ARTICLES commentary on environmental issues updated first of each month

Tom Jones, OECD, PRICING WATER

Sun, 1 Apr 2012 08:57:58 -0400

Water pricing is becoming more widespread, with the dual aim of expanding supply and encouraging more responsible use.

Anything scarce and in demand commands a price; this is one of the basic principles of economics. Water is scarce in some contexts (drought, degraded quality), so water pricing is increasingly seen as an acceptable instrument of public policy. Water-use charges, pollution charges, tradable permits for water withdrawals or release of specific pollutants, and fines are all market-based approaches that can contribute to making water more accessible, healthier and more sustainable over the long term. For this reason, OECD countries are working toward the goal of “internalising” the full marginal costs (including environment costs) into decisions that affect water use and water quality.

One particular area of water policy that has become increasingly subject to pricing principles is that of public water supply and wastewater services. Efficient and effective water pricing systems provide incentives for efficient water use and for water quality protection. They also generate funds for necessary infrastructure development and expansion, and provide a good basis for ensuring that water services can be provided to all citizens at an affordable price. The metering of water consumption is a prerequisite for the application of efficient water pricing policies. About two-thirds of OECD member countries already meter more than 90% of single-family houses, although universal metering remains a controversial issue in some contexts.

Selective metering is less controversial, particularly if the public knows that new water resources are scarce, or if the metering applies to discretionary water use, like private swimming pools. Metering new homes is also more widely accepted than converting older ones.

Most of the OECD area population still lives in apartments, where metering tends to be for water supplies entering the building, rather than for individual apartments, although this is starting to change.

In terms of the structure of prices for public water services, there is a clear trend in OECD countries away from fixed charges and towards volumetric charging; in other words, the more you use, the more you pay. Even where fixed charges still exist, the policy of allowing large free allowances is decline. Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic, for example, already use pricing systems based solely on volumetric pricing, with no fixed charge element at all.

To encourage conservation, the trend in volumetric charging is also moving away from decreasing-block tariffs and towards increasing-block ones. This means that the charge increases with each additional unit of water used or wastewater treated, rather than providing discounts to high-volume users.

The pricing systems for wastewater treatment are rather more complicated than they are for water supply. This is partly because responsibility for sewerage, sewage treatment, and drainage is typically held by different bodies, each with their own principles and practices. Another complicating factor is that use of water directly from natural sources in the environment represents roughly 75% of total water consumption by the industrial sector (on average) in OECD countries.

Nevertheless, the basic charges for wastewater services are sometimes linked directly to volumes of water delivered from the public water supply system. Where this is the case, the structure of wastewater charges tends to mirror that of water supply systems.

Overall, however, industrial water consumption levels are actually not a very good proxy for industrial sewerage and sewage disposal costs, as discharges vary so much from industry to industry. Hence the trend in OECD countries towards separating industrial water use charges from wastewater charges.

In most countries, standard sewerage charges are supplemented by “special strength” charges designed to recover the costs of any extra capacity required to treat particular industrial effluents.

Industrial effluent charges can also be set by pollution content. In France, for example, a charge is levied on the eight types of pollutant deemed most dangerous and difficult to treat (heavy metals, phosphorus, soluble salts, etc.). The charge is calculated as a function of pollution produced during the period of maximum activity on a normal day. In other cases, the charging formula involved can reflect the costs of treating a particular effluent, or the environmental sensitivity of the receiving waters.

Service providers generally receive the proceeds of any industrial effluent charges. This revenue is sometimes channelled into an investment fund that can either allocate the money to water service providers, or to commission wastewater treatment investments directly.

Water charge levels have been rising in most OECD countries in recent years. One reason for this is that water quality is often getting worse as a result of over-consumption (especially where groundwater is used). Moreover, government budgets have been stretched to the limit, putting upward pressure on charges. Indeed, there is a demand for more efficient and equitable approaches than across-the-board subsidies for achieving social goals, like affordability.

There are other contributing factors, too. There may be past pollution of groundwater that necessitates more sophisticated and more expensive treatment, with a consequent need to develop more expensive demand-management or supply-based regimes. Maintaining and enhancing existing sources can also require more elaborate treatment to deal with new organic pollutants, often from non-point sources. And there may be legislative reasons, with EU directives, for instance, demanding tighter wastewater treatment standards.

As these trends are unlikely to be significantly reversed in the near future, further price increases are in the offing for most OECD countries.

Concern about the affordability of household water services for vulnerable groups, such as low-income households and retired people, has led to the development of a range of policy measures aimed at resolving affordability problems, while still meeting economic and environmental goals. In general, policies that target specific vulnerable groups – such as through income-related support – have been found to be more efficient at achieving all three objectives than across-the-board subsidies.

As regards “non-public” water services, about half of OECD countries levy some form of general charge on water abstracted outside the public system. In some countries, this charge has an explicit environmental objective, so the proceeds are allocated to an environmental fund. The Netherlands, for example, has two abstraction charges: one levied by the provinces for groundwater protection; and the other levied by the state within the general taxation regime.

For various reasons, some industries are finding that it is more efficient to avoid using the public treatment system to dispose of their effluents, and are developing their own self-treatment and re-use facilities.

General discharge controls are also often imposed on direct wastewater discharges that do not go through public sewers. The proceeds of these charges always go to the government, since there is no service provider involved. For example, a permit is usually required for discharging directly back into a river or aquifer. Some countries reduce these charges on the basis of environmental criteria. For example, there is a 75% reduction in the basic charge in Germany if the environmental standards envisaged by current regulations (expressed as “best available technique”) are maintained.

Subsidy conundrum

While pricing structures for municipal and industrial water services increasingly reflect the full costs of providing the services, agricultural water use – primarily for irrigation – remains heavily subsidised, which encourages inefficient use of often scarce resources. Recent OECD reports indicate that industrial and household water users often pay more than 100 times as much as agricultural users, although comparisons of this type are difficult because of the differing water quality needs and conveyance standards of different users. Nevertheless, it is clear that water prices are significantly lower for agriculture than for other user sectors in most OECD countries.

OECD countries are working towards more complete recovery of infrastructure and operating costs from users, although rather slowly. Greater transparency, including in the level of implicit subsidies provided through undercharging for infrastructure use, could help build public support for further reforms.

Tom Jones is with the Environment Directorate, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

Reprint of article © OECD Observer, No. 236, March 2003
http://www.oecdobserver.org/news/fullstory.php/aid/939/Pricing_water.html

References:

OECD (1999). The Price of Water: Trends in OECD Countries.

OECD (2003). Social Issues in the Provision and Pricing of Water Services.

OECD-IWA (2001). Water Management and Investment in the New Independent States.

Note: Pricing outside the OECD

Recent OECD work has also examined water pricing policies in the countries of eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia (EECCA), and in China. Unlike most OECD countries, many of these countries face serious financial deficits in the water sector. This results in underfunding of necessary maintenance and expansion of water and wastewater treatment infrastructure. In the EECCA countries, the extensive water infrastructure left from the Soviet period is deteriorating, resulting in reduced service quality and increased health and environmental risks. These countries face significant problems in even maintaining existing infrastructure, let alone expanding it.

irish environment Editor’s Note:

See also the © OECD (2012), Water Quality and Agriculture:
Meeting the Policy Challenge, OECD Studies on Water, OECD Publishing. http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264168060-en
(12 March 2012).

Joe Romm, Joe Nocera Is Still Wrong and ‘Very Unfair’ About the Keystone XL Tar Sands Pipeline. McKibben, Hansen and I Explain Why.

Thu, 1 Mar 2012 11:27:52 -0500

[Editor’s Note: Below is a Blog posted by Joe Romm on an ongoing debate with Joe Nocera, a New York Times business columnist, with Bill Mckibben and Jim Hansen joining with Romm in disputing Nocera. The debate focuses on the Keystone XL pipeline that is proposed to carry oil from tar sands extraction to the lower United States. This debate is over hard-to-get-and-especially-risky-GHG-emitting fossil fuels and fracking, now being considered on the island of Ireland, falls within this category. For a primer on gas from fracking and oil from tar sands and some connections between the two, see Jon Flatley, “Fracking and Tar Sands,” http://ezinearticles.com/?Fracking-and-Tar-Sands&id=6864316]

We must leave the overwhelming majority of unconventional fossil fuels in the ground to avoid catastrophic warming, but [New York Times writer] Nocera wants to open every spigot.

Significantly exceeding 450 ppm risks several severe and irreversible warming impacts. Hitting 800 to 1,000+ ppm — which is our current emissions path and the inevitable outcome of aggressively exploiting unconventional fuels like the tar sands as Nocera advocates — represents the near-certain destruction of modern civilization as we know it as the recent scientific literature makes chillingly clear.

NY Times business columnist Joe Nocera responded to my post “Joe Nocera Joins the Climate Ignorati.” He also interviewed Bill McKibben for his new column, “The Politics of Keystone, Take 2.” But he is still very wrong, and he didn’t represent McKibben’s position well at all. Nocera’s new arguments are more elaborate. Since you see them a lot from centrist economist types, I will respond in some detail – with the help of McKibben, who explains here what he was trying to explain to Nocera and why Nocera’s final paragraph is “very unfair.”

I’ll also show that Nocera holds the environmental costs of the pipeline up to a considerably different standard of analysis than he does his hand-waving assertions of the supposedly vastly larger non-environmental benefits of Keystone. A leading expert on life-cycle greenhouse gas analyses of the tar sands responds to Nocera’s lowball estimate.

Nocera goes astray almost immediately: “Here’s the question on the table today: Can a person support the Keystone XL oil pipeline and still believe that global warming poses a serious threat? To my mind, the answer is yes.”

I know what you’re thinking. Since when does Nocera “believe that global warming poses a serious threat”?

If Nocera really believes global warming poses a serious threat, you’d think he’d write about it regularly. But his first Keystone article never mentioned warming and dismissed all environmental concerns. Nocera wrote a long piece on the Chevy Volt last year and never mentioned warming or CO2 at all.

If you google his name and “global warming,” you’ll find 2008′s “At Exxon’s Can’t-Miss Meeting,” in which he touts the widely debunked nonsense peddled by physicist Freeman Dyson and dismisses knowledgeable people who express science-based views as trying to “push Exxon Mobil toward their belief system — their global warming religion.”

Needless to say, folks who “believe that global warming poses a serious threat” do not generally use the phrase “global warming religion.” That was a key reason I called him a member of the climate ignorati. The science says that global warming is an existential threat (see Lonnie Thompson on why climatologists are speaking out: “Virtually all of us are now convinced that global warming poses a clear and present danger to civilization” and literature review here).

Heck, the International Energy Agency, a staid and conservative group of economists and the like where Nocera should feel at home, says the world is on pace for 11°F warming and “Even School Children Know This Will Have Catastrophic Implications for All of Us”

So Nocera lacks any “street cred” to either pose or answer the “question on the table today,” as he has never shown any indication that he believes global warming poses a serious threat — and indeed he has written in the past as if he does not. In his first Keystone piece last week he wrote: “Along with the natural gas that can now be extracted thanks to hydraulic fracturing — which, of course, all right-thinking environmentalists also oppose — the oil from the Canadian tar sands ought to be viewed as a great gift that has been handed to North America. These two relatively new sources of fossil fuels offer America its first real chance in decades to become, if not energy self-sufficient, at least energy secure, no longer beholden to OPEC.”

Now that doesn’t sound much like a climate realist. Apparently Nocera wants us to think he is concerned about the global warming threat while simultaneously embracing full exploitation of unconventional oil and gas. The analysis by James Hansen (and others) makes clear that those two views are in fact incompatible. [See also Bombshell Study: High Methane Emissions Measured Over Gas Field “May Offset Climate Benefits of Natural Gas.]

That’s a key reason why all the folks best known for worrying about the threat posed by global warming oppose the pipeline.

Let’s dive into the piece itself.

Nocera’s piece continues: “The crude oil from the tar sands of Alberta, which the pipeline would transport to American refineries on the Gulf Coast, simply will not bring about global warming apocalypse. The seemingly inexorable rise in greenhouse gas emissions is the result of deeply ingrained human habits, which will not change if the pipeline is ultimately blocked. The benefits of the oil we stand to get from Canada, via Keystone, far outweigh the environmental risks.”

Talk about moving the goal posts and misstating the problem and handwaving. First off, no individual pool of carbon can “bring about global warming apocalypse” by itself. But in combination with the conventional coal, oil, and gas we are burning unconstrained — a policy Nocera appears to endorse wholeheartedly — then, yes, the tar sands will be a clear contributor to impacts that deserve the label apocalyptic. Nocera would know that if he bothered to talk to real climate scientists like Hansen.

Blocking the tar sands isn’t about changing “human habits” — it’s about blocking access to a vast pool of carbon that needs to be left in the ground. Obviously if you frame all efforts to stop catastrophic climate change as attempting to change “deeply ingrained human habits” then you can hand wave all action away.

And speaking of handwaving, Nocera never actually quantifies the supposed “benefits of the oil we stand to get from Canada.” That’s probably because such quantification is difficult if not impossible, since those benefits are minimal.

In fact, Nocera simply asserts that tar sands oil and shale gas gives us a chance to become “no longer beholden to OPEC.” But that may be the sloppiest statement Nocera has written on this subject. He knows that the price of oil is set on an international market. The Keystone XL pipeline would carry up to 900,000 barrels of oil a day. That’s a little over 1% of global supply (and 4% of U.S. supply, assuming we got it all, which we won’t) – it will have no significant impact on the price of oil or OPEC’s ability to control price (neither will shale gas). Now, if Nocera is really proposing a vast expansion of tar sands oil significant enough to be even, say, 10% of global oil supply, well, then that would be precisely what opponents of the pipeline have been arguing — that it opens the door to levels of tar sands exploitation that would in fact make a major contributor to climate catastrophe.

Nocera continues: “When I tried to make that case on Tuesday, however, I was cast as a global warming ‘denier.’ Joe Romm, who edits the Climate Progress blog, said that I had joined ‘the climate ignorati.’ Robert Redford — yes, that Robert Redford — denounced my column in The Huffington Post. ‘Let’s put the rhetoric aside, and simply focus on the facts,’ he wrote.”

NOTE TO NOCERA: Calling you part of the climate ignorati does not mean I am casting you as a “global warming ‘denier’.” I reserve that term for people who spread long-debunked disinformation knowingly and/or as part of the broader anti-science disinformation campaign. The ignorati are, as Google quickly reveals, “Elites who, despite their power, wealth, or influence, are prone to making serious errors when discussing science and other technical matters.”

Actually, Nocera didn’t try to make that case. He never detailed the supposed benefits of the pipeline, and he called concerns about environmental risks posed by expansion of the tar sands “ludicrous.”

Nocera continues: “Yes, let’s. In particular, let’s focus on two issues that have become the cornerstone of the opposition to Keystone. The first is that the crude from the tar sands is, in Redford’s words, ‘the dirtiest oil on the planet’ — so dirty, in fact, that it will dramatically increase greenhouse gas emissions and greatly exacerbate the growing threat of global warming. There is no question that oil from the tar sands will increase greenhouse gases. But by how much? According to a study by IHS Cera, a leading energy research firm, the oil from the tar sands emits only 6 percent more greenhouse gases than other, lighter forms of oil. (Environmental groups have tried to poke holes in the study, but even they don’t come up with the kind of increase that would doom the planet.)”

No and no.

First, the IHS Cera analysis isn’t transparent, and therefore it isn’t very useful. It isn’t just enviros who have issues with it. I interviewed one of the country’s foremost authorities on comparative lifecycle GHG analyses of the tar sands, Adam Brandt. He is in Stanford’s Department of Energy Resources Engineering, and author of the December 2011 study, “Variability and Uncertainty in Life Cycle Assessment Models for Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Canadian Oil Sands Production.”

I asked him why IHS Cera was on the low side of most other analyses and what he thought was the best range to use. He said, “I am not sure of exactly what CERA did in their study” and “I have a hard time commenting on numbers that CERA derives, because I can’t see what they did.” He says: “There is a lot of variability depending on the oil sands project in question. I think a reasonable range for the existing oil sands projects is a 5%-30% increase over the California baseline value. When speaking to reporters, I cite a baseline industry-average increase of 10-15% compared to the California baseline.”

Second, again, to avoid catastrophic global warming we need to leave the majority of hydrocarbons in the ground — and the overwhelming majority of unconventional fossil fuels in the ground. The tar sands is at the top of the list of unconventional fossil fuels that need to be left in the ground, particularly if you’re talking the kind of exploitation needed to actually have any impact whatsoever on U.S. energy security — see Hansen slams Keystone XL Pipeline: “Exploitation of tar sands would make it implausible to stabilize climate and avoid disastrous global climate impacts.”

X-axis is the range of potential resource in billions of barrels. Y-axis is grams of Carbon per MegaJoule of final fuel.

Nocera continues: “What’s more, there is plenty of oil being produced today with the same greenhouse gas consequences as the oil from the tar sands. As Michael Levi, an energy expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, says, ‘The argument you hear is that because it increases greenhouse gas emissions, we shouldn’t tolerate it. Well, so do the lights in my house. You have to be discriminating’.”

Seriously.

That may be the lamest analogy in the history of energy and climate. Nocera is actually analogizing the GHG emissions increase from 900,000 barrels a day of dirty tar sands oil with flicking on the lights in your house! And remember, Nocera wants a lot more oil than that.

How bad is this analogy? Many people choose to get their electricity from renewable sources — so for them turning on the lights don’t even increase GHGs. The point is people don’t have any choice about the dirty tar sands oil — but Obama does.

Nocera continues: “The second argument is that the tar sands oil won’t help the United States because it is all headed for export. This is perhaps the silliest argument of all. Right now, most of the big refineries on the Gulf Coast export around 20 percent of their refined product. Why? Because every barrel of crude oil is converted partly to diesel and partly to gasoline — and the rest of the world is far more reliant on diesel fuel than we are. The gasoline remains in the United States. Keystone wouldn’t change that equation one bit. Normally, one wouldn’t have to point out that exporting high-value products is good for the country. But, of course, improving our trade balance is irrelevant when you’re facing the apocalypse.”

Actually, it isn’t a silly argument because Nocera titled his piece “The Politics of Keystone.” Exporting this oil is a political killer. But in any case, Nocera is willing to hand wave away all the environmental arguments because Keystone would enrich U.S. refiners?

He continues: “You want to know another little secret about the tar sands? It’s already coming here, thanks to existing pipelines — and it is already doing us a great deal of good. The influx of Canadian oil is partly why our imports from OPEC are at their lowest level in nearly a decade. And because the crude from Canada is selling at a steep discount to Saudi Arabian crude, it is stabilizing the price at the pump.”

Another handwaving argument. Let’s see if Nocera can find a study that says 900,000 barrels of tar sand oil will lower US oil prices over the long term. Good luck.

Consider an analogous case, the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s 2009 report, “Impact of Limitations on Access to Oil and Natural Gas Resources in the Federal Outer Continental Shelf.” The EIA analyzed the difference between restrictions to offshore drilling and full offshore drilling, which means about half a million barrels of oil a day more in U.S. oil production in the 2020s and beyond. In 2030, US gasoline prices would be three cents a gallon lower. Woohoo!

Noticera continues: “Somewhat to my surprise, the most reasoned Keystone opponent I spoke to this week was Bill McKibben, who led the protests against it. Although the tar sands ranks as ‘the second biggest pool of carbon in the world,’ he told me, ‘Keystone, by itself, won’t make or break the environment’. Rather, he said, he and other environmentalists had decided to draw this particular line in the sand because stopping Keystone would help accelerate what he described as the difficult transition from a fossil fuel economy to a new, brighter world based on renewable sources of energy. ‘The most sensible way to go about dealing with global warming is one pipeline at a time,’ he said. ‘These kinds of fights are extremely important because they are the way the message gets out that we need to change’.”

You won’t be surprised to learn this isn’t what McKibben was saying. McKibben writes me: “What I said, in fact, was ‘the most sensible way to go about dealing with global warming is not one pipeline at a time.’ And of course that’s true–it would make the most sense to have a real policy that put a stiff price on carbon. But since that’s not happening at the moment, despite our best efforts, we’re in a constant fight to try and keep carbon in the ground wherever we can. The tar sands are key for the reason we’ve said from the start: there’s so much carbon in there that if you tap it heavily it’s ‘game over for the climate’ no matter what else you do. The other thing that I talked with him about but failed to get across was that the biggest danger was not the extra carbon in tar sands oil but the sheer scale of the new deposit they’re now opening up. He seems to have dropped his earlier insistence that they’d get it to Asia somehow anyway: I think he heard from people about the opposition to the Gateway pipeline. He’s taking what I think he conceives of as a ‘realist’ stance, from someone immersed in the world of business and diplomacy. What I tried and failed to explain to him is that there’s a deeper kind of realism that comes from physics and chemistry, a kind of realphysics that will trump realpolitik.”

Nocera ends his piece: “Maybe — just maybe — stopping the Keystone pipeline would be worth it if it really was going to change our behavior and help usher in the age of renewable energy. It would, indeed, be worth turning our backs on oil that we badly need and that is already making our country more secure and prosperous. But let’s be honest. It’s not going to change anyone’s behavior. If Keystone is ultimately blocked, the far more likely result is that everyone who opposed it will get to feel good about themselves while still commuting to work, alone, in their S.U.V.’s.”

Again, it’s clever but specious to turn this into an issue about changing our behavior. We need to leave most of the fossil fuels in the ground and that should start with the tar sands.

McKibben writes: “The last paragraph is very unfair. ‘Everyone’ opposed to keystone is not commuting to work alone in their SUV; the people I’ve met in the course of this fight are the most spirited, engaged, sincere and lovely bunch of people I can imagine. But you know, you could add one more thing from me please: ‘Nocera at least heard the criticism of his column and circled back for another look. He didn’t reverse what he said, but he did soften his tone. And that’s good. This is complicated stuff if you’re new to it, the power of the status quo is strong, and over time our leading journalists are starting to figure it out. It wouldn’t surprise me if eventually he ended up where the New York Times editorial page arrived many months ago: understanding that Keystone really was an important part of the fight for a working planet’.”

Hear! Hear!

Posted by Joe Romm on think progress on Feb 13, 2012 at 12:27 pm
http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2012/02/13/423525/joe-nocera-wrong-unfair-keystone-xl-tar-sands-pipeline-mckibben-hansen-explain-why/

Editorial Note:

The opinion pieces by Joe Nocera in The New York Times can be found at:

Joe Nocera, “Poisoned Politics of Keystone XL” The New York Times, February 6, 2012.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/07/opinion/nocera-the-poisoned-politics-of-keystone-xl.html?_r=1&scp=3&sq=Nocera%20Keystone&st=cse

Joe Nocera, “The Politics of Keystone, Take 2,” The New York Times, February 10, 2012
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/11/opinion/nocera-the-politics-of-keystone-take-2.html?scp=1&sq=Nocera%20Keystone&st=cse

For more on the debate, see:

George Hoberg, “The Three Logics of Climate Politics” Posted on February 13, 2012
http://greenpolicyprof.org/wordpress/?p=790

Bryan Walsh, “Pipeline Politics: Keystone, Advocates and Analysts,” Posted February 15, 2012
http://ecocentric.blogs.time.com/2012/02/15/pipeline-politics-keystone-advocates-and-analysts/

For another blog post on the relation between fracking for shale gas and extracting oil from tar sands, see “The Hidden Cost of Canada’s Oil Sands,” The Harbinger: Green Culture & Politics in New Brunswick
http://nbharbinger.wordpress.com/2011/09/05/fracking-and-the-tar-sands/

“EU tar sands pollution vote ends in deadlock,” The Guardian, February 23, 2012 http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/feb/23/eu-tar-sands-pollution-vote?INTCMP=SRCH

James E. Hansen, The White House And Tar Sands

Wed, 1 Feb 2012 15:36:46 -0500

Tar Sands Action organized a civil disobedience sit–in at The White House to oppose construction of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline that began on August 20 and will culminate in a big rally on September 3rd. On August 29 I joined 60 religious leaders
and other fellow protestors. I was arrested that day.

But before I was handcuffed, I addressed fellow activists who had gathered outside The White House with these words:

Let us return for a moment to the election night in 2008. As I sat in our farmhouse in Pennsylvania, watching Barack Obama's victory speech, I turned my head aside so my wife would not see the tears in my eyes. I suspect that millions cried. It was a great day for America.

We had great hopes for Barack Obama — perhaps our dreams were unrealistic — he is only human. But it is appropriate, it is right, in a period honoring Martin Luther King, to recall the hopes and dreams of that evening.

We had a dream — that the new President would understand the intergenerational injustice of human–made climate change — that he would recognize our duty to be caretakers of creation, of the land, of the life on our planet — and that he would give these matters the priority that our young people deserve.

We had a dream — that the President would understand the commonality of solutions for energy security, national security and climate stability — and that he would exercise hands–on leadership, taking the matter to the public, avoiding backroom crippling deals with special interests.

We had a dream — that the President would stand as firm as Abraham Lincoln when he faced the great moral issue of slavery — and, like Franklin Roosevelt or Winston Churchill, he would speak with the public, enlisting their support and reassuring them.

Perhaps our dreams were unrealistic. It is not easy to find an Abraham Lincoln or a Winston Churchill. But we will not give up. There can be no law or regulation that stops us from acting on our dreams.

Tar Sands and Unconventional Fossil Fuels
In a previous post “Silence Is Deadly” I wrote, “The environmental impacts of tar sands development include: irreversible effects on biodiversity and the natural environment, reduced water quality, destruction of fragile pristine Boreal forest and associated wetlands, aquatic and watershed mismanagement, habitat fragmentation,
habitat loss, disruption to life cycles of endemic wildlife particularly bird and caribou migration, fish deformities and negative impacts on the human health in downstream communities.”

Figure 1: Total conventional fossil fuel emissions (purple) and 50% of unconventional resources (blue).

Now, I’ll illustrate the emissions scenario from potential burning of tar sands oil and other unconventional fossil fuels (UFF) as contrasted with conventional fossil fuels (oil, gas, and coal). Figure 1 helps make clear why the tar sands and other unconventional fossil fuels ought not to be developed and burned. The purple bars show the total emissions to date from the conventional fossil fuels. These past emissions, plus a smaller contribution from net deforestation, are the cause of the CO2 increase from 280 to 391 ppm — where we are today. I wrote before, “Easily available reserves of conventional oil and gas are enough to take atmospheric CO2 well above 400 ppm, which is unsafe for life on earth.”

The blue bar is 50% of known UFF resources. Supporters of UFF development argue that only 15% of the tar sands resource is economically extractable, thus we may exaggerate their threat. On the contrary, Figure 1 is a conservative estimate of potential emissions from tar sands because: the economically extractable amount grows with technology development and oil price; the total tar sands resource is larger than the known resource, possibly much larger; extraction of tar sands oil uses conventional oil and gas, which will show up as additions to the purple bars in Figure 1; development of tar sands will destroy overlying forest and prairie ecology, emitting
biospheric CO2 to the atmosphere.

We show in “The Case for Young People” that it is probably feasible to avoid dangerous climate tipping points, but only if conventional fossil fuel emissions are phased down rapidly and UFFs are left in the ground. If governments allow infrastructure for UFFs to be developed, either they don't “get it” or they simply don’t
care about the future of young people.

Preserving creation for future generations is a moral issue as monumental as ending slavery in the 19th century or fighting Nazism in the 20th century.

Citizen's Arrest on Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama?
George Bush confessed our addiction to oil. Taking tar sands oil amounts to borrowing a dirty needle from a neighbor addict. Fortunately, Congress adopted and Bush approved the Energy Independence and Security Act 2007, which was intended
to prevent US agencies from buying alternative fuels that generate more pollution in their life cycle than conventional fuel from customary petroleum sources. Tar sands oil not only exceeds conventional petroleum, but the energy used in mining, processing, and transporting tar sands oil makes it slightly worse — in terms of CO2 produced per unit energy — than coal.

Who would drive a car powered by coal!?

This raises a question: if the Keystone XL pipeline is approved, can we make a citizen's arrest on Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for violating the Energy Independence and Security Act? If they were put in the back of a hot paddy wagon in DC and held for at least several hours with their hands tied behind their backs, maybe they would have a chance to think over this matter more clearly.

Real Solution
Let's address a common criticism: “It does no good to stop the Keystone XL pipeline, because other pipelines will be built.” Indeed, pipeline opposition and other stopgap actions (closing a coal–fired power plant, etc.) have little ultimate effect unless we put in place the real solution.

Let me address the following points that would lead to the real solution:

a. 'Law of gravity': as long as fossil fuels are cheapest, someone will burn them.
b. Fossil fuels are cheapest because: direct/indirect subsidies; human health costs not paid by fossil fuel companies; and climate disruption costs not paid by fossil fuel companies.
c. Only workable solution: rising across–the–board flat fee on carbon, collected from fossil companies at point where fossil fuel enters domestic market (domestic mine or port of entry).
d. Larson rate — $10/ton of CO2/year — at year 10 yields 30% reduction in US emissions.
e. 30% of US emissions is ~ 13 Keystone XL pipelines!!!

By year 10 the Larson fee is equivalent to $1/gallon of gasoline. The public will not allow this to happen unless 100% of the collected fee is distributed to the public, which could be done electronically to bank accounts or debit cards. By year 10 the fee collected from fossil fuel companies would be over $500 billion per year, providing $2–3,000 per legal adult resident of the country.

Jim Dipeso, Policy Director of Republicans for the Environment, endorses this approach, saying that it “makes use of market principles, by prodding the market to tell the truth about the costs of carbon–based energy through prices. It would not impose mandates on consumers or businesses, create new government agencies, or
add a penny to Uncle Sam's coffers.”

Further: “Businesses would seek out more opportunities to improve their energy efficiency. Other businesses would sell products and services that enable them to do so. Low carbon energy sources would be more competitive with high–carbon sources.”

Finally: “Transparent. Market–based. Does not enlarge government. Leaves energy decisions to individual choices. Takes a better–safe–than–sorry approach to throttling back oil dependence and keeping heat–trapping gases out of the atmosphere. Sounds like a conservative climate plan.”

How could this be achieved, given our well–oiled coal–fired Congress? Not easily.

Obama had the chance when he was elected. He would have needed to explain to the public that national security, energy security and climate security all yield the same requirement: an honest price on carbon emissions that provides market–based incentives for moving to clean energies.

Obama lost his chance for a spot on Mount Rushmore by not addressing the moral issue of the century. He would have needed Teddy Roosevelt's drive and Franklin Roosevelt's ability to speak to the public. A second chance if re–elected? It would be much harder, even if characters like Inhofe are smoked out by then. And it cannot be done with a sleight–of–hand approach, pretending there will be little impact on fossil fuel prices as in the proposed cap–and trade, or with government picking winners as in the would–be “green jobs” program.

The energy/climate matter will be addressed eventually. But will it be in time and which country will lead? There is an incentive to be the first to put an honest price on carbon: future global technologic and economic leadership. Europe squandered its resources on government specified inefficient technologies. If the United States
continues on its current path, and if China seizes the opportunity to be the leader by putting an honest price on carbon, it will probably mean second–rate economic status for the United States for most of this century.

If President Obama chooses the dirty needle (approves the Keystone XL pipeline) it is game over (for the earth's climate) because it will confirm that Obama was just greenwashing, like the other well–oiled coal–fired politicians with no real intention of solving the addiction (of fossil fuels). Canada is going to sell its dope (dirty tar sands oil), if it can find a buyer. So if the United States is buying the dirtiest stuff, it also surely will be going after oil in the deepest ocean, the Arctic, and shale deposits; and harvesting coal via mountaintop removal and long–wall mining. Obama will have decided he is a hopeless addict.

Have no doubt — if the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline is approved, we will be back, and our numbers will grow. For the sake of our children and grandchildren, we must find a leader who is worthy of our dreams.

©2011. James E. Hansen

Dr. James E. Hansen is director of NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City and adjunct professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental

The article was first published on www.climatestorytellers.org, the website founded by Subhankar Banerjee, an Indian-born American photographer, writer, environmental educator, and activist, and the article is reprinted with Subhankar’s kind permission. www,climatestorytellers.org

Editorial Note:

For an argument similar to Hansen’s that “Preserving creation for future generations is a moral issue as monumental as ending slavery in the 19th century or fighting Nazism in the 20th century,” see Damian Carrington’s Environment Blog in the Guardian (January 4, 2012) where he reports on “Future generations risk 'enslavement' without a vote now: intergenerational justice.” Rupert Read, a philosopher at the University of East Anglia, in a report called Guardians of the Future for the think tank Green House proposes an idea that is both radical and straightforward: a council of "Guardians of Future Generations", chosen like a jury from the general public, would sit above the existing law-making bodies and have two core powers. A power to veto legislation that threatened the basic needs and interests of future people and the power to force a review, following suitable public petition, of any existing legislation that threatens the interests of future people.

See also the idea that we do not inherit this earth from our ancestors, but we borrow it from our children. The sentiment is usually attributed to the American Indian Chief Seattle .

Finally, the concept has been raised by the United Nation’s Environment Program (UNEP) in a recently issued “Common Statement.” The Statement reflects various issues that the UN agencies believe need to be addressed at the Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD), better known as Rio+20, in June 2012. In the “Common Statement,” the UNEP calls for more inter-generational equity even urging creation of “a special arrangement for oversight of and advice on equity as an outcome of the development process, including for future generations, such as an independent special rapporteur for equity...”. http://www.unep.org/

Sunita Narain, Equity: the next frontier in climate talks

Mon, 2 Jan 2012 12:37:07 -0500

In 1992, when the world met to discuss an agreement on climate change, equity was a simple concept: sharing the global commons—the atmosphere in this case—equally among all. It did not provoke much anxiety, for there were no real claimants. However, this does not mean the concept was readily accepted. A small group of industrialised countries had burnt fossil fuels for 100 years and built up enormous wealth. This club had to decide what to do to cut emissions, and it claimed all countries were equally responsible for the problem. In 1991, just as the climate convention was being finalised, a report, released by an influential Washington think tank, broke the news that its analysis showed India, China and other developing countries were equally responsible for greenhouse gases. Anil Agarwal and I rebutted this and brought in the issue of equitable access to the global commons. We also showed, beyond doubt, that the industrialised countries were singularly responsible for the increased greenhouse gases.

In 1992, it was accepted that the occupied atmospheric space would need to be vacated to make room for the emerging world to grow because emissions are an outcome of economic growth. This acceptance recognised the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities in reducing emissions. A firewall was built to separate those countries that had to reduce emissions to make space for the rest of the world to grow. That year in Rio de Janeiro, the world was talking about drastic cuts of 20 per cent below the 1990 levels to provide for growth as well as climate security. Even in that age of innocence, the negotiations were difficult and nasty. The US argued its lifestyle was non-negotiable and refused to accept any agreement specifying deep reductions. In 1998, the Kyoto Protocol set the first legal target for these countries much below what the world knew it needed to do.

Two decades later, the idea of equity has become an even more inconvenient truth. By now there are more claimants for atmospheric space. Emerging countries have emerged. China, which in 1990, with over a quarter of the world’s population, was responsible for only 10 per cent of annual emissions, contributed 27 per cent by 2010. So, the fight over atmospheric space is now real. While the rich countries have not reduced emissions, the new growth countries have started emitting more. In 1990, the industrialised countries accounted for 70 per cent of the global annual emissions. In 2010, they accounted for 43 per cent but this is not because they have vacated space. The new growth countries—China in particular—have only occupied what was available. Emission reductions proposed 20 years ago have still not been committed or adhered to. In fact, in most already industrialised countries emissions have either stabilised or increased. In coal and extractive economies, like Canada and Australia, emissions have risen by 20 per cent and 46 per cent respectively.

The world has run out of atmospheric space and certainly of time. Will the rich, who contributed to emissions in the past and still take up an unfair share of this space based on their populations, reduce emissions? Or will the emerging countries be told to take over the burden? This is the big question, and an inconvenient one at that.

And mind you climate change is not the problem of the present but past contributions. The stock of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has a long life. This means that any discussion on how the carbon cake will be divided, must take into account those gases emitted in the past and still present. So while China accounts for 27 per cent of the annual emissions, in cumulative terms (since 1950) it still accounts for only 11 per cent. Similarly, India contributes 6 per cent to the annual global emissions, but is only responsible for 3 per cent of the stock. The rich countries, with less than a quarter of the world’s population, are responsible for some 70 per cent of this historical burden. This stock of gases is responsible for an average global temperature rise of 0.8°C and another 0.8°C in future, which is inevitable. To keep temperature rise below 2°C, the world needs to cut emissions by 50-80 per cent below the 2000 levels by 2050. Now equity is no longer a moral idea, but a tough challenge. It is for this reason that global climate negotiations reached their nadir in Durban. It is for this reason that the US and its coalition are hell bent on erasing any mention of historical emissions from all texts. It is for this reason that the rich world is pointing to the emission growth in China and India, and dismissing their need for development as their obdurate right to pollute.

It is also an idea that is difficult to sell in a world distrustful of idealism and any talk of distributive justice. Even climate change negotiators do not really believe this form of climate-socialism can happen. They will tell you that the world is never going to give up space, that the world is too mean to give money or technology to poor nations for transition to low-carbon growth.

But this is because they forget that climate change is the market’s biggest failure. We cannot use the market for its repair. To avoid catastrophic changes it is essential to reach a collaborative agreement, which will be effective. And cooperation is not possible without fairness and equity. This is the pre-requisite. Take it because we must.

* * *

Sunita Narain is a writer and environmentalist, the director general of the Centre for Science and Environment, the director of the Society for Environmental Communications, and publisher of the fortnightly magazine, Down To Earth, all in India. In 2005 she was awarded the Padma Shri, the fourth highest civilian award in the Republic of India, she has received the World Water Prize for work on rainwater, she is a member of the Prime Minister’s Council for Climate Change, and a member of the National Ganga River Basin Authority, chaired by the Prime Minister, set up to implement strategies for cleaning the river.

The article was first printed in Down To Earth (December 2011).
www.downtoearth.org.in

EEA, Policies and measures to promote sustainable water use

Thu, 1 Dec 2011 07:47:46 -0500

Most countries have water resource management plans that address both supply and demand.

In EU, the Water Framework Directive (2000/60/EC) is based on the idea that modern water management needs to take account of ecological, economic (including pricing) and social functions throughout the entire river basin.

Water pricing is one of the measures used to reduce water demand. The Water Framework Directive requires EU Member States to ensure that by 2010 the proportion of the cost of water services – such as pumping, weirs, dams, channels, supply systems – with a negative impact on the environment – must be paid by the users (e.g. agriculture, hydropower, households, navigation). Member States are required to split the costs according to the ‘polluter-pays’ principle in order to reduce the impact on the environment and promote economic instruments to tackle the decline of natural resources. If Member States fail to include other infrastructures than drinking water supply and wastewater treatment in their economic analyses, there is a major risk that such infrastructures already identified as creating major environmental problems will be exempt. Consequently, the economic burden of water bodies reaching ‘good status’ by 2015 will remain with citizens, who already pay high prices for water services.

There has been a general trend towards higher water prices in real terms throughout Europe over the past 20 years, and wide variations in water charges exist both within individual countries and between different countries in Europe. This is due to the wide range of factors that determine local water prices and the level of recovery costs.

In several countries, increased water prices decreased household water use significantly (see figure below). In many eastern European countries, water prices were heavily subsidised until 1990. After 1990, there was a marked increase in prices in these countries during their transition to market-economies, resulting in lower water use. In Estonia, for example, water prices increased markedly after subsidies were removed, which in conjunction with water measuring and application of more advanced sanitation devices, led to a more than 50 % reduction in water use in the last 15 years (Figure WAT_PRICE_b).

WAT_PRICE: Effect of water price on household use in A) Denmark 1985-2004 and B) Estonia 1990-2004

Source: A) DEPA 2004 updated by EEA and B) Estonian Environment Information Centre, 2006

Measuring water use is a prerequisite for water prices reducing consumption. Households with water meters installed generally use less water than households without meters. In Europe, household and industrial water metering continues to increase. Many of the NWE countries already meter the majority of water uses. However, in many countries and in relation to agriculture water use metering is still limited.

When addressing water charges, focus should also be placed on households and agriculture that have difficulties with paying for water for essential purposes (since it is generally recognised that no one should have to compromise personal hygiene and health). The Water Framework Directive requires an affordable price to guarantee a basic level of domestic water supply (Article 12a).

Over the past 10 years there has been a marked increase in the amount of information provided to consumers (e.g. water-efficiency labels for households’ appliances, information on efficient lawn watering and gardening practices, etc.) and agriculture. Many countries, NGOs, large municipalities, water companies and international organisations have dedicated home pages to water conservation and water use behaviour.

Re-published with permission from European Environment Agency

Jim Morris, The Pennsylvania Experience With Methane Extraction, or Fracking

Tue, 1 Nov 2011 14:36:28 -0400

By population, Pennsylvania is the six largest state in the U.S.A. By area, it actually ranks only thirty-third. However, it contains some of the largest known deposits of methane and coal in the world, as well as significant amounts of oil – indeed, the U.S. oil industry began in Titusville, Pennsylvania. There is thus a significant prior history of mineral extraction in Pennsylvania and the current state of regulation respecting methane extraction in Pennsylvania is not properly understood without making one’s self at least superficially aware of that history as it respects methane. I will first describe briefly the current state of methane extraction in Pennsylvania, the process for issuing permits to authorize it and then consider the history of other methane generating activities that also have occurred in Pennsylvania.

Fracking

Fracking (or “hydrofracking”) is the deliberate inducing of an underground detonation in a methane bearing formation from which methane cannot otherwise be extracted. It consists in the high-pressure injection of massive amounts of water, sand and undisclosed chemicals into production wells. The effect of the injection is to shatter the methane bearing rock strata, which releases the methane for commercial recovery through pumping the same well. The pumping liquid, highly toxic, is returned to the surface as part of the recovery process. While Pennsylvania has highly articulated and longstanding programs for regulating both coal mining and landfilling municipal waste, which embrace removal and disposition of methane associated with those activities, the Pennsylvania program for regulating methane extraction, itself quite old, was never designed to consider fracking. That program, as you can see by examining the permit application form of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Resources (“DEP”) [ http://www.elibrary.dep.state.pa.us/dsweb/Get/Document-48256/550-2100-002.pdf ], involves only notifying the Department of the location of the well and providing assurances on the amount of local water that will be consumed in the proposed fracking operation. This latter requirement exists only because certain other governmental agencies, such as the Delaware River Basin Commission and the Susquehanna River Basin Commission, are required by law to safeguard their associated river basins from excessive extractions of surface and groundwater. There is, for example, no requirement that chemicals used in a particular fracking operation be disclosed in the permit and in fact the fracking operator need not disclose these chemicals to anyone under federal law, which prohibits such disclosure as a “trade secret.” Neither is there any requirement that fracking operators assess or protect groundwater in the vicinity of their operations, despite the fact that common sense consideration of the impact of an underground detonation, coupled with Pennsylvania’s long historical experience with coal mine and quarry blasting, inevitably suggests that there will be some significant deleterious impact on groundwater near such detonations or even considerably distant from them.

What is the actual, on the ground experience with fracking in Pennsylvania? From the standpoint of the methane extraction industry, production has been good, huge pipeline projects are being eased through a complacent regulatory process that is noticeably lighter in touch than that experienced by their business cousins in the coal mining and landfill industries.

From the standpoint of landowners, householders or well users, the experience has been radically different. It takes little imagination and scant sympathy to recognize that exploding toilets or flammable tap water were not part of ordinary life in Pennsylvania prior to fracking, yet these are some of the assaults that have occurred. Free methane in groundwater is not and never has been an ordinary occurrence in Pennsylvania. While a DEP sympathetic to the fracking industry pushes its half measures through Pennsylvania’s cumbersome legal process, landowners worry deeply about contamination of their groundwater. Of course, since all of the fracking chemicals are exempt from disclosure, no one really has any idea what the extent of the contamination might actually be. I will not try to list individual instances of damage likely occurring as a result of fracking in Pennsylvania, but instead refer the interested reader to the website maintained by Robert Myers, which is comprehensive if not indeed currently definitive on negative occurrences in Pennsylvania which are reasonably attributable to fracking. http://www.lhup.edu/rmyers3/marcellus.htm Most recently, and most astonishingly, the DEP, only twenty-four hours after the errant driller made his request, allowed the driller to stop potable water delivery to a family whose water well was much earlier found to have been contaminated by the driller’s activities. The evident theory of DEP is that methane in the family’s well has reached “acceptable” levels. There was of course no analysis of what fracking chemicals – protected from disclosure even in these grievous circumstances – are still present in the family’s household well. See http://citizensvoice.com/news/dep-cabot-ok-to-stop-dimock-water-deliveries-1.1220633#axzz1bJy9kQqe

What’s Not Reached Under The Current Pennsylvania Program for “Regulating” Fracking?

Pennsylvania has one of the most evolved systems of environmental law in the U.S. Yet none of it is regularly, effectively or thoroughly applied to fracking. The Pennsylvania Clean Streams Law, 35 P.S. 691.1 et seq., is a comprehensive statute that regulates the discharge of all forms of industrial waste to ground and surface waters within Pennsylvania, yet clearly the prohibition on discharge of industrial waste to such waters is not enforced as to fracking activities. Likewise, the Pennsylvania Solid Waste Management Act, 35 P.S. 6018. 101 et seq., is clearly applicable to the sort of wastes generated by fracking, but it seems simply not to occur to Pennsylvania regulators actually to engage in such an undertaking. Both those statutes provide for stringent civil and criminal penalties for violation of permit terms and for discharges in violation of the statutes. They are still regularly applied, however, to other regulated entities, such as coal mining operations, landfilling of trash, steel fabrication, sewage treatment and a variety of other private and public activities in Pennsylvania – just not to methane drilling and extraction activities.

The False Promise of Severance Taxes

There is repeated talk of imposing a severance tax on methane extraction in Pennsylvania. Such taxes are generally opposed by the industry, although the experience with severance taxes on coal in other U.S. coal mining states has been that such taxes actually lead to increased coal extraction since the states earn substantial revenue from granting, at times indiscriminately, permits for more and more coal mining. (Editor’s Note) In addition, with nonrenewable geologic substances such as coal and methane, when the extraction ends – when the coal’s all taken or the methane exhausted – revenues stop abruptly and governments are without the financial means to function. This includes any governmental ability to abate damage left behind by coal mine operations, which has been substantial and largely unaddressed. Pennsylvania has some 50,000 miles of streams. Of that total, some three thousand miles are contaminated irretrievably by coal mining discharges.

These two drawbacks – pressure to issue dangerous permits and ultimate loss of a revenue source on which government becomes dependent and with no ability to replace it – argue strongly against such a tax.

Fracking in Pennsylvania State Parks

Pennsylvania has one of the oldest and most extensive state park systems in the U.S.A. Most of the land was acquired at sales of land for local taxes that had not been paid, typically timber operations that were no longer profitable. What Pennsylvania acquired in these purchases was usually just the surface estate, but not the still potentially lucrative mineral rights, which include the right to extract methane. Thus many of Pennsylvania’s 117 pristine state parks, all heavily used by the public, are now subject to methane extraction operations that cannot be stopped absent a legislative prohibition on methane extraction activities in such areas. In the vast Allegheny National Forest, a U.S. preserve within Pennsylvania, a U.S. court has recently authorized drilling in the forest, also a heavily used tract of publicly accessible land used for camping, hiking, hunting and fishing. Ironically, drilling may also take place on the grounds of Pennsylvania’s prison system, including Farview State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Waymart, Pennsylvania. See http://citizensvoice.com/news/state-prisons-eyed-for-drilling-1.1220635#axzz1bLfoHU7r

Coalbed and Landfill Methane

Coal mining has been part of Pennsylvania life at least since the early 1800s. The amount of unaddressed historical damage to land and water from coal mining is astonishing, although at least since the early 1970s, the grosser abuses of coal mining have been significantly curbed under a panoply of specialized statutes aimed at damage from coal mining. Among those statutes are Pennsylvania’s laws on deep mine safety, which have required for many, many years that methane (often encountered underground by mining laborers) be vented from the mines for the safety of the workers. More recently, as disputes over ownership of such methane have been resolved, efforts to recover it commercially have increased. All aspects of the coal and methane extraction operations remain subject to strict regulations as to effects on groundwater quality and quantity (including household wells), surface water quality and quantity, air quality, worker safety and public safety. None of these considerations apply with respect to fracking.

Likewise, landfilling of municipal waste in Pennsylvania is also stringently regulated and it also produces substantial amounts of methane for commercial recovery. The same considerations as for coal mining and associated methane extraction also apply to Pennsylvania regulation of landfilling and associated methane extraction – protection is required for groundwater quality and quantity (including household wells), surface water quality and quantity, air quality, worker safety and public safety. Again, none of these considerations are required by DEP with respect to fracking.

Areas Unsuitable For Mining

Under the Federal Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977, 30 U.S.C. 1201 et seq., the federal government prohibits coal mining in certain areas, e.g., within one hundred feet of an occupied dwelling. It also provides a discretionary governmental process whereby an individual may seek to have certain tracts of land declared unsuitable for coal mining based on predictable or likely deleterious environmental effects or to protect the public health safety and welfare from mining activities. Pennsylvania has long since adopted a similar set of prohibitions and a similar administrative process for coal mining in Pennsylvania, yet it has no such prohibitions or processes for fracking, despite the damage drilling operations have already caused in Pennsylvania.

Conclusion

Pennsylvania’s experience with methane has been largely negative, fraught with mishaps and environmental damage. Neither DEP nor the Pennsylvania General Assembly demonstrate any meaningful inclination to regulate methane drillers as they do methane extraction accompanying coal mining and landfilling of municipal waste, so it is most likely that methane extraction will proceed with permanently unabated and avoidable environmental harm and deleterious effects on the public health, safety and welfare. Given Pennsylvania’s extensive history of successful regulation of these other two methane-producing industries, this omission seems as intentional as it is inexcusable. Any jurisdiction considering allowing fracking should look closely at the largely negative Pennsylvania experience and see if similar mistakes can be avoided in their own geographic province.

Jim Morris is an environmentalist who formerly worked for the Pennsylvania environmental protection agency.

Editor’s Note: The President’s Commission investigating the BP oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico pointed out a similar outcome to severance taxes. The federal agency responsible for assuring that oil drilling did not harm the environment was also responsible for raising revenues for the government from oil drilling. In the 1980s, under President Reagan and Secretary of the Interior James Watts there was an explosive expansion of oil drilling, their version of “Drill, baby, drill.” As a result, royalties and revenues from oil and gas resources constituted the second largest source of revenues for the US. Not surprisingly, regulatory oversight, intended to protect the natural resource being exploited, disappeared so that between 1990 and 2009 unannounced inspections in the Gulf of Mexico by the federal agency fell from almost 3,000 a year to a few hundred a year.

David Goldstein and Ralph Cavanagh, Energy Efficiency and the ‘Rebound Effect’

Mon, 3 Oct 2011 11:03:25 -0400

Throughout almost four decades of societal progress in getting more work out of less energy, those who deny the promise of energy efficiency have persisted in a bizarre claim: any energy savings from efficiency are offset by activities that demand additional energy consumption.

While implausible concerns about “rebound effect” have been around since the mid-nineteenth century, they have not impeded recent progress in improving the efficiency of energy use and reducing its environmental impacts.

The most obvious rebuttal to “rebound effect” claims is the performance of the US economy since the early 1970’s: between 1973 and 2009, US economic production more than tripled even as total US energy use increased by less than a third. If “rebound effect” advocates were right, that record would have been flatly impossible, since savings in energy use would be offset by activities that demand energy, keeping energy use trends in lockstep with economic growth (just as they were for the first three decades after World War II).

That was indeed the confident prediction of some economists when we began our careers in the mid-1970s, and such forecasts lie today on the ash heap of history -- along with hundreds of unmourned power plants that never had to be built and mines that never had to be dug.

Yet the same discredited thesis has resurfaced recently in reports by The New Yorker writer David Owen and the iconoclastic Breakthrough Institute, which today released a report subtitled, “A Review of the Literature” [translation: “don’t expect anything new”]. In the report, the Institute acknowledges that, “truly cost-effective energy efficiency measures should be vigorously pursued as they will lead to an improvement in the general welfare.” Since we agree entirely with that conclusion, it is tempting to end the discussion there, but the authors of the study also insist that the “rebound effect” will deny the global environment any benefits following that “improvement in the general welfare,” so an additional word is in order.

We reject the Institute’s implication that there is some kind of emerging academic consensus around the “rebound effect.” To the contrary, the most respected academic energy efficiency think tanks such as the UC Davis Center on Energy Efficiency and Stanford’s Precourt Institute on Energy Efficiency share the view that energy efficiency delivers big economic and environmental benefits. The reality is that energy efficiency is a huge success story and a key tool to reducing global warming, increasing electric reliability, slashing energy bills for those consumers who can least afford them, and avoids the need to build new costly power plants.

The Breakthrough Institute blames a host of evils on efficiency, but fails to back up their accusations with facts. It acknowledges that serious energy analysis of rebound effects shows them to be “comparatively trivial.” People who insulate their houses don’t absorb all the savings by sweltering through the winter, and buyers of efficient refrigerators don’t start leaving the doors open gratuitously. But after admitting that studies show rebound effects to be small and getting smaller over time, it tries to create a counter-narrative by inserting warnings that “the available evidence to date remains too limited to draw precise conclusions.”

Efficiency does not mean restraining energy services growth. It means using less for the same amount of service. The skeptics are confusing this trend with the sometimes-on, sometimes-off trend towards more efficiency, and claiming that more efficiency induces more demand for energy services.

The problem is that neither Owen nor the Breakthrough Institute has presented any evidence that this is happening in the real world: all of their examples are devoid of any mention of how efficiency leads to demand for activities that demand more energy, as opposed to other economic factors. Instead, they rely on naïve interpretations of economic theory—the same interpretations that show that cost effective energy efficiency is impossible.

Given the weaknesses of this form of economic theory for the purposes of efficiency analysis, it is even more important than usual to rely on data. The clearest data-focused test of the “rebound” hypothesis is whether an economy that embarks seriously on efficiency policy really can cut its overall energy use. Because without question, if the thesis has any plausibility at all, the answer has to be “no”; or at least “not nearly as much as predicted.”

Fortunately for the cause of economic truth, we have such experiments. California, for one, embarked on a broad set of policy reforms to encourage efficiency and promote renewable energy in 1974.

The influence of energy efficiency policies are helping the whole California economy (California would be the 8th largest national economy in the world if it were a nation) to save much more than one would expect. California is not the only example of a state or country promoting efficiency through policy and then showing divergent usage trends from its neighbors and thus demonstrating that energy really is saved. Perhaps this is why serious studies have found that the economy-wide rebound effect is trivially small.

In my blog, I show how California’s projected savings from energy efficiency programs, derived year by year in real time by the California Energy Commission, have resulted in 15 percent reductions; and these programs have resulted in 40 percent reductions compared to the rest of the country.

California is just one example. Other states and several countries that have pursued efficiency policies also demonstrate lower energy usage and growth than those that did not so implement such policies.
Energy efficiency saves energy, increases electric reliability, avoids the need to build new power plants, and saves Americans money. It’s really that simple.

The article was originally published on David Goldstein’s Blog, at SWITCHBOARD: Natural Resources Defense Council Staff Blog, http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/dgoldstein/energy_efficiency_and_the_rebo.html

Lucy Bingham McAndrew, The ethics behind environmental action: why worry now?

Thu, 1 Sep 2011 06:05:14 -0400

Why worry about doing right or wrong when it comes to the environment?

A recent survey showed that the vast majority of Irish people consider that they care for the environment. Some of us even act on that concern – picking up litter, monitoring the lives of the birds in 'our' gardens, writing letters about gas refineries, cycling to work. But even those of us who consider ourselves as acting with concern for the environment would do well to pause for a moment and ask, on what basis do we act with concern?

Various reasons have been given for why people show concern for the environment but the first, foremost or sometimes only reason is, how the environment affects particular humans. For example, with climate change, Americans are only or mainly concerned for the impact on the United States, the Irish for the impact on Ireland, and so on. Self-interest, or self preservation, is extended only insofar as it is felt that its extension will extend the benefits to the self. There is no actual ethical consideration in this position.

However, there is also another perspective on why we ought to consider the right and wrong – the ethics – of our actions towards the environment. This relies on thinking of the environment as having value in and of itself. From this perspective, individual organisms, entire species, and entire ecosystems are valuable for their own sakes and not because humans are there to value them. Pigs, dogs and horses, as well as microbes and whole, natural ecosystems, have value by virtue of their being evolved, independently of human agency, and of being alive.

The word “environment”, derives from a latinate root, still evident in the French term, environ, meaning “round about or surround”. By environment, in a sense, I mean, the neighbourhood, that surrounding milieu within which we live out our lives. This includes, most obviously, the human environment, in the sense of the community of people, but also the built landscape, by which we are surrounded. It also includes the environment in the more traditionally understood sense: the natural world, from the microbial to the entire biosphere: the living ecosystems around us, and the material, mineral, gaseous backdrop upon which they evolved. The microbial environment is not only external, existing in the soil around us, as well as in all our humanly built constructions. It's also within us: in our guts and bloodstreams, in the air, water and food, passing in and out of us, and living alongside the primate part of us as intimately and intertwined as if we were one co-organism.

Morality is about more than acting in our own interests. The requirement of ethics is to go beyond simply doing as you would be done by – only in order that someone or something does something good to you in return. Instead of acting kindly in the hope that someone will act kindly back, we also act kindly for the other's sake. In acting morally, we don't act for a reward, even if a reward of some kind is one element of motivation. Instead, we act because we recognise that the other has value too. We treat that other – either human agent or 'the environment' - not as an instrument of our own good, but as an end in itself, recognising that certain conditions are good for the other quite independently of their being good for us.

Once we admit to ourselves that individuals and communities of other species have their own agendas, their own interests (though that does not imply that they need to be conscious of those interests) , independent of our interests, then we'd be hard pressed to ignore that information and continue as though the only interests which mattered were human.

Human agents – individuals or communities - which operate purely on self-interest are impoverished by the lack of imagination and creativity they display. To human beings, and indeed to human societies, which have evolved through the strategy of thinking, of problem-solving, any process, such as imagination, which curtails thinking is bound to curtail the ability to behave resiliently when under threat. In reality, a curtailment of imagination, of creativity, is actually a curtailment of resilience, a failure to use the full potential that humans have to react and respond to emergency situations. Without imagination, especially the ability to imagine the life of other humans or species, we often resort to fear and violence for survival. Just as 'de-humanising' others is used as a strategy to facilitate the killing of other humans in war, so a denial that other organisms or clusters of organisms have interests of their own allows us – illegitimately – to justify their destruction.

There is an argument that living with ethical concern for the environment involves a contradiction in terms. We can't help but to destroy life in the course of our own living. Our living requires that we kill to eat (even as vegetarians), to clothe and heat ourselves, for shelter – taking space from other creatures. And we are simply too large as organisms to be able to avoid the unfortunate unintentional killing of countless tiny lives as we go about the course of our days.

What this argument fails to recognise is that having a concern for the environment for its own sake implies developing an attitude of respect not only towards the environment, but towards one another. However hard it seems, we need to rebalance the consideration of interests involved, including the interests of the environment. This involves using all the tools we have, internal, external, to imagine how our lives impact on other lives. We necessarily still kill and destroy others in the environment, but if our attitude is to minimise the harm that we do to the interests of others in the environment, then we are far more likely to come to a balance than if we only consider, 'what's in it for me'.

However ethical we want to be, self-centredness will still be one important motivating factor in any decisions about how to relate to the environment. However much we respect and even revere living entities in all their shapes and forms, from mountains to molehills, from oceans to octopi, we have also to recognise that it is most certainly in our own interests to be involved in the protection and conservation of the environment and of natural biodiversity, where this means a rolling back of the influence of human interventions. We really don't need to be hair shirt wearers to act ethically towards the environment. We don't need to pretend that we're on some moral high ground either. As human agents we have the capacity to step outside ourselves, to understand that we're not alone in having an interest in being alive. Without acknowledging that recognition that there are other interests at stake, narrower, shorter-term interests will always take precedence. But we need to do more than appeal to pragmatism. Because beneath and beyond our self-interest, concern for the environment is more than just 'doing it for ourselves'.

Lucy Bingham McAndrew is a PhD student at NUI Galway researching environmental ethics

Duncan Clark, Why a high-carbon investment bubble could be the lesser of evils

Mon, 1 Aug 2011 11:48:10 -0400

The alternative – that there will never be enough political will to halt emissions – is the really scary prospect

This week has seen a new green meme emerge: the idea that investment in high-carbon companies is creating a "carbon bubble" that could leave the world exposed to another financial crash. The catalyst is a fascinating report by the Carbon Tracker Initiative that explores the obvious but usually overlooked mismatch between the world's stated climate change targets and the market response – or lack thereof.

We've known for a long time that the world's remaining carbon budget is tiny compared with the total amount of exploitable oil, coal and gas reserves. In other words, our chance of tackling climate change mainly comes down to one thing: how much fossil fuel the world can be persuaded to leave in the ground.

Although that sounds obvious, it's worth restating, because for all the crucial current debate over renewable energy and nuclear power, it's important to bear in mind that low-carbon technologies are necessary but not necessarily sufficient. Even if we had enough low-carbon power to match current energy consumption that wouldn't in itself mean that the fossil fuels would stay in the ground; the world might simply use more energy.

Given that meeting the world's agree climate target limiting global warming to 2C - will almost certainly require huge quantities of valuable fossil fuels to be left untouched, it's surprising that the environment community hasn't been quicker to flag up what that might mean in terms of business risk for fossil fuel companies. If most oil, coal and gas reserves are "unburnable", could the primary assets of the world's biggest energy companies be as toxic as the dodgy mortgage debts being traded in the run-up to the 2008 financial collapse?

Thanks to the Carbon Bubble report, we now have some better numbers to help us grapple with that question. Based on research by the Potsdam Institute , the report suggests that if the world wants an 80% chance of staying within the 2C limit, we should avoid emitting more than 565 gigatonnes (GT) of CO2 by 2050. That equates to just one-fifth of the world's total proven fossil fuel reserves, which contain enough carbon to produce a massive 2,795GT of CO2, the report estimates.

Of course, a large proportion of the world's fossil fuels are controlled by state-owned companies such as Saudi Aramco. But even if these states could somehow be persuaded to leave all their oil, coal and gas in the ground for the greater good, that wouldn't solve the problem because, according to the report, even just the top couple of hundred private energy companies listed on world's stock markets have significantly more carbon assets that the world can afford to burn. And yet fossil fuel companies - which are heavily invested in by our pension funds, as well as by private investors - are generally considered among the safest companies to put money into.

So what's going on here? It seems there are four scenarios that could explain the apparent mismatch:

1. The markets are in fact working properly and the cost of energy investments already reflect the considerable risks of unburnable assets. However, this doesn't seem likely given that until the Carbon Bubble report came out there wasn't even an easily available reference with which to compare the carbon content of reserves with the acceptable carbon budget. More fundamentally, it doesn't seem likely when you consider that the big energy companies are openly prospecting for new reserves: if they and their investors really believed they were going to have to leave some of their existing fuels in the earth, why would they be spending large sums of money looking for new ones?
(The most recent BP annual report is typical of the industry's public stance on this question: it softly acknowledges that carbon regulation could increase costs and reduce growth opportunities but also states emphatically that "BP's future hydrocarbon production depends on our ability to renew and reposition our portfolio".)

2. The markets understand the big-picture risks of unburnable assets but believe these will be obviated by the development of technologies that allow us to inexpensively capture the CO2 released by fossil fuels - either at the point of use or through a massive rollout of ambient carbon scrubbers. This seems unlikely, given carbon capture's painfully slow development.

3. The market is acting irrationally or on bad information and, as the report suggests, gradually inflating a carbon bubble.

4. Conversely, the market believes simply that the risks of unburnable carbon are small because the world shows no sign of taking the two-degrees target seriously.

The really worrying thing, I think, is that the fourth scenario seems just as plausible as the third - and will remain so until the UN process shows some progress on legally binding emissions cuts at the global level. In other words, let's hope that there does indeed turn out to be a carbon bubble, because at least a bubble can burst. The alternative - that the markets are correctly predicting there will never be enough political will to impose the 2C temperature limit - is the really scary prospect.

Duncan Clark is an environment journalist, author and campaigner.

The article was originally published in the Guardian on July 15, 2011.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2011/jul/15/high-carbon-bubble

EEA, Forests and their forgotten communities

Fri, 1 Jul 2011 18:39:58 -0400

In May 2008 a helicopter flew over unexplored parts of the Amazon in Acre State in Brazil, near the country’s border with Peru. Onboard were officials from Funai, the Brazilian government's Indian affairs department, on a mission to prove the existence of unknown Amazonian tribes who have never been in contact with the outside world. The few aerial pictures Funai has released show startled and intrigued people and their huts but do not reveal any landmarks which could be used to identify the exact location.

The alarming rate of deforestation in the Amazon poses a very concrete threat to such remote tribes. It does not only threaten their livelihood but also their way of life. Loggers and cattle ranchers continue clearing the forest cover and moving further into the heart of forest, inflicting often irreparable damage to the environment as well as exposing remote tribes to diseases for which they have no immunity.

Unfortunately, the Amazon and its tribes are not the only ones bearing the consequences of the growing global demand for natural resources. Five years ago Bisie was jungle. Located in the Wailikale territory, east Congo, it is now a cramped township as a result of the discovery of cassiterite, a derivative of tin that is a crucial component in the circuitry of many modern gadgets. It’s in mobile phones, laptops, digital cameras and gaming devices. Today despite the boom in mining activities in its forests, the large majority of the Congolese remains extremely poor.

Thousands of kilometres from Bisie, in the state of Orissa nestled up against the Bay of Bengal, live Gangi Bhuyan and her husband Sukru Bhuyan with their young family. This is east India, the legendary spring of India’s mineral wealth and a major source of materials for global industrial growth in the past.

For about five months of the year Gangi and Sukru feed their family from the less than half acre plot of land they cultivate on the verge of the forest that surrounds Raibada, their village. During this time they also harvest vegetables, seeds, fruit, medicine and building materials (such as grass) from the forest. For a further four months, this is their main supply of food. Without the forest they would starve. For the remaining three months they are forced to migrate to large urban areas such as Bangalore or Mumbai where they work as labourers.

For many indigenous people the forest is their lifeline, while the timber or the minerals buried beneath are sometimes a curse. Across the world, because of their relatively higher dependence on the environment, the poorest of the poor are often the most affected by environmental degradation. This damage is driven by global demand for raw materials, which in turn is driven by human consumption.

Unfortunately, such communities’ historic claim to forest resources and land has rarely been transcribed in modern society’s legal systems. Government bodies like Funai or non-governmental movements like Survival International are faced with a daunting task. To have the rights of such indigenous tribes protected fully, in the case of the Amazon and Peru, they might first have to prove the existence of these tribes.

In other cases, like in India, there has been some progress. The Forest Rights Act is now facilitating the transfer of land rights to tribal communities. Gangi and Sukru Bhuyan have not received a title to the plot of land but some of their neighbours have. These one-sided, carefully laminated pieces of paper are clutched with a mixture of pride and surprise. The success of their neighbours means that the Bhuyan family has hope.

Most of the losses in forest cover take place in developing countries and are largely caused by weak governance structures for forest conservation and management. But the pressures forests and forest communities face are not limited to developing countries.

Despite growth in forest cover and stronger forest governance structures, Europe’s forests and forest communities also feel the bite of growing demand for natural resources and environmental degradation.

We are using our planet’s resources faster than they can replenish themselves but we want to continue consuming and producing ever more. We not only risk running out of vital resources, we are actually making our home less and less habitable.

Perhaps the solution lies in recognising the fact that we are only one species among many and our wellbeing depends on harmonious interaction with all others. All living things, including us, have a rightful claim on the forests of the world, even if we live in an urban area on the other side of the planet, because the quality of the air we breathe and the water we drink, and the climate we live in depend on them.

What forests do for you

Forests can provide all sorts of food: fruit, honey, mushrooms, meat and so on. If properly managed, they can also deliver a sustainable flow of resources such as wood to the economy.

Forests are also crucial in terms of the medicines they store. In India, As many as 8 000 species of plants are regularly used as medicine by the people of India with 90–95 % coming from forests. Less than 2 000 of these plants are officially documented.

But forests do a lot more. For example, trees and vegetation help ensure a healthy climate locally and globally by absorbing pollutants and greenhouse gases. Forest soils decompose wastes and purify water. And people often travel far to enjoy the beauty and tranquillity of forests, or to engage in pastimes such as hunting.

All of these services — providing food and fibre, regulating the climate and so on — are valuable. We would pay a lot for machines that could do the same thing. For that reason, we should think of ecosystems as a form of capital, which provides services to the owner but often also to other people nearby and far off (as in the case of climate regulation). Crucially, we need to maintain our natural capital — not overexploiting the ecosystem and not over-polluting — if it is to continue providing these hugely valuable services.

Reprinted from the European Environmental Agency (22 April 2011). For further information and related material, see http://www.eea.europa.eu/articles/forests-and-their-forgotten-communities

NUI Maynooth, MSc Climate Change Class 2010-2011, Adapting to Climate Change: The urgency and some challenges to begin

Wed, 1 Jun 2011 14:30:04 -0400

Our response to the challenge of climate change will shape our future in many different and crucial ways. Adaptation is about realizing the impacts of climate change and acting in such a way to limit negative impacts and embrace positive outcomes in order to reduce our vulnerability from the effects of climate change.

Adaptation is a process. It can be one change made by an individual, such as a farmer changing the planting time of his crops, or a national or global action supported by legislation. We can identify two primary types of adaptation based on how the process takes place: reactive and anticipatory. Reactive adaptation is prompted by an extreme event, such as hurricane Katrina, while anticipatory adaptation is a planned approach to adapting to anticipated climatic changes. Reactive approaches are much less cost effective than anticipatory approaches, as we all know a stitch in time saves nine.

Adaptation is distinct from mitigation actions that lower our greenhouse gas emissions. Adaptation and mitigation ideally go hand in hand but this is not always the case and this can lead to what is known as mal-adaptation. An example of this is the increased demand for air conditioning units in the summer months which although tackling the heat increase leads to an increase in emissions. Adaptation should be appropriate, feasible and effective. It needs to be appropriate to the place that it is in and the conditions, it needs to be feasible with appropriate funding, and it needs to be cost effective.

Why the urgency?
Prevention is undoubtedly better than cure; it’s preferable to tackle a problem at source rather than trying to deal with the consequences. This idea is wholly applicable in the case of climate change adaptation. Recently international bodies have failed to address and mitigate anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases and this has led to a global mean temperature rise of on average 0.76°C. Furthermore, the rising trend is accelerating and we are now urgently in need of a cure. It must be highlighted that adaptation is not a Plan B or an alternative to the reduction of greenhouse gasses. Adaptation should be viewed as a vital component of the effort to address the wider issue of climate change. Thus adaptation and mitigation should be pursued urgently and in parallel with each other, in a complementary and timely way.

One of the biggest arguments put forward for attempting to adapt now is that climate change has already built significant momentum. Even if we could switch off all emissions now, we would not stop or reverse the effects of climate change over the next 50 years due to inertia in the climate system. This means that some climate change is inevitable due to historic and current emissions of greenhouse gases. In essence the different rates of response of the climate system mean that the effects of greenhouse gases emitted today will not be felt for years to come. We as a society then have to come to terms with the fact that we must urgently adapt to climate change, irrespective of how greenhouse gas emissions are presumed to change over the coming decades. We have seen that the establishment of reduction targets and agreements is highly politicised and can become badly side-lined.

The calls from experts are clear. In Ireland the Irish Academy of Engineers has highlighted the risks posed by climate change to critical infrastructure. Over the coming century we can expect higher sea levels which will threaten Ireland’s cities and major towns. We as a nation can also expect more intense storms, warmer temperatures and warmer waters, more flooding, summer droughts and changing rainfall patterns. By 2050 we expect to see a 25% reduction on the amount of surface water available and a population increase of 2.5 million; both factors will have a severe impacts for Ireland and in particular on Dublin which relies heavily surface based resources. It would not take a great leap of the imagination then to come to the conclusion that if current climatic conditions test our infrastructure, such changes will only serve to cause further hardship. Look at the lessons from the November 2009 floods.

The impacts and risks associated with these changes are real, are already happening and will have consequences for us all, including many systems and sectors that are necessary for human livelihood, including water resources, flood protection and energy supply. Reactive adaptation is an expensive and risky option. Academics have noted that in the absence of planned and anticipatory adaptation, autonomous adaptation will inevitably occur, but the residual costs associated with this strategy, and potential losses associated with the wait and see policy, severely outweigh the cost of building a more robust society now. By avoiding the costs of adapting now we only place a larger burden on future populations. Uncertainties in the models of the climate system and gaps in knowledge need not be a limit to pursuing adaptation through identifying win-win options, those which are designed to be effectual today, tomorrow and under a wide range of climatic conditions.

The maintenance of Ireland’s society, economy and ecology can be climate proofed through robust anticipatory adaptation strategies. This is an issue that cannot be put on the long finger. The proof of what is happening is before us and many systems are already at the limit of their capacity to absorb shocks. The Dublin water supply system, Cork flood defences and our unique wetlands are just some of the examples. To ensure a secure and prosperous future we must be proactive now, and not shy away from our responsibility to future generations

Some Challenges to Begin
As adaptation requires action on the part of society, it poses a great challenge, as factors such as personal ethics, goals and values, awareness/knowledge, understanding the risk posed and ingrained cultural behaviours influence how and why people act or do not as the case maybe.

People’s ethics and values greatly control how and why they act, as it is what motivates them. If there is no value or benefit to changing one’s actions to adapt, or the current lifestyle is valued more, goals will never be set and action will never be intentionally taken. In Ireland, our capacity to adapt to climate change is large relative to that of other nations, even if the current financial crisis has dented substantially our ability to mobilise capital resources to address these problems.

In terms of adaptation, knowledge can affect adaptation in very different ways and can either aid our ability to adapt or hinder it. At the personal level, knowledge is often derived from past experiences which shape our opinions or understanding of issues and events. In the case of climate change adaptation, people who have experienced natural hazards or climate extremes will be more aware of the importance and need for adaptation to occur and may have some idea of how this would be done. These people have developed a local knowledge that facilitates their adaptive capacity. For people with no experience of these types of events it may not be quite so easy to see the necessity or urgency of adaptation to climate change and therefore they may be unable or unwilling to adapt. However, this is not the only way that knowledge will challenge adaptation. On the wider scale, where people have considerable knowledge about future climate trends there may be questions raised as to whether this knowledge is “trustworthy”. Climate scenarios are based on modelled projections and are therefore inherently uncertain. Although this uncertainty can be accounted for and quantified, it can never be eliminated. For this reason climate model outputs and future climate scenarios are often viewed as untrustworthy knowledge by the public and lead people to wonder if there is a point in adapting to changes that we are unsure about.

What we perceive as a risk and whether it should be acted upon can reduce adaptation actions on an individual and societal level. Perception of risk can interact with underlying values and factors such as social status and as a result can form limits to adaptation. The perception of vulnerability is linked to the perception of risk. A population can either see themselves as vulnerable to a particular risk or see themselves as not threatened or vulnerable. When a population does not see themselves as vulnerable they do not see the need to adapt. Many populations do not see themselves as vulnerable or at risk due to a lack of knowledge about local impacts. People see climate change impacts as removed from them in space and time (not here, not yet).

The most immediate challenge for adaptation then is to make the threat of climate change, and the imperative of adaptation, here and now.

MSc in Climate Change, Department of Geography, NUI Maynooth:
Dr. Conor Murphy (Course Director), Liam Barnard, Patrick Barrett, Stephen Barry, Sarah Boggan, Jessica Butler, Nicola Cadogan, Eimear Flynn, Aoibhinn Lynch, Ciara McTeigue, Elizabeth Moran, Robert Moss, Suzanne Mulholland, Susan O’Driscoll, Marie O’Connor, Laura Watts.

Joseph A. McMahon, “The European Union Common Agriculture Policy in 2020?”

Sun, 1 May 2011 12:55:08 -0400

I. Introduction

After an extensive consultation exercise, in November 2010 the European Commission issued a paper on the options for reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). (Commission 2010b) Arguing that there should be a common policy built around two pillars, the Commission suggested that the three strategic aims of the policy in the period up to 2020 should be to guarantee long-term food security, to provide European citizens with high quality food that is produced in a sustainable manner and to maintain the viability of rural communities. For the Commission this would involve greener and more equitable measures in the area of market support (first pillar) whilst rural development measures (second pillar) would concentrate on competitiveness, innovation, climate change and the environment. The reform path according to the Commission would involve a choice between three broad policy options. This contribution examines the options identified by the Commission in more detail and how the environment has been impacted by the existing CAP. As for the scope of the environmental challenge facing the EU, some interesting facts are given in the Commission's Consultation Document for the Impact Assessment of the proposed reform. This indicates that:

- Agriculture and forests cover 77% of the EU territory (47% agriculture). There are 13.7 million holdings with an average farms size of 12.6 ha and over 50% of farms are managed by persons over 55. Between 0.2 and 2% of utilised agricultural land is abandoned annually;
- 36.4% of family farmers engage in another gainful activity;
- One-third of EU agricultural land is managed by farming systems delivering High Nature Value;
- Natura 2000 sites cover 10% of agricultural areas;
- 65% of assessments under the Habitats Directive are unfavourable;
- 24% of water abstraction is used for agriculture (only one-third of this is returned);
- 25% of EU soil suffer from unsustainable erosion and 45% has low organic matter content;
- There has been a substantial decline in fertiliser consumption and a decline in the use of plant protection products;
- Non-CO2 emission from agriculture fell by 20% from 1990 to 2005. Emissions in agriculture are predicted to remain at current levels unless further action is taken. Agriculture currently represents 9% of total European emissions;
- Agriculture is a source of renewable energy and provides raw materials for bio-based products; and,
- Agriculture uses 2.4% of final energy consumption in the EU. (Commission 2011, 4-9)

II. Option 1

Under this option in the first pillar, the current direct payment system would remain basically unchanged, although measures would be introduced to ensure a more equitable distribution of such payments, and existing market instruments would be simplified with stronger risk management tools being introduced. In the second pillar, the orientation of the policy evident from the 2008 Health Check of the CAP would be maintained with increased funding for the challenges posed by climate change, water, biodiversity and renewable energy. This option is essentially the “business as usual” or limited adjustment option.

The 2003 Mid-Term Review introduced the Single Farm Payment (SFP) to improve the overall market orientation of agriculture and to promote greater environmental protection by the removal of production-specific incentives. The 2008 CAP Health Check acknowledged the central role played by agriculture in protecting and enhancing biodiversity, managing and protecting water resources and in tackling climate change. Key to these objectives is the cross-compliance criteria, which are classified into the following areas; animal welfare, animal health, public health, and the environment. There are five cross-compliance criteria which relate to environmental protection. Two of these relate to the contribution of agriculture to nature conservation, namely Directive 79/409 on the conservation of Wild Birds and Directive 92/42 on the conservation of Natural Habitats and of Wild Fauna and Flora. Although the two Directives establish a comprehensive legal framework to protect biodiversity within the EU, it has been noted that: “in reality, Member States’ implementation record in relation to each Directive has been less than impressive.” (Jack 2009, 157) The Commission has emphasised that the CAP must do more to protect biodiversity through the support of environmentally-friendly farming practices. (Commission 2007) The Member States also have an important role to play in this area as sitting alongside the cross-compliance criteria is a requirement for the Member States to develop codes of practice on maintaining land in good agricultural and environmental condition as a further eligibility requirement for the SFP.

A further two directives in the cross-compliance criteria deal with water pollution caused by the use of nitrates (Directive 91/676) and certain dangerous substances (Directive 80/68). Pollution is defined in the Nitrates Directive as the direct or indirect discharge of nitrates from agricultural sources “into the aquatic environment, the results of which are such as to cause hazards to human health, harm to living resources and to aquatic ecosystems, damage to amenities or interference with other legitimate uses of water.” Waters with a nitrate content above a certain threshold are regarded as being polluted and an obligation is imposed on the Member States to designate all lands draining into those waters as being “Nitrate Vulnerable Zones.” Within such zones an action programme must be implemented to reduce the level of nitrate pollution, irrespective of the source of such pollution. These two directives are part of a wider EU programme with respect to Water which includes the Urban Waste Water Treatment Directive and the Water Framework Directive.

In early 2010 the Commission reported on the implementation of the Directive 91/676 for the period 2004-07 which was the first report covering all 27 Member States. (Commission 2010a) The report indicated that some 21 million tons of nitrogen fertilizer and nearly 17 million tonnes of nitrogen from animal husbandry were used annually in this period. It also indicated that 15% of monitoring stations had average nitrate concentrations greater than 50mg/l, which is the level set by the Directive for water to be regarded as polluted; the non-binding target of 25 mg/l, which had been initially set in Directive 75/440, had been exceeded in a further 21% of monitoring stations. Eight Members States were identified as having increasing trends of pollution in more than 30% of their monitoring stations compared with the previous period; Ireland was included in this list.

Looking specifically at water and Ireland, in 2008 the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has identified the main threat to surface water quality as being eutrophication, which comes mainly from agricultural manures and fertilisers, sewage and detergents. For the period 2004 – 2006, the 2008 report indicated that the percentage of water bodies at risk of failing to meet the targets set by the Water Framework Directive for good water by 2015 in Ireland were: 64% (rivers), 64% (lakes), 53% (estuarine waters), 27% (coastal waters) and 62% (groundwater). On the latter the EPA reported that approximately 30% of all samples taken between 2003 and 2005 showed bacteriological contamination, with such contamination occurring at least once in the period 2003-05 at 52% at all monitoring locations. (EPA 2008) However, the latest report, published in March 2011, indicates that there have been improvements in water quality. For example, significant investment in facilities for the storage of livestock slurry and manure at a farm level and decreasing sales of fertiliser have improved the quality of groundwater with just over 15% of groundwater now being classified as Poor under the Water Framework Directive. Similar improvements were made in the other categories (lakes, rivers, estuarine and coastal waters), however, the 2011 Report recognises that continuing efforts will be needed to maintain these improvements and to reverse the negative effects of agriculture in this area. (EPA 2011)

Option 1, the limited adjustment option, should lead to a harmonisation of the SFP across all the Member States, and as a result give encouragement to agriculture in the new Member States where the sector remains important for social and economic reasons. The focus of the policy would remain income support for “active” farmers, with this concept still to be refined. There would also be some changes to the market management measures, especially in the area of risk management and this would allow the EU to cope more efficiently with exceptional situations such as those that arose in the dairy sector in 2009. Public intervention and private storage would continue to be features of the first pillar. As for the second pillar, there would be strengthening of measures in accordance with the 2008 Health Check (climate change, water, biodiversity and renewable energy) but the increase in funds for these measures would be limited. Overall, the extent to which this reform scenario would refocus the policy to support the production of public goods as suggested in the public consultations that preceded the Commission’s communication may be doubted. A more integrated approach would be needed.

III. Option 2

There would be a substantial re-design of direct payments under the second option with the basic rate serving as income support and a compulsory additional aid for those extra costs associated with realising the public goods demanded from agriculture. Further additional payments would be available to compensate for specific natural restraints and a new scheme would be introduced for small farms. In the second pillar, the Commission would propose measures to ensure that existing instruments would be better aligned with priorities in the areas of the environment, climate change and/or restructuring and innovation at national/local levels. Whereas the first option envisaged risk management measures under the first pillar, this option would see the introduction of such measures as part of second pillar measures to ensure income stabilization and to compensate for substantial income losses. It is implicit in the Commission document that it is this option which will lead to “green growth in the agricultural sector and the rural economy as a way to enhance well being by pursuing economic growth while preventing environmental degradation.” (Commission 2010b, 6)

Increased competitive pressures arising from a more open international trading system (and the need to feed an expanding population) will lead to greater specialisation and intensified production and so the greater integration option can be seen as a response to the need to create incentives within the CAP promoting more sustainable agricultural practices. Within the existing policy such incentives are located in the poorer second pillar but under this option they would become a more prominent feature of the first pillar addressing issues such as climate change and the environment.

On climate change, land use, land use change and forestry is not part of the EU’s greenhouse gas reduction commitment, although the Commission will report later this year on the possible inclusion of this sector in the future. There is little doubt that changes in climate will affect agricultural production but the nature of those changes is uncertain at a global level and may be minimised if there is an open international trading system. As for the local impact of climate change the EPA recognises that Ireland faces significant challenges if it is to meet its emissions targets for greenhouse gases under the EU Climate Change Package. Emission levels peaked at about 68.3 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent in 2005 and are projected to fall to just above 65.3 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent by 2020 but a further reduction of 5.2 million tonnes could be made with additional measures. (EPA 2010, Appendix 1) The 2020 EU Effort Sharing target requires a 20% reduction from 2005 levels for those sectors not covered by the Emissions Trading Scheme which includes agriculture. The latest emission projections for agriculture show the three main sources of emissions as enteric fermentation (47%), manure management (28%) and nitrogen application to soils (20%) with total emissions decreasing by 5% by 2020 to 17.8 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent. (EPA 2010, 14) The agriculture sector is the largest source of emissions in Ireland at 29% of total emissions in 2009 so meeting the mandate of the Climate Change package will be a major challenge, especially if the food processing sector is included.

For the Commission, the second option would link the SFP with the provision of public goods (environment, climate change etc) and the proposed division into three parts would further reduce the link between support and historical type and level of production, thus promoting greater equity between farmers and Member States. The three elements are a basic rate for all active farmers, additional aid to compensate for the extra costs associated with realising an improved environmental outcome (e.g. permanent pasture, green cover, crop rotation and ecological set-aside) and payments to compensate for specific natural restraints. This three/four fold division of income support raises the question of whether it is in accordance with the simplification agenda for the CAP. Under the proposal, active farmers would be eligible for environment payments and payments for specific natural constraints under both pillars, which would increase the relative share of the Rural Development pillar in overall spending. This is hardly consistent with the objective of a simpler CAP. It also raises the questions of whether the additional environmental payment under Pillar 1 would be more effective and efficient than equivalent payments under Pillar 2 and the balance between the specific natural constraints under Pillar 1 and the less-favoured areas payment under Pillar 2. In both cases there may be a transfer of resources from Pillar 2 to Pillar 1.

The basic rate will still be conditional on the cross-compliance criteria and maintaining land in good agricultural and environmental condition. How prominent this feature will be is a decision that has yet to be made as is the decision on the period during which these changes will be implemented. In deciding on this balance, the fact that farm income has stagnated – the decline following 2008 has brought levels back to what they were fifteen years ago – will have to be taken into account and the Commission communication promises that any reform would limit the “gains and losses of Member States by guaranteeing that farmers in all Member States receive on average a minimum share of the EU-wide average level of direct payments”. (Commission 2010b, 8) So, for example, if the relationship between these three elements were to be 50:40:10 (basic rate: environmental payment; specific payment) this would yield greater benefits to the environment than one in which the relationship was 90:5:5. It is the balance between these three elements, which will ultimately be decided by the Council and the European Parliament that will determine the extent to which this particular option meets its goal of ensuring that the CAP becomes “more sustainable and that the balance between different policy objectives, farmers and Member States is better met.” (Commission 2010b, 12)

IV. Option 3

The integration approach focuses on the issues of climate change and improving environmental performance which could also be a feature of the third option presented by the Commission. This option, the most radical presented, would involve the phasing-out of existing direct payments and the abolition of all market measures, although there would be limited payments for environmental public goods and specific natural constraints and a disturbance clause that could be activated in the event of severe crises. Most measures under this option would be in the second pillar and would focus on the environment and climate change. Whilst proposed it is difficult to imagine that the Commission wishes this option to be taken seriously.

However, others have proposed this option as the way forward, by pointing to the fact that the CAP does not at present adequately fulfill important objectives in relation to the environment, competition and development. Support for some of these arguments actually emerges from the Commission who in their Impact Assessment document acknowledge that the state of European farming is such that it would be difficult to reorient the policy towards greater environmental sustainability. (Commission 2011, 2) The Commission also appear not to recognise that farm household income is more than income from farming as members of the household, including some farmers, have non-farm incomes. This makes justification of a CAP directed at income support harder to justify. Of greater significance is that the document suggests that concerns about food security in Europe are misplaced and that agriculture’s positive contribution to the environment is questionable.

V. Conclusion

Legislative proposals are due from the Commission later in 2011 and it is probable that the second option, greater integration, will be chosen. However, a number of questions remain to be answered. These include; the definition of an active farmer; the balance between elements of the Pillar 1 payment; the relationship between the cross-compliance criteria (and the good agricultural and environmental condition requirement) with the additional environmental payment; the relationship between the payment for specific natural constraints under Pillar 1 and the Less Favoured Area payment under Pillar 2; the balance between the two pillars; the impact of the changes on the Rural Development pillar; and, the budgetary settlement for agriculture. Answers to these questions will determine what sort of CAP emerges from the current reform process.

Joseph A. McMahon is Professor of Commercial Law, School of Law, UCD. This is an abbreviated version of a contribution to the Irish European Law Forum on European Environmental Law and Governance held on 25 February 2011.

References

Commission (2007), COM (2007) 722 Preparing for the ‘Health Check’ of the CAP Reform.

Commission (2010a) COM (2010) 47, Report from the Commission to the Council and the European Parliament on implementation of Council Directive 91/676/EEC concerning the protection of waters against pollution caused by nitrates from agricultural sources for the period 2004-2007.

Commission (2010b) COM (2010) 672 The CAP towards 2020: Meeting the food, natural resources and territorial challenges of the future.

Commission (2011) The Reform of the CAP Towards 2020: Consultation Document for Impact Assessment http://ec.europa.eu/agriculture/cap-post-2013/consultation/consultation-document_en.pdf,

Jack, Brian (2009), Agriculture and EU Environmental Law (Ashgate Publishing, Farnham).

EPA (2008), Water Quality Report: Water Quality in Ireland (2004-2006) (EPA, Dublin) Available at http://www.epa.ie/downloads/pubs/water/waterqua/waterrep/#d.en.25320.

EPA (2011), Water Quality in Ireland Report (2007-2009) (2011, EPA, Dublin) http://www.epa.ie.downloads/pubs/water/waterqua/WaterQuality0709.pdf
See, also, “Ireland’s Water Quality: Groundwater OK, Surface Waters 50% Good, 50% Not So Good,” in the Reports section of irish environment (May 2011).

EPA (2010), Ireland’s Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Projections 2010-2020 (EPA, Dublin). http://www.epa.ie/downloads/pubs/air/airemissions/EPA_GHG_Emission_Projections_2010.pdf.

Pew Center on Global Climate Change, Climate Change and Competitiveness

Fri, 1 Apr 2011 15:58:47 -0400

In considering the U.S. policy response to climate change, both at home and abroad, one concern is the potential impact on U.S. competitiveness. Any potential competitiveness risks would be felt most directly by energy-intensive industries whose goods are traded internationally, a relatively small segment of the U.S. economy. (1) Potential concerns include relocation of energy-intensive U.S. industry to countries with no or looser controls, loss of market share to competitors in those countries, or a shift in U.S. investment to those countries.

Past experience with the adoption of new environmental standards shows little evidence of significant competitiveness impacts. One major review—synthesizing dozens of studies assessing the impacts of a range of U.S. regulations across a variety of sectors—concluded that while environmental standards may impose significant costs on regulated industries, they do not appreciably affect patterns of trade. (2) Other studies indicate that when U.S. producers do relocate to developing countries, factors such as wages and access to raw materials and markets are far more decisive than environmental costs. (3)

In gauging the potential impacts of GHG regulation, it is important to distinguish the “competitiveness” effect from the broader economic impact on a given industry or firm. A mandatory climate policy would present costs for U.S. firms regardless of what action is taken by other countries. In the case of energy-intensive industries, one likely impact will be a decline in demand as consumers substitute less GHG-intensive products. The “competitiveness” impact is only that portion of the total impact on a firm resulting from an imbalance between GHG constraints within and outside the United States.

A Pew Center report, The Competitiveness Impacts of Climate Change Mitigation Policies, analyzes the historical relationship between energy prices and production, trade, and employment in order to project the potential competitiveness impacts of mandatory domestic GHG limits, at a price of $15/ton CO2. Looking at paper, iron and steel, aluminum, cement, and bulk glass, the analysis concludes that most of the anticipated decline in production within those sectors (–1.6 percent to –3.4 percent) reflects a decline in consumption. The gap made up by imports, or the “competitiveness” effect, ranges from –0.7 percent to –0.9 percent. (4)

While most research has focused on the potential negative competitiveness impacts of climate policy, less attention has been paid to the opportunity presented by climate and clean energy policy to enhance the competitiveness of U.S. firms by driving innovation in the high-growth industries of the future. Some economists believe that stronger environmental standards in many cases confer a competitive advantage by driving firms to innovate and become more efficient. By fostering markets for new technologies, new standards are at least as likely to create jobs in some sectors as to reduce them in others—though the circumstances under which this is true remain a subject of ongoing debate. (5, 6)

The fact is that clean energy technology markets are already substantial in scope and likely to grow significantly in the coming decades as worldwide demand for lower-carbon technologies increases. Between 2004 and 2009, clean energy investments (including renewables, efficiency technologies, biofuels, CCS, nuclear power, and other low-carbon technologies) grew at an average compound annual growth rate of 39 percent. (7) Thanks in part to government stimulus packages, global clean energy investments will total about $200 billion in 2010, (8) and even under a business-as-usual case that assumes no changes to existing climate change policy by any major emitters, the International Energy Agency estimates that cumulative global investments in clean power generation technologies between 2010 and 2020 will total about $1.58 trillion, and will be even larger in the following decade. (9)

Recognizing the size and potential of these markets, other nations—most notably China—are aggressively expanding their own domestic clean energy markets by taking steps to reduce GHG emissions, become more energy independent, support lead markets for clean energy technologies, and build up their manufacturing capacity to meet expanded domestic and international demand for new technologies such as wind and solar power, advanced batteries, carbon capture and storage, and nuclear energy. In 2009 Europe led the world in clean energy investments with $41 billion and China invested $34.6 billion, while the United States only invested $18.6 billion. (10, 11)

The United States stands to benefit from the development of these markets, but only if it moves quickly to support domestic demand for and production of clean energy technologies.

NEXT STEPS

Mobilizing an effective global response to climate change requires stronger efforts both within and outside the UNFCCC.

For the past 15 years, the primary thrust of negotiations within the UNFCCC has been the establishment, and then the extension, of a legally binding regime to reduce GHG emissions. This should remain the long-term objective. Binding commitments are the ultimate expression of a countries’ will to address an issue of international concern. They provide countries a higher degree of confidence that others will fulfill their obligations. This confidence, in turn, enables each to deliver a stronger level of effort.

The Copenhagen summit, however, demonstrated the difficulty of achieving a new round of binding climate commitments. Most countries with binding targets under the Kyoto Protocol are unwilling to commit to new targets without commensurate commitments from the United States and the major emerging economies. These countries, however, are not yet prepared to assume binding commitments.

Under these circumstances, the best course forward within the UNFCCC may be an evolutionary one. In other international arenas, such as trade, human rights and the law of the sea, multilateral regimes have evolved gradually over time. As initial steps help build parties’ confidence in the regime, and in one another’s performance, they become willing to assume stronger obligations.

On climate, parties could take incremental steps to strengthen the multilateral architecture in ways that promote stronger action in the near term, while providing a stronger foundation for future binding commitments. Drawing political guidance from both the Bali Action Plan and the Copenhagen Accord, parties could strengthen existing UNFCCC mechanisms and, where necessary, establish new ones. Of central importance are a financial architecture to deliver strong, sustained support to developing countries, and an improved system of reporting and verifying countries’ actions to ensure transparency and a measure of accountability.

In parallel, countries could pursue other opportunities outside the UNFCCC to address key aspects of the climate challenge on a multilateral, plurilateral or bilateral basis. For instance, the International Maritime Organization and the International Civil Aviation Organization are examining measures to control GHG emissions from international shipping and aviation, respectively. Other possibilities include further steps under the Montreal Protocol to phase out substances contributing to global warming or an agreement within the World Trade Organization to phase out fossil fuel subsidies.

Over time, efforts within and outside the UNFCCC can strengthen countries’ confidence in one another’s actions and in the emerging climate change regime. The success of the international effort will hinge heavily on domestic action by the United States. Stronger U.S. action will be critical both because it will promote stronger action by other countries, and because it will better position the United States to take on the types of binding commitments needed to ensure a sustained and effective global effort.

_____________
The article is an edited, shortened version of an article by the Pew Center on Global Climate Change entitled, Climate Change 101: International Action at http://www.pewclimate.org/climate-change-101/international

NOTES:

1. Energy-intensive industries (those whose energy costs are 4 percent or more of shipped value) consume more than half of the energy used in U.S. manufacturing but generate only 16 percent of production and 20 percent of employment (less than 1 percent of total U.S. employment). Aldy, Joseph E. and William A. Pizer, The Competitiveness Impacts of Climate Change Mitigation Policies, Pew Center on Global Climate Change (forthcoming).

2. The authors found “relatively little evidence to support the hypothesis that environmental regulations have had a large adverse effect on competitiveness...” Jaffe, A.B., S.R. Peterson, P.R. Portney, and R.N. Stavins. “Environmental Regulation and the Competitiveness of U.S. Manufacturing: What Does the Evidence Tell Us?” Journal of Economic Literature. Vol. XXXIII, March 1995.

3. Goodstein, Eban. 1994. Jobs and the Environment: The Myth of a National Trade-Off. Island Press. Jeppesen, Tim, John List and Henk Folmer, 2002. Environmental Regulations and New Plant Locations Decisions: Evidence from a Meta-Analysis, 42 J. Regional Science. 19, 36.

4. Aldy. Joseph E. and William A. Pizer, 2009. “The Competitiveness Impacts of Climate Change Mitigation Policies.” Pew Center on Global Climate Change. May 2009.

5. See, for example, Greaker, Mads. “Spillovers in the development of new pollution abatement technology: A new look at the Porter-hypothesis,” Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Vol. 52, 2006; Porter, Michael. “America’s Green Strategy,” Scientific American, 264, 4: 96, 1991; Porter, M. and C. van der Linde, “Toward a New Conception of the Environment-Competitiveness Relationship,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 9, 4:97–118, 1995. As discussed in endnote three, this concept remains controversial and has its critics; see Ziesemer, Thomas. “The Porter Hypothesis Revisited: An Overview on Empirical and Theoretical Evidence,” Papers in Global Business Management, Universität Augsburg, December 2007, and Palmer, Oates, and Portney, “Tightening Environmental Standards: The Benefit-Cost or the No-Cost Paradigm?” J. of Economic Perspectives, 9(4), 1995.

6. The Pew Center has compiled a review summarizing several studies on the links between environmental policy and job creation, available here.

7. Overall clean energy investment growth estimates are derived using data from United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and New Energy Finance, “Global Trends in Sustainable Energy Investment 2009: Analysis of Trends and Issues in the Financing of Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency,” 2009 and Pew Charitable Trusts 2010. This figure includes total financial investment (including venture capital, private equity expansion capital, public markets, and asset finance) as well as government research and development (R&D), corporate R&D, and small projects. “Clean Energy Trends 2009,” Clean Edge Inc., March 2009.

8. Bloomberg New Energy Finance, March 2010 and Pew Charitable Trusts. “Who’s Winning the Clean Energy Race?” Pew Charitable Trusts, 2010.

9. IEA 2009. Unless otherwise noted, all IEA investment figures are in 2008 dollars. Clean power generation technologies includes renewables, CCS, and nuclear power. Cumulative totals for each of these categories in the decade 2010-2020 are $1.25 trillion, $2 billion, and $297 billion, respectively. As noted, investments in the following decade (2021-2030) are significantly higher; for example, cumulative investment in CCS could be $43 billion in those years.

10. Bloomberg New Energy Finance. “Clean energy investment down just 6.5% in 2009; Asia outstrips the Americas,” Press release, January 7th, 2010 and Pew Charitable Trust 2010.

11. Pew Charitable Trusts, 2010.

EEA and Frank Convery, Budget Deficits and Environmental Tax Reform

Tue, 1 Mar 2011 15:33:58 -0500

When we charge ourselves for our use of the environment and public resources, we use them with care. When we allow us ourselves to use them for free, we over-use the environment, and we waste resources. The idea of environmental taxation – which includes charges and levies – is to impose these charges on ourselves, and reduce the pressure we put on the environment.

When the revenue collected from such taxes is used to reduce or avoid other taxes, this is called ‘Environmental Tax Reform’. The amount of taxes raised on things that are bad for us and we want to discourage, such as pollution, is compensated by reducing or avoiding taxes on employment and investment that we want to encourage. Under certain conditions, we get a double dividend – improved environmental quality and a better performing economy.

The European Environment Agency (EEA) recently decided to focus on an individual member state – Ireland — that is struggling with budget deficits, and go into some detail as to the specific national opportunities as regards environmental tax reform.
Several experts in the application of environmental taxes came to Dublin to present details of their experience.(1) A number of opportunities were identified where environmental performance could be significantly improved, while at the same time revenues could be generated.(2) Some of the opportunities that were presented that are of direct relevance to the situation in Ireland are listed with a comment on the potential they present in Table 1, below. The below proposals would provide a significant relief up to €5 billion for the budget.

Environmental taxation already has widespread application in Ireland. The poster child of this approach is the plastic bag levy, which reduced the use of such bags in Ireland by over 90 per cent within a week of its introduction. However, Ireland also recently introduced a CO2 tax for the part of fossil fuel use not subject to emissions trading with carbon allowances.

The ‘polluter pays’ principle’ is fair in the sense that it charges most those who use most. It is manifestly unfair that a pensioner living alone who uses water vary sparingly subsidises the rich who use water prodigally. And the same applies to the use of energy, emissions of air pollutants, land use etc – without charging, the poor subsidise the rich. And in general, unless environment and resources are priced, the rich will always benefit as they use more ‘stuff’ and services of all sorts.

But it is the case that even though poor people impose much less on the environment than the rich, the poorest will still be stressed financially to pay the charges. In such cases, they should be given the means to reduce their consumption – in the case of water there are very low cost investments (less than €100) that will have an immediate effect – and they should get either a green check or a small free allocation.
In the case of business, the quid pro quo in these difficult times where everyone must pay more taxes and endure a reduction in public services, is that business pay for the impositions it makes on the publicly-owned environment. Also, such environmental taxes will support the emergence of a new generation of clean tech businesses whose financial and employment model depends on such charges being imposed.

Notes
(1) Dublin Stakeholder Event “Environmental Tax Reform: Learning from the past and reinventing the future” Oct. 29th 2010 http://www.comharsdc.ie/events/event_details.aspx?Event=37.
(2) Further environmental tax reform – its illustrative potential in Ireland based on established practices across Europe, EEA staff paper 2010. http://www.comharsdc.ie/files/2010_BriefingNoteETRWorkshopDublin%20_pap.pdf

This article is a modified, shortened version by staff at the European Environment Agency of a Commentary by Professor Frank Convery, Chairperson of Comhar Sustainable Development Council (SDC) and Director of the Earth Sciences Institute, University College Dublin. The work is based on a conference on Environmental Tax Reform – organised by Comhar SDC in collaboration with the European Environment Agency, UCD Earth Sciences Institute, Smart Taxes and Feasta – which took place in Dublin on 28th and 29th October 2010. Frank Convery’s Commentary on ETR and the conference can be found at http://www.comharsdc.ie/blog/?m=201011

Related EEA publications

Using the market for cost-effective environmental policy, EEA report 1/2006. http://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/eea_report_2006_1

Market-based instruments for environmental policy in Europe, EEA Technical Report 8/2005. http://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/technical_report_2005_8

Environmental taxes – recent developments in tools for integration, Environmental issue report 18/2000. http://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/Environmental_Issues_No_18

Environmental taxes – implementation and environmental effectiveness, Environmental issue report 1/1996. http://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/92-9167-000-6

Owen Polley, Northern Ireland gets the water it pays for

Tue, 1 Feb 2011 19:25:48 -0500

Northern Ireland Water underwent prolonged public criticism, after its supply suffered serious stoppages and shortages over the Christmas period. The consensus is that while the company’s emergency plans were inadequate, the crisis itself, caused by thousands of pipes bursting as ice melted, was unavoidable.

Of course the weather over the holidays was severe, even unprecedented. Any company would struggle as the thaw struck. In Northern Ireland, though, decades of neglect and underinvestment have resulted in an ancient and crumbling system. Major disruption here was inevitable.

For that our politicians must take their share of the blame and the water consuming public cannot be absolved from responsibility either.

The hard truth is that you get what you pay for. By deferring water charges, with overwhelming popular support, and refusing to consider privatising Northern Ireland Water, the Executive at Stormont indefinitely postponed the major overhaul of infrastructure that our water system urgently needs.

The result can be seen in places like Lurgan, where melt water overwhelmed sewers, causing raw effluent to spew into people’s homes. Northern Ireland’s inadequate sewage facilities have long been criticised by organisations as diverse as Friends of the Earth and the European Court of Justice.

In 2006 a High Court judge was forced to rule that the planning system in Northern Ireland should take sewage capacity into account, in the vicinity of proposed new developments. Many thousands of houses had already been sited where there was little or no facility to get rid of waste. The court prevented the Department of Regional Development (DRD), in the guise of the then Northern Ireland Water Service, from simply connecting more and more properties to an already overloaded system

Meanwhile poor treatment facilities attracted yearly fines from the ECJ in Luxembourg. With environmental effects that can only be imagined, raw sewage was pumped into the sea, some of it in the vicinity of popular tourist destinations like Portrush and Bangor.

It would be naïve to suppose that our recent difficulties, caused by pipes freezing, bursting and then draining reservoirs of water, weren’t exacerbated by inadequate infrastructure. If pipes were laid further beneath the surface, properly lagged and better maintained, problems would still occur, but their scale would be vastly smaller.

It’s not as if the authorities were not aware of the existing issues around investment. As far back as 2003, when Angela Smith was Labour’s regional development minister at the NIO, she conceded that water charges here would be the highest in the UK, if there were to compensate fully for an under-funded service.

The message was clear. Not only was the Northern Ireland Water Service short of money to improve its facilities, due to a lack of water charging, the body was also woefully inefficient in its previous guise as an integral part of a government department.

Northern Ireland Water (NIW) became a nominally separate, publicly owned company in 2007, but it remained under the auspices of DRD and it still literally leaked money. It suffers a financial double whammy of poor governance and under-funding which keeps its service in the dark ages.

Just this year the department was forced to dismiss NIW’s chairman, Chris Mellor, and three other executives, after it emerged that the company had failed to follow competitive tendering rules for contracts worth up to £28m.

The controversy deepened after a senior DRD civil servant, Paul Priestly, was suspended from his post as permanent secretary. The local broadcaster UTV uncovered documents suggesting that Priestly had proposed changes to the text of a supposedly independent inquiry into the tendering process.

As a quasi-independent body NIW staggers from one crisis to the next. A committee of the Northern Ireland Assembly recently found that it suffers from “the worst of both worlds”. The DRD and the minister are not fully accountable for a body they describe as “arm’s length’, but the company is not sufficiently independent to resist political interference.

In the face of public spending cuts, the necessary upgrade of infrastructure, particularly in new sewers, is only likely to be successful if water provision is privatised or at least substantially independent. In England privatisation allowed public utility companies like Severn Trent Water to successfully upgrade a system which had remained relatively unchanged since the Victorian era.

Accountable to share-holders, these organisations were efficient enough to keep costs low while also making the improvements required. Northern Ireland Water needs to be properly independent, with genuinely independent regulation, if its management is to be appointed for competence, rather than political expediency. It needs to be able to borrow to fund investment, as the Stormont Executive’s capital spend is subjected to an ever tighter squeeze.

Unfortunately, there are signs that our service is moving in precisely the opposite direction. During September, the DRD Minister, Conor Murphy, suggested that NIW be fully re-nationalised, prompting Sammy Wilson to describe his Executive colleague’s plan as ‘bananas’.

Consumers must hope that NIW’s latest troubles can inject some realism into the water debate in Northern Ireland. The constant deferral of charges has become a rare point of unanimity across the political spectrum. That particular ’holy cow’ should be slaughtered once and for all.

The Alliance party was the first to put its head above the parapet, supporting charges. Sammy Wilson (the Finance Minister) and John McCallister (the UUP deputy leader) have also shown signs that some of our politicians are prepared to challenge the cosy consensus. The Executive should simply tell people the truth. If water charges continue to be deferred then the service will suffer.

Along with a phased introduction of bills, we need to look urgently at options for privatising NIW or at least securing its independence from government. Otherwise, like Northern Ireland’s drinking water at the moment, money will continue to pour down the drain, without any improvement in supply.

Politicians should take the lead, but the public also needs to grasp the concept that you get what you pay for where services are concerned. Water is no exception. If the system remains under-funded it will continue to under-perform and disrupt our lives.

Owen Polley is a journalist who covers politics and current affairs in Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom. His blog is found at http://threethousandversts.blogspot.com/ This article is a modified version of an article by Owen originally published in the Belfast Telegraph on 31 December 2010.

Editor’s Note: For an analysis of some of the problems attributed to privatization of water services, see: Bill Marsden, “Cholera and the Age of the Water Barons,” on the website of The Center for Public Integrity at www.publicintegrity.org The article is found at http://projects.publicintegrity.org/water/report.aspx?aid=44 Linked by permission.

Robert Emmet Hernan, Local Citizen Participation in the Irish Planning Process

Mon, 3 Jan 2011 19:30:09 -0500

The Context

The quality of our individual lives depends, in part, on the quality of the community to which we belong, including its physical characteristics, amenities and services. Some can and do live isolated from others, in remote places, largely self-sufficient, content with contact with only a few neighbors and an occasional foray into a village or town. Many lived such lives on the island of Ireland only several generations ago. Now most live in close proximity to others, often many others, sharing land and space for public purposes. Contemporary life is complex and complicated and getting pleasure out of our communal life can be difficult.

If we want that communal life to offer the most opportunities and pleasures, we need to engage with planning and development efforts. Leaving these efforts to others assures that private vested interests, centered on financial or commercial advantages for a few, will control the process and we may well not like what comes out of such a process. Just look around at what happened during the last several decades as a result of a process dominated by developers and people who made money off chaotic and unsustainable residential and commercial developments. See “Booms, Busts, Ghosts and NAMA: Irish Planning at its Worst,” in the Reports section of irish environment.

Local citizen participation in the planning process is critical. Many have criticized the domination of planning and politics by “localism, cronyism and clientelism,” so we need to be very clear about what kind of “local” participation is helpful. There is a constant struggle by local interests that want to see development that sustains public resources and benefits serving the community against local interests that want to develop land because there is money to be made for the local landowners, the developers of that land, local auctioneers and solicitors who participate in the transactions, and even local authorities that earn income from development rights for infrastructure and other public purposes.

In this article we will explore some of the failures of local authorities in the planning arena and how local participation, or citizen activism, needs to exert influence over the local authorities. To document this issue, we will look at recent reports by An Taisce and An Bord Pleanála, an academic paper on regional planning, and a High Court decision. Another view of local participation can be found in the video interview with Gerry Crilly of Dunleer, County Louth in the current Podcast section of irish environment.

An Bord Pleanála

Some of the more contentious planning disputes are appealed to An Bord Pleanála and the scope and results of its work give us a clue as to the source of some of the planning problems.

At the beginning of 2009 the Bord had on hand 2,636 cases, it received 3,786 new cases, and determined 5,090 cases in 2009. In 2009 the number of oral hearing requests in relation to normal planning appeals was 74 and the number of hearings held was 13. Normal planning appeals arise from decisions by planning authorities on applications for permission for the development of land. Such appeals accounted for 91% of the intake of cases in 2009. This workload was handled by 159 staff members, which represents the average number of staff employed during 2009 (down from 167 in 2008).

Nine percent of local authorities planning decisions were appealed to the Board, and 34% of local planning authority decisions appealed were reversed, about the same as in 2008. Dun Laoghaire/Rathdown (18.8%), Dublin City (18.3%), Fingal (15.2%) had the highest levels of decisions appealed. Areas with the highest rate of appealed decisions overturned by the Board were Donegal (59.5%), Roscommon (53.3%) and Longford (48.0%) while those with the lowest rate of appealed decisions overturned were Cork City (22.0%), North Tipperary (26.0%) and Waterford City (26.9%).

The higher numbers of appeals come from the areas where, it can be assumed, the prices of and profits from developments are the highest, and so the high stakes make the appeal process worthwhile. The higher numbers of reversals come from border regions where the planning process may fairly to be said to be dominated by “localism, cronyism and clientelism.” These statistics on the source of many unsustained planning decisions reinforce other recent studies. See “Booms, Busts, Ghosts and NAMA: Irish Planning at its Worst,” in the Reports section of irish environment.

Since January 2007 and the commencement of the relevant provisions of the Planning and Development (Strategic Infrastructure) Act 2006, the Board became the planning consent authority for strategic infrastructure projects in the energy, transport and environmental areas (whether promoted by the public or private sector), including rail transport, gas pipelines and electricity generation and transmission. It also became responsible for determining applications for compulsory acquisition relating to gas, airport and railway projects. Certain local authority development applications and
associated compulsory acquisition cases also became classified as strategic infrastructure in the 2006 Act.

Six of the eight strategic infrastructural projects submitted for approval under the Planning and Development (Strategic Infrastructure) Act 2006 were approved, and 2 refused approval. For an assessment of the different roles of the Bord on normal planning appeals and on appeals for strategic infrastructural projects, see the Interview with Ian Lumley, Heritage Officer of An Taisce in the Podcast section of irish environment.

During 2009, High Court judicial review proceedings arising from the Bord’s decisions and procedures in relation to appeals and other matters were instituted in 16 cases. Leave applications for judicial review were refused in 5 cases. In 2009 High Court Judgments were given in 14 substantive cases, 12 of which went in favour of the Board and 2 against. In addition the Board consented to the quashing of one of its orders where a procedural defect was identified.

High Court Case of McMahon vs. An Bord Pleanála

An example of a recent High Court decision that supported rational sustainable planning is McMahon vs. An Bord Pleanála (December 2010). In that case, An Bord Pleanála overturned Galway County Council’s grant of planning permission for a 31-house development outside Kinvara town. The housing estate was to be located on a blind curve on the main road to Ballyvaughan and the Burren area within a 100 km per hour speed zone. The project also in effect extended the boundaries of the town. The Board ruled that the project was contrary to proper planning and sustainable development of the area, particularly because it would result in traffic hazards and risks to people, and because of the unplanned, unsustainable manner in which the town boundaries were extended.

In a well-reasoned and carefully thought-out opinion, Justice Peter Charleton first addressed a knotty procedural issue (whether the late submission of objections to the Bord was grounds for dismissing the appeal – it was not).1 The Court then upheld the substantive decision of the Bord overturning the County’s grant of planning permission. In very clear, forceful language Justice Charleton found that the local authority is bound to follow the well-grounded principles of proper planning and sustainable development that are embedded in statutory development plans, principles adopted to protect the “priceless heritage of generations of work within the countryside, as reflected in our landscape and in the separation of town from rural areas.” The Court noted that the environment that the planning codes are designed to foster and protect is an invaluable economic resource, especially for tourism. This aim of the planning codes serves as counterweight to the constant claim by developers that they bring jobs and economic benefits through their developments. The Court held that the decision of the Board rightly rejected the planning permission on grounds of the traffic hazards and unplanned extension of the town in an important tourist area.

Indicating that it “was very difficult to understand” the County’s approval for such a development, Justice Charleton concluded that under the Planning and Development Acts, An Bord Pleanála is an appeal body and that “the reasoning of its decisions should be studied at local authority level.” It can only be hoped that not only the Bord’s decision in this case will be granted precedential effect, but so will Justice Charleton’s opinion. So as not to suggest that the Bord always gets it right, see An Taisce v. Ireland & Ors, [2010] IEHC 415 (25 November 2010) where Justice Charleton quashed the planning permission issued by An Bord Pleanála for continued use of a quarry in County Monaghan.

“Dublin 2026, the Future Urban Environment.”

In a special edition, the Journal of Irish Urban Studies (December 2010) has published a series of articles entitled “Dublin 2026, the Future Urban Environment.” The articles focus on the urban environmental implications of planning in the Greater Dublin Area with particular emphasis on the interrelationships between planning policy and development trajectories in the region. One of the articles, by Dr. Brendan Williams, Cormac Walsh and Ian Boyle, investigates the land use and growth pattern that is emerging in the Greater Dublin Area, relying extensively on economic and social statistical evidence. The authors argue that strategic decision-making on development issues needs to made at the functional regional level if national development policies are to be effectively achieved. A Functional Urban Region (FUR) is defined as “the geographic space appropriate for the comparison of economic development in urban areas,” a concept that grows out of the concentration or clustering of economies and competition in a geographical setting. The article makes clear that despite the plethora of development policies and guidance — National Spatial Strategy, Regional Planning Guidelines, National Sustainable Development Strategy, National Development Plan, and others — there has been a lack of serious implementation and support at local level for any coordinated development strategy. Rather development is proceeding in a random, inefficient pattern with little consideration of the existence of social amenities, and decisions by local authorities are approving developments that conflict, sharply at times, with regional planning guidelines. Lobbying from landowners at local level has more influence than planning policies, there has been corruption in the planning process, and we witness the triumph of “individual or local benefits over the general public good” as a result of such “advocacy-based planning decisions.”

After analysing smart or managed growth versus unmanaged or dispersed development in the GDA, the authors conclude the urban regional market of Dublin and similar cities has expanded beyond traditional city and county boundaries with residences, employment, investment and development of all kinds now regional in nature rather than local. The authors urge administrative agencies to acknowledge this reality in their planning and development organizational structures. The authors conclude that “What is needed … is a more robust implementation of the ‘rules’,” and a doing away with the “divergence between rational policymaking and how it is interpreted on the ground. “

An Taisce

An Taisce-The National Trust for Ireland has published This Place Matters, an important, and smartly titled, report that provides A Guide to Public Participation in the Development Plan Process (2010). It both encourages citizen activism and shows ways for being active in the planning process. As one of the important voices raised against unsustainable development over decades, it is always worth listening to An Taisce.

With changes in the Planning and Development Act between 2000 and 2010, in large part as a result of European Union legislation and rulings from the European Court of Justice, the Guide notes that “the general content of development plans has moved from simple development management (i.e. the regulation of land use) to environmental management (i.e. a more holistic ecosystem management approach.” A host of environmental policies and regulations have come to influence development plans, including Strategic Environmental Assessments, Habitats Directive Assessments, Strategic Flood Risk Assessments, and others. The business of formulating and implementing development plans has become a complicated process that requires experienced and professional guidance.

An Taisce explains clearly how and when development plans are put together and why it is critical to participate in the formation of these plans. Since planning permission does, or should, require that the proposed project comply with national, regional and local development plans, it is crucial that those plans reflect the views and interests of the community at large and not just the narrow vested interests of developers and those who profit off commercial developments.

Analysis of the key issues that need to be addressed so that any plans fulfill the goal of “proper planning and sustainable development” is provided. Those issues include energy scarcity and climate change, economic transformation and sustainable employment, reversing car dependency and implementing sustainable transportation objectives, protecting and improving water resources, halting biodiversity loss, and social integration and quality of life.

The Guide also offers a way to review and understand what a development plan is and what it attempts to do. The Guide helpfully explains when people can make submissions to the local authorities, what kinds of information should be included, and even the format of the submission (e.g., provide brief bullet points as an executive summary of the submission, which can be cut-and-pasted by the county planners for their report for the local councilors). It also urges people to engage in lobbying of local councilors who are responsible for decisions, both for adopting plans and granting planning permission. We can be assured that the local landowners, developers and others pushing for private interests have lobbied and will continue to lobby those councilors.

As the Guide notes, the policies embedded in sustainable planning laws unfortunately have not been put to practice in the field by local authorities.

Conclusion

Based on these recent analyses, local planning authorities have largely ignored national, regional and local plans in considering planning permission applications. An Bord Pleanála overturned a third of local authority planning decisions, including over 50% of decisions from some counties.

The clear consistent message is that the national and regional sustainable development plans, as well as other environmental protection policies and procedures, must function as prerequisites for any local plans and planning permissions. To the extent that An Bord Pleanála, and the courts, require adherence, even strict adherence, to national, regional and local development plans as a prerequisite for planning permission, it becomes increasingly important for everyone to participate in the formation of those development plans.

A consensus is forming about what happened to undermine the Irish planning process, and what corrections are needed. The unsettled issue is how these reforms are going to reach the local authorities. How do we provide the financial and other resources to educate, train and professionalise the planning staff at the local level, as well as the local councilors who have the final say on plans and applications, at least initially.

In the meantime, we must rely on the likes on An Taisce and people like Gerry Crilly in Dunleer to protect our environment, and hope that An Bord Pleanála and the courts do the same.

1 The objectors filed their submission to the County Council late but the County sent a formal acknowledgement of the submission to the objectors. When the objectors filed an appeal to the Bord, they noted that they had filed a submission that was acknowledged by the Council, a prerequisite for their appeal. Justice Charleton held that the Board considered the appeal requirements at their face value, including that a County-acknowledged submission had been made by Notice Parties, and the Bord need not, indeed could not, look beyond that facial validity to question whether it was timely or untimely.

Robert Emmet Hernan, Publisher, irish environment

Resources:

An Bord Pleanála, Annual Report 2009. http://www.pleanala.ie/publications/index.htm

McMahon vs. An Bord Pleanála [2010] IEHC 431 (08 December 2010).

Dr. Brendan Williams, Cormac Walsh, Ian Boyle, “The Development of the Functional Urban Region of Dublin: Implications for Regional Development Markets and Planning, Journal of Irish Urban Studies (December 2010).
http://www.uep.ie/news/researchpubs.htm

An Taisce-The National Trust for Ireland, This Place Matters: A Guide to Public Participation in the Development Plan Process (2010). http://www.antaisce.org/developmentplans/PlanningToolKit/Resources/tabid/679/language/en-US/Default.aspx

An Taisce’s website for communities and planning process http://www.antaisce.ie/Default.aspx?alias=www.antaisce.ie/developmentplans

See, “Natural Wealth Accounts”, “Landscape Character Assessment”, “One-Off Housing”, “Smart Growth”, and “Urban Sprawl” entries in the iePEDIA section of irish environment

See, “Booms, Busts, Ghosts and NAMA: Irish Planning at its Worst”, and “Biodiversity and Planning: Developing Connectivity for Sustainability: Irish Biodiversity Forum and Northern Ireland Biodiversity Group’, in the Reports section of irish environment

See the interviews in the Podcast section of irish environment with Frank McDonald, Environment Editor, The Irish Times; Malcolm Noonan, Green Party Mayor of Kilkenny; Frank Convery, Chairman, Comhar Sustainable Development Council; Ian Lumley, Heritage Officer, An Taisce The National Trust for Ireland; Dr. John Barry, Reader in School of Politics, International Studies and Philosophy, Queens University Belfast, Northern Ireland; and Gerry Crilly, National Council, An Taisce (current issue).

EEA, Climate change "mitigation impossible" without transport

Wed, 1 Dec 2010 13:20:10 -0500

As the source of substantial and rapidly growing greenhouse gas emissions, transport must clearly be part of a global agreement to mitigate climate change. In its current form, however, the Kyoto Protocol ignores the international maritime and aviation sectors. The omission is perhaps not surprising — after all, setting up a system to allocate international transport’s emissions to individual countries is no easy task. But it is a significant flaw, since the two sectors together account for around a quarter of all transport emissions.

Despite its shortcomings, the COP-15 climate summit in December 2009 succeeded in bringing transport closer to climate mitigation discussions. Almost all participants recognised that international transport emissions need to be addressed as part of broader efforts to mitigate climate change. Consequently, the relevant United Nations bodies — the International Maritime Organization and the International Civil Aviation Organization — were asked to work towards an agreement on reducing emissions.

The EU is acting on transport emissions

The European Union is likewise adamant about tackling emissions from all forms of transport. Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso has made it clear that decarbonising transport is a priority for his second term. Similarly, the new Commissioner for Climate Action, Connie Hedegaard, has stressed the importance of developing a low-carbon strategy for transport.

Climate mitigation has thus moved to the heart of transport policy and indeed to the heart of EU policy. Scientists talk about the need for a 50 % reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and 80–95 % reductions on the part of developed countries. And transport will clearly have to contribute. Today the sector accounts for around one quarter of all EU emissions, so we can only meet these long-term emissions targets if we reduce emissions from the transport sector.

Emission trading for transport?

The scale of transport’s GHG emissions clearly demands a policy response. Transport is generally not exposed to international competition, meaning that a trip from Paris to Poznan cannot be replaced by one from Singapore to Sidney. There is therefore no real risk of ‘carbon leakage’ with emissions that are regulated in Europe simply moving abroad. This, in principle, makes transport a good candidate for emission trading as a means to regulate emissions.

Two other criteria should also be met before embarking on a trading scheme. First, the number of operators in the market must be limited in order to make the allocation of allowances manageable. Aviation meets this criterion and emission trading will start in coming years. Maritime transport could also meet this criterion but verification is more difficult because ships can carry fuel for longer periods of time than planes. Rail is already covered by emission trading as the electricity used is bought from a sector under emission trading. Road transport, however, cannot meet the ‘limited number of operators’ criterion as each driver is essentially an operator.

Second, the carbon price should be high enough to induce a change in behaviour. The current carbon prices would add less than 1 ¢ per kilometre to the cost of driving a car (less than 4 ¢ per litre of fuel). Compared to present fuel taxes it is insignificant and therefore unlikely to have any impact on behaviour.

Cleaner cars but more of them

Some issues have already been addressed. New passenger cars have been put on a trajectory towards emissions of 95 g CO2/km by 2020 — almost a 50 per cent cut compared to 1990. Unfortunately traffic levels are growing at around the same rate as average emissions are projected to fall, meaning that the net effect may still be far from what we need.

Initiatives exist to include vans and, with a longer time perspective, trucks into the emissions target. But without complementary measures there is still a risk that most improvements will be offset by the growth in traffic. Indeed, more efficient vehicles may lower transport costs in the long run, thereby increasing the demand for transport (a phenomenon known as ‘the rebound effect’). This process is already apparent in the airline industry. Half a century ago few could afford a vacation in Thailand but now it is available to a broad segment of society.

The changes that are needed are thus profound. Transport is an integral element of our lives and changes therefore affect us all. Small incremental adjustments may not be enough to deliver a shift away from a carbon-based paradigm. Instead, addressing the climate challenge requires us to create a vision of what the transport system should be like by the middle of the century, so that it can be debated. The process of establishing a new Common Transport Policy for the EU is essentially about creating this vision and then filling it out with policies that can deliver its goals. This will be the real challenge in creating a pathway towards a de-carbonised transport sector.

Reprinted from European Environmental Agency (16 Sep 2010)
http://www.eea.europa.eu/articles/climate-change-mitigation-impossible-without-transport

Cathy Maguire, Biodiversity and Ecosystems – Ireland’s Undervalued Economic Assets

Mon, 1 Nov 2010 14:39:02 -0400

What do we mean when we talk about biodiversity and what has it got to do with economic policy? Biodiversity is the diversity of all life on earth and includes species, habitats and ecosystems. Ecosystems provide a variety of services to us for free and these bring many benefits to society and the economy. There are four main categories: provisioning, such as the production of food and water; regulating, which includes the control of climate and disease; supporting, for example, nutrient cycling and crop pollination; and cultural, such as spiritual and recreational benefits.

So, yes, clearly biodiversity is important, but in these difficult economic times isn’t spending money on preserving biodiversity more of a luxury than a necessity? A question that can only be answered when we understand the real value of biodiversity and the role of biodiversity and ecosystems in supporting economic and social development. Biodiversity underpins the continued provision of ecosystem services so the loss of biodiversity affects our economy, society and future development opportunities. Because these ecosystem services are free, their value is often overlooked and not taken into account in economic decisions or policymaking.

Biodiversity and ecosystems are important economic assets as well as having an intrinsic value in their own right. They are our natural capital, and at the heart of the Government’s economic renewal plan – ‘Building Ireland’s Smart Economy’ – is a recognition that economic prosperity depends on maintaining and enhancing our assets – human, social, produced, financial and natural capital.(1) However, these fine words have not yet translated into action when it comes to recognising the value of biodiversity.

Relatively few things that we pay for have their wider social and environmental costs built into the price. This is changing with the introduction of a carbon levy and the alignment of vehicle taxes to carbon emissions that reflect their contribution to climate change. It took a report on the economics of climate change, the Stern Review, to put this issue right at the top of the agenda of politicians and policymakers.(2) Stern estimated that the costs of action to address climate change would be 1 per cent of global GDP each year, but the costs of not taking action would cost at least 5 per cent of global GDP. The review also highlighted the opportunities that shifting to a low-carbon economy would bring.

A recent global study, The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) aims to do the same thing, by building the evidence-base that clearly demonstrates the economic value of biodiversity and ecosystems, and providing tools that will enable this value to be factored into decisions in a way that hasn’t occurred before.

So when we talk about the economic value of biodiversity and ecosystems, what type of numbers are we talking about?

It is estimated that ecosystems deliver essential services worth between $21 trillion and up to $72 trillion a year, comparable to World Gross National Income in 2008 of $58 trillion.(3) But these huge numbers assume that we are deprived entirely of these services. From a policy point of view, it is more meaningful to see what’s happening at the margin, what are the values that we are losing year by year as we shrink our stock of natural capital.

Wetlands – half of which have been drained over the past century, often for agriculture – provide annual services of almost $7 trillion and forested wetlands treat more wastewater per unit of energy and have up to 22-fold higher costbenefit ratios than traditional sand filtration in treatment plants. Pollination from bees and other insects provides services boosting agricultural production worth at least $153 billion annually.(4)

Economic losses from degradation of ecosystems have also been estimated. The cumulative loss of land-based ecosystem services from 2000-2010 was estimated at $500 billion (5) and unsustainable fishing reduces potential fisheries output by an estimated $50 billion / year.(6) By 2050, loss of biodiversity under a business-as-usual scenario could cost up to 7 per cent of global GDP. These numbers are in the same ballpark as those in the Stern report, yet there is a long way to go before biodiversity loss gets the same political attention as climate change and other environmental challenges.

The TEEB study clearly demonstrates the value of ecosystems and biodiversity to the economy, to society and to individuals. It underlines the urgency of action, as well as the benefits and opportunities that will arise as a result of taking such action. The study shows that the cost of sustaining biodiversity and ecosystem services is lower than the cost of allowing biodiversity and ecosystem services to decline.

What do these global figures mean for Ireland? Isn’t the developing world more directly dependent on ecosystems? An estimate of the value of some ecosystem services was calculated for Ireland at €2.6 billion per annum (7) and this is a conservative value as some important services were not included. In Scotland, research showed that ecosystems protected by Natura 2000 sites provide three times more benefits than associated costs.(8) At a European level, it has been estimated that one in every six jobs is somehow dependent on the environment.(9)

So any plans for economic recovery that don’t recognise the value of nature are failing to put in place the long-term foundations for economic and social wellbeing, both here in Ireland and globally. Money talks, and without knowing the value of biodiversity, we are missing the signals and running down our natural capital. As the leader of the TEEB study Pavan Sukhdev said, “Economics is mere weaponry, its targets are ethical choices”. And, so, targeting biodiversity and ecosystems will enable economic valuation to be used to demonstrate that biodiversity is an asset that delivers benefits to the economy and wider society.

Many ecosystem services are public goods; therefore public policies have an important role to play. Understanding Ireland’s natural capital and the services it provides will help us make better decisions and ensure that we understand the trade-offs between biodiversity loss and short-term economic gains. The whole picture of benefits and costs needs to be appreciated and there are many ‘winwins’ to be had in taking action to preserve and enhance our natural capital as this will help us adapt to climate change, provide flood protection and enhance food security and water supplies.

While the focus of TEEB may be global the action needs to be local. We need to identify opportunities where public policy can respond and act. Ireland has committed to the publication of legislation on climate change and the bill intends to put in place the long-term framework that is needed to address the challenges and grasp the opportunities that transitioning to a low-carbon economy and society will bring. At global, European and national levels, we have yet to put in place or devise such a framework to address the loss of our natural capital. Ireland – as part of the EU – has committed to a new vision for biodiversity and a target “to halt the loss of biodiversity and the degradation of ecosystem services in the EU by 2020, and restoring them in so far as possible, and stepping up the European contribution to averting global biodiversity loss”. This is going to be extremely challenging and not least in the context of climate change. Ireland’s latest report on the implementation of the Habitats Directive showed that many of our most important habitats and species are reported to be in bad conservation status.

The TEEB study has identified a range of solutions; some of these are not new and are already used by Government albeit with different aims. The revised National Biodiversity Plan is due for publication later this year and this could put some of the actions that need to be taken in place, but not all and so we need to start thinking about this more strategically and making the link between natural capital and human well-being more explicit in our policy and decision-making.

We need to measure what we want to manage but – unlike economic and human capital – there are no dedicated systems for measuring, monitoring and reporting on natural capital. Our national accounting systems and indicators should reflect the value of nature and monitor how natural assets depreciate or grow in value. We need to address biodiversity losses through our regulatory framework, reform environmentally harmful subsidies, and develop ways of rewarding beneficial actions.

There are a number of upcoming opportunities such as the development of a Green Public Procurement Action Plan. This can help expand and realise the potential of purchasing power and contribute to greening markets for the benefit of biodiversity. The development of the National Climate Change Adaptation Framework also offers an opportunity to support investment in Green Infrastructure that will support and enhance our natural capital as well as supporting jobs.

Changing how we think about and value biodiversity and ecosystem services is a huge challenge; it will need creativity and vision. As for climate change, government can set the framework but it will take action at all levels of our society and economy to identify and deliver the solutions. At Comhar SDC, we hope that this is the beginning of that process and that the TEEB study will act as a catalyst to change our policy and practice. Otherwise, when the economic impacts from the loss of biodiversity and ecosystems begin to hit home, we may find ourselves mulling over the words of Benjamin Franklin: “I believe that the great part of miseries of mankind are brought upon them by false estimates they have made of the value of things”.

Dr. Cathy Maguire is Director of Research, Comhar Sustainable Development Council
Reprinted with permission from Comhar SDC.

Notes:

(1) Government of Ireland (2009), Building Ireland’s Smart Economy. A Framework to Sustainable Economic Renewal 2009-2014.
(2) Stern, N. (2007). The Economics of Climate Change – The Stern Review, Cambridge University Press.
(3) UNEP (2010) Dead planet, living planet: Biodiversity and ecosystem restoration for sustainable development.
(4) TEEB (2008) Interim Report (http://www.teebweb.org)
(5) TEEB (2008) Interim Report (http://www.teebweb.org)
(6) TEEB (2009) TEEB for policymakers.
(7) Bullock, C., Kretch, C. & Candon, E. (2008). The Economic and Social Aspects of Biodiversity Benefits and Costs of Biodiversity in Ireland. (http://www.npws.ie/en/media/NPWS/Publications/Biodiversity/Media,6432,en.pdf)
(8) Jacobs (2004) an Economic assessment of the costs and Benefits of Natura 2000 sites in Scotland. Final report. url: http://www.scotland.gov.uk/resource/doc/47251/0014580.pdf
(9) GHK, Cambridge Econometrics and Institute of European Environmental Policy (2007) links between the environment, economy and jobs. A report to DG Env of the European Commission. Brussels. (http://ec.europa.eu/environment/enveco/industry_employment/pdf/ghk_study_wider_links_report.pdf.

For additional information on biodiversity, see the interview with Dr. James Robinson, Director, Royal Society for the Protection of Birds NI in the November issue of irish environment, and the entry on “Biodiversity” in the iePEDIA section of irish environment.

Waste: Incineration and Mechanical Biological Treatment

Mon, 4 Oct 2010 11:56:23 -0400

In the current Reports section of this magazine, there is a report on “Landfilling: Waste Not, Want Not,” summarizing the state of landfilling in the Republic of Ireland. In this Articles section of the magazine, we re-print or link to several articles on ways of dealing with waste other than landfilling, or prior to landfilling residual material. Below are links to several studies prepared for the Republic of Ireland (RoI) EPA on Mechanical Biological Treatment and on incineration as part of Ireland’s waste management strategy. Reprinted below is a blog posting from a website on Zero Waste from the UK opposing incineration, as well as links to several other articles critical of incineration.

Mechanical Biological Treatment

Guinan, B. Kristiansen, T. Milton, D. "Critical Analysis of the Potential of Mechanical Biological Treatment for Irish waste Management". Associated datasets and digital information objects connected to this resource are available at: Secure Archive For Environmental Research Data (SAFER) managed by Environmental Protection Agency Ireland http://erc.epa.ie/safer/resource?id=d22d6f8a-217b-102c-b381-901ddd016b14

Prepared for the Environmental Protection Agency as part of the Science, Technology, Research and Innovation for the Environment (STRIVE) Programme 2007–2013. The programme is financed by the Irish Government under the National Development Plan 2007–2013.

Incineration

RoI EPA, Municipal Solid Waste Incineration as part of Ireland’s Integrated Waste Management Strategy (October 2004). This ten-page report is listed as being available on the RoI EPA website but can’t be found. If you type the title in a Google Search, you can get a copy of the pdf file from a website called www.start-int.info

Against incineration

August 15, 2008 in section: Uncategorized by Mr Green with 17,718 views

From http://myzerowaste.com/articles/against-incineration/ See webpage link for extended commentary on the article

Why waste incineration is wrong

Waste incineration is like controlling the population through euthanasia before birth control. It’s wrong because it’s trying to control the problem, before preventing the cause. Most wise people recognise that prevention is better than cure, so how can waste incineration be a viable option?

If we look deeper into the problem of production and consumer waste, we see that it’s a monster that has got out of control. We are producing so much and so fast, that slowing it down and reducing waste is not enough. We also need to get rid of it more efficiently and stop contaminating the environment by burying rubbish in the ground. Incineration answers the problem of reducing the bulk of waste by 95-96 %, depending upon composition and degree of recovery of materials. Incineration is therefore, at a superficial level, a viable solution.

The argument for incineration focuses on providing an immediate solution to reducing landfill waste burial and mitigates the toxic after effect by pointing to possible solutions for unwanted bi-products, such as reprocessing of leachate and gas scrubbing. The cost of post treatment like this is high and its effectiveness is uncertain for technical reasons. Some medical waste is in fact very suitable for incineration as the high temperatures reached are sufficient to sterilise the waste and remove the biological hazard. In addition, some incineration processes may be linked to power production by utilising the heat generated. Overall, there is undoubtedly a niche market for incineration, but not as a panacea to mass waste reduction.

Unfortunately, waste incineration comes with its own environmental problems, as well as technical issues and dubious cost effectiveness. Incinerators produce greenhouse gases like CO2, and also heavy metals, particulates, sulphur dioxide, acids, furan and dioxins. Although incineration may reduce the bulk of waste, by burning it away, the toxic by-products produced are no longer bound to stable materials and maybe freely released into the environment as gasses and leachate. Waste mass is reduced, but at a high cost of greater environmental pollution. The wider goal of reducing toxic contamination and sustaining environmental systems is ultimately defeated through incineration.

Taking a wider view of post consumer and post industrial waste reveals that the real root of the problem lies much further back and begins with the production of waste, as opposed to its disposal. That may seem obvious, but if so, why are we even contemplating the use of incinerators? Why don’t we grasp the nettle of responsibility and prevent the problem and stop taking reactive measures of dealing with the monster after it has escaped? If we project the waste problem into future generations, it’s clear that incineration can only be a temporary measure, or reserved for specialist waste disposal needs.

If the real issue is rooted in waste production, then the most effective prevention is to centre our resources on providing creative and legislative methods to reduce waste in the first place. This is the only route that will achieve sustainable waste reduction without incurring too many tricky caveats at the end of use. The counter argument against this approach suggests that while this maybe an ideal solution, it will take too much time to implement and we need an immediate relief to landfill waste. Many UK regions calculate that we have only a few years left of available landfill space and that we are already at a critical stage in dealing with waste disposal. This observation makes incineration attractive as a necessary evil that maybe inevitable, at least as a short term option.

It is true that it takes a long time to stop a moving freight train and that in order to avoid disaster it is tempting to divert it’s route rather than apply the brakes. The easy option is not always the best one and usually only offers short term solutions. We do have to take immediate action, but incineration is an easy diversion that leads us later up a siding with nowhere to go. The answer is to make large and immediate investment into prevention and not cure. This way ahead is not unusual and has already been adopted by other countries like New Zealand and parts of Canada. They have turned the prevention of waste and residual recycling into a business opportunity, seeing waste that can’t be factored out of manufacturing as resource material for new production. Not only good for the environment, but also good for industry. This ‘closed loop’ approach regards waste as the result of a failure to realise a reuse possibility for any materials. If something cannot be reused, it becomes more costly because it has no residual post production or post consumer recycling value.

No producer wants to raise costs and if they can recover materials for reuse this is an incentive for cleaner greener production methods. To make such systems work there needs to be organised and effective recovery systems, both in manufacturing and also post consumer recycling. These are the areas that we must focus on here in the United Kingdom to initiate a sea-change of attitudes both in industry, marketing and consumer habits.

Where do we go with this? The goal of MyZeroWaste.com is to demonstrate that with a change in attitude and a small amount of commitment, an ordinary family can achieve a huge reduction in landfill waste in excess of 80% without much effort. This can be done with virtually no cost or outlay and relies solely on a ‘will’ to shop carefully, recycle responsibly and see waste as a resource. Our small model demonstrates a paradigm for change that is both easy to realise and accessible by ordinary people. If this model was proliferated across our region and country, we would see a reduction in landfill waste that would leave every other method almost redundant. We have gone from about 100 liters of weekly waste to an average of 150grams of waste, that is only due to lack of mixed plastics recycling facilities in our area. We joke that if everyone else produced as little waste as us, our village would only need a small transit van for landfill kerbside collection. Our waste bin has 6 weeks of unrecyclable plastic in it and it’s only half full. The main changes for us have been in an attitude of mindfulness and very little has changed to threaten our consumer enjoyment or lifestyle.

It can be argued that what we have demonstrated is a new skill, a new cultural shift that is required for a new generation facing new environmental problems. We still eat well, enjoy a little moderate spending and note only a small ‘down-shifting’ as a result of our recycling habits. The fact is that a small effort to prevent waste by an individual or family unit multiplied across a large area has a much greater effect than the reactive efforts to deal with waste once it’s produced. Surely that is a valuable key to revealing the way forward.

We advocate a ‘Greater awareness campaign’ as the primary thrust for waste reduction. The individual holds the key, whether that is a head of industry, politician, ordinary individual, or family household. Reach the individual on a mass scale and a vast change can be achieved with a self governing approach that removes the need for legislation or draconian measures. Even with limitations with kerbside collections and problems with mixed plastics recycling we have shown that huge reductions in landfill waste are possible, simply by adopting new habits and utilising the resources available.

Zero landfill waste is a distinct possibility, 75% - 90% reduction is a certainty, given an acceptance and commitment from the individual. Have our decision makers become too detached from the people that they can’t reach them. Or is that that local government is too occupied with popularity and vote securing? Maybe we see that waste freight train thundering along the tracks and think it’s simply too big and too fast to put the brakes on and that the only option left is to limit the damage and incinerate the evidence of our environmental crash.

See, also:

Friends of the Earth, Dirty Truths – incineration and climate change
http://www.foe.co.uk/cymru/english/press_releases/dirty_truth_incineration.html

Irish Doctors Environmental Association [IDEA] Incinerators and their Health Effects
http://www.ideaireland.org/incineratorsandhealth.htm

Dr. Dominic Hogg, A Changing Climate from energy from Waste? Final Report for Friends of the Earth by eunomia research & consulting ltd. (5 March 2006).

Michael Surgan and Caroline Cox, An Integrated Pest Management Dilemma: Pesticide Regulations Confound Efforts to Identify Least Toxic Products

Wed, 1 Sep 2010 08:12:09 -0400

In terms that are widely accepted, Integrated Pest Management (IPM) can be defined as an approach to economically manage pest damage with the least possible hazard to non-target species, the environment and property. As a practical matter, IPM programs seek to attain these goals by selecting non-pesticidal control and, when such controls are unavailable or insufficient, by selecting those chemical controls which pose the lowest risk of adverse effects.

The European Community’s interest in the development and implementation of Integrated Pest Management is not new, but dates back to the first European IPM task force – the “Working Group for Integrated Plant Protection in Fruit Orchards” which was established by the International Organisation for Biological and Integrated Control of Noxious Animals and Plants (IOBC) in 1959.

Today, the European Union is at an important junction in the evolution of pest management and pesticide regulation. Directive 2009/128/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 21 October 2009 (the Framework Directive) established a framework for action to achieve the “sustainable use” of agricultural pesticides. It states: “The application of general principles and crop and sector-specific guidelines with respect to integrated pest management by all farmers would result in a better targeted use of all available pest control measures, including pesticides. Therefore, it would contribute to a further reduction of the risks to human health and the environment and the dependency on the use of pesticides. Member States should promote low pesticide-input pest management, in particular integrated pest management, and establish the necessary conditions and measures for its implementation.”

The Framework Directive requires Member States to develop, and to submit by 14 December 2012, National Actions Plans describing how they ensure the implementation of the principles of integrated pest management, with priority given wherever possible to non-chemical methods of plant protection and pest and crop management. Member States are instructed to take all necessary measures to encourage professional users of pesticides to switch to practices and products with the lowest risk to human health and the environment among those available for the same pest problem.

To the extent that these National Action Plans will allow the use of pesticides, the Plans should provide for the means to accurately and reliably assess the risks attending the use of specific pesticide products and to compare the risks associated with the use of various alternative formulations. While the Framework Directive specifically addresses the use of pesticides in agriculture, the application of IPM principles in non-agricultural settings, such as the home and garden, schools and the workplace is also dependent upon comparison of risks associated with the use of various alternative pesticide products. Therein lies a significant problem.

Pesticide products, as they are available in the marketplace, are formulations of two general categories of ingredients. “Active” ingredients are those which are included for their direct action on the target pest. The active ingredients are formulated with additonal ingredients that serve in a variety of ways to enhance and / or preserve the efficacy of the active ingredients. In the European market, the latter ingredients are known by a variety of names, including “adjuvants,” “co-formulants” and “synergists.” In the US, they are “inert” or “other” ingredients. For ease of discussion, we refer to all of these non-active ingredients as “other ingredients.” “Other” ingredients generally comprise the bulk of pesticide products and in many formulations account for more than 99% of the formulation as marketed. Under current regulatory schemes “other” ingredients present a dilemma to those who would like to make meaningful assessments of the risks of pesticide use.

First, with few exceptions, the identities of the “other” ingredients are not disclosed on the product label nor are they otherwise readily available to the consumer, be that an agribusiness or a homeowner. In Ireland, package labeling regulations require the identification of only those “other” ingredients whose toxicity and concentration exceeds prescribed thresholds. In the US, Environmental Protection Agency regulations currently require label disclosure of a scant few chemicals based on their known toxicity but independent of their concentration in the formulation. The secrecy surrounding the composition of pesticide products is inconsistent with the ingredient information readily available to consumers on product labels of other formulated items such as processed foods, drugs, cosmetics, and personal care products.

Nondisclosure of the identity of “other” ingredients is a particular concern given mounting scientific evidence that many “other” ingredients may have significant adverse consequences for human health or the environment. “Other” ingredients can increase the ability of pesticide formulations to affect significant toxicologic end points, including developmental neurotoxicity, genotoxicity, and disruption of hormone function. They can also increase exposure by increasing dermal absorption, decreasing the efficacy of protective clothing, and increasing environmental mobility and persistence. “other” ingredients can increase the phytotoxicity of pesticide formulations as well as the toxicity to fish, amphibians, and microorganisms.

Research has also shown that commercial pesticide products (including both active and “other” ingredients) have effects that cannot be accurately predicted by using data about active ingredients alone. For example:
- A dicamba-containing herbicide caused three times more damage to ovary cells than did dicamba alone.
- Absorption through the skin of a permethrin-containing insecticide was 4 - 10 times greater than for permethrin alone.
- A glyphosate-containing herbicide was more toxic to a non-target aquatic plant (Lemna gibba) than was glyphosate alone.
- A permethrin-containing insecticide caused complete mortality of developing tadpoles at a concentration of 9 parts per billion; a similar concentration of permethrin alone did not cause mortality.
- Mortality of zebra finches following exposure to a fipronil-containing insecticide was caused by a solvent (diacetone alcohol) in the product rather than the active ingredient.
- An imidacloprid-containing insecticide caused twice as much mortality of Daphnia magna as did equivalent concentrations of imidacloprid alone.

Over the years a wide variety of tools have been developed to analyze the hazard and exposure characteristics of pesticides for various potential human health and environmental impacts. As a group, these tools are generally known as “Pesticide Risk Indicators” (PRI). PRIs vary in scope and format, and may consider impacts such as toxicity to humans, birds, fish or beneficial insects and pollution of surface waters, groundwater and air. In some instances, multiple impacts may be considered and an overall rating developed.

More than 100 PRIs have been developed worldwide and at least several are in widespread use in the European Union. They have been applied to prospective assessments of pesticide impacts, as in the design of pest management programs and the preparation of environmental regulations and environmental impact assessments, to monitoring the impacts of agriculture and pesticide policies, and in the evaluation of ongoing pest management programs. Pesticide Risk Indicators vary in the range and type of pesticide attributes they include in their analysis – some focus purely on toxicological risk, while others consider the transport and fate of the applied chemicals. Most PRIs aim to produce a simplified metric or ranking system to facilitate comparison of risks associated with pesticide use and to better inform product selection.

Given the secrecy surrounding the identity of “other” ingredients in pesticide formulations, it can be argued that PRIs cannot provide accurate and reliable assessments of the risks associated with specific pesticide products as they are available in the marketplace for sale and use. Although the identity of “other” ingredients is generally not available to anyone other than the manufacturer / formulator and the appropriate regulatory authorities, there are at least a few exceptions to this rule. In a few cases, the identity of one or more “other” ingredients in specific pesticide products sold in the US has been provided in Material Safety Data Sheets, in response to inquiries to the manufacturer and as a result of legal action. With our colleague, Madison Condon, we have compared the results of PRIs applied to some active ingredients with the results of the same assessment applied to “other” ingredients with which those active ingredients are formulated in actual pesticide products. The results are disturbing.

For example, one simple PRI, the Groundwater Ubiquity Score (GUS), is an indicator of the potential for groundwater contamination based on the carbon adsorptivity (KOC) and soil half-life (DT50) of chemicals assessed. Data for those properties are available for many chemicals and enable a straightforward comparison of several pesticide active ingredients and the “other” ingredients with which they have been formulated. Based on the quantitative assessment, GUS assigns chemicals to one of 3 categories: non-leacher, transitional or leacher. In Table 1 below, the GUS evaluation of the herbicides Glyphosate, Imazapyr, 2,4-D and Alachlor are compared to the results for several “other” ingredients with which they have been formulated in some pesticide products.

In the cases of Glyphosate and Alachlor, “other” ingredients prove to be a greater threat to groundwater than the active ingredients with which they are formulated. In these instances, a GUS analysis of the active ingredient alone, as is generally done, would provide a deceptively favorable assessment for the formulated pesticide product. The analyses for Glyphosate products show that an assessment for one formulation cannot be taken to reflect the impacts of a different product with the same active ingredient. Some glyphosate products have contained POEA but not 1,2-benzisothiazolin-3-one while other products contained both. The assessment must be product specific and must consider all ingredients in the product.

A more complex PRI, the Environmental Impact Quotient, factors the physical, chemical and toxicological properties (human, avian, fish and beneficial arthropod species) of pesticide active to derive separate Farmworker, Consumer and Ecology scores as well as a Total EIQ score for specific active ingredients. Like the GUS analysis, the score is derived for the active ingredient alone, regardless of the “other” ingredients with which it may be formulated. This total score can then be multiplied by the pesticide’s application rate to determine an EIQ Field Use Rating. The EIQ is particularly user-friendly; scores are calculated and published for individual active ingredients. The user simply consults a table to obtain the score for an active ingredient of interest. The potential for adverse effects varies with the EIQ.

Using data available for some of the “other” ingredients found in formulation with Glyphosate, Imazapyr and 2,4-D we determined their EIQs using the same calculations as the original authors used for the active ingredients. (See Table 2.) We were unable to calculate EIQs for each of the “other” ingredients that had been identified due to a lack of published data on their environmental and toxicological properties.

It is clear from these analyses that each of the “other” ingredients has a greater potential (higher score) to cause adverse health impacts to farm workers than their co-formulated active ingredients. POEA also has a higher “Ecology Score” than glyphosate, the active ingredient with which it is formulated. While the “Consumer Score” for the “other” ingredients was the same or lower than the “Consumer Score” for their co-formulated active ingredients, the “Total Score” for the “other” ingredients is consistently greater than that of their co-formulated active ingredients. Used as intended, the published EIQ scores may not fairly represent the potential adverse health and environmental impacts of formulated products containing the specified active ingredients.

The laws and regulations which currently enable pesticide registrants to maintain secrecy in regard to the “other” ingredients in pesticide products are, in large part, beyond the control of the research community which has developed the PRIs, beyond the control of professional risk assessors and beyond the control of the non-scientific communities which may depend on PRI evaluations to determine pest management policies and practices. Without full public disclosure of the identity of all ingredients formulated in pesticide products, active and “other” ingredients alike, accurate and reliable risk assessments will not be possible. Without a means to compare risks, there is little basis to select the lowest impact pesticide decisions that are at the heart of any IPM program.

With National Action Plans due to be submitted in just over 2 years, now is the time for action. Steps should be taken to revise existing pesticide regulations, as they apply to both agricultural and non-agricultural pesticide products, to insure full public disclosure of all ingredients. Ideally, that information should be available to the consumer prior to the time of purchase, on the package label. Litigation and/or legislation may be required to force such full disclosure. In the US, the Environmental Protection Agency has undertaken a rulemaking process to consider options for increasing the public disclosure of inert ingredients. That process was initiated in response to petitions submitted by the Attorneys General of several states and by a large number of citizens’ advocacy groups.

In addition to full disclosure of the identity of “other” ingredients, it may also be necessary to expand the data required from pesticide registrants to assure that they adequately characterize the physical, chemical and toxicological properties of “other” ingredients and of the formulated products. Much of this data is not currently required by the pesticide registration process. If such information were available it would be a relatively simple matter to modify PRIs. Until such time as that information is available, PRIs should be used with extreme caution and with full disclosure of their limitations. The selection of non-pesticidal control methods remains the most certain means of assuring the lowest potential for adverse effects.

Michael Surgan retired after 28 years of service as the Chief Scientist at the New York State Attorney General’s Environmental Protection Bureau.

Caroline Cox is the Research Director for the Center for Environmental Health in Oakland, California.

Further Reading:

Cox, C. and M. Surgan, 2006. Unidentified Inert Ingredients in Pesticides: Implications for Human and Environmental Health. Environmental Health Perspectives 114(12):1803 - 1806.

Surgan, MH, M. Condon and C. Cox, 2010. Pesticide Risk Indicators: Unidentified Inert Ingredients Compromise Their Integrity and Utility. Environmental Management 45:834–841.

United States Environmental Protection Agency, Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, Public Availability of Identities of Inert Ingredients in Pesticides. Fed Reg 74(245), December 23, 2009. Available at http://edocket.access.gpo.gov/2009/E9-30408.htm.

John FitzGerald, Environmental Challenges for Ireland

Wed, 4 Aug 2010 08:03:06 -0400

When Frank Convery, then working in the ESRI, began research on environmental economics a quarter a century ago, this was very much a “new” area of research, one which attracted little attention from policy-makers and the wider community. By contrast, today key issues of environmental policy have moved closer to central stage in debate. Nonetheless, much more needs to be done as progress on tackling our environmental problems has been slow, and in some cases we have actually gone backwards.

One of the lessons from economic research is that using market mechanisms, such as taxation, to produce behavioural change is likely to have the most enduring (and least cost) impact on human behaviour. The EU Commission in the early 1990s proposed a tax on greenhouse gas emissions (and energy) in order to tackle the long-term problem of global warming. If such a tax had been introduced as proposed twenty years ago we would see the benefits today. Firstly, it would have encouraged us all to work harder to reduce our emissions. Secondly, and probably more important in the long run, it would have told the world that research into reducing greenhouse gas emissions would be profitable. While fuel switching and energy efficiency can and should make a valuable contribution to reducing emissions, the development of carbon free technologies will hold out the key to long-term sustainability. While governments can and do finance research, experience has shown that the most effective stimulus to R&D in this field is the prospect of future profitability.

Experience with the oil crises of the 1970s showed that they stimulated major research into energy efficiency. This research paid off handsomely in the mid 1980s, ironically at the same time as the oil price collapsed. However, once new technology was invented it was impossible to “forget it”, even if it proved to be less profitable than expected. For the future policy needs to hold out a good prospect that carbon saving or carbon free technologies will be profitable in the future. For this to happen policies need to hold out a certain prospect that the price of carbon in the future will be significantly higher than they are today. Widespread adoption of carbon taxes would achieve this. It is for this reason that economists favour the taxation route to dealing with the problem of global warming.

The advantage of using taxation is that the revenue accruing to governments can be used for other good purposes – welfare payments or cutting other taxes. The research done by colleagues suggests that the costs of tackling global warming in Ireland will fall disproportionately on the poor. Without the revenue from the environmental taxes will governments provide the increased welfare payments and other expenditures to insulate (literally) the poor?

One alternative to taxation currently being implemented on a limited scale is to effectively give ownership of some of the environment to individual companies. This can achieve the desired effect of reducing pollution. However, it is both economically much less efficient and also, at least for me, offensive to make the shareholders in certain companies richer by allowing them to effectively sell the environment.

An interesting example of the inferiority of other methods of signalling to people how to be good is the case of “food miles”. Just because food has travelled a long distance does not make it more environmentally damaging. For example, if we grow strawberries or tomatoes in greenhouses in Ireland heated by gas this may be much more polluting than growing them in Spain and driving them to Ireland, or even growing them in the open in Ethiopia and flying them to Europe. If consumers had to consider the food miles of all their purchases, as well as the price, shopping might never get done. Instead if governments put the correct price on all fuel then we will know that if we buy the cheapest tomatoes they are also the most environmentally friendly. Blind adherence to a “food miles” philosophy could also seriously damage some of the poorest countries in the world, such as Ethiopia.

The lessons from economic research also show that progress will be slow. This partly reflects the need to develop new technologies to meet our needs in a sustainable manner. It also reflects the fact that sustainability will require major investment – for example, in new types of cars and in new types of electricity generating technology. Even once the new technologies are developed, putting in place the new investment can take at least a generation.

The need to invest today so that our children and grandchildren will reap the benefits makes environmental policy-making a very different challenge than other policy areas, where problems are immediate and solutions can be expected within a few years. However, the fact that progress will be slow is not a reason to give up. Rather we need to redouble our efforts if progress is to happen at all. If we had acted on global warming in the early 1990s by introducing suitable taxes, as early policy research had suggested, we would today see the difference. Instead the threat of global warming has increased as policy initiatives have been endlessly delayed. Failure to implement good policy today could further delay the essential progress by another 20 years.

Promising too much or aiming too high too soon could discredit the policy changes that are essential to protect and develop our environment. What is needed is a realistic approach which accepts the need for some short-term pain in the interest of achieving very long-term benefits. There needs to be more concentration on doing something real through implementing policy changes that may hurt a little today rather than setting endless targets for the future, which have no current cost, and where no means of making sure that they are attained are implemented.

Over the last few years there has been extensive rhetoric about the benefits of a green economy. While jobs are welcome, and under present circumstances in very short supply, the objective of environmental policy should be to tackle the key environmental problems facing Ireland at minimum cost. Digging holes (metaphorically) and filling them in again, while creating jobs, would not be welfare improving. It would also not be sustainable in an economic sense. Jobs in industries or businesses which produce “green” goods and services will be welcome if they are profitable. However, the rhetoric of green jobs may sometimes ignore reality. The Irish economy does not have a comparative advantage in mechanical engineering. Thus it seems unlikely that we will ever create substantial jobs in firms making machines to generate electricity from wave, ocean or air. Where Ireland does appear to have a comparative advantage is in software engineering – so that control systems may be an area where we will see new business developing. However, for any such jobs to be economically sustainable they must be profitable. For any such businesses to be environmentally desirable they must help minimise the costs of meeting our environmental objectives.

Agriculture in Ireland is one of the major producers of greenhouse gases. Apart from the problem of global warming, it is also one of the major sources of pollution, especially of water pollution. As a result, if policy makers are serious they need to address the question as to how the environmental footprint of agriculture can be minimised.

While one of the cheapest ways of reducing Ireland’s greenhouse gas emissions would be to get rid of all of our cattle this would be neither optimal from an environmental point of view or from an economic point of view. As Ireland has a comparative advantage in livestock production, shutting off that outlet for Irish agriculture would merely see the relocation of such activity to other countries where the environmental impact would be even more negative. It is only if there were a simultaneous fall in world demand for livestock products that such a solution would see a reduction in worldwide emissions. Even then it would prove economically inefficient.

However, just because Ireland may have a comparative advantage in producing livestock products does not mean that policy should favour their production over other uses for the land. Over the last 20 years the CAP has done just that. For the future farmers should be encouraged to produce the crops that are most profitable. If these should prove to be energy crops, such as biomass for heating, then there would be a simultaneous reduction in Irish greenhouse gas emissions. However, provided that carbon emissions are appropriately priced this should be left to market forces to determine.

Where action is needed, possibly through tax measures, is the area of water pollution. As this is Ireland’s greatest domestic environmental problem it is important for our future welfare that it is tackled seriously over the next few years. While this may well involve tax measures, it also will require regulatory action. Regulatory action will be more appropriate where the impact of emissions on the environment depends on the absorptive capacity of the receiving waters. For example, where pollution from a particular farm is damaging a river or a lake, taxing that pollution is too complex an approach. It is better just to set a limit on the acceptable emissions and then legally enforce that limit.

Finally, there are crucial environmental problems, other than global warming, where benefits are likely to be reaped in a more medium-term time scale. For example, Ireland faces a serious water pollution problem and I have just discussed the role of agriculture as a source of that pollution. However, tackling other sources of water pollution will require major further capital investment if we are to make serious progress.
The current economic crisis is posing a challenge for all environmental improvements which require large-scale investment. This applies in the case of investment in renewable electricity but it also applies to the sphere of water pollution. Funding the necessary environmental investment in the future will be a much greater challenge and involve greater cost than was envisaged even three or four years ago, because of the effects of the current economic crisis on the cost of capital.

If serious progress is to be made on tackling water pollution we need to consider how to fund the necessary investment at least cost; otherwise the investment may not happen or may be delayed. In the case of investment in water infrastructure what is needed is a new water utility with responsibility for all Irish water infrastructure. Such a utility should mirror the responsibilities of ESB and Eirgrid for the electricity network and BGE for the Gas network. (Maybe one of these utilities might end up also performing the role for water). To allow such a utility to work, just as in the case of electricity or gas, it would need its own independent income stream from user charges. It would also need an initial equity investment by its owner – the people of Ireland. Once such an income stream were established, guaranteed, and regulated by an independent regulatory authority, it could then borrow independently of the state, just as happens with the energy utilities. This would free the funding of investment to tackle water pollution from the currently very tight constraints on public funding. (It would also reduce government borrowing and the national debt as conventionally defined.)

A new water utility, with well defined objectives, should be able to deliver the necessary investment and maintenance of the water infrastructure at much lower cost than the current plethora of local authorities that have responsibilities in the area. Running costs should be reduced through a reduction in employment and an increase in productivity. Such productivity gains have been realised elsewhere where independent utilities have clear responsibility for water services. Even more important, the independence of the utility from current constraints should allow the essential objective of cleaning up our environment to be achieved more rapidly and at lower cost than will happen if we maintain the current approach to tackling the problem.

John FitzGerald, The Economic and Social Research Institute, Dublin.

The article is based on a talk by the author at a public lecture on Ireland’s Sustainable Future, sponsored by the Irish Environmental Protection Agency on 22 June 2010

Andrew L.R. Jackson, The Emerald Isle? Ireland’s environmental compliance record in cross-EU terms

Tue, 1 Jun 2010 09:23:18 -0400

Introduction

Resigning from the Seanad and the Green Party Parliamentary Party in February 2010, Déirdre de Búrca offered a stark assessment of the Green Party’s time in government: “we have gradually abandoned our political values and our integrity and in many respects have become no more than an extension of the Fianna Fáil party” (de Búrca 2010a). Party leader, and Minister for the Environment, John Gormley has done a disservice to the Greens, Ms. de Búrca argued, having presided over a party that has lost its way (de Búrca 2010a).

Much of the subsequent fallout focused on an alleged personal motivation for Ms. de Búrca’s resignation: that is, her failure to secure a promised position in the cabinet of Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, Fianna Fáil’s favoured - and subsequently appointed - candidate for the (independent!) role of European Commissioner (de Búrca 2010b). However, in the face of this political distraction, little has been said of the substance of Ms. de Búrca’s argument, which nevertheless deserves some attention. In brief, can it justifiably be argued that the Green Party has, in any objective sense, lost its way during its first spell in power? Evidence would suggest that it can.

Ireland’s environmental record
The Green Party’s entry into coalition government in May 2007 unsurprisingly raised expectations that Ireland’s environmental reputation might be rejuvenated on the international stage. However, figures recently released by the European Commission regarding compliance with EU environmental law reveal that Ireland's record has got worse, not better, during the coalition government’s time in office.

To understand the figures, a bit of background is required: breaking EU environmental law can have legal consequences in two stages. At the first stage, under Article 258 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) (ex Article 226 of the EC Treaty), the European Commission can refer the infringing Member State to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) in Luxembourg, which gives its judgment regarding whether or not a breach of EU environmental law has occurred. Ireland has been found in breach many times at this stage.

The second stage, under Article 260 TFEU (ex Article 228 of the EC Treaty), arises only if the Member State fails to comply with the ECJ’s judgment. It ends with the European Commission applying to the ECJ for a second time, this time asking that a fine be imposed on the Member State for failing to comply with the ECJ’s earlier judgment. While proceedings at the second stage are relatively common (European Commission 2010), they only very rarely result in a fine, since in most cases the Member State in question complies before a fine can be imposed.

Indeed, there have been only nine fines imposed under this provision in the history of the EU, across all sectors of EU policy (Greece 4; France 3; Spain 1; Portugal 1). That said, all of these fines have been imposed since 2000, six of the nine have been imposed since 2006, and four have been imposed since December 2008 alone, so the European Commission is undoubtedly making growing use of its power to request a fine from the ECJ. Further, the prospect and potential level of fines certainly concentrates minds in government: e.g. in 2005, France was fined a lump sum of EUR 20 million, plus EUR 57.7 million for each 6 months of continuing non-compliance with a judgment of the ECJ (Case C-304/02).

Notwithstanding a popular misconception to the contrary (perpetuated even by the Law Society’s Law Reform Committee (2008, at p.13), which should clearly know better), Ireland has never been fined for breaking EU law, though this now seems only a matter of time. Indeed, based on the figures recently released by the European Commission (European Commission 2010) - covering the period to the end of 2009 - the three worst offenders in terms of ongoing environmental infringement cases were: Spain (40 cases), Italy (35 cases), and Ireland (34 cases) (Figure 1). These three countries effectively form a breakaway group, their nearest rivals being the Czech Republic, France, and the UK, each on 26 cases (Figure 1). Focusing only on cases at the second stage (proceedings for fines in environmental cases), Ireland fares even worse, the top (or bottom) three being: Ireland (14 cases), Italy (9 cases) and Greece (8 cases) (Figure 2).

Figure 1: Total number of EU environmental infringement proceedings (under Articles 258 and 260 TFEU) open against each EU Member State as at the end of 2007 and 2009. Member States ranked from highest number of open cases to lowest using the figures for 2009. Based on European Commission 2008 and European Commission 2010.

Figure 2: Number of EU environmental infringement proceedings open under Article 260 TFEU (proceedings for fines to enforce earlier ECJ judgment) against EU Member States as at the end of 2007 and 2009. Member States ranked from highest number of open cases to lowest using the figures for 2009. Based on European Commission 2008 and European Commission 2010.

In other words, of the 27 EU Member States, not only did Ireland have the third highest total number of EU environmental cases to defend at the end of 2009, it was the worst performer by some distance in terms of meeting its obligations after a breach had been confirmed by the ECJ.

Given Ireland’s relative size, these figures are staggering. As the European Commission points out, Germany and Ireland are two exceptions to the general rule that larger Member States typically have a larger caseload, the former having many fewer cases than one would expect, the latter many more (European Commission 2010). But more worrying than the bare statistics is the year-on-year trend. For the period to the end of 2007 - shortly after the Fianna Fáil/Green Party coalition came to power - Ireland was dealing with 34 environmental infringement cases overall (still 34 at the end of 2009), and 10 cases at the second stage (14 cases at the end of 2009, 12 now). In contrast, most of the other generally poor environmental performers have improved their positions over the same period. Italy, for example, has cut its overall caseload from 60 cases at the end of 2007 to 35 cases at the end of 2009; at the second stage (proceedings for fines), its caseload has halved from 18 cases to 9 over the same period.

Potential explanatory factors
Statistics do not tell the full story, of course. The number of cases open against a given country might, as the European Commission highlights, “depend on many different factors such as the level of pro-activeness of local environmental groups and citizens” (European Commission 2010). However, given the tiny NGO sector in Ireland (Irish Environmental Network 2010), it seems unlikely that a difference in environmental pro-activeness explains, for example, why Ireland - a country with less than half Sweden’s population (CIA 2010) - has more than three times that country’s environmental caseload overall, and fourteen times its caseload at the second stage.
The second potential factor cited by the Commission – “how likely [local environmental groups and citizens] are to approach the European Commission with their concerns rather than maybe turning to their national authorities or courts” (European Commission 2010) - seems a better explanation. Indeed, access to justice at the national level is one of the key problems for NGOs and others seeking to improve the environmental situation in Ireland (Ewing et al. 2008).

Access to justice
So what has the government done in this area? In 1998 Ireland signed the UNECE’s Aarhus Convention, a groundbreaking international agreement on access to information, public participation in decision-making, and access to justice in environmental matters, described by former President Mary Robinson as “a key signpost for the future of human rights and the environment in all parts of the world” (Robinson 2001). Not in Ireland, apparently. Twelve years after signing the Convention, Ireland has still to ratify (such that the Convention has not come into force here), leaving Ireland as the only EU Member State in this position (UNECE 2009).
This failure to ratify has not, of course, prevented the Convention’s entry into force elsewhere, but it nevertheless raises serious questions about the government’s commitment to transparency and environmental protection. A promise in the renewed Programme for Government to “ensure that Ireland can ratify the Aarhus Convention by March 2010” (RPG 2009) seems merely the most recent in a long line of such promises.

Two potential explanations for the government’s tardiness present themselves. First, it might be argued that ratification is unnecessary, as the EU has adopted legislation to implement parts of the Convention (European Commission 2009), which Ireland has in turn taken certain steps to transpose (e.g. see the European Communities (Access to Information on the Environment) Regulations 2007 (S.I. 133 of 2007)). However, there are major acknowledged gaps in the EU’s implementation (e.g. there is no directive on access to justice (European Commission 2009)), and the Convention contains a standalone compliance mechanism, which is highly unusual in an international environmental agreement. Ratification would therefore be anything but a redundant step. Second, the government might argue that it wants to ensure that Irish legislation complies with the Convention before ratifying. To this there are two responses. First, after twelve years and with no sign of ratification in sight, just how long is a process of ensuring compliance supposed to take? And second, the Convention provides for a grace period of 12 months from ratification before allegations of breaches can be considered by the Convention’s Compliance Committee, thus giving the government (additional) time to bring Irish legislation into line (UNECE 2004).

Conclusion
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that non-compliance with environmental obligations is a systemic problem in Ireland. Internationally, the government risks characterisation as an environmental Will-o’-the-wisp: happy to sign up to agreements, but less happy to comply when push comes to shove. Having inherited a toxic legacy of environmental breaches, which typically take years to work their way through the EU’s legal enforcement regime (Krämer 2006, 2008), and sharing power with the environmentally recalcitrant Fianna Fáil, the Green Party cannot be held solely to blame for this, of course. Nonetheless, during three years in power, in terms of compliance with its international obligations, the government has moved sideways then back, like an ill-fated sidewinder, trapped in reverse. Most worryingly, even with a Green Minister for the Environment, Ireland has lost ground in addressing its infringement record. Our first EU fine is looming, which may not be pleasing news to an already hard-pressed tax-payer, particularly in the midst of a recession.

Notes
1. In an interview with Village Magazine in March 2010, Minister Gormley stated “that’s not true – we had 33 [ongoing cases] and now we have 28 or 29 – so it’s reduced.” (Inside the mind of John Gormley, Village, published online on 9 March 2010: http://www.theormond.ie/villagemagazine/index.php/2010/03/inside-the-mind-of-john-gormley/.) However, this is not borne out by the European Commission’s official statistics, as detailed below.
2. Cases C-387/97 (Greece), C-278/01 (Spain), C-304/02 (France), C-177/04 (France), C-70/06 (Portugal), C-121/07 (France), C-109/08 (Greece), C-568-07 (Greece), C-369/07 (Greece). In addition, ECJ decisions on two applications for fines are pending: Cases C-407/09 (Greece) and C-496/09 (Italy).
3. This has recently fallen to 12 cases, following the Commission’s closure of two cases in March 2010: see Press Release IP/10/313 of 18 March 2010: http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/10/313&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en. Nevertheless, Ireland still has the highest number of ongoing proceedings for fines under Art. 260 TFEU.
4. See note 3.

References

CIA (2010). CIA World Factbook. Ireland: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ei.html; Sweden: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/sw.html

DE BÚRCA (2010a) Letter of Resignation from Senator de Búrca to Party Leader John Gormley (12 February 2010). http://www.deirdredeburca.ie/2010/02/letter-of-resignation-from-senator-de-burca-to-party-leader-john-gormley/

DE BÚRCA (2010b). Putting the record straight (15 February 2010). http://www.deirdredeburca.ie/2010/02/putting-the-record-straight/

EUROPEAN COMMISSION (2008). Statistics on environmental infringements. Formerly available at http://ec.europa.eu/environment/legal/law/statistics.htm, which has since been updated as European Commission (2010). The relevant figures for 2007 are available from the European Commission, DG Environment.

EUROPEAN COMMISSION (2009). The Aarhus Convention. http://ec.europa.eu/environment/aarhus/

EUROPEAN COMMISSION (2010). Statistics on environmental infringements. http://ec.europa.eu/environment/legal/law/statistics.htm

EWING, M., HOUGH, A. and AMAJIRIONWU, M. (2008). Assessing Access To Information, Participation, and Justice In Environmental Decision-Making in Ireland. http://www.environmentaldemocracy.ie/pdf/finalreport.pdf

IRISH ENVIRONMENTAL NETWORK 2010. List of Member Organisations. http://www.ien.ie/?page_id=31

KRÄMER, L. (2006). Statistics on Environmental Judgments by the EC Court of Justice. Journal of Environmental Law 18(3): 407-421.

KRÄMER, L. (2008). Environmental judgements by the Court of Justice and their duration. Research Papers in Law, No. 4/2008. College of Europe, Bruges. http://www.coleurop.be/file/content/studyprogrammes/law/studyprog/pdf/researchpaper4_2008.pdf

LAW SOCIETY’S LAW REFORM COMMITTEE (2008). Enforcement of Environmental Law: the Case for Reform. http://www.lawsociety.ie/Documents/committees/lawreform/Envir%20Report.pdf

RPG (2009). Renewed Programme for Government (10 October 2009). http://www.taoiseach.gov.ie/eng/Publications/Publications_2009/Renewed_Programme_for_Government,_October_2009.pdf

UNECE (2004). Paragraph 18 of the Annex to Decision I/7 Review of Compliance, adopted at the first meeting of the Parties held in Lucca, Italy, on 21-23 October 2002. http://www.unece.org/env/pp/documents/mop1/ece.mp.pp.2.add.8.e.pdf

UNECE (2009). Status of ratification. http://www.unece.org/env/pp/ratification.htm

--------------------
Andrew L.R. Jackson (jacksoa1@tcd.ie) Friends of the Irish Environment/ Department of Geography, TCD An earlier version of this article appeared in Atlas (2010), TCD’s annual Geographical Journal.

Tony Lowes, Remote Sensing: A Tool for Enforcing EU Environmental Law

Wed, 5 May 2010 18:18:54 -0400

REMOTE SENSING
A TOOL FOR ENFORCING EU ENVIRONMENTAL LAW
GOOGLE, CORINE, LANDSAT, SPOT, GEOEYE AND LIDAR

This presentation reviews the implications of the work undertaken for Friends of the Irish Environment in UCC’s Department of Geography and Coastal and Marine Resources Centre’s Draft Report on ‘the Use of Remote Sensing to Evaluate the potential of Identifying Exposed and Vegetated Peatlands in Ireland in the context of the developing science of Earth Observation.

May I suggest that I am uniquely qualified to speak today about Remote Sensing – or Earth Observation [EO] – as one of the few human beings to have seen the very first satellite, Sputnik 1, hours before it plunged to a fiery death on 4 January, 1958.

I was a schoolboy in northern New York State and our inspired science teacher had made the school part of the International Geophysical Year ‘Moonwatch’. This was a network of 200 observation posts across the world that were trained to observe the early satellites in what was then described as ‘the largest single scientific undertaking in history’. My school mates had before my time ground the lens and made the telescopes.

We were the ones who got to freeze in the pre-dawn practices; I can remember crying from the pain trying to defrost my hands in the bathroom one early dawn. But of the contingent of boys on duty that night, it was my scope that the bright little satellite chose to pass through.

50 odd years on, I have become involved in EO through Friends of the Irish Environment because we needed it for environmental monitoring. What I propose to try and outline today is why we needed remote sensing and what we have discovered about this tool.

Why our NGO needed remote sensing
FIE was alerted to the wide scale extraction of peat adjacent to the River Inny in County Westmeath by a contact operating through an anonymous internet address. This is a sample of the photographs he sent us.

We were also informed that the scale of these operations was even greater than that shown, involved several counties, various operators (we subsequently found these included cross-border interests and Anglo Irish Bank). These operations are part of a wide scale export of peat for wholesale horticulture to the south of England and Holland, and as a sorbent for industrial spills to Mozambique, South Africa. Michael Martin described the product as ‘environmentally friendly’ in a trade mission to Africa.

We visited the site.

We saw pumps exiting directly into the River Inny with peat-laden waters.

We wrote to all local authorities in Ireland, asking for their records of peat extraction. There were virtually none. The Senior Executive Officer of Leitrim County Council spoke for them all when he informed us that planning ‘exemptions are very generous. A site of less than 10 hectares is exempt and a site larger than 10 hectares is exempt if work had begun prior to the coming into force of the Exempt Development Regulations 2001.’ The Leitrim SEO continued: ‘The Planning Authority does not have, not is it required to have, any records of the amount of peat extracted in the County. Neither does it have any details of the areas wherein peat extraction, by way of exempt development, is being undertaken.’

We were reminded of the terms of the ECJ judgment delivered in 1999 under the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) Directive: “Ireland has not denied that no project for the extraction of peat, covered by point 2(a) of Annex II to the Directive, has been the subject of an impact assessment, although small-scale peat extraction has been mechanised, industrialised and considerably intensified, resulting in the unremitting loss of areas of bog of nature conservation importance. [C-392/96]”

It was perhaps this judgment that led to the inclusion of 'related drainage' in the definition of peat extraction in the 2001 Regulations. Under S.I. no 538 of 2001 a new or extended area of over 30 hectares requires an EIA if it is may have significant impacts on a Natura 2000 site, alone or in combination with other activities. IPPC Licences require an EIA if the activity involves a new or extended area of over 50 hectares. A Discharge Licence also requires appropriate assessment in these circumstances. Cumulative impact must be considered.

In addition to adverse impacts on listed interests for nature conservation, extraction of peat and the consequent siltation of water with its dissolved organic carbon can be the cause of public health problems in potable water supplies.

We suspected from Google Earth that we should be able to identify peatlands with ongoing extraction. Here is this landscape from Google Earth

Would remote sensing technology enable us to create a map of the amount of peat being extracted in each County – the exposed peatlands of Ireland? We prevailed upon Dr. Fiona Cawkwell and her colleagues who undertook to produce a national scale map of exposed peatlands with a greater scale regional study.

Freely available imagery from LANDSAT was to be used for the first, and SPOT [the French Systeme Pour l’Observation de la Terre] imagery was to be sourced with an educational discount, giving higher resolution for the second.

There is a huge amount of satellite data in Ireland. Vast stocks of satellite images are held by Local Authorities relating to planning and EIAs – often in boxes marked ‘hard drives 2002’. The EPA, the OPW, the GSI, the National Biodiversity Centre, the NPWS, Teagasc, and semi states like Coillte, Bord na Mona and the ESB all hold geoinformatics data.

Thirteen of the 20 third-level institutions have schools or Departments holding geoinformatics information. These come under a variety of headings - civil engineering, chemical and life sciences, geography, botany, geology, and environment. At UCD, no less than 5 schools, 2 departments, 1 institute and 1 research group all hold geoinformatics, with DIT Spatial Planning including ‘spatial data research.’

The data is sourced from a variety of satellites which vary in the sensors they carry and the width of the swatch they cover. Additional images are sourced from aerial photography. Laser-based contour mapping is becoming more common, with a new Irish national survey recently announced. These systems, also known as LIDAR, are based on a downward-pointing laser placed on an aircraft. Because of its three dimensional image it is alone amongst the remote sensors in being able to distinguish between hand-cut, milled, and uncut bog surfaces.

Landsat – which we used - would be familiar to most people as it formed the basis of Google Earth. Its base imagery is 30m and it is multispectral - various raw bands provide different data. However, Google is actively replacing this base imagery with higher resolution datasets based on 2.5m SPOT imagery.

Each of the satellites offers different resolution and spectrum, from Landsat’s 30 metres [Landsat also has 15m data] to SPOT’s combination of 10m and 5m down to more specialised and expensive very high resolutions. Each higher resolution is not only more expensive per image but means the swathes are narrower resulting in more images and costs in processing and classification.

Satellites that provide higher resolution may have to be balanced against more limited multispectral bands. In our case only SPOT images within the summer growth months provided sufficient clarity to distinguish between the characteristic plant communities because of the limited bands compared to LANDSAT.

But the most significant problem in using satellite observation for environmental monitoring in Ireland is cloud cover. Cloud, cloud shadows, and simply the moisture in the air can distort the information. LANDSAT shuts down the camera when there is more than 5% cloud cover.

An analysis of the Landsat images of the Boora area in the years 1990 – 1996 showed that there were less than two cloud free scenes per year acquired by Landsat. If the need for the images is in the summer when the vegetative differences are most pronounced and vegetative discrimination easiest, the availability of suitable images is further reduced.

It will sadly come as no surprise that there were no cloud free images over the past three Irish summers that could be used for our map. The necessary 8 images had to be sourced over a three-year period 2003 – 2006 and all from different seasons.

Then, there is the way the information is digitally processed to show what you want. CORINE - the EU land use map - for example, does not distinguish between exposed peat and vegetated peat, although it holds the data to do so.

The EPA is currently running a pilot programme that seeks to recreate Fosset’s Habitats of Ireland using ‘Definies’ image segmentation software as a classification tool, a rule-based classification process with software that uses homogenous groups of pixels to form landscape units. This project is using three sets of imagery from different growth seasons as this is the best way of differentiating between different plant communities. Plant communities show different characteristics at different times of the year, so two communities that look quite similar in spring can be differentiated by looking at their characteristics in Autumn, for example.

Digital image processing provides an objective and repeatable way of ‘training’ through the creation of rule-sets based on spectral characteristics. But it is not so easy: a land cover training data set developed for one of our map’s eight original segments could not be applied to another segment as the season was different. ‘Post processing’ or ‘cleaning’ and ‘cloud masks’ can further clarify images.

Two key factors are currently holding back the use of EO in environmental monitoring.

This first is the limited number of GIS trained graduates capable of assessing the various sources of remote data, selecting and operating the most appropriate software, and producing final images that are fit to purpose and presenting them, when necessary, to judges and juries in language they can trust.

The second is the cost and availability of the data.

There is no common searchable database covering all major suppliers at this time. A 10-year international initiative has begun in Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS). At the moment, potential users have to access individual distributor’s warehouses and these are not designed with non-technical people in mind. Nor do they archive all data – some contain only images distributors think people will buy, favouring cities over rural areas. Some are only vaguely dated.

On the other side, NASA's globe software and Landsat are works created by an agency of the United States government and as such are in the public domain at the moment of creation. The GeoEye Foundation provides commercial satellite imagery to students and faculty at select educational institutions and it also offers select imagery to support non-governmental institutions in their missions of humanitarian support.

Unfortunately, the cost of much of this data in Ireland is set at commercial rates by the Ordinance Survey Office while in the United Kingdom recent advances have made much of this data more freely available.

The best quality spatial data on river and stream systems in Ireland, for example, is that held by the EPA. It is based on river lines collected by OSI, with some improvements and a large amount of added attribution. Due to this, this data can only be given to holders of a license for the OSI Discovery Series vector water lines data.

Even with the data obtained, the legal basis for its use is only now evolving.

EO is emerging slowly in legislation and guidelines around the world. Ray Purdy is undoubtedly the world’s expert on EO and the law. He draws attention to New South Wales, Australia, where illegal vegetative clearance was a serious issue. Since EO’s entry into legislation ten years ago, there have been dozens of prosecutions; an official told Purdy that ‘without satellite imagery to target potentially unlawful clearing and use as evidence there would be little if any vegetative compliance in Queensland.’

The Environmental Law of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has now authorized the use of satellite remote sensing to ‘conduct the analysis, comparison and verification of environmental pollution sources and deterioration’. ‘Remote sensing shall be used as a surveillance tool to detect polluters and to substantiate liability claims’. An environmental monitoring programme, initiated last month, covers all four environmental domains “land – air – coast - marine”.

Malaysia officials are preparing amendments to their legislation to allow the use of EO in Court as a result of their success with the targeted enforcement strategy of the Malaysia Forestry Department. They recently contracted with SPOT for weekly images of sensitive areas (those with high potential for forest clearing). These are sent to a ground receiving centre, processed within six hours, and the data then placed in their database which is linked to the department. To access any information, the department accesses the database and calls up the specific page to check if logging carried out in that area is legal. Until the legislation is enacted, Inspectors go down to the field to check and use their report as evidence in Court.

At the other extreme, the residents of Mumbai in India recently provided an example of the individual use of EO. After their complaint against encroachment in a mangrove area fell on deaf ears, the resident of the Dahisar suburbs of Mumbai in India collected money to buy before-and-after aerial images to prove their point and fight their case in court.

Forum member Dr S P Mathew is quoted in the Mumbai News as saying: “We approached the Indian Space Research Organisation, IIT-Mumbai, and even Google for images of the area, but were unsuccessful. Then, after six months of research, we found a US company called Mapmart which could provide high resolution images, and struck a deal for US $600. We think we’ll be the first in Mumbai to use such a method.”

Where EO is irreplaceable is with the monitoring of isolated regions and areas where for political or physical reasons access is difficult and its use by NGOs is advancing in addressing environmental exploitation, human rights abuse, and refugee conflicts.

Grasberg's Freeport mine in Irian Jaya (West Papua) is a strong contender for the worst case of environmental and human rights abuse of any mining project currently underway in the world. It comprises several delicate ecosystems - alpine meadow, wetland and mangrove forest - which make this environmental site world-renowned for its range and diversity of flora and fauna. This mine is the largest gold mine in the world and the third largest copper mine.

The recent deaths of two U.S. journalists and the West Papuan leader, Kelly Kwalik, in late December 2009 made access more difficult. Recently satellite data has been used to monitor rain forest "conversion" and land use planning. The level of detail allows for the monitoring of individual trucks (8 yd x 16 yd- width x length) and the ability to differentiate the operations of different types of mine machinery.

Multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) have been an encouraging sign of international commitment to protect the environment. But many international laws in fact lack compulsory inspection regimes (or standards for those inspections) or sufficient resources to ensure compliance.

These are obvious targets for EO. There is a basis in EU inspection regimes for farmers, which specify that farmer’s selected for audits require 80% ‘on the spot check by remote sensing’; the Commission spends €5 million a year acquiring images to deal with its 50 million land parcels.

EO evidence can be questioned on the basis of its credibility or reliability. Processing could conceivable add an element of hearsay. Audit trails might be sought. But in fact, the bull may already be in the yard in that satellites are being used for compliance monitoring and enforcement without, Purdy suggests, prescription under legislation.’

A further argument for expressly prescribing satellite monitoring by law is to ensure that its application does not interfere with a person’s private life under a country’s constitution or agreements like the European Convention on Human Rights.

Even without legal grounding, there is nothing to stop local authorities requiring high quality EO images of application sites and conditioning these to be updated annually. Nor has FIE yet met any barriers to the targeted enforcement strategy using EO that we are pursuing with our partners.

Chester Bowles perhaps provides the best rational for ‘the spy in the sky’ in writing about his years in public life as an American politician and diplomat:

‘20% of the regulated population will automatically comply with any regulation. 5% will try and evade it, and the remaining 75% will comply as long as they think the 5% will get caught and punished.’

NOTES

1. Draft report on ‘The Use of Remote Sensing to Evaluate the Potential of Identifying Exposed and Vegetated Peatlands in the Republic of Ireland’, Produced by Dr. F. Cawkwell, UCC; March 2010, for Friends of the Irish Environment, unpublished.

2. FIE is indebted to Ian Lumley, the Heritage Officer of An Taisce, who identified this trade and has pursued the issue doggedly. In particular, his success in preventing planning permission for extraction to be granted to permit the sale to Erin Horticulture of the NPWS-owned 80h Kilballyskea Bog in Shinrone, County Offally [ABP RF1078] is a case worth reading. The Department had been intending to use the largely degraded raised bog [‘unworthy of conservation’] to relocate displaced peat producers from bogs that were designated conservation areas in the locality. When this did not happen, they offered the bog for public sale. The Board refused inter allia because ‘The proposed development would adversely affect an Annex I habitat type: ‘degraded raised bog still capable of natural regeneration’. http://www.friendsoftheirishenvironment.net/cmsfiles/files/library/abp_r225687.pdf

3. Discharges licences are listed in part II of S.I. No. 94/1997:EUROPEAN COMMUNITIES (NATURAL HABITATS) REGULATIONS, 1997 as an ENACTMENT REFERRED TO IN REGULATION 32. Reg 32: (1) Where an operation or activity or an established activity to which an application for a licence or a revised licence or a review of a licence or revised licence, as appropriate, under any of the enactments set out in Part II of the Second Schedule applies is neither directly connected with nor necessary to the management of a European site but likely to have a significant effect thereon either individually or in a combination with other operations or activities or established activities a local authority, the Board or the Environmental Protection Agency shall ensure that an appropriate assessment of the environmental implications for the site in view of the site's conservation objectives is undertaken.

4. Bord na Mona is exempt from the provisions of the Water Pollution Acts, a fine example of parallel legislation over which FIE has protested to no avail. Section 27 of the Turf Development Act 1945 gives immunity to Bord na Mona’s operations from the Local Government (Water Pollution) Acts. The Minister is only required to take such measures to protect the environment if taking ‘such precautions and making such provisions will not cause substantial detriment to the works or substantial hindrance to, or substantial increase to the cost of, the works’.

5. Dissolved organic carbon reacts with chlorine to produce trihalomethanes, cancer-causing agents which were identified as a major problem in 51 of Irish drinking water supplies in 2007. [EPA, Drinking Water in Ireland 2007] Their removal requires separate treatment and costs that should be borne by the polluter, not the State.

6. The support of the Department of Environment’s Spatial Planning, and COMHAR, the National Sustainability Council, with encouragement from the National Biodiversity Centre, made the pilot project possible.

7.‘Existing Geo-informatics in the Republic of Ireland’, Rory Scarrott, for Friends of the Irish Environment, unpublished, 2010. http://www.friendsoftheirishenvironment.net/cmsfiles/files/library/geoinformatics_report.pdf

8. The Irish town of Westport was added to Google Earth in 3D on January 16, 2008. and is the first such model of an Irish town to be created. As it was developed initially to aid Local Government in carrying out their town planning functions it includes the highest resolution photo-realistic textures to be found anywhere in Google Earth. [Source: Google Earth.]

9. In this context Dr. Cawkwell notes in her conclusion to the FIE Report: ‘With additional funding it would be interesting to explore the potential of TerraSar-X imagery, the highest spatial resolution microwave images available and equivalent to the SPOT multispectral images used in this project. Being a microwave imager cloud cover would not be an issue, permitting a wider range of images to be suitable, and although unable to distinguish vegetation species the differences in backscatter between exposed, semivegetated and intact peat surfaces may be sufficient to identify regions of change on a more frequent basis than can be realistically anticipated from high resolution optical imagery.’ TerraSar-X is radar based, and so can operate independent of cloud cover and during the hours of darkness with a definition of up to 1m.

10. Jason Larkin, EPA, email, 01.07.09: IE-EPA-2008-GIS-FA Remote Sensing/01. ‘Suitability of a rule-based feature extraction and classification processing methods to a habitat mapping solution for a study area in Ireland.’

11. Free-gis-data.blogspot.com (2010) is an excellent site where you can find complete information about websites which provide free GIS, Remote Sensing, spatial and hydrology data as a service.’ Op cite. Existing Geo-informatics in the Republic of Ireland useful for monitoring landcover and landuse changes impacting on peat soils and water quality’

12. It was only after I submitted my title for this paper that the conference organiser, Owen McIntyre – and then a fellow contributor, Andrew Jackson - kindly sent me the recent paper by Ray Purdy, ‘Using Earth Observation Technologies for Better Regulatory Compliance and Enforcement of Environmental Laws’. See UCL FACULTY OF LAWS, Centre for Law and the Environment, http://www.ucl.ac.uk/laws/environment/index.shtml?research_main. Accessed 4 April, 2010.

13. http://jel.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/22/1/59

14.http://www.eomag.eu/articles/846/gaf-and-partners-start-satellite-based-environmental-monitoring-for-saudi-arabia

15.http://www.mumbaimirror.com/index.aspx?page=article&sectid=2&contentid=2010031020100310040110234a9ae6fa1. Mumbair Mirror March 10, 2010. Accessed 4 April, 2010

16. High Resolution Satellite Imagery for Monitoring Environmental and Climate Induced Change in Isolated Rural Communities, by Dr. Christopher Lavers , Britannia Royal Naval College http://www.directionsmag.com/article.php?article_id=3457, accessed 4 April, 2010.

17. To show how savings may be affected, Purdy quotes The British Potato Council which changed over largely to satellite observation, reducing their field staff from 92 to 16 and so saving €3 million per annum.

18. ‘Once a farmer has been selected for an on-the-spot check in accordance with paragraph 3, at least 80 % of the area for which he requests aid under aid schemes established in Titles III and IV of Regulation (EC) No 1782/2003 shall be subject to on-the-spot check by remote sensing’. Commission Regulation (EC) No 796/2004 of 21 April 2004, OJ 2004 L 141

19. Satellites – an new area for environmental compliance, Ray Purdy, 1996 http://www.ucl.ac.uk/laws/environment/satellites/docs/Rayscan003,%20JEEPLb.pdf [accessed 4 April 2010]

20. Chester Bowles, My Years in Public Life, 1974, quoted in Purdy, op cite. Purdy also quotes the 19th century English utopian Jeremy Bentham: ‘The more strictly we are watched the better we behave’.

Tony Lowes, Friends of the Irish Environment
The article is based on a presentation by Tony Lowes at Law and the Environment 2010, 8th Annual Conference, University College Cork in April 2010

Robert Emmet Hernan, Irish Carbon Tax: A Primer

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 10:55:20 -0400

The Problem

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has experienced some negative publicity of late — a few factual errors and some loose, exaggerated language contained in four major reports produced over 18 years by thousands of the most experienced scientists throughout the world. Despite the recent, valid criticisms, climate change is real, it’s here, and it’s going to create serious challenges for most countries. Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, that have increased significantly and that continue to increase, are a major driving force in creating the climate change conditions that put many at risk.

The EU has imposed targets for reducing GHG emissions on each of its members. Under the provisions of the EU Energy and Climate Change Package agreed in December 2008, Ireland is legally obliged to reduce its emissions by 20% (from a 2005 base) by 2020 in the following sectors – agriculture, residential, low intensity energy and commerce, transport and waste.

Efforts are focusing on how to control those GHG emissions, particularly the burning of fossil fuels — coal, peat, oil, gas — that generate carbon dioxide (CO2), a major component of GHG. A consensus among most scientists and policy makers has formed that CO2 generated from burning fossil fuels has to be reduced or the climate change impacts will become disastrous.

The challenge is how to reduce GHG emissions, particularly CO2 which accounts for about 70% of Ireland’s GHGs , when there is no cost associated with continuing or expanding these emissions. When oil gets scarce, and we continue to rely on it, the price rises. Not so when our natural resources, including air, water, land, are getting scarce, especially because of impacts from climate change. Actions to reduce emissions need to be rewarded and inaction or failing to reduce must cost a lot. This simple proposition is consistent with the polluter pays principle.

Most answers to the challenge include either a cap-and-trade system, implemented for example in the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) for certain industries, or a carbon tax. The Irish organization, FEASTA: The Foundation for Economic Sustainability, has proposed a variation which it calls a cap-and-share program where a cap on carbon is set and then each adult gets allocated a permit to generate a certain amount of carbon and any surplus can be sold by the individual adult to those individuals or businesses that need carbon credits. Here we’ll discuss only the carbon tax, including what to do with the revenue generated by a carbon tax as it is estimated that such a tax could produce about 500 million euros in revenue each year.

Context

The 2007-2012 Programme for Government for the Republic of Ireland (RoI) introduced a Carbon Budget that reports on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, measures progress in implementing the National Climate Change Strategy, and assesses the GHG emissions from any measure introduced in the Budget. The Programme also promised that “Appropriate fiscal instruments, including a carbon levy, will be phased in on a revenue-neutral basis over the lifetime of this Government.” In 2009, the government indicated its intention to include a Carbon Levy as part of the 2010 Budget process. Then the RoI Commission on Taxation Report 2009 proposed a carbon tax, along with other controversial measures such as a property tax and water charges. Finally, the RoI government has issued a Framework for Climate Change Bill 2010 setting forth the outlines of its plans for a Climate Change Act along the lines of the UK Climate Change Act of 2008. The Framework commits the government to giving the carbon budget process a statutory basis and to introducing in its Budget 2010 a carbon “levy” (apparently a tax for people who want to avoid the word “tax”). It indicates that the carbon levy will protect those most at risk from fuel poverty, improve the fuel efficiency of the housing stock, and reduce the tax burden on labour.

This article explores the nature and terms of carbon taxes so that the final provisions for a carbon levy in the RoI’s Climate Change Act can be evaluated as that Act unfolds in the legislative process. Throughout the discussion we will use the term “tax” rather than “levy” as it seems more direct and understandable to most people, however unpopular it might be. Focus will be on recent analyses and proposals from several organizations in the RoI.

The Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) Reports

The ESRI published two Working Papers on carbon tax in 2008 and explored some of the economic underpinnings and consequences of a carbon tax. Generally, the authors take the position that a carbon tax is probably the cheapest, fairest and easiest way to set a price on carbon, and theoretically reduce CO2 emissions, but extending the ETS to all emissions would also be acceptable although politically infeasible. Note 6 in the Report (see Sources below).

The carbon tax should be revenue-neutral and the tax should equal the futures price of tradable permits under the ETS. Tying the carbon tax to futures price for ETS permits makes it fair since every source would pay the same amount per emitted tonne of emissions.

Any carbon tax will generate substantial revenues and an important issue, especially for making the tax fair, is what to do with the revenues. Not many are in favor of letting those revenues go unattached into the general treasury. The authors of the ESRI reports reject ring-fencing or hypothecating the revenues for energy efficiency or other climate change projects. They acknowledge that such a tax will make energy more expensive, limiting business competitiveness (with non-Irish companies not paying such a tax) and reducing the amount of disposable income for households. These costs can be offset by use of the revenues either to distribute flat sums to each household or to reduce other taxes. In the June 2008 paper, the authors recommend applying 25% of the revenues to higher social welfare payments (for those who have no taxed income), 40% to lowering income taxes, and 35% for lowering pay-related social insurance (PRSI), benefiting businesses. These uses of the revenues, in the view of the authors, would stimulate the economy and compensate for any negative impact on the economy from the imposition of a tax, and do so much more efficiently and effectively than a lump sum payment to households (“a cheque in the post”).

Finally, the authors recognize that the carbon tax is mildly regressive, impacting more on lower income populations, and that fuel poverty is a major concern. The authors argue that the increase in benefits and reduction in income tax will offset this effect.

In a separate document, the Irish Rural Link (IRL) raises issues about the impact of any carbon tax on rural communities. IRL points out that rural household disposable income is already below that of urban counterparts, for example Donegal is 16.5% below the state average. The IRL is especially concerned that in the current economic recession there will be pressure on the government to impose the carbon tax but keep the revenues for the general budget without offsetting benefits and lower income taxes. In addition, IRL argues that public transportation and full implementation of the home insulation program in the rural areas are needed before any tax is levied. The ESRI authors point out that while the rural population likely will feel the effects of the tax more than urban households — rural houses are bigger, distances are longer and life is more car-dependent — the absolute differences are small, equaling less than one euro per household per week in the lower income levels.

Commission on Taxation Report 2009

In February 2008 the government established a Commission on Taxation to review the structure, efficiency and appropriateness of the Irish taxation system. The RoI Commission issued a report in July 2009 on a variety of tax matters including its analysis and proposal for a carbon tax, after consulting the ESRI and many other organizations and individuals.

The report proposes a tax on fossil fuels — peat, coal, oil, gas —based on tonnes of CO2 emitted by each fuel. The tax would apply only to energy products released for consumption in Ireland, and thus exclude products exported. Otherwise, Irish industry might be competitively disadvantaged with an extra carbon tax not imposed in other countries.

The Commission proposes that those businesses subject to the EU ETS scheme be exempted from the carbon tax. The price of the carbon tax would be aligned with the EU ETS permit prices, and set by reference to the carbon price for futures market for permits for the next calendar year. In this way, those subject to the EU ETS and those subject to the carbon tax will all incur the same cost as a market mechanism for driving down uses of carbon and emissions resulting from that usage. The Commission recommends that a floor, or minimum, price be set for carbon to provide certainty and stability and avoid the volatile prices seen with the ETS permit prices.

It is suggested that the tax be collected at the earliest point of supply and that the purpose of the tax be visible to people at the point of consumption so it is not seen as just another tax but as a means of inducing behavioral change. This last point, on the transparency of the tax, is informed by the experience with the plastic bag levy that dramatically reduced consumption of bags almost overnight from 328 bags per head to 21 per head.

The Commission expressed concern that vulnerable households from both urban and rural areas be cushioned from the effects of the tax, so as not to exacerbate the existing inequalities in income distribution. It supported the use of carbon tax revenues to fund energy efficiency incentives for business and households, in effect at least to some degree ring-fencing the revenues. This part of the proposal differs from the authors of the ESRI reports.

The Commission, also unlike the authors of the ESRI reports, suggests that some exemption from the carbon tax might be applied to companies that have already entered into negotiated energy-reduction agreements, e.g., with Sustainable Energy Ireland.

The Commission recommends that the carbon tax not be applied, at this time, to methane or nitrous oxide emissions, mainly associated with agriculture, because those emissions are too difficult to monitor, report, and verify. When they do become subject to such oversight, then it would be time to subject the methane and other emissions to the carbon tax.

The Commission accepts that the purpose of a carbon tax “is not to achieve a given level of emissions reductions,” but rather it is a “visible, concrete move in the right direction towards implementing Ireland’s climate change obligation.”

Elsewhere

Other EU countries that have implemented some form of a carbon or energy tax in the 1990s include Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands, Finland, Germany and the UK.

In the United States, much of the focus has been on cap-and-trade programs. Some states have already adopted such a system, as in the northeastern states Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI). Generally, the large, national US environmental organizations have supported a cap-and-trade approach primarily because they have made the judgment that a carbon tax is not a viable option in the present US political climate. Leading individual advocates for an aggressive approach to climate change tend to support the carbon tax, including James Hansen and Bill McKibben. In a recent exchange in the NY Times, Hansen argued for a carbon tax and against a cap-and-trade while Paul Krugman, a widely-respected economist, at least in Democratic and liberal circles, castigated Hansen for trashing the cap-and trade option. For Hansen, it’s a matter of timing: a cap-and-trade system takes about 10 years to negotiate and the process is so full of compromises it becomes ineffectual, whereas a direct tax can be globally effective in a short time, assuming there is the political will to impose a tax.

Very recently in the US, there may be a shift away from cap-and-trade in part because critics of climate change and of environmental protection efforts generally have successfully stimatised such programs as cap-and-tax, and in part because the cap-and-trade approach has gotten very complicated and subject to exploitation by special interests.

It seems that the choice of market fix is a matter not of economics but judgment about what is doable in a particular political environment.

Robert Emmet Hernan is head of Blue Stacks Productions Inc., the publisher of irish environment

Sources

Department of Environment, Heritage and Local Government, Framework for Climate Change Bill 2010 at http://www.environ.ie/en/Publications/Environment/Atmosphere/

Thomas Conefrey John D. FitzGerald, Laura Malaguzzi Valeri and Richard S.J. Tol, The Impact of a Carbon Tax on Economic Growth and Carbon Dioxide Emissions in Ireland (Economic and Social Research Institute, Working Paper # 251, August 2008). http://www.esri.ie/publications/search_for_a_working_pape/search_results/view/?id=2607

Richard S.J. Tol, Tim Callan, Thomas Conefrey, John D. Fitz Gerald, Seán Lyons, Laura Malaguzzi Valeri and Susan Scott, A Carbon Tax for Ireland (Economic and Social Research Institute, Working Paper # 246, June 2008).
http://www.esri.ie/publications/latest_publications/view/index.xml?id=2573

FEASTA’s cap-and-share proposal at http://www.capandshare.org/

Commission on Taxation Report 2009 at http://www.commissionontaxation.ie/Report.asp

Irish Rural Link, Ignoring Rural Realities: The Implications of a Carbon Tax For Rural Ireland (March 2009). http://www.irishrurallink.ie/
Carbon Tax Center (US) at http://www.carbontax.org/

Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), an initiative of the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic States of the U.S. http://www.rggi.org/home

James Hansen, “Cap and Fade,” Op-Ed Page, New York Times, December 7, 2009.

Paul Krugman, “Unhelpful Hansen,” Opinion, New York Times, December 7, 2009.

“‘Cap and Trade’ Loses Its Standing as Energy Policy of Choice,” New York Times, March 25, 2010.

Carbon Tax Center (US) at http://www.carbontax.org/

Uta Bellion, The urgently needed reform of the Common Fisheries Policy

Mon, 1 Mar 2010 12:58:07 -0500

European seas are emptying of valuable fish - more than 80 percent of assessed fish stocks in EU waters are overfished and 30 percent are outside safe biological limits. As a result, the fishing sector is suffering and fishing communities struggle to make a living. The long-term environmental consequences are yet to be determined. However all is not lost, as a recently launched reform of the EU’s Common Fisheries Policy is up for completion by 2012. Fish stocks can be rebuilt and the fishing sector can once again thrive, at least in the medium and long term.

Be warned though, this isn’t the first attempt at reform. The most recent occurred in 2002. The Commission then cited "dwindling fish stocks, diminishing catches, too many vessels chasing too few fish, steady job losses and a lack of effective control and sanctions" among the chronic problems facing European fisheries.

Five years after the 2002 reform, however, the European Court of Auditors still identified "poor profitability and steadily declining employment" in the fishing sector, and many of the problems observed then by the European Commission still plague the industry.

Because fisheries policy affects so many individuals and communities so deeply, it is essential that they participate in the discussion to get this reform right. Fortunately, in June 2009 environmental, social, consumer and development organisations across Europe came together to form a coalition, OCEAN2012, to widen the debate and seek the involvement of all stakeholders.

Severe overfishing is contributing to the size of fish populations falling far short of the capacity to harvest them. Indeed, overcapacity -- too many vessels, too much time to fish and fishing gear that removes too many fish from a population -- has plagued the industry for years. Shockingly, many EU Member States, rather than trying to limit this, are subsidising it even more. Efforts to curb capacity have been largely unsuccessful, as ever more advanced fishing technology continues to boost the capability, resulting in ongoing overfishing and illegal fishing.

Once fishing capacity has been restricted, access to fishing rights - who should be allowed to fish, where, when and how - becomes a pressing and political question. Currently decisions on the allocation of fishing rights are based on historic catches. Allocation should instead centre on a set of transparent criteria which encourage legal and less destructive fishing practices, low fuel consumption, greater employment, good working conditions and high quality products. This would create positive competition amongst fishers, with those who meet the criteria earning priority access.

In addition, the EU needs to collaborate still further with those developing countries with whom it has fisheries agreements. These agreements have so far not had “a significant impact on the fight against poverty and the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals” according to the EU Commission. A framework for sustainable fisheries management with effective control and enforcement in all waters, including those of developing countries where EU fishing vessels are active, is necessary to preserve the health of this shared resource. The EU needs to support this work with a range of incentives benefiting fishers and communities in developing countries and EU citizens.

However, the principal failure of the Common Fisheries Policy to maintain healthy fish populations results from structures for decision making that have simply proven counterproductive. Even very detailed management decisions are being made at the highest political level, influenced by short-term economic interest rather than guided by a vision of how to ensure long-term sustainable fisheries.

In recent years, catch limits set by the EU’s Council of Fisheries Ministers have exceeded scientific advice by an average of 48 percent, resulting in the severe overfishing of a number of valuable stocks. The Council of Ministers and the European Parliament must focus on the over-arching vision and objectives of the Common Fisheries Policy, leaving the detailed implementation to more appropriate, decentralised bodies.

Unlike previous reforms of the Common Fisheries Policy, this one must succeed if the crisis facing EU fish stocks and the fisheries sector is to be stemmed. There is clear evidence that continuous overfishing has resulted in less productive fisheries and job loss. Without enough fish, the EU's vibrant coastal communities will wither and fishers’ livelihoods will all but vanish. To get this reform right we need to involve everybody affected, not just those few parties who have a vested interest. The Common Fisheries Policy means too much, to too many Europeans, to be allowed to fail.

Uta Bellion is director of the Pew Environment Group's European Marine Programme

Seamus Burns, Futurescapes: a vision for large landscape-scale conservation in Northern Ireland

Mon, 1 Feb 2010 11:38:55 -0500

Introduction: What is Futurescapes?

The way we “do” nature conservation in Ireland and Britain is evolving. For the last century and more, the conservation of wildlife and the countryside depended greatly on the protection of areas of the landscape as nature reserves and protected areas. Over the last 10 years, progress has been made towards taking a much larger and ambitious step by implementing programmes that integrate the management of these areas into the wider landscape. This is known as the landscape-scale approach to nature conservation.

Futurescapes is the vision of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) for a large landscape-scale approach to achieving a thriving countryside. The approach will help wildlife build resilience to climate change. It involves managing or restoring important habitats and integrating the best wildlife sites into the wider countryside. All of this will be made possible by working in partnership with others to deliver sustainable land management.

Why large landscape-scale management?

The RSPB protects and manages a suite of nature reserves across Great Britain and Northern Ireland. We work with Governments to have our best areas protected as Areas of Special Scientific Interest (ASSI), and as Special Protection Areas / Special Areas of Conservation (SPA/SAC) under the Birds and Habitats directives and as Ramsar under the Convention on Wetlands of International Importance.

The Futurescapes programme builds on this work and focuses on the integration of protected areas into the management of the wider landscape, building on the network of nature reserves and the individual species interventions that the RSPB have made.

In 2001 the RSPB published a visionary document called “Futurescapes - Large scale habitat restoration for wildlife and people”. The programme has grown and evolved quit a bit since then with our understanding of climate change, its likely impacts on biodiversity, and how we must help wildlife to adapt.

One of the biggest drivers behind the landscape scale approach is helping biodiversity adapt to climate change. Sustainable land management across larger landscapes provides much more scope for species to build resilience to these changes and will have a greater capacity to accommodate species as they adjust to shifting climate space.

Climate change mitigation for wildlife

The Climatic Atlas of European Breeding Birds, produced by the RSPB and Durham University, predicts that many breeding bird species will shift their range north and northeast by several hundred kilometers as climate change happens. The Futurescapes programme takes account of this prediction, preparing for the future and building large-scale habitat restoration, re-creation, and management projects in partnership with others. Current project areas range is size from thousands of hectares to hundreds of square kilometres.

Restoring our most precious habitats

A report under Article 17 of the EU Habitats Directive issued in 2009 confirmed that 91% of threatened habitats in the UK are in unfavourable condition. This situation highlights how resources for tackling biodiversity declines have been too limited and implemented at far too small a scale.

The Northern Ireland Biodiversity Report 2009 states that the suite of protected sites here, though still requiring further designation and management work, cannot be regarded as “islands of biodiversity separate from the surrounding countryside” because of the pressures of wider changes in the countryside, including climate change-induced shifts in habitats and species.

The report supports the case that habitats and many species’ distributions are becoming fragmented, and that a new landscape-scale approach is needed that integrates the needs of farming and rural communities, site protection and habitat restoration.

The fact that protected areas are not enough on their own was recognised by the European Birds Directive some 30 years ago. The Birds Directive drew together measures both to protect and restore the places birds use to feed, live and breed.

The focus has perhaps been too often on the dramatic set-piece “battles” between development and conservation. There remains an urgent need to take action to create and restore a sufficient diversity of habitats throughout the fabric of the countryside recognised in Article 3 of the Birds Directive. If this is achieved, our wild bird populations can reverse their historic and ongoing declines to build healthy populations resilient and adaptable to future change.

Value of nature’s services

As well as providing a healthy landscape for birds and wildlife, the landscape-scale approach benefits people socially and economically. Such an approach is essentially about working with ecosystem services that provide major benefits for people. The landscape and the services provided include fuel, food, fibre, water and places to live, work and relax. Valuing ecosystem services is a first step in making a landscape-scale approach operational.

The next step is to establish the means of recognising or capturing these values in real, private and public sector decision-making processes. Nature provides a myriad of services that are not only essential for human life, but also enrich it. Conserving the landscape and the functions it provides often makes sound economic sense. Yet, in spite of this, ecosystems are destroyed and therefore their ability to deliver critical services, like flood mitigation, soil formation, water purification, and climate regulation.

A major advantage to developing projects on a larger scale is that this is a much more effective use of public money and the resources available, resulting in much larger and sustainable gains for biodiversity.

Case study: Cuilcagh Mountain, Co Fermanagh
An illustration of ecosystem services within a landscape can be found on the upland blanket bog of Cuilcagh Mountain, which straddles the international border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. This is one of the best and most extensive peatland areas on the island of Ireland.

In the late 1980s, the blanket bog suffered unsustainable pressure from peat extraction, overgrazing, uncontrolled burning of surface vegetation, and the damaging use of all-terrain vehicles. This damage reduced the bog's ability to retain water, resulting in flooding and abnormally high water levels in the caves downstream. This, in turn, reduced tourist activity at the Marble Arch caves, a major attraction in County Fermanagh with over 53,000 visitors in 2007.

In 1997, a project to protect the blanket bog in Northern Ireland and Scotland was funded by the European Commission. In Northern Ireland, the project was a partnership between the Fermanagh District Council and the RSPB. This led to the restoration of 28 hectares of cut-over blanket bog on Cuilcagh Mountain. The ecosystem services provided by the restored peatland are helping to maximise the future tourism potential of the Marble Arch caves as well as conserving an important habitat that supports a wealth of wildlife.

Back to the future

If decisions about land management and the use of resources is focused on the short-term delivery of one service, without adequate consideration of the impacts on the full range of services over time, land management can often be unsustainable.

The landscape-scale approach helps us balance the competing demands we place on our natural environment, helps us understand why unsustainable growth today, at the expense of ecosystem health, will be short lived and outweighed by future, longer-lasting climatic and ecological costs.

Ecosystem service valuation provides the rationale for taxing damaging activities and for paying for the delivery of valuable, non-marketed benefits, consistent with the ‘polluter pays’ and ‘provider gets’ principles. Key to this is that valuation should be based on all ecosystem goods and services, and not simply those that can be traded. Eco-system goods and services provided by farmers who agree to store large volumes of water on land is just one possible benefit to be identified from this process.

Farmers who can produce food on floodplains while recognising the need to store water during periods of high rainfall are helping restore valuable wetland landscapes that help purify water and manage flood risk within the wider catchment area. Some of the savings made by protecting infrastructure from floods in this way could be directed towards supporting such land use activities.

Big is beautiful

There are considerable health benefits that people get when they have access to beautiful landscapes. An important part of the conservation of any landscape is its community, and conversely, an important part of a community is the landscape in which the people live, work and relax. The natural environment has a strong influence on peoples’ relationship with place, and is consistently their preferred place to be.

A study by the RSPB in Great Britain “Natural Thinking - Investigating the links between the Natural Environment, Biodiversity and Mental Health” unsurprisingly found that outdoor space containing trees and natural vegetation was more likely to be used than a featureless, barren space.

The report stated that the interaction that resulted from people using the local environment had important implications for the vibrancy of the community, and concluded that a person’s attachment to a place is a result of past positive experiences with the natural environment. It also highlighted that natural places provide special areas for individuals to enjoy and be restored, and that they provide meaning and purpose.

Physical inactivity is a major preventable health risk, which affects about 60% of the population. Correcting this is a public health priority. Accessible green space has the potential to increase our wellbeing as a society, and reduce the costs of health care. In terms of physical health, inactivity costs the UK alone over £8 billion a year. It leads directly to chronic disease and lack of independence in the elderly.

Physical activities involving an environmental experience (green exercise) appear to be a sustainable way to improve public health. During green exercise, such as the 1.41 million visits to RSPB reserves, and other regular use of the countryside each year, physical exertion becomes an unnoticed secondary benefit from the enjoyable primary activity of being outdoors.

New research is also showing how the proximity and quality of nature affects our psychological wellbeing. The World Health Organisation estimates that depression and depression-related illness will become the greatest source of ill-health by 2020. Nature, through the role it plays in stimulating and encouraging physical activity, and through the direct impact it has on our emotional state, can help alleviate a range of psychological problems. This positive correlation between natural green space and physical and psychological wellbeing is, regrettably, seldom reflected in health care policies, planning guidelines or economic strategies.

There is evidence that green space in an urban environment can improve life expectancy and decrease health complaints. The combination of natural green space with local opportunities for social walking and other activities means green exercise can be a cheap and sustainable way of preventing public health problems.

All together now

Landscape-scale conservation will require action and resource from the EU, member states, the conservation sector, key business and industrial stakeholders, as well as local communities if we are to help shape tomorrow’s natural landscapes or Futurescapes. Joint action across Northern Ireland will help ensure the countryside is managed sustainably for the benefit of current and future generations.

The Futurescapes programme has prioritised the Lough Neagh and Lough Erne catchments to take the landscape-scale approach forward, and the RSPB is building projects with key partners within these areas. A priority area for the programme is the restoration and re-creation of wetland areas that can help improve water quality, provide vital floodwater storage to help reduce rural and urban flooding and natural storage for carbon.

The size of the task means that no organisation can achieve this alone. The RSPB, with wide and deep land management experiences, is putting its resources with those of others to support collaborative working that has the most effective outcome.

First steps: Lough Neagh and Lough Erne

The landscape areas of the Lough Neagh and Lough Erne catchments are where priority is being given to the development of landscape-scale projects under the Futurescapes programme. Both catchment areas have historically held some of the most important wetlands in Ireland, some of which still exist today. Others have been lost or are in very poor condition because of various unsustainable land management practices.

Within the Lough Neagh catchment, a project is underway to restore large areas of wet grassland as floodplains where threatened wildlife can return. These areas will be managed using sustainable land management solutions, especially through farming. The first stage of this project is underway at Lough Beg.

Case study: Lough Beg, Lower Bann
Lough Beg is located within the Lower Bann Valley. It is a shallow Lough that has been created by the water that flows along the Lower Bann River from Lough Neagh. This is the only river that drains Lough Neagh to the sea, and as the water reaches the Lough Beg area it floods the large floodplain during periods of high rainfall.

The RSPB is working in partnership with local farmers and Government agencies to collectively manage 500ha of wet grassland here as farmland while creating the most suitable conditions that allow some of our most threatened wildlife to return. Farmers and land managers are implementing sustainable land management practices that will help them adapt to changes in climate, and manage water resources, flooding and food demand.

The sustainable land management of this farming area is helping to address economic, social and environmental challenges at an effective scale. The approach being taken at Lough Beg is a small part of a much larger programme that aims to restore large parts of the Lough Neagh catchment and build resilience to climate change. For example, water levels can increase at Lough Beg in spring and summer, causing difficulties for farmers and for the ecology of the site, such are ground nesting birds.

Water levels at Lough Beg are dictated by the amount of water reaching Lough Neagh. Lough Neagh drains around one third of the Northern Ireland landscape and therefore the pressure on the lough can be significant during periods of high rainfall. To relieve the pressure on Lough Neagh, and therefore Lough Beg, a landscape-scale approach to restoring upland blanket bog and the floodplains along the main rivers that feed Lough Neagh is required. For this to happen requires a joint approach.

Case study: Sliabh Beagh
Within the Lough Erne catchment work is getting underway to restore the upland blanket bog area of Sliabh Beagh on the Fermanagh/Tyrone/Monaghan border. The priority here is to restore and manage up to 2000ha of upland blanket bog to ensure that it functions to provide the storage and sequestration of carbon, and the storage of water in the context of water management within the wider catchment area. Again land managers and local communities are at the heart of the partnership to ensure the implementation this project.

Seamus Burns is Habitat Restoration Officer, RSPB

Further Reading

Naturally at Your Service - Why it pays to invest in nature, RSPB, 2009

Wellbeing through Wildlife - Nature conservation improves the quality of people's lives. Protecting wildlife benefits society: it sustains and enhances our health; offers educational opportunities; contributes to the regeneration of communities and generates economic activity

Wellbeing through Wildlife in the EU - Report by RSPB and BirdLife International, with foreword by European Commission President, Jose Manuel Barroso.

All available at http://www.rspb.org.uk/ourwork/policy/economicdevelopment/wellbeing.asp

Natural Thinking - A Report by Dr William Bird, for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, investigating the links between the natural environment, biodiversity and mental health, RSPB 2004

Comment on Natural Thinking - A comment on the report from the Faculty of Public Health

All available at
http://www.rspb.org.uk/ourwork/policy/health/index.asp

The Law of the Wild – Meeting the challenges for birds and people. The European Birds Directive.

Available from
https://www.rspb.org.uk/Images/birdsdirective_tcm9-231549.pdf

Futurescapes - Large scale habitat restoration for wildlife and people, 2001,
hard copies available from RSPB Northern Ireland on request – Tel 028 9049 1547

The Convention on Wetlands of International Importance
Available at: http://www.ramsar.org/cda/ramsar/display/main/main.jsp?zn=ramsar&cp=1_4000_0

Article 17 of the Habitats Directive requires that every 6 years Member States prepare reports to be sent to the European Commission on the implementation of the Directive. The Article 17 report for the period 2001-2006 for the first time includes assessments on the conservation status of the habitat types and species of Community interest. The European Commission adopted the Composite report on Article 17 on July 13th 2009 and can be viewed at http://biodiversity.eionet.europa.eu/article17

Northern Ireland Biodiversity Report 2009, NIBG, NIEA

Richard Tol, How Much Abatement Is Enough?

Mon, 4 Jan 2010 13:46:49 -0500

Climate change is often portrayed as the greatest problem of the 21st century. Politicians are promising deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. A substantial amount of money has already been spent on climate policy, and much more will be spent if such promises are realised. The EU has promised a transfer of €100 billion per year from rich to poor countries. The new EU climate directive may cost the same amount again. Are such sums justified?

We worry about climate change because of the impacts it might have. The benefits of climate policy are the impacts that would be avoided. In order to justify emission reduction, we need to understand the impacts of climate change. These are uncertain and diverse. The impacts are uncertain because climate change will take place in the future. We do not know how many people there will be, how rich they will be, how much energy they will use and what sort, and how much they will emit. We do not fully understand all mechanisms in the climate system, so we do not know how temperature and rainfall will change – but change they will. We have limited knowledge on the effects of climate change, and these effects will be on a future society that will be radically different from today’s. The impacts of climate change, and thus the benefits of climate policy are very uncertain.

The impacts of climate change are also diverse. Low-lying coasts are vulnerable to sea level rise while mountain areas may see a decline in skiing. The very old and the very young suffer disproportionally from heat stress. Rich people can afford air conditioning and poor people cannot. And there are benefits too. The Baltic coast may become a prime tourist attraction. The costs of heating homes in winter would fall. Fewer people would die of cold-related diseases.

If we want to compare the different impacts of climate change to each other, and if we want to compare the impacts of climate change to the costs of costs of greenhouse gas emission reduction, we need to express the impacts of climate change in money. This is a difficult and controversial step. Economists have developed methods for monetary valuation for almost 50 years. They work roughly as follows. People travel to see beautiful things. The more beautiful it is, the further we are willing to travel to see it. While we do not buy the beauty, we do pay an entrance fee in the form of travel cost and travel time. This entrance fee indicates the value. Similarly, people make an effort to protect themselves from harm, while workers in dangerous jobs demand a higher pay. This is an indication of the value of safety. These methods have been applied to climate change for almost 20 years.

There are a number of robust results from this literature. Climate change has negative as well as positive impacts. Positive impacts dominate in the short term. This is irrelevant, because we cannot affect the course of climate change in the short term. Negative impacts dominate in the longer term. We can influence climate change then. Emission abatement reduces the negative impacts of climate, but leaves the positive impacts as they are. Abatement reduces damages. This is a benefit. There is thus an economic case for greenhouse gas emission reduction. You do not need to be a bleeding heart ecologist to favour climate policy. Cold economic calculus calls for action too.

At the same time, estimates of the impacts of climate change do not support the often dramatic language of the media. Estimates suggest that the overall impact of a century of climate change is equivalent to losing up to 2% of income. The impact of a century of climate change is of the same size as a year of economic growth. In the worst case, impacts may be ten times as large. Still, a deep recession wreaks as much havoc in a year as climate change would do in a century. Climate change is therefore not the biggest problem of humankind.

Climate change implies more malaria and diarrhoea, and this may have killed 100,000 children already in 2009. Poverty also brings malaria and diarrhoea, and this killed 1,000,000 children or more in the same year. Climate change may not even be the biggest environmental problem. The WHO reckons that air pollution kills over 1,000,000 per year in India and China. But although climate change is not the biggest problem, it is still a problem. It will need to be solved.

Climate change primarily affects poor people in faraway places. Poor people often live in hot places. They are more exposed to the weather. They cannot afford to protect themselves against the vagaries of the weather. This means that climate policy is not for our benefit, nor for the benefit of our children and grandchildren. Climate policy is for the benefit of the children and grandchildren of people in distant countries. We have a moral obligation, however, to avoid harming others or to compensate them if we do.

We should also wonder what is in their best interest. Emission abatement would slow the spread of malaria. A malaria vaccine would eradicate the disease. Climate change may cut food production in Africa by one-third. If African farmers would use the latest farming methods, food production would increase ten-fold. Climate policy should therefore not come at the expense of development policy. But it does. A growing share of development aid is spent on climate change.

Some of the impacts of climate change are really impacts of poverty in disguise. If we leave these aside, there is still plenty to worry about climate change. And there are many things that we do not know or understand. The effect on biodiversity is one such area. We know climate change will have widespread negative effects, but we do know how bad it will be. We know that the negative impacts of a gradual warming in the 21st century would be modest, but there has been no serious study of the impacts of more rapid warming or of the impacts in the very long term. If emissions continue unabated, climate change after 2100 could well be much more dramatic than anything foreseen for this century. Nor do we know much about the indirect effects of climate change. Tropical countries tend to grow slower than economies in the temperate zone. If climate is a contributing factor to the inability to develop, as some scholars suspect, then the impacts of climate change are much larger than current estimates suggest. But we simply do not know.

Uncertainty is no reason not to act. In fact, it is the other way around. The impacts of climate change are very uncertain. What we do know, suggests that climate change is a real problem. There is no reason to believe that climate change will make us all rich. There is good reason to believe that there is an unknown (hopefully small) probability that climate change will wreck the livelihood of many people. In this case, uncertainty is a reason to increase the ambition of emission abatement.

The social cost of carbon is a measure of seriousness of climate change. It shows how much damage is done by emitting one tonne of carbon. This is useful because even the government of a middle-sized country like Germany or Italy can only change the climate by a little bit between two elections. Money would be wasted if climate policy costs more, per tonne, than the social cost of carbon.

Almost 300 estimates of the social cost of carbon have been published. Estimates with independent quality control and more recent estimates tend to be lower. The overwhelming majority of estimates are positive. That is, climate change does harm. Reducing emissions improves welfare.

This means that an economist would recommend that greenhouse gas emissions be taxed or otherwise regulated. At the moment, only the European Union has such regulation in place, and it covers only about one-third of emissions. Europe is right to extend its current policy, and other countries should follow suit.

There are four important assumptions in the estimate of the social cost of carbon. How serious is climate change? How much do we care about remote probabilities? How much do we care about people in distant lands? How much do we care about the far future? There is therefore a strong ethical component to any assessment of climate policy. If you do not care about what could happen to someone faraway in the future, then climate change is not a concern. There is, however, strong empirical evidence that people do care about such things. We buy insurance, give to charity, and save for our old age. Following the guidance from such behaviour, the recommended price of carbon is €4/tCO2.

The current price of CO2 emission permits in Europe is €15/tCO2. That is, we are paying almost four times as much as we should. Alternatively, European climate policy reveals an increased concern about the future. This may well be, but the logical implication is that we should then also start to invest much more in education and pensions.

In sum, these results call for a measured policy of greenhouse gas emission reduction. There is reason to believe that European climate policy is overly ambitious. Climate policy outside Europe is surely not ambitious enough.

Dr. Richard S.J. Tol is a research professor at the Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin and the professor of the economics of climate change at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam.

William E. Dornbos, Why Copenhagen Still Matters

Tue, 1 Dec 2009 16:04:17 -0500

In early 2009 the great hope – at least among those who see the climate change threat clearly – was that the Copenhagen climate summit would be the historic moment when the world would come together to agree on a binding treaty to curb greenhouse gas emissions sufficiently by 2050 to save the planet from catastrophic climate change.

This was not an unreasonable hope. The timing was propitious. The Bush administration was out of office; its unproductive, even obstructionist, presence in international climate negotiations would no longer be a factor working against progress. President Barack Obama had promised strong action on climate change during his campaign, and now it seemed he could deliver on that promise with the support of large Democratic majorities in both chambers of the U.S. Congress.

For the first time in almost a decade, the United States – the nation that is unquestionably a pivotal player, if not the pivotal player, in international climate negotiations – would finally be free to pursue a constructive course, perhaps even lead the way to a new treaty. The sleeping giant of climate change would finally awaken from its slumber of the Bush years. That was the hope anyway.

Unfortunately, on the eve of Copenhagen, this scenario seems remote. The consensus among international climate experts is that a binding agreement is not possible at the summit. Several factors are at play – the exceedingly complicated bargaining dance between developed and developing nations over a range of issues should not be discounted – but primary among them is the slow progress of the Obama administration. The United States appears not yet fully ready to come to the bargaining table.

Obama’s original goal was for the United States to have a new cap-and-trade climate law in place before Copenhagen. Such an achievement would have firmly set the U.S. bargaining position at the international level, thereby giving the world clarity on what was politically feasible for the United States at Copenhagen. Yet the forces opposed to the regulation of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States – the fossil fuel industry, climate change deniers, and right-wing politicians –proved to be much more formidable than many initially believed, particularly in the heady days after Obama’s overwhelming election victory. These groups have powerful tools of delay at their disposal, not the least of which are the daunting procedural hurdles built into the U.S. Congress, such as the filibuster in the Senate, which the Republicans now employ to require 60-vote supermajorities in favor of almost any major bill proposed by the Democrats. The current prediction of those who read the Congressional tea leaves is that a climate bill will not be on President Obama’s desk for signature into law until sometime in the summer of 2010 – if it makes it there at all.

So this much we know. The U.S. delegation will arrive at Copenhagen next week effectively lacking the full political authority necessary to negotiate a binding treaty. They will not, in other words, come bearing the imprimatur of a new U.S. climate law. The pessimistic view is that this fact guarantees Copenhagen will be a failure. The thinking is simple and understandable – no U.S. climate law means no international climate treaty. Without a clear view of the emission reductions the United States can commit to, other major emitters will not reveal their commitments either. Copenhagen will be an unproductive stalemate.

This view is only partially right, however. Yes, agreement on a binding treaty at Copenhagen would require a diplomatic miracle at this point. But so much of consequence is still achievable at the summit that it would be unwise to dismiss the opportunity to make real progress. In the race against catastrophic climate change, making Copenhagen the penultimate meeting matters very much.

So what factors will make Copenhagen matter?

First, the Obama administration needs it to matter for domestic political reasons. Obama probably knows he needs to start accumulating successes that fire up his base of political support for the Congressional mid-term elections in 2010. The latest polls show his approval ratings slipping below 50 percent for the first time in his young presidency. While some of that decline is due to hardening opposition among conservatives, more appears attributable to the perception on the left that Obama has been disappointing on their issues. Climate change is a signature issue for his strongest supporters. A Copenhagen that moves the world forward in a visible and tangible way – especially if Obama’s hand is seen in that progress – would help Obama begin to change the political dynamics back at home. That Obama has recently decided to attend the opening days of Copenhagen suggests that he sees this potential political upside.

Second, for the first time during the multi-year negotiations for a successor climate treaty to the Kyoto Protocol, the United States has actually played a meaningful hand at the bargaining table: Obama has recently stated that the United States will provisionally commit to greenhouse gas emission reductions “in the range of” 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 and 83 percent by 2050. This is the long-awaited opening move by the United States. And although the move is not as strong, or as firm, as some hoped it would be, it is nevertheless a move that places pressure on the remaining major emitters who have been reluctant to state clear commitments to also announce their moves. Copenhagen thus could be the place where all of the major players show their respective hands and we begin to see where the game really stands and what strategic paths forward might be open. This is an absolutely necessary step for coming to a final agreement.

Third, the Obama negotiating team is not caught up on form. They have determined that if a binding treaty is not possible at Copenhagen, then alternative kinds of agreements to address the threat of climate change still are and should be pursued with all vigor. This is why Obama has recently stated that he wants to see Copenhagen produce an agreement of “immediate operational effect.” What might such an agreement look like? The hints lay in two important diplomatic developments that have received little fanfare in the last few weeks. Obama’s climate negotiators have worked in recent months to develop separate cooperative plans on climate and energy matters with China and India. These efforts bore fruit when first China, on November 17, and then India, on November 24, agreed to such plans with the United States.

The plans have two characteristics in common: (1) a commitment to full transparency in any agreement reached at Copenhagen – specifically, agreement on the need to abide by international standards of measurement, reporting, and verification for greenhouse gas emissions in each country (in other words, an internationally credible carbon inventory); and (2) a commitment to engage in broad and sustained collaboration on clean energy research and development through numerous initiatives intended to speed the deployment of key, low-carbon technologies such as solar energy, wind energy, smart grids, and energy efficiency, to name just a few. The plan with India also notably contained a commitment to an effort to halt deforestation in that country as a way to slow greenhouse gas emissions related to land use.

These plans offer a roadmap for the type of agreement that might come out of Copenhagen, one that is silent on binding national emission reduction targets, but does resolve the array of less controversial, yet still significant, matters, such as establishing an international system for verifying national carbon inventories, developing a trustworthy international system for investing in forests as carbon sinks, or creating international “best practice” centers for clean energy technology dissemination in the developing world. Efforts of this kind could commence immediately, and Obama is right to recognize that they should not be stalled by the ultimate pursuit of a binding treaty on mitigation. Seen in this way, then, Copenhagen is a critical opportunity to prepare the world for success in 2010.

Much can still go awry at the summit, of course. Progress could remain elusive. But the prevailing view of Copenhagen as a preordained failure is a view that overlooks too much. With mere years available to us to begin significantly cutting greenhouse gas emissions before it is too late to forestall catastrophic climate change, any chance for meaningful progress towards a global climate agreement is a chance worth taking.
Copenhagen matters because it has to.

William E. Dornbos is the Associate Director of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy. An attorney, Mr. Dornbos has previously worked with the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of the largest environmental advocacy groups in the United States, and with the Environmental Protection Bureau of the New York State Attorney General’s Office

Lorcán Ó Cinnéide, Reform of the Common Fisheries Policy – An Irish Fishing Industry View

Mon, 2 Nov 2009 14:34:51 -0500

Fishing is essentially a pretty simple business: Vessels go to sea, deploy gear, catch fish, sell fish. Wild fish form a hugely important source of nutrition whose qualities have come to be even more valued in recent times. Fishing plays a vital economic role in coastal communities.

We in the fishing industry are perfectly conscious that it is indeed possible to destroy the basic ingredient of our industry – fish stocks – but we would ask our critics to also recognise that we want to conserve the fishing way of life as a legitimate objective too!

Fisheries policy and management - in contrast to fishing itself - is pretty complex. The ability of man to deplete fishing stocks has increased with technology in vessels, fish-finding equipment and fishing gear. Because the resource is not capable of being corralled into identifiable areas, there is a basic need for regulation and management in the wider public interest – interest that originally was solely concerned with preservation of stocks at acceptable levels but has increasingly come to be recognised as an issue of biodiversity and habitat conservation.

The EU Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) was negotiated in the late nineteen-seventies and came into force in 1983. It is of course a political agreement that reflects the interests and relative strengths of the different contracting parties. The policy is made up of over 700 different pieces of EU legislation that have built up incrementally over the years and that govern fleet sizes, fishing quotas, fishing gears, market organisation, control regimes and access by various nations to resources in different areas.

The current policy might be best described as a “cacophony of mis-directed co-operation”, insofar as it is incredibly complex, is costly to operate for everybody concerned, has not succeeded in conserving fish stocks (with some exceptions which may or may not be attributable to the CFP) and has lead to a fishing industry which contnues to lose jobs.

To summarise the main problems:
• The problem is that the fish are under the sea. We can’t see them or tell how many of them are there except in pretty hazy terms. They move around in a most inconvenient way. They are subject to biological processes we only partially understand. In EU waters we have fishermen from dozens of countries trying to catch them. The fishermen are pretty good at what they do.
• We have devised regulations to manage stocks and when we think they haven’t worked, we devise more complex regulations. Nobody believes anyone. Some people respect the rules, others don’t. Some people adapt as technology changes, some don’t. Everything has to go to Brussels for decision. Countries jockey for advantage. Rules change from year to year.
• Solutions deemed to work for a stock in one area are imposed on others where conditions may be completely different. No-one knows where they stand and the biggest impulse is to catch more – now. Attempts are made to circumvent rules. More rules. More confusion.
• The system consumes the energies of a lot of good people but we rarely seem to get positive outcomes. Indeed, practically every participant in the system is deeply unhappy. Some fish stocks are indeed in considerable trouble in the EU. Others, mind you, are patently not. Many parts of the European and indeed Irish fishing industry are in deep and continual crisis.

There remains however an absolute imperative of having an effective CFP because the resource is shared between many countries and interests. An essential prerequisite to reversing the current abject state is that responsibility for that failure must be clearly acknowledged by policymakers, by managers, scientists, by fishermen and indeed leaders of fishermen’s organisations. We have all made mistakes. It is not good enough and not true for anyone to imply that the fault for failure lies solely at the hands of allegedly irresponsible fishermen and irresponsible politicians.

We need to concentrate on solutions, but any such solutions will not be found if we do not have a clear and honest analysis of how we got here. The 2009-2013 CFP reform can only be effective in producing results if the process itself is designed to change the nature of the dialogue between the stakeholders. It is unclear that this fact is understood by those who should understand it.

While some key aspects of existing policy are superficially common on an EU wide basis, we have a multilateral system with widely different systems of administration, resource allocation and wildly different levels of controls and sanctions for misbehaviour in place. Harmonising some key pillars of a renewed CFP is essential as is implementation on a genuinely common footing.

The policy has to be seen as a process in itself, which sets a clear road-map towards achieving biological sustainability in an achievable timeframe, but in a manner which concurrently seeks to maintain the optimal economic and social benefits of having a healthy fishing industry.

A key feature of such a process must be the achievement of the maximum level of consensus among all the stakeholders. There is little or no common understanding at present, with the result that stakeholders are often at complete cross-purposes and policies are incapable of being implemented and thus have no legitimacy. Management should be a participative process not a form of backstreet surgery.

This can be facilitated by a credible “audit” process that examines the state of biological knowledge of fish stocks and the marine ecosystem, and that also examines and quantifies the economic and social dimensions. Only when such an audit is credible can the requisite policy imperatives be identified.

Features which will need to be a part of a renewed CFP should include:
• Establishing an appropriate hierarchy of decision-making is a key element to avoid the excruciating reference of practically all management issues to the top. We need tiers of subsidiarity which would mean decisions – and responsibilities - being taken at appropriate levels. The ground rules and scope for such regionalisation must be properly thought out or we will end up with a set of mini-CFPs which will be even more incoherent and ineffective.
• We have an environmental dimension which is increasingly important. That is essential and welcome. Care for biodiversity and the future existence of the resource is seen quite correctly as being essential for society and indeed is good for fishermen.
The implications of legislation such as the Habitats and Birds Directives will also require to be factored into the CFP process.
• A major difficulty for the fishing industry is that the environmental “bar”, if I may call it that, is not fixed and we have to contend with ever-changing demands which undermines confidence and leads to continued instability. There must be reasonableness and balance in the decisions arrived at. It is notable that half of the online responses to the EU Green paper to date are part of an orchestrated campaign to make 40% of Europe’s waters Marine Protected Areas and to ban bottom trawling for fishing. This is not reasonable.
• Commercial fishing is an economic activity which seeks to make profit. It is a vital part of the economy and fulfils a vital consumer need. We need people making profits, earning incomes and sustaining the economic and social life of the coastal regions. The current ever-changing management landscape is crippling to the fishing industry. The economic questions also extend to dealing with who has access to the resource. There are value judgements to be made. Such decisions should not be left entirely to the market, with those with access to capital being the only ones who benefit. It does not make sense economically, regardless of how the simplicity of it might be attractive to some.
• The EU Commission’s green paper on CFP reform seems to lean heavily towards international transferability of individual vessel quotas on a vessel-to vessel basis, something we in Ireland are quite concerned at as it could lead to an effective migration of fishing rights away from Ireland to other countries.
• We should maintain a degree of economic and social diversity to be protected in a new CFP. We need to take a pragmatic look at the appropriateness of long term assignment of rights: we need to have a frank and reasoned debate.

A major conundrum in fisheries management and the effective operation of the CFP is the difficulty in achieving reliable estimates of stock levels and trends. The state of fish stock biology at present is terrible – not the fault of scientists, but of the system and a culture that does not provide scientists with the requisite data on a reliable and consistent basis. Rectifying this by internalising and incentivising it into the new CFP over time is essential.

People who are given responsibility are far more likely to act responsibly. Enlightened co-management, with appropriate regulation where fishing interests are at the heart of decision- making relevant to them, must be part of the new dispensation – not on every issue, but certainly in managing particular regional stocks.

While there always will be tension between managers, regulators, environmentalists, scientists and fishermen, we can go a long, long way if we have the will and the patience to achieve a partnership approach and a commonality of control which would make everyone’s job a lot easier. A few demonstrable successes would help too.

We need a CFP that is properly resourced. While the development of a new CFP can in time achieve more cost-effective management, it must be recognised that there are likely to be up-front additional costs in achieving that transition. This is a key test of the political will to achieve change. Such financing has to be based on leveraging structural change, rather than short term maintenance and in this I think I might agree with the EU Commission – although I am not sure, as usual, whether I am seeing the world the same way as they do!

We are not starting from a blank canvas. That adds to the challenge of reform. Different countries’ governments and the industries in them are in fact quite happy with elements of the current set-up, often based on large investments in individual quota. They might fear that certain types of change will disadvantage their countries.

We must have a reliable assessment of the appropriate fleet size and profile that can profitably fish the resource on an economically sustainable basis. This involves assessing fishing capabilities on a realistic basis and not simply on the basis of nominal Gross Tonnage or KW measures as is currently the case.

How the management of the market for fisheries products is to be organised within the EU is a further component which must be re-defined at an EU level, having regard to the viability of the producers, processors and distributors, food security and trade issues. This is an essential further component of the process in which clear and unambiguous timelines are established.

To summarise: the CFP reform needs to set out the high level strategy which balances economic and environmental sustainability with social dimensions, national access to resources, uniform controls and sanctions insofar as legally possible. In addition, there must be a clear trajectory for implementing these with respect to central and regional management, achieving acceptable levels of reliability in scientific analysis and the various management tools which can be applied at the appropriate levels.

On some more of the ideas raised in the Green Paper:
• The question of overcapacity – “too many boats chasing too few fish” —is a gross oversimplification. Too much fishing potential, which is presumably what is really meant, is a problem that applies differentially in different fisheries and different countries. So we need to be cautious about how we define the issue and how it should be solved.
• The possibility of moving away from catch limits to effort control sounds superficially attractive but is fraught with danger. Apart from the obvious risk that the available effort would be subject to the same fluctuations as we have in quotas, there is the potential for a real threat to stocks from such a move. The issue is also bound up with fishing potential and with the distribution of fishing rights and with discards policy.
• Regarding discards, it is a fallacy to strive for the elimination of discards of fish. People forget that many discards are the result of legally imposed minimum landing sizes. We should concentrate on landing fish that people want to buy, not rubbish. We should of course seek to minimise unwanted discards through more sophisticated use of adaptive zonal management and technical measures such as increased mesh sizes. But this is a complex issue which should not be dictated by ill-informed sentiment as I fear it is.
• National limits – i.e. the coastal areas in which national fleets have exclusive or priority access —are essential and I believe there is a considerable case for extending such limits on regional, social and indeed environmental grounds. The question of intra-national access to these resources is key and inshore management is essential.
• I am of course totally in favour of additional quota shares for Irish fishermen. I strongly suspect however that my colleagues in France, UK and Spain might have their own views on the subject.

While not wishing to muddy the waters or diminish the need for real reform of the CFP within Europe, a word of caution that doing so while continuing to allow unregulated fishing in other areas of the world and a flood of imports from areas which have been environmentally trashed in the process is hardly a credible solution on global terms.

The trendy and simplistic notion that “big” boats are the cause of all the problems and that “small” boats should be encouraged in their stead is likewise a fallacy. The fact is that mixed profile fleets of a size appropriate to the different waters in which fish can be caught is likely to be a far more beneficial outcome. Deciding the appropriate mix is partly a public value judgement but also a function of economics and biology. Considerations such as local and regional policy, distribution of ownership, optimising employment and economies of scale need to be factored into such decision-making.

Survival of many parts of the European fishing industry is in considerable doubt due to the immediate short term pressures that exist right now, but the long term future for the stocks, the marine environment and for fishing communities hangs on the outcome of the collective deliberations of stakeholders throughout the EU in coming months.

The debate on reform will continue from now until 2012. It is essential that the various viewpoints be heard in that debate and that the often impassioned proponents of opposing views pause to take account of the real and genuine concerns of each other.

It should not be beyond the combined efforts of political representatives, environmental organisations, biologists, economists, social scientists as well as those committed to the future of a fishing industry and fishing communities to devise a vastly improved outcome and processes for delivering it.

Lorcán Ó Cinnéide, Chief Executive, Irish Fish Producers Organisation (IFPO)
ifpo@eircom.net

Uta Bellion, Overcapacity in fishing fleets brings depleted fish stocks

Mon, 2 Nov 2009 14:22:19 -0500

Too many hooks and nets are systematically reducing the fish stocks on which we rely for a profitable fishing industry, a reliable food source and for healthy oceans.

More than 80 percent of assessed European fish stocks are overexploited and 30 percent are outside safe biological limits, cautioned the European Commission in the recent Green Paper for the reform of the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP). The culprit is not hard to find.

The UN Food and Agricultural Organization (www.FAO.org) notes that a fishing fleet's capacity to harvest more fish than nature can replace is an important, or even the principal, cause of overfishing. And the EU commissioner responsible for fisheries, Joe Borg, agrees. Earlier this year, he stated, “Most of our problems stem from fleet overcapacity, which is … a main driver for overfishing.”

While the EU has made efforts to regulate fishing capacity as far back as 1983, when it implemented a series of plans that sought a "balance between fishing capacity to be deployed by the production facilities … and the [fish] stocks," fishery management in the EU is still failing.

Despite the reduction in the size of the EU fleet, overcapacity continues to be a problem as technology has made ships -- and fishing -- more efficient. In an ironic twist, the EU and its member states continue to fuel fleet overcapacity by subsidising the fishing sector.

The most recent assessment in 1995 found EU fleet capacity to be 40 percent over sustainable levels. Reform in 2002 shifted responsibility for fleet management to member states, requiring them to report annually on their "efforts during the previous year to achieve a sustainable balance between fleet capacity and available fishing opportunities." But a recent report by the Institute for European Environmental Policy for the Pew Environment Group (the conservation arm of The Pew Charitable Trusts) indicates poor compliance with this requirement.

The report reveals that in 2005 only 11 of the 22 countries submitted their annual reports on time. The information provided was patchy, making assessment of overcapacity levels difficult, if not impossible.

In 2006, not only did the same problems still plague the documents, but most member states did not bother to evaluate their fishing capacity in relation to fishery resources. In 2007, only 12 countries submitted an analysis on time. The United Kingdom, in particular, was six months late, preventing its inclusion in the Commission’s summary.

In 2008, in response to a written question by MEP Paulo Casaca of Portugal, Commissioner Borg clarified that measuring the balance between fishing capacity and fishing opportunities requires detailed data for each fishery, accounting for both biological and economic factors. Only the 2006 Danish report included such an assessment. The reports of the remaining member states merely provided information on the trends in fishing capacity or fishing effort, not making a clear statement on the balance between fleet and fishing opportunities.

It is said that “if you won’t measure it; you won’t manage it.” Fishery managers need to know the capacities of fleets, the size and composition of fish populations and the basic rates of harvest. Without such information, fishermen could easily fish stocks to the point of collapse without knowing it. Not even subsidies will be able to keep fishermen afloat if fish stocks continue to plummet.

With 30 percent of assessed European fish stocks outside safe biological limits, the action and inaction of member states over the past years shows a distinct indifference toward a valuable marine resource and to those who depend on it.

A joint study by the World Bank and the FAO in 2008, "The Sunken Billions," revealed that inadequate fisheries management costs 50 billion US dollars globally per year in lost opportunity. Member states need to take overfishing and fishing overcapacity seriously for the benefit of all.

We may dispute the exact percent of stocks in trouble, but it is clear that the Common Fisheries Policy has failed, that European fisheries need significantly improved management and that we must reduce fishing capacity. Accurately reporting the EU fishing fleet’s capacity is a first step in achieving that. If we fail, we risk squandering a once bountiful, self-renewing marine resource.

Uta Bellion is Director of the Pew Environment Group's European Marine Programme.

NOTE: Next month irish environment plans on publishing an analysis of the EU CFP by staff at the Pew Environment Group

Frank Convery, State of the Environment, Republic of Ireland - Environmental challenges ahead

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 14:03:50 -0400

We are lucky to live on an island where nature compensates and corrects for the various follies to which our ignorance and greed give rise. Air pollution generally gets swept off shore by the energetic winds from the Atlantic. Most of our soils are fixed by the sinews of vigorous grass growth, and nutrient loss is real but not catastrophic. Droughts are rare, and plant growth and nature’s web of life are regularly enabled by rainfall, which also re-charges groundwater aquifers and lakes, rivers and streams and the reservoirs we have built to store our supplies. Wetlands – marshes and bogs – store water and release it slowly, removing pollutants and reducing intensity of floods. And then there is how we build. A developer can be defined as someone who cuts down all the trees to build houses, and then names the streets after the trees. Not a bad description of suburbanisation in Ireland, where estate after estate appears first as a lunar landscape, untrammelled by either quality architecture, landscape or mature trees. However, planners do manage typically to secure some open space for residents, and nature over time develops various camouflages, so that an identikit development of 300 houses gradually morphs over a 20 year period into an often surprisingly diverse and green land, as rapidly growing hedges, shrubs and trees, and various building add-ons, transform aesthetic blight into something better. And nature does this for free, with a little nudging from ourselves from time to time.

But can we depend on nature to see us right in the future? There are several reasons for concern. First, our ability to push off our air pollution to the rest of Europe is being increasingly constrained and challenged, both by international agreements (Gothenburg Protocol) and EU ceilings. Secondly, our water supplies are becoming constrained by a multitude of forces; growing income and population in the East is driving a move to pipe water from the Shannon; there are issues and dangers as the hundreds of thousands of houses using groundwater must maintain and renew their septic tank systems and some are on soils and soaks that are inappropriate and very difficult to manage. Contamination becomes difficult and expensive to trace and to correct. Treating water is very energy and chemicals intensive, and requires substantial recurrent funding and skilled management. Our dispersed patterns of development make it very difficult to provide public transport that meets our needs, and which at the same time is environmentally efficient and financially affordable. As regards climate change, we need to both adapt to the manageable change which is now upon us, and reduce our emissions as part of the global effort to forestall catastrophe. To make this transition of in effect being bailed out by nature to being a proactive steward of our patrimony and our destiny we need to take responsibility, and this means three things – getting the incentives, the investments and the institutions right. As regards incentives, we have to adopt the polluter pays principle, where we are charged whenever we impose a burden on nature -this means water charges based on volume of use, waste charges based on weight, a carbon tax that recognises that the ability of the atmosphere to absorb more greenhouse gas is limited, and the recycling of the revenues raised to help people adapt and to innovate. All the evidence shows that we respond best to incentives where we have some choice as to what to do, and how to do it. Secondly, we need to ‘green’ our public and private investment, to support businesses that can produce new and better and less damaging ways of providing everything from roads to electricity to renewable energy, and systems for reducing water and energy use. We need to pay particular attention to green infrastructure – the web of nature which if treated with respect and some knowledge can do so much to enhance the quality of our lives. Thirdly, we need to re-visit our institutions – how we structure our communities and government at various levels to deliver a sustainable future. And this is related also to settlement patterns. Dispersion, unless it is necessary for work, as in the case of farming, makes it very difficult to provide high standards of essential infrastructure such as broadband and public transport or of social support for older people in the home at affordable cost.

And our economy – tourism, the food industry, any highly skilled area where we are trying to attract people of rare talent for whom quality of life is always important – depends on a high quality environment, the fundamental pre-requisite for a sustainable economy.

Frank J. Convery, University College, Dublin, and Comhar Sustainable Development Council

John Woods, State of the Environment, Northern Ireland

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 10:10:06 -0400

INTRODUCTION

Destruction of special sites, decline in farmland birds, industrial pollution, eutrophication of water bodies, illegal waste disposal, atmospheric ozone levels, unconstrained carbon dioxide emissions, demolition of listed buildings, illegal landfill, bungalow blight: it is not difficult to come up with a litany of environmental degradation in Northern Ireland.

The official state of the environment is documented in the Northern Ireland Environment Agency’s first State of the Environment Report published in 2008 with a statistical update in 2009 with some more candid assessments available from a range of NGO sources.

While the reports and data series now being developed are welcome, an arguably more useful indication of the state of Northern Ireland’s environment is to be found by taking a closer look at the politics of the environment.

There have been three key influences on the Northern Ireland environment in recent years. In common with most developed countries, economic growth has placed huge pressure on eco-systems. And in common with other regions of the EU, European environmental law has been the main means of protecting those eco-systems – with varying degrees of success. But unique to Northern Ireland has been the emergence of devolved political responsibility – local democracy welcomed by almost everyone but fraught with difficulty as the political class makes the transition from decades of opposition to responsibility for extensive governmental powers.

ENVIRONMENTAL GOVERNANCE

Underlying these three factors is a history of environmental neglect under a succession of Westminster direct-rule administrations. While environmental governance made significant strides in Great Britain with the 1990 Environmental Protection Act, for example, and the creation of the Environment Agency as an independent regulator, Northern Ireland remained trapped in governance structures and attitudes towards the environment that had changed little since the 1970s.

Early stages of the devolved government did not offer much in the way of changed attitudes. For example, Environment Minister, Dermot Nesbitt, had agreed that the Environment and Heritage Service (EHS), an agency within his department, would not object to planning applications in areas where the sewage infrastructure was inadequate. This led to a long running legal saga that wound up in both the European Court and the High Court. The catalogue of failures to comply with European legislation had been growing from 2001 onwards confirming the position of environmental NGOs that an independent agency was needed.

Things began to change under direct rule in 2005 when the then environment Minister, Angela Smith MP, after persistent lobbying by a group of environmental NGOs, agreed to review the structures and processes of environmental governance. There was at least tacit support from the Minister for the idea that Northern Ireland, in common with England, Wales, Scotland and the Republic of Ireland needed an independent environmental protection agency. Smith’s successor, Lord Rooker, progressed things by appointing Tom Burke to lead the Review of Environmental Governance which reported in May 2007, the central recommendation being the creation of an independent agency. The timing proved to be unfortunate. After a period of suspension, the Northern Ireland Assembly was reinstated in June that year and the Environment portfolio went to the Democratic Unionist Party. A year later Environment Minister, Arlene Foster MP, rejected the Burke report’s key recommendation and instead the EHS was rebranded as the Northern Ireland Environment Agency (NIEA) and given some additional resources.

This was a controversial decision opposed by all other political parties and a broad spectrum of civil society organisations from the CBI to the Consumer Council. Cheer-leading the Minister, however, was the Ulster Farmers Union which had brought its considerable influence to bear on a party keen to bolster its rural vote.

In practical terms this means that although NIEA possesses the enforcement powers it needs to require Northern Ireland Water to bring its sewage infrastructure up to scratch, in reality there are significant financial constraints on NI Water that mean it is struggling to fulfil promises made to the European Commission on the timetable for its capital works programme. The Assembly’s refusal to impose water charges means that there is a revenue shortfall of some £400 million per annum, much of it needed for water infrastructure and the Executive has been reluctant to make this up by raiding other budget lines. It is difficult to imagine the Environment Minister pressuring his NIEA officials to require NI Water to invest money that can only be provided by his cost cutting party colleague, the Finance Minister.

Thus environmental protection in Northern Ireland remains compromised by NIEA’s lack of independence and its inability to prioritise the environment above all other considerations.

ASSI PROTECTION

A recent compelling example of why NIEA needs to be free from political interference was when Environment Minister, Sammy Wilson, attempted to block the designation of an Area of Special Scientific Interest (ASSI) after being lobbied by the affected landowners. Refusing to recognise that the process was an administrative and legal one properly left to his officials, the Minister attempted to rescind the decision. A legal opinion for Friends of the Earth showed that the Minister was acting unlawfully and a threat of judicial review brought about a swift volte face by Mr Wilson. It is now possible to be reasonably confident that the Minister’s extraordinary statement that he would be 'cautious' about declaring ASSIs where commercial activity might be restricted by the declaration will be consigned to the dustbin that contains his less considered utterances. The case highlights the fact that as long as the NIEA lacks independent status, environmental protection relies on litigious NGOs and the generous benefactors who fund their legal actions.

PPS14/21

Another early victim of the return of the Assembly was Planning Policy Statement 14 – a strong document designed to stem the proliferation of one-off building in the countryside. Bungalow blight is popular with rural landowners and their political representatives, however, and the draft policy was quickly ditched and replaced with the much looser PPS21. The new policy includes the capacity for farm businesses to add a new dwelling to the land-holding every 10 years – official sanction for property development as an alternative agricultural income. No estimates have been given of the expected number of dwellings that will be built under this policy and no assessments of the impacts on water quality or carbon emissions have been made. Largely unnoticed is the fact that all of Northern Ireland’s Green Belt areas have been abolished at a stroke.

PLANNING REFORM

The reform of the planning system has become an important plank of the Executive’s economic policy with the current consultation on planning reform clearly focussing on speeding up the planning process. Inevitably the environment and those who would protect it are casualties of such an approach. As a response to recession, Sammy Wilson even took the step of instructing his officials to elevate economic considerations when assessing planning applications, although it wasn’t clear whether this was a serious attempt to subvert the planning system or just a bit of political grandstanding.

The reform proposals include the withdrawal of fundamental rights of individuals to be heard at both developer appeals and area plan inquiries. This is driven by a perceived need to speed up both the formal and informal hearings process; but the workload problems of the Planning Appeals Commission should be tackled by managerial solutions and not by depriving citizens of their basic rights. Although the proposals raise the possibility of a third party right of appeal and the current Minister, Edwin Poots, has publicly supporter such a right in the past, this will not be won easily. The Government’s advisor, Professor Greg Lloyd, has made much of the ‘front loading’ effect of pre-application discussions: if those affected are thoroughly consulted beforehand, there should be no need for a right of appeal as the decision will, by definition, be the right one. This would be fine if the Professor’s perfect world corresponded with reality but it seems unlikely that developer led pre-application discussions could produce such unquestionable results.

Two other aspects of the reforms that set Northern Ireland apart from the rest of the UK is the failure to recognise the role of planning in combating climate change and the absence of a statutory purpose to achieve sustainable development. Instead the reforms rely on the Programme for Government’s prioritisation of economic development.

But what really separates the Northern Ireland planning system from those in England, Wales and Scotland is the emphasis on individual rights (e.g. a rural landowner’s ‘right’ to develop his land) and economic development, in contrast to the accepted norm that planning is an expression of the common good. Failing to pursue the common good is a trait we share with the Republic of Ireland, but at least a right of appeal exists there for third parties to recover some of the ‘good’ appropriated by developers and landowners.

WASTE

Northern Ireland has a serious and growing waste problem. Illegal landfill sites and other waste operations are commonplace. In some areas anyone buying land would be as well to check for an illicit tip beneath what may seem an otherwise green and pleasant field. On the legal side of the fence, successive Waste Management Strategies have failed to arrest the growth in waste arisings and often struggled to meet a range of EU waste targets.

The Waste Framework Directive has a target for recycling 50% of household waste by 2050. In addition the Landfill Directive has targets of 25% diversion from landfill of biodegradable waste by 2010, 65% by 2020, and recycling targets for total waste of 35% by 2010, 40% by 2015 and 45% by 2020. Northern Ireland’s average recycling rate is in the low to mid 30s so the recycling target is likely to be met, but the diversion from landfill target won’t be.

Faced with an ever growing waste problem and imminent fines for missing European targets, local councils have been attracted by the quick-fix of incineration despite the well documented environmental downsides. One argument used by proponents is that an energy-from-waste facility would displace a fossil fuel power station, and therefore should be considered an environmentally friendly option. However, it is more likely to displace new-build generation, such as renewable energy sources, making it a poor choice from an environmental perspective. And of course incineration would undermine ambitious recycling rates like those being pursued in Scotland which has adopted a 70% target, with 25% cap on incineration and a 5% cap on landfill.

The recent decision by Belfast City Council not to have an incinerator on the north foreshore is a set-back for ARC21 (the group of councils in the east of Northern Ireland). The Belfast site plan was stopped by Sinn Feín, some SDLP and some North Belfast Unionists of various hues. Alliance and most Unionists were in favour. If a site is sought in a Unionist dominated council area it is likely the plan will be passed. The no vote from Belfast is a serious set-back, however, and it will probably be several years before a new proposal is made.

Bryson House is running a campaign to achieve a target of 70% recycling by 2025 and an ARC21 household waste composition study found 72% of residual waste is recyclable or compostable. A combination of kerbside collection of recyclables, with green waste and food scraps going to anaerobic digestion could make the 70% target attainable. EU targets could be met without the need for incineration.

CLIMATE CHANGE

Northern Ireland’s contribution to the UK’s obligation to cut greenhouse gas emissions under the Kyoto Protocol has been minimal: just 5.8% on 1990 levels compared with 15.7% for the UK as a whole. The reduction in carbon dioxide emissions has been just 1.5%.

If emissions cuts have been poor, targets have been equally unambitious. The Executive is committed to cutting greenhouse gases by 25% on 1990 levels by 2025 and CO2 by 30% by 2030. This compares with the UK Government’s Committee on Climate Change recommendation of a 34% cut in GHGs by 2020 (42% if there is a new global deal on emissions cuts).

Although the Assembly agreed to opt into the UK Climate Change Act and although the official line from the DOE is that Northern Ireland will fulfil all its statutory obligations under the Act, in fact the Act does not oblige Northern Ireland to make any cuts at all. Despite an ongoing campaign by a broad coalition of environment, development and other NGOs, there is no sign of a willingness to legislate for the same mandatory emissions cuts that apply to the UK as a whole.

Instead plans to spend over 80% of the £3 billion available under the Executive’s Investment Strategy on road building at the expense of public transport remain intact. If any of the grandiose schemes to dual the regions A roads fail to go ahead it will be due to spending constraints rather than for the sake of controlling spiralling emissions from transport.

On the plus side, former Energy Minister, Arlene Foster, appears to be serious about maximising renewable energy’s share of electricity supply with an ambitious but realistic target of 40% in the new draft Strategic Energy Framework. Disappointingly, though, there is no mention of the UK Climate Change Act as a key policy driver and only a commitment to ‘supporting’ the 2050 UK and EU Climate Change targets.

While Northern Ireland has clearly underperformed for many years in terms of cutting emissions, the period when Sammy Wilson MP was environment Minister from mid 2008 to mid 2009 was a time during which the need for action on climate change rocketed up the political agenda. At least that was the case in most of the developed world and many of its less developed regions, but not in Northern Ireland. Having a ‘climate sceptic’ environment minister was more than just an embarrassment for most people in Northern Ireland; it meant that serious action on climate change was kept off the Executive’s agenda. Now that Mr Wilson has been promoted to the position of finance minister, it remains to be seen whether he will continue to exercise his power to malign environmental effect.

GREEN NEW DEAL

Lest it appear that the state of Northern Ireland’s environment and the politics that determine it are beyond repair, there is one brightening green light on the horizon. The language of the ‘Green New Deal’ has become commonplace since it made its first public outing in July 2008 and in Northern Ireland it has put down strong roots amongst the social partners (business, trades unions, farmers and voluntary sector) and civil society more widely. The idea that the ‘triple crunch’ of recession, climate change and energy insecurity could be tackled in a joined up manner is being addressed by a broad coalition comprising groups as diverse as the CBI, ICTU, the Sustainable Development Commission and Friends of the Earth. The basic idea is that high levels of both public and private investment in energy efficiency and renewable energy would create jobs, cut carbon emissions and reduce Northern Ireland’s 99% reliance on imported fossil fuels. A series of working papers are being produced with the intention of building political consensus around the Green New Deal and making it a central plank of economic, social and environmental policy.

CONCLUSION

At the heart of Northern Ireland’s grim state of the environment is the mistaken belief that the economy and the environment are always in conflict and that the former should always prevail over the latter. This is plainly very old-fashioned thinking. The Green New Deal demonstrates that this need not be the case and there can be clear win-win situations. Likewise a report from the NI Green NGOs Group and NIEA showed that the environmental economy supports nearly 33,000 full time jobs.

But that is the easy bit. In fact environmental and economic considerations are often opposed and politicians and policy makers must have ways of resolving such conflicts. Sadly, in Northern Ireland the gut reaction of Ministers appears to be to privilege the economy. That it is thought acceptable to re-orientate the planning system, itself a balancing mechanism between competing interests, in favour of economic interests, speaks volumes for the value that Ministers attach to Northern Ireland’s environment.

It may seem a forlorn hope, therefore, that our political masters might embrace the promise of sustainable development: Northern Ireland’s first Sustainable Development Strategy was published in 2006 by the direct-rule administration but remains largely unimplemented. And yet if the Executive cannot be persuaded that sustainable development offers solutions to the challenges it faces, the outlook for the state of Northern Ireland’s economy will be as bleak as it is for its environment.

John Woods, Friends of the Earth Northern Ireland