Many people involved in aid and development programs for Africa think that science and agribusiness can reduce hunger and poverty. Governments, including Canada, promote this. They are wrong. Well, maybe in some hypothetical situation they can, but not in the real world. An example is Margaret Wente’s column about a year ago in The Globe and mail (Enviro-romanticism is hurting Africa, July 18, 2009). She said that in Africa, poverty and malnutrition are rising “largely because of primitive farming practices.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Poverty and malnutrition are rising because, among other factors, bad governance is ruining farmland, bad governments are leasing and selling farmland to foreign firms and governments, and bad international trade is preventing small farmers’ access to markets.
She said, “We could increase the global food supply by 80 per cent just by bringing the rest of the world up to the standards of modern agriculture.” This is pure nonsense. Many analyses of the global food situation, such as that of Lester Brown, “Plan B 3.0 Mobilizing to Save Civilization” (Earth Policy Institute, 2008), make it abundantly clear that global food production is on the decline. The improvements and innovations that gave rise to the “Green Revolution” during 1950–1990—mainly in large-scale irrigation, mass-production and distribution of fertilizers combined with plant breeding—have already been made and no amount of technological development can forestall the decline. Desertification (exacerbated by climate change), salinization of soils because of irrigation, and urban encroachment have reduced the global supply of farmland and rangeland. Water scarcity because of over-pumping of aquifers, over-use and degradation of surface water, and logging and other causes of more rapid runoff and erosion in watersheds are further reducing the amount and productivity of arable land. The world’s ocean catch of wild fish peaked at about 96 million tons in 2000. Aquaculture has allowed continued, modest increases in total fish production, but only at the expense of destruction of destruction of coastal ecosystems, especially mangroves, that support local shore-based fisheries and coastal farming.
Meanwhile, the increasing human population has meant that global per-person food supplies have declined. The wild seafood supply per person peaked at 17 kg in 1988 and now stands at 14 kg. The amount of grainland per person in 1950 was 0.23 ha, but in 2007 was 0.10 ha.
The global food crisis of 2007–2008 that saw food riots in several African countries, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Haiti because of dramatically increasing grain prices portends worsening food security. Today, in September 2010, people are rioting in Mozambique for the same reason.
Driving across Saskatchewan or Kansas, one sees Wente’s “modern agriculture”: vast distances of highly productive monoculture farmland with hardly any people. In our recent drive through four sub-Saharan African countries (Namibia, Botswana, South Africa and Swaziland), we saw a land densely dotted with small villages and single-family huts where people guarded their small herds and flocks, hoed their meagre maize and vegetable plots, and trudged by with heavy loads of firewood and water. Agribusiness may fit into the overall economic mix and productivity of these countries, but will not help the 60% of the population of sub-Saharan Africa who, as Wente notes, are “smallholder farmers, mostly women, who typically earn a dollar a day or less.”
Agribusiness is making their plight worse day by day. The report, “Land grab or development opportunity? Agricultural investments and international land deals in Africa” by the United Nations and the International Institute for Environment and Development, shows that big businesses in rich countries have been buying and leasing farmland in Africa at an alarming rate. Since 2004, governments of five African countries of re-allocated (sold outright or leased in long-term contracts) 2,492,684 ha of land (excluding allocations below 1000 ha) away from smallholders to big business, many of them foreign. They include governments or businessed in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Kuwait, Qatar, India, Britain, South Korea, and China. The rate of farmland reallocation to foreigners has increased dramatically after the 2007–2008 food crisis as countries seek to increase their own food security. In May, the government of Madagascar fell because of a popular uprising against the government’s 99 year leases of almost 1.8 million ha of farmland to South Korean and Indian companies.
The biotechnology that Wendt and many others advocate as a panacea for African hunger is not bad by itself and may be an important part of the mix, but will not help the smallholders and often hurts them. What they need is for rich countries like Canada to tie its international trade and aid in poor countries to only those business deals and programs that help poor families.
Showing posts with label Africa. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Africa. Show all posts
Thursday, September 2, 2010
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
African Wildlife: The Big 5, Ugly 5 and Little 5
Preface
When Jeff and I were planning our trip to Africa in 2008, we searched hundreds of safari Web sites, and corresponded with perhaps 100 tour operators, some in person here in Vancouver, and began to suspect what I wrote above about tours. All of them advertised the “Big 5”. In Ernest Hemingway's day, when he wrote ”The Snows of Kilimanjaro”, these were the 5 most dangerous game animals to the hunter: lions, cape buffalo, white rhinoceros (black is more dangerous, but were nearly extinct by then), leopard, and elephant.
When non-hunting tourism began to take hold, the tour operators co-opted this phrase, implying that if you saw these 5 wildlife species, you had seen Africa.
Preamble
After some time with our guide, Lucky Garenamotse (www.luckyafricasafaris.com), and cook, Moses, on our private safari (which actually cost less than the all-inclusive tours), we discovered that the guides and other tour staff uniformly deride this “Big 5” notion. Our guide, when he understood that Jeff and I felt likewise, played a game: he began to show us the “Little 5” (one was a mouse) and the “Ugly 5” (for example, the Jaribou Stork).
The Story
After I’d been in Africa about 4 ½ weeks (3 with Hannah) and Jeff 1 ½ weeks, and had seen 24 species just in the family Bovidae (the antelopes and buffalo), 2 species of zebra, 2 of giraffe, 2 of rhinoceros, hundreds of hippopotamus including one that ran through our camp between our tents, plus nearly every other big game animal in southern Africa, not to mention almost all of the medium-sizes and large carnivores (bat-eared fox, 6 species of mongoose, 2 kinds of civets, spotted hyena--had actually looked up from my sleeping bag on the ground into the eyes of a hyena looking down at me--hunting dogs, leopards, and lions), and counted 344 species of bird; and had leapt aside as hyenas actually chased impalas between our tents, we came to the resort down of Kasane on the Zambezi River. This is just above Victoria Falls in Zambia, where tourists fly in on 3- or 5-day tours, see the falls, and then take a day’s detour so they can say they were in Botswana. Jeff and I went into the biggest resort for coffee while Lucky and Moses tinkered with the Land Rover and refilled our fuel and food supplies. On the verandah overlooking the Zambezi River, I put up my ‘scope and found an African Finfoot, a rare grebe-like bird with no relatives on Earth (except for the Asian Finfoot) and that that only occurs in Botswana at this one spot. Jeff and I were thrilled, as we wouldn’t get another chance. As we were turning to re-join Lucky and Moses, we encountered a young woman in safari tour-leader garb, with “Naturalist” on her name patch, who asked us if we had “got lucky” that morning. Not knowing what she meant, Jeff mentioned the Finfoot as being quite a prize. Then it was her turn to look perplexed. She had no idea what a Finfoot was. Finally we understood that she had been enquiring whether we had been lucky enough to see a hippopotamus on the morning’s boat ride!
The Epilogue
For the rest of the trip, when Jeff or I saw a new species, the other would say, “Got lucky there!”
The Sequel
Jeff and I are thinking about a trip to Borneo. Reading the tour operators' and lodge literature, it seems that people only go there to see orang-utans, which Jeff and I have labeled "The Big One." Worth seeing, to be sure, but Jeff and I agreed that we could be happy not seeing captive orang-utans being fed bananahs in rehabilitation centres. We've seen them in zoos, after all. If I (a primatologist, partly) miss them in the wild, but see a reasonable diversity of gibbons, leaf monkeys and perhaps a tarsier or two, and if Jeff adds 200 or 300 birds to his life list, we can live without seeing The Big One.
When Jeff and I were planning our trip to Africa in 2008, we searched hundreds of safari Web sites, and corresponded with perhaps 100 tour operators, some in person here in Vancouver, and began to suspect what I wrote above about tours. All of them advertised the “Big 5”. In Ernest Hemingway's day, when he wrote ”The Snows of Kilimanjaro”, these were the 5 most dangerous game animals to the hunter: lions, cape buffalo, white rhinoceros (black is more dangerous, but were nearly extinct by then), leopard, and elephant.
When non-hunting tourism began to take hold, the tour operators co-opted this phrase, implying that if you saw these 5 wildlife species, you had seen Africa.
Preamble
After some time with our guide, Lucky Garenamotse (www.luckyafricasafaris.com), and cook, Moses, on our private safari (which actually cost less than the all-inclusive tours), we discovered that the guides and other tour staff uniformly deride this “Big 5” notion. Our guide, when he understood that Jeff and I felt likewise, played a game: he began to show us the “Little 5” (one was a mouse) and the “Ugly 5” (for example, the Jaribou Stork).
The Story
After I’d been in Africa about 4 ½ weeks (3 with Hannah) and Jeff 1 ½ weeks, and had seen 24 species just in the family Bovidae (the antelopes and buffalo), 2 species of zebra, 2 of giraffe, 2 of rhinoceros, hundreds of hippopotamus including one that ran through our camp between our tents, plus nearly every other big game animal in southern Africa, not to mention almost all of the medium-sizes and large carnivores (bat-eared fox, 6 species of mongoose, 2 kinds of civets, spotted hyena--had actually looked up from my sleeping bag on the ground into the eyes of a hyena looking down at me--hunting dogs, leopards, and lions), and counted 344 species of bird; and had leapt aside as hyenas actually chased impalas between our tents, we came to the resort down of Kasane on the Zambezi River. This is just above Victoria Falls in Zambia, where tourists fly in on 3- or 5-day tours, see the falls, and then take a day’s detour so they can say they were in Botswana. Jeff and I went into the biggest resort for coffee while Lucky and Moses tinkered with the Land Rover and refilled our fuel and food supplies. On the verandah overlooking the Zambezi River, I put up my ‘scope and found an African Finfoot, a rare grebe-like bird with no relatives on Earth (except for the Asian Finfoot) and that that only occurs in Botswana at this one spot. Jeff and I were thrilled, as we wouldn’t get another chance. As we were turning to re-join Lucky and Moses, we encountered a young woman in safari tour-leader garb, with “Naturalist” on her name patch, who asked us if we had “got lucky” that morning. Not knowing what she meant, Jeff mentioned the Finfoot as being quite a prize. Then it was her turn to look perplexed. She had no idea what a Finfoot was. Finally we understood that she had been enquiring whether we had been lucky enough to see a hippopotamus on the morning’s boat ride!
The Epilogue
For the rest of the trip, when Jeff or I saw a new species, the other would say, “Got lucky there!”
The Sequel
Jeff and I are thinking about a trip to Borneo. Reading the tour operators' and lodge literature, it seems that people only go there to see orang-utans, which Jeff and I have labeled "The Big One." Worth seeing, to be sure, but Jeff and I agreed that we could be happy not seeing captive orang-utans being fed bananahs in rehabilitation centres. We've seen them in zoos, after all. If I (a primatologist, partly) miss them in the wild, but see a reasonable diversity of gibbons, leaf monkeys and perhaps a tarsier or two, and if Jeff adds 200 or 300 birds to his life list, we can live without seeing The Big One.
Saturday, December 5, 2009
Why the Copenhagen meeting on Climate Change is important
Like Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his delegation going to Copenhagen this week, I, too, have been thinking about global warming—since 1985 when I read an article in the Canadian Journal of Zoology by two Canadian wildlife biologists (Sinclair, A. R. E. and J. M. Fryxell. 1985. The Sahel of Africa: ecology of a disaster. Canadian Journal of Zoology, 63:987-994). The article gave evidence that the weather was changing in the Sahel, the arid grassland region on the southern edge of the Sahara Desert, and that this was partly the reason for the mass starvations of livestock and people in the 1970s and 1980s. Remember the television images of people starving and dying in their thousands in Eritrea, and Biafra? Sinclair and Fryxel proposed that the cause of the climate change in the Sahel was desertification caused by land mis-management and they got it partly right. But they could not have known then, as we now do, that part of the drying was caused by our greenhouse gas emissions. Yes, you and I share responsibility for countless deaths from starvation in Africa. Our culpability grows when we realize that conflicts like those in Sudan and Somalia derive from the same source: too many goats, sheep, cows and camels competing for too little forage and forcing families, clans and countries to confront each other over water and territory.
(please let me know if you would like a more detailed discussion of the agove paragraph, with references).
In 1987, as a middle manager with Environment Canada, I attended my first briefing on climate change. That was the year Canada hosted an international meeting in Montreal that resulted in an agreement to ban chlorofluorocarbons (CFC), a gas used in refrigeration systems that causes atmospheric ozone depletion, another aspect of climate change.
Five years later I had risen enough in the ranks, as well as in the science, to be the briefer instead of the briefee. In 1993, in a briefing to the Regional Director General and the regional executives of Environment Canada, Pacific & Yukon Region in Vancouver, I quoted this from John H. Gibbons and his colleagues in the U.S. Congressional Office of Technology Assessment in a 1989 article from Scientific American on "Managing Planet Earth.":
“Even if industrial countries managed to halve their carbon dioxide emissions...population growth and economic development in the less developed countries would most likely drive up their carbon dioxin emissions from 450 to 900 kilograms per person per year by 2030. Annual worldwide emissions of carbon dioxide would then be 2.5 times what they are today....The path of industrial development in China, for instance, could have a greater effect on the atmospheric accumulation of carbon dioxide that of any other nation. China's critical role stems from its large and growing population, its tendency toward energy intensive processes, its poor energy efficiency and its massive reliance on coal.”
I prepared that briefing after my first visit to China and before the publication of my Environment Canada report, Biodiversity in British Columbia: our changing environment, which was in peer review at the time and was published in early 1994. It contained a chapter, which I wrote with co-author Eric Taylor of the Atmospheric Environment Service, “Atmospheric change in British Columbia.” The title itself says quite a lot, because, back then, Environment Canada had not officially accepted that climate change would, in fact, occur with continuing increases of greenhouse gases. I was not allowed to use the term, nor to imply that the changes that I documented as already occurring in British Columbia—increasing precipitation on the coast, drying and winter warming in the interior, increased frequency of forest fires and increased spread of destructive forest insects—were the result of human-caused climate change.
The purpose of my 1993 briefing to the regional executives was to explain why Canada should support the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the precursor to the Kyoto Protocol. I pointed out the example of China as one of several vigorously developing countries whose air emissions would be crucial to success in controlling global warming:
• China led the world in per capita economic growth during 1965-1989, and would continue to do so at least through 2025,
• World economic growth assumptions, and hence the projected rate of increase in greenhouse gasses, had to be revised upwards for the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) 1992 supplementary report, partly because of China's unexpectedly strong performance,
• In 1990 China's carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GNP were four times higher than the global average, and five time higher that OECD countries, owing to inefficient production, transportation/ transmission systems, and patterns of consumption,
• The greenhouse gas emission projections are highly sensitive to population and economic growth assumptions, and most of the uncertainty over future growth in greenhouse gas emissions was likely to depend on how developing countries such as China chose to meet their economic and social needs.
As an example of this last point, I noted that if China did not build the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River—the world’s largest, which was extremely controversial at the time—it would forgo electricity equivalent to the consumption of 40-50 million tons of raw coal, or to 10 nuclear generating stations, or to seven 2.4 million KW thermal generating stations and associated coal mines and railroad transportation. The dam would, according to Chinese official estimates, cut carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide, carbon monoxide and nitrogen-oxide emissions by 100 millions tons, 2 million tons, 10,000 tons and 370,000 tons, respectively. Against these energy and climate change benefits, the dam would displace 1.2 million people and endanger many rare Yangtze River species, such as the unique Chinese river dolphin.
(The conservationists were right: the Chinese river dolphin was officially declared extinct on December 13, 2007.)
My take-home message to the Environment Canada executives was that the stability of our own ecosystems here at home, and the industries and commerce that they support, depend on the success of international agreements such as the UNFCCC.
Another chapter in Biodiversity in BC, “Threats to diversity of forest ecosystems in British Columbia” showed that insect infestations had increased exponentially during the 1980s and 1990s, coinciding with record warm winters. One species, the mountain pine beetle, had recently overwintered further north than ever before, and reproduced earlier. The damage had gone from an annual average of about 250,000 hectares to a peak of 1.1 million hectares and I warned that, with global warming, forest pests could increase further. Sure enough, by 2004, the scale had scale of insect damage had grown to 9.0 million in 2004, and the BC Government acknowledged that it was at least in part due to global warming.
In 2005, the federal government chipped in $100 million, on top of British Columbia’s $101 million, to combat the mountain pine beetle, just one of the two dozen species that regularly damage our forest. This a cost of not controlling climate change. Others include damage to forest and residences from forest fires, damage from increasing floods stronger storms, rising costs of insurance payouts and premiums, and so on. These costs grow annually are not hypothetical: British Columbians and other Canadians are paying cash for them.
There are even more ominous threats that centre on global trade. Canada sells a lot of food (mainly wheat) to other countries and buys a lot of food (mainly fresh produce and specialty foods) from them. Our selling depends on being able to produce surpluses and finding buyers who can afford them. Our buying depends on being able to afford it and finding sellers with surpluses. Given the climate change impacts in the most recent IPCC report, completed February 3, 2007, these are matters of increasing uncertainty. Climate change disruptions in food production and wealth generation systems in other countries will affect us. Our survival may depend on joining with other countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Meanwhile, in 1997, as Canada prepared for the negotiations on greenhouse gas controls under the UNFCCC, to be held in Kyoto later that year, Canada asked its top scientists to prepare an eight-volume “Country Study.” Its purpose was to brief negotiators and the bureaucracy that supported them on the implications of Climate change for Canada. Volume I, British Columbia and Yukon, contained my chapter on ecosystem response to climate change and 25 other chapters detailing the potential impacts on Canada’s environment and a range of response options that focused on greenhouse gas emission reductions. As a result, Canada signed the Kyoto Protocol in April 1998 and, with even stronger science evidence, ratified it in December 2002.
When I was first in Shanghai in 1993, the city’s 14 million people owned seven million bicycles and almost no private cars. Busses, trucks and a few taxis inched their way through streets filled with bicycles, pedestrians and handcarts. By 2003, the human population had increased by another 2 million (6 million, if outlying cities are included), the number of bicycles had increased at a lower rate than the people, and 200,000 private cars were in use
China’s CO2 emissions rose rapidly from 1978 to 1996, mostly as a result of increasing automobile use and new coal-fired power plants. Coal-fired power plants now provide 70% of its electricity supply, compared to 24% hydroelectric power. China gets just 2.3% of its electricity from nine nuclear power plants, but plans to build another 30 by 2020. Its CO2 emissions fell 7% by 2000, however, as a result of new hydroelectric power (principally from the Three Gorges Dam) and the closing of coal-fired plants. US emissions grew by 5% in the same period. Canada’s also grew. In 2005, China stopped construction of 22 more coal-fired power plants, possibly to try to embarrass the United States into signing on to the Kyoto Protocol.
The amount of pollution in China’s air is becoming legendary. In 1995, my wife and I visited Qingdao, a coastal city blessed with sea breezes that blow its pollution inland from its popular sandy beaches. We did not notice any particularly thick air. In December 2007, however, I returned to Qingdao, taking with me our 1995 tourist map of the city. A new edition of the map showed that the city had expanded to about 3 times its former size and the air pollution was more than noticeable: inland from the beach, it was so dirty that it hurt my eyes and lungs. One day the highway west (downwind) of the city was closed because drivers couldn’t see the road. My pictures taken in a nature sanctuary some 400 km northwest of Qingdao, halfway between there and Beijing, show migratory birds in a thick soup of air pollution on an otherwise clear, sunny winter day.
The data on China’s, the United States,’ India’s and other countries’ air emissions make a mockery of Canada’s politicians’ sudden efforts to convince us to give up our SUVs. (I drive one because as a wildlife biologist and I need it for fieldwork, but my wife and I gave up our second car years ago and willingly arrange our schedules accordingly.) Of course we as citizens need to do that because it is the right thing to do. We should recognize, however, that to make a meaningful impact on global warming, we will have to set rigorous emission limits for commercial vehicles and our most polluting industries. Even this will not actually dent global CO2 emissions much, but it will buy us a place at the table—the Copenhagen table—where we can hopefully influence the countries whose emissions do matter, such as the United States, China, and India. Our future depends on it.
(please let me know if you would like a more detailed discussion of the agove paragraph, with references).
In 1987, as a middle manager with Environment Canada, I attended my first briefing on climate change. That was the year Canada hosted an international meeting in Montreal that resulted in an agreement to ban chlorofluorocarbons (CFC), a gas used in refrigeration systems that causes atmospheric ozone depletion, another aspect of climate change.
Five years later I had risen enough in the ranks, as well as in the science, to be the briefer instead of the briefee. In 1993, in a briefing to the Regional Director General and the regional executives of Environment Canada, Pacific & Yukon Region in Vancouver, I quoted this from John H. Gibbons and his colleagues in the U.S. Congressional Office of Technology Assessment in a 1989 article from Scientific American on "Managing Planet Earth.":
“Even if industrial countries managed to halve their carbon dioxide emissions...population growth and economic development in the less developed countries would most likely drive up their carbon dioxin emissions from 450 to 900 kilograms per person per year by 2030. Annual worldwide emissions of carbon dioxide would then be 2.5 times what they are today....The path of industrial development in China, for instance, could have a greater effect on the atmospheric accumulation of carbon dioxide that of any other nation. China's critical role stems from its large and growing population, its tendency toward energy intensive processes, its poor energy efficiency and its massive reliance on coal.”
I prepared that briefing after my first visit to China and before the publication of my Environment Canada report, Biodiversity in British Columbia: our changing environment, which was in peer review at the time and was published in early 1994. It contained a chapter, which I wrote with co-author Eric Taylor of the Atmospheric Environment Service, “Atmospheric change in British Columbia.” The title itself says quite a lot, because, back then, Environment Canada had not officially accepted that climate change would, in fact, occur with continuing increases of greenhouse gases. I was not allowed to use the term, nor to imply that the changes that I documented as already occurring in British Columbia—increasing precipitation on the coast, drying and winter warming in the interior, increased frequency of forest fires and increased spread of destructive forest insects—were the result of human-caused climate change.
The purpose of my 1993 briefing to the regional executives was to explain why Canada should support the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the precursor to the Kyoto Protocol. I pointed out the example of China as one of several vigorously developing countries whose air emissions would be crucial to success in controlling global warming:
• China led the world in per capita economic growth during 1965-1989, and would continue to do so at least through 2025,
• World economic growth assumptions, and hence the projected rate of increase in greenhouse gasses, had to be revised upwards for the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) 1992 supplementary report, partly because of China's unexpectedly strong performance,
• In 1990 China's carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GNP were four times higher than the global average, and five time higher that OECD countries, owing to inefficient production, transportation/ transmission systems, and patterns of consumption,
• The greenhouse gas emission projections are highly sensitive to population and economic growth assumptions, and most of the uncertainty over future growth in greenhouse gas emissions was likely to depend on how developing countries such as China chose to meet their economic and social needs.
As an example of this last point, I noted that if China did not build the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River—the world’s largest, which was extremely controversial at the time—it would forgo electricity equivalent to the consumption of 40-50 million tons of raw coal, or to 10 nuclear generating stations, or to seven 2.4 million KW thermal generating stations and associated coal mines and railroad transportation. The dam would, according to Chinese official estimates, cut carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide, carbon monoxide and nitrogen-oxide emissions by 100 millions tons, 2 million tons, 10,000 tons and 370,000 tons, respectively. Against these energy and climate change benefits, the dam would displace 1.2 million people and endanger many rare Yangtze River species, such as the unique Chinese river dolphin.
(The conservationists were right: the Chinese river dolphin was officially declared extinct on December 13, 2007.)
My take-home message to the Environment Canada executives was that the stability of our own ecosystems here at home, and the industries and commerce that they support, depend on the success of international agreements such as the UNFCCC.
Another chapter in Biodiversity in BC, “Threats to diversity of forest ecosystems in British Columbia” showed that insect infestations had increased exponentially during the 1980s and 1990s, coinciding with record warm winters. One species, the mountain pine beetle, had recently overwintered further north than ever before, and reproduced earlier. The damage had gone from an annual average of about 250,000 hectares to a peak of 1.1 million hectares and I warned that, with global warming, forest pests could increase further. Sure enough, by 2004, the scale had scale of insect damage had grown to 9.0 million in 2004, and the BC Government acknowledged that it was at least in part due to global warming.
In 2005, the federal government chipped in $100 million, on top of British Columbia’s $101 million, to combat the mountain pine beetle, just one of the two dozen species that regularly damage our forest. This a cost of not controlling climate change. Others include damage to forest and residences from forest fires, damage from increasing floods stronger storms, rising costs of insurance payouts and premiums, and so on. These costs grow annually are not hypothetical: British Columbians and other Canadians are paying cash for them.
There are even more ominous threats that centre on global trade. Canada sells a lot of food (mainly wheat) to other countries and buys a lot of food (mainly fresh produce and specialty foods) from them. Our selling depends on being able to produce surpluses and finding buyers who can afford them. Our buying depends on being able to afford it and finding sellers with surpluses. Given the climate change impacts in the most recent IPCC report, completed February 3, 2007, these are matters of increasing uncertainty. Climate change disruptions in food production and wealth generation systems in other countries will affect us. Our survival may depend on joining with other countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Meanwhile, in 1997, as Canada prepared for the negotiations on greenhouse gas controls under the UNFCCC, to be held in Kyoto later that year, Canada asked its top scientists to prepare an eight-volume “Country Study.” Its purpose was to brief negotiators and the bureaucracy that supported them on the implications of Climate change for Canada. Volume I, British Columbia and Yukon, contained my chapter on ecosystem response to climate change and 25 other chapters detailing the potential impacts on Canada’s environment and a range of response options that focused on greenhouse gas emission reductions. As a result, Canada signed the Kyoto Protocol in April 1998 and, with even stronger science evidence, ratified it in December 2002.
When I was first in Shanghai in 1993, the city’s 14 million people owned seven million bicycles and almost no private cars. Busses, trucks and a few taxis inched their way through streets filled with bicycles, pedestrians and handcarts. By 2003, the human population had increased by another 2 million (6 million, if outlying cities are included), the number of bicycles had increased at a lower rate than the people, and 200,000 private cars were in use
China’s CO2 emissions rose rapidly from 1978 to 1996, mostly as a result of increasing automobile use and new coal-fired power plants. Coal-fired power plants now provide 70% of its electricity supply, compared to 24% hydroelectric power. China gets just 2.3% of its electricity from nine nuclear power plants, but plans to build another 30 by 2020. Its CO2 emissions fell 7% by 2000, however, as a result of new hydroelectric power (principally from the Three Gorges Dam) and the closing of coal-fired plants. US emissions grew by 5% in the same period. Canada’s also grew. In 2005, China stopped construction of 22 more coal-fired power plants, possibly to try to embarrass the United States into signing on to the Kyoto Protocol.
The amount of pollution in China’s air is becoming legendary. In 1995, my wife and I visited Qingdao, a coastal city blessed with sea breezes that blow its pollution inland from its popular sandy beaches. We did not notice any particularly thick air. In December 2007, however, I returned to Qingdao, taking with me our 1995 tourist map of the city. A new edition of the map showed that the city had expanded to about 3 times its former size and the air pollution was more than noticeable: inland from the beach, it was so dirty that it hurt my eyes and lungs. One day the highway west (downwind) of the city was closed because drivers couldn’t see the road. My pictures taken in a nature sanctuary some 400 km northwest of Qingdao, halfway between there and Beijing, show migratory birds in a thick soup of air pollution on an otherwise clear, sunny winter day.
The data on China’s, the United States,’ India’s and other countries’ air emissions make a mockery of Canada’s politicians’ sudden efforts to convince us to give up our SUVs. (I drive one because as a wildlife biologist and I need it for fieldwork, but my wife and I gave up our second car years ago and willingly arrange our schedules accordingly.) Of course we as citizens need to do that because it is the right thing to do. We should recognize, however, that to make a meaningful impact on global warming, we will have to set rigorous emission limits for commercial vehicles and our most polluting industries. Even this will not actually dent global CO2 emissions much, but it will buy us a place at the table—the Copenhagen table—where we can hopefully influence the countries whose emissions do matter, such as the United States, China, and India. Our future depends on it.
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