Welcome to the Global Climate Change blog, hosted by Nancy Margulies and Amy Lenzo of the World Café.
At
this time in human history we need each other more than ever to
address the challenges and make the changes that can reverse the
present environmental trends. Global climate change can refer to the political, social and cultural “climate” as well, all of which need to be addressed if we are to shift the way we live on this planet.
Share your thoughts with us; we’ll post them and together we can make a difference! You can click on the word "comments" below any post to respond to the ideas shared within it.
Nancy,
Thank you for providing this opportunity for all of us to share information on how to create a better world.
Our contribution is working to provide opportunities to think, question and explore new ideas, so we all can be informed citizens and catalysts for positive change.
I would like to invite others to visit Global Dialogue Center to listen to our new MOMENTS OF INSIGHT SERIES, which includes a powerful six-episode series with NY Times Bestselling Author, John Perkins called OUR GEO-POLITICAL CRISIS and YOU. It serves as a primer to his 2nd book that hit the NY Times bestseller list its first week. Learn about what’s going on in every region of the world and how we can each contribute to changing it by working together. It’s free and open to the world.
http://www.globaldialoguecenter.com/insights
May we all use our unique gifts to do our part for the good of all people, animals and our planet.
Debbe Kennedy
Founder, Global Dialogue Center
PICNIC Green Challenge
Win 500.000 euro for a ‘green businessplan’!
July 5, 2007
Mr. Lester Brown
Earth Policy Institute
1350 Connecticut Ave. NW
Suite 403
Washington DC 20036
Phone: 202.496.9290
Fax: 202.496.9325
Email:
Re: Plan B, at http://www.earth-policy.org/Books/PB2/index.htm.
Here are some suggestions:
1. Plantings along roads, fences, groves. In tropical and sub-tropical areas, plant Jatropha and Paradise trees along the margins. Also, plant them in groves, harvest the oil from the seeds, make biodiesel out of the oil and feed the crush cake to animals. The crush cake could also be used to make ethanol.
2. In ravines, swales and other unlevel spots, use rocks, tree limbs, brush, and gabions to stop or slow the rain water and snow melt so they have a chance to infiltrate into the ground.
3. In range lands, use dung beetles. Charles Walters, Acres, U.S.A. is coming out with a book soon on dung beetles. See: http://www.acresusa.com.
Best regards,
Jim Miller
Whatever you can do,
or believe you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius,
power and magic in it. -J. Goethe
P Please consider the environment before printing this email.
Plan B for a healthy earth and economy
By Lester R. Brown
The health of an economy cannot be separated from that of its natural support systems. More than half the world’s people depend directly on croplands, rangelands, forests, and fisheries for their livelihoods. Many more depend on forest product industries, leather goods industries, cotton and woolen textile industries, and food processing for their jobs.
A strategy for eradicating poverty will not succeed if an economy’s environmental support systems are collapsing. If croplands are eroding and harvests are shrinking, if water tables are falling and wells are going dry, if rangelands are turning to desert and livestock are dying, if fisheries are collapsing, if forests are shrinking, and if rising temperatures are scorching crops, a poverty-eradication program – no matter how carefully crafted and well implemented – will not succeed.
Restoring the earth will take an enormous international effort, one even larger and more demanding than the often-cited Marshall Plan that helped rebuild war-torn Europe and Japan. And such an initiative must be undertaken at wartime speed lest environmental deterioration translate into economic decline, just as it did for earlier civilizations that violated nature’s thresholds and ignored its deadlines.
We can roughly estimate how much it will cost to reforest the earth, protect the earth’s topsoil, restore rangelands and fisheries, stabilize water tables, and protect biological diversity. Where data and information are lacking, we fill in with assumptions. The goal is not to have a set of precise numbers, but a set of reasonable estimates for an earth restoration budget.
In calculating the cost of reforestation, the focus is on developing countries since forested area is already expanding in the northern hemisphere’s industrial countries. Meeting the growing fuel wood demand in these countries will require an estimated 55 million additional hectares of forested area. Anchoring soils and restoring hydrological stability would require roughly another 100 million hectares located in thousands of watersheds in developing countries. Recognizing some overlap between these two, we will reduce the 155 million total to 150 million hectares. Beyond this, an additional 30 million hectares will be needed to produce lumber, paper, and other forest products.
Only a small share of this tree planting will likely come from plantations. Much of the planting will be on the outskirts of villages, along field boundaries, along roads, on small plots of marginal land, and on denuded hillsides.
The big deforestation success story is South Korea, which over the last four decades has reforested its once denuded mountains and hills using locally mobilized labor. Other countries, including China, have tried extensive reforestation but mostly under more arid conditions and with much less success. Turkey has an ambitious NGO-led grassroots reforestation program, relying heavily on volunteer labor. So, too, does Kenya, where women’s groups led by Nobel Peace Prize–winner Wangari Maathai have planted 30 million trees.
If seedlings cost $40 per thousand, as the World Bank estimates, and if the typical planting rate is roughly 2,000 per hectare, then seedlings cost $80 per hectare. Labor costs for planting trees are high, but since much of the labor for planting these trees would consist of locally mobilized volunteers, we are assuming a total of $400 per hectare, including both seedlings and labor. With a total of 150 million hectares to be planted over the next decade, this will come to roughly 15 million hectares per year at $400 each for a total annual expenditure of $6 billion.
Conserving the earth’s topsoil by reducing erosion to the rate of new soil formation or below involves two principal steps. One is to retire the highly erodible land that cannot sustain cultivation – the estimated one tenth of the world’s cropland that accounts for perhaps half of all erosion. For the United States, that has meant retiring 14 million hectares (nearly 35 million acres), at a cost of close to $50 per acre or $125 per hectare, for a total annual cost approaching $2 billion.
The second initiative consists of adopting conservation practices on the remaining land that is subject to excessive erosion – that is, erosion that exceeds the natural rate of new soil formation. The initiative includes incentives to encourage farmers to adopt conservation practices such as contour farming, strip cropping, and, increasingly, minimum-till or no-till farming. These expenditures in the United States total roughly $1 billion per year.
In expanding these estimates to cover the world, it is assumed that roughly 10 percent of the world’s cropland is highly erodible and should be planted to grass or trees before the topsoil is lost and it becomes barren land. In both the United States and China, the two leading food-producing countries, which account for a third of the world grain harvest, the official goal is to retire one tenth of all cropland. In Europe, it likely would be somewhat less than 10 percent, but in Africa and the Andean countries it could be substantially higher than that. For the world as a whole, converting 10 percent of cropland that is highly erodible to grass or trees seems a reasonable goal. Since this costs roughly $2 billion in the United States, which represents one eighth of the world cropland area, the total for the world would be roughly $16 billion annually.
Assuming that the need for erosion control practices for the rest of the world is similar to that in the United States, we again multiply the U.S. expenditure by eight to get a total of $8 billion for the world as a whole. The two components together –16 billion for retiring highly erodible land and $8 billion for adopting conservation practices – give an annual total for the world of $24 billion.
For cost data on rangeland protection and restoration, we turn to the United Nations Plan of Action to Combat Desertification. This plan, which focuses on the world’s dryland regions, containing nearly 90 percent of all rangeland, estimates that it would cost roughly $183 billion over a 20-year restoration period – or $9 billion per year. The key restoration measures include improved rangeland management, financial incentives to eliminate overstocking, and revegetation with appropriate rest periods, when grazing would be banned.
This is a costly undertaking, but every dollar invested in rangeland restoration yields a return of $2.50 in income from the increased productivity of the rangeland ecosystem. From a societal point of view, countries with large pastoral populations, where the rangeland deterioration is concentrated, are invariably among the world’s poorest. The alternative to action – ignoring the deterioration – brings not only a loss of land productivity, but a loss of livelihood and ultimately millions of refugees, some migrating to nearby cities and others moving to other countries.
The restoration of oceanic fisheries centers primarily on the establishment of a worldwide network of marine reserves, which would cover roughly 30 percent of the ocean’s surface. For this exercise we use detailed calculations by the Conservation Biology Group at Cambridge University. Their estimated range of expenditures centers on $13 billion per year.
For wildlife protection, the bill is somewhat higher. The World Parks Congress estimates that the annual shortfall in funding needed to manage and to protect existing areas designated as parks comes to roughly $25 billion a year. Additional areas needed, including those encompassing the biologically diverse hotspots not yet included in designated parks, would cost perhaps another $6 billion a year, yielding a total of $31 billion.
There is one activity, stabilizing water tables, where we do not have an estimate, only a guess. The key to stabilizing water tables is raising water productivity, and for this we have the experience gained beginning a half-century ago when the world started to systematically raise land productivity. The elements needed in a comparable water model are research to develop more water-efficient irrigation practices and technologies, the dissemination of these research findings to farmers, and economic incentives that encourage farmers to adopt and use these improved irrigation practices and technologies.
In some countries, the capital needed to fund a program to raise water productivity can come from cancelling the subsidies that now often encourage the wasteful use of irrigation water. Sometimes these are power subsidies, as they are in India; other times they are subsidies that provide water at prices well below costs, as happens in the United States. In terms of additional resources needed worldwide, including the economic incentives for farmers to use more water-efficient practices and technologies, we assume it will take additional expenditures of $10 billion.
Altogether, restoring the earth will require additional expenditures of $93 billion per year. Many will ask, Can the world afford this? But the only appropriate question is, Can the world afford to not make these investments?
Lester Brown is the founder and president of the Earth Policy Institute. This article was adapted from the book, “Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble,” available at http://www.earth-policy.org/Books/PB2/index.htm.
Nancy, thanks for the invitation to chime in on climate change. To be brief, I love the way physical reality reflects our state of consciousness and “climate change” seems such a befitting metaphor for the global mind change (thanks you Willis Harman) our Western society (with the U.S. at the head of the line) needs to experience so we enjoy an environmentally sustainable, spirtually fulfilling and socially just world (thank you Pachamama Alliance).
To reverse the deteriorating condition of our environment we must simultaneously transform the consciousness that caused the problem in the first place (thank you Albert Einstein).
Thanks again for the invitation and kindest regards,
John Renesch, author, Getting to the Better Future (www.GettingToTheBetterFuture.com)
There’s a great CD by ‘Michel Montecrossa and his band The Chosen Few’ that is articulating the question of climate change in its various aspects. It
is called: Sweet Earth – Save The Climate Of Our Earth # 1′
One can find the pressinfo (including audiofiles) for this CD at:
http://www.mirapuri-enterprises.com/Michel-Pressinfos
In the run up to the Copenhagen climate change conference, it is vital the following information be disseminated to the public as well as to our political leaders.
A widely cited 2006 report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, Livestock’s Long Shadow, estimates that 18 percent of annual worldwide greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are attributable to livestock….however recent analysis by Goodland and Anhang co-authors of “Livestock and Climate Change” in the latest issue of World Watch magazine found that livestock and their byproducts actually account for at least 32.6 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year, or 51 percent of annual worldwide GHG emissions!
http://www.51percent.org
The main sources of GHGs from animal agriculture are: (1) Deforestation of the rainforests to grow feed for livestock. (2) Methane from manure waste. – Methane is 72 times more potent as a global warming gas than CO2 (3) Refrigeration and transport of meat around the world. (4) Raising, processing and slaughtering of the animal.
Meat production also uses a massive amount of water and other resources which would be better used to feed the world’s hungry and provide water to those in need.
Based on their research, Goodland and Anhang conclude that replacing livestock products with soy-based and other alternatives would be the best strategy for reversing climate change. They say “This approach would have far more rapid effects on GHG emissions and their atmospheric concentrations-and thus on the rate the climate is warming-than actions to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy.”
The fact is that we are being informed of the dangerous path we are on by depending greatly on animal flesh for human consumption. We still have the opportunity to make the most effective steps in saving ourselves and this planet. By simply choosing a plant based diet we can reduce our carbon foot print by a huge amount.
We are gambling with our lives and with those of our future generations to come. It’s madness to know we are fully aware of the possible consequences but yet are failing to act.
Promoting a plant based diet to the public is would be the most effective way to curb deforestation, we hope this will be adopted as a significant measure to save the rainforests and protect the delicate ecology.
Thank you for your consideration.