Canadian Kevin Freedman is celebrating World Water Day Tuesday by living on 25 litres of water a day, instead of the North American average of 330 litres per day. And he has enlisted 31 others in his “Water Conservation Challenge” to go water- lean, using just 25 litres per day for cooking, drinking, cleaning, and sanitation for the entire month of March.
“People in Canada and the U.S. have no idea how much water they use or how much they waste,” Freedman told IPS.
“Although people live on less, it is very difficult to use just 25 litres a day. You can’t shower or use a washing machine,” he said. “I’m hoping to raise awareness that water is a finite resource.”
Nearly a billion people don’t have good access to safe fresh water. In a single generation, that number could double as growing demands for water will exceed the available and sustainable supply by 40 percent, according a recent study. “Peak water” has already come and gone. Humanity uses more water than can be sustained, drawing on non-renewable reserves of water accumulated over thousands of years in deep aquifers.
“Water cannot be created, it can only by managed,” said Margaret Catley-Carlson, a former senior official with both the Canadian government and at the United Nations, a renowned global authority on water issues, and a director at the Canadian Water Network Continue reading →
45- 50% of global warming emissions from industrial agriculture
By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Feb 8, 2011 (IPS)
Eco-farming could double food production in entire regions within 10 years while mitigating climate change, according to a new U.N. report released Tuesday in Geneva.
An urgent transformation to ‘eco-farming’ is the only way to end hunger and face the challenges of climate change and rural poverty, said Olivier De Schutter, U.N. Special Rapporteur on the right to food, following the presentation of his annual report focusing on agroecology and the right to food to the U.N. Human Rights Council.
“Agroecology mimics nature not industrial processes. It replaces the external inputs like fertiliser with knowledge of how a combination of plants, trees and animals can enhance productivity of the land,” De Schutter told IPS, stressing that, “Yields went up 214 percent in 44 projects in 20 countries in sub-Saharan Africa using agro-ecological farming techniques over a period of 3 to 10 years… far more than any GM [genetically modified] crop has ever done.”
Other recent scientific assessments have shown that small farmers in 57 countries using agro-ecological techniques obtained average yield increases of 80 percent. Africans’ average increases were 116 percent.
“Today’s scientific evidence demonstrates that agroecological methods outperform the use of chemical fertilisers in boosting food production in regions where the hungry live,” De Schutter said. [Video Interviews with De Schutter]
“Hunger is not a food production problem. It is an income problem”
By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Jan 28, 2011 (IPS)
Billions of dollars are being made by investors in a speculative “food bubble” that’s created record food prices, starving millions and destabilising countries, experts now conclude.
[This is the second of a multi-part series investigating what is driving food prices higher]
Wall Street investment firms and banks, along with their kin in London and Europe, were responsible for the technology dot-com bubble, the stock market bubble, and the recent U.S. and UK housing bubbles. They extracted enormous profits and their bonuses before the inevitable collapse of each.
Now they’ve turned to basic commodities. The result? At a time when there has been no significant change in the global food supply or in food demand, the average cost of buying food shot up 32 percent from June to December 2010, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).
Nothing but price speculation can explain wheat prices jumping 70 percent from June to December last year when global wheat stocks were stable, experts say.
“There is no food shortage in the world. Food is simply priced out of the reach of the world’s poorest people,” said Robert Fox of Oxfam Canada in reference to the estimated one billion people who go hungry.
“Hunger is not a food production problem. It is an income problem,” Fox told IPS. Continue reading →
“Africans have become share-croppers, exporting coffee, cotton, flowers and now food while going hungry”
By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Jan 13, 2011 (IPS)
Famine-hollowed farmers watch trucks loaded with grain grown on their ancestral lands heading for the nearest port, destined to fill richer bellies in foreign lands. This scene has become all too common since the 2008 food crisis.
[This is the first of a multi-part series investigating what is driving food prices higher]
Food prices are even higher now in many countries, sparking another cycle of hunger riots in the Middle East and South Asia last weekend. While bad weather gets the blame for rising prices, the instant price hikes of recent times are largely due to market speculation in a corrupt global food system.
The 2008 food crisis awoke much of the world’s investment community to the profitable reality that hungry people will do almost anything, even sell their own children, in order to eat. And with the global financial crisis, food and farmland became the “new gold” for some of the biggest investors, experts agree.
In 2010, wheat futures rose 47 percent, U.S. corn was up more than 50 percent, and soybeans rose 34 percent.
On Wednesday, U.S.-based Cargill, the world’s largest agricultural commodities trader, announced a tripling of profits. The firm generated 1.49 billion dollars in three months between September and November 2010.
Meanwhile, U.S. Treasury Bills pay a return of less than one percent. Continue reading →
‘Governments Fail to Understand Gravity of the Situation’ – Stern
By Stephen Leahy
COPENHAGEN (IPS/TerraViva)
[I wrote this piece 16 December 2009 and it remains fully relevant today and is posted here for 1st time. And please note that the +5C cited here is the global average which means the warming could easily be 10 C warmer where you live. All of this is well beyond anything humanity has ever faced — Stephen]
On its current carbon emissions path, humanity faces a 50-percent chance of warming the planet a whopping 5.0 degrees C by the end of this century, warned Nicholas Stern, an economist who is chair of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics.
“Hundreds of millions of people will be forced to move. It will be the most severe global conflict in human history. That is what the science is telling us,” said Stern, author of the well-known Stern Review, the 2006 report that documented the effect of global warming on the world economy.
Humanity’s other option is to embrace a new energy revolution unlike anything ever seen.
And cities will be on the leading edge of this revolution, he said.
Cities use 80 percent of all energy and are responsible for the bulk of emissions. The good news is that cities are also the easiest places to get major emissions reductions because energy services are centralised and collaboration is easier.
“Local mayors and councils can more easily agree on policies and direct their administration to take action,” he said.
“Cities are already doing the work of national governments on climate,” said David Cadman, president of ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability, an international association of local governments that is hosting a mayors’ conference featuring mayors from more than 100 cities as part of the climate negotiations here.
Food Report Released Knowing the Science Was Wrong
By Stephen Leahy
Jan 19 2011
In the year 2020 climate change will devastate much of the world’s harvest leaving one in five people starving because the global temperature will have shot up an average of 2.4 degrees C a new report released Tuesday shows.
Shocking. Stunning. Scary even. And completely untrue.
Days before the report’s release I told the author Liliana Hisas of the Universal Ecological Fund (FEU), an Argentina-based NGO, it was impossible to get to 2.4 degrees of warming by 2020. Global temperatures have increased 0.8C in the last century and the 64-page report, “The Impacts of Climate Change on Food Production: A 2020 Perspective,” is based on additional 1.6C degree increase in just nine years time.
I asked several climate experts if it was possible to reach a +2.4 degree average global temperature by 2020. Their answer: “No way”.
The reason is that the oceans absorb 93 per cent of the additional heat being trapped in the atmosphere due to the burning fossil fuels. If we stopped burning all fossil fuels and emitting other greenhouse gases today, the atmosphere would still continue to slowly heat up over the next 50 to 100 years as the oceans released that stored heat.
So ‘thank God for the oceans’ I said to Hisas who is also Executive Director of FEU-US when I explained all this via emails. And in an interview with Hisas on Monday I suggested the report be withdrawn. She refused, saying her organization had worked on the report for more than a year and the science was solid. It was all based on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2007 report and had been vetted by Osvaldo Canziani, a former co-chair of the IPCC she said.
Unfortunately Canziani was in hospital and unavailable for an interview. Continue reading →
Global Warming Worsening Impacts; Creating New ENSO ‘Flavors’
By Stephen Leahy*
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Jan 11, 2011 (Tierramérica)
The strongest La Niña weather system in 50 years has brought historic flooding to Australia and drought to Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, driving up food prices.
Scientists now believe climate change is likely enhancing the impacts of the famous El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), a cyclical climate phenomenon that affects weather patterns around the world.
La Niña and El Niño are, respectively, the cold and warm phases of the ENSO cycle, and form part of the system that regulates heat in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean.
Both accompany simultaneous changes in surface ocean temperature and air pressure.
In conditions defined by climatologists as “neutral,” high air pressure predominates in the eastern Pacific, while low pressure predominates in the west.
The difference in pressure generates the trade winds, which blow east to west over the surface of the tropical Pacific, pushing the warm waters westward. The deeper, cooler waters then surface in the east, replacing the warm waters.
During episodes of La Niña, the differences in pressure are more marked, the trade winds blow more strongly, and the cold-water currents in the eastern Pacific intensify.
On the other hand, during El Niño, high surface air pressure in the western Pacific and lower pressure on the coasts of the Americas cause the trade winds to weaken or change direction, resulting in warmer water temperatures in the eastern Pacific.
“There has been a very rapid transition from El Niño to La Niña in 2010,” Kevin Trenberth, a senior climate scientist with the National Centre for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in the central U.S. state of Colorado, told Tierramérica. Continue reading →
More than 20,000 people from 190 nations attended the international climate meeting in Cancun, Mexico and it received one ten second clip on US network TV
Coverage of environment and science has been gutted. If there is coverage it rarely digs below the surface. It’s not just TV, it’s all media. After 18 years of being published in major publications on two continents, I now count myself lucky to get $150 to $200 for an in-depth article. The few independent media outlets are either non-profits or struggling.
Urgent environmental issues didn’t go away just because most media stopped covering them.
Many, many people tell me: “we need people like you to write about these issues”.
I’d like to do more but it is impossible to continue without your support for what I call Community Supported Journalism. People directly support independent journalists who craft honest and thoughtful articles about important subjects the mainstream media ignores or gloss over.
Community Supported Environmental Journalism Works
In 2010 dozens of people offered their help, donating $5,750 which helped ensure many breaking international stories were covered including the first media reports on the global die-off of corals and how climate change may be bringing colder winters to Europe and eastern North America. Those donors — who are really partners — enabled me to cover important international meetings like the UN Convention on Biodiversity, UN climate change conference, scientific meetings and much more.
Please join us. Consider a donation of just $10 a month to support enviro journalism that serves the public interest.
Contributions can be made safely and easily via PayPal* or Credit Card*. [You can cancel at any time, automatically. No need to contact me]
We need people like you. In tough economic times, where information flow is increasingly channeled and controlled, you perform a simply critical role. Hang in there. You are an admirable role model for the future.”
– E. Ann Clark, Associate Professor, University of Guelph.
“Stephen Leahy has done a superb job exposing the enormous sums the US government is spending on corporate welfare for big oil.”
Ross Gelbspan, Pulitzer-prize winning editor and author of The Heat is On
Africa is hungry – 240 million people are undernourished.
“Africa has enormous quantities of land and resources…and now there is a stampede to lock those up.”
By Stephen Leahy
NAGOYA, Japan, Oct 16, 2010 (IPS)
Africa is hungry – 240 million people are undernourished. Now, for the first-time, small African farmers have been properly consulted on how to solve the problem of feeding sub-Saharan Africa. Their answers appear to directly repudiate a massive international effort to launch an African Green Revolution funded in large part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Instead of new hybrid seeds, chemical fertilisers and pesticides, family farmers in West Africa said they want to use local seeds, avoid spending precious cash on chemicals and most importantly to direct public agricultural research to meet their needs, according to a multi-media publication released on World Food Day (Oct. 16).
“These were true farmer-led assessment where small farmers and other food producers listened and questioned agricultural and other experts and then came up with their own recommendations,” Pimbert told IPS.
“Food and agriculture policy and research tend to ignore the values, needs, knowledge and concerns of the very people who provide the food we all eat — and often serve instead powerful commercial interests such as multinational seed and food retailing companies,” he said.
“A four-degree C world would be horrendous and must be avoided at all costs”
By Stephen Leahy*
MEXICO CITY, Dec 7, 2010 (IPS/TerraViva)
Africa will be amongst the hardest hit regions of the world as the climate heats up, threatening the continent’s food security, experts agree. If global temperatures rise 2.0 degrees C, southern Africa will warm an additional 1.5 degrees to a 3.5-degree increase on average.
Such temperatures could be reached as early as 2035. The Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in Britain recently advised that a 4.0-degree C rise in the global average temperature could be reached as soon as 2060 if the ever-increasing emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are not curbed.
“The prognosis for agriculture and food security in SSA (Sub-Saharan Africa) in a 4°C+ world is bleak,” write the authors of a special issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society to be published next month.
“A four-degree C world would be horrendous and must be avoided at all costs,” said Philip Thornton of the International Livestock Research Institute in Nairobi, Kenya and co-author of a paper in the Royal Society special issue “Four degrees and beyond”.
“This special issue is a call to action so we can avoid such a future,” Thornton told TerraViva.
“It is going to get very difficult for rain-fed agriculture in this region,” Thornton warned.
This article was made possible by a contribution from Brewster Kneen of Canada
Due to the high costs of covering such important events, support is needed from readers like you. Please consider making a small automatic monthly contribution as a fair exchange for these articles – for more information.
Stephen Leahy, International Environmental Journalist 