A colleague forwarded me a link to the climate policy map (via the Private Sector Development Blog). This interactive tool allows you to make a do-it-yourself-map of different aspects of climate change policy. I made my own map, as you can see. Unfortunately, there is a lack of data for many countries, so apart from the developed nations we can’t really see much of what is happening in developing countries. Nevertheless, worth a play around.
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Archive for January, 2008
Figures just released show that deforestation in Brazil significantly increased in the last 5 months of 2007. The hotspots were Mato Grosso (53.5% of deforested area), Para (17.8%) and Rondonio (16%). The increase is blamed on rising commodity prices driving clearing for cultivation of soy, but I wonder if we are also beginning to see the impacts of the biofuel revolution, perhaps in the form of sugar in the Amazon?
Thankfully the Brazilian government have responded with emergency measures that include sending in more federal police, and fining colonizers selling commercially anything produced on illegally deforested land. Let’s hope it works.
We’re wrapping up our first stakeholder meeting for the Andes/Amazon region. You can now check out all the presentations on the dedicated site for the meeting (sorry - they are currently in spanish, but we’ll try to get some of it into English). We’ve got plenty of feedback specific to our analysis, and over the next weeks we’ll be incorporating it into our situation analysis.
Some of the highlights included pretty active discussion centred on the word poverty, with people from the region preferring the term “calidad de vida”, or “quality of life”. There’s a general disagreement with the validity of poverty definitions when it comes to ecosystem services. Indices like Basic Needs were not favoured for the analysis. This makes my job fairly difficult as, aside from US$1/day, it is the only consistent poverty index we have across the study region with decent spatial resolution. But for other work packages, we can adopt this different definition of poverty and analyse management options and evaluate case studies under the context of quality of life.
I also particularly liked a comment that the ESPA programme should actually be ESPAP - Ecosystem Services and Poverty Alleviation and Prevention. At least for Andes/Amazon, there are less poor people and the overall poverty is significantly less than other ESPA regions, such as in semi-arid sub-saharan Africa. Therefore one important component is maintaining ecosystem services to prevent future poverty in the region.
There really was a lot of important feedback, and shortly we’ll pull together a report and put it on this website.
A beta version of the 2008 Environmental Protection Index has been released by Yale University. The “Environmental Peformance Index (EPI) ranks 149 countries on 25 indicators tracked across six established policy categories: Environmental Health, Air Pollution, Water Resources, Biodiversity and Habitat, Productive Natural Resources, and Climate Change”. Some surprises there. Namely in the Andes/Amazon region where Colombia ranks 9th on a global level, beating the likes of Canada, Iceland, France, United Kingdom. Merit also for Ecuador in 22nd, Brazil in 34th, and Venezuela in 45th. The worst offenders in our region were Peru in 59th and Bolivia 110th. Interestingly, both the top of the table and the tail end reflect very closely the various development indices, with Scandinavian countries at the top and the last 8 consisting of western and central African nations.
Our project on a situation analysis of ecosystem services in the Andes/Amazon is currently in the midst of the first regional level stakeholder meeting in Cuzco, Peru. Over the past 4 months we have had over 15 national consultation meetings, and now is the time to present preliminary results of our work packages, and receive feedback from key stakeholders. This week we have the Andean region workshop in Cuzco, and in two weeks time we have the Amazonion workshop in Leticia, Colombia.
Every day over the next 3 days i’ll update our page with the latest presentations from the Cuzco meeting. Today, we examined the results of the spatial analyses. Participants saw our results, then met in groups to provide feedback and do some participatory mapping of priority interventions for the region in each of the ecosystem services we are studying. Check out the presentations!
In a recent study that is supposedly published in PNAS (although i can’t find it), Dr. Grainger of the University of Leeds raises eyebrows by questioning the validity of global deforestation estimates over the past four decades. The article has gained a great deal of press attention, leading to sensational headlines indicating that deforestation might not even be occurring, but the message appears to be that we simply should not trust the FAO-based deforestation estimates. This is not a particularly ground-breaking conclusion. A quick internet search actually provided several hundred instances where the FAO statistics are criticised, yet we all still use them. Grainger appears to question whether reforestation processes across the globe are accurately being captured in the forest resource assessments. I’m sure that is a difficult concept to incorporate. When does a pasture undergoing reforestation become a forest? We could get engaged in endless discussions about definitions without really doing much to actually act t curb deforestation, or indeed promote reforestation.
I have a practical mind, and would prefer to see solutions rather than the identification of more problems. Without seeing Grainger’s paper it is difficult to see where he sees the solution, but it does seem apparent that more innovative use of satellite technologies is the way to go. Indeed FAO responded to the BBC along these lines, acknowledging the challenges and opportunities out there.
IIED have published a report with an analysis of a number of cases of incentive based mechanisms for managing water resources in India:
“This report shares field experience and lessons in developing incentive-based mechanisms for watershed protection services and improved livelihoods at micro- and macro-scales at three locations in Himachal Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh. The process, progress and problems in the three sites, and the initial findings, are presented. Key lessons are discussed and specific recommendations made.”
Check it out here.
For those of you who haven’t yet spotted this, as part of our Andes/Amazon project we have developed a short online E-survey to assess the needs and priorities for the region in terms of ecosystem services and poverty alleviation. If you speak Spanish or Portugues, and have something to say about the subject, please do visit the survey and fill it in.
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