Tackling climate change can at times seem to be at odds with ensuring economic growth and alleviating poverty. I believe, however, that the only way to truly succeed with either of these goals is by striving to reach them all. Climate change, poverty, population growth, and food, water and energy insecurity are mutually reinforcing.

None of these challenges can be solved in isolation. While economic development is key for achieving social and environmental goals, long-term economic growth and lasting competitiveness can only be secured through environmentally sustainable and climate friendly development policies.

Norway, like all other countries, must strive to transform into a low-emission society, and must take the lead in domestic emissions reductions. As a developed country, we carry particular responsibilities in this regard.

We have therefore established a goal — supported by a large majority of our Parliament — to be carbon neutral by 2030. Our contributions to Indonesia’s REDD+ efforts is additional to this goal. We urge other developed countries to set equally audacious goals and follow up on them with determination.

However, the inconvenient truth is that commitment and action from developed countries alone would not solve the climate change challenge, even if all developed countries stopped all emissions today.

Developing countries must act as well. Unless we all take large scale remedial action, huge damage worldwide will follow, wreaking havoc with much of the development progress of the last decades.

Climate change is already affecting the globe through intense and frequent heat waves, droughts, floods, and tropical cyclones.

In 2010, the Brazilian rainforest experienced what some scientists describe as the worst drought in one hundred years. The signals are all flashing red; action can be delayed no longer.

Faced with the stark realities of climate change and its consequences for the developing world, no developing country will benefit from building its future on unsustainable resource extraction leading to environmental destruction and large emissions.

Fortunately, even in the most difficult times, there are always alternatives. Tropical forest countries, like Indonesia, are endowed with rich natural resources that sustain essential life support systems both for the region and for the world.

Lasting economic growth can be built on sustainable land use and world class agricultural productivity.

Effective and transparent land use planning and improved governance and transparency can be established at all levels of government.  What the world needs is good examples of how this could be done: Indonesia is in the process of becoming such an example.

Private enterprise, moreover, benefit from the ecosystem services that standing forests and peatlands provide, and will suffer from the consequences of climate change, such as lack of water and unreliable rainfall patterns.

I am pleased to see that Sinar Mas, Indonesia’s largest producer of palm oil believe that sustainable palm oil production is in their economic interest, and has vowed not to plant on peat, and not to clear forest where significant carbon is locked up in trees.

Low emission development is a fundamental choice for a country that cannot be imposed from the outside. Norway has pledged to support Indonesia with US$ 1 billion over the next few years. However, the agreement between Indonesia and Norway only captures in writing what Indonesia under President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s leadership had already planned to do.

Indonesia’s challenge over the next few years — as stated in its climate and forest strategy — is to rationalize land use by the forestry, mining and plantation sectors to ensure more effective protection and reduced emissions from natural forests and peatlands, as well as more effective utilization of degraded lands.

A comprehensive moratorium protecting most of the remaining natural forest and peatlands from this perspective provides a unique opportunity for Indonesia.

It points the way towards a situation where the long-term sustainability of these sectors would be
ensured, thereby strengthening their medium and long term growth prospects. In short, it represents an opportunity for sustainable economic growth.

I strongly believe that the direction in which President Yudhoyono is taking the country will be the best for Indonesia and for the Southeast Asian region, not decades from now, but in the near future.

Rainforests and peatlands provide invaluable services today, to the world and to all Indonesians. The Indonesian government’s pledges to both improve the lot of their population and lead the fight against climate change is a beacon to the world. The government of Norway admires these commitments, and we are proud to support them. (By Erik Solheim)

The writer is Norway’s Minister for Environment and International Development.

Source: The Jakarta Post

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SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Governments in the Asia-Pacific region face the risk of unprecedented numbers of people displaced by floods, storms and other impacts of climate change, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) said in a report on Monday.

The bank and climate scientists said the region, home to 4 billion people, will be among the regions most affected by the impacts of climate change, leading to major migration both within and between nations, stretching resources.

The draft report, "Migration due to climate change demands attention" also said no international mechanism has been created to manage millions of people on the move.

"Protection and assistance schemes remain inadequate, poorly coordinated, and scattered. National governments and the international community must urgently address this issue in a proactive manner," it said.

Failure to do so risked costly humanitarian disasters, the report concluded.

The report for policymakers reviewed climate threats and the complex nature of migration, of which climate change is only one of many drivers, including greater numbers of people moving to cities to seek jobs.

It pointed to impacts such as higher temperatures, changing rainfall patterns, greater monsoon variability, rising sea levels, floods, and more intense tropical cyclones.

Last year's floods in Pakistan led to the temporary or permanent dislocation of millions of people, while Sri Lanka is suffering its second wave of floods in less than a month, threatening up to 90 percent of the rice crop. More than 250,000 are seeking refuge in temporary shelters.

"The Pacific is particularly vulnerable because of its high degree of exposure to environmental risks and high population density. As a result, it could experience population displacements of unprecedented scale in the coming decades," the ADB report said.

Climate-induced migration would affect poor and vulnerable people more than others, said Bart W. Edes, director of ADB's Poverty Reduction, Gender, and Social Development Division.

"Those who stay in their communities will struggle to maintain livelihoods in risk-prone settings at the mercy of nature's whims," he said in a statement.

HUGE CITIES AT RISK

The report highlights Asia's booming megacities as being particularly vulnerable to disasters, such as floods, rising seas and cyclones.

"Megacities will often lack the carrying capacity to accommodate the influx of climate migrants on top of those moving for other reasons," said the report, adding that massive influxes of migrants could lead to conflict over resources.

According to UN data, only about 17 percent of, or 230 million people in, the Asia-Pacific lived in towns and cities in 1950. By 2005, it had reached 39 percent (1.5 billion) and was expected to hit 50 percent by 2025. By 2050, more than 3 billion people in the region will live in urban areas.

"The massive growth in megacities in coastal areas significantly increases the population exposed to the risks posed by climate change," said the report, pointing to Mumbai's population, forecast to reach 26.4 million by 2025. Dhaka's was set to hit 22 million and Shanghai's 19.4 million by the same year.

South Asia was most vulnerable to climate change impacts, such as rising sea levels and storm surges from cyclones, which were expected to become more powerful, threatening Bangladesh and India in particular, it said.

Other vulnerable areas were the densely populated low-lying coast of China, southern Pakistan, the deltas of the Mekong, Red and Irrawaddy rivers and the Pacific island states of Kiribati and Tuvalu.(By David Fogarty; Editing by Daniel Magnowski)

© Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters

Source: Reuters

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Hackers stole millions of euros in permits during past two months Analysts said the thefts were a serious challenge to the E.U.

system.

The European Commission has suspended trading in permits for greenhouse gas emissions for at least a week after the theft of permits worth millions of euros in a series of online attacks.

The Emissions Trading System had been attacked amid "recurring security breaches" over the past two months, the commission, the executive agency of the European Union, announced on its Web site Wednesday.

The commission said it needed to shut the system down until at least next Wednesday, as "incidents over the last weeks have underlined the urgent need" for enhanced security measures.

The attacks raised new questions about the viability of the bloc’s main tool for battling the rise in greenhouse gases.

The stolen permits are part of an E.U.wide system that caps the amount of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, that companies may emit each year.The E.U.system is the largest market in the world for credits for greenhouse gas emissions.

Companies exceeding their emissions quotas can buy certificates from companies that succeeded in shrinking their carbon footprints by, for example, adopting environmentally friendly technology or modifying production in other ways.

Some of the thefts of credits early this week were from electronic registries in Austria, Greece, the Czech Republic, Poland and Estonia, said Maria Kokkonen, a spokeswoman for Connie Hedegaard, the E.U. commissioner for climate action.

"It could be a concerted action by fraudsters to get access and steal permits from legitimate accounts to sellon spot markets before the thefts were discovered," Ms. Kokkonen said.

The permits stolen from the Czech registry were worth about ¤7 million, or $9.4 million, she said. She was unable to comment on the value of the allowances stolen in other countries.

Analysts said the thefts were a serious challenge to the E.U. system, which the bloc wants other parts of the world, including the United States, to emulate.

"Although such incidents are negligible in terms of actual market impact, they will overtime undermine the credibility of carbon trading as a policy measure to reduce emissions in Europe," said Kjersti Ulset, am anager at Point Carbon, a companyt hat reports on emissions markets and provides consultancy services.

The commission issued security guidelines after a similar attack in early 2010, but the latest incident will almost certainly oblige the authorities to invest in new and more secure hardware.

"By investing tens of thousands of euros to upgrade their I.T. systems, member states could prevent losses on the scale of millions of euros," Ms. Kokkonen said, referring to information technology systems.

The E.U. system has had a rocky ride since trading began six years ago, including extreme volatility, tax fraud, the recycling of used credits and suspicions of profiteering, in addition to cyberattacks.

In the incident a year ago, swindlers used faked e-mail messages to obtain access codes for individual accounts on national carbon registries. Traders and companies that fell for the ploy were directed to a rogue Web site and invited to enter their security codes —apractice known as ‘‘phishing’’ in the jargon of the Internet.

The swindlers used the stolen codes to gain access to electronic certificates that represent quantities of greenhouse gases. They then sold the certificates through trading accounts registered in Denmark and Britain.

That attack was estimated to have netted the swindlers as much as $4 million from Germany alone.

Ms. Kokkonen said Wednesday that it was stillu nclear what methods had been used to steal the permits in the latest spate of attacksb ecause the national authorities were still looking into the matter. (By JAMES KANTER)

Source: mydigitalfc.com

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Cancun, Mexico. Though Indonesia is not at high risk of extreme weather events, an expert said on Tuesday that the country’s vulnerability to environment disaster magnified the potential risk.

Armi Susandi, an Indonesian meteorological expert, said that while Indonesia did not experience extreme weather events that other countries suffered, such as typhoons and cyclones, it did not mean the government could sit back and relax.

He added the severity of the weather events that Indonesia faced was “nothing compared to other countries.”

“However, it doesn’t mean that we’re not affected by them,” said Armi, a member of the Indonesian delegation at the United Nations’ climate conference in Cancun.

“Just from the tail [of a storm], we can get very dry weather if it comes from the north or very wet weather if it comes from the south. And if it gets very dry, then the potential for forest fires also increases, which was exactly happened two years ago.”

Furthermore, the country’s vulnerability to storms magnifies the resulting damage, he said.

“It’s not the extreme weather that matters for Indonesia, but how prone we are,” Armi said.

“We have very low levels of resistance, so even if only a small part of the country is hit, the impact is tremendous.”

His warnings came as the World Climate Research Program released their report on increasing extreme weather events globally, such as tropical cyclones and hurricanes, as well as heat waves and cold snaps.

“When we observed these extreme events in the past, they were different in magnitude and frequency from what is happening now,” said Ghaseem R. Asrard, director of the WCRP.

Asrard gave the example of Russia, which has been experiencing heat waves from 2003 to 2010 the likes of which have not been seen since the 1500s.

He also quoted the 4th Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment from 2007, which said heat waves had become more frequent and widespread. The evidence also showed there were more warm nights and fewer cold days.

However, Asrard said these extreme events were largely regional in nature, meaning their manifestations tended to be varied and could not be generalized at the global level.

But a separate study, also released to coincide with the talks in Cancun, says risks to Indonesia, specifically, are on the rise.

Titled “Climate Vulnerability Monitoring: The State of the Climate Crisis,” the report, put together by DARA, an international NGO focusing on aid to areas suffering from conflict and natural disasters, said the negative effects of climate change on Indonesia would “slightly increase” over the next 20 years, with consequences including higher disease rates, habitat loss and economic stresses.

International experts said the important issue now was how to adapt to these changes.

“Some vulnerable countries are becoming much more proactive in their actions, such as the Maldives, which is aiming to be carbon neutral by 2020, and Bangladesh, which has already put $100 billion of its own money into implementing a climate change action plan,” said Saleemul Huq, a senior fellow at the London-based International Institute for Environment and Development.

These countries cannot afford to wait for the world to save them, so they are taking matters into their own hands, he said.

Michael Zammit Cutajar, a former chief of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, said countries could not deal with climate change without also addressing poverty, as there was a strong correlation between poverty and environmental vulnerability.

He also said countries needed to avoid the trap of defining which nations were the most vulnerable to climate change.

“Vulnerability and adaptation are [challenges] for all countries,” he said. (By Fidelis E. Satriastanti)

Source: The Jakarta Globe

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