Saturday, March 28, 2015

Sendai framework on disaster risk reduction disappoints | Down To Earth

By Ranjan K Panda, Down To Earth

Goals are without specific time plan and targets

On the midnight of March 18, representatives from 187 UN member states adopted the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030 with seven targets and four priorities for action. After the marathon negotiations that preceded the convention,one would have expected a clear cut action plan and commitments from developed nations. So far, it is understood, only Japan made some funding commitment for this proposal as the five-day-long conference wrapped up.

Earlier proposals for percentage goals were rejected, so the current set looks like vague targets. The current framework for 15 years replaces the 10 year long Hyogo Framework for Action. The Sendai Framework aims to lower the global mortality rate from disasters between 2020 and 2030, compared with 2005 to 2015, and reduce the proportion of people affected.

Disasters and the related devastations have increased in the last decade despite of the existence of the Hyogo Framework, the current Framework recognises. During 2005-2015 alone, over 700,000 people lost their lives. More than 1.4 million people were injured and approximately 23 million became homeless due to disasters.

The world’s worry about disasters, more so due to climate change, has aggravated manifold as more than 1.5 billion people were affected by disasters in various ways during the last decade. Women, children and people in vulnerable situations were disproportionately affected. The total economic loss was more than $1.3 trillion. In addition, between 2008 and 2012, 144 million people were displaced by disasters.

Disasters induced by climate change have in fact increased in frequency and intensity. While there are more noises around large-scale disasters among planners globally, the conference rightly points out that recurring small-scale disasters and slow-onset disasters particularly affect communities, households and small- and medium-sized enterprises. In fact, these sections of people face a high percentage of losses.

While all countries face mortality and economic losses from disasters, in the case of developing countries these are disproportionately higher. In fact, poor countries face increased levels of possible hidden costs and challenges to meet financial and other obligations. And, as we know, they are the least prepared to handle the challenges. Take for example India that faces huge losses due to climate change-induced disasters, so much so that the expenses on adaptation increased from 2.6 per cent in 2012 to 6 per cent of the country’s GDP in 2014. And the country is even not able to assess the real (covering all areas and all intensities) losses and damages due to climate change properly.

Just take the water crisis faced by the nation, most of which is due to climate change—global and local (growth induced)—and you would realise the vastness of the problem that the country faces now. Eight of the 10 warmest years in the country’s history fell in the last decade; and almost 54 per cent of the country’s geographical areas face high to extremely high water stress. Things are getting worse and we have not been able to cope with such disastrous situations.

The Sendai Framework recognises that the goals of sustainable development are being outsmarted by the gaps in progress and achievement agenda such as the Millennium Development Goals and have tried to give a perspective to overcome all these so as to contribute meaningfully and substantially to the new era December climate negotiations in Paris, however, the broadness of the goals without specific time plan and targets disappoint us.

It recognizes the need to develop an action-oriented framework that Governments and relevant stakeholders can implement in a supportive and complementary manner that can help to identify disaster risks to be managed and guides investment to improve resilience. It also recognizes some vital factors that are contributing to the disasters and rightly mentions about the role of unsustainable urbanisation.

However, it completely fails to discuss the way we produce our energy and the impacts there from. Fossil fuel, especially coal, continues to be the major source of our energy. The GDP growth oriented economy, that most of the climate change vulnerable countries such as India are following in fact not only contribute to global greenhouse gas emissions and disasters but also increase lot of local woes that club the impacts and devastate the poor the most.

The commitments for the Sendai Framework are voluntary but unless the signing countries adhere to green growth models, most of the goals would remain to be addressed in the same light even after 15 years. A new framework may then be developed but the gaps in implementation and disasters would have grown.

Source


Tuesday, March 24, 2015

How businesses can engage consumers in their sustainability stories | The Guardian

Consumers are facing information overload. Tapping into people’s values and sharing positive messages will help connect over sustainability

Communicating simple, inspiring stories of efforts to tackle complex social and environmental issues is an ongoing challenge for today’s businesses. Somewhere amid the cacophony of sustainability communications, consumers are reaching information overload.

As the effects of corporate ‘greenwashing’, ethical scandals and climate change doom-mongering take their toll, a kind of apathy is taking hold. Globally, just 28% of people believes business is doing enough to protect the planet and contribute to society, according to Accenture and the UN Global Compact (pdf).

In 10 years, the pressure to deliver concrete proof of green claims will intensify. “We’ll see a push for radical transparency and increasing scrutiny of businesses by consumers,” says Futerra co-founder Ed Gillespie. “To make their sustainability stories stand out from the crowd, businesses will need to make a fundamental transition – to reconnect with a deeper sense of purpose. This must fit perfectly with their core business, capture how they add value to the world, and resonate with people emotionally and rationally.”

So how will businesses of the future communicate their sustainability stories effectively and, further, inspire people to take action?

Tuning into values


Encouraging people to consume less and make lifestyle changes will largely depend on companies’ abilities to tap into people’s value systems, believes Eda Gurel-Atay, researcher and author of Communicating Sustainability for the Green Economy.

“Companies can’t change people’s deep-rooted social values, so they’ll need to try harder to understand them,” says Gurel-Atay. “This means tuning into the value systems of audiences in different countries, and personalising communications – tailoring messages to connect with people’s values and motivations.”

Telling sustainability stories in this way will also tap into the millennial market, according to Karen Deignan, senior consultant at SalterBaxter. “This is a generation who are more socially aware than ever and want to buy from brands that connect with them on issues they care about,” she explains.

Indeed, 83% of global millennials want brands and companies to become more active in solving the world’s challenges, research by MSL Group suggests.

Seeing is believing

In addition to delivering transparent evidence of their own results, tomorrow’s businesses will need to consider how to reflect the results of their customers’ actions. People will want to see how their contribution is making a tangible difference to the world, Gurel-Atay predicts. Social media could play an important role here. For example, the Instant hero campaign by bottled water company One Water gave customers the opportunity to project themselves as superheroes online – complete with cape and power boots – to highlight their contribution to delivering clean water to developing communities in Africa.

Collaborating with audiences

“We’ll see companies taking a far more interactive approach to sustainability communications,” says Gillespie. “Businesses will increasingly look to crowdsource ideas, and campaigns will become a lot more participatory. It will be more about businesses and consumers working in partnership, making decisions as a team.”

Nick Liddell, strategy director at design business Dragon Rouge agrees that “it will be a completely different kind of relationship.” “Central to this will be abandoning one-directional broadcasts and seeing consumers as people. That way, companies will be able to engage with people in multiple ways, beyond the straight consumption of goods.”

One corporate-backed initiative tapping into the spirit of collaboration is Collectively, a new editorial platform launched by Forum for the Future and major businesses including Unilever, Coca-Cola, M&S, BT and Carlsberg. Formed to encourage millennials to make sustainable lifestyles ‘the new normal’, it aims to inspire change by encouraging participation with positive stories of hope and progression.

Focusing on the positive

“Brands will need to communicate in a more sophisticated, strategic way to capture people’s imagination,” says Liddell. “This starts with knowing when not to share good work that people expect you to be doing anyway, and being more rigorous about communicating the things that really add value.”

Changing the language of sustainability communications will be central to this transition: in short, business must adopt a simpler, more upbeat rhetoric. “Sustainability is the only field where ‘zero’ is seen as a good thing,” continues Liddell. “Businesses must make a wholesale change from communicating efforts to reduce impacts to leading on value and benefits.” For example the light-hearted Intermarché ‘Inglorious fruits and vegetables’ campaign, which highlighted the benefits of buying ugly produce, proved so popular in France that the supermarket’s competitors have since followed suit.

Mainstreaming sustainability

“Today, sustainability is often marketed as an add-on feature, rather than an aspirational brand ethos or promise,” concludes Deignan. “Fast forward 10 years and it will stand for a whole range of benefits that, combined together, simply mean ‘better’. Substantiating this big picture message will mean highlighting exactly how the product or service is smarter, healthier or fairer in readily understandable terms.”

BMW already refers to its new generation of electric cars as “redefining mobility”. The product claims to be creating a better future for urban travel, weaving the green credentials of its ‘i’ series within a broader message on innovative design and convenience.

As sustainability becomes a key ingredient in the way brands communicate, people are more likely to absorb the message without even realising there’s a green agenda. And it is not inconceivable to hope that one day we will describe businesses, not by turnover or share value, but by how they are making society better.

Thursday, March 12, 2015

A how-to guide to restoring tropical forest | SciDev.Net

Through numerous experiments, the Forest Restoration Research Unit at Chiang Mai University, Thailand, have found ways to optimise seedling vigour and health. As a result, they have developed an efficient way to restore tropical forest ecosystems, with advantages for biodiversity conservation, environmental protection and carbon storage.

Steve Elliott, the unit’s cofounder and research director, explains why forests do not restore themselves any more, and argues that reforestation must enter the drone age.

Monday, March 9, 2015

The Journey of Women's Rights: 1911-2015 | UN Women

UN Women captures the journey of women's rights from 1911-2015, and key moments of the women's movements globally.

Saturday, March 7, 2015

Indigenous Peruvians win Amazon pollution payout from US oil giant | The Guardian

By Dan Collyns, The Guardian

Out-of-court settlement ends long legal battle for compensation for deaths, birth defects and environmental damage allegedly caused by Occidental’s pollution


Members of the indigenous Achuar tribe from the Peruvian Amazon have won an undisclosed sum from Occidental Petroleum in an out-of-court settlement after a long-running legal battle in the US courts

They sued the company in 2007, alleging it knowingly caused pollution which caused premature deaths, birth defects and damaged their habitat.

It is the first time a company from the United States has been sued in a US court for pollution it caused in another country, Marco Simons, the legal director of EarthRights International, which represented the Achuar people in the lawsuit, said. It set a “precedent” which he said will be “significant for future cases and has already been cited by other courts in the United States”.

The case was initially dismissed in 2008 when the federal district court agreed with Occidental Petroleum that the case should be heard in Peru rather than Los Angeles, the plaintiffs successfully appealed to overturn this decision, and the US supreme court refused to hear the company’s arguments in 2013.

The funds provided by the company through a trust will be used for health, education and nutrition projects run by a collective of five Achuar communities (Antioquía, José Olaya, Nueva Jerusalén, Pampa Hermosa and Saukí) that filed the lawsuit. All come from the Corrientes river basin in Peru’s northern Amazon.

One of the plaintiffs, Adolfina Sandi alleges her 11-year-old son and eight-year-old daughter died after drinking water from the contaminated river.

“We didn’t know the impact of the pollution and the company never told us. My son and daughter died vomiting blood. They never confirmed to us why they had died,” she said. Speaking her native Achuar language, Sandi said she was grateful for the settlement even though her children would not benefit from the projects.

LA-based Occidental Petroleum drilled for oil in Peru’s block 1-AB – one of the country’s biggest oil concessions – between 1971 and 2000, during which time it spewed out around 9bn gallons of untreated “produced waters” containing heavy metals such as cadmium, lead and arsenic into the rivers and streams without regard for international standards, according to a report by the NGO Amazon Watch.

In 2006, a study by Peru’s health ministry in seven affected communities revealed that all but two of the 199 people tested had levels of cadmium in their blood above safe levels. In the same year, the Achuar seized oil wells, forcing the government and the Argentinian company Pluspetrol which took over the block in 2000 to remediate the environmental damage by reinjecting the production waters.

But conditions have not improved with Pluspetrol. The Peruvian government declared an environmental emergency in the Corrientes basin in 2013. The company, which operates oil and gas fields across Peru’s Amazon, is challenging nearly $13m in environmental fines through Peru’s courts, according to the country’s environmental supervision agency.

Arli Sandi, an Achuar leader from Saukí, said the communities would not be afraid to file a similar lawsuit against Pluspetrol.

In January, Achuar, Kichwa and Urarina communities seized Pluspetrol oil wells in Peru’s northern Amazon demanding the company pay compensation for contamination and the use of their territories.

Source

Tuesday, March 3, 2015

Johan Rockstrom: Let the environment guide our development | TED TALK

Human growth has strained the Earth's resources, but as Johan Rockstrom
reminds us, our advances also give us the science to recognize this and
change behavior. His research has found nine "planetary boundaries" that
can guide us in protecting our planet's many overlapping ecosystems.