Latest Articles by Maryann Bird

Briefing: climate change

Maryann Bird — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 16:10:00 +0000

Difficult decisions on greenhouse gases loom large for China, writes Maryann Bird, in the second of a series of guides to hot topics in a warming world.

Climate change will affect China, and China will affect climate change.

In its broadest usage, “climate change” refers to alterations in the earth’s global climate, or in a region’s climate, over several decades or longer time periods. Long-term, persistent fluctuations in temperature, precipitation, wind and other factors can be measured, and statistically significant variations in the average state of the climate – or in its changeability – are cited to illustrate climate change. But what is climate? It’s the long-term average of a region’s weather. Weather, then, is a short-term thing – encompassing the variety of phenomena that can occur in the earth’s atmosphere.

Climate change can occur as a result of both natural and man-made forces. The earth’s climate has suffered drastic changes in the past but climatology studies have shown that a limited number of factors have been responsible for most of the past climate change episodes. These factors include: variations in the earth’s orbital characteristics, volcanic eruptions, variations in solar output and atmospheric carbon-dioxide variations. It is the latter factor, carbon dioxide -- along with other “greenhouse gases” -- that are linked to the planet’s current predicament. This time it is humankind, not natural forces, that is being blamed – because of the burning of fossil fuels -- for the build-up of these gases in the earth’s atmosphere. The gases, in turn, trap the sun’s heat, affecting rainfall patterns, sea levels, drought and desertification, habitat loss and much more.

While scientists prefer the term “climate change” as the more accurate description of what is happening, many people use “climate change” interchangeably with “global warming” and “the greenhouse effect”. How does it work? The greenhouse effect means that the warmth of the sun – 93 million miles, or 150 million kilometres, away -- heats the planet’s surface, and that heat radiates back into space. Some of this infrared radiation is trapped in the atmosphere by greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and water vapour, warming the lower atmosphere, or troposphere. Some of the heat finds it way back to the planet’s surface, making it hotter than it otherwise would be. In effect, the atmosphere acts like the glass in a greenhouse.

Along with carbon dioxide and the more plentiful water vapour, greenhouse gases include methane, ozone, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and nitrous oxide. “Methane is the most important of these,” says New Scientist magazine. “Its atmospheric concentration has more than doubled since pre-industrial times. Methane sources include bacteria in paddy fields, cattle guts and natural gas from landfills and rotting vegetation. Molecule for molecule, other substances are even more potent. A single molecule of either of the two most common CFCs has the same greenhouse warming effect as 10,000 CO² molecules.” CFCs drift into the upper atmosphere, or stratosphere, where their chlorine and/or bromine components destroy ozone. While it is polluting and harmful in the troposphere, ozone in the stratosphere is a natural form of oxygen, forming a protective layer around the planet and shielding it from life-threatening ultraviolet radiation.

So, what does all this mean for China? Key to the country’s relationship with climate change is its booming economy and energy sector, says Pan Jiahua, executive director of the sustainable development research centre of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. “Since the end of the 1980s, when climate change was brought to the global political agenda, China has gone from generating a surplus of energy to becoming an importer of oil,” Pan wrote in a 2005 article for the Science and Development Network. “The change is a symptom of a rapidly industrialising nation and comes hand-in-hand with many of the signs of a nation already suffering from the effects of climate change.” China is the second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases after the United States and recent figures indicate that China’s population and environment “are likely to suffer the effects of extreme weather events made more frequent by climate change, [...] rising temperatures and changing rainfall will affect food production, and [...] energy consumption — a major source of emissions — will continue to rise over the coming decades.”

“Yet,” Professor Pan adds, “China, as a developing nation, is not bound to limit its emissions under the Kyoto Protocol, and will not do so at the expense of its development. The government says developed nations must bear the responsibility for historical rises in concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Despite this, the Chinese government is aware of the complexities and effects of climate change. Although its primary motivation is not to align itself with international climate change policy, it is adopting measures to diversify its sources of energy and to increase energy efficiency, which could slow the steep rise of its emissions.”

As Professor Pan acknowledges, China, like the rest of the world, has been experiencing the effects of climate change. A comprehensive two-volume assessment in Chinese, Climate and Environmental Change in China (edited by Qin Dahe, Chen Yiyu and Li Xueyong), published in 2005, says the average temperature in China increased by 0.6 to 0.8 degrees centigrade over the past century, while in the past 50 years, sea levels rose by 1 to 2.5 millimetres annually.

How much do these seemingly slight increases matter? “Climate change,” writes Professor Pan, “will make China more vulnerable to damage caused by rising sea levels, drought, flooding, tropical cyclones, sandstorms and heat waves. Although a warmer climate will increase the amount of land available for farming, extreme weather could reduce agricultural yield by 10%.”

In only 50 years, China has moved from an agrarian society to one in which half of its output is industrial. With that shift – and the increase in energy consumption that comes with urbanisation, plus the fact that it still generates most of its energy from burning coal – China faces a harsh reality. Like India and Brazil, the country is expected to be a major voice in future international climate change negotiations, in the post-Kyoto period beginning in 2012.

“Probably the only way China will take on emissions restrictions is if it can implement clean energy technologies that will allow its economy to keep growing swiftly,” writes Maya Papineau in the online journal of the Centre for International Climate and Environmental Research (Cicero). “However, technology transfer from the developed nations, on an unprecedented scale, is likely the only way to bring about serious cutbacks while preserving economic growth. In this respect, most of the challenge lies with the industrialised nations to agree on a framework to efficiently transfer cleaner energy technologies to the developing world.”

“As post-Kyoto negotiations evolve,” writes Professor Pan, “many feel that China will have to consider committing to reducing emissions after 2012. … [i]t is in China’s interest to help mitigate the effects of climate change both internationally and domestically. Cooperating will help China become more energy efficient and use more energy from renewable sources. Spurred on by this, China is more likely to participate in global initiatives on energy efficiency, development of renewable energy, and carbon capture and storage, than to commit to reducing its emissions.”

Still, he points out, the country has a long way to go on its development path.

NEXT: Energy and development

Maryann Bird is a London-based journalist

Related article:

"Learn from mistakes of western countries"

Briefing: opportunities and challenges

Maryann Bird — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 19:02:00 +0000

China’s handling of its environmental problems will affect the whole earth, writes Maryann Bird, in the first of a series of guides to hot topics in a warming world

China is poised to present the world with some of its greatest opportunities – as well as some of its greatest challenges – in the years ahead. The planet’s most populous country is now home to 1.3 billion people. It is also home to a rapidly developing economy that is fast becoming a major global player. The spectacular rise of China has lifted millions out of poverty. It has also alarmed many of its neighbours and competitors and prompted the question, “Is China a threat or an opportunity?” Its rapid development has come at a heavy environmental cost.

The Chinese government acknowledges China’s environmental crisis. In a 2005 interview, Pan Yue, vice minister of the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA), the government agency with responsibility for the environment, said: “This [economic] miracle will end soon because the environment can no longer keep pace…Acid rain is falling on one-third of our territory, half of the water in China’s seven largest rivers is completely useless; a quarter of our citizens do not have access to clean drinking water; a third of the urban population is breathing polluted air; less than a fifth of the rubbish in cities is treated and processed in an environmentally sustainable manner.”

China’s need for energy and water to feed continuing urbanisation and industrialisation will only exacerbate this crisis if solutions are not found. However, the country’s environmental problems are of concern not only to China; they affect everybody in the world, directly and indirectly. As China expands its search for energy and minerals, timber and other raw materials across the world, the environmental impact becomes a global issue. According to the Washington-based Worldwatch Institute, China used 26% of the world’s crude steel in 2005, 32% of the rice, 37% of the cotton and 47% of the cement. While some of those materials are going into exported products, a good deal is going into building a Chinese infrastructure that is transforming the country’s landscape. And as China’s carbon emissions rise, the common problem of global climate change is affected.

Since the late 1970s, the country has moved from a centrally planned system to a more market-oriented one, with a burgeoning private sector. China’s economic restructuring, with its accompanying gains in efficiency, have led to a huge leap – more than tenfold -- in gross domestic product (GDP) since 1978. Measured in purchasing power, then, China has become the second-largest economy in the world, after the United States. In per-capita terms, however, it is still lower middle-income, with large income disparities between regions and 150 million people falling below international poverty lines. The Chinese government has struggled to cope with both the consequences of past environmental policies and the challenges of the current economic transformation. With China’s growing national wealth, its rapid urbanisation and its economic weight in the world comes new responsibility regarding a tidal wave of environmental issues – issues of environmental protection, conservation of resources, power-generating capacity, fossil-fuel use and much more, which need to be urgently addressed.

Today, environmental issues are confronting every country in the world, large and small, powerful and weak. For China, with its huge population, colossal energy needs, growth in consumerism, expanding industrialisation and, soon, the 2008 Summer Olympic Games taking place in its capital, Beijing, the demands on its environment will be staggering. How will the country cope? And how will China work to ensure that it does no harm to places -- and resources -- outside its national borders?

Along with having the second-largest economy on the planet, China is the world’s second-largest emitter of carbon dioxide (CO²), one of the major greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming. Although China has ratified both the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and its 1997 Kyoto Protocol, as a developing country it is not legally bound to any emissions-limiting or emissions-reduction targets. Nor, notes the UN Environment Programme’s Global Environment Outlook 2006, have any targets been set under the 2005 Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate, which encompasses China and two of its regional, developing neighbours – India and South Korea – along with the US, Japan and Australia. (India and Japan are the fourth and fifth largest CO² emitters, with Russia in third place.) The partnership, however, aims to develop and utilise emerging cleaner technologies and practices, including renewable energy systems.

In 1990, according to UNEP figures, the Asia-Pacific region produced 435 million tonnes (8%) more CO² than did North America. By 2002, the disparity was 2.6 million tonnes (41% more). Figures cited by the Worldwatch Institute show China emitting one billion tons of carbon dioxide annually, or 14% of the world total (still only one-seventh of the level of the US, the world’s largest emitter). Pressure on China to limit its greenhouse-gas emissions, post-Kyoto, is mounting, both internationally and internally. The Chinese government is well aware that China is vulnerable, on many fronts, to the effects of climate change: rising sea levels, violent weather fluctuations, desertification, loss of habitat and biodiversity, health issues, and more.

San Francisco-based Pacific Environment, one of the organisations supporting China’s emerging environmental movement, says that “China’s contribution to global warming will impact the environment of every nation on earth.” Indeed, it adds, the country’s management of its environmental problems will have significant global repercussions. “The inability of China’s farmers to eke out a crop from drying land will force it to turn to the world food market, further intensifying the stresses on land in grain-producing countries like the US and Canada. And China’s consumption of over a third of the global fish harvest, a number that is certain to grow, is placing severe strain on our already overtaxed oceans. Simply put, anyone concerned about the global environment must be concerned about the capacity of China’s people to deal with the pressing threats they face.”

NEXT: Climate change

Maryann Bird is a London-based journalist

Briefing: energy and development

Maryann Bird — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 17:51:00 +0000

As China grows, it needs to invest in lower-cost energy efficiency, writes Maryann Bird, in the third of a series of guides to hot topics in a warming world.

If a nation is to develop, particularly in this increasingly globalised world, it needs energy – energy to power its factories, supply its construction industries, light its buildings, heat and air-condition its homes and workplaces, run its transportation systems, and produce its food and clothing.

China, with its booming economy and increasing national wealth, is (like its neighbour India) not immune to the environmental consequences of its development, however. The doubling of its gross domestic product (GDP) since 1995 (from about US $500 billion in 1995 to $1.1 trillion in 2005) has produced a concomitant increase in carbon emissions, from roughly 800 million metric tons in 1995 to more than 1.2 billion metric tons in 2005. China has a great deal of growing to do yet, however, and 150 million Chinese people are still living in poverty – and using very little energy.

Assuming that present trends in China (along with its fellow developing giants, India and Brazil) continue, these nations will more than double their use of energy and greenhouse gas emissions in the next two decades, according to a recent report by the 3 Country Energy Efficiency Project, a four-year international partnership involving the World Bank, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and institutions in China, India and Brazil. By one estimate, say officials of the project (known as 3CEE), “the China power market will require an average 48 gigawatts of new capacity every year”, equal to two-thirds of the United Kingdom’s total installed capacity.

In China, much of that energy will come from coal, given that the country is both the world’s largest consumer and supplier of coal. “While coal in China’s overall energy mix is projected to decline from 66% in 2002 to 41% in 2030, its total CO² emissions are still projected to increase from 3,307 to 7,144 megatonnes.” That is within a single human generation, and will affect global energy markets as well as the environment.

However, say the experts, China and other countries can reach similar development levels with “substantially lower economic, social and environmental costs” by pursuing cost-effective investments in energy efficiency. Along with actively pursuing various new, non-fossil-fuel technologies (be they solar, wind, wave, nuclear, ethanol and more -- all of which have their own drawbacks), says 3CEE, cost-effective retrofits can significantly reduce energy use today. Advanced technologies, meanwhile, can help cut the projected growth in energy use, along with related increases in CO² emissions. Given the potential impacts on both climate and global energy markets, both China and the rest of the world have a major stake in seeing that happen.

“Unlocking today’s potential savings requires simple, highly cost-effective renovation projects to identify and eliminate energy waste,” says 3CEE. “The keys are fostering corporate awareness, supporting catalyst energy efficiency practitioners and enlightening commercial banks to ease access to local financing for such projects.”

Despite the huge potential, however, on-the-ground investments in energy-reduction have been difficult to achieve. Although many such projects quickly pay for themselves, with typical returns of 20 to 40%, says Chandra Govindarajalu, a senior environment specialist with the World Bank, “companies often cite other, more immediate investment and borrowing priorities.” Other roadblocks, according to 3CEE, include: the general unfamiliarity of commercial banks in developing countries, such as China, with financing cost-saving projects (rather than producing new product lines or other tangible assets); lack of awareness or experience with newer, efficient technologies; high transaction costs for smaller-sized projects; high perceived risk by decision makers, and a lack of combined technical and financial skills at finance institutions.

According to Robert Taylor, an energy specialist at the World Bank and leader of the 3CEE project: “Cutting energy waste is the cheapest, easiest, fastest way to solve many energy problems, improve the environment and enhance both energy security and economic development. What we must develop further are systems to tap huge potential energy savings through thousands of projects” scattered across China and other developing countries, large and small. The reluctance of companies to undertake energy retrofits, Taylor adds, is akin to the countless millions of people worldwide who fail to buy energy-efficient light bulbs for their homes, despite proof that they save enough in utility bills to more than pay for themselves. “It seems like a small thing; why take the trouble?” he says. “But from a national or global point of view, the potential savings add up to the electricity and pollution produced by many large power plants.”

Rapidly developing counties such as China, Taylor argues, need to identify energy efficiencies – be they in industrial facilities or in apartment buildings – and “exploit large-scale energy-use reduction opportunities.” And they need “enlightened banks to finance them.” Such retrofits, he says, involve the installation of “high-efficiency lighting, air conditioners, boilers and waste-heat recovery systems for commercial and public buildings, industrial plants and other facilities.”

While China has been making some headway, and has had a long-standing policy on energy that gives an equal role to development of energy supply and to energy efficiency, investment in the supply side wins out in reality. According to a recent US publication, Sustainable Growth Through Energy Efficiency, produced by the China Energy Group at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in California: “We calculate that about $25 billion a year invested in energy efficiency would turn the current trend around, assuming a long-term energy demand growth rate of 7% and a target of shaving annual energy demand growth to 3.5%. Of course, these are just rough calculations, but the key comparison to make is with current spending, which is only about $3 billion per year.”

While China’s energy needs are daunting, says LBNL, the challenge of meeting them presents “a wealth of opportunities, particularly in meeting demand through improved energy efficiency and other clean energy technologies.”

The Chinese government has acted to allow energy from renewable sources to be sold into the national grid at a higher tariff, and encouraged construction of more energy-efficient homes and workplaces. One project drawing considerable attention is Dongtan, which is being called the world’s first eco-city. To be set on Chongming Island, in the mouth of the Yangtze River just north of Shanghai, Dongtan is planned to house 500,000 people. Oil and diesel vehicles will be banned, organic waste will be recycled to generate electricity, rainwater will be captured and used. The vision for the development, the first phase of which is due to be completed in 2010, is to create a carbon-free community with low energy consumption.

NEXT: Water, air and health

Maryann Bird is a London-based journalist

BP Receives Top Score in First-Ever Ranking of 100 Global Companies on Climate Change Strategies

Briefing: water, air and health

Maryann Bird — Tue, 04 Jul 2006 13:18:00 +0000

Pollution control is vital if China is to fulfil its development goals, writes Maryann Bird, in the fourth of a series of guides to hot topics in a warming world.

When a country is developing as quickly as China is, it produces an immense amount of pollution of its air and water. Ultimately, such pollution affects the health of both the environment and the citizenry.

Zhu Guangyao, deputy director of China’s State Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA), in releasing China’s second “white paper” (a report stating the agency’s position) on environmental protection since 1996, said on 5 June 2006 that economic losses as a result of environmental pollution may account for as much as 10% of China’s gross domestic product (GDP).

Entitled Environmental Protection in China (1996-2005) and released by the information office of the State Council, China’s cabinet, the report says the environmental-protection situation in the county remains “grave”. Zhu acknowledged that the 10% figure is not very precise, given the immense difficulties in conducting research and analysis, but he emphasised that in China’s future development, environmental protection will be a brake on the government’s economic macro-control policies.

The World Bank, in fact, reached a similar statistical conclusion years earlier, finding that pollution was costing China 8 to 12% of GDP annually in direct damage. In a 2004 article entitled “The Great Wall of Waste”, the Economist reported that such damage was arising from the impact of acid rain (droplets containing sulphur or nitrogen oxides) on crops, medical bills, lost work from illness, money spent on disaster relief following floods and the implied costs of resource depletion. As health costs rise, so too will the effect on China’s GDP – now the world’s sixth largest.

China’s current (11^th) five-year plan lays out its main goals for environmental protection, emphasising improvement in the environmental quality of key cities and regions and reining in the trend toward ecological deterioration. China’s most important environmental task, says Zhu, is control of water pollution, with a focus on providing drinking-water security to its population.

According to the Worldwatch Institute’s State of the World 2006 report, China has just 8% of the world’s fresh water to meet the needs of 22% of the planet’s population – “and virtually the entire northern half of the country is drying out. Extreme pollution exacerbates water scarcity by rendering some water virtually useless. Of 412 sites on China’s seven main rivers that were monitored for water quality in 2004, 58% were found to be too dirty for human consumption.”

The air pollution problem is also critical, and another casualty of rapid growth and heavy dependence on energy produced by coal. Sandstorms and the boom in urban construction projects – which have multiplied since China was awarded the 2008 Olympic Summer Games -- add to the pollution. So do the increasing number of vehicles on China’s traffic-congested streets. After the United States and Japan, China is the world’s third-largest car market – and, as is frequently mentioned, the second-largest oil consumer after the US. Beijing’s dirty skies often block out the view of nearby mountains, and pollution-related airline flight delays are not uncommon. As one measure to curb auto-related energy consumption, the government has raised levies on highly polluting vehicles with larger engines.

As the Worldwatch study indicates, of the 20 most-polluted cities in the world, 16 are in China, and SEPA estimates that some 200 cities “fall short of World Health Organisation standards for the airborne particulates that are responsible for many respiratory diseases.” The Worldwatch report continues: “China’s air is also filled with sulphur dioxide, which has given it some of the world’s worst acid rain. An estimated 30% of China’s cropland is suffering from acidification, and the resulting damage to farms, forest and human health is projected at $13 billion. In coming decades, the health and ecological burdens of polluted air are likely to grow steadily, as coal-fired air pollution is complemented by a growing brew of automotive emissions.”

Environmental problems that afflicted developed countries in various phases of their century-plus period of industrialisation have occurred in China all at the same time – in the relatively short time since the country’s economy began to boom in the late 1970s. Although resource consumption and pollutants are increasing greatly, the trend toward aggravated environmental pollution and ecological destruction is actually slowing, the Chinese white paper maintains. New or revised laws have been formulated since 1996 – laws on prevention and control of air and water pollution, protection of the marine environment, and evaluation of environmental impact. In the last few years, SEPA says, some 16,000 enterprises have been closed down, as a result of the state’s special environmental protection campaigns to protect human health and to deal with those who illegally discharge pollutants.

Judging by statistics in the white paper, the Chinese news agency Xinhua says, the amount of industrial waste water, oxygen for industrial chemicals, industrial sulphur dioxide, industrial smoke and industrial dust discharged in generating one unit of China’s GDP declined – respectively -- by 58%, 72%, 42%, 55% and 39% from 1995 to 2004.

Still, the government is aware that a grave environmental-protection situation persists. The fragile environment and relative shortage of resources has led a worried China to invest heavily in environmental pollution control – 238.8 billion yuan ($29.9 billion) in 2005 alone. Earlier statistics show that rivers that go through cities are polluted in sections of their downtown areas, Xinhua reports, with one-fifth of Chinese cities suffering from serious air pollution, one-third of the land area affected by acid rain, and millions of square kilometres of land sustaining soil erosion and desertification. Natural grasslands and biodiversity also have severely declined.

China has set a number of optimistic goals under the five-year plan (up to 2010), including keeping annual growth at 7.5%, which Zhu maintains “will keep the country’s development at a stable pace.” But some local governments, particularly in “remote or backward areas” are still pursuing faster growth, which is putting pressure on local environments and resources. Plans also call for the reduction of major pollutants by 10%, a drop in energy consumption per GDP unit by 20%, and growth in forest cover to 20%. To fulfil the goals, Zhu says, pollution control is vital.

NEXT: Desertification and deforestation

Maryann Bird is a London-based journalist

Briefing: deforestation and desertification

Maryann Bird — Fri, 07 Jul 2006 12:23:00 +0000

China faces a major battle to revive its degraded and denuded land, writes Maryann Bird, in the fifth of a series of guides to hot topics in a warming world.

The United Nations has declared 2006 as the International Year of Deserts and Desertification, in recognition of the grave perils of desertification, a global phenomenon affecting a third of the earth’s surface and more than one billion people in over 100 countries. As susceptible dryland areas lose their productive capacity, says the UN, desertification has potentially devastating social and economic consequences, including poverty, famine and political instability.

Acknowledging those connections, the UN Convention to Combat Desertification was established after the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. The convention defined desertification as “land degradation in arid, semi-arid and dry sub-humid areas resulting from various factors, including climatic variations and human activities”, and is the first international treaty to address the issues of poverty and environmental degradation in rural areas. It also is the first pact, says the UN, to “recognise that grassroots resource-users are central to identifying and implementing solutions”; to involve local women as well as men in the development process; to stress the need for an integrated approach, and to call for a global mechanism to mobilise resources through partnerships. (At the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development, the convention was singled out as a key instrument for poverty eradication in dryland rural areas.)

In establishing the International Year, the UN General Assembly emphasised concern over desertification and its implications for the UN’s eight Millennium Development Goals, to be met by 2015. One of those goals is ensuring environmental stability. That involves integrating the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programmes; reversing the loss of environmental resources; reducing by 50 percent the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water; and, by 2020, achieving significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum-dwellers.

China is on the frontline in the struggle with desertification. The country’s grasslands have been severely damaged and its soil eroded by overgrazing of livestock, drought, mining and other types of development. Also contributing to the worsening desertification situation is deforestation – the conversion of forested areas to non-forested ones, whether deliberately (such is by logging, agriculture or dam construction) or unintended (such is through catastrophic wildfires). Tree roots are essential for keeping topsoil in place; without them, soil erosion and flooding inevitably result.

In China, the problems are acknowledged as immense. For example, “the deterioration of the plant cover in the headwaters of the Yangtze river has created major flooding problems,” according to the UN Environment Programme’s Global Deserts Outlook. “Massive efforts are now required to deal with the enormous problem of water erosion in the Loess Plateau, one of the most eroded regions in the world, on account of intensive agricultural practices on the steep mountain slopes.” The plateau is situated between the deserts of western China and the north China plain. As a result of the deterioration of water reserves, it has become essential to monitor groundwater levels and confront salinity problems on the vast plain.

On the Qinghai-Tibet plateau (“the roof of the world”), glaciers are shrinking by 7% a year because of climate change, the news agency Xinhua reported in May 2006. Dong Guangrong of the Chinese Academy of Sciences told the agency that as the glaciers retreat due to global warming, the high plateau is turning to desert – which will trigger more droughts and sandstorms. Dong’s study used more than 40 years’ worth of data from nearly 681 Chinese weather stations. Average temperatures in Tibet have risen by 0.9 degrees C. since the 1980s, causing the glaciers to melt faster, Han Yongxiang of the National Meteorological Bureau told Xinhua.

Since February 2006, Beijing has sustained the worst sandstorm record in five years. Through a combination of forces, the Gobi desert is expanding by about 950 square miles annually, drawing ever closer to the capital. China is battling to stem the sandy tide through a decades-long programme to shield the city through the creation of a series of greenbelts. Popularly termed “the Green Great Wall”, the government plans an eventual 2,800-mile network of forest belts, containing billions of trees, to stop the advancing desert, much like the Great Wall was erected centuries ago to keep out unwelcome invaders.

Some 2.64 million square kilometres of land in China has already been devoured by desertification – nearly one-third of its landmass, the government says. Zhu Lieke, deputy director of the State Forestry Administration, reported some progress, however, telling the Beijing International Conference on Women and Desertification in May 2006 that China’s deserts are shrinking by 7,585 square kilometres annually, compared with yearly expansion of 10,400 square kilometres at the end of the 20^th century.

Others are not so optimistic. The leading environmentalist Lester Brown of the Washington-based Earth Policy Institute, says a giant dust bowl is forming across northern China and that it “represents the largest conversion of productive land to desert anywhere in the world … Here and there, there are successful pilot projects, but overall we are not anywhere close to arresting this situation. The deserts are expanding.” In past years, says Brown, dust from storms originating in China has been traced all the way to the United States and Canada.

San Francisco-based Pacific Environment -- which works to protect the living environment of the Pacific Rim by promoting grassroots activism, strengthening communities and reforming international policies – is also worried about the larger picture. “The inability of China’s farmers to eke out a crop from drying land,” the organisation points out, “will force it to turn to the world food market, further intensifying the stresses on land in grain-producing countries like the US and Canada.”

Zhu acknowledges that the work China needs to do on desertification “remains tough” and, despite a yearly investment of 2 billion yuan (US $250 million), restoring all the country’s “curable” desertified land – 530,000 square kilometres -- by 2050 will be difficult. To reach that goal, he said, would cost at least 238.5 yuan (US$29.8 billion).

The government, Zhu said, has been hampered by a shortage to funds with which to confront desertification, which, he added, affects the lives of 400 million people and causes direct economic losses of 54 billion yuan (US $6.75 billion) annually. Zhu noted that overgrazing of livestock (which has greatly increased in China since the late 1970s), overlogging, collection of firewood and other human activities still were taking place in environmentally fragile areas, and global warming could worsen the trend toward desertification. The battle needs to be fought, Zhu said, by improving legislation, by severely punishing those who damage the environment and by strengthening international cooperation.

Yang Weixi, the chief engineer of China’s Desertification Control Centre, told the Los Angeles Times in April 2006 that the millions of square kilometres of desert in China “will continue to be a source of sandstorms in the future, and we cannot cherish unrealistic expectations this problem will vanish overnight.”

In one week in April, desert winds dumped 300,000 tons of sand and dust on Beijing, turning rooftops yellow and forcing residents to wear surgical masks. Meanwhile, in southern China, floods and mudslides – triggered by torrential rains and exacerbated in some cases by deforestation – have claimed lives and forced a great number of people to flee their homes. Over the past 40 years, Chinese meteorological studies indicate, the country has experienced rising temperatures. “Experts project that the ‘northern drought, southern flood’ weather pattern will break by 2015, as less precipitation falls in the rainy reaches of the Yangtze river and more comes to northern China,” says the Worldwatch Institute. But it adds a cautionary – and worrying -- note: “Such projections could change, however, as human activities increasingly affect the global climate.”

NEXT: HABITAT AND BIODIVERSITY

Maryann Bird is a London-based journalist

Briefing: habitat and biodiversity

Maryann Bird — Tue, 11 Jul 2006 13:58:00 +0000

Biologically, China is one of the world’s “mega-diverse” countries, but threats to that legacy persist, writes Maryann Bird, in the sixth of a series of guides to hot topics in a warming world.

Biodiversity – or biological diversity – means the variety of life on earth, and is measured within species, between species and in the plenitude of ecosystems (the system of interactions between living organisms and their environment). In its biodiversity, China is one of the richest countries on earth. It is also one in which biodiversity has been most seriously damaged – and is still threatened.

With its huge population and long history of agriculture, China has been cultivating its vast territory for centuries. Forests and other types of vegetation were destroyed to clear land to cultivate more crops to feed more people. Wars and other chaos throughout China’s history have had their negative effects on the land and its life forms, and now climate change is playing a part. More recently, says China’s Biodiversity: A Country Study – labeled “a preliminary summary of China’s biodiversity and of the work needed for its preservation” -- both the government and the public are more aware of the importance of biodiversity conservation. But threats to the country’s biodiversity legacy – one that is rich and varied, but also broken and incomplete -- are still growing.

Forests, says the 1998 report -- organised by China’s State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) and compiled with the support of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) – have been “broken into small, fragmented areas”. Rangelands have been “overgrazed and severely degraded”. Animal and plant resources have been overexploited and overutilised. Atmospheric pollution, particularly in the form of acid rain, endangers plants, soil, lakes, fish and other resources. Invasive exotic weeds and animal pests have damaged indigenous life. Human activities, including tourism, mining and wetlands reclamation, produce a range of harmful effects.

As the report unequivocally states: “The survival of mankind cannot be separated from that of other species. Numerous plants, animals and micro-organisms provide indispensable human food, fiber, wood, medicine and industrial raw materials. … The many beautiful and aesthetic life forms on the earth also give human beings much enjoyment. They are also sources of artistic creation and scientific invention. Most of the functions of living organisms cannot be replaced by other things. Today, man is modifying the features of the earth at an unprecedented rate. This creates raw materials for human survival on the one hand, but has changed the living environment of other living things, continuously decreasing biodiversity, and has led to the extinction of large numbers of species, on the other. The basis for human survival is gradually disintegrating and the protection of biodiversity is currently of worldwide concern.”

Experts, including the UNEP, consider China one of the earth’s 12 “mega-diverse” countries, ranking it third in the world for biodiversity in GEO-2000, the Global Environment Outlook, and first in the northern hemisphere. With more than 30,000 species of advanced plants and 6,347 kinds of vertebrates, representing 10 and 14 percent, respectively, of the world’s total (according to 1996 SEPA figures). Additionally, China is credited with 1,000 species of economic trees and more than 11,000 species of medicinal plants. Countless species are endemic to the country – ancient flora and fauna – and are both rare and endangered.

Washington-based Conservation International (CI), which works to protect the earth’s richest regions of plant and animal diversity, has identified 34 “biodiversity hotspots” globally. These are regions that contain at least 1,500 endemic species of vascular plants (greater than 0.5% of the world’s total) and which have lost at least 70% of their original habitat. Among the 34 hotspots on CI’s list are the mountains of southwest China, stretching over 262,400 square kilometers of temperate to alpine peaks between the easternmost edge of the Tibetan plateau and the central China plain. The mountains feed the most species-rich temperate and tropical river systems in Asia and “support a wide array of habitats, including the most endemic-rich temperate flora in the world.”

The region has evolved into “cluster of distinctive mini-hotspots,” each with its own unique flora and fauna, says CI, due to its dramatic differences in topography, climate and vegetation. The mountains are home to an estimated 12,000 species of plants, 237 of mammals, 611 of birds, and at least 90 each of reptiles, amphibians and freshwater fish – many of which are found nowhere else in the world. Two-hundred thirty rhododendron species – more than a quarter of the world’s total – are found there. So, too, is the richest variety of pheasants and their relatives – about 25 species – and, among mammals, there is the very symbol of China and of conservation: the giant panda. The animal, says CI, is “almost entirely restricted to the shrinking forests of this hotspot.” Other important mammals include the golden monkey, the Yunnan or black snub-nosed monkey, the takin (a large goat antelope), the Chinese forest musk deer and the snow leopard.

The World Conservation Union (also known as IUCN and based in Gland, Switzerland) is the world’s largest and most important conservation network. Among its functions is maintenance of the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, a database recognised as the most authoritative guide to the status of biological diversity on the planet. It evaluates the extinction risk to thousands of species and subspecies. Its 2006 figures list 804 threatened species in China: 442 plants, 84 mammals, 88 birds, 34 reptiles, 91 amphibians, 59 fishes, 1 mollusc and 5 other invertebrates.

Deforestation – for agriculture, logging, dam construction, industry and human settlements – and climate change have played their part in the decline of China’s wildlife and habitats. So, too, has the destruction of grasslands and wetlands – such as the large freshwater swamps of the Sanjian plain in northeastern China. While habitats shrink, so too does the varied life of ecosystems.

And as Jared Diamond writes in his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive, “Other biodiversity losses with big economic consequences include the severe degradation of both freshwater and coastal marine fisheries by overfishing and pollution, because fish consumption is rising with growing affluence. … The white sturgeon has been pushed to brink of extinction, the formerly robust Bohai prawn harvest declined 90%, formerly abundant fish species like the yellow croaker and hairtail must now be imported, the annual take of wild fish in the Yangtze river has declined 75%, and that river had to be closed to fishing for the first time ever in 2003.”

As China pursues its aspirations to a “First World lifestyle,” the impact on human-resource use and the environment is certain to be immense.

NEXT: Consumption and Consumerism

The Author: Maryann Bird is a London-based journalist

Briefing: consumption and consumerism

Maryann Bird — Fri, 14 Jul 2006 13:21:00 +0000

Nations rich and poor need to reduce the impact of consumption on their natural resources, writes Maryann Bird, in the seventh of a series of guides to hot topics in a warming world.

Since China embarked on structural reforms two decades ago, its economy has boomed to become the second-largest in the world, averaging a 9.5% rate of growth and doubling in the last decade alone. By leaps and bounds, China is growing wealthier, and the evidence of that progress can be seen in everything from new construction, energy demand and more cars on the roads to greater travel and availability of the latest consumer gadgets.

While countries around the world are benefiting from low-cost Chinese manufacturing, China is also providing – through both production and imports -- a new world of consumer goods and services for its own people, who increasingly have the money with which to acquire them. The growing culture of consumption and consumerism in traditionally frugal China has serious environmental impacts, however.

The Worldwatch Institute’s State of the World 2004 report, which focused on consumerism, noted that while Americans and western Europeans “have had a lock on unsustainable overconsumption for decades …developing countries are catching up rapidly, to the detriment of the environment, health and happiness.” According to the report: “One quarter of humanity—1.7 billion people worldwide—now belong to the ‘global consumer class,’ having adopting the diets, transportation systems and lifestyles that were once mostly limited to the rich nations of Europe, North America and Japan.” While China and other developing countries are home to growing numbers of such consumers (particularly in large urban centres), however, disparities remain “as 2.8 billion people on the planet struggle to survive on less than $2 a day, and more than one billion people lack reasonable access to safe drinking water.”

To survive, people must consume, acknowledges Worldwatch, “and the world’s poorest will need to increase their level of consumption if they are to lead lives of dignity and opportunity. But the world cannot continue on its current trajectory—the earth’s natural systems simply cannot support it. The economies of mass consumption that produced a world of abundance for many in the 20th century face an entirely different challenge in the 21st: to focus not on the indefinite accumulation of goods, but instead on a better quality of life for all, with minimal environmental harm.”

As China adds the weight of its consumer consumption to the global economy, Worldwatch’s more recent State of the World 2006 addresses a critical question: “Can the world’s ecosystems withstand the damage – the increase in carbon emissions, the loss of forests, the extinction of species – that are now in prospect? The answer is no, according to the 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment.” The millennium assessment on ecosystems and human well-being -- a United Nations report released by the World Health Organisation -- determined that human activities in the last 50 years have changed the diversity of life on earth more than at any other time in history, and that such activities, if continued, will have life-threatening consequences.

China’s demands can be measured in many ways, in snapshots of its growing consumption as it strives toward a “first-world” lifestyle. With lighting, air conditioning, computers and other office equipment, “China’s nearly seven million public servants reportedly use almost 5% of the country’s annual electricity, which is enough to meet the demands of 780 million farmers,” the newspaper China Daily reports.

In a globalised world, goods and services previously out of reach in developing countries – things once considered to be luxuries – are now seen as necessities by many: televisions, mobile telephones and other electronic gadgetry, cars and airline travel. Internationally known brands of clothing and other products abound in China’s biggest cities (particularly Beijing and Shanghai), along with an increasing number of western restaurant and coffee-shop franchises. Consumerism has been termed the new “ism” in China, linking happiness to material goods and helping to drive the economy.

Hand in hand with consumerism is consumption, which in some cases means the using up of a resource. China’s goal of achieving a first-world lifestyle for its people will double the world’s human-resource use. According to author Jared Diamond in his 2005 book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive, China is the world’s leading producer and consumer of both coal and fertilizer, the second-largest producer and consumer of pesticides, the largest producer of steel, the second-largest producer of electricity and chemical textiles, and the third-largest consumer of oil. China’s auto production is now third in the world, behind the United States and Japan, adding to both energy use, air pollution and demand for oil.

China also ranks third in the world in timber consumption – wood for rural energy (firewood), for the paper and pulp industry and for the booming construction industry. (Diamond reports that “the projected decrease in Chinese household size to 2.7 people by the year 2015 will add 126 million new households -- more than the total number of US households -- even if China’s population size itself remains constant”.) Due to massive deforestation, followed (after severe floods in 1996 and 1998) by a ban on logging of its natural forests, China is on course to overtake Japan and become the world’s largest importer of tropical timber. Since the ban, writes Diamond, China’s wood imports have increased sixfold. Deforestation, he says, is being exported.

While the country’s demands for timber put massive pressure on the planet’s forestry resources, environmental campaigners say China is not alone in doing little or nothing to control the burgeoning trade in illegal wood imports. The conservation group WWF, in a 2005 report entitled China’s Wood Market, Trade and the Environment, says China is one of the major destinations for wood that may be illegally harvested or traded. More than half of China’s imported timber comes from countries such as Russia, Indonesia and Malaysia, all of which are struggling, says WWF, with over-harvesting, conversion of natural forests and illegal logging.

China’s increasing affluence has also produced more demand for meat and fish. In the northeast, freshwater swamps in the Sanjian plain have been converted to farmland. With a greater demand for meat comes a larger share of cereal production going toward animal feed. Per-capita fish consumption has increased five-fold in the past quarter-century, while China also exports fish, molluscs and other aquatic species. Chinese fishermen have cast their nets around the world – including in the lucrative waters off southwestern Africa in their (not always legal) search for fish. Overfishing occurs in China’s deep seas and along its coastline, and a growing movement – including Pacific Environment’s Save China’s Seas network – seeks to “help consumers focus on how their dietary choices affect our oceans’ bounty”.

The water quality in rivers and groundwater sources is poor, due to industrial and municipal waste-water discharges, as well as agricultural and aquacultural runoff of fertilizers, pesticides and manure. All that nutrient runoff has produced excessive concentrations of algae, a process known as eutrophication. “About 75% of Chinese lakes, and almost all coastal seas, are polluted,” writes Jared Diamond. “Red tides in China’s seas—blooms of plankton whose toxins are poisonous to fish and other ocean animals—have increased to nearly 100 per year, from only one in every five years in the 1960s.”

As if the devastating toll on China’s resources by all this production and consumption activity were not enough, the country also imports untreated rubbish -- including electronic equipment and toxic waste -- from the rest of the world for disposal. As Diamond puts it: “This represents direct transfer of pollution from the first world to China.”

China -- like the US, Europe, Japan and India – is exceeding its “ecological footprint”, a resource management tool devised by environmental analyst Mathis Wackernagel to estimate the amount of “ecological space” occupied by humanity. “Footprint analysis,” explains Worldwatch’s 2006 report, “measures what an economy needs from nature: the inputs that fuel it and the wastes that emerge from it.” To determine whether a country is living within its ecological means, its footprint is compared with its number of global hectares of biologically productive space. “Where a nation’s footprint is larger than its biocapacity, its economy is consuming more forests, cropland and other resources than the country can supply and is overtaking the domestic environment’s capacity to absorb wastes.”

“The world’s largest and most industrialised economies,” says Worldwatch, “are essentially consuming their ecological capital by cutting forests faster than they can regenerate, pumping groundwater faster than it is recharged, and filling the atmosphere with carbon that cannot be safely absorbed.” On a per-person basis, the inequality of claims on biocapacity is clear. The world average footprint is 2.3 global hectares per person. The average Chinese person’s is 1.6, the average European’s is 4.7, and the average American’s is 9.7.

As China (and India) continue to develop rapidly, the global footprint grows. Worldwatch says that “if by 2030 China and India alone were to achieve a per-capita footprint equivalent to that of Japan today, together they would require a full planet Earth to meet their needs.”

“China will, of course, not tolerate being told not to aspire to first world levels,” writes Diamond in Collapse. “But the world cannot sustain China and other third-world countries and current first-world countries all operating at first-world levels.”

NEXT: Transport

The Author: Maryann Bird is a London-based journalist

(photo by Shanghai Streets)

Briefing: Transport

Maryann Bird — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 15:52:00 +0000

As China becomes richer, its clean, energy-efficient bicycles are giving way to boom in travel by cars, trains and planes, writes Maryann Bird, in the eighth of a series of guides to hot topics in a warming world.

Twenty-five years ago, Chinese city streets were crowded with people on bicycles, and there were few private cars. China still has approximately 500 million cyclists, the bicycle remaining the primary mode of transportation for many of the country’s poorest people. But bicycle production has been declining for the past decade, as the country becomes more affluent, and the majority of the bikes produced in China today are exported.

China cancelled bicycle-registration requirements in 2004, China Daily reported, “signalling the beginning of the end of its status as the world’s ‘bicycle kingdom’ as an emerging middle class increasingly forgoes the clean and energy-efficient transport in favour of the car.” In cities such as Beijing, the bicycle is no longer viewed as a “transportation tool”. Cars and bikes compete for road space, and the capital’s wide boulevards, overpasses and ring roads reflect China’s new transportation priority. Each day, it is said, about 1,000 new cars take to the streets of Beijing.

By 2000, there were five million cars on the roads and the number is expected to keep growing by 10 to 20% or more annually over the next several years. While more disruptive road building and more air pollution come with the additional motor vehicles, car ownership is an aspiration of an increasing number of Chinese people – and the government views the development of a motor industry as an important facet of the country’s economic development. (Still, as part of a weeklong energy-saving campaign in June 2006, the State Council, China’s cabinet, urged civil servants to leave their cars at home and either walk or take public transportation to their offices.)

Since 2003, China has been considered the fourth-largest producer and the third-largest consumer of automobiles, and cars have surpassed industrial dust as the greatest urban polluter (representing an estimated 80% of urban air pollution in 2005). A consumer study in China found that most people consider knowing how to drive a car -- along with speaking English and using a computer – to be one of three basic, necessary skills in modern society.

As a result of the growing popularity of – and pollution by -- cars in China, the government promulgated new vehicle-emissions standards in 2004, in order to force polluters off the road. The new standards, equivalent to the so-called Euro II regulations, require a 30.4% cut in carbon monoxide and a 55.8% reduction in hydrocarbon and nitric oxide emissions in China. Low-quality petrol, according to the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA), contributes to vehicular air pollution in China. It contains three to eight times more sulphur than does gasoline used in Europe and the United States.

According to SEPA, which issued five new national emissions standards for a range of vehicle types in 2005, “exhaust gas and noise emitted by vehicles have brought extensive concern from society”. It added that the “automobile manufacturing technology level in China is not good enough” at present, and that “low, even zero, emission vehicles will be the future development direction of China’s auto industry.” Even-higher emissions standards – equivalent to Euro III regulations – are expected to be adopted nationwide in 2008, with tougher regulations to be considered further in the future.

Along with road traffic, China’s railways also have been booming. The last stretch of the world’s highest railway, the nearly 2,000-km-long Qinghai-Tibet line, linking China’s Qinghai province with the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, opened on 1 July, 2006. President Hu Jintao declared it “not only a magnificent feat in China’s history of railway construction, but a great miracle of the world’s railroad history”. The Chinese consider the line an engineering marvel in having overcome the perennial ice and slush along the route, which many felt was too fragile to support tracks and trains. Projections indicate the railway will help double tourism revenues by 2010 and cut transport costs for goods by 75% in Tibet. Environmentalists remain concerned about the frail ecosystem on the Tibetan Plateau, which is home to numerous unique animal species, and have called for conservation measures.

Generally, rail mileage and traffic have increased rapidly, though not as fast as economic development currently demands. The rail industry, market researchers say, is an important part of China’s comprehensive transportation system. Its prospects are considered bright and likely to attract considerable financial investment in the years ahead.

The country has nearly 75,000 rail-kilometres (and more than 5,600 stations), according to 2004 statistics, and there were over 1.2 billion passenger-journeys on the lines. China’s Ministry of Railways said in July 2006 that the country’s trains had made 620 million passenger journeys in the first half of the year – up over 8% from the same period in 2005 -- and carried 1.39 billion tons of goods, including greater amounts of economically critical coal and petroleum, as well as chemical fertilisers and pesticides – an annual increase of more than 6%. The country’s lines handle a quarter of global rail traffic on just 6% of the world’s tracks.

Chinese citizens are increasingly taking to the skies, too, travelling for business or pleasure, both within China and abroad. “For the first time in history,” The New York Times reported in May 2006, “large numbers of Chinese are leaving their country as tourists … In 1995, only 4.5 million Chinese travelled overseas. By 2005, that figure had increased to 31 million, and if expectations for future growth are met or approached, even that gargantuan growth will be quickly dwarfed. Chinese and international travel industry experts forecast that at least 50 million Chinese tourists will travel overseas by 2010, and 100 million by 2020.”

Coupled with travel by the Chinese, of course, is travel to (and around) the county by visitors from abroad. The 2008 Olympic Games, to be hosted by Beijing, are expected to bring an additional 2.6 million Chinese to the capital during, before and after the games, plus an estimated 500,000 overseas tourists and spectators, according to the Beijing Tourism Administration. Citing figures from the National Bureau of Statistics and the China National Tourism Administration, the Xinhua news agency reported in 2005 that the number of inbound foreign tourists to the Chinese mainland in 2004 had reached nearly 110 million. They came, mainly, from 16 countries and brought around $25 billion into China’s foreign exchange coffers. And – like air travel all over the world -- the planes they flew in on contributed to the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

According to the International Air Transport Association (IATA), the industry’s voice, air transport is responsible for 3.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, while supporting 8% of global economic activity. Over the last 30 years, the organisation says, aircraft emissions are down by 70%, due to fuel efficiency, new technology and direct routings. IATA and China reached agreement in early 2006 on a new route for international traffic – north of the Himalayas -- which is designed to reduce flight times between China and Europe by an average of 30 minutes.

China has a shortage of international air routes, says IATA, because only 30% of the country’s airspace is available for civilian aviation and flight-planning policy is restrictive. Air-traffic delays have resulted in the “golden triangle” bounded by Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.

IATA contends that the new route, known as IATA-1 (officially, Y-1), will have a “significant impact” on the environment, resulting in the annual reduction of 2,860 hours of flight time, 27,000 tonnes of fuel consumption, 84,800 tonnes of carbon-dioxide emission and 240,000 kilograms of nitrogen oxides emissions. It also will mean US $30 million in savings on airline fuel bills “at a time where the airline industry is bleeding red ink from the record high price of oil,” said IATA’s director general, Giovanni Bisignani, in April.

As airline fuel costs rise, domestic airlines too have initiated new fuel-saving measures. (Fuel costs represent 25 to 28% of the general operational costs of an airline in China, according to China Daily.) China Southern, which operates the most extensive air network in the country, for example, has applied to the authorities for more direct -- and higher -- flight routes designed to save fuel.

Along with such measures, however, China also plans to build 48 new airports over the next five years, bringing the national total to 190. The country’s largest international hubs – Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou – are already being expanded, and China has promised to buy hundreds of new planes by 2010. With the new ground facilities, reports the British newspaper the Guardian, “the country’s 1.3 billion people will be served by fewer than 200 airports, compared with more than 10,000 in the US, which has a quarter of the population.”

Environmentalists are worried by the expected boom in air traffic over the next several years, fearing increased depletion of the earth’s protective ozone layer (as well unsafe skies). Campaigners have targeted the world’s air travel as a serious contributor to global warming through greenhouse gas emissions -- despite carbon-trading schemes such as Europe’s which are designed to reduce those emissions. At higher altitudes, contrails – the vapour trails, or artificial cirrus clouds, formed by condensation from aircraft engines or wing-tip vortices – also have an overall warming effect due to changes in radiation balance known as radiative forcing.

Despite the growth in cars, trains and planes, will China say goodbye to its non-polluting two-wheelers? Not according to a spokesman for the Beijing Traffic Administration Bureau, who told the China Social News in 2004: “The improvement in the state economy, the traffic situation and city management does not mean that Chinese are saying a final and complete farewell to the bicycle. Some people will still choose this non-polluting, small and green transport tool.”

And, according to the Worldwatch Institute, “one of the brightest signs on the bicycle landscape is the growth in output of electric bicycles, which have electric motors to make pedalling easier.” Their rapid rise is fuelled by Chinese sales: roughly one of every six bicycles bought in China in 2005 was an electric model – and China accounted for 95% of the 10.5 million electric-bike sales in that year.

The Author: Maryann Bird is a London-based freelance journalist with a special interest in environmental and human-rights issues. A writer and editor, she was previously a staff member at Time magazine (Europe), The Independent, the International Herald Tribune and The New York Times.

Checking the earth’s vital signs

Maryann Bird — Thu, 27 Jul 2006 13:17:00 +0000

Global production, commerce and consumption are up. But, says, the Worldwatch Institute, such trends are set against “a backdrop of ecological decline in a world powered overwhelmingly by fossil fuels”.

The earth is unwell. While the planet’s vital signs are mixed, its temperature is clearly rising and its overall prognosis is worrying scientists who closely monitor its condition. Many believe that, as result of the climate change the earth is undergoing, urgent and unprecedented action must be taken if future generations are to inherit a secure and healthy place in which to live.

Global economic indicators are pointing upward, according to the Worldwatch Institute, which studies the complex interactions among people, nature and economies. In fact, the gross world product (GWP) -- the total global value of finished goods and services -- reached a record $59.6 trillion in 2005, nearly double the 1985 figure. However, says Worldwatch, despite upward trends in production, commerce and consumption, these indicators “are set against a backdrop of ecological decline in a world powered overwhelmingly by fossil fuels.”

In 2005, as GWP hit a record high level, so too did the average annual atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (CO²) and the average global temperature. CO² concentration rose 0.6% over the 2004 peak -- the largest yearly increase ever recorded – and the average temperature reached 14.6 degrees centigrade (58.2 fahrenheit) – making 2005 the warmest year ever recorded on the earth’s surface.

While official temperature records go back only to 1880, says Worldwatch, “climate scientists believe that these are the highest temperatures experienced since human civilisation began 10,000 years ago,” and that “we are now within 1 degree [centigrade] of the highest temperature Earth has experienced in the last 1 million years – before the emergence of Homo sapiens,” or modern humanity.

“Business as usual is harming the earth’s ecosystems and the people who depend on them,” asserts Erik Assadourian, project director of the Worldwatch report Vital Signs 2006-2007, released in July 2006. “If everyone consumed at the average level of high-income countries, the planet could sustainably support only 1.8 billion people, not today’s population of 6.5 billion. Yet the world’s population is expected not to shrink but to grow to 8.9 billion by 2050.”

In preparing its report, Worldwatch looked at trends in seven categories: food and agriculture; energy and climate; economy; transportation and communications; health and social; conflict and peace; and environment. Among the most alarming facts cited are those that foreshadow the not-too-distant future: the estimated 27% decline in Arctic Ocean sea ice in summer over the past 50 years; the effective destruction of 20% of the world’s coral reefs as of late 2005, with 50% of the reefs considered threatened in the short or long term; the destruction of 20% of the planet’s mangrove forests over the past 25 years. (Both reefs and mangroves provide important coastline buffers against wave damage, erosion and flooding.) Additionally, 12% of all bird species have been categorised as threatened, along with 3% of all plant species.

Concentration of carbon-dioxide, the main greenhouse gas that is driving climate change, has reached its highest level in 600,000 years, according to atmospheric measurements, and the rate of increase is accelerating. “This suggests that a ‘positive feedback loop’ is coming into play, with ecological changes impeding the ability of natural systems to absorb carbon dioxide as well as causing some ecosystems to release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere,” writes Christopher Flavin, president of the Worldwatch Institute, in his preface to Vital Signs. “Global warming may in effect be fuelling more global warming. We could be on the verge of a tipping point at which climate change shifts from a gradual process that can be forecast by computer models to one that is sudden, violent and chaotic.”

Vital Signs’s findings are built on the 2005 United Nations-sponsored Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, which attributed the degradation of the planet’s ecosystems to human activity. The decline of earth’s natural systems undermines the life-giving services those systems provide: fresh water and food, and regulation of air and climate quality. “Ecosystem decline is also increasing the risk of disruptive and potentially irreversible changes, such as regional climate shifts, the emergence of new diseases and the formation of low-oxygen ‘dead zones’ in coastal waters,” Worldwatch says.

Top climate scientists, including lead NASA climate-change researcher James Hansen, warned in early 2006 that a 1-degree temperature rise above the 2000 level would constitute “dangerous” change, given the likely effects on sea levels and biodiversity. A satellite survey, he has said, shows that the Greenland ice cap is melting faster than scientists had feared. With twice as much ice going into the sea as five years ago, there are potentially dramatic implications for the planet.

As Worldwatch’s Flavin writes: “If either the Greenland or the West Antarctic ice sheet were to melt, hundreds of millions of coastal residents would be displaced—a thousand times the scale of the New Orleans disaster [following Hurricane Katrina in August 2005]. In the Shanghai metropolitan area alone, 40 million could lose their homes. And large sections of Florida would simply disappear.”

The greenhouse-gas emissions that precipitate climate change stem in large part from the burning of fossil fuels – oil, coal and natural gas – which provide nearly 80% of the world’s energy. Despite the rising cost of such energy, its use has grown over the past two years: coal rose by 6.3%, natural gas by 3.3% and oil by 1.3%.

One positive energy indicator, though, says Worldwatch, is that growth rates in renewable energy have overtaken those of fossil fuels, and “the already rapid growth of renewable energy industries has accelerated in the past year.” Global wind-power capacity leapt 24% in 2005, solar photovoltaic production by 45% and biofuels by 20%. “These developments are impressive,” writes Flavin, “and are likely to provoke far-reaching changes in world energy markets within the next five years. But the transition will have to move even faster to prevent the kind of ecological and economic crises that may be precipitated by continuing dependence on fossil fuels.”

High oil prices and a wildly gyrating market, according to the Vital Signs report, may lend a helping hand to melting icecaps and catastrophic weather in bringing about an energy transition. Prices are at their highest level, in real terms, in over two decades. Although production has not yet peaked, growth is slowing and no longer keeping up with the roughly 2% annual increase in demand.

Numerous other factors also surround the oil market. Worldwatch points out that geologists are not finding sufficient oil to replace the 83 million barrels extracted each day. Much of the remaining oil is in unstable regions of the world or is otherwise difficult to reach. Fuel-guzzling airlines and manufacturers of fuel-guzzling vehicles have been pushed to the brink of bankruptcy. (Hybrid electric cars are growing in popularity, even in the energy-hungry United States, where new government policies and booming private investment is propelling the growth of energy technology. In China, the government has responded to the changing energy era by raising taxes on large vehicles and requiring higher levels of fuel efficiency.)

While the energy markets have not yet been brought into balance, says Worldwatch, “one tipping point can lead to another, and signs are now growing that the world is on the verge of an energy revolution.” While Flavin hails some recent developments as impressive and likely to provoke important changes over the next five years, he argues that “the change is still not fast enough to bring on the broader changes in the global economy that could stave off imminent ecological and economic crises.”

“Government leaders and private citizens,” he writes, “will have to mobilise in an unprecedented way if we are to have any chance of passing a healthy and secure world on to the next generation.”

The Author: Maryann Bird is a London-based freelance journalist with a special interest in environmental and human-rights issues. A writer and editor, she was previously a staff member at Time magazine (Europe), The Independent, the International Herald Tribune and The New York Times.

Homepage photo by Ryan Lackey

Backgrounder: The Loess Plateau project

Maryann Bird — Tue, 08 Aug 2006 12:50:00 +0000

The rehabilitation of the Loess Plateau has significant implications for other places on earth which suffer from large-scale environmental degradation as a result of human impact, and can serve as model for those regions.

In 1995, the World Bank asked John D. Liu to record the early stages of its Loess Plateau Watershed Rehabilitation Project for a film called Investing in People. That film was about initiatives that were changing the bank’s focus from large infrastructural projects to ones in which poor people living in remote parts of the world would directly benefit.

Over the following decade, Liu led the Environment Education Media Project on numerous other visits to the Loess Plateau, which is considered the cradle of Chinese civilisation. Approximately the size of France, the plateau is 640,000 kilometers square, situated in the upper and middle reaches of the Yellow River, and stretching over parts of seven provinces. Its name comes from the powdery, mineral-rich, windborne loess soil that characterises the area – and which gave the Yellow River its name.

Settled agriculture is thought to have emerged 9,500 to 10,000 years ago on the Loess Plateau. Throughout the plateau’s long and complex history, human activity produced a great civilisation, while also ecologically destroying the region. It came to be known as the most eroded place on earth. Silt raised the riverbed, making it more prone to flooding – flooding that often preceded drought and famine. The Yellow River, which has flooded more than 1,500 times in recorded history, became known as “China’s Sorrow”. But each time it flooded, the people rebuilt.

The ecological devastation of the region took place over generations with the cutting of forests and removal of vegetation cover, leading to soil erosion, disruption of the water cycle and the disappearance of wild plants and animals. A cycle of poverty and environmental destruction ensued, a cycle that fed on itself.

In the 1990s, the Chinese government decided to restore what took 10,000 years to destroy. Thanks to a complex programme of watershed management – formulated by the World Bank in cooperation with the Chinese Ministry of Water Resources and the local people -- an astounding transformation has occurred within just 10 years. Ecological improvements have shown tremendous promise, and local people’s income and quality of life have improved.

Planting on steep slopes has been banned, as has tree-cutting and grazing of goats and sheep. Farmers are responsible for maintaining tree-planting areas and terraced fields, to reduce erosion. Sand dunes have been stabilised, and grasses and bushes are taking hold again. Small dams are helping to restore productive croplands in eroded gullies, and perennial crops (such as orchard fruits) are reducing the disruption of soil cover and helping to diversify local economies.

The successful start to the ambitious rehabilitation of the Loess Plateau has significant implications for other places on earth which suffer from large-scale environmental degradation as a result of human impact, and can serve as model for those regions.

The plateau’s tale, Liu believes, provides the kind of critical knowledge the world needs now if it is to envision a sustainable future for a human race living in harmony and sharing the planet’s resources. With support from several development agencies, he has collected more than 100 hours of videotape of the region, its people and the ongoing rehabilitation effort. A fraction of those tapes will make up his latest film project, China’s Sorrow, Earth’s Hope.

The Author: Maryann Bird is a London-based journalist

Still image taken from John D. Liu's film China’s Sorrow, Earth’s Hope