Twenty years ago, an historic environmental summit in Rio de Janeiro produced groundbreaking treaties and high hopes that pressing issues would be addressed. But as organizers prepare for the Rio+20 conference in June, there is little on the agenda to suggest any substantive action will be taken.

It is easy to be cynical. Back in 1992, more than 100 world leaders, including George H.W. Bush, showed up for the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. It was a two-week mega-event that attracted huge attention, highlighted by the signing of two groundbreaking treaties on climate change and biodiversity and grand declarations about creating a future green and equitable world.

To put it mildly, the subsequent two decades have not lived up to the promises. George W. Bush effectively broke the climate treaty signed by his father, refusing to sign up to the Kyoto Protocol. Emissions have soared, resource plundering has intensified, nature is still on the retreat, the world has become less equitable, and climate change has gone from distant prospect to frightening reality. While the population bomb may be being defused, the consumption bomb is primed to destroy us all.

The 1992 Rio summit’s aspirations were left in the hands of a new body: the UN Commission on Sustainable Development (UNCSD). You have probably never heard of it. That’s not a good sign, since the commission is now in charge of a new event, Rio+20, which is being billed as the next step in making the planet fit for future generations.

The truth is we have gone backwards in the last two decades.

Rio+20 will be held in the Brazilian megacity this June. It is hard to escape the conclusion that the hearts of our leaders are not in this. It will last for just three days (June 20-22), rather than the 14 days of its predecessor. President Obama isn’t going. The organizers are so scared nobody of note will turn up that, when they learned a few months ago that the event would clash with Britain and its former empire celebrating Queen Elizabeth’s diamond jubilee, they postponed the summit for a week.

It probably won’t help much. Even British Prime Minister David Cameron refused to take the hint and show any signs that he might attend.

It has to be said that maybe Cameron is right. The “zero draft text” (don’t you just love UN-speak?) issued by the UNCSD at the end of January suggests leaders will not be asked to sign on to anything of substance that was not in the original Rio declaration 20 years ago. There will be no new treaties — plenty of pious words, but no action plan.

It is fine and good to call for a “green economy,” of course. But as the Green Economy Coalition — a grouping of NGOs, research institutes, UN organizations, businesses and trade unions — puts it, the text fails to address the fundamental issues involved in achieving it. “How are we going to kick-start the finance of a green and fair economy?,” the coalition asked in a statement issued last month. “How can we ensure the poorest benefit?… How will a green economy improve the management of our natural world?”

Many Western politicians may feel that the current economic crisis means that 2012 is not a good time to address environmental issues. But the counterargument is that rapacious use of the world’s natural resources over the past 20 years is one reason we got into this mess — causing sharp rises in commodity prices, for instance — and that “green economics” is the only long-term solution.

We need new environmental governance. It’s time to reboot the Rio+20 summit agenda.

The truth is that we have gone backwards in the past two decades. The growing power of big developing nations like China and Brazil is often putting the international agenda on sustainability into reverse. Their governments see even current weak international guidelines on social and environmental standards in development projects, such as those developed by the World Bank, as undermining their national sovereignty and impeding economic development, rather than enhancing and sustaining them.

As a result, notes Andy White, coordinator of the Washington-based Rights and Resources Initiative, “there is nothing in the draft Rio+20 text that even mentions the rights of poor people to their land and their forests, even though we know they are far better custodians of nature than governments or private corporations.”

Tinkering with business as usual is not enough. What is needed is new environmental governance for a crowded planet running on empty. It is time to reboot the Rio+20 summit agenda.

The world’s environmental scientists are doing their best. They know best how the planet’s life support systems have deteriorated since 1992 and the imminent dangers of runaway ecological and climatic disaster.

The International Council for Science (ICSU), which represents science bodies in 140 countries including the U.S. National Academy of Science, has organized a meeting in London in March to put pressure on the politicians to get real in Rio. The event, Planet Under Pressure, is one of the formal pre-Rio preparatory meetings, and it won’t pull its punches.

The starting point for the scientists, says ICSU, is that “stark increases in natural disasters, food and water security problems, and biodiversity loss are just part of the evidence that humanity may be crossing planetary boundaries and approaching dangerous tipping points.”

We need something like a UN environmental security council to drag us back from the tipping points.

The March conference will hear, for instance, how researchers are developing early warning systems to spot those approaching tipping points. If such systems had been in place 40 years ago, they might have warned of the sudden emergence of the ozone hole over Antarctica. A decade ago, they might have predicted the collapse of Arctic sea ice. Next up could be the explosive growth of nitrogen-gorged “dead zones” in the oceans, or runaway emissions of methane from melting permafrost.

But the scientists don’t just want to predict disasters. They want to stop them. To do that, they will insist that politicians have to be wrenched from their comfort zones. New priorities will require new institutions and new actors. Frank Biermann of the Free University Amsterdam, who heads ICSU’s Earth System Governance Project, will tell the conference that incremental steps will not be sufficient and that “we have to reorient and restructure our national and international institutions.”

We need, he says, a “constitutional moment… akin to the major transformative shift after 1945 that led to the establishment of the United Nations and other international organizations,” like the World Bank. At the very least we need something like a UN environmental security council — with real muscle to call the big polluters, ecosystem trashers, and resource plunderers to account and to drag us back from those tipping points.

Climate change will affect most people’s lives most dramatically through changes to the water cycle, with wet areas set to become wetter and dry areas drier. So, to take one specific recommendation, the scientists want Rio+20 to pledge a new system of global water governance that would be charged with protecting international rivers for downstream users and maintaining irreplaceable underground water reserves for future generations.

Rio+20 needs to give teeth to its predecessor’s vague promises about sustainable development.

Thankfully — for they do not always do this — the scientists have embraced a democratic vision that wants the environment to work for people. The new environmental governance, ICSU says, needs to build greater
resilience for humans to survive what is almost certainly looming, especially for the poorest, who need protection from climate change, food shortages, natural disasters, and failed states. That means developing crops that are more drought tolerant, helping poor communities prudently harvest forests and other ecosystems for their own day-to-day needs, and ensuring that communities are better protected against floods and other natural disasters.

Other independent researchers take a similar view about the need for Rio+20 to give teeth to its predecessor’s vague promises about sustainable development. Alex Evans of New York University’s Center on International Cooperation, a co-founder of globaldashboard.org, says Rio+20 needs to address three fundamental challenges. The first is the greening of growth, especially in emerging economies — “not because they have the greatest responsibility, but because they have the greatest opportunities to be laboratories of the future.”

The second is creating greater equity in a world of growing tensions over access to energy, land, water, and the diminishing “carbon space” in the atmosphere if we are successfully to tackle climate change. The third is building resilience to inevitable shocks, whether from crossing thresholds in natural systems or from market dysfunction, as food and other resources grow scarce.

Evans agrees this is unlikely to be achieved by existing world leaders alone. Nor should it be. The world’s seven billion people need to be asked what they think. That’s us. Evans proposes harnessing the Web for an instant “global outsourcing process” during the 100 days leading up to the summit. Starting with the scientists’ conference, those hundred days could rewrite the politicians’ flaccid agenda, and pick peoples’ delegates to attend on behalf of the real world.

The summit badly needs outside input. Right now, the official Rio+20 agenda and draft text show few signs that politicians are willing to go beyond the green-sounding rhetoric we heard from their predecessors in the same city two decades ago. It wasn’t enough then. It certainly isn’t enough now.

Article by Fred Pearce, appearing courtesy Yale Environment 360.

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The European Environment Agency published a report on the cost and toll of air pollution due to industrial facilities to the European Union last November.

The costs are staggering as the 10,000 facilities induced up to 102 and 169 billion euros in 2009 alone.

However, only a small number of these plants are responsible for the vast majority of this pollution. The EEA notes:

Fifty per cent of the total damage cost occurs as a result of emissions from just 191 or 2 % of the approximately 10 000 facilities that reported data for releases to air.

Three quarters of the total damage costs are caused by the emissions of 622 facilities — 6 % of the total number.

This proves that solving the problem of industrial air pollution could be relatively easy.

The energy sector is the most polluting one as it is responsible for 66 to 112 billion euros of damages. Excluding carbon dioxide, the pollution still costs the 27 country members up to 26 to 71 billion euros.

Other sectors like production processes and manufacturing combustion are responsible for much less pollution, and thus much less induced: 23 to 28 billion euros and 8 to 21 billion euros respectively.

Meanwhile, the report notes that carbon dioxide contributes the most to the overall damage costs with approximately 63 billion euros in 2009. But this is not enough:

Air pollutants, which contribute to acid rain and can cause respiratory problems – sulphur dioxide (SO₂), ammonia (NH₃), particulate matter (PM₁₀) and nitrogen oxides (NO_x) – were found to cause €38-105 billion of damage a year.

The bottom line: the European Union needs to change the way it is producing electricity and to improve its few remaining plants to get much cleaner air.

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Duke University researchers have predicted that climate change in California will result in a declining percentage of rangeland. Such a change will have widespread impact on the state’s large cattle industry of California’s Central Valley. No matter if climate change will cause wetter or drier weather, available pasture will decline. Forage areas, known as one of nature’s free services, may no longer be so free. The grasses will either wither as arid conditions creep north, or be pushed out as inedible shrubs and brush take over.

The study has been published in the journal, Climatic Change, by Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment in conjunction with the Environmental Defense Fund. The change in the rangeland ecosystem is expected to occur gradually over the coming century. Total costs expected to hit California ranchers over the next sixty years may be as high as $209 million a year if the ecosystem dries up.

Less grazing land will mean smaller herds, and less productive herds. Movement of cattle will also be much more difficult because of highways and suburban sprawl.

If the weather becomes wetter rather than drier, biodiversity is expected to increase. However, this will come at the expense of the ranchers. Cattle like to eat grasses, not trees or bushes.

The US Department of Agriculture has estimated about 5.2 million head of cattle in the state of California. Of these, less than 10 percent are raised in large feedlots. The rest can roam across the range, munching on free grasses.

A decline of rangeland may result in an increasing percentage of cattle raised in feedlots, where cattle food has to be bought and fed, adding to the costs of beef production.

California’s cattle industry brings in over $2 billion in total income through about 11,800 ranches. The hit the industry will take will likely affect the state’s overall economy. If similar climate changes occur in states like Texas and Oklahoma where cattle are much bigger slice of the economy, the nation’s economy may be affected.

In order to prevent this, rangeland preservation efforts may be required. This may be legislated through California’s new cap and trade system.

Article by David A. Gabel, appearing courtesy Environmental News Network.

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When one thinks of cruise ships, one thinks of grand luxury, solitude, safety, and big. The January 13 capsizing of the Concordia off the coast of Italy, in which at least 11 people died, caught the world — including the cruise ship industry and its passengers — off guard and is shining a spotlight on cruise ship safety and environmental issues. The cruise ship hit a reef and nearly hit their fuel tanks. There was also concern over how the passengers were evacuated in this disaster. Beyond that there are other environmental concerns such as cruise ships air emissions and sanitary waste discharges.

It was only luck that the ship’s oil is not already spewing into the sea—the hole in the hull missed the fuel tanks by a few feet, according to reports.

However, there are “normal” emissions or discharges from cruise ships at all times.

According to EPA cruise ships were involved in 87 confirmed illegal discharge cases from 1993 to 1998. Most of these involved the accidental discharge of oil or related substances. A few of the 87 cases involved large numbers of illegal discharge incidents. In addition, 17 other alleged incidents were referred to countries where the cruise ships were registered because the incidents occurred outside U.S. waters or because jurisdiction could not be clearly ascertained.

What sort of waste discharges are there? EPA was petitioned to review and study these issues. The petitioner raised the following points:

Black Water (sewage): A typical cruise ship generates as much as 210,000 gallons during a one-week voyage.

Gray Water (shower, sink, and galley water): A typical cruise ship is estimated to generate up to one million gallons a week. The petition states that current Federal regulations do not restrict gray water discharges except in the Great Lakes, and that gray water may pose environmental impacts as great or greater than sewage.

Hazardous Waste (waste from dry cleaning, photo labs, paint, and maintenance chemicals, etc.)

Solid Waste (food waste, plastic, paper, wood, cardboard, cans, glass, etc.)

Oily Bilge Water: Cruise ships are estimated to generate up to 25,000 gallons on a one week voyage.

Then there are air emissions.

Cruise ships incinerate between 75% and 85% of garbage according to the EPA in its 2008 study, contributing to smog in coastal communities and on the ocean. They also release incinerator ash and sewage sludge — blobs of concentrated toxins from the bottom of waste treatment facilities — into the ocean. They contribute nutrients, metals, ammonia, pharmaceutical waste, chemical cleaners and detergent to deep marine environments from sewage treatment systems that either don’t work as planned or aren’t able to remove such substances, according to tests in Washington and Alaska, interviews with state officials, the EPA study, and information provided by the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary. It’s legal to discharge untreated sewage in most areas of the United States farther than three miles from shore. But if you are 4 miles out?

Cruise ships burn fuel, much of it a cheap grade, which will continue until new international fuel standards take effect in 2012. A 2005 study done by WashPIRG, a public interest advocacy group based in Washington, estimates a 3,000-passenger ship generates the air pollution equivalent of more than 12,000 cars in a single day.

Article by Andy Soos, appearing courtesy Environmental News Network.

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It is hard to believe there was a time when we, as a united people on Planet Earth, didn’t really focus on the environment. However, it really wasn’t until 1970 that the collective global eye turned towards the environment and how the global human footprint was making a forever-impact.

In 1972, the United Nations took notice and held the Conference on the Human Environment. Soon enough, diverse constituencies ranging from companies and regulatory bodies to consumers and activists realized there had to be a common framework for talking about the environment, monitoring impacts, and improving how human beings treat the only planet we call home.

It took almost 25 years but, in 1996, the United Nations was able to pass the ISO 14000 family of standards. Today, it is used in about 160 nations. ISO 14000 mirrored what ISO 9000 standards accomplished for quality. Thanks to ISO 9000, everyone, no matter the nation, industry, company, or department, approached quality from the same points of reference.

The ISO 14000 series was developed by the International Organization for Standardization as a multi-purpose tool. To begin with, standard concepts and terminology was created to allow many countries to “speak the same language” when it came to organizational processes and how they were affecting the environment.

It stands to reason that if it could work for global quality issues, it could work for common goals relating to the environment. That’s why, when it comes to sustainability, with a common framework, the private sector, government, and nonprofits can also make faster progress. With these standards in place, countries and companies can address these issues more easily internally as well as externally with international and nation regulatory bodies, consumers, the public, and funding sources — be they investors or foundations.

Secondly, the basic ISO 14001 standard provides guidelines for improving environmental performance. Participation is voluntary. The initial step is a review or gap analysis of all the organization’s processes and what might be on the drawing board. It’s a broad set of guidelines — extending from internal operations such as production to sourcing of raw materials. However, it works because, based on the findings, targets are established. Such analysis and goal-setting also serve as a standard way to comply with and report to regulatory bodies and conduct remedial action.

The third way the tool works is through implementing the plan. Seems obvious, but that’s a major undertaking. Executives have to buy in and then employees have to be trained. A new language is introduced and then systems, procedures, and practices are modified or eliminated if they fail to meet goals. Finally, measurement becomes routine.

The fourth function is continuous improvement. Usually that includes expanding the effort and raising the bar on expectations. At that point, the organization builds sustainability into its overall strategy. There it can become innovative and perhaps even launch breakthrough approaches.

The payoff of basic ISO 14001 can be profound.
• Organizations have clear guidelines for establishing environmental policy.
• Process changes usually reduce electricity costs.
• Compliance and reporting are easier and less expensive.
• Stakeholders are satisfied that sustainability is being addressed and the risk of environmental crisis minimal.

The other ISO 14000 standards are applied for specific functions such as labeling and auditing.

Global standards forge common goals, that’s for certain. But the real work starts at home – in your own backyard. As you “go global’ with your environmental efforts, take the time to measure energy use to make sure your own companies’ systems are in order. A properly working HVAC system, for example, will keep occupants cool in the summer and warm in the winter. However, perhaps most importantly, it will keep utility costs under control every season of the year.

Article by Bari Faye Siegel, a technology writer and marketing consultant at Noveda Technologies, an innovative leader in real-time, web-based energy management, solar PV monitoring and water management. Noveda also offers real-time collaboration tools that leverage social media to educate and empower stakeholder communities and make the smart grid a reality today. For more information, visit www.noveda.com.

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The Chinese government has ordered five cities and two provinces to set caps on greenhouse gas emissions in preparation for a series of regional carbon markets.

Last week, China’s National Development and Reform Commission urged Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, Chongqing and Shenzhen, as well as the provinces of Hubei and Guangdong, to set “overall emissions control targets” and submit strategy proposals on how to achieve them.

A plan developed by Guangdong — which commits the province to achieving 20 percent of its total energy consumption from non-fossil fuels by 2015 — has already been approved by the central government. The province must also cut its “carbon intensity,” or the CO2 emissions per unit of economic growth, by 19.5 percent.

China as a whole, which has already passed the U.S. as the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter, has committed to reducing its carbon intensity by 40 to 45 percent by 2020. According to a new government report, China’s urban population surpassed its rural population for the first time ever in 2011.

Article appearing courtesy Yale Environment 360.

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For the first time, an inventory of the largest stationary greenhouse gas emitters in the United States has made been made publicly available. On Wednesday, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency published the first-ever inventory of greenhouse gas emissions from large polluters. The inventory, which catalogs the 2010 direct emissions of the 6,700 largest stationary emitters across nine industrial sectors, shows that nearly three-quarters of industrial greenhouse gases (GHGs) are emitted by power plants. When the emissions generated by the second-largest stationary source, oil and gas refineries, are added to that figure, 78% of GHGs can be contributed to those two segments of the fossil fuel sector.

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Using NASA-Patented technology, designer Francesco Codicè has designed a new concept for purifying air on trains.

Trains provide a greener alternative to transportation than driving or flying, but US trains could definitely use a design update. Codicè’s AirTrain is a modern and elegant solution to the often stuffy and stale air of the indoors. AirTrain purifies air with live plants and recycled rain water.

The design includes an exterior rain collection system for watering the plants. Not only purifying the air, the plants provide a more aesthetically-pleasing environment for travelers.

Article by Karen MacKay, appearing courtesy crispgreen.com.

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One of my very first posts in 2010 was about what I called the triple crisis. As I noted back then “our economies are crumbling, our climate is warming and our energy supplies are getting scarcer.”

You would think that after two years, we would have started to do something about them. Well, from what I see, we haven’t. Unemployment is still high, we are still as reliant on oil and coal and our climate is getting weirder by the month.

On top of these crises, a fourth one has emerged: government debt. Our economies are completely broken as the richest are getting even richer and as more and more people are struggling.

We are now certain that we are beyond peak oil. The IEA announced it in its World Energy Outlook last November. Since conventional oil supply is not growing any more, any increase in oil supply will come from extreme oil. And with it more pollution per barrel of oil extracted.

Meanwhile, our climate continues to get warmer and weirder as more extreme weather events that have occurred in the past two years. From Texas to Thailand, from Europe to Australia and Brazil in South America, all our continents have been affected.

This would be worrying enough, but with positive mechanisms feedback such as the melting permafrost in Russia or the Amazon rainforest which started EMITTING greenhouse gases, the situation threatens to move from alarming to dire.

The Economist announced that we should  “Be afraid” in a recently published issue. Well, I am starting to be seriously worried for our common future, for my own future…

Solutions DO exist most fortunately:

Energy efficiency, conservation and sobriety can do wonders. This is why I am now preferring efficiency and sobriety over renewables… As we have less and less capital to spend and as a mechanism to engage our chronic unemployment, these mechanisms can do wonders.

Renewable energy sources like solar, wind and many others (geothermal or tidal among others) still have the potential to completely change our ways of life this decade, but they need to be paired with efficiency efforts and behavioral modifications.

Let’s hope we will apply them with the necessary scale and scope… Let’s make it happen in 2012 and after!

photo: Flickr

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Here’s environmentalist Bill McKibben at his best, pointing out that we should shelve the resentment and cynicism that we feel for corruption in Congress, and start to show how we truly feel: Angry. He writes, “We’ve reached the point where we’re unfazed by things that should shake us to the core.”

According to James Hansen, the government’s premier climate scientist, tapping Canada’s tar sands for the Keystone pipeline would, in the end, essentially mean “game over for the climate.” So how could Speaker of the House John Boehner insist that the Keystone approval decision be sped up? Well, he’s gotten $1,111,080 from the fossil-fuel industry during his tenure. His Senate counterpart Mitch McConnell, who shepherded the bill through his chamber, has raked in $1,277,208 in the course of his tenure in Washington.

McKibben refers to cynicism as “a sucker’s game.” Until we demonstrate how truly outraged we are, we’ll get exactly the degree of change we deserve: none. As Frederick Douglass reminds us, “Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.”

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