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Reviving the valley

Rina Saeed Khan — Tue, 15 May 2012 15:22:00 +0000

Tourism offers an opportunity to rebuild the local economy of Pakistan’s Swat Valley, ravaged by conflicts and floods. But can it also restore its rivers and forests? Rina Saeed Khan reports.

For years, Pakistan’s former princely state of Swat, famous for its fruit orchards, snow-clad mountains, Buddhist stupas and trout-filled rivers, was a popular tourist destination. Its hotels were clean and its people well educated, at least in the main towns. Then the Taliban came. First, they shut down the hotels. Then they started destroying them, along with the schools.

“They blew up the famous Pakistan Tourism Development Corporations’ ski resort in Malam Jabba. They also started bombing the girls’ schools. It was a terrible time – anyone who had any means started leaving Swat,” said Ehsanullah Khan, a landowner and long-time resident of Matta, which was at the heart of Taliban activities at the time.

Like many others, Khan moved to the capital, Islamabad, when the army moved in to flush out the Taliban in May 2009. The army operation, though bloody, did not last very long. By July 2009, the internally displaced persons of the Swat Valley, once known idyllically as the “Emerald Valley”, began to return to their war-torn homes and villages. Khan went back to Matta and was dismayed to see the damage: “The crops were destroyed, the rice could not be sown, and the tourism industry was ruined. The local people were in a quandary.”

Before the arrival of the Taliban, tourism was the main revenue source for the local economy of Swat. Many tourists from Khyber Pukhtunkhwa would come here in the summers to escape the scorching heat of Peshawar and the plains. The hotel industry mushroomed as tourists poured in.

After the Pakistan military operation ended, NGOs and donor agencies stepped in to help the local people rebuild their livelihoods. Then, in 2010, massive floods hit the Swat Valley due to unprecedented monsoon rainfall in the region and damaged many more hotels located alongside the River Swat.

The flooding was made worse by extensive deforestation that started in the 1990s and worsened thanks to links between the Taliban and the timber mafia, which operates in the north of Pakistan. Under Taliban rule, many forests in Swat were cut down. Experts say that the lack of trees and thick vegetation to slow down the water flow intensified the flooding of 2010 took on greater intensity. “If you don’t stop the water it will go at a greater speed,” pointed out Shafqat Kakakhel, former deputy director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). “Deforestation is a big problem in Pakistan.”

WWF-Pakistan estimates forest cover in the country is now less than 3%. Wherever the Taliban took control (as it did in Swat and Waziristan) protected forests were cut down and exploited with no regards to the consequences. There is no information available on the extent of the deforestation, however, since most NGOs are focused on reviving the Swat Valley economy, and rebuilding hotels, schools and other infrastructure lost to war and floods.

But before the floods, tourism had brought environmental problems as well as economic benefits to the region. Many of the hotels along the River Swat had been dumping their waste into the river for years and NGOs protesting against the pollution. In 2006, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) funded a local NGO to conduct a pollution survey of the River Swat, which revealed problems beginning at the hill resort of Kalam and intensifying around Mingora (near the capital of Swat) and that the pollution in the river was well above acceptable limits.

Previously, the government’s environmental protection agency had tried unsuccessfully to construct a compost plant and septic tanks in Mingora to save the River Swat from pollution by sewerage and effluent of hotels.

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) estimates “pre-conflict annual contribution of the tourism industry to Swat's economy” at US$60 million (379 million yuan). It says there was “a sharp decline after the conflict in 2007, with total revenue losses of an estimated US$27 million with floods in July 2010 adding to the challenges.”

With USAID’s assistance, 239 hotels in Swat received US$2.7 million (17 million yuan) in cash grants and in-kind assistance such as construction material, furniture and other hotel supplies. They also received training in hotel management and other technical assistance. After years of inaction, hotels in Swat finally started re-opening their doors in 2011 to receive tourists for the summer season.

In July 2011, a nationwide media campaign was launched to help attract tourists to Swat. And, according to USAID, “the occupancy rate has climbed exponentially for these hotels, and US$668,390 in sales revenue has been recorded for the 2011 season, which is a substantial increase over last year.”

The agency claims the revival of tourism has helped initiate the overall recovery of Swat’s economy. Ameer Noshad, the owner of two hotels in Swat agrees: both of his hotels are once again catering to tourists. “Things are finally looking up for me and for hundreds of other hoteliers in Swat,” he pointed out.

But for Khan, there are still challenges. While agreeing that Swat is now safe for tourism, he said it is still difficult for visitors to venture into the more picturesque mountain areas of Kalam, Bahrain and Madyan due to army check posts and flood-damaged roads. These areas are known for their pine forests, alpine meadows and clear lakes; and are ideal for trekking and hiking.

He continued: “There are no Taliban left in the area and the people of Swat want to recover from the terror they faced. But I think that more than building hotels, they should fix the roads.

“We desperately need better roads. Once the tourists start coming, the local people will start building the hotels themselves. What the government and NGOs should do is to make sure that there is proper drainage and waste management for all these new hotels and that the river is not polluted like before and that the remaining forests are protected.”

Khan's foreign friends are keen to visit Swat again, he said. As the old saying goes, “if you build it, they will come.”

Rina Saeed Khan is a freelance environmental journalist based in Lahore.

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A yam between two rocks

Navin Singh Khadka — Tue, 15 May 2012 07:00:00 +0000

Beijing and New Delhi are competing for influence in Nepal. Navin Khadka asks how this rivalry will shape the country’s hydropower policies.

Editor’s note: in February, Nepal signed a US$1.6 billion agreement with China to develop the 760-megawatt West Seti hydropower project within its borders. This marked a major push by China into Nepal’s water and power sector, which has long been dominated by India. It came as several other major dam projects, mainly developed with Indian investment, have stalled for various reasons, including protests by a faction of Nepal's ruling Maoists against the awarding of deals to foreign companies. Nepal is sometimes called the "yam between two rocks” due to its position between India and China. Its hydropower sector is living up to the name.

It has become something of a merry-go-round. A Nepali lawmaker in a parliamentary subcommittee probing the West Seti hydro project deal reportedly accused energy ministry officials of behaving like Chinese agents.

Meanwhile, a faction of Nepal’s Maoists, the ruling party, opposing the initial agreement signed with Indian companies to develop Upper Karnali and Arun III hydropower projects, called the deal pro-India and anti-national.

If those were sweeping swipes and extreme judgements, consider this softer approach: no sooner had Nepal’s energy ministry signed the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on West Seti with the China Three Gorges International Corporation (CTGIC), than hopeful Indian hydropower developers contacted ministry officials, according to senior sources.

“They told us we were so quick to sign the MOU with the Chinese company while the projects they wanted to develop have remained in limbo,” one source told me. “They said they were happy to see the fast progress in case of West Seti and hoped that same would happen to the projects they have applied for.”

Indeed, it has been four years since the Nepali government signed MOUs with Indian companies GMR Energy and Sutlaj Jalvidyut Nigam to develop Upper Karnali and Arun III respectively. These projects have not moved forward since.

While it was barely a year ago that CTGIC came in contact with the Nepali government, the two have already signed the initial agreement. Power generated by the West Seti project will be entirely for Nepal, whereas Upper Karnali and Arun III, as agreed in the MOUs, will generate electricity mainly for the Indian market.

Who could understand that distinction better than the power-starved Nepali population? Perhaps that was why the Indian developers too “have agreed to be flexible to make more electricity available to Nepali consumers,” according to a senior politician involved in informal discussions with the Indian companies.

If that is how the Indians have begun to lobby, particularly in the wake of the deal signed with the CTGIC, what will the Maoist-led government do now? “We will be guided by the national policy of equidistance with both our neighbours,” energy minister Post Bahadur Bogati said in an interview for a report I did for the BBC Nepali service. “That policy will be followed in the area of hydropower development as well.”

Even if the Maoists tried seriously to pursue that policy, will it work? Especially, when observers believe Beijing and New Delhi have intensified competition to secure increased influence in Nepal?

Chinese companies have slowly but surely secured several development projects, including hydropower schemes. While some of them may have been completed in a satisfactory manner, many have seen costs spiral or severe and painful delays — the mirage of the Melamchi drinking water project is a striking example.

Even the CTGIC that built the almost 20,000-megawatt Three Gorges Dam has had financial troubles. China’s National Audit Office has uncovered 31 financial issues related to accounting, financial management, investment, bidding and corporate management, according to the Chinese state-run Xinhua news agency.

It is true that most Chinese contractors with projects in Nepal are private companies from the northern neighbour. But the latest contract signed, the 750-megawatt West Seti hydro-electric project, was witnessed by Chinese ambassador Yang Houlan himself. This happened in the same Nepal where, back in 1954, ministers agreed during a meeting with India that “...in matters relating to the relation of Nepal with Tibet and China, consultations will take place with the government of India.”

A lot of water has flown down Nepali rivers since then. Meanwhile, India has been able to secure a series of water-resource treaties that critics say do not much favour Nepal. And now, when Nepali bureaucrats talk of so many yet-to-be-done surveys before deciding whether or not to go for the Kosi high dam – that will control floods in India’s Bihar state – Indian state politicians have no doubt that the structure will be built.

Next, keen observers say, will be the newly elected chief minister of India’s Uttar Pradesh state, Akhilesh Yadav, who could start pressing for the Pancheshwar multipurpose project. Apart from dealing with the bordering Indian state governments, an unstable and disunited Nepal will also have to be receptive to New Delhi’s bigger agenda; like the mammoth river linking project involving more than 30 rivers.

So, will the tug of war between the two Asian giants shape Nepal’s water resources and hydropower policies? During his recent whistle-stop visit to Nepal, Chinese premier Wen Jiabao said Beijing wanted to see Nepal-India relations become stronger. A few days later, his Indian counterpart Manmohan Singh reportedly said India was happy to see Nepal’s good relations with China.

If Singh and Wen really meant what they said about Nepal garnering good relations with both, hydropower development would be an area to reflect that. Movement here would indeed indicate a change in the way Beijing and Delhi regard each other when it comes to Nepal.

Navin Singh Khadka is a BBC journalist based in London

This article was first published in the Kathmandu Post. It is reproduced here with permission

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China’s stunted children

Yuan Ying, Wang Jingyi — Tue, 15 May 2012 06:46:00 +0000

Despite the unprecedented economic boom, millions of impoverished kids are suffering the irreversible effects of malnutrition. Yuan Ying and Wang Jingyi report from Qinghai province.

Ledu county in western China lies 80 kilometres from Xining, the capital of Qinghai province. A yellow-hued river divides the territory and its 300,000 residents into two halves: Nanshan and Beishan. Three-year-old Rong Tongxi lives with his grandparents in Nanshan, in a typical village of the impoverished north-west called Shangzhangfang.

Playing among a group of children, Rong appears markedly smaller than his peers, an observation borne out by his measurements: 84 centimetres in height and 9.4 kilograms in weight. Chen Chunming, nutrition expert and senior advisor to Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CCDC), winced when she saw these figures. World Health Organisation standards say healthy three-year-olds should be between 91.1 centimetres and 98.7 centimetres tall. Rong is seven centimetres shorter than even the minimum.

Rong’s grandparents say he eats “normally”, but Chen believes he is suffering moderate stunting, a reduced growth rate brought on by malnutrition in early childhood. Its effects are largely irreversible, and can lead to premature death. At least 10 million pre-school children in China have stunted growth, according to a report from CCDC. It’s the second highest population in the world, behind only India. And the incidence of stunting in infants aged six to 11 months is rising.

Rong’s case is no exception in this corner of China, where flour and potatoes are the staple foods. An Jun, head of the township clinic, said annual check-ups indicate at least 15% of children here suffer light or moderate stunting. It’s a problem shared by many other parts of the country too. A CCDC survey in 2010 suggested 9.9% of children under the age of five have stunted growth. In 2006, children’s charity UNICEF said China had at least 12.7 million stunted children.

But child health experts argue the problem has been largely ignored, both within China and worldwide. “In some areas, stunting is very common, so people mistake it for a genetic and unavoidable disease,” said Gillian Mellsop, UNICEF’s China representative.

Like so many other children, Rong’s fate appears sealed. But fortune has looked differently on children across the river in Beishan. In August 2009, nine villages and towns in this half of Ledu county were selected for an infant development programme, run by the China Development Research Foundation and UNICEF. Protein and iron supplements were handed out to boost the diet of children between six months and two years old. Pregnant women were also given nutrition pills.

Chen Chunming believes this kind of nutritional boost can help to solve the problems of stunting and anaemia caused by childhood malnutrition. The 1,000 days between conception and a child’s second birthday are key, she said.

The project in Beishan is still running, and data collected indicates it has succeeded in reducing malnutrition. In the village of Gonghe, we met boys the same age as Rong Tongxi who had received supplements before the age of two. At 101 centimetres tall and 16.4 kilograms in weight, the difference in their stature was clear.

A follow-up study carried out one year into the project found stunting rates among 12 to 14-month-old children had fallen from 10% to 4.6% in the county, while anaemia rates among children between six and eight-months-old at the start of the programme had fallen by 38.6%.

In fact, child nutrition in China more widely has seen improvements since the economic boom began and the government introduced pro-rural policies. But some argue that optimism has led to complacency – and that fragile improvements are, in places, going into reverse. UNICEF nutritionist Chang Suying pointed out that non-economic factors are also at work, and that child nutrition is very sensitive to slowing economic growth.

CDCC data shows that, since 2005, the rate at which childhood malnutrition is falling has slowed. And, in 2010, as the impacts of the global economic crisis fed through to China, child malnutrition rates even increased in impoverished areas.

While the rate of stunting in children over one year old in China’s poor villages remained static between 2008 and 2009, in 2010 it rebounded to 2005 levels. Stunting in infants aged between six and 11 months doubled between 2008 and 2009, from 6.7% to 12.5%, and remained at 12.1% in 2010.

Rates of anaemia, an important indicator of childhood malnutrition, have also remained stubbornly high. Despite the supplements, anaemia in Ledu county is still at 46.4%. In 2010, the rate of anaemia in children under five nationwide was 12.6%. In children under three in rural areas, the figure was 19.2%. And for under-threes in impoverished rural areas, it was 23.3%.

“Anaemia isn’t just a rural problem – it exists in major cities and coastal areas like Shanghai and Guangdong,” explained Liu Bei, a project officer in Ledu. “The 2010 survey found anaemia rates of 20% in babies and infants in these places, and up to 70% in some impoverished south-western counties.” Like stunting, anaemia has long-lasting and largely irreversible impacts on a child’s development.

Prompted by the achievements in Ledu, at the end of 2011 the Qinghai government provided 10 million yuan (US$1.6 million) to expand the provision of supplements to the whole province. It is the first government-funded project of its kind to cover such a large area, said Chang Suying.

But nationwide, only 130,000 children are receiving these supplements. Chen and other child nutritionists say they are anxiously awaiting the day when more children benefit, especially those in poor villages.

On April 8 this year, it emerged that the Ministry of Health is planning a “nutrition intervention project” for preschool children in impoverished regions of the Luliang mountains, in north China’s Shanxi province. A scheme to provide children aged between six months and six years with free supplements may also be trialled here.

Government involvement offers a ray of hope. But Chen Chunming, who is 87 and has worked on child nutrition for much of her life, believes current efforts are nowhere near adequate. “The problem is how to get nutritious food into the mouths of the children who need it – how to create sustainable distribution mechanisms,” Chen said. “Relying on the Ministry of Health alone isn’t enough”. She may have a point: in the past, funds provided to families to improve nutrition for school-age children ended up being used for other purposes by their parents.

How to make the supply sustainable, how to make it free, how to scale it up – these are questions that must be answered, said Chen, if China is to solve childhood malnutrition.

This article was first published in Southern Weekend, where Yuan Ying is a reporter and Wang Jingyi an intern.

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Keeping an eye on China’s bankers

Wang Haotong — Mon, 14 May 2012 06:36:00 +0000

The financial industry remains secretive about the loans it makes, but tireless campaigning by green groups offers hope for change. Wang Haotong reports on the latest civil-society assessment of Chinese banks.

Last August, a major pollution story broke in China: 5,000 tonnes of toxic chromium tailings had been dumped near a Yunnan reservoir, contaminating water supplies and killing livestock. Worse revelations were to come. The company behind the incident, Luliang Chemicals, had been illegally discarding chromium slag by south China’s Nanpan River for more than a decade – 280,000 tonnes of it in total.

China’s environmental activists had questions, and not just about the local governance and company management that had allowed such devastating pollution to go unchecked for so long. Campaigners, led by Yunnan-based NGO Green Watershed, also wanted the government to publish details of the financial institutions that had provided financial backing to Luliang. They wanted to know which banks had lent the company money and details of the regulatory response to the disaster.

Green Watershed put these questions in a freedom of information request and filed it with the Kunming branch of the People’s Bank of China, the provincial banking regulator and the provincial environmental authorities. It also organised an open letter, signed by 24 Chinese NGOs, asking China’s 16 listed banks to disclose whether or not they had made loans to the company and two connected firms. This was the first time such a request had been made in response to a major pollution incident in China.

The freedom of information request was refused: by the People’s Bank of China due to “commercial secrecy”; by the environmental authorities due to “scope of government function”; and by the banking regulators on grounds of “information technology limitations”. Only two banks, Pudong Development Bank and Industrial Bank, responded to the open letter, each stating that it had no lending relationship with Luliang Chemicals. The other 14 remained silent.

Unlike financial institutions in most of the world’s leading economies, China’s banks are still able to keep a closed lid on the ecological and social impacts of their lending decisions, as the Luliang case makes abundantly clear. But civil society activism in this sector offers room for hope. And there are signs that NGOs may be starting, slowly, to prize open that lid.

The latest environmental rankings of the country’s listed banks, published last month by Green Watershed and partners, is a case in point. The existence of these rankings points to growing levels of public supervision over China’s financial sector, and is raising hopes for more systemic financial regulation from both industry and government.

Green Watershed was the first of China’s NGOs to start advocating for social responsibility and green lending in the banking sector, back in 2002. The years since have seen some progress. In 2007, the State Environmental Protection Agency (now the Ministry of Environmental Protection) together with the People’s Bank of China and the China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC) issued a document on limiting credit to polluting industries, considered the launch-pad for China’s green credit policy. Following this, CBRC and the People’s Bank of China released a string of guidance documents, in a bid to make loans to energy efficient and low-emissions industries an important factor in the rating of banking institutions.

Though seen as a bold move, the green credit scheme has faltered in implementation. Transparency on lending decisions remains weak and environmental performance a long way from global standards. In this context, NGOs have continued to push for improvements: in 2008 Green Watershed launched a discrete project on “Green Credit Advocacy”, and since 2009 it has carried out an annual assessment of banking performance.

At the end of April this year, Green Watershed published the Environmental Record of Chinese Banks (2011), the third edition of the annual study which tracks and evaluates the environmental performance of China’s listed financial institutions, compiled in partnership with seven other Chinese NGOs. (Rather confusingly, though the report was published this year, it is labelled 2011 and uses data from 2010.)

The 16 banks investigated are: Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), Bank of China, China Construction Bank, Agricultural Bank of China, Bank of Communications, China CITIC Bank, China Minsheng Bank, China Merchants’ Bank, Industrial Bank, Shanghai Pudong Development Bank, China Everbright Bank, Bank of Beijing, Huaxia Bank, Shenzhen Development Bank, Bank of Nanjing and Bank of Ningbo.

The report drew on four sources of information. First, the authors used the banks’ own publications, such as corporate social responsibility reports, annual reports and corporate websites. Second, they looked at information on the websites of the banking regulators. And third, they analysed reports in Chinese or foreign media on the lending and investment activity of the banks, or their environmental performance. Lastly, a questionnaire was sent to each institution, though this proved a limited stream: only three institutions, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, Shenzhen Development Bank and the Industrial Bank, responded.

Green Watershed and its partners used the collected information to rank the banks based on 11 indices: environmental transparency; environmental policies; use of environmental measures; existence of a designated environmental department; loans to polluting or energy-hungry firms; environmentally friendly loans; reputation; adherence to international environmental norms; internal environmental performance; peer and client advocacy; and overseas impact.

Overall, the environmental transparency of the banks was deemed to have improved across the board since last year’s report. The best performers were: Industrial Bank, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, Shanghai Pudong Development Bank, China Merchants’ Bank and Shenzhen Development Bank. Agricultural Bank of China, Beijing Bank, Nanjing Bank, Ningbo Bank and Everbright Bank, brought up the rear.

The positions of ICBC, CITIC, Industrial Bank, Shanghai Pudong Development Bank, Huaxia Bank and Shenzhen Development Bank had improved since the previous rankings. But Construction Bank of China, Bank of Communications, China Merchant’s Bank, Bank of Beijing, Bank of Nanjing and Bank of Ningbo had all fallen. The Bank of China and China Minsheng Bank staying in the same positions as last year, while Agricultural Bank of China and Everbright Bank were new additions to the list.

Whether or not banks subscribe to international environmental norms is an important marker of their performance in this area. But the number of Chinese financial institutions adopting global green-lending standards has stayed stubbornly low. Industrial Bank has outstripped its peers here, having signed up to the Equator Principles – a voluntary set of standards for assessing social and environmental risk in project financing – as well as the United Nations Environment Programme’s Finance Initiative (UNEP FI) and the Carbon Disclosure Project, a scheme that tracks the carbon emissions and climate actions of the world’s biggest firms.

China Merchant’s Bank has also joined UNEP FI, while ICBC is a member of the Carbon Disclosure Project. China Construction Bank, Minsheng Bank and CITIC have made preparations to join the list of signatories to the Equator Principles, but are yet to actually do so. There is no news of any other Chinese bank preparing to adopt any international standards.

Green Watershed’s annual reporting project is the only scheme in China to comprehensively investigate and rank the environmental performance of the country’s banks. That it is being produced by people outside the financial sector is telling. And it should spur China’s financiers to take the reins and get their houses in order.

In 1974, the world’s first environmental and social full services bank, GLS Bank, was founded in Germany, set up specifically to provide preferential loans to the ecological, social and cultural projects that normal banks often weren’t interested in. In the decades since, Germany has developed a mature set of green lending policies and mechanisms and the Equator Principles have been adopted throughout its banking sector. The government is also actively involved in developing green-credit products.

In the United States, commercial banks have clear social obligations enshrined in law, including towards the environment. And there has been a shift from shareholder-value orientated corporate structures towards stakeholder theory, which acknowledges the need to consider the interests of different participants, such as customers, staff and society. Banks in the United Kingdom, Japan and Canada generally apply the Equator Principles and operate green-lending policies.

In China too, there are stirrings of change, as the financial system itself responds to expressions of public oversight. On February 24 this year, CBRC published guidelines on green lending, providing a regulatory framework that has been warmly welcomed by environmental campaigners. Could a new order for Chinese finance be on its way at last?

Wang Haotong is a journalist based in Beijing.

This article is published as part of our Green Growth project, a collaboration between chinadialogue and the Energy Foundation.

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Consumer power for China?

Meng Si, Xu Nan — Fri, 11 May 2012 16:44:00 +0000

Partial victories in the campaign to clean up Apple highlight civil society’s potential to constrain the worst polluters. Meng Si and Xu Nan report.

A vigorous campaign to clean up pollution in electronics giant Apple’s supply chain, waged through 2011, ended up as one of the year’s hottest topics of public debate in China. With good reason: a series of reports published by a coalition of domestic green groups exposed serious violations at some of the company’s contractors and seized the attention of the global media. (See chinadialogue’s latest report on pollution in Apple’s supply chain, “Living with Foxconn”, for a detailed account of the friction between a factory and local community in Shanxi province.)

More profoundly, the campaign has signalled the emergence of an NGO-led consumer movement for China, in which civil society activists are helping the public to exercise oversight over the brands that produce their everyday products.

In January, Apple published its 2012 progress report on supplier responsibility. It’s an annual update, but this year there was something new: details of a set of special environmental audits that had been carried out at 14 of its suppliers. A member of Apple’s supply-chain responsibility team confirmed that these were prompted by questions from Chinese environmental groups, led by Beijing-based activist Ma Jun and his NGO the Institute of Public & Environmental Affairs (IPE).

Unlike Apple’s usual audits, these checks were carried out by third-party experts. More information was provided about the results, too: in contrast to last year’s report – which only included overall pass rates on six environmental measures (a total of 12 numbers) – the 2012 update provided a four-page summary of the specialised environmental audits, as well as more information than usual about the standard checks applied to the rest of the supply chain.

Air pollution was identified as the biggest problem, and in fact performance on this count was worse than the previous year. Only 68% of Apple’s suppliers were found to be complying with mandated standards, compared to 69% in 2011. Just 57% had air-pollution management systems in place, compared to 74% the previous year. Fifty-eight facilities were failing to monitor and control air emissions, while 77 lacked the procedures to do so.

Apple said that it is working with Chinese environmental groups to resolve these problems. And it has pledged to encourage its suppliers to publicise data on their environmental performance in the year ahead.

It sounds like major progress, and has been welcomed by environmental campaigners. Ma Jun said the “arrogance” Apple showed in the early days of the campaign, ignoring IPE’s approaches and hiding behind “commercial confidentiality”, has started to fade.

Interaction between the two sides has indeed stepped up, as two recent meetings show. In October last year, Ma visited San Francisco for what turned out to be a five-hour discussion with Apple executives. Apple made clear that it wished to maintain commercial confidentiality, while the environmental groups urged the corporation to press suppliers to make public statements about their environmental performance. “This way, they wouldn’t need to reveal their relationship with Apple and could protect confidentiality, but would allow a certain degree of public supervision of supply chain pollution,” said Ma.

Then, during the Chinese New Year holiday in January, Apple held a video conference with IPE and American campaign group the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), which has long supported the Chinese campaign. At this meeting, Apple agreed to experiment with NGO-monitored environmental audits of its suppliers, Ma said.

Despite this progress, the Chinese groups argue that Apple’s demands on suppliers are still too weak. According to the information provided in the progress report, the most common response to environmental breaches was to ask the factory in question to make changes. In only two cases where auditors discovered “core violations” – the most serious breaches of compliance such as using a facility built without an environmental impact assessment – did Apple suspended business with the supplier.

And, while the company has shown itself willing to be more open than in the past, data gaps remain: the latest supplier report provides details on environmental violations, but not the names of the violators. Meanwhile, Apple is yet to make good on its promise to get suppliers to engage with environmental groups, said Ma.

Clearly, the battle with Apple is not over quite yet. Nonetheless in a struggle with a powerful corporation, Chinese NGOs have scored significant successes. And they are making global brands nervous.

IPE is also seeing better responses from Chinese factories than in the past. Since November 2006, some 560 companies have approached the organisation, wanting to explain the steps they are taking to address pollution – 218 in the past year alone. The first companies to get in touch were mostly well-known brands, but now most of the approaches come from suppliers to larger firms. “These are the manufacturers and processors,” said Ma. “They are the actual polluters.”

Corporate efforts to change the sweatshop image of Chinese factories aren’t new, but – the Apple example notwithstanding – have until recently come mostly from international brands, sensitive to global consumer preferences and keen to avoid legal battles and reputational risks. Moreover, such efforts have moved beyond the PR question – how best to present a company to the world – and into more substantive areas of verification and supply-chain management.

SGS, one of the world’s largest inspection, verification, testing and certification firms, started working in China 20 years ago. Xue Jian, head of the company’s environmental division, told chinadialogue his department has seen business double every year since it was founded in 2005. But most of its customers are foreign-owned: firms headquartered outside of China tend to take supply-chain management more seriously, he said. The most farsighted firms have set standards that are stricter than local laws require.

These firms are coming from a different context to China’s domestic outfits – that is to say, the countries where they are headquartered have an established culture of consumer supervision. For decades, environmental, labour and human rights campaigners have fostered a western consumer movement focused on “ethical consumption”: a preference for products that inflict no environmental or social harm, or at least less than other products on the market. Those campaigners lobby for legislation, press consumers to make ethical decisions and harness consumer power as a tool for holding corporations to account.

The shape of that movement today owes much to forces that took hold in 1960s and 1970s America. As wages rose, and the quantity of goods on offer grew, concerted and coherent consumer campaigning emerged, focused not just on consumer safety but also the wider ecological and social impacts of manufacturing and consumption. Outspoken individuals helped to catalyse a growing public consciousness: Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring – which highlighted the impact of pesticides on birdlife – and Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed (1965), an attack on the safety record of the automobile industry, spurred public debate about the potential harm of everyday products.

The movement’s growing clout was reflected in an expanding list of consumer legislation – from the 1966 Fair Packaging and Labeling Act to the 1969 Child Protection and Toy Safety Act – and its growing remit in the ever greater number of activist causes. Nader’s NGO Public Citizen, founded in 1971, acted as an umbrella group for projects focused on issues from air pollution to corruption. In 2011, the organisation had 225,000 members.

Public oversight in North America and Europe has also been exercised through direct action against corporations perceived to be unethical. From the boycott against Nestle for promoting breast milk substitutes in developing countries, launched in 1977, to the protests over labour conditions in overseas factories that dogged Nike throughout the 1990s, consumers have repeatedly proved their credentials as a check on corporate power.

But in China, consumer oversight has remained weak. The China Consumers’ Association (CCA) was founded in 1984 and has since established a Consumer Rights Day and a consumer hotline. But for 30 years, public participation has been limited to one-off cases, and the CCA remains very much an official body.

Now, China’s NGOs are changing the state of play, wielding pressure over polluters and providing the public with crucial data on manufacturers. In 2006, IPE created a pioneering map of water pollution in China, using publicly available environmental data to illustrate the geographical spread of the country’s environmental violations. This device allowed the organisation to monitor corporate polluters and, in turn, the Chinese supply chains of international brands. Today, Ma Jun is frequently compared to Rachel Carson for his role stoking a new kind of consumer consciousness.

IPE has since linked up with dozens of other Chinese NGOs to run a series of green consumer campaigns, encouraging Chinese shoppers to make “green choices”. They have also published lists of companies causing supply-chain pollution in the clothing and IT sectors.

This is how China’s consumer movement is being shaped. It is NGO-led, builds on government environmental protection work, and uses the media to advocate green consumer choices – choices that could change the way powerful companies manage their supply chains. The response of Apple, one of the biggest and most secretive companies in the world, shows just how seriously we should take it.

Meng Si is a Beijing-based freelance journalist, who formerly worked for chinadialogue.

Xu Nan is managing editor at chinadialogue’s Beijing office.

Homepage image by wZa HK

Living with Foxconn

Meng Si — Thu, 10 May 2012 09:50:00 +0000

Residents near the manufacturer’s plant in Taiyuan city are up in arms over a toxic stench. Meng Si went to meet the community that doesn’t much care for Apple’s gadgets.

Yang Xiuduan would love to have an iPhone – on one condition. “I’ll buy it just as soon as we chase Apple out of here,” he said, pointing at the Foxconn factory that stands 200 metres from his home.

Thirty-eight-year-old Yang, a mid-ranking employee at a state institution in Taiyuan, and other residents in Hengda Luzhou Apartments started to notice a strange smell shortly after moving into the new housing complex a little over a year ago. First, they blamed a sewer outside. Then, they wondered if it could be the furnishings in their newly decorated apartments. Finally, their eyes turned over the road to the factory that manufactures parts for Apple’s high-tech gadgets.

By the summer of last year, residents here were finding the stench unbearable and complaining of coughs, headaches and stomach problems. And they were pointing the finger squarely at the Foxconn factory.

Taiwanese-owned Foxconn is one of Apple’s key suppliers. The company shot to global fame in 2010 following a spate of worker suicides at its factory in Shenzhen, a wealthy manufacturing city in south China. And it has stayed in the news since, largely thanks to a high-profile campaign by Beijing-based green NGOs to get Apple to clean up pollution in its supply chain.

But while Foxconn’s Shenzhen plant has generated plenty of coverage in the global media, other parts of its operations have been under-reported. That is not for lack of tension: here in Taiyuan, a northern Chinese city best known not for manufacturing but coal-mining, a storm has been brewing between the electronics plant and local residents, who say the factory is blighting their lives.

It’s a story playing out all over China, as the industrial boom that started on the east coast spreads across the country. Break-neck expansion has brought jobs and opportunities, but it has also invaded the space between homes and factories, leaving people living side by side with manufacturers and their communities plagued by noxious gases. The supply chain behind Apple’s flashy gadgets offers a window into the complexities and costs of China’s manufacturing rise.

Five hundred kilometres from Yang Xiuduan’s home, environmental groups in Beijing have spent more than a year working to expose pollution violations by Apple’s suppliers. This coalition of NGOs, led by transparency campaigner Ma Jun, started monitoring Apple’s manufacturers in 2010 and went on to publish two reports revealing serious pollution violations, including in Taiyuan.

Although Apple does not directly manufacture any products itself, the green activists argued that the firm still has responsibility for the problems they uncovered. As a large and powerful client, the multinational corporation should be demanding better environmental performance from its suppliers, they said.

The Taiyuan residents hoped that the campaign against Apple would pressure both the factory and the government to act, breaking the deadlock and eradicating the stench once and for all. They were worried about their health and the homes they had channelled all their savings into.

These residents believe that Apple’s weak environmental regime has led to the chemical odours – which they say they can smell even with the windows closed – and already visible health problems. From breathing difficulties to stomach irritations, people living in this community suffer a range of illnesses that they suspect are linked to the factory’s activities, though as is so often the case in the field of environmental health they cannot confirm a causal relationship.

A protest T-shirt urging local residents to fight Foxconn's pollution.
Picture by Meng Si.

Standing in Yang’s apartment complex during my visit, I too caught whiffs of something strange – a smell close to paint fumes. It wasn’t too strong and it came and went with the wind. The residents described the smell in all sorts of ways to me: like sulphur, like burning and even a sickly sweet.

A Taiyuan Foxconn manager, speaking by phone, said that there is an odour problem at the plant and that Apple had come “two or three times to inspect the facility and audit its emissions data.” However, at the end of February, an Apple spokesperson told chinadialogue the audits had detected no pollution problem at the Taiyuan plant.

A zoning problem?

The problems suffered by the residents of Hengda Luzhou Apartments are linked to the way development here was originally planned. According to Shanxi’s environmental protection office, the housing complex is “200 metres from Foxconn Technology Industrial Zone”. At that distance, the odours are obvious in the eight buildings closest to the Foxconn factory when there is an easterly wind. They can also be detected in another eight buildings slightly further away.

Liu Xiang of China’s Centre for Legal Assistance to Pollution Victims (CLAPV) explained that Chinese law sets different size buffer zones for different types of factories, but that regulations have not yet been determined for certain categories. To know what should have been done in this instance, the residents would have to look at the recommendations made in the development’s environmental impact assessment – a document that has not been made available to the public – he said.

Liu Xiaowen, chief of the local environmental protection bureau (EPB), admitted that the distance between the residential area and the facility is inadequate, but said that his hands are tied. “The factory is already there. All we can do is to try our best to find a compromise. We have got duties both to the locals and to the 100,000 Foxconn employees.”

At full capacity, the Hengda Luzhou apartment complex can house 12,000 families, or around 30,000 residents, making it the largest in Shanxi province. Another housing development is under construction to the south of the factory.

The residents have made countess phone calls to environmental authorities at local, city, provincial and national levels, both polite and angry. On August 6, 2011, they stepped their protest up a gear: more than 100 residents blocked the road with their cars, attracting the attention of the provincial government. The locals, the authorities and Foxconn had a meeting, and the residents made four visits to the factory.

Their efforts weren’t entirely smooth – locals bearing a letter from the provincial petition office were prevented from entering the city petition office by the police, for example – but progress was made. The meeting opened up lines of communication between the residents and the factory, and from this point Foxconn began to upgrade the equipment at its plant.

The residents’ complaints have not stopped, however. Yang and others continue to publish information on Foxconn’s pollution online, discuss the problems on microblogs and complain to the environmental authorities. Offline, they organise petitions and factory visits, make phone calls to the local government and factory staff, and use their inside contacts to dig for information.

Chief among their demands is more information. The authorities have come to test the air four times, and the residents want to know precisely what they found out: what gases were present and were they above permitted levels? But they have only received vague answers.

A 2010 investigation into complaints about Foxconn, carried out by the provincial environmental protection bureau, concluded that the odours were coming from the coating workshop and from oil mist created by equipment in the machinery workshop. In 2011, the city-level environmental protection bureau expanded the list: the offensive smells, they said, were caused by fumes from the coating workshop, odours from the waste-water treatment equipment, dust from the recycling workshop and oil mist from the machinery workshop.

The most detailed publically available data can be found in a document from the Shanxi Party Committee’s Social Circumstances and Public Opinion Office: “Monitoring data indicates that levels of seven of the 50 non-methane hydrocarbons (NMHCs) that were tested for are too high.” When levels of NMHCs reach a certain level, they are directly harmful to human health, and under certain conditions can form a photochemical smog, endangering both the environment and people.

But which actual tests did the factory fail? What are the emissions made up of? What dangers do they pose? This is the information residents like Yang want to find out. Meanwhile, they have resorted to buying air purifiers – now stocked in two shops in their complex – and traditional Chinese medicinal remedies. Mr Wei, a resident who has given up his outdoor morning exercises because of the pollution, advises neighbours to take lily bulbs boiled in water as a detoxicant.

What are we breathing?

The failure of the residents to establish exactly what problems they face is not for lack of trying. Last year, Yang decided to apply to the provincial government to see the environmental impact assessment (EIA) for the construction of Foxconn’s factory, plus the past three years of environmental monitoring data.

When he arrived at the provincial environmental protection bureau to file his freedom of information request, a young civil servant told him he was in the wrong place. Yang followed directions to another floor, where he received an even less welcoming reception. Finally, he managed to lodge his application, but was later telephoned by the bureau: since Yang hadn’t explained why he wanted the information, he would have to reapply, they informed him. He filled in the forms again.

Twenty-four days later, Yang received a reply: full pollution monitoring data was not yet available. Once available, it would be released by the company itself. The EIA would not be made public. He could see the document approving the EIA, but would not be allowed to copy or photograph it.

Yang had been hoping to get evidence for a court case against Foxconn, but accepted this was “a dead end”. His experience is a common one. In May 2008, China introduced a set of regulations intended to enshrine in law the public right to data about polluting projects – the trial “measures on open environmental information”. But enforcement of this ground-breaking legislation has been challenging, and in the four years since it came into effect many people around the country have found their requests for data repeatedly rejected.

China’s advancing cities

Similarly, the continuing friction in Taiyuan is far from an isolated case. Across China, rapidly expanding cities are advancing into the countryside, bringing with them new and complicated dynamics.

At first, the villagers closest to the cities sell their land to developers facing saturated urban markets. Most of the young villagers move to the city to work, while those who stay behind sell their land or rent out their homes. Local governments are keen to attract factories to boost the local economy, while the companies themselves enjoy cheaper land prices than in the city, better infrastructure than in rural areas and preferential treatment from local government.

In Taiyuan, development has followed the route of the Dayun expressway, which links the city to surrounding rural areas. Along the road, villages and fields have one by one turned into mazes of apartment complexes.

Foxconn’s facility predates that process. The manufacturer built its facility here in 2005, and work started on the Hengda Luzhou Apartments two years later. Once the surrounding fields were replaced with apartment buildings, Foxconn’s days of peace were over. Who allowed the apartments to be built so close to the factory? As is so often the case in China, the answer is lost to history.

At the end of last year, the China Association for Science and Technology announced that local governments were behind 80% of all breaches of land law in the country. A National Development and Reform Commission official has warned that local government’s enthusiasm for development zones is leading to “scattered development, which neither farmland nor energy resources can support.”

Benefits too?

Not everyone is angry, however. For the Hengda Luzhou homeowners, Foxconn means pollution. But for the residents of Chengxi, a village to the north of the apartments and diagonally opposite the factory, it is a source of prosperity.

Mr He, a Chengxi shopkeeper, described how the village had got richer since Foxconn arrived. Locals have been able to sell land to property developers and almost every household here rents rooms to Foxconn employees.

Mrs Gao’s husband works at Foxconn. They rent a 30-square metre, two-room apartment on the third floor of a private dormitory. The building can accommodate seven families on each floor. When they first arrived in 2009, she said, the rent was 200 yuan per month. Now it is 450 yuan.

Many of the homes in the village have signs advertising rooms and there are plenty of restaurants, hotels, clinics and launderettes.

Nobody in Chengxi seemed to know much about the pollution nearby. Liu said “very few” villagers here had complained about the smells in the past. A woman from Hebei who sells dried foods said that there are strange odours in summer, but they aren’t necessarily caused by Foxconn: they could come from burning coal or the sewerage ditch at the front of the village.

The villagers of Chengxi may not care about the odours too much, but that doesn’t mean they suffer no impact. In fact, they have lived with the plant for longer than Hengda Luzhou’s residents, and Dr Li, a local physician who used to work in a hospital here, believes environmental health issues need attention.

Although there is no quantified data, Li said that the incidence of respiratory problems and congenital disorders among villagers is high. Between 2006 and 2011, the rate of cleft palates, cleft lips, hydrocephaly and spinal problems increased significantly, she said, estimating they may now account for 70% to 80% of all illnesses.

Benzene, an organic pollutant often used in the cleaning and coating of electronic components, is a carcinogen. High degrees of benzene exposure can cause reproductive abnormalities and leukaemia. Dr Li added that respiratory problems are often linked to harmful substances in the air.

According to a source with access to authoritative data, who wished to remain anonymous, between 2006 and the end of 2011, the rate of stillbirths, miscarriages, congential disorders and respiratory problems in the villages around the Foxconn factory – Xicheng, Nanheiyao, Xiaodian, Nanpan and Yangzhuang – was markedly higher than in the period from 2002 to 2006.

Official in the middle

Saddled with the unenviable task of balancing this host of competing priorities – health, growth, stability, jobs and living standards – is local EPB chief Liu Xiaowen, in a case symptomatic of the complex relationship between people and officialdom in boomtown China.

Almost everyone here has Liu’s mobile number – and he is feeling the pressure. The 57-year-old visits the factory whenever a complaint comes in, even if it’s at the crack of dawn. On December 31 last year he even invited Yang Xiuduan and several other residents to dinner (though he asked Yang not to bring anyone who had been abusive when lodging complaints). Making a rather unlikely New Year’s Eve party, Liu and his deputy sat down to eat with around a dozen residents’ representatives.

“No matter what, we’ve known each other for a year and they have helped our work,” Liu said of the residents. But he explained that it’s difficult for him to do anything about the smell: as the Foxconn facility was approved at provincial level, the local environmental protection bureau only has powers to monitor the problem.

He also believes that, as a local official, his duty is to keep his area stable. “We’ve got a staff of 10, and we’ve spent most of our time this year on Foxconn,” he said. “The public can talk in extreme terms – they don’t have any legal responsibilities. But we represent the government and it would be wrong for us to do the same.”

A more stable future?

Do the Foxconn factory’s upgrades – made in response to residents’ complaints – offer hope for more “stability”? The early signs are mixed. “Little” Yang, who lives on the tenth floor of a Hengda Luzhou block, has no faith in the new environmental equipment or monitoring systems. He and many other locals still insist the only answer is for Foxconn to leave.

Yang Xiuduan, meanwhile, believes that public campaigning has had an effect and that the problem is less severe now than in the past. But the residents are struggling to regain trust and a sense of security. Even with the new equipment, they say the smells still come.

And they have learned not to take soothing official words at face value. An article on the provincial government’s website on Taiyuan’s “modern circular economy” claims that emissions from the Foxconn facility are entirely controlled. In effect, it says, the factory produces no emissions at all, as all fumes go through a treatment process that renders them harmless. In 2006, Foxconn suddenly became a “Taiyuan Model Environmental Firm” and a “Shanxi Green Firm” and senior officials from the State Environmental Protection Agency (now the Ministry of Environmental Protection) visited and praised the plant on a number of occasions.

After months of constant complaining, Yang’s wife Jia Sumei has given up: “Let’s move in the summer. I don’t want to go through it all again.” But Yang is more confident: “Don’t worry, I believe things will get better,” he said.

Meng Si is a Beijing-based freelance journalist who formerly worked at chinadialogue.

Homepage image by Meng Si shows the gates to Taiyuan's Foxconn factory.

After Kyoto, a new economics?

Jeff Erikson — Wed, 09 May 2012 08:40:00 +0000

In the results of a survey out today, 800 sustainability experts from around the world have a clear message for governments: make greenhouse gases more expensive. Jeff Erikson explains.

At the end of this year, the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol will expire. That’s not because it has succeeded in tackling climate change – far from it. While the global treaty drawn up in 1997 has had many positive effects, getting carbon reductions down to a safe level has not been one of them.

The climate challenge looms larger than ever, and the governments of the world still have no clear plan to address it. Japan, Canada and Russia have refused to sign up to a second period of binding cuts, while the United States never ratified the global treaty. So what should be done as Kyoto part one breathes its final breaths? And what will it take to make real progress?

Earlier this year, SustainAbility and GlobeScan surveyed more than 800 sustainability experts and practitioners located in more than 70 countries, asking for their views on climate-change policy. We asked our respondents to rank the effectiveness of various mechanisms to address climate change. Notably, the tools garnering the most support – economic instruments, regulatory approaches and technology development – are those that will change the cost of emitting greenhouse-gas emissions and, consequently, change the economics of energy.

Fig 1. Most effective approaches in terms of likely ability to provide global solutions to climate change post-Kyoto. (Numbers are percentages of experts surveyed).

It seems that this group of experts recognises that better understanding of the impacts of global warming alone won’t change behaviours. The environmental community has been trying that for about two decades. Real, lasting and widespread transformation requires change to how carbon is priced – and that will occur most effectively through the use of economic instruments, regulatory approaches and technological progress.

Even corporate respondents, who unsurprisingly favour technological answers to climate change more than any other sector, also see comparative value in regulatory approaches and economic instruments. Among the latter, taxes on greenhouse-gas emissions are, by a wide margin, seen as the most likely to be effective in providing global solutions.

Fig 2. Rating of economic instruments in terms of likely effectiveness in reducing climate change after 2012, if implemented. (Numbers are percentages of experts surveyed).

Surprisingly, emissions-trading schemes are seen as the least effective economic instrument (this compared to its second place ranking in a similar 2006 survey). This result may be influenced by the evident shortcomings of the European Union’s Emissions Trading Scheme, which has so far resulted in neither the intended reductions in carbon-dioxide emissions, nor a stable and substantial price on carbon.

Europeans, however, tend still to have some faith in regulatory approaches and are less convinced by technology than respondents from other regions.

Fig 3. Most effective approaches in terms of likely ability to provide global solutions to climate change post-Kyoto, by region. (Numbers are percentages of experts surveyed).

But overall results show a strikingly low level of confidence that international agreements, such as a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, will result in adequate solutions. This is reflected in the relatively low expectations for the coming Rio +20 sustainable development conference in June, as well as the distinct lack of buzz around the annual UN-led climate-change conference in Durban last December.

So our experts are pretty clear on what must be done to address climate change in the post-Kyoto Protocol era: change the cost of greenhouse-gas emissions, change the economics of energy. Make it more expensive to emit more, and less expensive to emit less. That is what will really drive behaviour change, at the institutional and the individual level. We don’t need a complex scheme of capping and trading. Instead, governments should make use of taxes, tax credits and rebates, and support technology development.

Does this mean that companies and individuals should sit back and wait for governments to act? Certainly not. We know how great an influence business has in shaping public policy in many countries throughout the world. The voices opposing action on climate change are, at present, loud enough to stymie progress. What is required is for those companies who understand the implications of climate change – both to their business and to the broad economy – to make their voices more prominent.

It is not enough “not to oppose” policies and actions that move us toward a low-carbon economy. Policymakers need to know that business supports action on climate change because it is essential for long-term commercial success.

For the full results of our climate change survey, click here.

Jeff Erikson is senior vice president at SustainAbility

Homepage image by Onearth

Climate change in US classrooms

Jan McGirk — Tue, 08 May 2012 07:10:00 +0000

Ideological conflicts over global warming are heating up, drawing in teachers, scientists, politicians, religious groups, corporate lobbyists, judges and ordinary parents. They all want a voice in American children’s green education. Jan McGirk reports.

Ever since the menace of greenhouse gases and global warming was first touted widely by the mass media in 1988, ideological battles between climate contrarians and eco-activists have raged in the United States. Decades later, prominent climate scientists still find themselves vilified by Americans opposed to environmental regulations and fending off attacks about their research in newsrooms and courtrooms. The mutual contempt and distrust displayed in these highly publicised clashes over climate has trickled down and now interferes with rational discussion inside ordinary school classrooms.

When it comes to teaching climate change, the heat is on. Politically conservative parents across the country are upset about what children are taught inside America’s schools. Self-styled climate-change sceptics, who routinely challenge the scientific community’s consensus that emissions from burning fossil fuels have raised the average global temperature, now object to science lessons about these findings –unless they include counter-arguments from critics of the man-made warming consensus. (Only 3% of scientists disagree with the theory.)

Typically, sceptics within the Tea Party movement sneer at educators and label them alarmists or “warmists” who aim to “perpetrate a hoax” in order to scare students into embracing green activism. Facts often get lost or obscured when non-specialists scrutinise science lesson-plans and try to insert political balance. Denialists scorn any semantic shift as political correctness and, if the phrase “global warming” is replaced with “climate change”, many consider it a tacit admission that warming trends do not follow predictions. Teachers and climate sceptics both claim to be safeguarding impressionable students from ideological spin.

Attempts to dissuade or intimidate science teachers from teaching climate change in US high school and elementary classrooms are not unusual. A recent online survey by the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) found that 82% of elementary and high school science teachers have encountered climate scepticism from students, and 54% have experienced hostile reactions from parents after discussing global warming in class. Around 36% say they attempt to teach “both sides” of the issue.

Wherever extracting petroleum is big business, these political concerns seem to gain more traction and the pressure on local schools intensifies. State legislators in Louisiana, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas and Utah already have introduced bills to prevent “propaganda” from being taught in science classrooms and to mandate the inclusion of “theoretical alternatives” to human-caused climate change.

Much of the language in this new legislation comes from model bills concocted by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a corporate-funded advocacy group opposed to big government and environmental regulations. Such efforts are also championed by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), which advocates free-market perspectives on government policy. Matt Patterson, a CEI fellow, describes climate change as a “mass delusion”. He warned: “There is a danger that man will be convinced by these climate cultists to turn his back on the very political, economic and scientific institutions that made him so powerful, so wealthy, so healthy.”

In May 2011, a local school-board member in southern California, who was bothered by the “liberal dogma” of a proposed environmental science course, insisted that “multiple perspectives” be taught at Los Alamitos High School – even though all these views are not backed up by scientific evidence. “I believe my role on the board is to represent the conservative voice of the community and I’m not a big fan of global warming,” the board member, Jeffrey Barke, explained. “The teachers wanted [the class], and we want a review of how they are teaching it.”

The course in question, advanced-placement environmental science, followed California’s approved curriculum and was already offered at numerous other high schools without any objections. When the new policy of special oversight for controversial subjects was rescinded after just four months, most teachers felt relieved. Kathryn Currie, the science department chair at Los Alamitos High School, said in an email: “The school board has left us alone to teach science and that’s exactly what we should be doing.”

While academic freedom is valued in most American university research halls, the concept does not necessarily extend to public-school classrooms in the United States, where elected local school boards hold sway and teachers can’t count on tenure, or job security. There is no federally approved national curriculum. Course work in climate change is expected to be included in these new guidelines.

In Washington, congressman Henry Waxman, the leading Democrat on the House of Representatives’ energy and commerce committee, urged the US energy secretary, Steven Chu, to launch a national campaign for climate-change education. Waxman cited concerns that the public’s grasp of climate change is undermined by “powerful vested interests in the oil and coal industries successfully fanning disbelief”.

Educators despair when their science lessons are challenged by politicians who may also receive election-campaign donations from wealthy energy corporations. Using climate change as a wedge issue has become a favorite tactic (especially in this election year) of populist candidates, such as the Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum. Before dropping out of the White House race on April 10, Santorum got wild applause for this soundbite: “I refer to global warming not as climate science, but political science!” Santorum complained about “radical environmentalists [who] have it upside down… we’re not here to serve the earth.” He belittled his Republican party rivals because they “bought into the science of man-made global warming, and they bought into the remedy, both of which are bogus”.

In such a politically charged atmosphere, most public schoolteachers and students interviewed by chinadialogue were reluctant to speak on the record about climate-change lessons in their own classrooms. A Michigan-based teacher recounted how parents had complained about biased views in her junior-high class: “According to them, ‘global warming’ isn’t caused by people. It is manufactured by the liberal media.”

The press, by exaggerating or simplifying scientific trends and discoveries, often contributes to public confusion about climate change. Anomalies get trumpeted as theory-refuting data, and the scientific method itself is called into question. “Global warming is so hyped – just like that Y2K [year 2000 “millennium bug”] computer freak-out or swine flu. I don’t believe in it,” commented one jaded teenager from Arizona.

Patrick Ray, a life-sciences teacher in Monterey, California, pointed out that in discussions about global warming, “most of my students tend to echo their parents’ attitudes, if they care at all. The majority are sceptical and very susceptible to false information on the internet.” Even though the standard textbook is way above most of his students’ reading ability, Ray explains the scientific vocabulary and spurns “those dumbed-down hand-outs” many teachers rely on to supplement the text. Usually downloaded from specialised websites, these colorful educational materials range from a series of video lessons to carbon-footprint competitions.

Most US handouts on scientific topics are produced by government agencies, Discovery Channel, non-profit educational organisations such as McREL or private curriculum consultants. Climate-change lesson packets tend to stress the “need to shut down energy production and scientific dissent”, according to James Taylor of the Heartland Institute, a high-profile conservative think tank. E-mails recently obtained by subterfuge and leaked by the Pacific Institute’s Peter Gleick disclosed that Heartland hired a coal-industry consultant last year to develop a set of children’s educational materials that would stress disputes about climate change and carbon pollution.

But some religious groups opposed to environmentalism get their message out this way, too. “Resisting the Green Dragon”, a study series produced by the Cornwall Alliance, is particularly popular with home-schoolers (parents or tutors who educate children outside a formal school setting), who view it as an antidote to An Inconvenient Truth, former US vice-president Al Gore’s award-winning 2006 documentary.

Parents who want to shield their children from scientific ideas that might conflict with their religious beliefs often opt out of the US public school system, which provides sex education and instruction about evolution. (Although families need not register with the authorities in some states, the National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI) estimates that roughly two million, or 4%, of American children currently are home-schooled.)

However, churchgoers are not unified in opposition to the notion of climate change. Earlier this year, pastor Rick Warren, who led the prayer at president Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration, persuaded 300 leaders from evangelical Christian churches to lend their support to conservation efforts.

“Many of us have required considerable convincing before becoming persuaded that climate change is a real problem and that it ought to matter to us as Christians … it is a spiritual issue that we need to take better care of the earth. And whether global warming is as big a deal or not, or we’re the cause of it or not, we just need to take better care of the planet,” asserts Warren, pastor of Saddleback Church, one of the country’s most influential mega-churches.

Enter the National Center for Science Education (NCSE). This California-based watchdog group has promoted the teaching of evolution in public science classrooms for 21 years, while resisting demands to include creationism (the belief that the universe and living organisms originated from specific acts of divine creation) or “intelligent design” (an offshoot of the “creation science” movement) in biology classes.

The non-partisan and not-for-profit NCSE has just begun to monitor climate-change education, too. It found that science teachers often are labeled arrogant, smug or un-American if they cast doubt on biblical scripture.

Mark McCaffrey, NCSE’s project director, told chinadialogue: “A priority should be that the science being taught is current. But the topic of climate change is becoming polarised and politicised. The gloom and doom aspect really backfires.”

Studying emissions and rising temperatures frequently leads students to contemplate a dire future. The result is the antithesis of American can-do optimism. In fact, a new pop psychology term, ecophobia, describes a feeling of powerlessness to prevent Earth’s catastrophic end.

“Ecophobia gets blamed on environmental education and some parents complain about depression in very young kids,” McCaffrey continued. “If science is well taught, the focus is on solutions. But the science of environment is complicated –both interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary, with complex math projections. It’s not an integral part of the science curriculum, so it tends to fall through the cracks. Our concern is that so few students take classes that deal with climate change. It’s under the radar.”

A retired middle-school teacher, Ralph Cross, confessed: “In recent years I felt so much pressure to boost my students’ performance on California’s standard math tests that I sometimes gave short shrift to environmental topics. We made do with field trips to the ocean or after-school assemblies.”

“Teachers often feel under pressure to ‘teach to the test’,” observed Rebecca Anderson, a staff scientist for the Alliance for Climate Education (ACE), which in three years has reached over a million teenagers through after-school programmes. ACE was founded by a Californian, Mike Haas, after he launched Orion Energy, a wind-power company.

“Teachers are looking for guidance in how to teach this sensitive subject,” Anderson said, “and ACE guarantees that everything we say is based on sound science. Politics really doesn’t play into it. We make sure that science is being learned by young people – the very ones who will be most affected by climate change. We encourage all students to [make] a commitment to ‘do one thing’ to help the environment and cool the climate. Anybody can do one thing.”

When political tit-for-tat interferes with the teaching of science, it exasperates Francis Q Eberle, director of the National Science Teachers Association (NTSA). “In a public debate,” he pointed out, “people tend to say things that are not evidence-based… but quality science is based on what we know, what we can observe and then model mathematically. Climate science is based on modeling and predicting. It isn’t always intuitive. There are multiple ‘sides’, not just two – many different ways to think about the physical world, continually testing and modifying. It takes about 20 years to gather enough evidence to alter the way science is taught.”

“In my own lifetime, for example, plate tectonics has become much more mainstream,” Eberle said, adding: “My perception is that climate science now is less controversial than it has been in the recent past.”

Indeed, the latest National Survey of American Public Opinion on Climate Change showed 62% of the public now believes there is solid evidence showing that the average temperature on Earth has been getting warmer. Despite the uptick in these statistics, a sense of urgency is barely detectable. A decade of denial effectively has scuttled long-term fixes for short-term economic gains. Most scientists stuck to their laboratories and avoided politics until politicians began distorting their scientific findings.

Outspoken scientists are considered bogeymen, people to fear. Michael E Mann, best known for creating the iconic “hockey stick” graph of rising global temperatures, has been pilloried by global-warming deniers for allegedly tweaking temperature data to fit his theory. In the past decade, his graph has morphed into a symbol of the rancour between mainstream climate scientists and their detractors. Although Mann was exonerated by several investigations, his detractors have been relentless in their search for supposed fraud.

The Supreme Court of Virginia ruled in early March that the state’s crusading attorney-general, Ken Cuccinelli, could not gain access to research notes, handwritten memos and private e-mails belonging to Mann. An American Civil Liberties Union spokesman praised the outcome of this benchmark court case, saying: “If academic freedom means anything, it is that scientists and other scholars should be able to communicate freely without fear that the government is looking over their shoulders.”

Jan McGirk is a former correspondent for The Independent (London) who has reported on environmental issues and disasters in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East.

Homepage image from the Worcester Academy of a US classroom discussion on climate change

Pipeline in the crossfire

Yin Hongwei — Mon, 07 May 2012 08:17:00 +0000

For months, the Burmese army and ethnic militias have been engaged in fierce fighting – raising concerns for the project due to carry oil and gas to China from next year. Yin Hongwei reports.

Editor's note: since the suspension of the multibillion dollar, China-backed Myitsone dam last autumn, Chinese investments in Myanmar have been in the spotlight. We've published a fair amount on this topic already, including a three-part history of Sino-Burmese relations by Tsinghua University professor Qin Hui and a translated analysis of the risks posed to Chinese investors by Myanmar's political upheaval (from Bloomberg Businessweek's Chinese edition). The topic continues to generate a lot of column inches in the Chinese press. Here is a translation of an article from Guangzhou-based publication Time Weekly about fears for another investment, a twin pipeline project due to start pumping oil and gas to China next year.

In late February, Burmese vice-president U Tin Aung Mying Oo led a ministerial delegation to Maday Island on Myanmar’s west coast, the starting point for two major pipelines that will carry oil and gas to China from next year, should everything go to plan.

He heaped praised on the project, saying it would benefit the people of both nations. And he stressed that if gas and oil are to flow through the pipelines by the end of May 2013 as planned, then all sections of the project (in Burma, China and offshore) will have to be completed and connected in the near future.

This was the first high-level visit to the scheme – a joint venture between China’s state-owned China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) and Myanma Oil and Gas Enterprise (MOGE) – by Myanmar’s new government. The Chinese media hailed the event as a show of support for the project that indicates the confidence of both nations’ leaders in this collaborative effort.

But other factors at work in Myanmar may yet intervene to hold up the scheme. Since June 2011, the Burmese army has been fighting the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), an ethnic militia in the north of the country, in fierce clashes that could impact on the construction of the pipelines and leave CNPC caught in the crossfire.

On October 1, 2011, a ceremony was held in Myanmar’s Shan State to mark the start of work on the fourth section of the pipelines. Since then, a steady stream of machinery and pipeline parts have been arriving in Myanmar and the south Chinese province of Yunnan by road and rail. Materials are also stored along the route: anyone driving from Kunming to the Burmese border will pass enormous piles of waiting supplies.

The pipelines, expected to carry a final price tag of US$2.54 billion (16 billion yuan), begin in Kyaukpyu and enter China at the border town of Ruili in Yunnan province. Once they are up and running, an estimated 22 million tonnes of crude oil and 12 billion cubic metres of natural gas will flow into China every year.

The oil pipeline will run for 771 kilometres within Myanmar’s borders and then a further 1,631 kilometres through China. The natural gas pipeline will be slightly longer, at 793 kilometres in Myanmar and 1,727 kilometres north of the border. A refinery is also under construction in the city of Anning, Yunnan. All three projects are due for completion in 2013.

For the experienced Chinese firm leading the construction effort, it’s a straightforward engineering job – there are no major technical challenges. But civil society opposition poses a different set of problems.

In February 2012, workers completed a section of the pipeline at Mandalay’s Mount Popa Buddhist Reserve, part of the religious heritage of ancient Bagan and an area that enjoys the highest level of state protection due to its natural beauty. On the morning of February 15, a tunnel under the Irrawaddy River, the first of the pipeline’s tunnels, was successfully drilled.

But the good news announced on the website of the China Petroleum Pipeline Bureau was not received with universal applause. On March 1, about 100 Burmese citizens protested outside their country’s embassy in Thailand, calling for Myanmar’s president Thein Sein to halt the project.

“The benefits of the scheme aren’t being shared with the people,” complained one organiser with the Shwe Gas Movement. “The financing and responsibilities are opaque, and there is no corporate responsibility. We’re targeting all associated companies and interested parties, with simultaneous protests at the Burmese, Indian, Korean and Chinese embassies in Thailand.”

Jason Tower, an employee of Quaker NGO the American Friends Service Committee with a long-standing interest in Myanmar, explained that these organisations are made up of members of the 1988 Burmese democracy movement who fled to Thailand. They have long opposed the Burmese junta and anyone who works with it. “The construction company should look into the social impact of the project, make contact with Burmese civil society and strengthen dialogue,” he said.

The business environment in Myanmar remains uncertain. Three major projects have been halted in the last eight months: a Thai coal-fired power plant as well as China’s Myitsone dam and an Indian hydropower plant. The suspensions and uncertainties have called many other projects into question.

In addition, the handling of land requisitions and community resettlements has ramped up the tensions. Border residents near Ruili said that, 86 households impacted by the dam over the border at Namhkan, the northernmost town in Shan State, received no compensation until external pressure finally pushed the authorities to make partial payments.

Even though the families in question eventually received some money, and even though their affairs were handled by the Burmese side, not the Chinese parties, many of the locals still blame China: “the Chinese started work without paying anything” is a common refrain.

As a result, while Chinese firms have been doing their best to boost their image in the region – assisting flood victims, building schools for orphans and investing in local education, for instance – they do not have the full support of the Burmese people.

While vice-president U Tin Aung Mying Oo praised CNPC and other firms for their work in February, he also stressed the importance of public welfare. He expressed gratitude for the Chinese partner’s decision to use local labour for 70% of jobs, and also hopes for greater cooperation with Burmese firms in the construction and operation of the pipelines in order to provide even more jobs and allow the transfer of advanced technical and management skills.

Zhang Jialin, president of CNPC subsidiary South-East Asia Pipeline, said that firms involved in the construction project donated a total US$4.07 million in 2011 for the construction of 45 schools and 24 hospitals or clinics, improving healthcare for 800,000 people. In March 2011, the shareholders of the joint venture agreed to spend US$1 million annually on public welfare projects along the route of the pipeline.

But the tensions persist. “We heard a pipeline was going to be built back in 2005, and that it would run through KIA-held territory. Given our history with the government and the different interests involved, we were worried that there would be some conflict,” said a KIA liaison officer. “We informed the Chinese authorities that there would be problems building the pipeline if the political and economic issues were not resolved in advance.” There was never any response, he said.

The Burmese army and the KIA have been fighting on and off for decades. The last ceasefire was signed in 1994. But in June last year, the 17-year peace agreement was broken by the Burmese army when it attacked KIA territory to protect a Chinese-built dam on the Tarpein River. They said the KIA had ignored an order to withdraw from an area near the hydropower plant.On September 23, the army went on to attack a KIA area in Shan State, in order to allow construction of the pipeline.

“This Kachin area of Shan State has seen some of the worst fighting,” the liaison officer explained. The region is a patchwork of territories held by an array of different militias: the KIA’s 4^th Brigade and their allies the Northern Shan Army and the Ta’ang Liberation Army, along with the “Old 4^th Brigade”, which signed a peace deal with the government in January 1991. There are other, smaller militias too.

The Burmese army has not been particularly successful, taking only major roads and a few strategic points, and the KIA continues to fight a guerrilla war from the surrounding mountains. According to rumours coming out of Kachin-held parts of Shan State, the KIA may seek to take revenge by sabotaging the pipeline.

“That’s just a government-spread rumour, we’re not against the pipeline and nor will we attack it – on the contrary, we can protect it,” said Lanyaw Zawng Hra, president of the Kachin Independence Organisation and its international affairs chief, on the phone. “But one thing needs to be made clear – if the government army follows the pipeline into our territory, then the KIA will fight to the death, and other militias are bound to be caught up in the conflict. And that fighting may damage the pipeline.”

Zhao Lei [his Chinese name], governor of the south of the Kachin territory, said he hoped that China would intervene to end the crisis – that would help all three parties. “I hope China and the Burmese government can understand the ethnic sentiment here, and allow us room to live. We haven’t been fighting all this time for independence, just for a high degree of autonomy, for recognition and respect.”

He added that that pipeline will bring economic development for all ethnic groups in the area and improve the quality of life. That’s why the Kachin want to protect the pipeline and have no interest in damaging it, he said.

This article was first published in Time Weekly, where Yin Hongwei is a reporter. It is reproduced here with permission.

Photo by: anevillemorgan

Meat off menu for China’s Olympians

Jiang Xinjie, Zhang Luyan, Wang Jingyi — Fri, 04 May 2012 08:28:00 +0000

Athletes are struggling to source safe pork and beef as fears grow over the impact of additives on doping test results. Jiang Xinjie, Zhang Luyan and Wang Jingyi report on China's latest food crisis.

You might not expect a meat shortage to top the list of concerns at the Jiangsu Sports Bureau’s training centre. But despite careful rationing, three tonnes of pork donated by a local pig farmer a month ago is almost gone. China’s national sports teams are plagued by similar problems.

Speaking in March, Li Zhongyi, deputy supply chief at the aquatics division of China’s General Administration of Sport (GAS), admitted that the 196 athletes under his department’s supervision had eaten no meat for 40 days. Instead, they had relied on protein powder and eel. At Chinese New Year, they “only ate vegetable dumplings”. Normally, an athlete would consume around a pound of pork and a pound of beef every day.

This new wave of vegetarianism in the Chinese sports world was triggered by a “meat ban” issued by GAS on January 19. Specifically, athletes were forbidden from eating pork, beef or mutton not supplied by their training centres, while the training centres themselves were ordered not to serve meat unless it came from a reliable source.

These drastic steps were driven by anxieties over additives. A range of chemicals is used to increase the amount of lean meat in livestock. But, as these substances promote protein synthesis, they are banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA). Their use in animal fodder is also restricted to varying degrees by national governments wanting to protect human health.

The sports world faces tighter rules than the general public. Li explained that, while state standards permit one nanogram of leanness-enhancer per gram of meat, professional athletes are not allowed to eat meat with more than 0.003 nanograms of these chemicals – that’s 300 times less than the rest of the population.

In the last two years, there have been a number of stories about sports teams taking control of their own food supply. The Tianjin karate squad became famous for raising pigs, and the national marathon team for keeping free-range chickens in Lijiang. The family of champion hurdler Liu Xiang, meanwhile, told journalists he had shunned pork for years so as to avoid leanness-enhancing drugs. Now, in the year of the London Olympics, the athletic community has been left without a steady supply of reliable meat.

“Leanness-enhancers are terrible. Now even our athletes are at risk. I’m donating some meat.” Pig farmer Liu Yaqing posted this message online just after the Chinese New Year. On February 24, he made good on his promise and handed over three tonnes of pork – worth about 100,000 yuan (US$15,900) – to the Jiangsu Sports Bureau in eastern China.

Liu, 40, calls his livestock “healthy pigs”. He rejects modern farming techniques such as compound feeds, and refuses to use antibiotics. Instead, he gives his animals soya beans, corn, carrots and grass, all processed at his farm. These traditional methods have gradually disappeared from large-scale pig-farming since the 1990s. His pigs take three or four months longer to be ready for market, and they cost more too. That means sales are low.

When Yang Hongbo, head of food provision at the Jiangsu training club, drove his truck the 440 kilometres from Nanjing to the farm on a meat-finding mission, he found that “some of the pigs weighed over 400 kilograms, the size of calves.”

“The conditions at the farm are fine,” he said. “But, we’re more worried about the drug tests.” The meat was tested three times – in Nanjing and at the National Anti-Doping Centre in Beijing. No leanness-enhancers were found. But that was just the first step. There was much more to come before the pork could pass an athlete’s lips.

The kitchen is more closely guarded than any other part of the training centre. A staff of 70 work here, and 70 different dishes are provided at each meal. Entry to the kitchen is controlled by a fingerprint scanner, which will only admit staff. Details of strict procedures for everything from disinfecting clothes to washing vegetables are posted on the walls.

Meat procurement processes for the national teams are even stricter. Purchases are frozen and left in storage until the anti-doping centre has finished tests. Three samples are taken from every batch, with two to be retained until eight months after the closing ceremony of the London Olympics.

“Even if nothing goes wrong,” said Yang, “you will lose your job for not following procedures.”

Germany’s anti-doping agency warned European athletes off meat from Mexico and China as early as April 2011. The French authorities meanwhile have ordered their athletes to avoid Chinese meat products while competing in China, so as to avoid failing drugs tests.

Germany’s anti-doping agency told Southern Weekend that meat from Mexico and China tends to be the most heavily contaminated.

At last year’s under-17 football World Cup in Mexico, 109 players – from 19 of the 24 teams present – failed drugs tests, representing 52.4% of all people tested. But the World Anti-Doping Agency and FIFA agreed this extraordinary result had been caused by contaminated meat.

No players from the Mexican team, which successfully defended its title, tested positively. Apparently, the hosts, aided by their local knowledge, had stuck to fish and vegetables. The government subsequently made a number of arrests and closed several abattoirs.

But it isn’t impossible to provide safe meat. An employee at one of the beef and pork suppliers to the Beijing Olympics said that online surveillance can be used to monitor the entire process from Beijing. At one point in 2008, someone who wasn’t wearing uniform entered the factory – Beijing was instantly on the phone asking what was going on. But after the Beijing Olympics, the partnerships between these firms and the national and provincial teams were dropped.

In the four years since the 2008 games, sports officials have often ordered Chinese athletes to avoid eating outside their training centres in the run-up to competitions. So far this year, GAS has held two meetings on food safety and followed up with urgent notices.

Then, on March 19, the Chinese Olympic Committee and COFCO Meat Investments inked a deal which will see COFCO provide meat for almost 1,000 athletes at 20 large training centres. COFCO will provide pork, beef, chicken and processed meats. However, as COFCO is mainly a pork and chicken producer, national teams will still turn to imports for beef.

According to insiders, it took only 50 days to conclude the deal, compared to a full year for similar agreements in the past. It is clear just how urgently the matter is being treated.

This article was first published in Southern Weekend, where Jiang Xinjie is a reporter and Zhang Luyan and Wang Jingyi interns.

Southern Weekend reporter Feng Jie also contributed to this article.

Homepage image by Cao Yi