Electric cars have come a long way, both literally and figuratively, in the past few years. I remember when the green-minded father of a school friend bought a G-Wiz, the dinky electric car that blazed a modestly-paced trail among early adopters. In 2007 Top Gear named it the worst car of the year and co-presenter James May described it as “the worst car for this year – and indeed for every year whilst we have breath in our bodies.”  They blew one up later in the episode.

It’s amazing to think that 10 years later, Tesla’s Model X, a seven-seater, electric SUV would be beating a Lamborghini Aventador in a quarter mile drag race and UK Environment Minister Michael Gove would be announcing that the sale of new petrol and diesel cars would be banned in the UK by 2040.  It’s probably fair to say the beleaguered G-Wiz and its descendants have had the last laugh.

The rise of the electric car has given us a tantalising glimpse into a world of clean city air, free from choking vehicle fumes, cheaper running costs (as the many moving parts in the complicated combustion engine won’t need fixing), not to mention a reduction in our national carbon emissions. 

But a new report published today shows that electric vehicles will also dramatically improve Britain’s energy security by reducing its dependence on foreign oil as well. The study, by the Green Alliance in conjunction with organisations such as WWF, Greenpeace and Christian Aid, shows that if Michael Gove and his Government were to bring forward the ban on new petrol and diesel cars to 2030 Britain could reduce its oil imports by 51 per cent in 2035 compared to current projections.

Considering the world’s biggest oil producers include such delightful regimens as Russian, Iran and Saudi Arabia it seems obvious that we would want to spare ourselves having to rely on countries with such questionable human rights records as these, not to mention being wedded to potentially volatile and unreliable trading partners. When combined with the other benefits of electric vehicles it seems like a no brainer.

Bringing forward the era of new electric vehicles would see the UK starting to catch up with other countries which are already ahead of the curve. Norway has nearly ten times more charging points per head of the population than the UK and 29 per cent of new cars and vans sold there in 2016 were electric, compared to 1.4 per cent in the UK.

The report comes before the launch of the Government’s plan, which will set out how the UK plans to cut its emissions and boost the nation’s low carbon industries.  Laura Taylor, Head of Advocacy at Christian Aid, said: “The UK Government’s long-overdue Clean Growth Plan needs to prove that this government is serious about speeding up the low carbon transition, not slackening the pace.”

That pace may well come faster than we expect. Technology advances often accelerate at surprising speed. The Daily Telegraph’s Juliet Samuel recently told the story of consulting firm McKinsey, which was asked in the nineties to predict what the global market for smartphones would be by 2000. It guessed just under 1 million – wrong by a factor of 109.  She concluded: “The decarbonisation of energy is coming. It’s time for governments, investors and industry to plan for it, rather than sticking their heads in the sand.”

Likewise, if the British Government is to put the UK in the fast lane for the coming low carbon vehicle revolution then it needs to publish a truly bold and transformative Clean Growth Plan next month.

This Author

Joe Ware is a journalist and writer at Christian Aid and a New Voices contributor at the Ecologist. He is on twitter @wareisjoe

Cumbrian farmers have a problem.  Although Cumbria is in the Low Risk Area (LRA) for bovine TB, the disease has quietly been on the increase for some years.

The county was badly hit in the 2001 foot-and-mouth crisis. A total of 3500 farms lost all or some of their stock, and when they started re-stocking the following year, it included cattle from an area in the South West that was known to have a high incidence of bTB.

TB testing had been suspended during the crisis so the cattle that went up north were a risk. But, given that farmers were literally in the depths of despair, it was thought best to restock as quickly and cheaply as possible. We now know, as they didn’t then, that the TB skin test is pretty unreliable, and can leave many unidentified infected cattle in the herd.

However, farmers that had been to hell and back in 2001 were hypersensitive to disease risks and somehow managed to contain any possible bTB, so much so that Cumbria was rarely troubled. In 2013 in the northern half of Cumbria there were only three incidences of bTB (between Penrith and Carlisle).  There were a further eight incidents in southern Cumbria.

But since then, in the north and in less than four years, there have been around 61 separate outbreaks, with yet more in the south.  Bovine TB now surrounds the Lake District (see http://www.ibtb.co.uk/ – select all types/all years)

That infection had to come from somewhere, so what went wrong?

Cumbrian cattle farmers buy stock imported from other areas of England (even some from High Risk Areas), Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.  Tanis Brough from the Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA) said that strain-typing has shown that the strain of TB infecting Cumbrian cattle comes from Northern Ireland – a strain that had never previously been present in the rest of the UK.

APHA believed that this particular strain came from Northern Ireland in an animal imported prior to autumn 2014. “How this strain M.bovis 17Z came to be in the Cumbrian herds remains unclear,” said Ms Brough.  “We do not know if this original animal is alive. It is probably dead.”

Because of the 2001 foot-and-mouth crisis, the tracking system for all farm stock was quickly improved. All cattle can now be individually identified and their movements followed. Yet here the system failed. In LRAs the default bTB testing is still every four years instead of annually. Trading is easier. But does farming in an LRA give a false sense of security? Security which turns out to be not so secure?

The first sign that the LRA was being compromised was in 2011, when Plumpton Head Farm, near Penrith, lost 103 of its 260-strong dairy herd. This herd was said to be a ‘closed herd’ (that is, not bringing in cattle from elsewhere). One possible cause was nose-to-nose contact with cattle on a neighbouring farm.

Slowly the incidence of bTB in Cumbria has increased without any real outcry from the agricultural lobby. Why then, at the beginning of this month (August), has all of this information suddenly become news?  Because, accompanied by a typical knee-jerk reaction from farmers and the NFU, they have now found bTB in some Cumbrian badgers – the first time since the 1980s.

It is admitted that the cattle must have infected the badgers. Seeing that the original source of this outbreak is Northern Ireland, they have to – unless they insist that badgers swam across the Irish Sea.  And with so much disease now in the area it would be hard for the badgers to avoid it.

But of course the answer, as always, is to cull the badgers to stop them spreading the disease. Given the rise of bTB across Cumbria in the last four or five years, one would think that the cattle trading, farming practices and inadequate biosecurity are doing a pretty good job of spreading TB without any help from Mr Brock.

But no… badgers have to be ‘controlled’.

And we return to ignorant and uninformed statements about badgers.  Take this Penrith vet, talking to the BBC:

“Badgers live in the same fields as cattle; they can move into cattle buildings and eat the feed and poo in the troughs.  It’s very easy for badgers to spread the disease to cattle.”

Defra has issued some fairly comprehensive advice on the biosecurity measures farmers should take to prevent badgers from accessing yards, feed stores and cattle housing.  And farmers are advised to fence off any areas in their fields where cattle could get close to badgers.  But it is only ‘advice’ that, sadly, most farmers ignore.

Study after study has found that badgers avoid cattle and cattle housing (when the cattle are there). Despite many efforts, no one has yet managed to demonstrate how badgers are supposed to give TB to cattle. And badgers don’t ‘poo in troughs’. Why ever would they? They are clean creatures and dig latrines to defecate in.

You would hope that this succession of events would persuade Defra, Natural England, the NFU and farmers that badgers really are not the problem. It is farming-based. But no; to deal with the disease one of the options would be to kill the badgers which have had the misfortune to become infected.

There is hope. Recent research by a Nottingham University team has developed a new bTB blood test.  This identifies bTB in cattle at a much earlier stage than current testing methods do. Their study, carried out over four years at a Devon farm, also identifies many more infected cattle than the standard testing does. And that appears to show that the reservoir for the disease was within the herd, not the wildlife – news that won’t be welcome to farmers.

This Author

Lesley Docksey is a campaigner and regular contributor to the Ecologist

Electric cars have come a long way, both literally and figuratively, in the past few years. I remember when the green-minded father of a school friend bought a G-Wiz, the dinky electric car that blazed a modestly-paced trail among early adopters. In 2007 Top Gear named it the worst car of the year and co-presenter James May described it as “the worst car for this year – and indeed for every year whilst we have breath in our bodies.”  They blew one up later in the episode.

It’s amazing to think that 10 years later, Tesla’s Model X, a seven-seater, electric SUV would be beating a Lamborghini Aventador in a quarter mile drag race and UK Environment Minister Michael Gove would be announcing that the sale of new petrol and diesel cars would be banned in the UK by 2040.  It’s probably fair to say the beleaguered G-Wiz and its descendants have had the last laugh.

The rise of the electric car has given us a tantalising glimpse into a world of clean city air, free from choking vehicle fumes, cheaper running costs (as the many moving parts in the complicated combustion engine won’t need fixing), not to mention a reduction in our national carbon emissions. 

But a new report published today shows that electric vehicles will also dramatically improve Britain’s energy security by reducing its dependence on foreign oil as well. The study, by the Green Alliance in conjunction with organisations such as WWF, Greenpeace and Christian Aid, shows that if Michael Gove and his Government were to bring forward the ban on new petrol and diesel cars to 2030 Britain could reduce its oil imports by 51 per cent in 2035 compared to current projections.

Considering the world’s biggest oil producers include such delightful regimens as Russian, Iran and Saudi Arabia it seems obvious that we would want to spare ourselves having to rely on countries with such questionable human rights records as these, not to mention being wedded to potentially volatile and unreliable trading partners. When combined with the other benefits of electric vehicles it seems like a no brainer.

Bringing forward the era of new electric vehicles would see the UK starting to catch up with other countries which are already ahead of the curve. Norway has nearly ten times more charging points per head of the population than the UK and 29 per cent of new cars and vans sold there in 2016 were electric, compared to 1.4 per cent in the UK.

The report comes before the launch of the Government’s plan, which will set out how the UK plans to cut its emissions and boost the nation’s low carbon industries.  Laura Taylor, Head of Advocacy at Christian Aid, said: “The UK Government’s long-overdue Clean Growth Plan needs to prove that this government is serious about speeding up the low carbon transition, not slackening the pace.”

That pace may well come faster than we expect. Technology advances often accelerate at surprising speed. The Daily Telegraph’s Juliet Samuel recently told the story of consulting firm McKinsey, which was asked in the nineties to predict what the global market for smartphones would be by 2000. It guessed just under 1 million – wrong by a factor of 109.  She concluded: “The decarbonisation of energy is coming. It’s time for governments, investors and industry to plan for it, rather than sticking their heads in the sand.”

Likewise, if the British Government is to put the UK in the fast lane for the coming low carbon vehicle revolution then it needs to publish a truly bold and transformative Clean Growth Plan next month.

This Author

Joe Ware is a journalist and writer at Christian Aid and a New Voices contributor at the Ecologist. He is on twitter @wareisjoe

Cumbrian farmers have a problem.  Although Cumbria is in the Low Risk Area (LRA) for bovine TB, the disease has quietly been on the increase for some years.

The county was badly hit in the 2001 foot-and-mouth crisis. A total of 3500 farms lost all or some of their stock, and when they started re-stocking the following year, it included cattle from an area in the South West that was known to have a high incidence of bTB.

TB testing had been suspended during the crisis so the cattle that went up north were a risk. But, given that farmers were literally in the depths of despair, it was thought best to restock as quickly and cheaply as possible. We now know, as they didn’t then, that the TB skin test is pretty unreliable, and can leave many unidentified infected cattle in the herd.

However, farmers that had been to hell and back in 2001 were hypersensitive to disease risks and somehow managed to contain any possible bTB, so much so that Cumbria was rarely troubled. In 2013 in the northern half of Cumbria there were only three incidences of bTB (between Penrith and Carlisle).  There were a further eight incidents in southern Cumbria.

But since then, in the north and in less than four years, there have been around 61 separate outbreaks, with yet more in the south.  Bovine TB now surrounds the Lake District (see http://www.ibtb.co.uk/ – select all types/all years)

That infection had to come from somewhere, so what went wrong?

Cumbrian cattle farmers buy stock imported from other areas of England (even some from High Risk Areas), Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.  Tanis Brough from the Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA) said that strain-typing has shown that the strain of TB infecting Cumbrian cattle comes from Northern Ireland – a strain that had never previously been present in the rest of the UK.

APHA believed that this particular strain came from Northern Ireland in an animal imported prior to autumn 2014. “How this strain M.bovis 17Z came to be in the Cumbrian herds remains unclear,” said Ms Brough.  “We do not know if this original animal is alive. It is probably dead.”

Because of the 2001 foot-and-mouth crisis, the tracking system for all farm stock was quickly improved. All cattle can now be individually identified and their movements followed. Yet here the system failed. In LRAs the default bTB testing is still every four years instead of annually. Trading is easier. But does farming in an LRA give a false sense of security? Security which turns out to be not so secure?

The first sign that the LRA was being compromised was in 2011, when Plumpton Head Farm, near Penrith, lost 103 of its 260-strong dairy herd. This herd was said to be a ‘closed herd’ (that is, not bringing in cattle from elsewhere). One possible cause was nose-to-nose contact with cattle on a neighbouring farm.

Slowly the incidence of bTB in Cumbria has increased without any real outcry from the agricultural lobby. Why then, at the beginning of this month (August), has all of this information suddenly become news?  Because, accompanied by a typical knee-jerk reaction from farmers and the NFU, they have now found bTB in some Cumbrian badgers – the first time since the 1980s.

It is admitted that the cattle must have infected the badgers. Seeing that the original source of this outbreak is Northern Ireland, they have to – unless they insist that badgers swam across the Irish Sea.  And with so much disease now in the area it would be hard for the badgers to avoid it.

But of course the answer, as always, is to cull the badgers to stop them spreading the disease. Given the rise of bTB across Cumbria in the last four or five years, one would think that the cattle trading, farming practices and inadequate biosecurity are doing a pretty good job of spreading TB without any help from Mr Brock.

But no… badgers have to be ‘controlled’.

And we return to ignorant and uninformed statements about badgers.  Take this Penrith vet, talking to the BBC:

“Badgers live in the same fields as cattle; they can move into cattle buildings and eat the feed and poo in the troughs.  It’s very easy for badgers to spread the disease to cattle.”

Defra has issued some fairly comprehensive advice on the biosecurity measures farmers should take to prevent badgers from accessing yards, feed stores and cattle housing.  And farmers are advised to fence off any areas in their fields where cattle could get close to badgers.  But it is only ‘advice’ that, sadly, most farmers ignore.

Study after study has found that badgers avoid cattle and cattle housing (when the cattle are there). Despite many efforts, no one has yet managed to demonstrate how badgers are supposed to give TB to cattle. And badgers don’t ‘poo in troughs’. Why ever would they? They are clean creatures and dig latrines to defecate in.

You would hope that this succession of events would persuade Defra, Natural England, the NFU and farmers that badgers really are not the problem. It is farming-based. But no; to deal with the disease one of the options would be to kill the badgers which have had the misfortune to become infected.

There is hope. Recent research by a Nottingham University team has developed a new bTB blood test.  This identifies bTB in cattle at a much earlier stage than current testing methods do. Their study, carried out over four years at a Devon farm, also identifies many more infected cattle than the standard testing does. And that appears to show that the reservoir for the disease was within the herd, not the wildlife – news that won’t be welcome to farmers.

This Author

Lesley Docksey is a campaigner and regular contributor to the Ecologist

Electric cars have come a long way, both literally and figuratively, in the past few years. I remember when the green-minded father of a school friend bought a G-Wiz, the dinky electric car that blazed a modestly-paced trail among early adopters. In 2007 Top Gear named it the worst car of the year and co-presenter James May described it as “the worst car for this year – and indeed for every year whilst we have breath in our bodies.”  They blew one up later in the episode.

It’s amazing to think that 10 years later, Tesla’s Model X, a seven-seater, electric SUV would be beating a Lamborghini Aventador in a quarter mile drag race and UK Environment Minister Michael Gove would be announcing that the sale of new petrol and diesel cars would be banned in the UK by 2040.  It’s probably fair to say the beleaguered G-Wiz and its descendants have had the last laugh.

The rise of the electric car has given us a tantalising glimpse into a world of clean city air, free from choking vehicle fumes, cheaper running costs (as the many moving parts in the complicated combustion engine won’t need fixing), not to mention a reduction in our national carbon emissions. 

But a new report published today shows that electric vehicles will also dramatically improve Britain’s energy security by reducing its dependence on foreign oil as well. The study, by the Green Alliance in conjunction with organisations such as WWF, Greenpeace and Christian Aid, shows that if Michael Gove and his Government were to bring forward the ban on new petrol and diesel cars to 2030 Britain could reduce its oil imports by 51 per cent in 2035 compared to current projections.

Considering the world’s biggest oil producers include such delightful regimens as Russian, Iran and Saudi Arabia it seems obvious that we would want to spare ourselves having to rely on countries with such questionable human rights records as these, not to mention being wedded to potentially volatile and unreliable trading partners. When combined with the other benefits of electric vehicles it seems like a no brainer.

Bringing forward the era of new electric vehicles would see the UK starting to catch up with other countries which are already ahead of the curve. Norway has nearly ten times more charging points per head of the population than the UK and 29 per cent of new cars and vans sold there in 2016 were electric, compared to 1.4 per cent in the UK.

The report comes before the launch of the Government’s plan, which will set out how the UK plans to cut its emissions and boost the nation’s low carbon industries.  Laura Taylor, Head of Advocacy at Christian Aid, said: “The UK Government’s long-overdue Clean Growth Plan needs to prove that this government is serious about speeding up the low carbon transition, not slackening the pace.”

That pace may well come faster than we expect. Technology advances often accelerate at surprising speed. The Daily Telegraph’s Juliet Samuel recently told the story of consulting firm McKinsey, which was asked in the nineties to predict what the global market for smartphones would be by 2000. It guessed just under 1 million – wrong by a factor of 109.  She concluded: “The decarbonisation of energy is coming. It’s time for governments, investors and industry to plan for it, rather than sticking their heads in the sand.”

Likewise, if the British Government is to put the UK in the fast lane for the coming low carbon vehicle revolution then it needs to publish a truly bold and transformative Clean Growth Plan next month.

This Author

Joe Ware is a journalist and writer at Christian Aid and a New Voices contributor at the Ecologist. He is on twitter @wareisjoe

Donald Trump has done many things to tarnish America’s reputation, but his decision to walk away from the Paris Agreement is probably the most internationally symbolic and damaging. That a US president can put climate change denial at the centre of his climate and energy policy is truly unprecedented, and it is difficult to remember an administration that has been so intent on undermining the intellectual and scientific findings on global warming.

Fighting back against Trump’s climate folly seems to be an uphill task. Even the impending publication of the Climate Science Special Report, drafted by scientists from 13 federal agencies, is unlikely to do much. The final report is expected to warn of the dangers of climate change, but it will most likely be surreptitiously sidelined. 

One of the reasons behind Trump’s bullish attitude might be to do with public opinion in the US. In a poll carried out by Yale University in 2016, 70% of Americans said they believed in global warming and 58% believed that it will harm Americans. However, only 40% believe that it will actually impact them individually. Furthermore, just 24% said they heard about global warming in the media every week.

In a poll conducted by the Pew Research Centre this year, 76% said terrorism should be a top priority for the administration. Only 38% mentioned global warming. The polls suggest that Americans might be concerned about global warming and want more to be done about it. But they are more likely to be worried about, say, Kim Jong-un than climate change.

It appears that confronting Trump – or any other climate denier – on the basis of facts simply won’t work. The challenge should perhaps be to first rally public opinion until there is an overwhelming consensus that serious and urgent action is needed.

One practical short-term solution might be to shift the public discourse from “climate change” to “pollution”. Focusing on pollution has three advantages that may mean it moves public opinion better than global warming.

Can’t see ‘warming’

First, pollution is tangible. The fact that glaciers are melting might be alarming but it is not something that most of us experience in everyday life. And why would a rise in temperature matter as much to someone living in Sacramento, California, where it is already hot and where one can find shelter in air conditioned buildings?

Pollution, however, can be experienced on a daily basis and causes nuisances of all sorts. The same Sacramento resident who is indifferent to global warming might be concerned with the pollution in their local urban river parkway, for instance. In addition, reports claiming that there are millions of annual deaths from air pollution have a different, more personal ring from those making the more abstract claim that “global temperatures” are rising fast.

People care about pollution

Americans also seem to be more concerned about the environment than global warming. In the same opinion poll carried out by Pew, 55% of Americans saw “the environment” as a priority, a similar score to crime or poverty (and comfortably ahead of the military, immigration or “global warming”). They seem to be more worried about the quality of air and water where they live rather than losing sleep over a global climate phenomenon. 

Not for sale. welcomia / shutterstock

What might also be encouraging is a poll carried out by the Center for American Progress this year which showed around two-thirds of those who voted for Trump opposed the idea of privatising or selling off America’s national forests and public lands. Whether this is a strong enough basis for there to be a rallying of the public is difficult to know. Nevertheless, focusing on the local environment is a good start.

You, the expert

A focus on pollution might also actually open up the debate on the environment and encourage some kind of grassroot reaction.

Too often the discourse on the environment and global warming has been dominated by scientific experts and politicians. As such, the public might believe that this is a matter of scientific debate that somehow they cannot participate in, without some prior knowledge. After all, what can you, personally, contribute to a debate on carbon dioxide parts-per-million, or melting glaciers? Would you even know either was a problem if scientists hadn’t warned us?

By contrast, feeling the effects of environmental pollution does not require expert knowledge. The public can express remedial actions and suggestions, without having to pretend that they understand atmospheric science. Moreover, actions are more likely to be taken on a local level if the focus is on local pollution.

The public should be scientists’ first ally in this battle. Any language and issues that engage people against Trump’s climate folly in whatever way should be the priority for scientists and policy makers seeking to address the problem.

This Author

Tae Hoon Kim is a researcher in Energy Politics, University of Cambridge. This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Bani-Hashem in northern Jordan was once a picture postcard landscape. In years gone by, its rich plant life and abundant water supply attracted Bedouin tribes, traditional pastoralists in search of good land on which to raise their cattle, sheep and goats. Then the landscape began to change. By the turn of the 21st century, pasture had become scarce, water was in short supply and life for the local Bedouin was tough.

Alongside all its other troubles, the Middle East is facing an environmental crisis. In a region where herding is a bulwark of food security, global warming is set to hit hard as it brings drought. But this is one problem that is now being successfully tackled. At Bani-Hashem, and other areas throughout the region, local people are rediscovering a traditional practice of land management, which is not just improving pastureland but also increasing biodiversity and bringing financial benefits and gender equality too.

Al Hima (Arabic for “protected place”) is a centuries’ old tradition developed by Bedouins of the Arabian Peninsula to help communities manage shared rangelands effectively. Under Islamic law it became a method for the sustainable use of the region’s limited natural resources and the conservation of its biodiversity. But in the latter part of the 20th century al Hima declined across the Middle East, as governments in many countries laid claim to rangelands and opened them up for anyone to use. Robbed of ownership, herders became careless about maintaining the land and its resources. Within a generation the situation went from bad to worse as global warming exacerbated the problem.

With the restoration of al Hima things are changing, and Jordan has been at the vanguard. In 2010, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) teamed up with Jordan’s Ministry of Agriculture, the Arab Women’s Organization and the European Union to begin a pilot initiative. Their efforts focused on Bani-Hashem and three other locations around the Zarqa River Basin in the eastern Jordanian desert. Part of the North Arab Desert, which stretches into Syria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, this is classified as the most environmentally vulnerable region in the kingdom.

At Bani-Hasham, the Jordanian government designated 100 hectares of rangeland for inclusion in the scheme and the local Bedouins then drew up a plan to restore the land and use it sustainably. Al Hima does not specify what measures a community should take but, rather, how to go about doing things. In essence it solves the “tragedy of the commons” – the problem that a shared resource is susceptible to overexploitation if all stakeholders try to take full advantage of it – by creating an open and egalitarian framework for management with checks and punishments for those who do not comply. So, once the locals had agreed their plan, a tribal charter pledging to protect the site was drafted and signed by community members; a system for policing was established and a committee was formed to coordinate the management of the al Hima following tribal traditions.

A key advantage of al Hima is its flexibility. In this case, the community decided to divide the designated rangeland into three enclosures and rotate grazing on them. For the first two years all grazing was prohibited – although access to neighboring land remained unrestricted. This almost tripled the dry yield of biomass in the enclosed areas from 40 to 113 kilograms per hectare. In subsequent years, the lots were grazed one at a time, in rotation. Decisions about how many livestock to admit and for how long were based on annual measurements of fodder yield (taken from the enclosure about to be grazed). The scheme has already dramatically increased the quality and quantity of forage plants and restored many indigenous floral species.

Evidence-based success

In 2015, the IUCN carried out a study to assess the impact al Hima could have if adopted widely in Jordan. The researchers used a combination of satellite images, soil characteristics; weather and land use data to predict how al Hima land use practices will affect the rates of groundwater recharge and soil erosion. They also considered rangeland vegetation and carbon storage in soils and plants.

“The models showed that al Hima restoration has a positive impact on all of these biological and hydrological processes and that they provide valuable goods and services to Jordanian society,” says Vanja Westerberg, formerly of IUCN’s Global Economics and Social Science Programme in Switzerland.

The study estimated the value of sustainable management to pastoralists in the four Zarqa River Basin communities, at some US$10 million in the next twenty-five years.

Along with environmental and economic benefits, the reintroduction of al Hima in Jordan is also narrowing the gender divide. Traditionally, al Hima gave Bedouin women little say or involvement in natural resource conservation and management despite the fact that they herd livestock, farm and collect medicinal plants. This time around they have been involved in all phases of the project, with dramatic consequences. It is widely recognized that participation of women has helped reduce the numbers of tribal conflicts over natural resources.

“Women’s [involvement] has proved to be a major factor in restoring rangelands and improving standards of life in local communities,” says Fida Haddad of IUCN’s Drylands, Livelihoods and Gender Programme in Amman, Jordan.

Al Hima is not a panacea for the challenges facing pastoralists in arid regions today. Nevertheless, many see it as an important link between conservation of renewable resources and sustainable development. While other conservation schemes, such as national parks, often deny pastoralists in developing countries access to key resources, al Hima gives traditional communities an incentive to conserve because they manage and natural resources and allocate them equitably.

“What makes it unusual is the degree of cultural and social acceptability because it is effectively a traditional approach that also has religious endorsement in the qu’ran,” says Jonathan DaviesCoordinator of IUCN’s Global Drylands Initiative.

This is tried and tested indigenous knowledge, backed by one of the world’s great religions that spoke the language of conservation long before saving the planet became vogue.

curtisabraham@yahoo.com

Related reading

http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/2871076/overgrazing_and_desertification_in_the_syrian_steppe_are_the_root_causes_of_war.html).

http://www.onthecommons.org/magazine/elinor-ostroms-8-principles-managing-commmons

A recent statement to a UN council by Sheikh Hasina Wazed, the prime minister of Bangladesh,  declared that the predicted one meter sea-level rise would render 30 million people in coastal areas homeless and migrating to Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital.

A staggering number, comprising the combined population of Belgium and the Netherlands, and one that has been much contested by studies and during international talks.

We asked Dr. Saleemul Huq, director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD) and a world expert on climate change adaptation, how accurate his prime-minister’s statement is, and how Bangladesh is planning for the climate migrants to come.

The smokescreen of numbers

“The emphasis on numbers in the current debate is a very great distraction, generating more noise than coming up with any strategy on how to deal with the issue. This type of debate is creating a smoke curtain, without necessary having a fire behind it,” urges Dr. Huq. 

“The number of expected climate migrants in Bangladesh being 30 million is not what matters here. Thirty million is as right as any number. Nobody can be certain of the exact amount of climate migrants that our global society will have to deal with.”

“What we can say with absolute certainty,” states Huq, “is that ‘human-induced climate change is causing sea-levels to rise’ as well as ‘more than 30 million people living in coastal Bangladesh now will no longer be able to live where they are living today if the sea-level rises by 1 meter’.  When discussing the future, attributing migration to human induced climate change can be done with a lot of credibility and a strong scientific basis.

“It becomes more problematic when you are trying to determine the pace at which these processes are currently developing: most projections for a 1 meter sea-level rise for the coast of Bangladesh run well past 2100, by which time of the population itself will have doubled, if not tripled.

“Low-lying areas like the coast of Bangladesh and island states like Tuvalu and Kiribati will disappear into the ocean. And when these lands disappear, their inhabitants will become climate migrants and climate refugees, without any question. Whether climate migration is already happening TODAY, is still strongly disputed in the current debate, because migration always has multiple reasons: they can be political, sociological or environmental reasons. And attributing climate change as the main or only reason for moving, to any group of migrants, is a very difficult thing to do … for now.”

He adds: “Climate change is already a super-imposed factor in the web of push- and pull-factors that makes people decide to leave their homes. And more and more of these climate-related factors are going to contribute to push-factors for migrants making the decision to leave their homes. In the future, the existence of climate migrants will be undeniable.”

Terminology Counts

“When talking about climate migration, terminology counts: the media has adopted the terms ‘climate migrants’ or ‘climate refugees’ to describe this issue, although in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC, these terms do not exist, because none of the parties can agree on what they mean. But to be able to deal with the issue, we have to find a way to name it first,” states Huq.

Although consensus is lacking regarding the definition of climate migration and whether it is a phenomenon that is already taking place or not, the issue itself did already find its way into the negotiations of the United Nations.

In the UNFCCC – which is a negotiated treaty within the United Nations for which a Conference of Parties (or COP) takes place every year – the discussion of climate migration falls under a category called ‘Loss & Damage’ (L&D).

L&D forms the last of three chapters making up the Paris Agreement, with the first two being ‘mitigation’, which regulates the scaling down of emissions, and ‘adaptation’, or building resilience against climate change. In some cases, it is too late for the first two strategies to protect communities from the effects of climate change, and the loss and damage that come with climate change-induced effects are inevitable.

Dr. Huq explains: “Loss refers to things that are lost for ever due to climate change, such as human lives or species loss, while damages refers to things that are damaged, but can be repaired or restored, such as roads or embankments.”

Although this third chapter in the Paris agreement opens up a discussion for climate migration, recognising that climate change can indeed cause the necessary harm for people to become displaced, the chapter itself is also very controversial and the product of a decade-long international debate. 

One of the most significant steps forward in this discussion, before the Paris Agreement, was made during COP19, which took place in Poland in2013, where the Warsaw International Mechanism or WIM was put in place.

The WIM is an integral part of the L&D chapter, and is the first formal international mechanism that addresses the effects of  irreversible damage due to human-induced climate change.

It includes an executive committee and a 9-item action plan, one of which is ‘forced migration due to climate change’. Together with an additional article in the Paris agreement (article 8), these 2013 and 2015 landmarks delineate the progress so far.

A country under water

In Bangladesh, however, the government is already several steps ahead of what little progress has been made in an international context. Dr. Huq states: “Our country already has a climate strategy and action plan in place, performing adaptation projects and building climate resilience. This plan now recognises, however, as the recent statement of our prime-minister confirmed, that we will be dealing with millions of people who will have to leave the coastal areas.”

The forced migration away from the Bangladeshi coasts, additional to the direct trauma it inflicts on people, also holds a greater sociological threat that can have enduring consequences for Bangladeshi society: the resettlement will mainly be a move from rural to urban communities.

Dhaka city is already the fastest growing mega city in the world, with a current population of 15 million people and predicted to absorb another 10 million in the coming two decades.

The high influx of people from rural areas into cities is likely to cause large bodies of people without the background or skill-set to make a living in an urbanised environment, causing enduring poverty, a strong class division and political unrest in a country where large areas of rural land are soon to become part of the seafloor.

“Our current revision of the national climate strategy and action plan will still keep helping coastal communities to adapt to their changing environment. Additionally, as a long-term strategy to deal with the predicted rural-to-urban migrations, education will be a key adaptation strategy: we are handing over the right skills and knowledge to the youth, so they don’t need to become farmers and fishers like their parents, and they are able to get jobs in towns elsewhere.”

By both educating the youth in rural areas, as well as creating new job opportunities in provincial towns, the Bangladesh government is hoping to stimulate so-called ‘facilitated or assisted migration’ to address both the projected loss of agricultural communities and the overpopulation in the capital. 

Saleemul Huq explains, “By helping people to become more resilient to climate change, and by educating them so they can utilise migration as a choice instead of a necessity, we are turning the rising sea-level around from a problem to an opportunity. Planned migration offers a solution by enabling people instead of forcing them to move.”

This Author

Arthur Wyns is a tropical biologist passionate about biodiversity and climate change action. He’s been involved in research teams all over the world, and recently joined the Climate Tracker team as a campaign manager. He Tweets at @ArthurWyns.

A recent statement to a UN council by Sheikh Hasina Wazed, the prime minister of Bangladesh,  declared that the predicted one meter sea-level rise would render 30 million people in coastal areas homeless and migrating to Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital.

A staggering number, comprising the combined population of Belgium and the Netherlands, and one that has been much contested by studies and during international talks.

We asked Dr. Saleemul Huq, director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD) and a world expert on climate change adaptation, how accurate his prime-minister’s statement is, and how Bangladesh is planning for the climate migrants to come.

The smokescreen of numbers

“The emphasis on numbers in the current debate is a very great distraction, generating more noise than coming up with any strategy on how to deal with the issue. This type of debate is creating a smoke curtain, without necessary having a fire behind it,” urges Dr. Huq. 

“The number of expected climate migrants in Bangladesh being 30 million is not what matters here. Thirty million is as right as any number. Nobody can be certain of the exact amount of climate migrants that our global society will have to deal with.”

“What we can say with absolute certainty,” states Huq, “is that ‘human-induced climate change is causing sea-levels to rise’ as well as ‘more than 30 million people living in coastal Bangladesh now will no longer be able to live where they are living today if the sea-level rises by 1 meter’.  When discussing the future, attributing migration to human induced climate change can be done with a lot of credibility and a strong scientific basis.

“It becomes more problematic when you are trying to determine the pace at which these processes are currently developing: most projections for a 1 meter sea-level rise for the coast of Bangladesh run well past 2100, by which time of the population itself will have doubled, if not tripled.

“Low-lying areas like the coast of Bangladesh and island states like Tuvalu and Kiribati will disappear into the ocean. And when these lands disappear, their inhabitants will become climate migrants and climate refugees, without any question. Whether climate migration is already happening TODAY, is still strongly disputed in the current debate, because migration always has multiple reasons: they can be political, sociological or environmental reasons. And attributing climate change as the main or only reason for moving, to any group of migrants, is a very difficult thing to do … for now.”

He adds: “Climate change is already a super-imposed factor in the web of push- and pull-factors that makes people decide to leave their homes. And more and more of these climate-related factors are going to contribute to push-factors for migrants making the decision to leave their homes. In the future, the existence of climate migrants will be undeniable.”

Terminology Counts

“When talking about climate migration, terminology counts: the media has adopted the terms ‘climate migrants’ or ‘climate refugees’ to describe this issue, although in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC, these terms do not exist, because none of the parties can agree on what they mean. But to be able to deal with the issue, we have to find a way to name it first,” states Huq.

Although consensus is lacking regarding the definition of climate migration and whether it is a phenomenon that is already taking place or not, the issue itself did already find its way into the negotiations of the United Nations.

In the UNFCCC – which is a negotiated treaty within the United Nations for which a Conference of Parties (or COP) takes place every year – the discussion of climate migration falls under a category called ‘Loss & Damage’ (L&D).

L&D forms the last of three chapters making up the Paris Agreement, with the first two being ‘mitigation’, which regulates the scaling down of emissions, and ‘adaptation’, or building resilience against climate change. In some cases, it is too late for the first two strategies to protect communities from the effects of climate change, and the loss and damage that come with climate change-induced effects are inevitable.

Dr. Huq explains: “Loss refers to things that are lost for ever due to climate change, such as human lives or species loss, while damages refers to things that are damaged, but can be repaired or restored, such as roads or embankments.”

Although this third chapter in the Paris agreement opens up a discussion for climate migration, recognising that climate change can indeed cause the necessary harm for people to become displaced, the chapter itself is also very controversial and the product of a decade-long international debate. 

One of the most significant steps forward in this discussion, before the Paris Agreement, was made during COP19, which took place in Poland in2013, where the Warsaw International Mechanism or WIM was put in place.

The WIM is an integral part of the L&D chapter, and is the first formal international mechanism that addresses the effects of  irreversible damage due to human-induced climate change.

It includes an executive committee and a 9-item action plan, one of which is ‘forced migration due to climate change’. Together with an additional article in the Paris agreement (article 8), these 2013 and 2015 landmarks delineate the progress so far.

A country under water

In Bangladesh, however, the government is already several steps ahead of what little progress has been made in an international context. Dr. Huq states: “Our country already has a climate strategy and action plan in place, performing adaptation projects and building climate resilience. This plan now recognises, however, as the recent statement of our prime-minister confirmed, that we will be dealing with millions of people who will have to leave the coastal areas.”

The forced migration away from the Bangladeshi coasts, additional to the direct trauma it inflicts on people, also holds a greater sociological threat that can have enduring consequences for Bangladeshi society: the resettlement will mainly be a move from rural to urban communities.

Dhaka city is already the fastest growing mega city in the world, with a current population of 15 million people and predicted to absorb another 10 million in the coming two decades.

The high influx of people from rural areas into cities is likely to cause large bodies of people without the background or skill-set to make a living in an urbanised environment, causing enduring poverty, a strong class division and political unrest in a country where large areas of rural land are soon to become part of the seafloor.

“Our current revision of the national climate strategy and action plan will still keep helping coastal communities to adapt to their changing environment. Additionally, as a long-term strategy to deal with the predicted rural-to-urban migrations, education will be a key adaptation strategy: we are handing over the right skills and knowledge to the youth, so they don’t need to become farmers and fishers like their parents, and they are able to get jobs in towns elsewhere.”

By both educating the youth in rural areas, as well as creating new job opportunities in provincial towns, the Bangladesh government is hoping to stimulate so-called ‘facilitated or assisted migration’ to address both the projected loss of agricultural communities and the overpopulation in the capital. 

Saleemul Huq explains, “By helping people to become more resilient to climate change, and by educating them so they can utilise migration as a choice instead of a necessity, we are turning the rising sea-level around from a problem to an opportunity. Planned migration offers a solution by enabling people instead of forcing them to move.”

This Author

Arthur Wyns is a tropical biologist passionate about biodiversity and climate change action. He’s been involved in research teams all over the world, and recently joined the Climate Tracker team as a campaign manager. He Tweets at @ArthurWyns.