by Alex Evans | Oct 30, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity
Regular readers will know that we’ve been watching food prices rise steadily over the last few months with increasing concern – see the Scarcity category of posts for the backstory, and also this excellent in-depth analysis piece that the FT published last week. Today, the Food and Agriculture Organisation’s head, Jacques Diouf, had some blunt words in an interview with the FT:
“Many [countries] will have to take hard decisions because of the impact of food prices. In some countries there will be price controls, some will scrap import tariffs on food to minimise the impact of rising costs and others will increase food subsidies … If prices continue to rise, I would not be surprised if we began to see food riots,” Mr Diouf said, noting that in the past year, Mexico, Yemen and Burkina Faso had all witnessed social unrest over high food prices.”
Concern at FAO is clearly rising steadily; last week, the FT quoted the head of its grain trading division as saying that “the world is gradually losing the buffer that it used to have to protect against big swings [in the market]. There is a sense of panic.” But Diouf has a plan:
At the FAO’s annual meeting in Rome next month, Mr Diouf will propose a “high-level conference on world food security” that would aim to agree on measures to cool down rising food prices.
Interesting idea – and welcome to see Diouf seeking to raise the political temperature on food prices. But it still leaves the question: how much can an FAO summit on its own really achieve? Step back for a moment and consider what’s actually driving the increase in food prices. Here are Jenny Wiggins and Javier Blas last week in the big FT analysis piece mentioned earlier:
Some of the price rises are the result of temporary problems, such as drought in Australia, and diseases, such as blue-ear in Chinese pigs. But there is a more permanent increase in demand from Asia, as richer populations in China and India demand more protein, and from the biofuel industry, which is on course to consume about 30 per cent of the US corn crop in 2010 – developments that will underpin prices for the medium term. The FAO estimates that those structural new trends will help to push the cost of agricultural commodities in the next decade between 20 and 50 per cent above their last 10-year average.
Problem is, these challenges – droughts, affluence in China and India, demand for biofuels driven by high energy prices – lie well beyond FAO’s sphere of influence. Even if ministers attending the forthcoming FAO summit agreed to cap food costs, it’s highly unlikely they’d be able to deliver it, given the sprawl of drivers at play – just as environment ministers have a bad habit of signing glitzy treaty declarations that then (with a few exceptions like the Montreal Protocol on ozone depleting substances) comprehensively fall down during the implementation phase.
But none of this is to deny that there genuinely is a problem – and one that we can expect to get a lot worse once long term scarcity trends like climate change and water depletion get stirred into the mix. So what should Mr Diouf do?
Here’s a starter for ten. Instead of going all out for a meaningless summit declaration full of warm words, big targets, no new funds and no compliance mechanism, Diouf should start the slow, painstaking process of building shared awareness of the fact that we have a major geopolitical scarcity problem in the post. While the first stirrings of the problem are already clear, he should recognise that building consensus on the nature of the problem could take a decade or more; just consider the fact that eighteen years elapsed between the IPCC’s establishment in 1988 and 2006 when consensus on the reality of climate change really coalesced.
The first step, then, is simply to get the key agencies talking to each other. Anyone who’s spent any time working in international bureaucracies knows that the most fundamental fact about them is that they are organised in silos that don’t talk to each other. The problem is bad enough within individual agencies or government departments; it’s even more serious when two rival agencies work on the same area. But even that is still simple compared to trying to build a relationship between agencies that barely know each other exists.
That’s where we are today with the international agencies who will have to manage the geopolitics of scarce oil, scarce water, scarce food and scarce atmospheric space. Lots of staff at IEA won’t even know what FAO stands for; and vice versa.
So Diouf should go ahead and organise his summit. But he should also organise a retreat for 50 key staff from 50 key agencies relevant to the management of scarcity, and start building the shared awareness that they’ll need in the next few years: mapping the most vulnerable countries, how food scarcity could exacerbate conflict flashpoints, figuring out how currency fluctuations could affect the situation, running scenarios for $150 a barrel oil, reading William Cline’s CGD research on how climate change will affect developing country agricultural productivity, working out what kind of developing country governance frameworks have proved effective at managing local scarcity, devising ways of building scarcity awareness into peacekeeping operations (as DPKO are doing with Darfur)… the list is endless.
Building the barest bones of a common language that all the relevant players can speak may seem a modest first step, especially as the clamour for kneejerk responses builds. But it is an indispensable one too.
by David Steven | Oct 28, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity, Influence and networks
One addendum to Alex’s discussion of the new paper from Gerard Roe and Marcia Baker, which argues that we will never really know how much warming we are letting ourselves in for…
Isn’t that exactly why climate change is frightening? We’re poking a complex and poorly understood system with a very big stick – and we don’t know how it’s going to react (although there are plenty of reasons to believe it could be ugly).
Yet we insist in framing this as a problem of certain consequences rather than uncertain ones. It’s a big mistake in my book.
Update: Cf this quote from the Stern Review (chapter 13):
Uncertainty is an argument for setting a more demanding long-term policy, not less, because of the asymmetry between unexpectedly fortunate outcomes and unexpectedly bad ones.
by Alex Evans | Oct 28, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity
Two scientists, Gerard Roe and Marcia Baker, have a paper in Science this week which is a must read for everyone in climate policy. Here’s the abstract:
Uncertainties in projections of future climate change have not lessened substantially in past decades. Both models and observations yield broad probability distributions for long-term increases in global mean temperature expected from the doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide, with small but finite probabilities of very large increases. We show that the shape of these probability distributions is an inevitable and general consequence of the nature of the climate system, and we derive a simple analytic form for the shape that fits recent published distributions very well. We show that the breadth of the distribution and, in particular, the probability of large temperature increases are relatively insensitive to decreases in uncertainties associated with the underlying climate processes.
What that means, essentially, is that the climate system is so inherently complicated – because of internal variables like snow cover, clouds or water vapour in the atmosphere – that it’s just not possible to put specific numbers on ‘x amount of CO2 = y degrees C of warming’. Here’s Scientific American this week, with an interview of the paper’s authors:
Some of these feedback processes are poorly understood—like how climate change affects clouds—and many are difficult to model, therefore the climate’s propensity to amplify any small change makes predicting how much and how fast the climate will change inherently difficult. “Uncertainty and sensitivity are inextricably linked,” Roe says. “Some warming is a virtual certainty, but the amount of that warming is much less certain.” Roe and his U.W. co-author, atmospheric physicist Marcia Baker, argue in Science that, because of this inherent climate effect, certainty is a near impossibility, no matter what kind of improvements are made in understanding physical processes or the timescale of observations.
Why does this matter for policymakers? Because it puts a question mark over the current emphasis in policy debates on limiting warming to 2 degrees C (c.f. discussion of temperature limits at the recent UN climate summit). How can you limit warming to 2 degrees, or any other number, if you’re not sure what that equates to in terms of a parts per million ceiling on carbon dioxide in the air? Here’s Scientific American again:
…targets such as stabilizing atmospheric concentrations of CO2 at 450 parts per million (nearly double preindustrial levels) to avoid more than a 3.6 degree F (2 degree C) temperature rise are nearly impossible as well. There is no guarantee that such a target would achieve its stated goal. “Policymakers are always going to be faced with uncertainty and so the only sensible way forward to minimize risk is to adopt an adaptive policy,” argues climatologist Gavin Schmidt of the NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies, “which adjusts emissions targets and incentives based on how well, or badly, things are going.”
So, while it still makes sense to use the IPCC estimate that limiting warming to between 2.0 and 2.4 degrees C means limiting CO2e levels to between 445 and 490ppm (and hence reducing global emissions by between 60 and 85 per cent by 2050), what Roe and Baker’s research really underlines is: focus on the CO2, not the temperature. For all that 2 degrees makes a nice advocacy position for NGOs, the problem with temperature limits has been that they just don’t equate directly to emissions targets in the way that concentration limits to.
Which is why David and I have always called for stabilisation limits in ppm terms, not degrees C – and have also stressed that the key thing is to make the CO2 ceiling revisable in the light of emerging science.
by Alex Evans | Oct 23, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, North America
Here’s a story that seems to have gone virtually unremarked outside the US. Atlanta is running out of water: not in some long term “by 2050” kind of way, but in about 75 days’ time. As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution put it in an article on 11 October,
That’s three months before there’s not enough water for more than 3 million metro Atlantans to take showers, flush their toilets and cook. Three months before there’s not enough water in parts of the Chattahoochee River for power plants to make the steam necessary to generate electricity. Three months before part of the river runs dry. “We’ve never experienced this situation before,” state Environmental Protection Division Director Carol Couch said of the record-breaking drought and fast-falling lake.
As the New York Times observed over the weekend, “the response to the worst drought on record in the Southeast has unfolded in ultra-slow motion”. The drought afflicting Georgia has been underway for more than a year. Yet:
All summer … fountains sprayed and football fields were watered, prisoners got two showers a day and Coca-Cola’s bottling plants chugged along at full strength. On an 81-degree day this month, an outdoor theme park began to manufacture what was intended to be a 1.2-million-gallon mountain of snow.
Atlanta’s waking up to to the juggernaut bearing down on it, as the lakes on which it depends – Lake Lanier and Allatoona Lake – sink lower and lower, has been sudden. On September 28, Couch ordered an immediate ban on all outdoor water use, the most severe step laid out in state drought plans – but warned as she did so that, “my calculation is it may be inadequate”. She would be “reaching out”, she went on, to the US Army Corps of Engineers, to lobby for more water to be released from corps-run lakes (of which Lake Lanier is one).
By October 11, the full extent of the problem – including the fact that only three months’ worth of water remained, in the face of a forecast for another dry, warm winter – was becoming clear. Couch and her officials began drawing up a more demanding crisis plan to figure out where the pain should land. Couch commented at the time, “there has to be a balance between determining how much water we can conserve against how much lost jobs and lost economy there is. You don’t do that lightly.”
Then, on Friday last week – with drinking water down to 80 days – Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue staked out his position: it’s not our fault. Carol Couch’s attempts to “reach out” to the Corps of Engineers had been met by a blunt refusal, based on federally mandated protection for mussels and sturgeon downstream in the Sunshine State. The governor’s office claimed bitterly that “the amount of water the corps sends downstream is about double what Mother Nature would provide to federally protected mussels living in Florida’s Apalachicola River”, and promptly sued the Corps. (Even the local paper conceded on its editorial page, “Let’s be honest: It’s not about the mussels. The struggle for control of water flowing down the drought-stricken Chattahoochee River is about money and politics and human frailties such as jealousy, greed, laziness and procrastination.”) On Saturday, as the story went national, the Governor declared a state of emergency for more than half the state, and requested federal assistance.
Yet as the New York Times observed, “these last-minute measures belie a history of inaction in Georgia and across the South when it comes to managing and conserving water, even in the face of rapid growth”. As Mark Crisp, a water expert in the Atlanta office of engineering firm CH Guernsey commented, “we have made it clear to the planners and executive management of this state for years that we may very well be on the verge of a systemwide emergency”.
True and necessary as such statements of tough love may be, they are of scant consolation to the people of Georgia – who, as Katie Couric’s flagship news program on CBS reported yesterday, are feeling “rising panic”:
Across North Georgia, thousands of people are digging private wells, nervous that their regular water’s about to run dry. “The phone is just ringing off the hook,” said Bob Askew, the owner of a well-drilling company. “It’s like working at a telethon or something.”
So here comes another test of urban resilience – and one that emphatically illustrates the importance of futures and horizon scanning (as well as the fact that in the US, when you need a scapegoat for your incompetent water management, you can always blame the Corps of Engineers). And as a thoughtful feature in the NYT magazine on Sunday suggests, that what’s happening in Atlanta may well be a preview of coming attractions:
A catastrophic reduction in the flow of the Colorado River — which mostly consists of snowmelt from the Rocky Mountains — has always served as a kind of thought experiment for water engineers, a risk situation from the outer edge of their practical imaginations. Some 30 million people depend on that water. A greatly reduced river would wreak chaos in seven states: Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and California.
An almost unfathomable legal morass might well result, with farmers suing the federal government; cities suing cities; states suing states; Indian nations suing state officials; and foreign nations (by treaty, Mexico has a small claim on the river) bringing international law to bear on the United States government. In addition, a lesser Colorado River would almost certainly lead to a considerable amount of economic havoc, as the future water supplies for the West’s industries, agriculture and growing municipalities are threatened. As one prominent Western water official described the possible future to me, if some of the Southwest’s largest reservoirs empty out, the region would experience an apocalypse, “an Armageddon.”
by Alex Evans | Oct 19, 2007 | Climate and resource scarcity, Europe and Central Asia
With Angela Merkel’s advocacy of a per capita based approach to future global climate policy, and now (as David reported earlier this week), the prospect of the European Parliament endorsing the same, Europe’s posture on post-2012 climate commitments is looking more interesting that it has done for months. I’ve just finished a CIC discussion paper on this area, which is published today: here it is.
The paper’s starting position is to wonder why it should be that although the US and EU camps have opposite assumptions about how urgent climate change is, they actually agree on two of the most fundamental issues on post-Kyoto climate policy: neither side is arguing for a quantified ceiling on CO2 levels in the atmosphere, and neither is arguing for developing countries to take on quantified targets.
Why this odd consensus? The explanation I put forward is that although the EU ultimately believes developing country targets to be essential, it also judges that there is no political space for any discussion of them in the post-2012 commitment period. Instead, the EU argues for a sub-global approach with targets for developed countries but not developing ones.
But, the paper suggests, this approach rests on a pretty questionable analysis of the likelihood of developed countries taking on tougher targets in the absence of developing country targets – and an over-optimistic sense of how much emissions abatement can be achieved in developing countries through an expanded Clean Development Mechanism.
The problem is – contrary to what EU states appear implicitly to believe – the political context for a discussion of developing country targets will actually become progressively more difficult the longer it is left unaddressed. If developing countries take on shares of an emissions budget within an equitable framework early enough, then they can make money from participating in a global climate regime. But as the paper argues, this window of opportunity will only stay open for a limited time.
Except that now we have Angela Merkel livening things up – and proposing an approach that could potentially slice through the current Gordian knot. The paper concludes with a few recommendations on how Europe can capitalise on the momentum that she’s generating, and build up a useful head of steam in advance of the December Bali climate summit and beyond.
