.” This demonstrates the government’s commitment to expanding public participation – and could provide a more advanced starting point for public participation in the future.

This is an edited extract from the Green Book 2007, published by Friends of Nature, a Beijing-based NGO. It is translated and reproduced here with permission.

Homepage photo by Thomas F. Peng via Flickr

The Great Smog of Guangzhou

Tang Hao — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 11:08:00 -0400

The residents of China’s Pearl River delta suffer serious air pollution every day. But, writes Tang Hao, few understand how near they are to potential disaster. To alleviate the situation, he adds, monitoring standards must be improved.

Smog is becoming an ever more frequent feature of Guangzhou’s weather, and levels of particulate matter in the air are increasing too. As a result, more people are suffering the symptoms of respiratory diseases, which include shortness of breath, coughs, dizziness, weakness, nausea and even the loss of temper. But since the situation seemingly presents no immediate threat to life, it is easy to ignore.

But as the situation worsens, that may change. In early April the Southern Weekend newspaper carried a report about China’s worsening air pollution, which warned that London’s Great Smog may be repeated in Guangzhou. The Great Smog of December 1952 is famous as the world’s worst case of air pollution. In only five days more than 4,000 people in the British capital died from respiratory illnesses, many of them elderly people. In the following months a further 8,000 died. As early as the end of 2004, Tang Xiaoyan, a professor at the Peking University College of Environmental Science, made similar predictions based on his research: that a severe photochemical smog could arise in Guangzhou – or even across the entire Pearl River delta.

In fact, the air in the Pearl River delta has already been severely polluted by the manufacturing industry: air quality levels already fall to levels seen in London in 1952. The city of Shenzhen saw a record-breaking 226 days of smog in 2007. Smog is spreading across whole regions: in the urban areas around the Pearl River delta and around the whole Beijing and Tianjin metropolitan area. These cities are the main source of pollution and they also suffer from it the most. In 2006 only 4.3% of China’s 559 cities reached Class I air quality (the cleanest level), 58.1% averaged in Class II, 28.5% at Class III and the remaining 9.1% at even lower levels.

Almost every city in the Pearl River delta suffers from smog all year round. And as the provincial government attempts to shift the worst polluters out of the area, the problem only moves to the provinces of Jiangxi, Hunan and the northern part of Guangdong. I recently visited Qingxin, a county in central Guangzhou, which used to be renowned for its clean air, but now faces pollution from industries relocated from the Pearl River delta. Industrial output has been increasing every year, with many factories sprouting up in its still-expanding industrial zones. Economically, it has been a great success, but the damage to air quality is easy to see on your windscreen as the rain dries and leaves dirty grey marks.

Urban air pollution is a major threat to public health in China. Smog is made up of the soot and dust in the polluted air above our cities; it is a complex mix of hundreds of different types of particulate matter. Those most harmful to human health are tiny aerosol particles: minerals, salt, sulphates and nitrates that lodge in the lungs and breathing passages, giving rise to rhinitis and bronchitis – and cancer in the long term. Outdoor air pollution kills around 300,000 people in China every year, according to research in 2003 by Wang Jinnan, of the China Environmental Planning Institute. The country’s city dwellers have become like vacuum cleaners, each one of us filtering out the particulates from 15 cubic metres of air a day. The difference in air quality is striking to anyone who travels overseas.

Many are unaware of the risks and fail to connect their health problems with air pollution. But the public do not only suffer from the pollution, they also produce it. Surveys indicate that sources of urban air pollution are changing in the Pearl River delta; vehicle emissions are becoming the main culprit and may even exceed emissions from industry. In 2007 there were 1.8 million cars on Guangzhou’s roads and this number is growing by 150,000 every year. We are facing a gradual, yet potentially fatal, process that is reaching a tipping point: the conditions for air pollution to become very acute are already in place. Guangzhou’s unique climate has so far protected the city, but if things continue, a disaster is almost inevitable.

An environmental crisis is not like other emergencies. An isolated pollution accident or an explosion, for instance, occurs suddenly and can be dealt with quickly. An environmental crisis gathers form gradually on a large scale; once formed, it is hard to solve quickly. It is not a temporary problem, but something we have to live with every day. Therefore, we do not only need emergency measures, but also changes in our everyday life. We need laws that require local governments to control polluting industries, and measures to prevent air pollution in cities. Most importantly, we must find a way to alleviate a long-term crisis.

China’s government, businesses and people are not paying enough attention to the risks of a large-scale environmental disaster. When it is clear that polluters are not going to change their ways, the government should intervene. However, the gravity of the situation we face today can partly be blamed on government failures. For example, the very scale used to measure atmospheric pollution fails to reflect actual conditions. China’s environment authorities recognise a yearly average of 100 milligrams of particulate matter per cubic metre of air as a safe standard, five times the World Health Organization’s standard. They also do not measure particles over 2.5 nanometres in diameter, despite the fact they are the most toxic. There are huge differences between what the official data shows and what the public experiences. The law does not enforce environmental rulings and solve disputes as it should. Where in other countries the courts would handle environmental issues, in China the government takes control, which is far less efficient. The power of the public and civil society is weak; the right to be informed on environmental issues is not secure.

Of course, the system has also seen progress. For example, Guangzhou has been the first city to implement a smog forecasting system and many other cities are following suit. But scientists and the government must change China’s monitoring standards and make the results public. There are historical reasons for urban pollution in China’s cities, but we still have time to make a change and prevent chronic problems becoming an acute crisis. The clock is ticking.

Tang Hao is a newspaper columnist, deputy editor of Shimin (Citizen) magazine, and assistant professor of politics at Huanan Normal University. His essays and opinion pieces have appeared in Contemporary International Relations, International Studies, Nanfang Daily, Yangcheng Evening News, Southern Window and many other publications.

Homepage photo by 23hours

The rise of the social entrepreneur

John Elkington — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 07:21:00 -0400

A new breed of business leader is pioneering new technology, value and business models, says John Elkington. Environmentalists are starting to view the market not as the enemy, but an effective listening device for understanding people’s needs.

At a time when the United States is in deepening trouble, not only with the continuing war in Iraq, but also the gathering recession and Wall Street in disarray in the wake of the sub-prime meltdown, it is worth remembering what made the country great. As I flew to Santa Barbara, in California, a few weeks back to take part in the first Wall Street Journal conference on the greening of capital markets, I recalled the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill, which did so much to light the fuse of citizen action and modern environmentalism. I also reflected on how late the Journal was coming in to the game. Indeed, it is striking that such a great business newspaper has allowed itself to become not a leading but a lagging indicator of change.

As leading CEOs like Jeffrey Immelt, of General Electric, and Lee Scott, of Wal-Mart, took the stage to discuss how they are increasingly trying to build sustainability considerations into their strategies, at least one Journal editor kept wading into the audience in an attempt to get the assembled business leaders to say that they thought all of this greening was misguided and a huge threat to shareholder value. It soon became clear that they didn’t think this way, no matter how much the Journal and the current US government might like to believe. And it also quickly became clear that they largely supported what the likes of Immelt and Scott are trying to do.

What makes America great is its capacity to ride the great waves of scientific, technological and economic change. On the flight to Santa Barbara, I read an extraordinary book on the life and work of the economist Joseph Schumpeter, who came up with the idea of “creative destruction”. I am increasingly persuaded that we are seeing a new wave of creative destruction hitting the developed world, partly driven by new technologies, but also by growing concerns around energy security and climate change.

These great waves of change are rarely driven by big, incumbent companies. Indeed, General Electric is a rare beast, since it was a major listed company in 1900 and still survives and thrives today. Most of the other companies that proudly headed the most successful business lists at the dawn of the twentieth century are long since gone. Instead, the people who drive the processes of change that periodically reshape the American mindset and economy are the scientists, technologists and entrepreneurs who have created companies like Intel, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Google.

Like the industrial giants of a previous age – people like John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford – some of the New Economy pioneers have become billionaires. More importantly, they have started to bring their new thinking about technology, value and business models to bear on new areas of enterprise as they begin to invest in the work of social and environmental entrepreneurs. The co-founder of eBay, Jeff Skoll, is one of these people, and he was very much in evidence in March at the fifth Skoll World Forum on social entrepreneurship, held at the Saïd Business School in Oxford.

At one point, Skoll introduced former US vice-president Al Gore by recalling the foreword Gore had written in 1992 for a new edition of Rachel Carson’s paradigm-shifting book Silent Spring, published three decades earlier in 1962. At the time, Skoll noted, Carson was described as “hysterical” by the chemical industry and some of the scientific community. In very much the same way, many of the social and environmental entrepreneurs assembled in Oxford have been described as “crazy,” even by their family and friends, because they propose solutions to problems that most people see as insoluble.

These are the extraordinary people who we spotlight in our new book, The Power of Unreasonable People. With my co-author Pamela Hartigan, I believe that the focus is shifting from corporate citizenship strategies to a wider set of solutions that will require close partnerships between leading entrepreneurs, mainstream business and financial institutions, government agencies and the wider (and increasingly powerful) citizen sector.

During the forum, SustainAbility led two sessions focussing on how social and environmental entrepreneurs can build successful partnerships with major companies. These sessions were developed in collaboration with the Skoll Foundation, the International Business Leaders Forum (IBLF) and IDEO, the international design company. The sessions were so successful that there were queues to get in, with even some leading entrepreneurs unable to gain entry.

There were queues too for the session with former US president Jimmy Carter and the closing session with Al Gore. Though there was a strong sense, as Skoll Foundation president Sally Osberg put it, that there are no “silver bullets,” there was also an extraordinary degree of optimism about the potential to bring the world of the best social entrepreneurs to scale.

At the time of the insecticide abuses, which Rachel Carson spotlighted, and of the Santa Barbara oil spill, environmentalists and most other activists were anti-business, anti-profit and, fundamentally, anti-market. It is striking how the mood has shifted in recent decades. As one speaker put it, markets are “the best listening devices” we have for understanding people’s needs. Many of the world’s biggest social, economic and environmental challenges exist precisely because there are market failures: areas where the economy is both deaf and blind.

The third year of our SustainAbility’s Skoll Foundation-funded work on entrepreneurial solutions will switch from the social entrepreneurs (covered in our 2007 survey, Growing Opportunity) and their counterparts inside companies (who we spotlight in a new report called The Social Intrapreneur) to the potential future markets for the sort of solutions that an increasingly populous and carbon-constrained world will demand.

John Elkington is a founding partner of Volans Ventures (www.volans.com) and founder & director at SustainAbility (www.sustainability.com). He is also co-author of The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets That Change the World (Harvard Business Press, 2008).

Homepage photo by thinkpanama