The West Baray

In the 11^th century under the rule of King Suryavarman I, construction began on the Western Baray, a reservoir 8km long by 2km wide which initially served a ceremonial function as a depiction of the Hindu Sea of Creation, has also served as a reservoir for irrigation, and is still to be found today outside the town of Siem Reap. At the weekends, locals flock to the ‘Baray’ to drink beer, eat barbecued fish, and swim.

Siem Reap itself sits towards the top of the Tonle Sap, the largest lake in Southeast Asia. During the monsoon, the Tonle Sap increases 540% in size from 2,500km² to 16,000km² as water from the Mekong River reverses direction and fills the lake. November’s annual water festival Bon Om Teuk is a national event, when Khmers celebrate the bounty of the lake, and hold boat races and parties.

The area surrounding the Tonle Sap is home to over 1 million people, who depend upon it for fishing and irrigation.

Kompong Phluk

The communities living around the lake consist of floating villages like Chong Kneas, where everything from the houses to the schools, churches and pig farms are on floating platforms, to villages like Kompong Phluk that teeter on twenty-foot stilts. Around 80% of the population are agricultural workers, and rice paddies cover vast swathes of the country. Cambodia appears, then, to be a country very much at home around water, and which not only expects, but depends on the flooding brought by the annual monsoon for biodiversity and soil fertility – even the Cambodian currency, the riel, is named after a fish found in the Tonle Sap lake.

The UK Government’s Foresight report estimates that 80,000 properties are at very high risk from surface water flooding, causing on average £270 million of damage each year, as annual precipitation is set to become increasingly variable – increasingly monsoon-like. An analysis of average rainfall data for Cambodia and the United Kingdom shows the difference in variability of rainfall, and hints at how UK rainfall patterns may alter in future:

Data: World Weather Information Service, World Meteorological Association

Flooded fields near Kep

While Cambodia has a population density of 77/km² compared to 248/km² in the UK and a predominantly rural population, we may nevertheless attempt to examine how Cambodia manages flooding, to see if there is anything we in the UK can learn about how to live in a climate with more variable rainfall and higher flood risk:

• Habitation in vulnerable areas is built to deal with flooding. Most traditional Cambodian houses are on stilts, or have bases which are resilient to flood waters. The design of new housing in flood-prone areas in the UK can be informed by the architecture of housing in areas where flooding is common – and a UK flood design competition supported by insurance company Norwich Union encouraged just this in 2008. In Holland, amphibious houses are already being built.
• Most roads and tracks have ditches varying in size from small channels to canals, which absorb rainwater and run-off, channelling it away to fields or storing it. Canals and ditches are a common sight in Cambodia. In the UK, drainage and sewerage systems that often age to Victorian times are struggling with the amount of water flowing into them, from surface run-off to household usage – upgrading these systems, already in progress in many places, may go some way to reducing flood risk.
• Relatively sparsely populated Cambodia, with an abundance of rice paddies and other agricultural land, can hold large quantities of water. Respondents to a recent survey on flood risk agreed that farmland would be the best use of river valley floodplains, above housing. Floodplains, managed properly, act as an effective buffer in times of peak rainfall.
• Finally, Cambodia is a country still rich in vegetation and tree cover, which absorbs rainwater into the ground before it can reach rivers, exacerbating flood risk. In the UK, re-establishing hedgerows is one way that agricultural land is being restored to provide effective means of reducing surface run-off, and the further use of trees and vegetation to lessen flood risk can only improve the situation.

If proof were needed of how Cambodia is able to teach us in the UK lessons on managing flood risk, we only need to look back to Cambodia to see how urbanisation, industrialisation and development are now creating problems.

With Cambodia now firmly on the tourist trail in Southeast Asia after years of conflict, Siem Reap now receives over 2 million tourists every year, who come to see the temples of Angkor. Scores of new hotels have been built in the last five years alone. Every year, the main streets of Siem Reap from Highway 6 to Sivatha Boulevard flood, sewage floating in the streets, because more paved roads and significantly greater water usage have put an immense strain on the infrastructure of the town – so much so that the water table has lowered around Siem Reap and Angkor Wat faces collapse. Floods in the countryside have resulted in fatalities and damaged property, partly as a consequence of damming further up the Mekong River in Laos, and partly due to extensive deforestation. Further fatalities resulted from the flooding caused by Typhoon Ketsana in September 2009.

Angkor Wat

Cambodia, a country that for many hundreds of years has lived with an abundance of water, is increasingly seeing water as an enemy, its problems being worsened by the development that the country craves, and which, without proper planning, is leading Cambodia down the same path as us.

The greatest irony is that, as architectural discoveries suggest, Cambodia has already been down this path. The great Angkorian civilisation had collapsed altogether by the fifteenth century, partly as a result of overpopulation, unsustainable water resource management, and climate change. History could be doomed to repeat itself – for us as well as Cambodia.

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1. Climate change sceptics are to be called ‘deniers’. You know. Like holocaust deniers.

Deny everything, Baldrick.

The precautionary principle does not give you license to pummel sceptics into the ground with the sheer weight of your indignant rage.

Assume that most people at Copenhagen understand the basics of climate change, but be prepared to continue debating the issues and educating those who doubt, or more likely do not understand, the science. Don’t fall into the trap of being accused of intellectual arrogance or dogmatism, when that is what you’re trying to tackle in the first place.

Which leads us to the next thing…

2. All opinions are equally valid.

Gaia is hurting.

No. They’re not.

Ignorant, prejudiced, ill-considered bilge will issue forth from thousands of orifices at Copenhagen, and it will not all be from climate change ‘deniers’ or loony right-wingers. Some utter bilge is uttered with such ferocious, righteous anger as to take the breath away, and none more so than from some climate change protestors, activists, and other individuals whose grip on reality is just as tenuous as your average Melanie Phillips.

You may crochet your own underpants and not eat food that casts a shadow, but if you believe labrador tea is a better treatment for tuberculosis than antibiotics, we have a problem.

3. Nick Griffin is at Copenhagen representing the EU.

Immigrants, coming here and blah blah etc...

No, he’s not.

He’s a deluded idiot, and he was only elected to the EU Parliament through a combination of voter apathy and disenfranchisement. He recently appeared on Question Time in the United Kingdom and was laughed at, solidly, for around an hour. His views on climate change are as bonkers as his views on what constitutes an indigenous British person.

Mind you – we in the UK allowed him to become elected, so we probably deserve the embarrassment of being represented by him.

4. Carbon. Carbon. Carbon, carbon, carbon, carbon.

Carbon and on and on

How about we try talking about biodiversity? What about social justice? Ever heard of habitat fragmentation?

Every single discussion about the environment doesn’t have to centre around carbon, carbon offsetting, carbon trading, carbon footprints. Yes. Of course. Carbon is important. But look at that word.

Carbon.

Aren’t you just a little bit bored of seeing it, and worried by the growth of the ‘carbon economy’ as a panacea for all ills?

5. The whole climate change panic is a Marxist conspiracy to drag us back to the dark ages.

Children of the Quorn

Really? Really? Asking people to consider skipping meat one day a week does not a mung bean eating agrarian utopia make. Get over yourself.

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Responsibletravel.com now shares the opinion of Friends of the Earth when they describe offsetting as a ‘dangerous distraction‘, and encourages customers to reduce their carbon footprint, not offset it. All of responsibletravel.com’s 3,500 holidays can be booked with ‘land-only’ travel options.

• Responsibletravel.com carbon caution
• The Man in Seat 61 – travel options by rail and ship

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So, it’s a quiet news day then, and the search for a crystal ball continues.

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People have asked me what the course covered – after a moment’s thought, the response would usually be:

• Flooding (there seemed to be a lot about flooding)
• Competition for resources
• Environmental responses, the unpredictability of them

Thinking back over it, these three things sum up some of the most pressing environmental issues of our time.

Water. Food. Space. A projected population of 9.3 billion people by 2050. That’s nearly four times as many people as there were on Earth in 1950. And all these people are placing ever greater pressure on an environment that some would argue has already passed breaking point. And it isn’t just overcrowded developing countries that are set to suffer, though their suffering will be worst; in the UK, all the evidence suggests that we are heading towards a monsoon climate, with heavy winter rain in the north of the country, and major flooding events on a regular basis. Architects (encouraged by insurance companies) are now designing houses, for construction in this country and other Western industrialised nations, that float. Our environment is changing, now, and our ability to survive no longer depends on our ability to control that change, but to adapt to it.

The numbers are near-incomprehensible – not just on population, but on the human ecological footprint, and on a dozen other indicators of planetary health. One part of the course was a discussion on whether we should feel optimistic or pessimistic about climate change, and the challenges it presents us. The consensus from a panel of experts appeared to be “let’s be optimistic, as the science is good, our understanding of the issues is good, but we have a mountain to climb”. The scientists may say this, but looking at the upcoming climate change summit in Copenhagen this December, it’s hard not to worry about the potential for a raft of half-baked, woolly policies, frustration and failure from nation states with conflicting interests, even now, when instinctively one’s feeling is that it is now absolutely too late for economic concerns, for quibbling over whether Kyoto was the best deal for all countries, for waiting for the United States to take the lead. It’s tempting to feel thoroughly pessimistic about our prospects.

The truth is, nobody knows precisely what will happen to our climate, our planet, in the next fifty or one hundred years, and particularly the ramifications for all life. Changing technology and science, changes in international politics, conflict over resources, flooding, disease, food shortages, inequalities, notions of development, the unpredictability of environmental responses – all bets are off. Copenhagen could see binding legislation compelling countries to cut their CO2 emissions. The US may not fudge on the commitments it needs to make this December. We may also move beyond the current preoccupation with carbon emissions, and look to issues such as biodiversity and sustainable development that have been comparatively neglected.

So I promise is that I will maintain this blog, along with all of the others that have contributed to Blog Action Day, as a place for discussion, to try to keep the bigger picture in mind, to balance optimism with realism.

And I’ll try and update it more often. Sorry.

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What is carbon offsetting?

Carbon offsetting is the process of attempting to redeem the CO₂ generated by a particular activity, by paying a contribution to a project that will remove an equivalent amount of CO₂ from the atmosphere, or prevent its release.

Got that? OK. Let’s try again.

“…carbon offsetting is Enron environmentalism, a neat accounting trick that does little to stop global warming. The government should focus on transforming the way we use energy here in the UK at the same time as helping to put the growing economies of the developing world on a low carbon pathway.”
Greenpeace statement on carbon offsetting, 17 January 2007

An offset is essentially a financial instrument, measured and traded in units corresponding to one tonne of CO₂. Buy an offset, create a tonne of pollution (or visa versa). Your money funds projects to develop renewable energy, carbon sequestration (capturing and burying pollution), energy efficiency, or forestry. Theoretically, by the time you’re done, it’s as if you never polluted in the first place. In reality, assuming the project you contributed to was even fully successful, your carbon emissions may not be neutralised for years.

Proponents of offsetting see it as anything from a great way to create investment in renewable energy and energy efficiency to a panacea for developing countries. Another way of looking at carbon offsetting is that it is a license to pollute, what George Monbiot describes as “an excuse for business as usual”. When the ideal aim of reduction of CO₂ emissions costs money and takes investment, effort and changes to infrastructure and behaviour, offsetting offers a great way out by paying for these things to happen elsewhere while you continue doing what you were doing all along.

Carbon offsetting is controversial, difficult to prove, and yet the most popular way so far to mitigate climate change.

How does offsetting work?

Cough up if you cough up.

Carbon offsetting activities can be split into two main types; the large scale offset trading of companies and governments to comply with greenhouse gas emissions capping within a regulatory regime set out by the Kyoto Protocol, and the smaller scale activities of organisations, companies, governments and individuals within a voluntary regime. That means anything from nation states building wind farms to a family paying for a few trees to be planted to offset their flight to Spain.

Since the introduction of the Kyoto Protocol on February 16 2005, 183 countries have agreed to put in place efforts to reduce 5 percent of their GHG emissions between 2008 and 2012 from 1990 levels, including Europe. The UK has since undertaken to reduce carbon emissions by 34% on 1990 levels by 2020, announcing the Low Carbon Transition Plan on 15 July.

Under the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS), also introduced in 2005, companies can buy and sell carbon credits representing one tonne of carbon emissions. In exchange for a payment, a company is allowed to emit carbon, with the payment contributing to the cost of projects that defray the environmental impact of those carbon emissions. If a company has excess permits, it can sell these in an open marketplace.

The failure of the ETS

The ETS has been compromised by political and commercial meddling since its inception. Emissions caps were initially set too high, ignoring the scientifically indicated effective level, and industrial lobbying has led to a market flooded with surplus permits.

After the introduction of the ETS, industry lobbied the EU over the perceived commercial threat posed by a strict carbon trading scheme – to tourism and transport, for example. To placate industry, emissions permits were over-issued, for free or from abroad in the form of Certified Emissions Reduction (CER) credits from the Clean Development Mechanism, a system where industrialised, high-carbon nations can buy credit from developing, low-carbon nations. This flooded the permits market, commoditising permits and driving down their value to less than €1 in the early stages. An ETS carbon credit costs about €14 at the time of writing, less than half of its peak value in 2008.

With low-cost, readily available emissions permits, combined with a reduction in emissions in the last decade due to recession and off-shoring, many European companies have acquired a massive surplus of emissions permits. For example, German company Integriertes Hüttenwerk has 10.3 million surplus permits, one in ten of all surplus permits in the EU. That’s roughly the amount of emissions one person creates by flying return from London to Sydney. Two and a half million times.

European industry is likely to have 400 million tonnes worth of surplus permits in the period 2008-2012, which could be sold for over €5 billion in profits, or simply banked for future use, potentially depressing permit prices for the foreseeable future, while having no effect on emissions levels. There is no formal mechanism for clawing these surplus credits back. Companies are effectively able to continue business as usual, profit from surplus credits, and further enable other companies to pollute. High limits on the use of CER credits and further stockpiling could lead to a possible surplus of 1.6 billion permits in the ETS, which may be kept in reserve up to 2020.

Failing the environment

The environmental concerns attached to the failure of the EU ETS are numerous.

• Firstly, with the reduced value of emissions permits and overall volatility of prices, no predictable revenue stream exists to undertake large-scale sustainable energy projects or other projects aimed at reducing the impact of emissions. A lack of investment in low-carbon technologies arguably renders the ETS redundant as one of its primary aims is to fund this investment.
• Secondly, the ability of companies to purchase CER credits through the Clean Development Mechanism allows industrialised nations to purchase credit from developing countries with lower emissions, enabling them to continue to pollute by claiming the credit of low-carbon nations. It goes without saying that the effects of climate change caused by continuing carbon emissions are often felt most severely in precisely those developing countries.
• Thirdly, European companies sitting on a potential surplus of 1.6 billion tonnes of emissions permits need take no action on cutting domestic emissions, keeping surplus permits banked for sale or offsetting.
• Finally, any benefit of lower emissions levels due to decreased fossil fuel consumption as a result of decreased industrial output is cancelled out by the sustained activity of polluting companies with surplus credits, as well as their having enabled other companies – particularly power companies – to pollute with traded credit.

The next steps

The United Nations climate change conference in Copenhagen this December presents an opportunity to address the failures of the current approach to climate change, stymied by the competing concerns of the economy and the environment – as the EU ETS so clearly illustrates.

Fixing the ETS

The EU ETS could still provide a template for fledgling international emissions capping schemes, even for a global emissions market.

UK campaigning organisation Sandbag is focussed on emissions trading, specifically fixing the problem of surplus low-price EU emissions permits. Sandbag provides supporters with the means to buy and ‘retire’ (tear up) emissions permits, thus taking permits out of the system which can not then be used to pollute. Companies like Carbon Retirement also focus exclusively on buying and retiring emissions permits.

Sandbag is also campaigning to tighten emissions caps, forcing industry and governments to take the action that the ETS was originally designed to promote – to develop low-carbon energy infrastructure. These measures, along with financial incentives for permit cancellation and setting reserve permit prices, could repair the bloated and ineffective ETS.

Gold Standard organisations such as Climate Care also provide brokerage, trading and offsetting services with a focus on investment in effective, high quality projects offering sustainable development.

Protest and awareness

Campaigning organisations continue to serve an essential function by raising public consciousness to the issues around climate change, and stimulating debate.

On the day of publication of the UK government’s Low Carbon Transition Plan, the World Development Movement described it as a ‘dangerous get-out-of-jail-free card’ due to the reliance of the plan on carbon offsetting. Furthermore the WDM has initiated the ‘Big If’ campaign to protest against the construction of the new E.ON coal fired power station at Kingsnorth in Kent, inviting supporters to vote for candidates who oppose the construction of coal fired power stations, organise vigils, and ‘stand in the way’. Actor Pete Postlethwaite, supporting the campaign, told the press at the launch of environmental documentary ‘The Age of Stupid’ that the government should be dissolved if it proceeded with the construction of new coal fired power stations. Projects like the new Kingsnorth facility can only go ahead with the use of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology to sequester the huge amounts of carbon they will generate, and represent a step in the opposite direction from the development of renewable or low-carbon energy production.

Offsetting done right?

Surui land viewed with Google Earth

The Surui people of the Brazilian Amazon have been fighting a grassroots campaign with the assistance of environmental and monitoring groups, to protect their tribal lands from deforestation. They first drove settlers away in 1982 after their tribe was virtually wiped out by disease and loss of land in the wake of incursions by land speculators and loggers. The Surui have gained support from organisations who seek to promote the REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) approach to carbon capture, an approach based on the principle that forests are worth more intact than felled.

Though reforestation is a controversial approach to carbon offsetting (amongst other reasons, CO₂ capture can be difficult to guarantee), the REDD approach suggests that leaving forests intact could go some way to mitigating up to one fifth of the world’s carbon emissions, and that intact forests, if closely monitored, are an essential component of a successful low-carbon future for the world. REDD attracts funding to communities in developing countries; the Surui map their lands with laptops and a high-resolution version of Google Earth, and they have been given funding for community education and health projects, and the establishment of sustainable industries. Industrialised countries can sink money into REDD projects as a component of their current cap-and-trade activities.

REDD may be our last, best hope of saving the tropical forests.
Rhett Butler, Washington Monthly

REDD has the potential to gain more support at Copenhagen as it is shown to be more vigorously monitored, offering quantifiable benefits and development opportunities for indigenous people, and able to offer other benefits such as the preservation of biodiversity.

The future

It is vital that EU leadership (in climate change) continues. We have to invest in the future and the future is low-carbon.
Nicholas Stern (author of the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change)

UN climate chief Yvo de Boer identifies four essential points that must be agreed at Copenhagen:

1. How much are the industrialized countries willing to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases?
2. How much are major developing countries such as China and India willing to do to limit the growth of their emissions?
3. How is the help needed by developing countries to engage in reducing their emissions and adapting to the impacts of climate change going to be financed?
4. How is that money going to be managed?

Along with initiatives like REDD, clean energy development and low-carbon technology transfer to developing countries, fixing the EU ETS offers only part of the solution – and it’s worth noting that every question asked by de Boer above involves money. Idealistic ambitions to save the world will come to nothing if no one is willing to foot the bill.

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Some CO2. Bad, bad CO2. Naughty.

Lucy Siegle points out in today’s Observer that everything is going ‘carbon neutral’. Offset anything from your flight abroad to your Porsche and even your Mother’s Day flowers.

Welcome to the latest new money-spinning venture – and while we’re on the subject, damn it and why didn’t I think of getting into this sooner? – carbon offsetting.

The idea is really very simple. People want to be able to continue doing things exactly as they always have, still wish to be able to fly abroad, still wish to drive large cars five minutes to the supermarket – so why not offer to alleviate any pangs of guilt they might be experiencing by taking money from them and promising to remove their CO2 emissions? Brilliant. No work involved, bung a bit of money at the problem and away it goes.

Except it doesn’t work, at least for the most part. Siegle points out that only four companies conform to the Gold Standard for carbon credits:

• Pure
• Carbon Offsets
• Global Cool
• Equiclimate

Some carbon offsetting companies plant a tree for you somewhere in Wiltshire, and you have to assume that the tree grows to adulthood and eventually offsets all of the CO2 emissions you hoped it would. At the same time (and I speak from experience) they are quite likely to try and flog you a commemorative keyring, luggage tag and certificate – so before you know it, one short haul flight within Europe, and you have paid fifteen pounds for a bunch of tat and the promise of a carbon neutral holiday. All this, and the company has done nothing whatsoever to counteract pollution from businesses.

The companies listed above don’t even plant trees. They sponsor renewable energy initiatives in places from the UK to India and Brazil, and buy and retire credits from emissions trading programs, which in effect restricts the right of polluting companies to even pollute in the first place.

Reposted from my personal blog.

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