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Causing a stink in Shanghai (2)

Xu Shuda — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 17:06:00 +0000

Angry residents have long been battling to rid their neighbourhood of foul odours caused by Richina Group tanneries. In the second instalment of a three-part article, Xu Shuda reports that change is in sight.

I ask an official from the Baoshan Environmental Protection Bureau about the Richina Group. “The company has indeed made changes,” he says. “Since 2004, they have invested more than 10 million yuan (US$1.5 million) in environmental improvements. And, after they closed down the leather production line, pollution from Richina Leather fell by 80%. But the results are still not ideal.” Moreover, the changes are largely restricted to the Richina-branded facility. While this plant has significantly cleaned up its act, Richina’s smaller subsidiaries, which do not carry the company name, are still polluting.

He explains that the basic process of tanning leather makes it impossible to completely eliminate bad smells. “There’s no way the residents can put up with it, so we monitor the firm closely and keep up the pressure, going out looking for problems from time to time,” he says. He believes the crux of the issue is the location of Richina Leather’s plant – at the time of construction, there was no system of environmental-impact assessments in place in China and the company was free to build in a residential area. “If Richina was located in an industrial zone, rather than a residential one, then it could carry on,” says the official. “It is one of the industry leaders, after all.”

For the residents of Baoshan, however, there are signs that life could be about to change for the better. The official reveals that the Shanghai authorities have big plans for the area. In the future, there will be a beautiful, big park, modern service enterprises, post-processing bases and residential zones. He says: “They’ve made up their minds that, since there’s no hope of solving the problem and the impact on local residents is so great, they have to bring in some big changes – and not just pollution controls. This could transform life for the residents.”

He goes on to say that Richina owns the land the plant is on, which limits what the local authorities can do. Pressure on the firm to change its ways, therefore, has to come from the municipal government, which holds greater powers than local government and is better equipped to press the issue.

The official adds that his bureau has already held talks with Richina about bringing the company’s plans and those of the district into alignment. “Land is expensive here and the company will be able to make more money through property than producing leather,” he says. A source inside Richina also tells me that the firm will soon be shifting its focus to property development.

The company is also planning to move the smelliest parts of Richina Leather’s tanning activities to Liaoning province, in north-eastern China. Chief executive of Richina Industries, Bob Moore, says: “We’re going to invest 800 million yuan (US$117 million) in a new processing plant in Fuxin to handle the processes that create foul odours. The Baoshan plant will become a world-class facility for final processing, creating finished products without using any polluting techniques.” For the residents of Baoshan, this is good news; the reaction of locals in Fuxin, however, remains to be seen.

Ma Jun is director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE) and the developer of China’s first water pollution database. He says that some of Richina’s clients are already worried about the pollution being caused by their suppliers: “For example, Timberland has said it will gradually reduce and eventually eliminate sourcing from Richina.”

Such pressure is beginning to bear fruit. While Ma’s earlier requests for Richina Leather to undergo a systematic, third-party audit went ignored, the company has now contracted a firm to carry out a monthly inspection of its operations, according to the British Leather Council, which audits the environmental performance of international leather suppliers on behalf of major corporations. Furthermore, while Ma Jun says such “monthly inspections” fall short of the rigorous checks his organisation and others have been demanding, he understands that Richina Leather is now preparing to undergo a more comprehensive third-party audit.

But, for Ma, this is a small victory in the context of a much wider problem. “The most important thing to realise is that Richina is not an isolated case,” he says. “Lots of leather firms have similar issues with pollution.” He believes that China’s system of environmental supervision is not strong enough and this is one reason why Richina continued to violate pollution regulations for so long. “China’s environmental authorities have very few tools at their disposal – usually just administrative sanctions and fines that are capped at a low level,” he says. “The cost of breaching regulations is therefore low, particularly as companies are only ever fined once per year for any single breach. In many countries, such as the United States, the penalties are more severe and can be applied on a daily basis, with fines of US$25,000 (170,000 yuan) per day until the problem is solved.”

Another reason for better pollution control overseas is the imposition of punitive fines by courts, according to Ma. In many countries, victims can ask the courts to order firms to pay compensation for infringing their rights and the courts can impose higher penalties than the environmental authorities. Major polluters could face fines of hundreds of millions of US dollars – or even be shut down. And so it makes more sense for the firm to solve the problem than to risk a fine.

Ma Jun thinks the outsourcing of manufacturing’s dirtier parts has made corporate environmental responsibility more complex. “China is playing the role of the world’s factory, with many major brands sourcing products here,” he says. “The most power-hungry and polluting stages of manufacturing are transferred to Chinese firms – in much the same way as Richina purchased Shanghai Leather Industry and then transferred the most polluting parts of the manufacturing process to its subsidiaries.” His solution would see Richina’s corporate customers bolster management of their supply chain. Big brands such as Nike and Armani must screen suppliers carefully, says Ma. Otherwise, their environmental commitments are just a sop to trusting consumers.

Another key reason for Richina’s longstanding pollution breaches was a failing in oversight by the British Leather Council and the Leather Working Group, according to Ma. These organisations have developed a protocol for the environmental audit and assessment of leather suppliers, but Ma believes it was not sufficiently rigorous to raise the alarm about Richina. The Leather Working Group is made up of corporate customers of the world’s major leather producers and sets environmental standards for those producers. Auditing is entrusted to the British Leather Council, which carries out an environmental inspection of producers once every 18 months, with the date agreed in advance. “As long as there are no breaches on the actual day, they are fine for the next year and a half,” says Ma. “And neither historical records nor public complaints are covered by the audit.”

For global brands with a lot to lose, such a weak auditing system is potentially disastrous. The problems with the current system – and the bad publicity they have created – have caused companies like Timberland and Nike to take stock. After the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post ran an article on the problems at Richina Leather in July, 2009, Timberland and Nike both got in touch with the Leather Working Group: “They wanted to tighten up the British Leather Council’s auditing process and have the working group review its standards,” says Ma. In late 2009, Timberland’s representative in China, He Xu, said that, if the British Leather Council failed to improve its auditing methods, Timberland would update its own processes to make up for the inadequacies of the existing system – by tracking the past environmental records of suppliers, for example.

The Leather Working Group admits there have been weaknesses in its system but insists that it has worked hard to address these since Timberland and Nike raised objections. It has updated its protocol and is preparing to launch a new version next week. “There has been some corrective action to try to prevent this happening again,” says the group’s spokesman, Adam Hughes. “The audit is a snapshot in time – it’s not a background audit. But what we do now insist on is that a senior person on site signs a declaration that the assessment provided is true and accurate. In addition, they will get a negative score if they have had any convictions or warnings. If they have had a verbal warning plus a conviction, they will potentially fail the audit.”

The impact of Richina Leather’s pollution breaches has, it seems, stretched beyond the neighbourhoods of Baoshan. “This is one of the biggest black marks against the Leather Working Group’s process,” says Hughes. “But we reacted to it very quickly. We have taken significant steps forward.” Hopefully, the lessons learned will not stop there.

Xu Shuda is a reporter based in Shanghai.

NEXT: Who runs Richina?

Homepage image shows products from Timberland, which has said it will gradually cut Richina out of its supply chain.

Causing a stink in Shanghai (1)

Xu Shuda — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 15:43:00 +0000

A multinational leather company in eastern China has been breaching pollution standards and troubling locals with a pungent stench. Xu Shuda investigates.

Fifty-six-year-old Feng Min had never smelt anything like it. “It’s like pitch mixed with cat’s urine,” she says, standing at the gate to the Jufengyuan neighbourhood on Shanghai’s Shangda Road. Looking to the south-east, she wrinkles her brow. Two kilometres away is the Richina Leather factory.

The company was founded in 1995, with total investment of US$29.9 million (204.2 million yuan). The Richina Group originally held a 55% stake but has since increased its ownership interest to 95%. The facility, which supplies tanned leather to some of the world's largest shoe, clothing, furnishing and automobile brands, is the largest in east and south-east Asia and Richina's leathers are the raw material for everything from Clark's shoes to Toyota's luxury leather seats. The company's website boasts a client list including Giorgio Armani, Calvin Klein, Ugg, Nike and Rockport.

Ma Jun, director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE) and chinadialogue author, says that, of the tens of thousands of companies his institute monitors, Richina is the only one to have been investigated and sanctioned by environmental authorities every year since 2004.

The Jufengyuan neighbourhood lies in the north-east of Shanghai, where Shangda Road and Qilian Road meet, and is the largest residential complex near Shanghai University. In Shanghai, properties in this type of area normally cost at least 15,000 yuan (US$2,197) per square metre. But in Jufengyuan, a 170-square-metre apartment can be had for as little as 1.8 million yuan (US$264,000). Local estate agents always make a point of mentioning the “super-low” prices.

Right next door to Richina Leather is the village of Beizhang. The acrid odour from the numerous local tanneries, several of which are owned by the Richina Group, is apparent even at some distance from the village, on Nanda Road. As you get closer, your eyes become dry, your nose itches and breathing becomes a little difficult.

“It’s been so long we can’t smell it any more,” says 38-year-old villager Zhang Zhidong helplessly. Since the 1970s, the village has been surrounded by leather workshops, which have polluted the ground. Zhang explains that a powerful reek of rotten eggs has hung over the village since 1996, when the Richina plant started operating: “As soon as one of the workers from the plant rides his bike into the courtyard, the whole house stinks of rotten eggs.”

Richina was sanctioned annually from 2004 to 2008, the last year for which data is published, according to information on environmental-law enforcement from Shanghai municipal authorities and the Baoshan Environmental Protection Bureau (EPB). In 2008 alone, the firm was prosecuted for turning off air-treatment equipment and fined 100,000 yuan (US$14,635) for violating standards on the release of atmospheric pollutants. When I phone the Baoshan EPB to ask for monitoring results for 2009, the official at the other end of the phone checks with a colleague at the monitoring station before calling back to say “They were definitely still breaching standards.”

Zhou Qichao, a resident of Jufengyuan and former engineer at Shanghai’s 4th Pharmaceutical Factory, explains that Richina first soaks the leather and scrapes off remaining flesh and fat, then removes oil and hair before two tanning stages. During this process, the fat and proteins produce fetid odours as they are dissolved in water, just like organic matter rotting in a stream. Richina claims to use a spraying technique to absorb the odour but this is inadequate as the process must be repeated many times to be effective. “They won’t use that much water – it’s too expensive and would increase their costs,” says Zhou.

Baoshan Environmental Protection Bureau’s punishment of Richina in October 2008 backs up Zhou Qichao’s claim as the plant wasn’t using water at all. The bureau’s record of the event refers to: “Air pollution treatment equipment lying idle while waste gases are expelled untreated.”

Opposition from local residents dates back as far as the offensive odours. Feng Min says many letters have been written to the Shanghai authorities requesting relocation of the plant and residents have established a monitoring group to collect evidence of the pollution at their own expense. Local farmers from the village of Beizhang have also complained to Richina on a number of occasions. In the last two years the problem has abated significantly. Xu Jun, a Richina worker living locally, confirms that the production line responsible for much of the pollution was shut down in 2008. Xu’s job is to dye or decorate semi-finished product, which will later be used to make leather car seats. “Those techniques don’t create any pollution,” he says.

“It’s the small plants around here that are the worst polluters now,” says Zhang Zhidong. He takes me for a walk around the Richina plant and there is no particularly strong smell. But there is an offensive reek that makes my chest tighten by the nearby Hongguang Leather and Leather Chemical Factory. There are many other leather firms in the area and the villagers accuse them of polluting on the sly.

But checking up on the ownership of these companies, I found that the firms the villagers accuse of making uncontrolled emissions – Shanghai Torch Shoes, Shangahi Leather Case & Bag Factory, Shanghai Leather Chemical Factory, Shanghai United Ball Enterprises, Shanghai Weixing Leather Products, Shanghai Yimin Tannery and Hongguang Leather – all became subsidiaries of the Richina Group back in 2004. And the three companies named in almost every letter from the environmental authorities to local residents – Shanghai Richina Leather, Shanghai Hongguang Leather and Shanghai Leather Chemical Factory – are also Richina Group subsidiaries.

On the afternoon of November 17, 2009, Richina Leather chief executive Bob Moore tells me that “Since arriving in Shanghai in March, I’ve never smelt this ‘stench’ you are talking about.” However, local residents recorded when they smelt that odour on an online forum. In August alone, the smell was present on eight days: August 11, 12, 13, 14, 19, 20, 27 and 30.

Moore produces a record of odours near Jufengyuan in the two weeks from October 16. “It’s not even the smell of hydrogen sulphide – it’s mostly ammonia from chemical plants,” he says. “It’s nothing to do with Richina.” Moore says he has been working hard on environmental protection since arriving at Richina Leather. “From 2004 to 2008 we were punished every year because at the same time as we were making improvements, environmental standards were increasing. I’m sure 2009 will be different.” When I tell him that the Baoshan environmental authorities said Richina was still breaching standards in 2009, Moore gets a little angry: “Impossible! None of the authorities have spoken to us. If Baoshan Environmental Protection Bureau wants to put the figures on the table, we can discuss them.”

He believes that many small, local factories are causing pollution and people should not assume that every smell they encounter is coming from the Richina Leather facility. When reminded that many of those factories are actually owned by Richina Group, he does not deny it but says: “I am only the boss of Richina Leather Industries, responsible for Richina Leather. I can control pollution from Richina Leather but not those factories nearby.”

But Moore’s business card shows he is also president and chief executive of one of the Richina Group’s four major divisions, Richina Industries. On the Richina Group website, Richina Industries includes Shanghai Richina Leather and Shanghai Leather Company. And those nearby factories that he “can’t control” are all subsidiaries of the latter.

Xu Shuda is a reporter based in Shanghai.

NEXT: Ramping up the pressure on Richina

Homepage image from coco+kelley

The urban dream

Jared Green — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 15:09:00 +0000

David Owen is the author of a new book on the sustainability lessons of New York. In an interview with Jared Green, he argues the case for densely populated cities and says traditional environmentalists have got it wrong.

Jared Green: In your new book, Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability, you argue that New York City is one of the most sustainable cities in the United States because of its high population density. The environmental lessons are: live smaller, live closer and drive less. Why is this agenda central to achieving a more sustainable future?

David Owen: New York City has the smallest per-capita carbon footprint of any American community – just 7.1 metric tonnes of greenhouse gases per resident per year, compared with a national average of 24.5. The reason is population density. Shrinking the distance between people – and, especially, between people and their destinations – reduces energy use, carbon emission and waste in all categories.

The most important factor is automobile use. Cars are bad for the environment not only because they directly consume fuel and emit pollutants but because they facilitate the creation of far greater sources of energy profligacy and environmental damage in form of sprawling communities, oversized dwellings, inefficient commerce and huge networks of redundant civic infrastructure. New York City has the lowest automobile-to-resident ratio of any place in the United States. Fifty-four percent of the city’s households and 77% of Manhattan Island’s households don’t own even one car – an unimaginable deprivation almost anywhere else in the country.

New York City looks so different from so much of the rest of the country that its environmental examples aren’t easy to apply. But dense urban centres offer one of the few plausible templates for addressing some of the world’s most discouraging environmental ills, including climate change. We need to find ways to reduce the size of our living spaces, decrease the distance between ourselves and our destinations and begin to wean ourselves away from our near total dependence on automobiles.

JG: You argue that the best environmental investment a city can make should focus on how to make a city more attractive and tolerable for people to live closer together. How can cities fighting sprawl best invest in density?

DO: We must find ways to shift new residential and commercial development away from places where population growth and economic growth exacerbate critical environmental problems. For American cities, that will mean first understanding and then extending the benefits of population density and the thoughtful mixing of uses as well as acknowledging that, in a dense city, the truly important environmental issues are less likely to be things like solar panels on building roofs than they are to be old-fashioned quality-of-life concerns like education, culture, crime, street noise, bad smells, resources for the elderly and the availability of recreational facilities, all of which affect the willingness of people to live in efficient urban cores rather than packing up their children and fleeing to the suburbs.

Issues like these can be tough for traditional environmentalists to come to terms with because they don’t feel green: Where are the organic gardens and the backyard compost heaps? Planting trees along city streets, always a popular initiative, has high environmental utility but not for the reasons that people usually assume: trees are ecologically important in dense urban areas not because they provide temporary repositories for atmospheric carbon – the usual argument for planting more of them – but because their presence along sidewalks makes city dwellers more cheerful about dwelling in cities. Unfortunately, much conventional environmental activism has the opposite effect since it reinforces the view that urban life is artificial and depraved and makes city residents feel guilty about living where and how they do.

JG: Some argue that city living can add years to your life. What do you see as the most effective design tactic for creating healthy communities?

DO: City dwellers who fantasize about living in the country usually picture themselves hiking, kayaking, gathering eggs from their own chickens and engaging in other robust outdoor activities. But what you actually do when you move out of the city is move into a car because public transit is non-existent and most daily destinations are too widely separated to make walking or bicycling plausible as forms of transportation. Just about the first thing my wife and I did when we moved out of the city 25 years ago was gain 10 pounds apiece because we had gone from a place where we got around mainly by walking to a place where nearly everything we do away from our house requires a car trip.

To get people out of their cars, you have to do two things. First, you have to create enough density to make transit, walking and bicycling conceivable and, second, you have to make driving sufficiently expensive, inconvenient and unpleasant to force people to consider alternatives. You don’t get people out of their cars just by building attractive transit systems. Washington DC has a beautiful subway system, but no one with a car feels compelled to take the train because there’s always a place to park.

Anyone who has spent any time in Manhattan has had the experience of being stuck in traffic in a taxicab and watching a little old lady on the sidewalk overtake them and disappear into the distance. That’s a very green experience.

JG: At street level, you point to design professionals who are implementing “traffic calming” measures that make communities more pedestrian-friendly. In Europe, you point to the idea of “shared spaces”, which increase the ambiguity of urban road spaces and, instead of creating more accidents, actually force drivers to slow down. Please describe this concept.

DO: Shared space is a technique for controlling traffic by blurring, rather than sharply delineating, the boundaries between driving areas and walking areas; by making strategic use of traffic-impeding “street furniture,” such as plantings, benches and bicycle racks; and by eliminating traffic lights, stop signs, lane markings and other traditional controls. This sounds to many people like a formula for disaster, but the clear experience in the (mainly) European cities that have tried it has been that increasing the ambiguity of urban road spaces actually lowers car speeds, reduces accident rates and improves the lives of pedestrians: drivers proceed more warily when they aren’t completely certain what’s going on.

JG: Author and naturalist Henry David Thoreau in his cabin – an iconic image of man at one with nature and living self-sufficiently off the land – you argue, set the “American pattern” for a kind of “creeping residential development.” Do you think many environmentalists are anti-urban?

DO: Americans tend to think of dense cities as despoilers of the natural landscape, but urban density actually helps to preserve it. Preaching the sanctity of open spaces helps to propel development into those very spaces and the process is self-reinforcing.

Thoreau wasn’t actually much of an outdoorsman, and his cabin was closer to the centre of Concord, [Massachusetts, north-eastern United States], than to any true wilderness, but for many Americans he remains the archetype – the natural philosopher guiltlessly living off the grid, a mile from his nearest neighbour. Yet he actually set a very bad example, because anyone seeking to replicate his experience needed to move another mile farther along. Wild landscapes are less often destroyed by people who despise wild landscapes than by people who love them, or think they do. From an environmental point of view, dense cities are scalable; Thoreau’s cabin is not.

JG: In the suburbs, homeowners are spending more than US$40 billion (273 billion yuan) per year on 129,000 square kilometres of lawns. However, despite all this investment in residential outdoor spaces, they aren’t being used. How do you think residential landscapes should be re-developed so people re-engage with nature?

DO: The problem with almost any initiative aimed at “re-engaging people with nature” is that it tends to encourage the very kind of sprawling, wasteful residential development that threatens unspoiled areas in the first place. The way to protect natural landscapes is to concentrate human development, not to spread it out so that each of us can claim a small piece of it as our very own.

Environmentalists and urban planners sometimes say that, in order to get people out of their cars and onto their feet, developed areas need become more like the country by incorporating extended “greenways” and other attractive, vegetated pedestrian corridors. It’s true that such features, along with parks and natural areas, can encourage some people to take walks. But, if the goal is to get people to embrace walking as a form of practical transportation, oversized greenways can actually be counterproductive. Walking-as-transportation requires closely paced, accessible destinations, not broad expanses of leafy scenery. If you want to see people moving around under their own power under the sky, don’t go to the country or the suburbs; go downtown.

Jared Green is web content and strategy manager at the American Society of Landscape Architects.

David Owen is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of a dozen books.

This interview was first published by the American Society of Landscape Architects. It is reproduced here with permission.

Homepage image by Al_HikesAZ

Jane Goodall: wild at heart

Stephen Moss — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 11:31:00 +0000

It has been 50 years since the scientist turned eco-evangelist began her seminal work with chimpanzees in Africa. But, writes Stephen Moss, her work is far from finished.

Jane Goodall, grey in complexion but resplendent in a red shawl, is sitting on the sofa in a dimly lit room in west London. The scientist-turned-environmentalist has just arrived from Bournemouth on England’s south coast, had a rotten journey, has a hacking cough, but accepts it all stoically, rejecting the suggestion that the heating be turned up.

She is here with her talisman, a stuffed monkey called Mr H, given to her by the blind magician Gary Haun (“the Amazing Haundini”), who thought it was a chimp. Goodall, who has a childlike quality, sees a metaphorical significance in a blind magician who is able to pull the wool over the eyes of the sighted. The letter H, standing for Hope, also attracts her.

The world seems to divide into people who are besotted with Goodall and people who have barely heard of her. She is more prominent in the United States, where the Jane Goodall Institute (JGI) is headquartered, than in the United Kingdom, despite being born here in 1934; after half a lifetime spent documenting the lives of chimpanzees in the Gombe Stream National Park overlooking Lake Tanganyika in the far west of Tanzania, she is now living with her sister Judy in their old family home in Bournemouth.

Our meeting takes place at a flat that belongs to Mary Lewis, a JGI employee with a cut-glass English accent who appears to run Goodall’s life as if it were a military operation. The trigger is a book Goodall has written with two fellow environmentalists: a collection of stories of survival called Hope for Animals and Their World, the written-by-committee feel of which must of course be forgiven because of its subject matter.

Even I, an intermittent eco-worrier, was moved by the battle to save the California condor, and I feel doubly guilty for criticising the book because at the end of the interview she insists on signing it for me: “For Stephen. Together we can make this a better world for all. Thank you for helping.” Can is underlined, all is both underlined and capitalised.

These days, in her mid-70s, Goodall is more shaman than scientist. She has set aside a planned companion volume to her seminal study The Chimpanzees of Gombe, and instead tours the world preaching the need for sustainability, harmony and respect for the natural world (this makes me worry about the size of her carbon footprint).

It was in 1986 that, at a conference on chimps, she realised the extent of the crisis affecting them across Africa and determined, overnight it seems, on a life as an environmental evangelist. One journalist who has followed her career likens her to a “peripatetic Mother Teresa”, and it’s a good description: she combines stateliness with a kind of holiness, her religion a predominantly green one.

The message of her new book, with its stories about black-footed ferrets, American crocodiles and whooping cranes, is surprisingly upbeat. “My job seems to have increasingly become giving people hope, so that instead of doing nothing and sinking into depression, they take action,” she tells me. “It’s very clear to me that unless we get a critical mass of people involved in trying to create a better world for our great-grandchildren, we’d better stop having children altogether.”

Goodall has chosen to focus on the heroes fighting – and occasionally winning – individual battles, in the hope of attracting others to participate in a war she does not yet accept is lost. “I’ve seen areas totally despoiled that have been brought back to life. Animals that were almost gone have, with captive breeding or protection in the wild, been given another chance. If we stop now, everything’s going to go. So we have to keep on doing our best for as long as we can, and if we’re going to die, let’s die fighting.” The apocalypse is conjured up in a croaky and curiously detached monotone.

Do governments understand the scale of the crisis? Goodall argues that many are still in hock to “dark forces” – vested interests such as the fossil-fuel industry and agribusiness. Politicians, she says, should stop parroting the myth of limitless expansion. “Unlimited economic growth on a planet of finite resources is not possible; it doesn’t make sense. I thought this financial crisis would help people realise that, but it seems very much like, ‘Oh, let's get back to business as usual.’ ”

Much of her evangelising is directed at the young. Her institute – set up to protect chimps and their habitats almost 10 years before that Damascene moment in 1986 – has a dynamic youth wing called Roots and Shoots, which started in 1991 when 16 young Tanzanians met on the porch of her home in Dar es Salaam to discuss environmental issues affecting their lives.

Twenty years later, there are groups in 114 countries, with hundreds of thousands of youngsters involved in community projects. After a slow start, it has taken off in the United Kingdom in the past couple of years, with 700 groups now participating.

But apart from the headquarters in the US city of Arlington, Virginia -- which has 20-plus staff -- most of the JGIs that coordinate these projects are shoestring operations, and the institute has been hit hard by the credit crunch. “We’re in a financial hole in the US because of the downturn,” Goodall admits. “Money that should have come in has been cut.”

The organisation had just held a meeting in Belgium to discuss how to dig itself out, and one priority is to recruit an executive director. Is that recognition of a time when someone will need to take over from her? “Of course,” Goodall says. “It will probably be a collection of four people taking over from me.” Despite the holiness, she is not guilty of false modesty.

The institute today is not just concerned with her beloved chimps. “To me, it was obvious to grow from wild chimps to saving their forest to seeing about their conditions in captivity to working with local people and kids,” she says. “You can kill yourself saving forests and chimps, but if new generations aren’t going to be better stewards there’s no point. That’s why I’m so passionate about Roots & Shoots.”

Until the 1986 conference on chimpanzees, she had assumed she would spend her life studying chimps. “It was wonderful out in the forest collecting data and analysing it, giving a few lectures, writing books.” In her 1999 book, Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey, she says that as a Bible-reading teenager, she “fantasised about becoming a martyr”. In a way, she has achieved that ambition, sacrificing the paradise of Gombe for a succession of airport lounges.

When I ask if she is still a Christian, she gives a somewhat ambiguous answer. “I suppose so; I was raised as a Christian.” She says she sees no contradiction between evolution and a belief in God. Nor does she blame the Bible and the idea in Genesis that man has dominion over plants and animals for our exploitation of the natural world (she says “dominion” is a mistranslation; what is meant is “stewardship”). These might seem academic points, but perhaps they are a key to understanding her transition from scientist to eco-evangelist – and the resonance of her message in the more spiritually aware US.

“I realised that my experience in the forest, my understanding of the chimpanzees, had given me a new perspective,” she writes in Reason for Hope. “I was utterly convinced there was a great spiritual power that we call God, Allah or Brahma, although I knew, equally certainly, that my finite mind could never comprehend its form or nature.”

This year is significant for Goodall and her institute, marking 50 years since she began studying chimps at Gombe. As well as the new book, there will be a BBC documentary in the spring and a German-made film, Jane’s Journey, to be premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, in which Angelina Jolie has a walk-on part. It is indeed a remarkable journey, from a middle-class home in Bournemouth to secretarial work in London and then, thanks to the patronage of paleontologist Louis Leakey, to Gombe and beyond.

“I loved animals as a child, read the Tarzan books, and decided at the age of 11 that I would go to Africa, live with animals and write books about them,” she says. “Everybody laughed at me except my amazing mother, who said, ‘If you work hard and really want something and never give up, you will find a way.’ ”

In 1957, after earning the money for the boat fare by working as a waitress and a secretary, Goodall went on an extended visit to a school friend in Kenya. Someone suggested she get in touch with Leakey, a formidable figure who was then curator of the Coryndon museum of natural history in Nairobi. He barked at her down the telephone when she called, but she kept her nerve, got an appointment to see him, was given an administrative job and, in 1960, was given the chance to move to Gombe to start collecting data on chimps.

Leakey also dispatched Dian Fossey to Rwanda to study gorillas and Birute Galdikas to Borneo to observe orangutans; the three women were patronisingly known as Leakey’s angels or Leakey’s trimates, but each made significant contributions to primatology.

What did Leakey see in Goodall that made him choose her for Gombe? “I think he was amazed that a young girl straight out from England with no university degree knew so much,” she says. “I'd spent hours in the Natural History Museum in London, and could answer most of his questions.”

Goodall had planned to spend only a year in Africa but was there more than 30. She still has a home in Dar es Salaam, and makes the long trek to Gombe when she can. She learned her science in the field, but Leakey was keen for her to get academic training and, in the mid-60s, she did a PhD at Cambridge in ethology, the study of animal behavior. She needed the qualification to counter critics who attacked her approach as unscientific and anthropomorphic – she gave the chimps she studied names, and prided herself on getting to know them as individuals.

“I was told at Cambridge I shouldn’t have named the chimps and that they should have had numbers,” she says. “I wasn’t allowed to talk about them having personalities, and certainly not about them thinking or having emotions. But then I thought back to my childhood teacher who taught me that this wasn’t true – my dog.”

The scale of Goodall’s observational data eventually silenced her critics. She was the first scientist to observe an animal, her favourite chimp David Greybeard, not just using a tool (a stem of grass poked into a termites’ nest to dig out the insects) but fashioning it for that purpose. When she telegraphed a report of what she had seen to Leakey, he replied: “Ah! Now we must redefine man, redefine tool, or accept chimpanzees as human.”

We haven’t quite accepted chimps as human, but the work showed that the distance from one to the other was far less than previously thought. In his introduction to a revised edition of Goodall’s most famous book, In the Shadow of Man, the biologist Stephen Jay Gould called her work “one of the western world’s great scientific achievements”.

In 1964, she married the Dutch-born wildlife photographer Hugo van Lawick, and their son (also called Hugo, but known as Grub) was born three years later. In her books there are several sweet pictures of Grub growing up at Gombe, but the relationship of mother and son has not always been smooth. At one point he was engaged in commercial fishing, of which she as a committed vegetarian disapproved, but is now developing an eco-tourist project in Tanzania and they are getting on much better. Goodall and van Lawick divorced in 1974 and she married Derek Bryceson, director of national parks in Tanzania, who died of cancer in 1980.

Is she one of those naturalists, as Fossey supposedly was in her dark final years, who prefers animals to people? “I’m not one of those people who says let me go and live with chimps forever or dogs forever,” she says. “I certainly prefer a lot of animals to a lot of people, but then I prefer some people to some animals too.”

And does she miss the chimps? “All the chimps I knew so well have gone now,” she says sadly. “Fifi, the last of the real old-timers, died four years ago. It’s not the same as it was.” But she still enjoys returning to Gombe. “When I get up on to my peak where I sat for so long, I can get back into the skin I had and remember just what it felt like – the excitement of never quite knowing what you’d see and what you'd find.”

Hope for Animals and Their World is published by Icon Books.

www.guardian.co.uk/

Copyright Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

Homepage image from Jane Goodall's Wild Chimpanzees

Modern and mobile (1)

Ced Hesse — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:04:00 +0000

Nomadic pastoralism boosts African economies and protects livestock from drought. So why is it under threat? Ced Hesse explains.

Mobile-livestock keeping, or pastoralism, plays a critical role in the economic prosperity of Africa’s drylands. Across east and west Africa, an estimated 50 million livestock producers support their families, their communities, and a massive meat, skins and hides industry based on animals that are fed solely on natural dryland pastures. Where other land-use systems are failing in the face of global climate change, mobile-livestock keeping is generating huge national and regional economic benefits.

Today’s pastoralists download the latest market prices for cattle on their mobile phones, use cheap Chinese motorbikes to reach distant herds or lost camels and trek their livestock thousands of kilometres by foot, truck or ship to trade them nationally and internationally. Prevalent perceptions of pastoralists are that they are a minority, out of touch with the rest of the world and practicing an archaic and outmoded lifestyle. The reality is that pastoralists are fully integrated with wider global processes.

But moving is now becoming a serious problem. Grazing lands are being taken over for other uses and access to water and markets is increasingly difficult. With reduced mobility the economic profitability of livestock keeping is being critically undermined. Animals are producing less meat, less milk and are more susceptible to drought and disease. This is contributing to poverty, resource degradation and conflict.

New thinking, new policies and innovative practices for pastoralist mobility are beginning to take root in many parts of dryland Africa. The African Union and other regional institutions are recognising the huge benefits to be reaped from supporting livestock mobility. This is encouraging several governments to develop informed, progressive policies that reflect the needs of modern pastoralism.

Why move?

Essentially, pastoralists move to take their animals to places where they can find the best quality grazing. It is the scattering of different pastures over different places at different times that makes mobile-livestock keeping so productive in what is otherwise a difficult environment. To sedentary-livestock keepers, who rely on uniformity and economies of scale, randomly variable concentrations of nutrients on the range would be a serious constraint to productivity. But to pastoralists, who are mobile and maintain populations of selectively feeding animals, it represents a resource.

Modern ranching is often believed to be an improvement over traditional livestock management. But research in Ethiopia, Kenya, Botswana and Zimbabwe comparing the productivity of ranching against pastoralism all came to the same conclusion: pastoralism consistently outperforms ranching and to a quite significant degree. Whether measured in terms of meat production, generating energy (calories) or providing cash, pastoralism gives a higher return per hectare of land than ranching.

In east Africa, the intra-regional livestock trade is a major and growing industry, with an annual value in excess of US$65 million (444 million yuan). The profitability of this trade is dependent on livestock being mobile, particularly across borders. In many countries of the Sahel, livestock’s contribution to total agricultural GDP is above 40%. These figures are sizable, and yet they still fail to capture the full contribution of pastoral production systems to national economies. National accounts are based only on the value of final products such as meat and hides and leave out the many social, security and ecological benefits mobile-livestock production adds.

During periods of drought or disaster, mobility becomes absolutely essential for pastoralists, when they are forced to move in order to survive. Drought is a normal occurrence in drylands, and is a key reason why mobile-livestock keeping, rather than crops, is the production strategy of choice.

Obstacles

Pastoralists are increasingly constrained. Farms frequently block access to their grazing areas; national border controls hinder their trade patterns; and the areas they traditionally preserve for times of drought are now national parks or agricultural schemes. In other areas national government policies actively encourage pastoralists to settle and be “modern”. These policies are often driven by unfounded perceptions that pastoralism is economically inefficient and environmentally destructive. Alternative land uses, including large-scale agriculture and national parks, are believed to bring in more national revenues and to have less environmental impact. But this is not evidence based.

Farming is one of the biggest challenges to pastoral mobility. The slow but inexorable advance of family farms, combined in places with the establishment of large-scale commercial farming, is swallowing up vast areas of grazing lands. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has called for a moratorium on the expansion of large mechanised farms in Sudan's central semi-arid regions, sounding a warning that it was a “future flashpoint” for conflict between farmers and pastoralists. Northern Sudan’s huge commercial farms have been blamed for fuelling conflict and for environmental degradation and human rights abuses.

Particularly in east Africa, the loss of land to national parks, game reserves, hunting blocks and conservation severely restricts pastoral mobility as much of this land either consists of critical dry- or wet-season grazing or cuts across seasonal migration routes. The creation of Uganda’s Kidepo Valley National Park in the 1960s, on the border with Sudan and Kenya, severely restricts the movement of the Toposa from southern Sudan to dry-season grazing in Kaabong district, northern Uganda. Within Kaabong District, Dodoth pastoralists have also lost critical wet-season grazing in the north-eastern Timu forest when it was declared a forest reserve in 2000, according to research by Michael Godwin Wantsusi of the Karamoja Agro-Pastoral Development Programme. Yet a lot of evidence suggests that pastoralism is far more compatible with wildlife than other forms of land use, particularly crop farming.

Both non-pastoralists and pastoralists are enclosing the rangelands. From the Borana in southern Ethiopia, to the Fulani in Niger and Burkina Faso and Somali groups in Somaliland, a territory in the Horn of Africa, pastoral families are fencing grazing land. Poverty, due to shrinking herd sizes, is driving thousands of pastoral families throughout east and west Africa to fence off the rangelands to practice rain-fed agriculture and, where water is available, dry-season gardening. Others are enclosing land from a fear of losing out as more and more land is taken or are seeking to protect the rangeland from farming or the cutting of trees for charcoal.

It is not known how much former pastoralist-grazing land has been lost overall but much of it is in the form of wheat farms, sugar farms, irrigated tobacco, cotton and sorghum schemes, flower and vegetable farms, game and cattle ranches, national parks and forest reserves. And it is not just the sheer extent of the lost land that is so important; it is the nature of that lost land that is critical. Much of the alienation concerns strategic areas such as wetlands or riverine forests. Here, because of higher and more stable moisture, pastures of higher nutritional content can be found, particularly in the dry season when the surrounding range is dry and poor.

These areas represent “islands” of high-quality pasture where livestock feed until the arrival of new, fresh grass with the next rainy season. The loss of these areas undermines the profitability and resilience of the whole pastoral system. Little research has been carried out to calculate the economic and environmental impacts the loss of these areas has had on national economies, and whether the expected benefits from the new land-use systems are greater than the benefits lost as a result of displacing pastoralism.

Conflicts are also a major block to mobility, altering grazing patterns, reducing productivity and increasing environmental degradation. The enduring conflicts in Chad and Sudan mean pastoralists move together in larger groups for security but have subsequently found it more difficult to access high quality pasture and water. Sudan’s conflict with Egypt also reduced access to key grazing areas for Beja pastoralists in Red Sea state, north-west Sudan. Where grazing areas cannot be accessed, the under-utilisation of pasture leads to bush encroachment. Where pastoralists become squeezed into smaller grazing areas, competition for a dwindling resource increases and conflict becomes inevitable and self-perpetuating.

Across the drylands inappropriate policies are blocking livestock mobility. Enduring perceptions of pastoralism as an outdated, economically inefficient and environmentally destructive land-use system continue to drive rangeland and livestock policy in much of Africa. Yet, none of these perceptions are evidence-based, informed by past failure or reflect current scientific knowledge of the dynamics in dryland environments and livelihood systems. Nor are they designed with the participation of pastoral communities. These persistent beliefs must be left behind in the twentieth century.

Ced Hesse is principal researcher in the climate-change group at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED). Co-authors of this piece were Saverio Kratli, Izzy Birch and Magda Nassef.

An earlier version of this article was published in book form by the IIED as “Modern and mobile: The future of livestock production in Africa’s drylands”. It is summarised and used here with permission.

NEXT: recognising global advantages

Homepage image from World Bank

Modern and mobile (2)

Ced Hesse — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 10:48:00 +0000

African pastoralism has been dismissed as outdated and inefficient. But awareness of its social and environmental benefits is growing, says Ced Hesse.

In many parts of dryland Africa, national governments are beginning to value pastoralism and the importance of mobility for productivity. Innovative policies now recognise and reflect pastoralism’s crucial role within local, national and regional economies, and new activities put these policies into practice.

Recognising that pastoralism frequently needs to cross international borders, and that regional trade needs support, several international institutions are formalising cross-border pastoral mobility. This provides nation states with a benchmark to design their own policy and legislation. The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) has led the way, providing an institutional framework to facilitate cross-border livestock mobility. Cross-border movement is authorised by granting a certificate that controls the departure of pastoralists from their home countries and assures the health of local herds.

Over the past 15 years, the pace of policy reform in west Africa has been considerable. The governments of Burkina Faso, Guinea, Mali, Mauritania and Niger have all passed specific pastoral laws to protect pastoral land and to facilitate livestock mobility both within countries and across international borders. In eastern Africa, too, there is some progress. The Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers of Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania all recognise pastoralism as a livelihood system deserving of support. East Africa has also established influential pastoral parliamentary groups that offer oversight of government policy. Pastoralists’ Day in Ethiopia and Pastoralists’ Week in Kenya are now regular features on these countries’ political calendars.

Decentralisation throughout the Sahel has introduced a radical new agenda involving civil society in areas traditionally controlled by government. The devolution of authority for the management of local affairs including land and the provision of key services such as water, health and education through local government reforms, decentralisation and regionalisation in Mali, Niger, Sudan, Ethiopia, Tanzania and Burkina Faso offer hope for the more active involvement of pastoral communities in the implementation of policies that affect their lives in many countries. These reforms vindicate pastoral indigenous knowledge and practice, as well as the scientific research that confirms the critical role of livestock mobility in maximising productivity and preserving the environment from degradation.

In west Africa the Wodaabe (Fulani) of Niger are increasingly internet-aware. These groups develop their own websites in French and English and, more recently, Spanish to reach out to a wider public, to defend their way of life and to explain the key role of mobility. The Wodaabe have adapted their traditional gathering of clans and created an internationally-renowned General Assembly. Donors, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and tourists are all invited to attend what has become a cultural festival, further raising the political visibility of these emerging new forms of social organisation.

These innovations are assisted by new thinking among development agencies, who, after decades of development failure, now facilitate more holistic interventions in pastoral areas. Projects that focussed solely on water development, animal health or range management have been replaced with concern about social, institutional and governance issues. Peace building is on the increase, as are experiments with ways to protect key pastoral assets in the event of drought or disease. And the importance of markets has finally been recognised with innovations ranging from pastoral credit provision to drought insurance.

Much attention is paid to addressing land tenure and establishing appropriate institutional mechanisms at the outset to reconcile the competing interests over resources often found in Africa’s rangelands. These rangelands are part of what is broadly called the “commons” – natural resources that are owned, managed and used collectively by different users, either simultaneously or sequentially often under different tenure arrangements. Through experience, projects now acknowledge that rules for the management of these areas must recognise and secure these multiple interests.

Millions and millions of US dollars have been spent in pastoral-drought relief in dryland Africa since the 1970s. Nearly all of this money has gone on buying food aid, which while saving pastoral lives has failed to save their livelihoods. For many pastoral communities, the return of the rains after the drought has not allowed them to return to mobile-livestock keeping. Having lost their animals during the drought, they either remain in or around the towns from which they received the food aid that saved their lives, sometimes succeeding in a new livelihood, or they try their hand at agriculture, charcoal making or, in extreme cases, adopting a violent lifestyle.

Groundbreaking work by a consortium of agencies including Save the Children in eastern Africa has been experimenting with market-based approaches to protect the key livelihood assets of pastoral communities. By providing cash for work, as opposed to food for work, or by facilitating controlled de-stocking of pastoral livestock through the market with private traders, pastoralists in Ethiopia and Kenya managed to save their core breeding herd though the drought of 2006. These initiatives take a livelihoods approach to emergency response, which not only helps to harmonise relief and development interventions, so often contradictory, but also strengthens pastoralists’ resilience to drought.

Global challenges

Unlike other land uses, pastoralism is uniquely capable of adapting to climate change. Although climatic variability is the norm in Africa’s drylands, human-induced climate change is beginning to pose a serious challenge. Climate is becoming more variable and less predictable. Successive poor rains, shifts in the beginning and end of the rainy seasons, increased rainfall intensity – which often runs off in floods and damages crops and infrastructure – increases and decreases in rainfall in varying parts of the continent and increases in drought-related shocks, are all current trends observed across the continent. These trends are likely to continue over the short to medium term.

Pastoralists that are mobile are in a better position to quickly and successfully adapt to a changing climate than those tied to sedentary land uses. For 7,000 years pastoralists have used mobility to respond quickly to variations in the drylands’ climate, and used specialist risk-spreading strategies as an insurance against the potential loss of their stock. Whether pastoralists will successfully adapt to the current climate change will depend on how the environmental and developmental challenges are tackled and whether mobility is secured. To continue to adapt, pastoralist communities need to be informed of changes to come and be involved in planning for the future.

The livestock sector, and by implication pastoralism, has been accused of contributing to global warming through methane emissions. The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations’s high-profile report, “Livestock’s Long Shadow”, found livestock to be responsible for 18% of greenhouse-gas emissions measured in carbon dioxide equivalent, a higher share than transport. When the data is unravelled, however, it becomes clear that livestock have been globally aggregated, with European intensive-milk production, south-east Asian high-intensity pig farming, US beef burger feedlots and ranching and African pastoralism all lumped together. Until we have a better understanding of the environmental impacts of the different livestock sectors, it is a mistake to conclude that mobile-livestock keeping in Africa’s drylands does more harm through its contribution to global warming than good through its contribution to national food security, economic growth and carbon sequestration.

There is now increasing interest in exploring the value of pastoralism in mitigating the impact of climate change, with the carbon sequestration capability of Africa’s pastures emerging as a real opportunity for the drylands. Thirteen million square kilometres of grasslands are found in Africa. Grasslands store approximately 34% of the global stock of carbon dioxide – a service worth US$7 (47.8 yuan) for every 10,000 square metres, according to research by Robert Constanza, director of the Gund Institute of Ecological Economics, and others. What is important to note is that grasslands’ capacity to store carbon is significantly reduced in heavily degraded areas, or where rangelands are converted to croplands.

Rangelands, and pastoralism in general, are increasingly seen as having positive environmental impacts. The grazing action of livestock is recognised as having helped maintain healthy populations of wildlife – the cornerstone of much of Africa’s tourism industry. East African savannah landscapes have been largely shaped over the course of the past 3,000 to 4,000 years by pastoralist land-management practices. Well-managed grazing opens up pastures, stimulates vegetation growth, contributes to seed dispersal and pasture diversity and enhances nutrient cycling through the ecosystem. Where mobility is reduced and pastoralists are confined to limited spaces, evidence of overgrazing becomes apparent.

Where mobility is secured, pastoralism has massive environmental benefits, can adapt to climate change, and presents African governments with the very real possibility of grasslands generating revenues as carbon sinks. When their livelihoods are secure, pastoralists freely patrol inhospitable and remote border regions and can help reduce conflict. And when their herding strategies and practices are secured, pastoralism allows the economic independence of millions of people in the drylands, who would otherwise have little alternative but to fuel urban poverty and undesired social dynamics.

Future policy decisions need to take into account the many valuable benefits and services provided by pastoralism. If the pastoral system is allowed to flip into irreversible destitution, there is a real danger that all these benefits and services will be lost. Losing pastoralism is not in the public interest.

Ced Hesse is principal researcher in the climate-change group at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED). Co-authors of this piece were Saverio Kratli, Izzy Birch and Magda Nassef.

An earlier version of this article was published in book form by the IIED as “Modern and mobile: The future of livestock production in Africa’s drylands”. It is summarised and used here with permission.

Homepage image by Andy Catley

High-rise drama in Nanchang

Li Taige — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:09:00 +0000

The unnecessary demolition of a 10-year-old hotel in south-east China exposes a shallow commitment to low-carbon development, argues Li Taige.

It only takes eight seconds to demolish a four-star hotel.

Nanchang, the capital of Jiangxi province in south-eastern China, which claims it is en route to becoming a “low carbon city”, has done something almost unbelievable. On February 6, the landmark 22-storey, 86-metre high Wuhu Hotel, which only opened in 1997, was dynamited. The hotel was owned by Hong Kong’s Kaimei Group, which bought it in July, 2007 with a view to adding a further three floors – raising the building to a height of 90 metres – and refurbishing the interior to five-star standards.

The changes were approved by the local planning authorities, but the company then changed its mind. According to a city planner quoted in the city’s Information Daily on November 19 last year, Kaimei became nervous about possible subsidence and abandoned its plans. A new proposal was submitted: to demolish the original building and replace it with a new 25-storey hotel and six-storey auxiliary building. The Nanchang government signed off the plan in early November, approving both demolition and reconstruction.

The news of the demolition was met with scepticism from the public, with some commenting that the Wuhu was “the best hotel in the city” and demolition would be an “enormous waste” and others calling for an investigation. But the hotel was nonetheless demolished, to the bewilderment of the local community.

The quality of the original building can not have been the issue – otherwise, how could Kaimei have planned to extend it to 25 storeys? Furthermore, professor Xue Fengsong of the People’s Liberation Army University of Science and Technology, an explosions expert who was responsible for the demolition, told the media that the building was “solidly constructed”. The official line from Kaimei’s spokesperson, Qi Xiaoxing, was that there were failings in the structure and design of the hotel and that reinforcement would have been insufficient to enable the planned increase in height. Perhaps they are right that the Wuhu Hotel could not have been transformed into a 25-storey, five-star hotel. But it was designed as a 22-storey, four-star hotel. Why force these changes upon it?

Kaimei’s behaviour is strange enough. But the really odd thing is that Nanchang’s planning authorities played along. Surely, they realised the demolition would waste a huge amount of social resources, not to mention produce large quantities of dust pollution and building waste. Governmental neglect of duty led directly to the destruction of the hotel. Since Jiangxi is one of eastern China’s less economically developed provinces, the demolition of a perfectly good hotel in the provincial capital is particularly surprising. Its reconstruction also entails the pointless consumption of large amounts of energy, which will doubtless increase the city’s carbon footprint.

The ironic thing is that Nanchang talks endlessly about developing a low-carbon economy and creating a low-carbon city. In November last year, the city held the “First World Low-Carbon and Eco-Economy Conference and Technology Exhibition”. Low carbon banners and slogans were plastered everywhere and the conference even earnestly announced a “Nanchang Declaration” on the development of an eco-friendly global economy – through the promotion of low energy consumption, low carbon emissions and low pollution.

Prior to the conference, the UK’s Strategic Programme Fund had launched a low-carbon cities project, with Nanchang the first signed up. The Nanchang Daily reported that Nanchang, along with the provinces of Guangdong and Hebei, and the cities of Chongqing and Baoding, had been named as “National Low-Carbon Economy Pilots” at a climate-change conference in Beijing. The city is clearly very concerned about its environmental labels. Clean energy has an important place on Nanchang’s low-carbon roadmap, with plans for a world-class photovoltaic park. And several months ago, solar energy firm Saiwei’s thin film solar-cell plant went into operation in the Nanchang High-Tech Development Zone.

Many other Chinese cities have the same ambitions and plans for low-carbon economies and new energy. Indeed, a wave of “low-carbon cities” is sweeping across the land. The development of new energy sources is, of course, to be encouraged. But it would be short-sighted to think it is all that is required for a low-carbon economy. Other methods such as waste reduction through urban planning and advocating the use of public transport are equally important.

Demolishing a hotel that has been in use for little more than a decade is not common. But unnecessary demolitions do often happen in China. In one district of Fuzhou, the capital of the south-eastern province of Fujian, the local government recently released a startling piece of news: it plans to demolish a 15 million yuan (US$2.2 million) primary school, which only opened last year, along with a number of residential buildings that are less than ten years old in order to allow construction of a “Central Business District”.

Last summer I visited a project in Wuhan, central China’s most populous city, linking two urban lakes with a 1.7-kilometre long canal. The work involved the relocation of 8,932 households – but the majority of those homes were not actually in the area needed by the project. In early 2007, a Zhejiang University building on the bank of Hangzhou’s West Lake, east China, was also dynamited. The 20-storey, 60-metre high building was designed to last a century but ended up being used for just 13 years. The university had sold its lakeside campus to Hong Kong’s Kerry Properties, which plans to build a new complex.

The legal system should be the strongest guarantee of development of a low-carbon economy. But many take advantage of loopholes or a lack of legislation or simply forget about the law altogether. The unavoidable truth is that many of China’s local government officials have not appreciated the true meaning of a low-carbon economy. They like the low-carbon city label, but not what it really entails.

Li Taige is a Beijing-based journalist. He obtained a master’s degree in engineering from Sichuan University in 1997, and studied as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2003-2004.

Homapage image from Lotus prince.

A home away from home

Suzanne Goldenberg — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 15:29:00 +0000

Can some of the most vulnerable species be saved from extinction due to climate change? One biologist has a radical idea: pick them up and move them, writes Suzanne Goldenberg.

Picture an elephant in the wild, making its stately progress across the savannah, tall grass bending beneath its feet. Now transplant that image to the American prairie. In one of the most startling new ideas to emerge about climate change, a leading conservation biologist is calling for plants and wildlife facing extinction to be saved simply by picking them up and moving them.

Camille Parmesan, a butterfly biologist at the University of Texas at Austin, has been monitoring the effects of rapid climate change on species – particularly those threatened because they cannot adapt to or escape from rising temperatures – for more than a decade now. But her idea for a modern-day Noah’s ark remains hugely controversial.

“The idea is that, for certain species at very high risk of extinction due to climate change, we should actively pick them up and move them to suitable locations that are outside their historic range,” she tells me in her office at the university campus, near the biology laboratory in which she and her husband keep myriad caterpillar samples in the cold store.

Her proposals, once confined to a handful of scientists, are now getting a broader airing as governments begin to grapple with the enormous problem of how to insulate animal and plant life from a warming climate. Shortly after appearing inThe Atlantic magazine’s list of “brave thinkers”, Parmesan lobbied negotiators, environmental activists and scientists at last December’s climate-change summit in Copenhagen to start drawing up plans to move animals that are most at risk.

She is, not surprisingly, frustrated and angry with the failure of governments to cut the emissions that cause climate change. After the subsequent discovery of a false claim about melting Himalayan glaciers by the UN’s climate body the IPCC, Parmesan also stresses that conservationists should not fall into a pattern of reflexively blaming climate change for each and every decline in wildlife. However, she remains convinced of the dangers to the world’s animals from a rapidly warming atmosphere.

Scientists have long believed that 20% to 30% of all known species of land animal, bird and fish could become extinct because of climate change. But recent studies, based on more elevated temperature projections, have suggested an even greater rate of die-off – 40% to 70% – as heatwaves, drought and the increasing acidification of the oceans drive animals from their native habitats and destroy their food supply.

The sheer scale of threatened extinctions has forced conservationists to rethink what was once dismissed as an outlandish notion. And it’s got Parmesan thinking about elephants …

To date, there is little evidence about how climate change – rather than traditional threats such as poaching or growing urbanisation – is affecting the grasslands where these majestic creatures live in the wild. “But at some point, I think we might want to think about moving them around,” Parmesan says.

She has already been pushing for efforts to regenerate America’s prairie grasslands in parts of Texas and the US Midwest, by bringing in big grazing animals. There are fossils to suggest there were elephants in North America tens of thousands of years ago. So why not transplant African elephants to North America?

“With climate change, I am starting to think that, if we do get a massive reduction of Africa’s grassland, then as I am advocating restoration of the US prairie anyway, we can use the large herbivores from Africa to help that process because they are already co-adapted [or mutually accommodating]. I wouldn’t be opposed to that.”

Parmesan can see her way to moving other big herbivores too, such as giraffes. She can even justify finding new homes for pandas. However, she concedes that most of the planet’s iconic large animals would still have to find their own way out from climate change – it would be impractical to move carnivores, for example.

“What we are advocating is not moving tigers to Africa, nor moving polar bears to Antarctica – nothing as dramatic as that – but [on the whole] to take species that are fairly innocuous, including a lot of plants and insects,” she says. “We know enough about their competitive abilities and their behaviour, and we have no expectation that they are going to be able to take over an ecosystem.”

Climate studies since 2000 reveal a growing threat to animal life far beyond the polar regions that have been feeling its early impacts. A review of recent scientific literature showed 52% of species striking out for more temperate areas as their traditional habitats became unsuitable, migrating from 50 kilometres to as far as 1,600 kilometres away when geography and human settlements allowed.

Climate change is also altering their way of life: some 62% of species, for example, are mating earlier in the spring. The studies noted huge varieties in response to climate change except for one fatal trait: no species was exhibiting the kind of large-scale evolutionary changes needed to adapt to warming temperatures in its existing habitat. “Evolution is not going to save the polar bear,” says Parmesan simply.

If it were up to her, the evacuation would start now – perhaps with a variety of the ephemeral Checkerspot butterfly that started her on this unlikely career path. Now 48, she did not set out to become a campaigner – or even a lepidopterist, for that matter. The youngest (and smallest) of six daughters, she grew up in a solidly Republican family with deep roots in the Texas oil industry. Her mother, a geologist, worked for an oil company, as does one of her sisters.

Initially, Parmesan wanted to study primates, but she did not have the stomach to work with caged animals. She claims she is uncomfortable even describing herself as an environmentalist – although she does drive a blue Prius, and watches her carbon footprint.

It was fieldwork that set Parmesan on her more public trajectory, after she published her first paper on the plight of Edith’s Checkerspot. In the early 1990s, she spent more than four years rattling across the Pacific Northwest in an old Toyota pickup truck, tracking these butterflies from Mexico to Alberta.

Earlier researchers – including her husband, Michael Singer – had established that the Checkerspot was sensitive to temperature. The trek convinced Parmesan that it was dying out because of climate change: rising temperatures in California were drying up the plant that was its main food source, although the butterfly continued to do fine in northern latitudes. And yet Parmesan admits she was, at first, sceptical about projections of the broader impacts of climate change on the animal world.

“I have to admit that 10 years ago, I thought they were a bit too extreme,” she says. But now she fears the scientific community is under-estimating the risk of extinction, and is frustrated with conservation organisations for failing to grasp the urgency of this situation.

When Parmesan first began talking about moving species, or “assisted colonisation”, at academic conferences, her fellow biologists erupted. They accused her of playing God; of tampering with nature in ways that carry enormous risk. They warned that her approach would set off a whole new chain of problems. How did Parmesan know the transplants would take to their new surroundings? How did she know they would not stage a hostile takeover, chasing out the native species?

“I was surprised at how angry people got – how emotional,” she says. “They were just horrified that I advocated playing God. They thought I was advocating an engineering approach to conservation.”

Which, Parmesan concedes, she is. But she argues that her approach may be the only way left to save some species whose escape routes are blocked by urban sprawl or punishing desert, or which cannot adapt in time.

Unlike traditional threats to wildlife, Parmesan says there is no prospect of recovery from climate change. Loss of habitat and poaching can be reversed, given enough money. Threatened animals can be coaxed back to healthy numbers – as in the case of the wolf in the Rocky Mountain West region of the United States. Degraded landscapes can be restored. But climate change is irreversible, at least on a human timescale. And besides, it’s not as if there hasn’t been transportation of animal or plant life in the past.

“It doesn't make any sense to say it’s OK for the shipping industry and the transport industry to accidentally move stuff around, for the aquarium trade to move stuff around, for the garden trade to move stuff all over the place, but that it’s not OK for a conservation biologist who is desperately trying to save a species from extinction to move it 100 miles [about 160 kilometres]. Come on, we have mucked around with Earth to such a degree that I think it’s a ridiculous argument.”

In recent years, Parmesan and a handful of other scientists have begun work on a blueprint for moving plants and wildlife on the verge of extinction. She argues it would be far more effective to transplant entire communities of plants and animals, rather than a few token species.

“If we move individual species, it will just be: ‘Let’s save a few cool things for our grandkids.’ But if we can get people to think about it on a grander scale, it could save some significant percentage of species.”

Their idea is to start small – with plants, butterflies, birds, small rodents, and mammals – and to restrict the relocation plan to isolated spots that are immediately threatened by climate change. That is, high-altitude species that are being forced to migrate higher and higher up mountains to find cooler temperatures. Parmesan would shift those populations to another, higher mountain within close range.

It is too soon to say if she is winning the argument. Her ideas are still considered outside the mainstream of conservationists, and undertaking any kind of mass animal rescue will require rewriting existing international laws on transporting animals, as well as huge infusions of cash. But some of the bigger wildlife NGOs are beginning to listen more seriously to what was seen only a decade ago as an outlandish idea.

“We need to have as many potential tools as possible in our tool boxes,” agrees Thomas Brooks of Conservation International. “It is not very easy and it is not very cheap, but I do see this as an option that needs to be explored when cheaper and easier options aren’t working. But this is a more difficult and expensive approach, and needs to be evaluated carefully in that light.”

Even with temperature rises of 0.7° Celsius [1.26° Fahrenheit], some animals have already been lost – such as the golden toad that lives in the cool mountains of Costa Rica. (Biologists there have warned that more than a dozen amphibian species have disappeared from the jungles because of climate change). And last year, researchers in Australia reported what would be the world’s first mammalian extinction of modern times: the lemuroid ringtail possum. These animals drop out of trees and die if the temperature rises above 30° Celsius [86° Fahrenheit] –although subsequent reports suggest a number have since been sighted.

Many other species are under a death sentence. In the American west, researchers have charted a sharp decline in the pika, a small, furry brown animal that lives in the Rocky Mountains. As for the polar bear, its natural hunting grounds are fast disappearing with the melting sea ice. Some studies suggest the Arctic’s summer sea ice could disappear entirely by 2020, and with it the seals that are the bears’ main food supply. Recently, Canadian biologists reported several cases of male polar bears eating their young because they were going hungry.

But while it’s too late for the polar bear, Parmesan believes there is a chance of saving other animals – provided governments and conservation organisations overcome their reservations and act now. “Otherwise, we are going to see a whole slew of species go extinct that we could have saved, if only we’d been willing to think a little bit more outside the box.”

www.guardian.co.uk/

Copyright Guardian News and Media Limited 2010

Homepage image by lensbug.chandru

Wringing China dry

Feng Yongfeng — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 15:04:00 +0000

Reservoirs and hydropower stations are sprouting up all over China, damaging ecosystems and causing conflict. It’s time to leave the rivers alone, says Feng Yongfeng.

Last December, 160,000 residents living along the Qingzhang River in Hebei, north-east China petitioned local government over the construction of a new hydropower station in neighbouring province Shanxi, complaining that it was cover for a new reservoir. They wanted the authorities to call an immediate halt to the project, saying that the Qingzhang River – the lifeblood of the county and its 400,000 inhabitants – would, otherwise, be cut off.

The Qingzhang is part of the Hai River system. It rises in Shanxi, then flows through Hebei and Henan and its waters are shared between the upper and lower reaches. Since the 1950s, various water-storage projects have been constructed in Shanxi. In the two decades leading up to 1965, the river’s annual average flow was 1.96 billion cubic metres. But, from 1980 to 2000, it was only 356 million cubic metres – huge quantities of water were being retained upstream.

Meanwhile, Hebei has been busy building its own reservoirs. Since 1949, more than 1,000 reservoirs of different sizes have been constructed “for flood protection”. This took reservoir capacity across the province to 10 billion cubic metres of water, 6 billion of which could be supplied to cities. But a mixture of economic growth, a rising population and years of drought left parts of Hebei suffering from water shortages. And so reservoirs originally intended to prevent flooding were gradually used to supply water to the cities.

Hebei has another grievance. Even during times of extreme water shortage, it is obliged to provide a constant flow to Beijing to ensure the capital’s water security. The Hebei to Beijing section of the South-North Water Transfer Project has already been completed. Should Beijing suffer a water crisis, Hebei’s four major reservoirs – Wangkuai, Xidayang, Gangnan and Huangbizhuang – will be expected, come what may, to turn on the taps. When water levels at Beijing’s Miyun reservoir fall below one billion cubic metres, the Hebao and Yunzhou reservoirs, over the border in Hebei, are also forced to provide water – even if they themselves are nearly dry.

But even Hebei and Shanxi are not enough to satisfy the capital. In the 1950s, Beijing built the four billion cubic metre Guanting reservoir on the Yongding River, a tributary of the Hai River in north-east China. But, by 2009, water levels were hovering around the 100 million cubic-metre mark. Water expert and leader of Beijing-based NGO, Green SOS, Wang Jian, blames the 270 reservoirs built upstream for the low levels.

Currently, local governments are fighting to hold onto any water that passes through their borders. Hebei is also vexed about a project planned in Shaanxi, central China, that will divert water from the stretch of the Han River in the south of the province, through the Qinling mountains and into the Wei River, where it will raise water levels and reduce pollution. With such large quantities of water being taken at the upper reaches – and another 10 billion cubic metres from the middle reaches earmarked for Beijing – nobody can predict what kind of conflict will arise.

Per capita water resources in the north of China are inadequate, giving rise to protectionism and hoarding. But south of the Huai River, where flows are plentiful, a different kind of water war is under way. Hydroelectric firms want to turn water into electricity. For them, it is “liquid oil”, but all the hydropower stations and water distribution hubs they are putting in place will end up destroying the rivers’ ecosystems.

China’s major waterways flow down from the Tibetan Plateau, with differences in altitude providing the potential for energy generation. So power firms are particularly smitten with the hydropower possibilities in the south-west of the country. After the year 2000, investment in hydropower was liberalised, leaving both major power firms and smaller private companies free to build hydropower stations.

Within a few years, tributaries of the Jinsha, Yalong, Dadu, Lancang and Nu rivers had been developed; as soon as water left one power station, it flowed right into the next. The actual rivers themselves are also unlikely to escape their fate; there are plans for numerous dams on almost all of them. And while the public is paying attention to the hydropower fever that has taken hold in the south-west, similar developments are taking place on some rivers in the east. The counties of Jinzhai, Yuexi and Huoshan in the Dabie mountains of Anhui province, eastern China, all have plans to “enrich the people” and “boost the economy” through small-scale hydropower projects.

The first hydropower station on the Jinhua, or Wu River, system, the largest southern tributary of the Yangtze, was built in 1950, at Huhai on the Qiantang tributary. By 2005, 183 stations had been built, generating more than 61,000 kilowatts of electricity. Fujian’s Min River, in the south-eastern corner of China, was not far behind. Figures from 2004 indicate the river had 29 large or medium-sized hydropower stations and a large number of smaller stations. The city of Nanping, in central Fujian, was alone home to 183 stations that were completed, under construction or in the pipeline. Environmental assessments or approvals had not been obtained for the majority of these.

The density of hydroelectric development is shocking: the water outlet from one station feeds directly into the dam of the next. On the Min River, the outlet for the Shuikou station flows into the dam for the Shaxi station, while the outlet for Shaxi flows into the dam for the Xiayang station. And so it goes on. As a result, these stretches of river are left without flowing water – they and their tributaries become a series of lakes.

On December 12 last year, the State Council issued an environmental and economic plan for the Poyang lake region, indicating the area had become a part of national-level strategy. This plan includes the construction of a water-distribution hub, roughly where Poyang Lake and the Yangtze River meet, to control the level of the lake. When the lake is full, water will be returned to the river and, when levels are low, water from the Yangtze will be fed in. The level of the lake will not, therefore, fluctuate so much across the seasons.

Almost the entire global population of 3,000 white cranes spends the winter at Poyang Lake. “For a long time, the white cranes have found the habitat and food that they need at Poyang,” says wetlands expert Lei Guangchun. “If the water level during the winter suddenly increases, they and other wintering birds won’t be able to forage and populations will plummet.”

The idea of a lock controlling the water level also worries dolphin experts. Wang Ding, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Wuhan-based Institute of Hydrobiology, says that, like the already extinct baiji, or Yangtze River Dolphin, the originally populous finless porpoise could also be lost. There may already be fewer than 2,000 finless porpoises in the wild, divided into two main populations – one in the Yangtze River and one in Poyang Lake. Bridges over the entrance to the lake and frequent shipping have already virtually cut these two groups off from each other and there is an emerging consensus that this is resulting in genetic degradation. This “ecological lock” will completely remove any chance of genetic mingling and means that, in the not too distant future, the finless porpoise could follow the baiji into oblivion.

Ma Jun, a well-known environmentalist, director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs and chinadialogue author says: “Full-on building of reservoirs and hydroelectric stations are not only the spark for frequent water conflict but also cause loss of ecological function by breaking the rivers down into sections. We need to let the rivers flow and keep their ecosystems healthy. We need to let people live in harmony. The best way to do that is to reduce the exploitation of rivers and let them recover.”

Feng Yongfeng is a technology journalist at Guangming Daily.

Homepage image from Wetland China shows white cranes at Poyang Lake, south-east China.

Chinese coal remedies (1)

Natural Resources Defense Council — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 15:01:00 +0000

In spite of an urgent need to cut emissions, fossil-fuel consumption in China is soaring. CCS offers a solution, says the Natural Resources Defense Council.

To avoid the worst consequences of global warming, the world must limit average temperature increases to two degrees Celsius or less above pre-industrial levels by reducing carbon dioxide emissions by at least 50% below 1990 levels by the year 2050. Several recent studies have found that the warming we are already committed to will exceed that limit even if emissions growth were to stop completely.

Achieving the urgently needed emissions reductions will require efforts beyond first-resort measures such as increasing energy efficiency, scaling up renewable-energy use, and enhancing natural carbon sinks. Given the world’s current heavy reliance on fossil fuels, some countries, such as China and the United States, need to pursue a wide range of carbon-mitigation strategies that should include carbon capture and storage (CCS).

All three components of CCS technology – capture, transport, and sequestration – are commercially mature but have mainly been used for other purposes rather than CCS. Very few integrated large-scale projects are in operation today due to the lack of explicit national climate policies to limit carbon-dioxide emissions. For the technology to contribute to meaningful emissions reductions, integrated commercial projects are urgently needed to gain operational experience and drive down costs. Sequestering high-purity carbon-dioxide waste streams from certain industrial facilities reduces the cost of a CCS demonstration project and thus presents a “low-hanging fruit” opportunity. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that CCS is capable of contributing 15% to 55% of worldwide cumulative carbon-emission reductions until the year 2100.

CCS is of particular importance for China. Although the country has made significant strides in expanding capacities in hydro, wind, solar and nuclear power, it still meets 70% of its energy needs through coal. By 2020, China is projected to have four times the hydropower capacity and double the wind and solar-power capacity of the United States but these renewable sources will remain small in comparison to coal consumption.

Chinese researcher Kejun Jiang and colleagues project that, even assuming concerted action to restrict the development of energy-intensive industries, taxation policies to encourage energy efficiency and conservation, strong government support for renewable and nuclear-energy development and high efficiency standards in industrial production, coal will continue to meet more than half of China’s energy demand until 2030. Under this aggressive policy scenario, China’s coal consumption could peak around 2020 and then slightly decrease through 2050. Even if coal consumption decreases, China’s carbon-dioxide emissions from all fossil fuels would not decrease without CCS, but would only level off.

China has promising geological-storage potential. Chinese and US researchers have identified over 1,600 large carbon dioxide point sources, 91% of which are located 160 kilometres or less from potential geological sinks and more than half of which are located directly above a candidate formation.

There are at least 130 megatonnes of high-purity carbon dioxide emitted each year from 185 large-scale ammonia, hydrogen, and ethylene-oxide production facilities, according to Xiaochun Li and Ning Wei of the Chinese Institute of Rock and Soil Mechanics (ISRM). Three-quarters of those high purity carbon-dioxide streams are situated within 80 kilometres of a candidate sink. Such streams could total as much as 208 megatonnes per year in China once all planned ammonia, methanol, and liquid-hydrocarbon production facilities come online, according to research by Zhong Zheng, Eric Larson and others, who have told the NRDC about their work. Because the state where carbon dioxide is separated from a gas mixture is skipped, the costs of CCS for several of these sources can range from US$10 (68 yuan) to US$20 (137 yuan) per metric tonne of carbon dioxide avoided, lower than typical estimates for power plants, these researchers say.

Initial basin-scale assessments, performed and published jointly by Li and Wei of ISRM with the US Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), suggest that China’s theoretical sequestration capacity in deep saline formations amounts to 3,066 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide – more than 450 times China’s total carbon dioxide emissions in 2005. The practical capacity and matched capacity, however, are expected to be much smaller than the theoretical potential when more factors are taken into account, such as injectivity – the rate and pressure the carbon dioxide can be pumped into the target without fracturing the formation – the effectiveness of carbon dioxide trapping mechanisms, cap-rock tightness, reservoir size, risk from faults, regulations, infrastructure constraints and economics.

Even though China’s sedimentary basins are large in number, they are also among the most complicated in the world and are characterised by numerous small-scale faults and strong faulting activity. These features have led to the formation of complex geological traps, which indicate that detailed, localised studies and site characterisation will be crucial to ensuring the successful application of CCS.

China’s capacity for carbon dioxide-enhanced oil recovery (EOR) and enhanced gas recovery (EGR) is estimated to be up to 10 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide. While the assessments of oil and gas fields were also conducted at the basin level, the researchers used available field-location information to get greater storage-zone resolution. Unlike deep saline aquifers, oil and gas fields generally have more accurate and detailed geological information. According to ISRM-PNNL joint studies, two-fifths of the large carbon dioxide point sources in China are located within 80 kilometres of an oil or gas field and the estimated incremental oil production by EOR in China’s 16 major onshore and three offshore oil basins could technically reach up to seven billion barrels – two and half times China’s current annual oil consumption.

There are a number of near-term opportunities for CCS demonstration in China, including various oil and gas basins that show promising EOR and EGR opportunities from using high-purity carbon dioxide sources or combined waste gas streams. A number of integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) projects that are either under construction or in the planning stage have also expressed an intention to conduct a pilot CCS project, as has the Shenhua direct coal-liquefaction plant in Inner Mongolia, northern China.

A number of ammonia plants that are located 50 kilometres to150 kilometres from the oilfields of the Jianghan Basin, in south-central China, collectively emit over four million tonnes of high-purity carbon dioxide per year from manufacturing fertilisers. The combined benefits of short distances between sources and sinks and high potential EOR revenues make the Jianghan area a promising near-term CCS candidate.

The crude natural gas produced at the Jiangyou gas field in western China, contains acid gas – carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide – which needs to be removed from the gas product anyway. And the city of Jiangyou, located less than 25 kilometres away, has several large industrial point sources of low-concentration carbon dioxide. Therefore, one opportunity for low-cost CCS demonstration would be using the acid gas mixed with the industrial low-concentration carbon dioxide, without capture, for EGR.

China’s largest coal producer, the Shenhua Group, has a joint US-China project that aims to collect high-purity carbon dioxide from a direct coal-liquefaction facility in the Ordos Basin of Inner Mongolia and is slated to reach operational status in 2010 or 2011, with an aim to eventually sequester 2.9 megatonnes of pure carbon dioxide per year, most likely in a nearby saline aquifer.

The GreenGen project, mentioned in Li Jia and Xi Liang’s chinadialogue article on the economics of CCS, is led by China’s largest power producer, the Huaneng Group and will be China’s first commercial-scale IGCC facility, with plans to capture 25,000 to 30,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year starting in 2012-2013, with a higher target set for 2017. This 250-megawatt IGCC plant is currently under construction in the Bohai Basin in Tianjin, north-eastern China.

The China Power Investment Corporation has proposed an IGCC facility in Langfang, near Beijing, that would capture 8% of the carbon dioxide from the syngas – a gas mixture containing varying amounts of carbon monoxide and hydrogen – produced by two 488-megawatt IGCC units. An oilfield is only one kilometre away from the facility site, making sequestration through EOR a prime possibility for this project. The project is awaiting the government’s final approval.

In addition, two other large IGCC projects have been proposed and are seeking government approval, one in Dongguan in Guangdong Province, south-eastern China and the other in Lianyungang in Jiangsu Province, eastern China. The Dongguan project would build four 200-megawatt IGCC units and would be situated 100 kilometres from two depleted oilfields, while the Lianyungan project would eventually build 1200 megawatts of IGCC capacity and 1300 megawatts of ultra-supercritical capacity and would be situated in a coastal city 200 kilometres north of the Subei oilfield. Both projects have expressed an interest in combined CCS and EOR.

An earlier version of this article was published by the Natural Resources Defense Council, as “Identifying near-term opportunities for carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) in China”. It is a summary of a full report, co-authored by Jingjing Qian, George Peridas, Jason Chen and Yueming Qiu, Julio Friedmann, Xiaochun Li, Ning Wei, S Ming Sung, Mike Fowler, Deborah Seligsohn, Yue Liu, Sarah Forbes, Dongjie Zhang and Lifeng Zhao.

NEXT: The value of international cooperation

Homepage image from Huaneng shows its planned IGGC plant in Tianjin, north China.