It’s that time of year. Holiday decorations line the streets, days are getting short, and temperatures are falling (well, theoretically at least, it’s still been in the 50’s and 60’s here in Washington). It’s also the time to step back and reflect on what’s happened since the last time the earth was on this side of the sun.

2012 has been a big year: France, Egypt, South Korea, and the U.S. all held presidential elections; Apple released the iPhone 5, the iPad 3, the iPad 4, and the iPad mini; and my hometown little league team nearly won the world series (my home city major league team actually did win the world series). But politics, technology, and sports aside, 2012 has seen some major victories and defeats for tropical forests as well. I’ve spent the last week reflecting on the events of the 2012 and wanted to share with you what I think are the milestones for 2012.

Rhiannon Tomtishen and Madison Vorva win UN Forest Heroes Award

The year started off on a high note, when two 16-year-old Girl Scouts were awarded the first ever UN Forest Heroes Award. Rhiannon Tomtishen and Madison Vorva have been campaigning since the age of 11 to bring attention to the links between palm oil production and deforestation. The girls were not only recognized by the UN, but on a trip to DC the two met with their home state senators (Carl Levin and Debbie Stabenow) and representatives (John Dingell and Thaddeus McCotter), EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson and a number of State department officials.

Lacey Act and forest get some relief from RELIEF

In Washington, D.C. this year, the biggest fight to protect tropical forests involved defending the Lacey Act, which bans the importation of illegally sources animals and plant products (including illegal tropical timber and wood products), from a number of congressional attacks.

Thankfully, relief came to the Lacey Act when congressional leadership decided at the last minute to pull the Retailers and Entertainers Lacey Implementation and Enforcement Fairness (RELIEF) Act from the congressional calendar, essentially killing it. Lacey enters 2013 looking strong, free of congressional challenges, and ready to continue protecting tropical forests and US jobs.

Rio+20: The future we don’t want

The biggest environmental flop of the year was the failure of the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (aka Rio+20) to lead to any concrete decisions and commitments. The meeting, a follow up to the original Earth Summit in 1992, which gave rise to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Convention on Biological Diversity, shut down large parts of Rio for two weeks in June as representatives from over 190 countries descended on the city.

Widely seen as a failure, the meeting highlighted the difficulty and frustration of decision-making at an international level. The only glimmers of hope during the summit came from businesses, cities, and individuals that continue to push the sustainability movement forward in the absence of national and international leadership.

Brazil Forest Code: Taking the good with the bad

Following the theme of environmental disappointments in Brazil, that country’s national government made some substantial changes to its forest code, leading to a decline in forest protection. The debate over the forest code, which had raged in the Brazilian congress for nearly two years, concluded when the pro-agriculture block of legislators passed a bill which greatly reduced forest protections, over the objection from Brazil’s leading scientific bodies. A series of presidential vetoes and congressional responses led to a final law that, while better than it could have been, still reduced protections for Brazilian forests.

Brazil’s continued deforestation reductions

However, not all environmental news out of Brazil was bad. In early December, it was announced that for the eighth year in a row, Brazil has reduced its deforestation rate. Deforestation this year was down by 27 percent and has fallen by 75 percent from the years of peak deforestation. This effort has involved cooperation amongst governments, business, and land owners on the state, national, and international levels to address the drivers of deforestation (mostly soy and beef production) and change the way forests are managed and protected. It’s not yet clear what effect the changes to the forest code will have on deforestation rates, but for now it’s enough to marvel at how far Brazil has come.

Looking ahead

This time of year is as much about looking forward as it is about looking back. With the new Tropical Forest Alliance between the U.S. government, major businesses, and NGO’s to address deforestation in supply chains, the Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil reviewing its principles and criteria for certification, and the UNFCCC scheduled to resolve the remaining technical issues concerning REDD+, 2013 promises to be an eventful year. We here at UCS will be keeping a close eye on these, and countless other developments, so stick around, it should be a fun year.

Author Bio:Calen May-Tobin is a policy analyst with expertise reducing emissions from tropical deforestation and degradation. He holds a Master’s degree in ecology from the University of California, Irvine.

The irony of the world’s climate change negotiators meeting in Doha this week cannot be lost on anyone taking an interest in climate change.

Qatar is hardly a model of the low carbon economy. With annual per capita carbon emissions of more than 50 tonnes, it has the highest footprint of any nation. The country’s exponential economic growth has been driven by the export of oil, natural gas and other petrochemicals. Its winning bid to host the 2022 World Cup includes plans to fully air condition every new stadium, insulating the players and the crowds from the 40°C+ heat.

But even if it were held in the lowest-emitting of countries, this Conference of the Parties is unlikely to achieve anything meaningful.

Climate change is all about energy: the way we generate and use it for electricity, transport and food production. Energy is the foundation of the global economy. And negotiators working for environment ministers just don’t have the authority to contribute to decisions that affect these dynamics.

If you transform the energy system, you fundamentally transform the global economic system. All the ships crossing the ocean full of sheep and textiles and cars and all the other things on our supermarket shelves or our lounge rooms are moved by fossil fuel. All those planes transporting people around the globe are too. Not all, but most of the lights seen from space are illuminated by electricity from combusted fossil fuel.

It is not hyperbole to conclude that changing the inputs that create this amenity will require the most far-reaching transformation of the energy system since the industrial revolution. And as with the industrial revolution starting in Britain, Belgium and other northern European countries, so the energy transformation will be led by the current major global economic actors.

Understanding the global response to climate change is thus a matter of following political and policy developments in the United States, Japan, Germany and China as much as it is about following the formal UN processes.

Let’s take a closer look at China. It is now home to four of the top five solar photovoltaic manufacturers in the world. Two of the top five wind turbine manufacturers are also Chinese. Ten years ago none of these companies were even in the top ten. Some didn’t even exist.

This change has been rapid, and just as with any other product or commodity, once volumes increase, so prices fall. Just two weeks ago Suntech, the world’s biggest solar PV company, announced that its cost of manufacture will fall 30 per cent in 2012. That is on top of a 75 per cent fall since 2009. For certain consumers, in certain places, and at certain times, solar is rapidly becoming the cheapest way to generate electricity.

And China’s current Five Year Plan has earmarked $1.6 trillion of investment in low carbon infrastructure and technology. The “China 2030” report, released earlier this year by China’s State Council and the World Bank, concludes that China’s national interest is in building a low carbon economy and getting ahead of the competition. The recent energy policy has a series of ambitious renewable energy targets.

Japan is often forgotten in discussion of low carbon development. Yet the world’s third largest economy has long been a leader in energy efficiency. With few primary resources and massive global companies like Canon, Toyota and Sony, it built its post-war economic strength on the basis of technological innovation.

Following the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami and the break down of the Fukushima nuclear plant, Japan is shifting its energy system away from nuclear and towards renewables, energy efficiency, and modern power grids able to manage demand.

Driven by policies such as these, the changes in the energy and electricity business have the potential to be as rapid as the changes in information and communications technology. Large-scale electricity generation distributed to our homes, businesses and factories via a lengthy distribution network ending with a plug in the wall might be the equivalent of the old black dial phone owned by the government. Now we can choose our make of mobile phone; choose our plan and the level of service it provides.

As with our phones, we will soon be able to use electricity in different ways, at different times, to manage cost. Businesses with roof space, or the ability to invest in their own electricity generation through technologies such as co-generation, can get into the business of selling their own power back to the grid.

And with Japan and Germany leading this charge, with China on the rise, the economics of electricity will move even faster.

According to Bloomberg, last year was the first when new investment in clean energy overtook coal and gas. In 2004 only $US34 billion was invested in clean energy globally. In 2011 the figure was $280 billion. That is a more than 800% increase.

This is all happening a good deal faster than most predictions. Rhetorical commitments to green growth are fine, but tangible examples of where investment in new local carbon infrastructure has achieved clear environmental and commercial returns is more powerful.

It is easy to be sceptical about Doha. But one shouldn’t allow oneself to therefore become cynical about the UN process. It is far from what it has to become but remains a critical part of the complex three-dimensional jigsaw that is our emerging response to climate change. The agreement reached last year at Durban has maintained the hope that by 2015 we will have a legally binding framework focused on keeping climate change within 2°C.

Climate change is not a problem that can be “solved” by any one meeting at any single point in time. Reducing emissions will be driven by public and political will and a combination of international diplomacy, technological innovation, scaled investment and policy at national, state, and local level. The indications are that this will, driven largely by economic and national interest is growing. Deliberations in Doha this week can only contribute a small amount to strengthening it.

It’s been more than a decade since global leaders met in Stockholm, Sweden, to sign a treaty with the goal of eliminating persistent organic pollutants making their way into our food chain — such as harmful pesticides like DDT that nearly wiped out the American Bald Eagle. While leaders have come a long way in restricting these types of pollutants, contamination of the Arctic remains a problem. Researchers at MIT are working to help inform policies that more effectively address contamination problems with their latest research and the help of a new grant from the National Science Foundation.

“Persistent organic pollutants are chemicals of substantial international concern,” Noelle Selin, the project’s lead researcher and assistant professor in MIT’s Engineering Systems Division and Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, says. “For emerging contaminants in the Arctic, we need to know more about their sources, environmental behavior, and transport pathways in order to regulate them more effectively.”

Selin and Carey Friedman, a postdoctoral associate at the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, had their latest results published last week in the journal Environmental Science & Technology. The study, Long-Range Atmospheric Transport of Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons: A Global 3-D Model Analysis Including Evaluation of Arctic Sources, describes the researchers’ development of a detailed 3-D atmospheric model used to track the day-to-day transport of chemicals. Specifically, they tracked PAHs — toxic byproducts of burning wood, coal, oil and other forms of energy that remain in the atmosphere for less time than other persistent organic pollutants regulated by global standards.

“Even though our model estimates lifetimes less than a day, that’s still long enough for these PAHs to travel long distances and have potentially damaging effects,” says Friedman, the study’s lead author, noting that some of these chemicals are known carcinogens that could cause cancer. “So PAHs may be a good case study of how we regulate long-range transport.”

Friedman’s work will be an important foundation for ongoing work in Selin’s research group at MIT, in collaboration with the University of Rhode Island and the Harvard School of Public Health. Together the researchers will be exploring the global transport of other contaminants in the Arctic, such as chemicals used in stain-resistant carpets and non-stick pans. In research going forward, Selin and her team will extend the model created in their recent analysis that allows them to track chemicals with much greater precision.

“These more complex models are showing what simple models aren’t, such as daily fluctuations of pollutants in specific locations,” Friedman says, “So while the simple models are important for some aspects of the policy process, they may not provide enough information to base these types of important decisions off of.”

The presence of these pollutants in the Arctic is important for several reasons. First, the researchers say there’s a very real health concern. Organic pollutants typically condense and rain down into Arctic regions. Once they mix with other chemicals, it’s unknown what danger they could pose to animals and humans, especially in concert with climate change stressors in the Arctic. Already, these chemicals are known to build up in the fat of whales, seals and other animals — a main source of food for people living in these high latitude regions.

At the same time, the practices that create some of these chemicals such as gas and oil exploration and shipping are expected to increase in the Arctic. As they do, it’s important to understand how pollutants traveling from distant sources exacerbate the problem, and how climate changes can affect future contamination.

“Climate change and contaminants are both substantial present and future threats to the Arctic, and our research can ultimately help leaders make better policies to protect this unique environment,” Selin says.

Calls to “protect the environment” ring out across issues as diverse as climate change, biodiversity loss, deforestation, water conservation and chemical contamination. I believe it is time to abandon this type of thinking. Time to forget about the environment and start thinking more about yourself! Your ecological self, that is.

The idea of protecting the environment has two main problems: the concept of “the environment” and the idea that it is something we should “protect”.

The term “the environment” gives the impression of an identifiable thing that exists separate and distinct from ourselves; something that surrounds us, something that we use, but something that always remains an “other”. This is mistaken.

We do not exist as isolated units, surrounded by a separate and external “environment”. We exist within networks of interrelation, engaging with various entities in a dance of co-creation.

Research from the human microbiome project has recently emerged to add new weight to this perspective. The human microbiome refers to all the microorganisms that live on and in the human body (including bacteria, fungi and viruses). Within our bodies, microbial cells outnumber our cells by an astonishing 10-1. The makeup of these microbial communities is not only unique to individuals, it is also constantly changing as different organisms enter and leave our bodies. The fascinating thing here is that these microorganisms are not simply passengers or parasites. Many of them are performing functions essential to our health and wellbeing.

Most of the excitement surrounding the human microbiome centres on the potential for developing new medical diagnoses and treatments. Personally, I am most excited about how such research opens new ways of thinking about who we are. Understanding that I am a teeming mass of microbial life and that these organisms are performing functions essential for my existence, leaves me no choice but to embrace them as a part of my being, part of my “self”.

The argument, however, also extends to other organisms. For example, we need oxygen to survive. Plants produce this oxygen. Therefore we are directly, deeply and fundamentally connected to plants with every breath we take. Our existence is dependent upon theirs. But plants have their own webs of dependencies, with organisms like birds and insects, and also with their own microbiomes. (This is also emerging as an exciting new area of research and an alternative to genetic engineering in the quest for crop plants able to tolerate abiotic stress and climate change.) The microorganisms of the plant microbiome are, of course, then also dependent on their own webs of relations with things like rock minerals and decaying matter. And so it continues ad infinitum. So who am I, really? Where should we draw the boundary around our “self“ in this ecological matrix?

The Norwegian eco-philosopher Arne Næss believed that we dramatically underestimate ourselves. He argued that understanding our deep connections to biological communities allows us to expand our concept of self to include them – or to realise what he called our “ecological self”. Our sense of self and feeling of identification naturally expands as we mature – through ego, social, and metaphysical levels. But Næss questioned the missing ecological dimension of this process; that is, our identification with non-human beings, with nature, with our Earth.

According to Næss and the deep ecology movement that followed him, realising our ecological self creates the potential for a radically new way of seeing and being in the world. Currently, environmentally responsible behaviour is seen as something we must be compelled to do, as an altruistic act or a moral duty to benefit an external “other”.

If we expand our concept of self to embrace our ecosystem of interrelations, however, this would be transformed into an act of self-interest. Protecting our self would be protecting the system.

Næss argued that this shift was important because people would no longer need to be compelled by argument, guilt, or punishment to demonstrate care for biological communities. Rather, such care would flow naturally from an expanded sense of self.

While I thoroughly support the value of realising our ecological self, the goal of protection remains problematic.

Calls to protect “the environment” (or even our ecological self) are troubling because they give the impression that there exists some kind of static ideal form we should strive to maintain. In the environmental movement, this ideal is typically a state before human intervention. When we think of the earth from a perspective of evolutionary time, however, we realise that life on earth has been undergoing constant change, with thousands of species lost along the way and every organism co-creating its community. Why is maintaining any particular state therefore seen as ideal? Why are human interactions isolated as unique over this history of hundreds of millions of years? Why should any specific state, let alone that prior to human arrival, demand “protection”? Surely this has nothing to do with “nature” and everything to do with what we value and think is important.

I currently manage an interdisciplinary project examining how philosophers and scientists understand what it means to harm the environment, and how this feeds into regulatory decision-making on emerging technologies (such as biotechnology and nanotechnology). After some research, I started doubting the question’s appropriateness. Reflecting on different perspectives, I realised that there was in fact no static environment external to ourselves that can be objectively harmed by our actions. Rather, there is a co-evolving relationship between ourselves and our ecological communities that can be better or worse depending on what we (within our diverse cultures) value.

I decided we should forget about protecting some imagined static external environment, and focus instead on the dynamic and developmental process of cultivating desirable ecological selves.

What would this mean in concrete terms? We can take food as an example since it represents one of the most fundamental relationships you have with non-human organisms. With every food item you purchase, you are, quite literally, investing in a particular ecological self. You are cultivating a particular set of relations that shape who you are. Now ask, do you like your ecological self? For example, do you know what kinds of pesticides have been used on the plants and how these have affected communities of life? Or what conditions the animals involved have been raised in, attained through, transported by, slaughtered under? Are you happy with owning these realities as a part of your identity? If not, you may want to cultivate an alternative set of relations and invest your money in more desirable systems.

The important shift here is that the question is not about how these things are affecting some external “environment” that you may have to make sacrifices to protect, but rather, how they are shaping who you are and the ecological self you are cultivating through your choices.

Climate change is widely expected to disrupt future fire patterns around the world, with some regions, such as the western United States, seeing more frequent fires within the next 30 years, according to a new analysis led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, in collaboration with an international team of scientists.

By the end of the century, almost all of North America and most of Europe is projected to see a jump in the frequency of wildfires, primarily because of increasing temperature trends. At the same time, fire activity could actually decrease around equatorial regions, particularly among the tropical rainforests, because of increased rainfall.

The study, published today (Tuesday, June 12) in Ecosphere, an open-access, peer-reviewed journal of the Ecological Society of America, used 16 different climate change models to generate what the researchers said is one of the most comprehensive projections to date of how climate change might affect global fire patterns.

“In the long run, we found what most fear — increasing fire activity across large parts of the planet,” said study lead author Max Moritz, fire specialist in UC Cooperative Extension. “But the speed and extent to which some of these changes may happen is surprising.”

“These abrupt changes in fire patterns not only affect people’s livelihoods,” Moritz added, “but they add stress to native plants and animals that are already struggling to adapt to habitat loss.”

The projections emphasize how important it is for experts in conservation and urban development to include fire in long-term planning and risk analysis, added Moritz, who is based at UC Berkeley’s College of Natural Resources.

UC Berkeley researchers worked with an atmospheric scientist from Texas Tech University to combine over a decade of satellite-based fire records with historical climate observations and model simulations of future change. The authors documented gradients between fire-prone and fire-free areas of Earth, and quantified the environmental factors responsible for these patterns. They then used these relationships to simulate how future climate change would drive future fire activity through the coming century as projected by a range of global climate models.

“Most of the previous wildfire projection studies focused on specific regions of the world, or relied upon only a handful of climate models,” said study co-author Katharine Hayhoe, associate professor and director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University. “Our study is unique in that we build a forecast for fire based upon consistent projections across 16 different climate models combined with satellite data, which gives a global perspective on recent fire patterns and their relationship to climate.”

The fire models in this study are based on climate averages that include mean annual precipitation and mean temperature of the warmest month. These variables tend to control long-term biomass productivity and how flammable that fuel can get during the fire season, the researchers said.

Variables that reflect more ephemeral fluctuations in climate, such as annual rainfall shifts due to El Niño cycles, were not included because they vary over shorter periods of time, and future climate projections are only considered representative for averages over time periods of 20-30 years or longer, the authors said.

The study found that the greatest disagreements among models occur for the next few decades, with uncertainty across more than half the planet about whether fire activity will increase or decrease. However, some areas of the world, such as the western United States, show a high level of agreement in climate models both near-term and long-term, resulting in a stronger conclusion that those regions should brace themselves for more fire.

“When many different models paint the same picture, that gives us confidence that the results of our study reflect a robust fire frequency projection for that region,” said Hayhoe. “What is clear is that the choices we are making as a society right now and in the next few decades will determine what Earth’s climate will look like over this century and beyond.”

“We need to learn how to coexist with fire,” said Moritz.

Study co-author David Ganz, who was director of forest carbon science at The Nature Conservancy at the time of the study, noted the significance of the findings for populations that rely upon fire-sensitive ecosystems.

“In Southeast Asia alone, there are millions of people that depend on forested ecosystems for their livelihoods,” he said. “Knowing how climate and fire interact are important factors that one needs to consider when managing landscapes to maintain these ecosystem goods and services.”

The researchers noted that the models they developed focused on fire frequencies, and that linking these to other models of fire intensity and vegetation change are important next steps.

The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the U.S. Forest Service, the National Science Foundation and The Nature Conservancy helped support this study.

A layover at JFK International Airport could actually be quite refreshing if you could breathe cleaner air in a literally green room.

That is Carnegie Mellon University architecture student Anna Rosenblum’s idea: an airport terminal extension that uses walls and roofs made of aeroponic plants that filter and clean the polluted outdoor air before it enters the indoor ventilation system.

“The T4 Terminal Extension seeks to provide an improved indoor environmental quality for passengers and employees,” said Rosenblum (A’13). “The outdoor air is contaminated with petroleum, jet fumes, and other toxins, and so the intake air must go through a rigorous cleansing process.”

The plants that make up the green walls and green roofs are grown using a special method called aeroponics.

“Aeroponic plants do not have a growing medium such as soil or water. Instead, their roots are directly exposed to the air. These plants receive their nutrients through a special nutrient spray that is administered to the plants on a timer, directly to the top of the root zone,” Rosenblum explained.

The reason for using this particular growing method is because it is actually the rhizomes on the roots that digest volatile organic compounds (VOCs), particulate matter and other toxins.

“When the roots are not restricted by soil, they are able to grow bigger and healthier. When the air is directly exposed to this bigger, fuller root zone, it increases their air cleaning capacity by 200 to 300 percent,” she said.

Her proposed design for the T4 Terminal Extension creates a plenum in the walls and roofs where the roots are allowed to sit freely. The air is directly exposed to the roots in these plenum zones, and is directed through them like ductwork.

“The green roofs work to filter the intake air, and although they will need some help from a mechanical system, these plants will still have a great impact on the air as it is brought into the terminal,” she explained.

Based on her research, the green walls should be able to clean and filter 100 percent of the return air within the space, therefore greatly reducing or eliminating the need for mechanical filtration.

“If this system works as well as the research has shown, then the terminal would be able to take in less air from the outside, which would reduce the loads on the mechanical systems, and continue to clean and recycle the indoor air, creating an enjoyable space for passengers that has fresher, cleaner air as well as a connection to nature.”

Rosenblum initially presented her project at the Steinbrenner Institute for Environmental Education and Research (SEER) Environmental Expo. The expo exhibited environmental art projects, service projects, and research being done by the CMU campus community.

She’s scheduled to propose her idea to the architecture firm of SOM (Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill) who designed JFK’s T4 Terminal Extension — which is already under construction. And Rosenblum is hopeful that she’ll be able to see her project come to life.

With 10 Silver or Gold LEED certified (green) buildings — including the nation’s first green dormitory on its Pittsburgh campus — CMU maintains its longstanding commitment to the environment and a sustainable energy future.

Most recently, the university announced it will purchase green power to offset 100 percent of the university’s electric consumption for 2012.

“We practice what we preach,” said CMU president Jared L. Cohon. “Carnegie Mellon is committed to sustainability in education, research and our own practices.”

GABORONE, BOTSWANA. You wouldn’t know there’s a food crisis in Botswana, one of Africa’s wealthiest and most stable countries, because it’s a silent one. This is not the doom and gloom Africa that we often hear sensationalized in the media as a place of coups, famines and corruption. No, Botswana is a model African state which has lived carefully within its means, had democratically elected governments since independence, and is the world’s leading exporter of precious diamonds. Yet food prices are up here dramatically since last year and the rural and urban poor are hurting badly. Unless policymakers rethink their strategies on agriculture and development, ‘growth with hunger’ could be the rest of continent’s conundrum in 25 years time.

While the global economy struggles with its economic malaise, Africa’s resource rich economies continue to grow. In some regards, Botswana is a shining example of successful resource-financed development. It has carefully husbanded a valuable natural resource, diamonds, and invested the proceeds in infrastructure development and education. Botswana’s literacy rate of 86% is one of the highest in the world, and its road and hospital infrastructure is admirable. Its government is ranked as one of the least corrupt by Transparency International, it exports high quality, grass-fed beef and its high-end eco-tourism business is booming.

Yet, Botswana imports 90% of its food which has made it particularly vulnerable to rising global food prices. Last year, global food prices were the highest on average at any time since they began to be systematically recorded in 1990. Following a slight decline, prices are now rising again and are higher than they were in 2008 when they resulted in a good deal of social unrest.

Despite consistent growth, the problem is that Botswana also has one of the most inequitable income distributions in the world, second only to Namibia. As such, while Botswana is a prosperous middle income country, the median per capita household income in the capital city, Gaborone, is only $2 per day. With two-thirds of the city’s population spending nearly half its income on food, rising food prices present a particular problem. Recent surveys suggest that 63% of households in the capital are severely food insecure, and 21% of households in rural areas sometimes go for a day without eating.

Botswana’s problems could be those of the continent in the next 25 years if we stay on the current development trajectory. Botswana, while largely rural at independence in 1966, has been urbanizing at a phenomenal rate and now has 60% of its population residing in cities and towns. Although Botswana is ahead of its neighbors on this front, the continent as a whole is the most rapidly urbanizing region in the world.

While Botswana has anemic crop production (producing only 10% of its food), the poor are disproportionately dependent on this activity. Even the urban poor often depend on food shared with them by relatives in the rural areas.

It has been argued that it makes no sense for Botswana to try to produce more food. It’s a semi-arid country with limited water resources and rainfall is becoming even more erratic because of climate change. Its farmers can’t compete with large scale commercial agriculturalists in neighboring South Africa which supplies the majority of Botswana’s food. Farming is also under-remunerated because of the relatively strong Botswana currency due to diamond exports – which generally makes imports less expensive.

The economically rational thing for Botswana to do is simply exchange its revenues from diamonds, cattle and high-end ecotourism for food. And Botswana does have ample amounts of food, it’s just increasingly expensive. Therein lies the problem for this deeply unequal society. Climate change, the changing macroeconomic structure of the country, and liberalized food markets are killing subsistence, dryland agriculture, the long time safety net of the poor. No amount of good governance and welfare payments to the poor can seem to solve the resulting hunger if the price of imported food continues to rise.

In many ways, Botswana’s present condition could be a foreshadowing of the continent in 25 years time if the region assiduously follows the advice of development practitioners. This should be a rosy picture. Well run, corruption free governments that judiciously manage export-based economies emphasizing commodities for which they have a comparative advantage (gold, diamonds, oil, natural gas, platinum). In those areas of the continent not overly affected by climate change, agriculture adopts the full suite of New Green Revolution technologies (hybrid seeds, pesticides, fertilizers and irrigation) and large commercial farms produce the majority of food for significant urban populations.

But here’s the rub. Resource-based economies are often undiversified and produce deep inequalities. Furthermore, high-input agriculture, while good at producing lots of food, is also heavily dependent on fossil fuel energy and only practiced by wealthy farmers. As energy prices rise, so does the cost of food production. And the combination of expensive food and deepening inequality means that hunger will persist even if Africa’s leaders do everything ‘right.’

An Africa free of hunger requires a completely different approach to development. It means a move away from a productionist-based approach to agriculture (more is not always better), to thinking about farming as a livelihood that can sustain a segment of the population, provide fuller employment, and buffer people from fluctuating global market conditions. African economies must also aggressively seek to diversify beyond resource exports. This will likely mean a return to some protectionism, and greater regional cooperation, so that new industries may be established. While diversity may be inefficient, it often produces more resilient economies that offer greater employment and a better distribution of wealth.

William G. Moseley is a professor of geography at Macalester College in Saint Paul, MN USA, and currently visiting scholar in the Department of Environmental Science at the University of Botswana, Gaborone.

Some rights reserved by Dave Pinter via Flickr

Rick Perry, was once quoted as saying: “The air we breathe, the water we drink, and the land we inhabit are not only critical elements in the quality of life we enjoy – they are a reflection of the majesty of our Creator.” Given that the current governor of Texas and former candidate for US president cares for the environment so much, it’s about time we all have a serious look at what we can do to prevent air pollution in all its forms. The EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) acknowledges the fact that indoor air is even more dangerous than outdoor air. According to the EPA, indoor air is three times more polluted than outdoor air. This problem of indoor air pollution comes from paints or finishes applied to building surfaces that can lead to serious human health hazards.

Risk factors in conventional paint

Switching to eco-friendly paints can prevent you from inhaling potentially dangerous indoor pollutants. There are lots of conventional brand name paints that are made with dangerous chemicals called volatile organic compounds or (VOC’s). VOC’s normally produce fumes that may cause serious health issues if chronically exposed to them. These are those nasty smells and fumes that are recognizable when painting. Even after the paints are dry, fumes will continue to emit long after you think the coast is clear for conventional paints. These paints are a combination of mercury, ethylene glycol, vinyl chloride, and benzene, which are very toxic and should not be inhaled by people with weak or sensitive respiratory tracts such as the elderly, infants and children.

When you consider those who handle paint on a continual basis, eco-friendly paints should be considered. A major finding by the WHO (World Health Organization) found 40 percent of interior designers or decorators develop lung cancer because of prolonged exposure to toxic VOC fumes in conventional paints. There are lots of eco-friendly paints available in the market today which can sometimes be more cost effective than the your everyday standard paints (if you happen to catch them on sale). Although most so called eco-friendly paints range from ten to twenty-five percent extra over standard paint, the price is worth it when talking about inconvenient smells in your home, climate change, air quality, and other environmental issues.

Another great thing about using no-VOC or low-VOC paints are that most of those products are odorless which means that you can breathe a sigh of relief after freshly painting your walls. These low or no VOC paints can be put to good use when you want to remodel your children’s bedrooms. A great money saver with premium eco-friendly paint is the fact that some of these paints only need one coat, which saves you money and time.

Most earth friendly paints have an overall better quality in terms of elasticity and tensile strength, spread capabilities, elongation, paint color retention, and viscosity. Of course, premium paint will cost you more money but will make up for cost with quality in most cases.

The author John Tarantino is a green writer for theenvironmentalblog.org

These days, hospitals and schools are advised to paint with low or no VOC paints. This message should also extend to pregnant mothers-to-be who should not only consider the nutrients she inputs in her body but also the air quality introduced in the womb. One of the reasons why eco-paints are used in hospitals is because of the harmful chemicals that can directly affect an unborn child. Schools and other learning institutions should consider environmentally friendly paint as well because harmful chemicals emitted by conventional paints have been proven to affect a child’s underdeveloped respiratory system.

Before going out to purchase your eco-friendly paint, double check that label to make sure you are getting what you want. You can always ask the store clerk or the ‘local paint expert’ for advice. As you’ve probably seen before, there are always numerous displays with different brands of paint to choose from. And lastly, don’t be afraid to ask for technical datasheets to get the details on the chemical profile of the paint you are curious about.

Adding lime juice to water being treated with a solar disinfection method removes detectable levels of harmful bacteria such as E. coli significantly faster than solar disinfection alone, researchers say.

“For many countries, access to clean drinking water is still a major concern,” says Kellogg Schwab, professor of environmental health science at Johns Hopkins University and director of the Global Water Program. “Previous studies estimate that, globally, half of all hospital beds are occupied by people suffering from a water-related illness.”

Schwab, senior author of a study published in the April issue of the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, says the research showed that solar disinfection of water combined with the citrus juice greatly reduces E. coli levels in just 30 minutes—on par with boiling and other household water treatment methods.

In low-income regions, solar disinfection is used in the home to reduce diarrheal illness. One method recommended by the U.N. Children’s Fund is known as SODIS, or solar water disinfection. It calls for filling 1- or 2-liter PET plastic bottles with water and then exposing them to sunlight for at least six hours. In cloudy weather, exposure times of up to 48 hours may be necessary.

The 30 milliliters of Persian lime juice per 2 liters of water used in the study to speed up the process—roughly an ounce per half gallon—would “likely not be prohibitively expensive or create an unpleasant flavor,” Schwab says.

Schwab and Alexander Harding, lead author and a medical student at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, designed their study to determine if lime constituents known as psoralenes could enhance solar disinfection of water.

The researchers filled PET plastic bottles with dechlorinated tap water and then added lime juice, lime slurry or synthetic psoralen, and either E. coli, MS2 bacteriophage or murine norovirus.

Levels of both E. coli and MS2 bacteriophage were significantly lower following solar disinfection when either lime juice or lime slurry was added to the water. Noroviruses, however, were not dramatically reduced using the technique, indicating it is not a perfect solution.

“Many cultures already practice treatment with citrus juice, perhaps indicating that this treatment method will be more appealing to potential SODIS users than other additives such as TiO2 [titanium dioxide] or H2O2[hydrogen peroxide],” the authors write.

They caution, however, that “additional research should be done to evaluate the use of lemon or other acidic fruits, as Persian limes may be difficult to obtain in certain regions.”

The debate over how to green industry remains locked into national and regional settings. However, it is really at the level of cities that progress is likely to be achieved. Increasingly, the focus of efforts to green the current fossil-fuelled industrial system, as it spreads relentlessly worldwide, will have to focus at the city level for real solutions, both of technology and of finance – because it is at the level of cities that the most acute problems arise. And it is at the level of cities that political and economic coalitions can come together most readily to drive change.

There are several outstanding examples of industrial cities that have transformed themselves from fossil-fuelled nightmares to clean and green exponents of a new way forward.

Take Ulsan, the second-largest city of Korea and the country’s industrial centre. When he turned the sod for this first of Korea’s new “industrial parks” in 1962, Korea’s then-president, Park, Chung-hee, declared that only when the sky over Ulsan was black with industrial smoke, and the air was ringing with the sound of hammers on metal, would Korea throw off its centuries of poverty.

Within a few decades of the creation of petrochemical, automotive and shipbuilding complexes at Ulsan, Korea did indeed attain the status of a newly developed economy. But it did so at fearful cost for Ulsan itself. Environmental contamination of soil, water and air reached catastrophic levels, and the Taehwa River became an open industrial sewer.

A decade ago, in 2002, a new city administration took office. It pledged to regenerate Ulsan and turn it into an “eco-industrial park”. There would be resource and energy sharing between industrial complexes, reducing overall resource and energy throughput. So far, the efforts to reframe linkages between firms have shown substantial progress, and the Taehwa River is emerging as a symbol of the newly regenerated city.

This story was told by the former vice-mayor of Ulsan, Dr Bong-hyeon Joo, at a recent gathering of urbanists, economists and policy officials at a Greening Urban Growth symposium, staged in Penang in Malaysia by the[ Growth Dialogue ] in conjunction with ThinkCity. This latter is an arm of Malaysia’s sovereign wealth fund and investment agency, Khazanah Nasional, and its focus is on regenerating Georgetown, the colonial heart of Penang.

Other cities to tell their stories of eco-industrial regeneration included Ahmedabad in India and Portland in Oregon. An elected council member of Portland Metro told a fascinating story of how Portland had been moving relentlessly towards the urban uniformity and drabness of so much suburban development in the US, but reversed the process in the 1990s, led by the state’s agricultural and timber industries. They were not happy at seeing their livelihood disappearing under bitumen. This led to an urban regeneration that now boasts a new, “green” Portland, new human-scale transport systems and a general air of cultural revival.

These examples are emblematic of a growing global trend that seeks to reverse the environmental degradation of cities. Fossil-fuelled industrialisation is out. “In” is the recovery of both the economic potential of cities through creation of new green industries and the liveability and potential of cities through the regeneration of green precincts.

The symposium was enlivened by presentations from urbanists such as Professor Alfonso Vegara, founder of Fundacion Metropoli, and leader of urban redesign efforts in his native Spain and in south-east Asia. Dr Vegara sees cities as connected in patterns he describes as “diamonds” of spatial linkages – illustrated by the diamond that links the southern European cities of Lisbon, Madrid, Barcelona, Marseilles and Milan, or the diamond linking Singapore to the Malaysian industrial clusters of Iskandar Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur and Penang.

This latter diamond brings Singapore into a fruitful relationship with Malaysia, particularly with Iskandar Malaysia on the southern tip of the Malay peninsula. It provides a way to triple the land area of Singapore and extend its model of administrative guidance into the heartland of Malaysia. All these visions of new linkages provide opportunities for greening that were ignored or overlooked during the phase of fossil-fuelled industrialisation.

Perhaps the highlight of the symposium was the account of a new green technology for urban recycling, which has emerged in China. This is a process for recycling the solid waste of cities and turning its organic content into fertiliser, and inorganics such as plastics into pellets that are then available for recycling through manufacturing.

If there were a Nobel Prize for technological breakthroughs, this would surely be a candidate. It is the brainchild of Dr Zheng Shunchao whose company Zizhao Environmental Protection Development is building modular solid waste recycling (SWR) plants throughout China, through negotiation of a series of concessional arrangements. After decades of depending on non-solutions like landfill and incineration, here is a closed system that recycles everything promptly (within four hours), without odour or discharge. It creates a valuable fertiliser from the organic matter in the waste, which is appreciated by the local agricultural sectors. Dr Zheng describes his system as an “industrial stomach” that digests the organic materials in under four hours, day after day, in modular units that handle 200,000 tonnes per day. So out of China comes a technological breakthrough of the first order.

The Growth Dialogue has done the world a service in mounting this important initiative. But it is significant that it did so in partnership with Khazanah Nasional, which is likely to play a lead role in financing Malaysia’s greening, and specifically in its development of eco-industrial clusters. As the BICs take charge of the urban greening agenda, they are likely to utilize their sovereign wealth funds and investment agencies as the tools for transforming the current fossil-fuelled industrial model.

There are challenges aplenty in this agenda. So far, the successes raise the issue of what kinds of preconditions might be needed for eco-industrial initiatives to prove successful. One thing the Penang symposium made clear is that it is not just technological initiatives that are needed, but an equal emphasis on financing – such as the development bonds that have been used by the Indian city of Ahmedabad – to finance eco-industrial growth. Finance and technology are emerging as the twin faces of the incipient “greening of capitalism” revolution.