The grand winners of the Pinocchio Awards 2014 were Shell, GDF Suez and Samsung, announced at a celebrity-studded ceremony in Paris.

This year there were nine nominees for voters to choose between, and a new record was set for the number of votes since the Awards began in 2008: over 61,000 in total.

“This demonstrates citizens’ growing outrage about the severe impact multinational corporations’ activities are having on society and the environment”, commented Friends of the Earth France (FOEF) – which organises the Awards with Peuples Solidaires (ActionAid France) and CRID (Research and Information Centre for Development).

‘Most aggressive’ Shell – a richly deserved distinction

Shell won hands down for the Pinocchio award category ‘One for all and all for me!’, with 43% of the vote, for the development of shale gas projects across the entire world – except in Holland, its home country, which is subject to a fracking moratorium.

This prize is awarded to the company “which has the most aggressive policy in terms of appropriation, exploitation or destruction of natural resources.”

While Shell, like other big oil majors, prides itself on conducting its operations in accordance with “ambitious principles”, the reality observed on the ground, particularly in Argentina and the Ukraine, is quite different.

In these countries, reports FOEF, we see “lack of consultation with the population, wells drilled in a natural protected area and on farmland, toxic well-water reservoirs left out in the open, and lack of financial transparency, to name a few examples.”

Number two in the category with 29% of the vote was the French bank Crédit Agricole, for its financing of Mountain-top removal coal mining in Appalachia, USA – providing finance to Arch Coal and Alpha Natural Resources. Banktrack has published a full dossier on the bank’s activities.

GDF Suez – ‘green bonds’

In the prestigious ‘Greener than green’ category – which rewards the company which has led “the most abusive and misleading communication campaign in regard to its actual activities”, the Pinocchio award was received by GDF Suez with 42% of the vote for its ‘green bonds’, beating EDF and Pur Projet.

Last May, this French energy giant proudly announced that it had issued the biggest “green bond” ever made by a private company, collecting 2.5 billion Euros from private investors to finance its so-called clean energy projects.

However, on closer examination, no clear social or environmental criteria were associated with these ‘green’ bonds, and the company has not published a list of the projects it has financed.

It could even be using this money for destructive projects, such as large dams, like the one in Jirau (Brazil) that the company mentioned as an example. Furthermore, GDF Suez is continuing to invest heavily in fossil fuels.

Running up with a 31% share of the vote was the French parastatal energy giant EDF, recognising its construction of the Kolubara B 750MW coal-fired power station in Serbia – in direct contradiction of its declared “ambition for a diversified and decarbonised energy mix”.

Samsung – ‘dirty hands, full wallet’

Finally, with 40% of the vote, the Pinocchio award for the category ‘Dirty hands, full wallet’ – which honours the company with the most opaque policy at the financial level, in terms of lobbying or in its supply chain – was given to Samsung.

The award reflects the company’s “disgraceful working conditions in its product-manufacturing factories in China: excessive working hours, pitiful wages and child labour, to cite just a few examples.”

Despite repeated inquiries and questioning civil society, as well as the filing of a complaint in France, this technology market-leader persistently denies these accusations.

“The company should face up to reality and implement some practical measures to improve working conditions for Chinese factory workers and put an end to these violations of human rights”, says FOEF.

It was closely followed by French oil company Perenco, with 31%, for its oil drilling in DRC Congo characterised by “the pillage of natural resources, financial opacity, environmental destruction and repression of dissent in local communities.”

A powerful tool in holding corporations to account

By condemning numerous violations against human rights and the environment, the Pinocchio Awards have grown in importance since they were established in 2008, and they help put pressure on companies to make them change their practices.

The scale of the event and its role in the public debate surrounding CSR this year has forced all companies nominated for an award to speak out publicly on the facts that have been reported about them.

Juliette Renaud, Corporate Accountability Campaigner at Friends of the Earth France, says: “Just a year ago we were celebrating the proposal of a bill on the due diligence of multinational companies – but pressure from lobby groups kept the government inactive on the subject, and this law has still not been voted or even discussed in Parliament.

Fanny Gallois, Campaign Manager at Peuples Solidaires, added: “By setting concrete facts against companies’ grand speeches, the Pinocchio Awards are showing this year again that these loopholes are allowing companies to operate with impunity in France and throughout the world.”

The Pinocchio Awards are organised in a media partnership with Basta!, the Multinational Observatory and Real World Radio, who have published informative articles and interviews on each of the nominees.

More information: Prix Pinocchio.

Oliver Tickell edits The Ecologist.

During recent years we’ve become used to hearing that the answer to looming food security challenges is technology. For example, more sophisticated pesticides, genetic modification and machinery to grow food at ever-greater scale.

It is an especially believable narrative because – broadly speaking – this what has delivered some level of food security to most people during the period of explosive population growth that started during the 20th century, and continues today.

But while marking a success at one level, there are serious downsides, not least seen in how modern farming is responsible for driving several worsening global ecological trends.

These include climate change caused by the build up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere; the progressive pollution of ecosystems (especially aquatic and marine ones) with excess nitrogen and phosphorous; and the loss of biological diversity, caused by both of the above and habitat loss, mostly driven by conversion of more natural ecosystems to farmland.

Agriculture is also responsible for depleting resources that are vital for its own future – not least soils and freshwater.

That we cannot go on like this is not in doubt. The question is, will more technology present solutions that will actually work? The answer to that is an emphatic ‘yes!’ – although perhaps not the kind of technology many generally associate with farming policy.

A glimpse as to what technologies might work better in producing more food while protecting the natural systems we depend upon was glimpsed this week at the Slow Life Foundation‘s Slow Life Symposium taking place in the Maldives.

Digital technologies supporting India’s farmers

Rikin Gandhi is Chief Executive of an organization called Digital Green, and he presented to Symposium participants some of the methods being successfully deployed by his organization in dramatically increasing yields among small-scale farmers.

His basic idea is to exploit a particular fact of life that is seen right across the world. It stems from where most farmers get most of their new ideas from: namely other farmers.

Government training and information schemes can make an impact, so can advice from agrochemical companies (albeit biased at times), but by far the most convincing source of new ideas is other farmers.

Working with this reality Digital Green set out to improve yields through helping farmers make videos that would be shown to other farmers nearby.

Using off-the-shelf equipment including pocket video cameras and pico projectors, Digital Green assists farmers to generate content for use among tribal communities living in remote areas without electricity. (see photo)

Battery powered video and projection enables best practice to be shared even among illiterate groups where the written word is near to useless. Gandhi got results with better farming methods adopted more quickly and more cost-effectively than earlier attempts to do the same.

Indeed, Digital Green has demonstrated that for every dollar spent, the system persuaded seven times as many farmers to adopt new ideas as an existing official program of training and visits.

Twice the rice, half the water

Another measure of success is how many farmers have been empowered through new knowledge to the point where they are producing twice as much rice with half as much water – thereby helping to address the twin emerging challenges of food and water security, while keeping people on the land (and out of the fast expanding cities) by increasing their incomes.

And when farmers have more knowledge about soil health and the role of composts as at least a partial alternative to commercial fertilisers then opportunities are presented to cut costs while reducing environmental impacts.

Other technologies can complement this basic means of sharing ideas, including mobile phones. Although most farmers are still not yet connected in this way, the proportion that are is growing fast, in turn offering the prospect to lever further value from existing agricultural resources in terms of people and land through, for example, sharing of information about market conditions and weather forecasts.

There is of course a cautionary note to strike, as Gandhi observes: “During the Green Revolution era it was all about agricultural technology being transferred to farmers. That did boost yields but had issues coming with it.

“The same thing can be said about information technology. This is powerful but also needs to be supported through partnerships and working with social organisations. We need to think about the context for the technology, and the people using it, not just the technology.”

The new ‘intensification’: producing more, from less

Alongside a flipping of the narrative relating to agricultural technology is a change in tone regarding the very concept of intensification. For decades that idea has been associated with ever more chemical inputs, with all the attendant consequences as seen for example in resource depletion and greenhouse gas emissions.

Those close to the emerging challenge of how best to achieve food security while maintaining ecological integrity see a new definition here too.

‘Intensification’ is now regarded as empowering farmers to use their ingenuity and local resources more effectively, rather than being based on strategies to import energy intensive inputs.

David Monsma, Executive Director at the Aspen Institute‘s Energy and Environment Programme, emphasised that “Smallholder farmers remain the backbone of food supply systems in most low income and many middle income countries.”

Their “awareness of and access to agricultural technologies and techniques is often lacking”, he added, but that fact opens up a huge opportunity for sustainable growth in both food supply, and rural incomes:

“Training in production techniques and technologies that conserve soil and water, or that reduce waste and loss of crops, communications tools such as cellphones and videos and organizational innovations such as setting up market-oriented farmer based organisations, can lead toward more sustainable intensification while broadly increasing food security.”

The smart money is backing this new and more joined up farmer-focused approach, with big funders such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (also see here) and the Clinton Development Initiative ‘going local’ and backing strategies that help small actors do better.

Technologies for farmer empowerment

Among the approaches delivering results are those that improve storage and market access, thereby cutting food waste in the agricultural landscapes where food is grown.

Micro-finance and micro-insurance are proving vital facilities for many farmers in enabling them to make investments and to manage risk. Farmer empowerment via training is also increasingly seen as a vital plank for future food security.

Perhaps this shift of emphasis toward communications technologies and intensification based on farmer empowerment marks the opening of a new chapter in our multi-millennial efforts to ensure we have enough to eat.

It comes not a moment too soon. The days when technology could be thrown at the challenges linked with feeding ourselves and it assumed that the ecological damage was an acceptable price to pay for cheap food are over.

No longer is it feasible to trade one set of priorities at the expense of the others, for if nature doesn’t function neither will our food system. One vital strategy for navigating these tight straits is the empowerment of small scale farmers.

Tony Juniper is a campaigner, writer, sustainability advisor and leading British environmentalist. For more than 25 years he has worked for change toward a more sustainable society at local, national and international levels. His website is at tonyjuniper.com.

“As I read the agreement it requires the Chinese to do nothing at all for 16 years while these carbon emissions regulations are creating havoc in my state and around the country.”

So said US Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell on 12th November 2014 as the news of the US-China climate deal were announced.

But far from ‘doing nothing at all’, China will be building the world’s largest renewable energy system over the next 16 years. This is something that China has already started doing – so the targets agreed upon are feasible – if arduous.

As part of the US-China climate deal announced on Wednesday, China is committing to raise the proportion of renewables in its total energy system to 20%. As renewables and nuclear power currently account for 10% of China’s total energy consumption, this implies a doubling of its renewables commitment. The challenge is illustrated in the graph below.

This is why Chinese president Xi Jinping can commit China to peaking its carbon emissions by 2030. In reality, we and many other observers expect China’s carbon emissions to peak well before that date, so there is room for more dramatic announcements to come from the Chinese side.

China’s energy is already on a strong green track

In fact, at the recent APEC meeting in Beijing, China’s national Energy Bureau stated that China’s coal consumption would probably peak by 2020, at about 4.2 billion tonnes per year. So carbon emissions could peak just a little after that – and certainly before 2030.

Mitch McConnell and many other commentators have placed all their emphasis on China’s building of a “black” energy system, comprising new coal and other fossil fuel facilities, while ignoring the enormous commitments already made to renewables and a complementary green energy system.

By our reckoning, the leading edge of change in China’s energy system is already more green than black, and the total system is greening at such a rate that the goals just announced as part of the climate deal should certainly be met.

The White House, in its statement announcing the joint deal, said that for China to meet its commitment

” … it will require China to deploy an additional 800-1000 gigawatts of nuclear, wind, solar and other zero-emission generation capacity by 2030 – more than all the coal-fired power plants that exist in China today and close to total current electricity generation capacity in the United States.”

These are enormous numbers, but they fit with China’s current capacity and goals. In 2013 China’s generating capacity from all sources reached 1,247 gigawatts.

Its generating capacity from water, wind and sun (leaving nuclear to one side) has already reached 378 gigawatts, far in front of all other industrial countries (see here).

Aiming to build over 1GW of renewable capacity per week

China’s National Development and Reform Commission has already announced plans to raise that total to 550GW by 2017. This is a commitment to renewables on a colossal scale that dwarfs that of other countries.

This goal would call for an additional 1,000GW of renewable generation capacity to be built over the next 15 years – or 1.33 GW (equivalent to a large nuclear power station) every week.

The difference between the commitments made by China and those by other countries is that China is committing to renewables as part of an industrial strategy to focus its industrial growth around such clean industries and technologies.

As part of the 12th Five year Plan, China has singled out seven strategic industries that it sees as being the pillars of its economy – including electric vehicles, renewable energy, and energy efficiency.

There is likely to be even greener tinge to the 13th Five Year Plan, currently under discussion and due to run from 2016 to 2020.

So far from ‘doing nothing’ over the next 16 years, China is transforming its economy and energy system so that water, wind and solar power will be its driving forces. Other countries – not least close US allies such as Australia and Canada – would be wise to pay attention.

Verdict

False. China has an extensive plan to curtail its emissions between now and 2030, including building renewable energy facilities on a far larger scale than any other nation. Honouring its new climate pact with the United States will involve doing a lot more than nothing.

Review by Frank Jotzo: ‘it’s even better than that!’

The view that China’s announced target is feasible but arduous is correct. It is also true that a peaking of carbon dioxide emissions in China is possible before 2025, given strong Chinese policy efforts and future changes to the rate and nature of China’s economic growth.

China has extensive policies in place to constrain the growth in energy use and to shift away from coal, and under this commitment China will intensify those efforts.

It is important to understand that China’s effort is much broader even than the authors of this FactCheck suggest.

The text correctly points out the importance of renewable energy expansion, but improvements in energy efficiency and the transformation of China’s economic structure towards high-value manufacturing and services will do more to dampen carbon emissions growth.

In my own analysis, my colleagues and I found that a carbon dioxide peak around 2025 would be achieved by maintaining a 4% per year improvement in economy-wide energy productivity, and a 1.0-1.5% annual reduction in the carbon intensity of energy supply.

The former comes through better technical efficiency and structural change, the latter through a shift from coal to gas, renewables and nuclear power.

John Mathews is Professor of Strategic Management, Macquarie Graduate School of Management at Macquarie University.

Hao Tan is Senior Lecturer in International Business at the University of Newcastle.

Frank Jotzo (reviewer) is Director, Centre for Climate Economics and Policy at the Australian National University.

The authors do not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article. They also have no relevant affiliations.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

During recent years we’ve become used to hearing that the answer to looming food security challenges is technology. For example, more sophisticated pesticides, genetic modification and machinery to grow food at ever-greater scale.

It is an especially believable narrative because – broadly speaking – this what has delivered some level of food security to most people during the period of explosive population growth that started during the 20th century, and continues today.

But while marking a success at one level, there are serious downsides, not least seen in how modern farming is responsible for driving several worsening global ecological trends.

These include climate change caused by the build up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere; the progressive pollution of ecosystems (especially aquatic and marine ones) with excess nitrogen and phosphorous; and the loss of biological diversity, caused by both of the above and habitat loss, mostly driven by conversion of more natural ecosystems to farmland.

Agriculture is also responsible for depleting resources that are vital for its own future – not least soils and freshwater.

That we cannot go on like this is not in doubt. The question is, will more technology present solutions that will actually work? The answer to that is an emphatic ‘yes!’ – although perhaps not the kind of technology many generally associate with farming policy.

A glimpse as to what technologies might work better in producing more food while protecting the natural systems we depend upon was glimpsed this week at the Slow Life Foundation‘s Slow Life Symposium taking place in the Maldives.

Digital technologies supporting India’s farmers

Rikin Gandhi is Chief Executive of an organization called Digital Green, and he presented to Symposium participants some of the methods being successfully deployed by his organization in dramatically increasing yields among small-scale farmers.

His basic idea is to exploit a particular fact of life that is seen right across the world. It stems from where most farmers get most of their new ideas from: namely other farmers.

Government training and information schemes can make an impact, so can advice from agrochemical companies (albeit biased at times), but by far the most convincing source of new ideas is other farmers.

Working with this reality Digital Green set out to improve yields through helping farmers make videos that would be shown to other farmers nearby.

Using off-the-shelf equipment including pocket video cameras and pico projectors, Digital Green assists farmers to generate content for use among tribal communities living in remote areas without electricity. (see photo)

Battery powered video and projection enables best practice to be shared even among illiterate groups where the written word is near to useless. Gandhi got results with better farming methods adopted more quickly and more cost-effectively than earlier attempts to do the same.

Indeed, Digital Green has demonstrated that for every dollar spent, the system persuaded seven times as many farmers to adopt new ideas as an existing official program of training and visits.

Twice the rice, half the water

Another measure of success is how many farmers have been empowered through new knowledge to the point where they are producing twice as much rice with half as much water – thereby helping to address the twin emerging challenges of food and water security, while keeping people on the land (and out of the fast expanding cities) by increasing their incomes.

And when farmers have more knowledge about soil health and the role of composts as at least a partial alternative to commercial fertilisers then opportunities are presented to cut costs while reducing environmental impacts.

Other technologies can complement this basic means of sharing ideas, including mobile phones. Although most farmers are still not yet connected in this way, the proportion that are is growing fast, in turn offering the prospect to lever further value from existing agricultural resources in terms of people and land through, for example, sharing of information about market conditions and weather forecasts.

There is of course a cautionary note to strike, as Gandhi observes: “During the Green Revolution era it was all about agricultural technology being transferred to farmers. That did boost yields but had issues coming with it.

“The same thing can be said about information technology. This is powerful but also needs to be supported through partnerships and working with social organisations. We need to think about the context for the technology, and the people using it, not just the technology.”

The new ‘intensification’: producing more, from less

Alongside a flipping of the narrative relating to agricultural technology is a change in tone regarding the very concept of intensification. For decades that idea has been associated with ever more chemical inputs, with all the attendant consequences as seen for example in resource depletion and greenhouse gas emissions.

Those close to the emerging challenge of how best to achieve food security while maintaining ecological integrity see a new definition here too.

‘Intensification’ is now regarded as empowering farmers to use their ingenuity and local resources more effectively, rather than being based on strategies to import energy intensive inputs.

David Monsma, Executive Director at the Aspen Institute‘s Energy and Environment Programme, emphasised that “Smallholder farmers remain the backbone of food supply systems in most low income and many middle income countries.”

Their “awareness of and access to agricultural technologies and techniques is often lacking”, he added, but that fact opens up a huge opportunity for sustainable growth in both food supply, and rural incomes:

“Training in production techniques and technologies that conserve soil and water, or that reduce waste and loss of crops, communications tools such as cellphones and videos and organizational innovations such as setting up market-oriented farmer based organisations, can lead toward more sustainable intensification while broadly increasing food security.”

The smart money is backing this new and more joined up farmer-focused approach, with big funders such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (also see here) and the Clinton Development Initiative ‘going local’ and backing strategies that help small actors do better.

Technologies for farmer empowerment

Among the approaches delivering results are those that improve storage and market access, thereby cutting food waste in the agricultural landscapes where food is grown.

Micro-finance and micro-insurance are proving vital facilities for many farmers in enabling them to make investments and to manage risk. Farmer empowerment via training is also increasingly seen as a vital plank for future food security.

Perhaps this shift of emphasis toward communications technologies and intensification based on farmer empowerment marks the opening of a new chapter in our multi-millennial efforts to ensure we have enough to eat.

It comes not a moment too soon. The days when technology could be thrown at the challenges linked with feeding ourselves and it assumed that the ecological damage was an acceptable price to pay for cheap food are over.

No longer is it feasible to trade one set of priorities at the expense of the others, for if nature doesn’t function neither will our food system. One vital strategy for navigating these tight straits is the empowerment of small scale farmers.

Tony Juniper is a campaigner, writer, sustainability advisor and leading British environmentalist. For more than 25 years he has worked for change toward a more sustainable society at local, national and international levels. His website is at tonyjuniper.com.

“As I read the agreement it requires the Chinese to do nothing at all for 16 years while these carbon emissions regulations are creating havoc in my state and around the country.”

So said US Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell on 12th November 2014 as the news of the US-China climate deal were announced.

But far from ‘doing nothing at all’, China will be building the world’s largest renewable energy system over the next 16 years. This is something that China has already started doing – so the targets agreed upon are feasible – if arduous.

As part of the US-China climate deal announced on Wednesday, China is committing to raise the proportion of renewables in its total energy system to 20%. As renewables and nuclear power currently account for 10% of China’s total energy consumption, this implies a doubling of its renewables commitment. The challenge is illustrated in the graph below.

This is why Chinese president Xi Jinping can commit China to peaking its carbon emissions by 2030. In reality, we and many other observers expect China’s carbon emissions to peak well before that date, so there is room for more dramatic announcements to come from the Chinese side.

China’s energy is already on a strong green track

In fact, at the recent APEC meeting in Beijing, China’s national Energy Bureau stated that China’s coal consumption would probably peak by 2020, at about 4.2 billion tonnes per year. So carbon emissions could peak just a little after that – and certainly before 2030.

Mitch McConnell and many other commentators have placed all their emphasis on China’s building of a “black” energy system, comprising new coal and other fossil fuel facilities, while ignoring the enormous commitments already made to renewables and a complementary green energy system.

By our reckoning, the leading edge of change in China’s energy system is already more green than black, and the total system is greening at such a rate that the goals just announced as part of the climate deal should certainly be met.

The White House, in its statement announcing the joint deal, said that for China to meet its commitment

” … it will require China to deploy an additional 800-1000 gigawatts of nuclear, wind, solar and other zero-emission generation capacity by 2030 – more than all the coal-fired power plants that exist in China today and close to total current electricity generation capacity in the United States.”

These are enormous numbers, but they fit with China’s current capacity and goals. In 2013 China’s generating capacity from all sources reached 1,247 gigawatts.

Its generating capacity from water, wind and sun (leaving nuclear to one side) has already reached 378 gigawatts, far in front of all other industrial countries (see here).

Aiming to build over 1GW of renewable capacity per week

China’s National Development and Reform Commission has already announced plans to raise that total to 550GW by 2017. This is a commitment to renewables on a colossal scale that dwarfs that of other countries.

This goal would call for an additional 1,000GW of renewable generation capacity to be built over the next 15 years – or 1.33 GW (equivalent to a large nuclear power station) every week.

The difference between the commitments made by China and those by other countries is that China is committing to renewables as part of an industrial strategy to focus its industrial growth around such clean industries and technologies.

As part of the 12th Five year Plan, China has singled out seven strategic industries that it sees as being the pillars of its economy – including electric vehicles, renewable energy, and energy efficiency.

There is likely to be even greener tinge to the 13th Five Year Plan, currently under discussion and due to run from 2016 to 2020.

So far from ‘doing nothing’ over the next 16 years, China is transforming its economy and energy system so that water, wind and solar power will be its driving forces. Other countries – not least close US allies such as Australia and Canada – would be wise to pay attention.

Verdict

False. China has an extensive plan to curtail its emissions between now and 2030, including building renewable energy facilities on a far larger scale than any other nation. Honouring its new climate pact with the United States will involve doing a lot more than nothing.

Review by Frank Jotzo: ‘it’s even better than that!’

The view that China’s announced target is feasible but arduous is correct. It is also true that a peaking of carbon dioxide emissions in China is possible before 2025, given strong Chinese policy efforts and future changes to the rate and nature of China’s economic growth.

China has extensive policies in place to constrain the growth in energy use and to shift away from coal, and under this commitment China will intensify those efforts.

It is important to understand that China’s effort is much broader even than the authors of this FactCheck suggest.

The text correctly points out the importance of renewable energy expansion, but improvements in energy efficiency and the transformation of China’s economic structure towards high-value manufacturing and services will do more to dampen carbon emissions growth.

In my own analysis, my colleagues and I found that a carbon dioxide peak around 2025 would be achieved by maintaining a 4% per year improvement in economy-wide energy productivity, and a 1.0-1.5% annual reduction in the carbon intensity of energy supply.

The former comes through better technical efficiency and structural change, the latter through a shift from coal to gas, renewables and nuclear power.

John Mathews is Professor of Strategic Management, Macquarie Graduate School of Management at Macquarie University.

Hao Tan is Senior Lecturer in International Business at the University of Newcastle.

Frank Jotzo (reviewer) is Director, Centre for Climate Economics and Policy at the Australian National University.

The authors do not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article. They also have no relevant affiliations.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

During recent years we’ve become used to hearing that the answer to looming food security challenges is technology. For example, more sophisticated pesticides, genetic modification and machinery to grow food at ever-greater scale.

It is an especially believable narrative because – broadly speaking – this what has delivered some level of food security to most people during the period of explosive population growth that started during the 20th century, and continues today.

But while marking a success at one level, there are serious downsides, not least seen in how modern farming is responsible for driving several worsening global ecological trends.

These include climate change caused by the build up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere; the progressive pollution of ecosystems (especially aquatic and marine ones) with excess nitrogen and phosphorous; and the loss of biological diversity, caused by both of the above and habitat loss, mostly driven by conversion of more natural ecosystems to farmland.

Agriculture is also responsible for depleting resources that are vital for its own future – not least soils and freshwater.

That we cannot go on like this is not in doubt. The question is, will more technology present solutions that will actually work? The answer to that is an emphatic ‘yes!’ – although perhaps not the kind of technology many generally associate with farming policy.

A glimpse as to what technologies might work better in producing more food while protecting the natural systems we depend upon was glimpsed this week at the Slow Life Foundation‘s Slow Life Symposium taking place in the Maldives.

Digital technologies supporting India’s farmers

Rikin Gandhi is Chief Executive of an organization called Digital Green, and he presented to Symposium participants some of the methods being successfully deployed by his organization in dramatically increasing yields among small-scale farmers.

His basic idea is to exploit a particular fact of life that is seen right across the world. It stems from where most farmers get most of their new ideas from: namely other farmers.

Government training and information schemes can make an impact, so can advice from agrochemical companies (albeit biased at times), but by far the most convincing source of new ideas is other farmers.

Working with this reality Digital Green set out to improve yields through helping farmers make videos that would be shown to other farmers nearby.

Using off-the-shelf equipment including pocket video cameras and pico projectors, Digital Green assists farmers to generate content for use among tribal communities living in remote areas without electricity. (see photo)

Battery powered video and projection enables best practice to be shared even among illiterate groups where the written word is near to useless. Gandhi got results with better farming methods adopted more quickly and more cost-effectively than earlier attempts to do the same.

Indeed, Digital Green has demonstrated that for every dollar spent, the system persuaded seven times as many farmers to adopt new ideas as an existing official program of training and visits.

Twice the rice, half the water

Another measure of success is how many farmers have been empowered through new knowledge to the point where they are producing twice as much rice with half as much water – thereby helping to address the twin emerging challenges of food and water security, while keeping people on the land (and out of the fast expanding cities) by increasing their incomes.

And when farmers have more knowledge about soil health and the role of composts as at least a partial alternative to commercial fertilisers then opportunities are presented to cut costs while reducing environmental impacts.

Other technologies can complement this basic means of sharing ideas, including mobile phones. Although most farmers are still not yet connected in this way, the proportion that are is growing fast, in turn offering the prospect to lever further value from existing agricultural resources in terms of people and land through, for example, sharing of information about market conditions and weather forecasts.

There is of course a cautionary note to strike, as Gandhi observes: “During the Green Revolution era it was all about agricultural technology being transferred to farmers. That did boost yields but had issues coming with it.

“The same thing can be said about information technology. This is powerful but also needs to be supported through partnerships and working with social organisations. We need to think about the context for the technology, and the people using it, not just the technology.”

The new ‘intensification’: producing more, from less

Alongside a flipping of the narrative relating to agricultural technology is a change in tone regarding the very concept of intensification. For decades that idea has been associated with ever more chemical inputs, with all the attendant consequences as seen for example in resource depletion and greenhouse gas emissions.

Those close to the emerging challenge of how best to achieve food security while maintaining ecological integrity see a new definition here too.

‘Intensification’ is now regarded as empowering farmers to use their ingenuity and local resources more effectively, rather than being based on strategies to import energy intensive inputs.

David Monsma, Executive Director at the Aspen Institute‘s Energy and Environment Programme, emphasised that “Smallholder farmers remain the backbone of food supply systems in most low income and many middle income countries.”

Their “awareness of and access to agricultural technologies and techniques is often lacking”, he added, but that fact opens up a huge opportunity for sustainable growth in both food supply, and rural incomes:

“Training in production techniques and technologies that conserve soil and water, or that reduce waste and loss of crops, communications tools such as cellphones and videos and organizational innovations such as setting up market-oriented farmer based organisations, can lead toward more sustainable intensification while broadly increasing food security.”

The smart money is backing this new and more joined up farmer-focused approach, with big funders such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (also see here) and the Clinton Development Initiative ‘going local’ and backing strategies that help small actors do better.

Technologies for farmer empowerment

Among the approaches delivering results are those that improve storage and market access, thereby cutting food waste in the agricultural landscapes where food is grown.

Micro-finance and micro-insurance are proving vital facilities for many farmers in enabling them to make investments and to manage risk. Farmer empowerment via training is also increasingly seen as a vital plank for future food security.

Perhaps this shift of emphasis toward communications technologies and intensification based on farmer empowerment marks the opening of a new chapter in our multi-millennial efforts to ensure we have enough to eat.

It comes not a moment too soon. The days when technology could be thrown at the challenges linked with feeding ourselves and it assumed that the ecological damage was an acceptable price to pay for cheap food are over.

No longer is it feasible to trade one set of priorities at the expense of the others, for if nature doesn’t function neither will our food system. One vital strategy for navigating these tight straits is the empowerment of small scale farmers.

Tony Juniper is a campaigner, writer, sustainability advisor and leading British environmentalist. For more than 25 years he has worked for change toward a more sustainable society at local, national and international levels. His website is at tonyjuniper.com.

“As I read the agreement it requires the Chinese to do nothing at all for 16 years while these carbon emissions regulations are creating havoc in my state and around the country.”

So said US Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell on 12th November 2014 as the news of the US-China climate deal were announced.

But far from ‘doing nothing at all’, China will be building the world’s largest renewable energy system over the next 16 years. This is something that China has already started doing – so the targets agreed upon are feasible – if arduous.

As part of the US-China climate deal announced on Wednesday, China is committing to raise the proportion of renewables in its total energy system to 20%. As renewables and nuclear power currently account for 10% of China’s total energy consumption, this implies a doubling of its renewables commitment. The challenge is illustrated in the graph below.

This is why Chinese president Xi Jinping can commit China to peaking its carbon emissions by 2030. In reality, we and many other observers expect China’s carbon emissions to peak well before that date, so there is room for more dramatic announcements to come from the Chinese side.

China’s energy is already on a strong green track

In fact, at the recent APEC meeting in Beijing, China’s national Energy Bureau stated that China’s coal consumption would probably peak by 2020, at about 4.2 billion tonnes per year. So carbon emissions could peak just a little after that – and certainly before 2030.

Mitch McConnell and many other commentators have placed all their emphasis on China’s building of a “black” energy system, comprising new coal and other fossil fuel facilities, while ignoring the enormous commitments already made to renewables and a complementary green energy system.

By our reckoning, the leading edge of change in China’s energy system is already more green than black, and the total system is greening at such a rate that the goals just announced as part of the climate deal should certainly be met.

The White House, in its statement announcing the joint deal, said that for China to meet its commitment

” … it will require China to deploy an additional 800-1000 gigawatts of nuclear, wind, solar and other zero-emission generation capacity by 2030 – more than all the coal-fired power plants that exist in China today and close to total current electricity generation capacity in the United States.”

These are enormous numbers, but they fit with China’s current capacity and goals. In 2013 China’s generating capacity from all sources reached 1,247 gigawatts.

Its generating capacity from water, wind and sun (leaving nuclear to one side) has already reached 378 gigawatts, far in front of all other industrial countries (see here).

Aiming to build over 1GW of renewable capacity per week

China’s National Development and Reform Commission has already announced plans to raise that total to 550GW by 2017. This is a commitment to renewables on a colossal scale that dwarfs that of other countries.

This goal would call for an additional 1,000GW of renewable generation capacity to be built over the next 15 years – or 1.33 GW (equivalent to a large nuclear power station) every week.

The difference between the commitments made by China and those by other countries is that China is committing to renewables as part of an industrial strategy to focus its industrial growth around such clean industries and technologies.

As part of the 12th Five year Plan, China has singled out seven strategic industries that it sees as being the pillars of its economy – including electric vehicles, renewable energy, and energy efficiency.

There is likely to be even greener tinge to the 13th Five Year Plan, currently under discussion and due to run from 2016 to 2020.

So far from ‘doing nothing’ over the next 16 years, China is transforming its economy and energy system so that water, wind and solar power will be its driving forces. Other countries – not least close US allies such as Australia and Canada – would be wise to pay attention.

Verdict

False. China has an extensive plan to curtail its emissions between now and 2030, including building renewable energy facilities on a far larger scale than any other nation. Honouring its new climate pact with the United States will involve doing a lot more than nothing.

Review by Frank Jotzo: ‘it’s even better than that!’

The view that China’s announced target is feasible but arduous is correct. It is also true that a peaking of carbon dioxide emissions in China is possible before 2025, given strong Chinese policy efforts and future changes to the rate and nature of China’s economic growth.

China has extensive policies in place to constrain the growth in energy use and to shift away from coal, and under this commitment China will intensify those efforts.

It is important to understand that China’s effort is much broader even than the authors of this FactCheck suggest.

The text correctly points out the importance of renewable energy expansion, but improvements in energy efficiency and the transformation of China’s economic structure towards high-value manufacturing and services will do more to dampen carbon emissions growth.

In my own analysis, my colleagues and I found that a carbon dioxide peak around 2025 would be achieved by maintaining a 4% per year improvement in economy-wide energy productivity, and a 1.0-1.5% annual reduction in the carbon intensity of energy supply.

The former comes through better technical efficiency and structural change, the latter through a shift from coal to gas, renewables and nuclear power.

John Mathews is Professor of Strategic Management, Macquarie Graduate School of Management at Macquarie University.

Hao Tan is Senior Lecturer in International Business at the University of Newcastle.

Frank Jotzo (reviewer) is Director, Centre for Climate Economics and Policy at the Australian National University.

The authors do not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article. They also have no relevant affiliations.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

During recent years we’ve become used to hearing that the answer to looming food security challenges is technology. For example, more sophisticated pesticides, genetic modification and machinery to grow food at ever-greater scale.

It is an especially believable narrative because – broadly speaking – this what has delivered some level of food security to most people during the period of explosive population growth that started during the 20th century, and continues today.

But while marking a success at one level, there are serious downsides, not least seen in how modern farming is responsible for driving several worsening global ecological trends.

These include climate change caused by the build up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere; the progressive pollution of ecosystems (especially aquatic and marine ones) with excess nitrogen and phosphorous; and the loss of biological diversity, caused by both of the above and habitat loss, mostly driven by conversion of more natural ecosystems to farmland.

Agriculture is also responsible for depleting resources that are vital for its own future – not least soils and freshwater.

That we cannot go on like this is not in doubt. The question is, will more technology present solutions that will actually work? The answer to that is an emphatic ‘yes!’ – although perhaps not the kind of technology many generally associate with farming policy.

A glimpse as to what technologies might work better in producing more food while protecting the natural systems we depend upon was glimpsed this week at the Slow Life Foundation‘s Slow Life Symposium taking place in the Maldives.

Digital technologies supporting India’s farmers

Rikin Gandhi is Chief Executive of an organization called Digital Green, and he presented to Symposium participants some of the methods being successfully deployed by his organization in dramatically increasing yields among small-scale farmers.

His basic idea is to exploit a particular fact of life that is seen right across the world. It stems from where most farmers get most of their new ideas from: namely other farmers.

Government training and information schemes can make an impact, so can advice from agrochemical companies (albeit biased at times), but by far the most convincing source of new ideas is other farmers.

Working with this reality Digital Green set out to improve yields through helping farmers make videos that would be shown to other farmers nearby.

Using off-the-shelf equipment including pocket video cameras and pico projectors, Digital Green assists farmers to generate content for use among tribal communities living in remote areas without electricity. (see photo)

Battery powered video and projection enables best practice to be shared even among illiterate groups where the written word is near to useless. Gandhi got results with better farming methods adopted more quickly and more cost-effectively than earlier attempts to do the same.

Indeed, Digital Green has demonstrated that for every dollar spent, the system persuaded seven times as many farmers to adopt new ideas as an existing official program of training and visits.

Twice the rice, half the water

Another measure of success is how many farmers have been empowered through new knowledge to the point where they are producing twice as much rice with half as much water – thereby helping to address the twin emerging challenges of food and water security, while keeping people on the land (and out of the fast expanding cities) by increasing their incomes.

And when farmers have more knowledge about soil health and the role of composts as at least a partial alternative to commercial fertilisers then opportunities are presented to cut costs while reducing environmental impacts.

Other technologies can complement this basic means of sharing ideas, including mobile phones. Although most farmers are still not yet connected in this way, the proportion that are is growing fast, in turn offering the prospect to lever further value from existing agricultural resources in terms of people and land through, for example, sharing of information about market conditions and weather forecasts.

There is of course a cautionary note to strike, as Gandhi observes: “During the Green Revolution era it was all about agricultural technology being transferred to farmers. That did boost yields but had issues coming with it.

“The same thing can be said about information technology. This is powerful but also needs to be supported through partnerships and working with social organisations. We need to think about the context for the technology, and the people using it, not just the technology.”

The new ‘intensification’: producing more, from less

Alongside a flipping of the narrative relating to agricultural technology is a change in tone regarding the very concept of intensification. For decades that idea has been associated with ever more chemical inputs, with all the attendant consequences as seen for example in resource depletion and greenhouse gas emissions.

Those close to the emerging challenge of how best to achieve food security while maintaining ecological integrity see a new definition here too.

‘Intensification’ is now regarded as empowering farmers to use their ingenuity and local resources more effectively, rather than being based on strategies to import energy intensive inputs.

David Monsma, Executive Director at the Aspen Institute‘s Energy and Environment Programme, emphasised that “Smallholder farmers remain the backbone of food supply systems in most low income and many middle income countries.”

Their “awareness of and access to agricultural technologies and techniques is often lacking”, he added, but that fact opens up a huge opportunity for sustainable growth in both food supply, and rural incomes:

“Training in production techniques and technologies that conserve soil and water, or that reduce waste and loss of crops, communications tools such as cellphones and videos and organizational innovations such as setting up market-oriented farmer based organisations, can lead toward more sustainable intensification while broadly increasing food security.”

The smart money is backing this new and more joined up farmer-focused approach, with big funders such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (also see here) and the Clinton Development Initiative ‘going local’ and backing strategies that help small actors do better.

Technologies for farmer empowerment

Among the approaches delivering results are those that improve storage and market access, thereby cutting food waste in the agricultural landscapes where food is grown.

Micro-finance and micro-insurance are proving vital facilities for many farmers in enabling them to make investments and to manage risk. Farmer empowerment via training is also increasingly seen as a vital plank for future food security.

Perhaps this shift of emphasis toward communications technologies and intensification based on farmer empowerment marks the opening of a new chapter in our multi-millennial efforts to ensure we have enough to eat.

It comes not a moment too soon. The days when technology could be thrown at the challenges linked with feeding ourselves and it assumed that the ecological damage was an acceptable price to pay for cheap food are over.

No longer is it feasible to trade one set of priorities at the expense of the others, for if nature doesn’t function neither will our food system. One vital strategy for navigating these tight straits is the empowerment of small scale farmers.

Tony Juniper is a campaigner, writer, sustainability advisor and leading British environmentalist. For more than 25 years he has worked for change toward a more sustainable society at local, national and international levels. His website is at tonyjuniper.com.

“As I read the agreement it requires the Chinese to do nothing at all for 16 years while these carbon emissions regulations are creating havoc in my state and around the country.”

So said US Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell on 12th November 2014 as the news of the US-China climate deal were announced.

But far from ‘doing nothing at all’, China will be building the world’s largest renewable energy system over the next 16 years. This is something that China has already started doing – so the targets agreed upon are feasible – if arduous.

As part of the US-China climate deal announced on Wednesday, China is committing to raise the proportion of renewables in its total energy system to 20%. As renewables and nuclear power currently account for 10% of China’s total energy consumption, this implies a doubling of its renewables commitment. The challenge is illustrated in the graph below.

This is why Chinese president Xi Jinping can commit China to peaking its carbon emissions by 2030. In reality, we and many other observers expect China’s carbon emissions to peak well before that date, so there is room for more dramatic announcements to come from the Chinese side.

China’s energy is already on a strong green track

In fact, at the recent APEC meeting in Beijing, China’s national Energy Bureau stated that China’s coal consumption would probably peak by 2020, at about 4.2 billion tonnes per year. So carbon emissions could peak just a little after that – and certainly before 2030.

Mitch McConnell and many other commentators have placed all their emphasis on China’s building of a “black” energy system, comprising new coal and other fossil fuel facilities, while ignoring the enormous commitments already made to renewables and a complementary green energy system.

By our reckoning, the leading edge of change in China’s energy system is already more green than black, and the total system is greening at such a rate that the goals just announced as part of the climate deal should certainly be met.

The White House, in its statement announcing the joint deal, said that for China to meet its commitment

” … it will require China to deploy an additional 800-1000 gigawatts of nuclear, wind, solar and other zero-emission generation capacity by 2030 – more than all the coal-fired power plants that exist in China today and close to total current electricity generation capacity in the United States.”

These are enormous numbers, but they fit with China’s current capacity and goals. In 2013 China’s generating capacity from all sources reached 1,247 gigawatts.

Its generating capacity from water, wind and sun (leaving nuclear to one side) has already reached 378 gigawatts, far in front of all other industrial countries (see here).

Aiming to build over 1GW of renewable capacity per week

China’s National Development and Reform Commission has already announced plans to raise that total to 550GW by 2017. This is a commitment to renewables on a colossal scale that dwarfs that of other countries.

This goal would call for an additional 1,000GW of renewable generation capacity to be built over the next 15 years – or 1.33 GW (equivalent to a large nuclear power station) every week.

The difference between the commitments made by China and those by other countries is that China is committing to renewables as part of an industrial strategy to focus its industrial growth around such clean industries and technologies.

As part of the 12th Five year Plan, China has singled out seven strategic industries that it sees as being the pillars of its economy – including electric vehicles, renewable energy, and energy efficiency.

There is likely to be even greener tinge to the 13th Five Year Plan, currently under discussion and due to run from 2016 to 2020.

So far from ‘doing nothing’ over the next 16 years, China is transforming its economy and energy system so that water, wind and solar power will be its driving forces. Other countries – not least close US allies such as Australia and Canada – would be wise to pay attention.

Verdict

False. China has an extensive plan to curtail its emissions between now and 2030, including building renewable energy facilities on a far larger scale than any other nation. Honouring its new climate pact with the United States will involve doing a lot more than nothing.

Review by Frank Jotzo: ‘it’s even better than that!’

The view that China’s announced target is feasible but arduous is correct. It is also true that a peaking of carbon dioxide emissions in China is possible before 2025, given strong Chinese policy efforts and future changes to the rate and nature of China’s economic growth.

China has extensive policies in place to constrain the growth in energy use and to shift away from coal, and under this commitment China will intensify those efforts.

It is important to understand that China’s effort is much broader even than the authors of this FactCheck suggest.

The text correctly points out the importance of renewable energy expansion, but improvements in energy efficiency and the transformation of China’s economic structure towards high-value manufacturing and services will do more to dampen carbon emissions growth.

In my own analysis, my colleagues and I found that a carbon dioxide peak around 2025 would be achieved by maintaining a 4% per year improvement in economy-wide energy productivity, and a 1.0-1.5% annual reduction in the carbon intensity of energy supply.

The former comes through better technical efficiency and structural change, the latter through a shift from coal to gas, renewables and nuclear power.

John Mathews is Professor of Strategic Management, Macquarie Graduate School of Management at Macquarie University.

Hao Tan is Senior Lecturer in International Business at the University of Newcastle.

Frank Jotzo (reviewer) is Director, Centre for Climate Economics and Policy at the Australian National University.

The authors do not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article. They also have no relevant affiliations.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.