An informal moment with Lidia Brito

Luisa Massarani
Latin America regional coordinator, SciDev.Net

---

Last day of the conference… I was in the press room, very tired, thinking on what to write about, when the lovely and smiling Lidia Brito came into the room. Not even showing how tired she should be as co-chair of this conference…

We start talking in Portuguese – a Mozambique Portuguese much near of my Brazilian Portuguese than the one spoken in Portugal… I asked: “So Lidia, what next?”

Basically, the idea is to keep the level of engagement reached for this conference aiming to sensitize the negotiators of Rio+20. Next month, for example, a side event will be hold in New York, during the round for discussing the Rio+20 document.

Lidia Brito

In June, a five-day Forum on Science, Technology and Innovation for Sustainable Development will be held prior to the Rio+20, organised by the International Council for Science (ICSU), UNESCO, the World Federation of Engineering Organizations, the International Social Science Council, the Brazilian Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation and the Brazilian Academy of Sciences.

Both meetings aim to join different stakeholders and keep sensitizing the negotiators of Rio+20. But… how much the scientific community is in fact being heard during the negotiations?

According to Lidia, the hopes are high – same feeling expressed by Alice Abreu, ICSU Regional Coordinator for Rio+20 as a chat we had in Brazil a couple of weeks ago.

Both of them believe that the scientific community movements are being able to influence already the negotiations, as – they say – expressed in parts of the draft document.

“I think we will make the difference, but we still have a long way to go”, said Lidia.

“We are learning how to work differently, much more collaborative, in an inter and multidisciplinary way and we need to be prepared to answer the new scientific questions that are to be presented”, she believes.

Forum on Science, Technology and Innovation for Sustainable Development 

This blog post is part of our Planet Under Pressure 2012 coverage — which takes place 26–29 March 2012. To read news and analysis from the conference please visit our website.

How to adapt to climate change: ask the locals

T. V. Padma
South Asia regional coordinator, SciDev.Net

---

The one group conspicuous by their absence in the Planet Under Pressure conference is the local communities who, one would presume, have the highest stakes in all the developments and debate on climate change.

The reason is obvious: no one invites indigenous communities to conferences straddled by international and national policy experts and scientists. But it turns out that local communities are finding their own ways of coping with increasingly erratic weather changes, without the top-down ‘expert’ inputs, so thank you. And some experts suggest scientists could learn a thing or two from them.

Tirso Gonzales, professor at the department of indigenous studies in the University of British Columbia, described today (Wednesday) how for local communities who have been living in the Peruvian Andes for 8000 years, climate change is not a new phenomenon. They have the local knowledge to deal with erratic weather patterns, but neither scientists nor policy experts care to talk to them.

A session on ‘resilient communities: local pathways to meet the energy, climate and resource depletion challenges’ on Tuesday heard several case studies about how local farming communities in Nigeria, Senegal and India are devising their own methods of coping with the impacts of changing weather, even as their governments grapple with policy announcements and implementation.

Ranjay Singh, scientist at the Central Soil Salinity Research Institute, Karnal in northern India, cited several examples of local communities devising their own solutions, from cross-breeding yaks to  domestication of wild species with drought or flood tolerance, to intercropping to adapt to the changes they see around them.

“Most of the community knowledge led initiatives are based on incremental learning and natural adaptive capacity,” Singh says.

What’s missing is the will and interest of natural and social scientists to include this informal traditional knowledge into their research strategies, share experiences and knowledge, says Gonzales.

The day, for now, has not yet dawned.

This blog post is part of our Planet Under Pressure 2012 coverage — which takes place 26–29 March 2012. To read news and analysis from the conference please visit our website.

UN climate negotiations system ‘failing poorest countries’

Mićo Tatalović
Deputy news editor, SciDev.Net

---

Least developed countries may not be getting the best deal at the UN climate change negotiations, Planet Under Pressure conference heard this week (26–29 March).

Heike Schroeder, senior lecturer at the University of East Anglia, United Kingdom, presented new, still unpublished, findings analysing the past 15 years of national delegations at UNFCCC (UN Framework Convention on Climate Change) negotiations.

Schroeder and Maxwell Boykoff, a researcher at the University of Colorado, United States, found delegations “have grown significantly in size and diversified in composition”, which followed  the shift and expansion of content and complexity of negotiations.

But while the delegations of developed G8 countries, and emerging G5 countries (Brazil, China, India, Mexico, South Africa) grew significantly, those of the least developed countries (e.g. Gabon, Guyana) did not follow.

This means there was a capacity gap between the poor and rich — as well as between large and small countries. Having smaller delegations means that least developed countries do not get to partake in all sessions and are also less likely to have expert representation in their delegations.

The way forward, Schroeder said, was to cap the delegation size, introduce a code of delegations for all countries within the UNFCCC that would include representation of NGOs, indigenous people and other stakeholders.

And finally, linking activities between formal and informal negotiations to open them up and allow delegates to represent both their countries and their stakeholder groups.

“Many people that go to these conference would know [about these problems already] but there’s nothing that’s been done about it,” Schroeder told SciDev.Net. “It’s really important to address these issues of equity in the negotiations.”

Capping national delegation sizes would not fully solve the issue but it would help give more parity to the process, she added. “At least, it would be five against, let’s say 20, rather than a thousand.”

This blog post is part of our Planet Under Pressure 2012 coverage — which takes place 26–29 March 2012. To read news and analysis from the conference please visit our website.

How to make business environmentally ingenious

Aisling Irwin
Consultant news editor, SciDev.Net

---

A plea against bureaucracy when designing ways of getting businesses to be greener was made by Colin Drummond, chief executive of a UK waste company, Viridor, one of the few industry representatives to address the plenary sessions.

“Bureaucracy prevents new ideas coming forward,” he said, and gave a compelling example.

He contrasted the environmental footprint of the UK’s water industry with that of its waste industry.

Tax on landfill in the UK has seen a 60 per cent reduction in carbon emissions.

“But we have achieved it at the cost of a huge increase in carbon dioxide emissions – and is the system robust enough to cope with future droughts?” he asked.

In contrast, with the waste industry there was “no bureaucratic approach” he said. There was just a tax on every tonne of waste that went to landfill.

Making landfill too expensive drove ingenuity, with the result that waste handling in the UK has seen a 60 per cent reduction in carbon emissions; a five fold increase in recycling; a six fold increase in renewable energy generation … and a profit for shareholders.

The argument that incentives work better than regulation was also put forward by Shell’s Martin Haigh, whose reception on Day One we covered here.

“If there was a global price on carbon that would transform the incentives for Shell,” he said

This blog post is part of our Planet Under Pressure 2012 coverage — which takes place 26–29 March 2012. To read news and analysis from the conference please visit our website.

Why egalitarian societies have more cyclists

Aisling Irwin
Consultant news editor, SciDev.Net

---

The more unequal a society is, the fewer cyclists it has.

This turned out to be a useful insight which, after it was put to the Tuesday plenaries, was referred to by conference speakers again and again.

It was useful because it helped people to think of ways to move beyond the impossible invocations of many scientists here, repeated endlessly at this meeting, that the only way to save the planet is to “change societal values” and “reduce consumption”.

Low status?

Richard Wilkinson, professor at the University of Nottingham, UK, and expert from the world of inequality research, told us there is a growing wealth of data showing that more unequal societies are, regardless of the overall national wealth, more fraught with health and social problems ranging from obesity to violence.

“Inequality is divisive and corrosive. The data show us that that is truer than we ever expected,” he said.

Here’s where the cyclists fit in: they tend not to come out in societies where your position is in a steep hierarchy, and thus the symbols of status you project, are important. Cyclists are also less common when you need to defend yourself against the weak. In both cases a flashy four-wheel drive vehicle is a better option for those who can afford it.

That’s why greater inequality  leads to greater consumption, argued Wilkinson, as people aspire to climb the hierarchy, acquire status and protect themselves from those beneath them.

And that, in turn, is why reducing inequality may be the route to reducing consumption.

Wilkinson also said that people (and businesses) in more equal societies are more public-spirited and thus more likely to act according to the greater environmental interest.

The previous day, doctoral student Pamela Collins called for a ‘global patriotism’ – the kind of sentiment that has pulled communities together during times of war – as a route to rising above individual interests to halt Earth’s environmental decline.

So is tackling societal inequality, therefore, the first step?

This blog post is part of our Planet Under Pressure 2012 coverage — which takes place 26–29 March 2012. To read news and analysis from the conference please visit our website.

Is geoengineering a lot of hot air?

Joel Adriano
South-East Asia & Pacific regional coordinator, SciDev.Net

---

Geoengineering was described as a “pretty scary” idea by scientists who have been assessing its ramifications said Ben Kravitz, Carnegie Institute for Science. He has been studying the idea of mimicking the cooling effect of  large volcanic eruptions on climate. This could be done by continually pumping sulphates into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight away from earth.

Could we mimic this volcano?
Flickr/kahunapulej

He tested two scenarios — releasing suphates at the lowest layer, the troposphere, or the highest,  into space. Both cases carried the risk of serious unintended consequences.

Geoengineering is a highly controversial concept since it involves large-scale deliberate manipulation of the planet to remove greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and mitigate global warming. Some of the techniques, such as solar radiation management, are meant to reduce the warming effects of carbon dioxide.

Kravitz said the first idea, put forward in 1977, was to pump carbon dioxide into the deep ocean.

Colin Axon, of Brunel University in the UK, explained that issues included cost (energy, people and investments), materials, process, water and space (land and distribution).

Margaret Torn, head of the Climate and Carbon Sciences Program at Berkeley National Laboratory, US, who studied carbon carbon dioxide removal by terrestrial ecosystems, found that the disadvantages outweighed the advantages if the landscape was altered, for example by intensively planting trees where there used to be none.

But, she said the study showed that “there can be ways to manage land to increase carbon sequestration”.

“There are lots of grey areas in geoengineering” — and so far she said, very few researchers have actually came up with compelling research.

This blog post is part of our Planet Under Pressure 2012 coverage — which takes place 26–29 March 2012. To read news and analysis from the conference please visit our website.

Just how inclusive is ‘Future Earth’?

Aisling Irwin
Consultant news editor, SciDev.Net

---

Future Earth is a vast plan to draw together the big international global change research programmes, and funders, together, to deliver, as ICSU president Yuan Tseh Lee (interviewed here) says, “action-oriented research that society really needs”.

Anyone uneasy at how pratical, inclusive and nimble this behemoth of a collaboration can be (read our latest story on Future Earth here) was invited to a Town Hall session last night, to quiz Future Earth’s behemoth of a transition team.

One worry was how Future Earth would ensure it didn’t just “recycle basic knowledge and not actually be able to generate action”.

The reply was that, as agencies like UNEP are part of the collaboration, it would be forced to stay “action-oriented”.

But most of the questions probed just how inclusive this project, which aims to include just about everyone in setting its research goals and implementing them, will really be. The most upset member of the audience was a biological scientist who felt Future Earth was being driven by the climate and geosciences communities. Emphatically not, said the panel — we have DIVERSITAS, the biodiversity people, on board for a start.

Also: yes – there would be engineers; yes — humanities (there’s an environmental historian on the team); yes – a goal is to recruit and empower scientists from developing countries; yes – social scientist involvement is absolutely critical.

But it’s proving hard, said a member of the transition team, to persuade the last group to join.

There was really only one question that stumped the team: How will you know if you have succeeded?

The team had no answer to this question of metrics, which could be problematic if soliciting funds from outcome-obsessed funders like the UK’s Department of International Development.

But it felt like Future Earth has won the greater argument – that researchers need, urgently, to find out what the outside world needs from them and then pool their frames of reference to deliver it.
This blog post is part of our Planet Under Pressure 2012 coverage — which takes place 26–29 March 2012. To read news and analysis from the conference please visit our website.

Just whom do scientists want around the table?

T. V. Padma
South Asia regional coordinator, SciDev.Net

---

Day Two of the Planet under Pressure conference and I am beginning to feel that all environment/climate change/development/green economy/green growth conferences sound the same, and seem to lead nowhere. Why?

Nigel Cameron, president of Centre for Policy on Emerging Technologies (C-PET) in the United States, and research professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology, called a spade a spade during the plenary discussion this morning.

The conversation between scientists and other academics, business honchos, policymakers and policy implementers and civil society  –  is “moving backwards”, “week by week, conference by conference,” he claimed.

The sectors don’t seem to talk to each other in a common language.  Take, for example, the word ‘risk’: it may be described differently by a climate change scientist, a politician and a venture capitalist.

Great meeting: but who's around the table

Yvo de Boer, former executive secretary of UNFCCC and special global advisor for the professional services firm KPMG, suggested collaboration between governments, civil society and business as a way forward. He sees the biggest single opportunity that could break the logjam is a “different kind of dialogue and creating an understanding” among the various actors.

But what is happening, said Cameron, is that each sector is building up a wish list of what kind of technologies or policies they would like to have in place – “a wish list with no capacity to be enacted”

Scientists, he said, were living in a bubble. “Life in the bubble is pleasant but life in the bubble is problematic.”

There are groups out there who do have an interest in long-term change, he told the meeting: Venture capitalists, who have to think far ahead; industrial R&D departments.

“These people are not around the table [at Planet Under Pressure] and the reason for that is that the people around the table don’t want them.”

So, what’s your bet – will Rio + 20 sound the same or different?

This blog post is part of our Planet Under Pressure 2012 coverage — which takes place 26–29 March 2012. To read news and analysis from the conference please visit our website.

Community-based adaptation: can it be a solution?

Bothina Osama
Middle East & North Africa regional news editor, SciDev.Net

---

Terry Cannon, Institute of Development Studies, UK

“Community-based” is the keyword for any solution you may think of on local level, this is how Terry Cannon, a researcher at the Institute of Development Studies in the UK described his view in finding a way to improve the integration of disaster risk management (DRM) with climate adaptation, in the context development.

Cannon pointed out that these three issues are difficult to separate, “if we are putting plans for development we have to work on disaster risk reduction, and this will lead us to climate adaptation”, so the three issues have to intersect in many junctures.

He maintained that the link between DRM and adaptation to climate change has improved in the last five years but the problem is that they are not linked to development, nor are the funds. The agencies operating at the community level especially NGOs, and the donors that support them, still find it difficult to integrate work on adaptation and on disaster risk reduction with development.

Therefore as community-based adaptation and community-based disaster risk management expand rapidly with adaptation funds flow in larger quantities, there is a danger that separate silos will continue with a lack of clarity of where funding will fit.

Cannon raised that community assumed to be valid locus of interventions, but the continued mismatch between people’s priorities and DRM have to stop, and culture and belief systems that are still largely ignored have to be engaged.

This blog post is part of our Planet Under Pressure 2012 coverage — which takes place 26–29 March 2012. To read news and analysis from the conference please visit our website.

Animation engages young people in ocean issues

Luisa Massarani
Latin America regional coordinator, SciDev.Net

---

The need to engage the public in the ocean acidification issue — an increasing concern in scientific debates — is evident. But finding ways of attracting the attention of audiences can be tricky, highlighted a session on oceans at Planet Under Pressure 2012.

A project carried out by the European Project on Ocean Acidification and the UK Plymouth Marine Laboratory is an example of good practice.

Students from the Ridgeway School (Plymouth, UK) were commissioned to produce an animation film to explain the issue to young people.

The students talked to scientists and conducted their own research in the school and National Marine Aquarium. They were involved in the whole process of animation, including giving voice to the film’s characters.

The result was “The another CO2 problem”, a creative 8-minute animation film, which was awarded with the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Bill Bryson Prize.

There is no doubt how beautiful the film is and how important the experience was for the kids — who probably will not forget what ocean acidification means but also had a lot of fun! It is also an opportunity to raise the curiosity of other young people to the issue.

But a closer look at the film highlights the fact that the language does not make some of the main scientific concepts clear. This is the case, for example, when formulas or phrases are used that are more at home at a conference for scientists such as Planet Under Pressure.

This raises the point that although climate change is abstract and more difficult to understand, ocean acidification can be much more visual and concrete to understand. Another example of video that succeeds in making clear what happens with the oceans was created by the Reuben H. Fleet Science Center, in San Diego (United States). Although clearer, it certainly doesn’t have the charm of the Plymouth animation!

Check on Youtube:

This blog post is part of our Planet Under Pressure 2012 coverage — which takes place 26–29 March 2012. To read news and analysis from the conference please visit our website.