Brookings: Topics - Sustainable Development

Wanted: A Noah's Ark for Species' DNA

William Y. Brown — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 11:22:00 -0400

DNA was the topic of U.S. Supreme Court argument on April 15. Can a gene be patented if it occurs in nature—which is generally grounds for exclusion—but has been identified by an individual scientist or company and removed from the cells in which it occurs? Lower courts are split on the matter, and the justices didn't tip their hands.

But whether a gene can be patented will be irrelevant if it disappears before anyone has identified it. That is what's happening now and will continue to happen—at a rate perhaps 100 to 200 times faster than in prehistoric days—due to modern man's outsize influence on nature and encroachment on habitat. Unless we have sequenced a species' DNA, extinction means gone forever and never really known. Preservation of the DNA is the simpler, cheaper route, with sequencing to follow. If the Library of Congress is where every book is stored, the world needs the equivalent for species DNA.

Preserving the DNA of known species would provide genetic libraries for research and commerce and for recovery of species that are endangered—the Armur Leopard and the Northern Right Whale, for example. Preservation would also offer the potential to restore species that have gone extinct. We currently lack preserved DNA for most of the 1.9 million species that have been named, but that is fewer than the number of people in Houston. No doubt additional species exist, but their DNA can be preserved as they are named. The job is doable.

Just a small fraction of species are maintained as living organisms in cultivation or captivity or are kept frozen as viable seeds or cells. These are the best, because whole, reproducing organisms can be grown from them by planting or cloning. Botanical gardens and zoos keep the living stuff. The Millennium Seed Bank at Kew Gardens in England is on a course to preserve frozen seeds of all vascular plant species, and the Svalbard Seed Vault in Norway is taking seed duplicates from other facilities. The San Diego "Frozen Zoo" has some 20,000 viable cell cultures representing 1,000 vertebrate species, including "Lonesome George," the last Pinta Island Galapagos tortoise, which expired last year. Its DNA would have disintegrated if the Frozen Zoo hadn't made a heroic mission after the tortoise's death to get a sample.

The American Museum of Natural History in New York keeps 70,000 samples in liquid nitrogen, the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia has frozen samples for 4,000 bird species, and the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian has embarked on an ambitious course to freeze species tissues.

For a fraction more species, DNA is kept at low temperature in dead cells or extracted form. The American Museum of Natural History in New York keeps 70,000 samples in liquid nitrogen, the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia has frozen samples for 4,000 bird species, and the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian has embarked on an ambitious course to freeze species tissues.

Yet the DNA of most species is still not preserved. We need a plan. One might think that preserving the DNA of life on earth would cost a moonshot of money. But a viable cell culture in liquid nitrogen for a species at the Frozen Zoo costs only $200 to $300 to establish and just $1 a year to maintain. Multiplying $250 per species by 1.9 million species comes to $475 million, ignoring what has already been done. The U.S. pays more than twice that daily on the national debt. But let's be real, nobody is throwing new money around, even when the priority is obvious.

There is another way that could work, and would be much cheaper. First, we could develop a website to track progress on preservation whose key information is managed directly by contributing facilities. It would be a "wiki" site for DNA repositories, and many keepers would be delighted to share information if they could manage it themselves. They could both update holdings and let people know what species they will take and under what conditions.

Second, we can establish new incentives and mandates for contributing specimens, including grant, publication and permit requirements. Some grant makers and publications already require that DNA information be shared with a genetic information bank kept by the National Institutes of Health. Why not tissue too?

Third, donors who care could help develop and fund "citizen science" projects of museums and nonprofit groups to collect, identify and contribute specimens to repositories. The collections would grow, and so might public connection to nature. At the end of it all, we will preserve what we appreciate. And patent lawyers will be happy too, because they'll have something to fight about.

Authors

William Y. Brown

Publication: Wall Street Journal

Image Source: © Henry Romero / Reuters

Oil and Gas Management for Inclusive and Sustainable Development: An East African Regional Forum

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 11:15:00 -0500

Editor's Note: This report recaps the East Africa Regional Forum on oil and gas management for inclusive and sustainable development in Africa held on January 23-24, 2013, and jointly organized by the Economic Policy Research Centre, the Kenya Institute for Public Policy Research and the Africa Growth Initiative.

Recent discoveries of commercially viable deposits of oil and gas in Uganda and Kenya, as well as ongoing efforts to improve and make oil production in South Sudan more efficient, have brought to the fore the need to revisit national policies for the exploration and exploitation of oil and gas reserves and the allocation of the revenues obtained from such activities. Informed discussions based on research and evidence on how best to efficiently and effectively manage East Africa’s natural resources are of critical importance at this stage of the development of these resources.

Thus, in order to deliberate on and critically explore these issues, leading policy think tanks in East Africa—the Economic Policy Research Centre (EPRC), Uganda; Kenya Institute for Public Policy and Analysis (KIPPRA); and Centre for Strategic Analyses and Research (C-SAR), South Sudan—in collaboration with the Africa Growth Initiative (AGI) at the Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C., organized the two-day Forum on the Management of Oil and Gas Resources for Inclusive and Sustainable Development in Africa. The forum brought together 114 delegates from the East Africa region to deliberate on how to efficiently manage their oil and gas reserves.

The delegates engaged in rigorous debate about the exploration and exploitation of oil and gas, the efficient and equitable management of oil revenues and the management of the environment. Their particular focus was on how regional cooperation can enhance the efficient utilization of the region’s resources. In addition to sharing their experiences about managing an oil-based economy, they emphasized the importance of openness and transparency in the design and implementation of policies for the management of this nascent sector.

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The Innovative Metropolis: Fostering Economic Competitiveness through Sustainable Urban Design

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 09:00:00 -0500

Event Information

February 21, 2013
9:00 AM - 4:30 PM EST

Falk Auditorium
Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20036

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As global cities have embraced sustainable urban design and entrepreneurism, their strategies can serve as a source of inspiration and new knowledge to U.S. cities and beyond. By pairing best practices from international metros with their U.S. counterparts, the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at the Washington University in St. Louis has developed a series of case studies that examine the urgent challenges of an increasingly urbanized planet, focusing on the development of sustainable products, services, technology, and land use patterns following the economic recession.

On February 21, the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings and the Sam Fox School’s Master of Urban Design Program hosted an all-day forum which explored the intersection between sustainable urban design and economic growth while discussing the implications for design and practice. The event also highlighted policies that have enabled individual cities to become successful models of sustainability and examined specific design and policy issues through the lenses of economy, government, climate and social systems.

Mark Wrighton, chancellor of the Washington University in St. Louis, welcomed the forum participants and audience members, followed by a presentation from Ricky Burdett, professor of urban studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Panel discussions covered transportation; environmental and building technologies; and adaptation and renewal. The program closed with a presentation from Mohsen Mostafavi, dean and the Alexander and Victoria Wiley professor of design at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, followed by a reception and respondent discussion.

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Issue Brief: Water Resource Issues, Policy and Politics in China

Scott Moore — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 13:16:00 -0500

Editor’s note: Scott Moore is Giorgio Ruffolo Doctoral Research Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School. He was a guest researcher at Brookings’ John L. Thornton China Center and Brookings-Tsinghua Center for Public Policy in the spring of 2012. His research project was made possible by the generous support of the Ford Foundation.

Among the many challenges to China’s current economic development trajectory, water resource constraints are among the most worrisome. According to Barry Naughton, one of the foremost experts on the Chinese economy, “China’s greatest development challenges…are in the areas where a dense population pushes up against the limits of water and what the land can provide.”[1] The water resource challenge to China’s development is exceptionally complex, encompassing a blend of geographical, political, economic, and social dimensions. This Issue Brief describes the root causes of China’s water resource challenge, assesses the Chinese government’s policy response to date, and finally offers recommendations to increase the effectiveness of these policies.

In short, China’s water resource challenge consists of both water quantity and quality issues, each of which present distinctive challenges for Chinese policy. Although the Chinese government is implementing perhaps the world’s most ambitious water resource management strategy, its efforts risk being undermined by inter-governmental rivalries, corruption, and incentives that favor economic development over sustainable resource use. In particular, inter-jurisdictional conflicts over water resources threaten to undermine policies to address water scarcity, while mis-matched incentives between pollution control and economic development at local levels of government threaten to undermine water quality control objectives.

Plenty of water, in all the wrong places

In aggregate, China possesses substantial water resources, constituting the world’s fifth-largest national endowment of fresh water. By per-capita standards, however, China’s water resources are much more modest at approximately 2000 cubic meters per person annually, as compared to a global average of about 6200 m³/person/year.[2] These aggregate statistics nonetheless conceal marked regional discrepancies in precipitation and irrigation patterns, which combined with uneven distributions in population and economic activity mean that some areas possess plentiful water resources while others face chronic and crippling shortages. While residents of the sparsely populated, mountainous southwest enjoy some 25,000 cubic meters of freshwater per person annually, those of the populous and arid north have less than 500.[3] Some of China’s largest and fastest-growing urban areas, notably Beijing and Tianjin, and its most water-intensive crops, especially wheat, are located and grown in the arid north, where annual precipitation is less than one-third of that in southern coastal areas. For the past few decades, water-stressed areas have relied on groundwater to make up the difference, but since at least the 1970s rates of withdrawal have become unsustainable, and water tables are dropping by approximately one meter annually throughout the North China Plain.[4] Apart from making water more difficult and expensive to access, over-pumping of freshwater allows saltwater to penetrate aquifers in some areas, rendering them unfit for human consumption.[5]

Other factors exacerbate this fundamental geographic mal-distribution of water availability and demand. Climate change is expected to intensify aridity in northern China,[6] enhancing its scarcity of both surface and subsurface water supplies. Moreover, although the arid north depends on irrigated agriculture, its irrigation systems are exceptionally inefficient. Less than half the water withdrawn for irrigation actually reaches crops because of leaky equipment and rapid evaporation, while the overall economic productivity of water is about US$3.50 per cubic meter, compared to a developed-nation average of US$36.[7] Rising demand for water-intensive crops like wheat,[8] as well as other commodities which require large quantities of water to produce, process, and refine, further stress water resources. China’s coal use, in particular, contributes to its water scarcity challenges—independent estimates suggest that it takes between 800 and 3000 gallons of water to process a ton of coal.[9] China's largest coal basin stretches across five provinces in the North, and the scarcity of water there is already constraining production, especially for smaller, less-efficient mines. These growing pressures on water resources, particularly in north China, are of mounting concern to the Chinese government. The Vice-Minister for Water Resources confided last year that China faces an “increasingly grim” water scarcity situation.[10]

The Chinese government has adopted two basic policy responses to the water scarcity problem. First, it has continued to finance the gigantic South-North Water Transfer Project, or SNWTP (Nanshui beidiao gongcheng 南水北调工程). The SNWTP eventually aims to transfer some 45 billion cubic meters of water per year from central and southwest China to augment the flow of the Yellow River and meet urban water demand in the Beijing-Tianjin region. The Project envisions eastern, central, and western routes, of which the first is under construction and the second in a stage of advanced planning. All three routes pose enormous technical challenges: the eastern and central routes will be channeled under the Yellow River, while the western route entails pumping water at elevations of 10-16,000 feet above sea level over part of the Himalayan mountain range.

Although completion of the three routes is expected to meet projected water demand growth in the north, thus redressing China’s fundamental geographic disparity in water availability, its costs will be enormous. Estimates suggest a figure of around US$62 billion, the final cost is likely to be markedly higher. Moreover, estimates of the number of people who must be resettled range from several hundreds of thousands to over a million, adding substantial social disruption to the Project’s total cost.[11] Moreover, the SNWTP has necessitated additional water diversion and storage works to bring water into regions tapped to export water to the north, as well as treatment facilities to ensure that the water is clean enough to supply drinking water to northern cities.[12]

In addition to the supply-augmentation approach represented by the SNWTP, the Chinese government has also attempted to improve water use efficiency and to limit overall demand. A 2002 Water Law attempted to establish a strict licensing regime whereby virtually all water resources were declared to be the property of the state, and water use was made contingent on obtaining a usage license from local authorities. At the same time, the Water Conservancy Commissions (WCCs; Shuili weiyuanhui 水利委员会) established under the Ministry of Water Resources (MWR; Shuilibu 水利部) in China’s major river basins were given comprehensive water use planning responsibilities which were intended to guide local water use licensing.[13] Subsequent regulations[14] have established the basis for water rights trading, and a few such transfers have taken place between municipalities.[15]

In 2010, China’s Communist Party Central Committee and State Council promulgated a “three red lines” (santiao hongxian 三条红线) policy intended to establish clear and binding limits on water quantity usage, efficiency, and quality. In early 2012, the State Council announced that the “three red lines” policy would limit total national water consumption to less than 700 billion cubic meters per year, amounting to approximately three-quarters of China’s total annual exploitable freshwater resources.[16] In addition, the policy attempts to increase irrigation use efficiency to 60% by 2030.[17] These headline policies are augmented by increased investment, including 1.8 trillion RMB in 2011-2015, primarily for irrigation infrastructure improvements, rural clean water delivery, and reservoir enhancements.[18]

In combination, these policies seek to redress China’s regional imbalance in water availability, while making overall water use sustainable. However, they are likely to be undermined by conflict between regions which are asked to bear the costs of storing and transferring water, and those which benefit as a result. The dynamics of these conflicts is illustrated by the case of a dam, first proposed in 1954, intended to be built on the upper reaches of the Yellow River in order to provide water to poor farmers in Ningxia. Gansu Province, claiming that the dam would inundate some of its best farmland, has managed to prevent construction of the dam by lobbying different elements of the central government than those which had supported the dam. The dispute remains unresolved; in 2010, Ningxia’s representatives to the China People’s Political Consultative Conference (zhengzhi xie shanghuiyi 政治协商会议) took the unusual step of presenting a petition to the full Conference to build the dam.[19]

Similarly, water-exporting provinces in central China have complained at the costs they are expected to bear as part of the SNWTP for water treatment, refugee resettlement, and other issues, prompting the central government to impose an “SNWTP tax” on Beijing and other beneficiaries of the project.[20] Similar rivalries threaten to undermine water licensing and water rights trading schemes. In times of shortage, upstream provinces often reduce flows to their downstream neighbors,[21] and regularly appropriate water in excess of MWR quotas.[22] In short, although China’s current policies can theoretically alleviate the geographic imbalance in water resources, they do not adequately address the inter-jurisdictional political and economic conflicts which are likely to result. In a similar fashion, policies to improve water quality are undermined by the complexity of relationships between central and local levels of government.

A crisis of water quality

Water quality is arguably an even more serious problem than is water shortage. In rural areas, where less than half the population has access to purified water, agricultural run-off is the dominant pollution source, while in urban areas human and industrial waste are left largely untreated, contaminating both surface and underground water supplies.[23] Recent reports from China’s environmental protection authorities indicate that in the country as a whole, less than half of China’s water can be treated to the point where it is safe for drinking, and a quarter of surface waters are so polluted that they are unfit even for industrial use. Independent estimates are even more pessimistic.[24]

This crisis of water quality has contributed to a serious environmental health crisis. Arsenic poisoning from contaminated groundwater is thought to be widespread, and in some areas high incidences of particular cancers have been linked to organic water pollution.[25] The ecological impact of high pollution levels is also acute, dramatically reducing freshwater wild fish populations as well as driving larger animals like the baiji (白鱀豚), or Yangtze dolphin, to the very brink of extinction.[26] Water pollution issues have, moreover, proved to be particularly politically contentious. In 2005, the accidental release of some 100 tons of carcinogenic chemicals into a river near China’s northeastern border with Russia produced a diplomatic crisis,[27] and in 2001 pollution from dye factories in Suzhou provoked residents of downstream Jiaxing, Zhejiang Province to pool funds to buy old boats and sink them in the waterway, forming a dam that blocked up the polluted water into neighboring Jiangsu Province.[28]

The Chinese government’s policy responses to water quality issues rely largely on strengthening monitoring capabilities and enforcement mechanisms. The 2008 Water Pollution Law attempted to strengthen earlier legislation by providing for increased penalties, including stiff fines for the executives of polluting enterprises.[29] As part of a broader push to expand monitoring of pollution, Regional Supervision Centers were established throughout China to keep an eye on local enterprises,[30] and water quality bureaus were set up within the MWR’s river basin commissions. This institutional expansion has been complemented by continuing regulatory reform. The “three red lines” policy introduced a new requirement that 95% of tested water must meet national water quality guidelines, which have recently been expanded and updated to cover a wide range of organic and microbial pollutants as well as concentrations of heavy metals.[31] To help meet these standards, the government announced in late 2011 a five-year, 380 billion RMB investment plan to improve urban wastewater treatment facilities, as well as the establishment of some 14,000 monitoring stations throughout the country to continuously monitor water quality.[32]

Just as regional rivalries threaten to undermine water quantity policies, however, bureaucratic fragmentation and capacity discrepancies threaten to de-rail these water quality initiatives. Although MWR is broadly responsible for water project construction and water quantity issues, the Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP; Huanjing baohu bu 环境保护部) is primarily responsible for water pollution control. MEP is a relatively new entity, having been elevated to ministerial-level status only in 2008, and it is generally less powerful than the older and more established MWR. MEP also lacks institutional capacity relative to MWR; while MEP must supervise hundreds of thousands of enterprises with a core staff numbering in the hundreds, the MWR’s Yellow River Conservancy Commission alone employs some 30,000 people.[33] This imbalance in resources means that MEP relies on local environmental protection bureaus (EPBs), over which it possesses only partial control, to enforce water pollution regulations.

Such incomplete control is a consequence of China’s distinctive tiao-kuai (条块) administrative system, in which officials at lower levels of government are responsible both to line control by functional bureaucracies, such as the various ministries, as well as to territorial government leaders, including mayors and provincial governors.[34] These territorial government cadres are evaluated and promoted based on a detailed set of criteria known as kaohe (考核) which prioritizes economic growth, with the result that they often pressure EPBs to employ “light-touch” regulation, or encourage enterprises to channel pollution into waterways which flow into neighboring jurisdictions. MEP’s difficulty in exercising control over EPBs also stems from China’s decentralized fiscal structure, in which environmental protection authorities are financed largely by pollution fines levied in their individual jurisdictions rather than centrally-disbursed grants. [35]

MEP’s difficulties in exercising sufficient supervision and enforcement of local EPBs are illustrated by a recent chemical pollution incident in Yancheng, Jiangsu Province.[36] In 2004, environmental protection authorities raised concerns regarding water pollution in the city, and in 2005 the Biaoxin Chemical Company was fined for exceeding pollution discharge limitations and ordered to eliminate discharges into waterways within Yancheng. In 2008, local environmental protection authorities decreed that all industrial enterprises were to be re-located away from the city’s river, its primary source of drinking water. These directives were ignored, however, and in 2009 Biaoxin Chemical released large quantities of carbolic acid into the waterway, forcing some 200,000 people to rely on bottled water and wells for several days. MEP called a press conference pledging to punish those responsible, and a subsequent investigation concluded that company officials concluded simply that regulatory “compliance is expensive, evasion is cheap” (shoufa chengben gao, weifa chengben di守法成本高，违法成本低). As a result of the investigation, two local environmental protection officials were fired for neglecting their duties, and another five were reprimanded.[37] Nonetheless, similar if less dramatic releases of highly toxic pollutants remain common, reflecting the institutional barriers to resolving China’s water quality crisis.

Management of the Yellow River: a partial success story

China’s water quantity and quality problems coincide dramatically in the case of the Yellow River, where management efforts in recent decades have partially succeeded in easing chronic over-use of water resources while nonetheless leaving fundamental issues unaddressed. The Yellow is one of the world’s most intensively exploited river systems, being home to some 110 million people in the semi-arid North China Plain. Since the early 1970s, the scale of water withdrawal from the river has meant that it has failed to reach the sea for much of the year, a phenomenon known in Chinese as “desiccation of the Yellow” or Huangehe duanliu (黄河断流). In the early 1980s, the MWR’s Yellow River Conservancy Commission (YRCC; Huanghe shuili weiyuanhui 黄河水利委员会) formulated a provincial water resource allocation plan which granted the more economically-developed provinces of the middle and lower reaches the right to utilize much of the river’s flow. [38] However, rapid population growth and economic development along the upper reaches outstripped estimates, and in 1995-1998, the Yellow failed to reach the sea for about 120 days each year, in some years failing even to reach Shandong Province.[39] Consequently, in 1998 the YRCC promulgated more strict provincial water use regulations[40] and began planning a sophisticated “Digital Yellow River” (shuzi Huangehe 数字黄河)system to monitor water use and flow conditions in near-real time.[41]

These efforts have been successful in halting the desiccation of the Yellow, which has continually reached the sea since 1999. However, flows remain below levels considered necessary to satisfy ecological needs, and water quality has continued to deteriorate, with the percentage of river water designated as “Class V” or lowest-quality water increasing from 34 to 42% from 1998-2001.[42] Much of these lingering problems stem from the inter-jurisdictional conflict and mismatched incentives described above. Referring to the 1998 regulations, a 2011 YRCC report acknowledged that “In implementing the Yellow River water quantity regulations, there exist some localities which do not put into practice the water quantity allocation and dispatch plan, and exceed the allocation limits in using water resulting from inter-provincial flows not according with control limits.”[43] A recent Caijing news report likewise notes that provinces skirt Yellow River allocation rules by extracting water from tributaries of the Yellow before it enters the main stream. “Tributary water quantity allocations are not clearly defined,” the report notes, “meaning that each province can utilize water before it enters the Yellow River, and before it becomes part of the Yellow River water quantity allocation limits.”[44] The case of the Yellow River thus illustrates that while China has the capacity to address some of its pressing water resource challenges, fully meeting them will require deeper and more systematic reform of governance systems and institutions.

Water Scarcity and Pollution: Constraints on China’s future?

China’s water resource challenges are acute, but it has also developed a substantial policy infrastructure to meet them. What remains is to ensure that policies to address water scarcity and to improve water quality are implemented effectively and efficiently. The barriers to policy implementation identified in this Issue Brief reflect some deep-seated and systematic issues in China’s governance system. Inter-jurisdictional and inter-agency coordination, cooperation, and communication mechanisms are under-developed, while weaknesses in the rule of law undermine regulation and enforcement procedures. Fully addressing water quantity and quality issues therefore entails some basic and systematic institutional and political reforms, all of which will require substantial political will. Nonetheless, if this can be mustered, five reforms would greatly aid China in addressing water resource quantity and quality issues.

First, the Party’s cadre evaluation system should be overhauled to emphasize environmental and water resource management metrics. Some reforms have already been undertaken, but economic and stability criteria remain of paramount importance. [45] Although environmental outcomes are more difficult to measure than GDP growth, technologies like those employed in the Digital Yellow River system make it easier to hold cadres responsible for water quality and quantity issues within their jurisdictions.
Second, formalized mechanisms for inter-provincial consultation should be established at regional scales. In particular, provincial governments should be given formal representation on the Water Conservancy Commissions which manage China’s major river basins on behalf of MWR. Although the Commissions maintain extensive links with local governments, formalizing representation would improve stakeholder involvement and enhance policy buy-in.
Third, high-level encouragement should be given to inter-governmental cooperation on water resource issues, which are by nature inter-departmental. As part of this initiative, a high-level working group should be established under the State Council to coordinate policy implementation between MWR, MEP, and other relevant entities, and provide advice to decision-makers. This effort should be led by a senior leader, preferably at the Presidential or Prime Ministerial level, in order to ensure active participation by ministerial units.
Fourth, the central government should aim to strengthen the legal system to enable more effective water rights trading. Title and trading procedures should be clarified, special courts for dispute resolution created, and markets brought to a larger scale. Ideally this effort should be undertaken as part of a broader set of legal reforms which might aim to strengthen judicial independence and the rule of law more generally.
Fifth, both MEP and MWR should encourage the involvement of civil society groups in water pollution monitoring. Although the government is wary of such involvement, it can channel growing concern over water issues for constructive purposes by making civil society groups an adjunct to water pollution monitoring efforts.

The gravity of China’s water resource challenges cannot be overstated—in order to chart a sustainable development pathway in future decades China must use substantially less water much more efficiently, while also improving water quality. The government has built the foundations of a credible policy response, but these must be strengthened, expanded and built upon if China is to avoid a water resource constraint to its future growth and development.

[1] Barry Naughton, The Chinese Economy: Transitions and Growth. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007, 30.

[2] World Bank, “Renewable internal fresh water resources per capita (cubic meters),” 2012, available at http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/ER.H2O.INTR.PC (accessed October 28, 2012).

[3] UN Food and Agriculture Organization, “China,” 2010, available at http://www.fao.org/nr/water/aquastat/countries_regions/china/index.stm (accessed 22 July 2012).

[4] Eloise Kendy, David Molden, Tammo Steenhuis, Changming Liu, and Jinxia Wang, Politics Drain the North China Plain: Agricultural policy and groundwater depletion in Luancheng County, 1949-2000. Colombo, Sri Lanka: International Water Management Institute Research Report 71, 2003; Jane Qiu, “China faces up to groundwater crisis,” Nature 466 (308): 2010, doi:10.1038/466308a.

[5] KP Chen and JJ Jiao, “Seawater intrusion and aquifer freshening near reclaimed coastal area of Shenzhen,” Water Science and Technology: Water Supply 7 (2007), 137-145.

[6] National Development and Reform Commission, National Climate Change Program. Beijing: National Leading Group on Climate Change, 2009.

[7] UN Food and Agriculture Organization, op. cit.

[8] Jeff Wilson, “Corn, soybeans, wheat gain as China’s demand for imports climbs,” BloombergBusinessweek, October 14, 2011, available at http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-10-14/corn-soybeans-wheat-gain-as-china-s-demand-for-imports-climbs.html (accessed 28 October 2012).

[9] Keith Schneider, “Choke Point: China – Confronting water scarcity and energy demand in the world’s largest country,” Circle of Blue, February 15, 2011, available at http://www.circleofblue.org/waternews/2011/world/choke-point-chinaconfronting-water-scarcity-and-energy-demand-in-the-worlds-largest-country/ (accessed 28 October 2012).

[10] Zhang Jiaoyong, “Quanguo Shuiziyuan zonghe guihua [Comprehensive National Water Resource Plan],” Huanghe Shuili Weiyuanhui [Yellow River Water Conservancy Commission], August 2011, available at http://www.yellowriver.gov.cn/zwzc/zcfg/zcjd/201108/t20110811_82252.html (accessed 30 March 2012).

[11] Carla Freeman, “Quenching the Dragon’s Thirst: the South-North Water Transfer Project—Old Plumbing for New China?” China Environment Forum Report. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2011.

[12] See National SNWTP Project Office, “Li Jincheng Fuzhuren diaojiu Nanshuibeidiao dongxian jiewu daoliu gongcheng he zhiwu gongzuo [Vice-Director Li Jincheng inspects the SNWTP east line pollution control efforts]”, available at http://www.nsbd.com.cn/NewsDisplay.asp?id=195490 (accessed 25 July 2012).

[13] Patricia Wouters, Desheng Hu, Zhang Jiebin, Philip Andrew-Speed, and Dan Tarlock, “The new development of water law in China,” University of Denver Law Review, 7, No. 2 (2004), 243-308; Dajun Shen, “River basin water resources management in China: a legal and institutional assessment,” Water International, 34, No. 4 (2009), 484-496.

[14] Nicola Cenacchi, Yunpeng Xue, Fu Xinfeng, and Claudia Ringler, “Water rights and water rights trading: option for the Yellow River basin?,” International Food Policy Research Institute, 2010.

[15] Zhou Jigang, Peng Guangcan, and Ceng Zhen, “Trading water in thirsty China,” China Dialogue, June 26, 2008, available at http://www.chinadialogue.net/article/show/single/en/2144-Trading-water-in-thirsty-China (accessed 28 October 2012).

[16] China Daily, “Water usage to be monitored better,” China Daily, May 8, 2012, available at http://www.china.org.cn/environment/2012-05/08/content_25332381.htm (accessed 28 October 2012).

[17] State Council, “Guowuyuan guanyu shixing zuiyange shuiziyuan guanli zhidu de yijian [State Council Opinion regarding the most strict water resource management system],” State Council Document No. 3 (2012), available at http://www.gov.cn/zwgk/2012-02/16/content_2067664.htm (accessed 25 July 2012).

[18] Xinhua, “China to invest heavily in water conservation,” Xinhua, February 10, 2012, available at http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2012-02/10/c_131403240.htm (accessed 28 October 2012).

[19] Huanghe Shuili Weiyuanhui [Yellow River Water Conservancy Commission], Huanghe Guihuazhi [History of Yellow River Planning], Huanghezhi Quan Liu [Yellow River History Volume 6] (Zhengzhou, China: Henan Renmin Chubanshe [Henan People’s Press], 1991), p. 268-9.

[20] Freeman, op. cit., pg. 5.

[21] Zhou, Peng, and Ceng, “Trading water in thirsty China.”

[22] Caijing, “Huanghe zhengduozhan: shui quan zhuan rang shichanghua jincheng shouzu [Yellow River Turf Battle: Water rights trading hinders the process of marketization],” Caijing News, July 28, 2011, available at http://www.caijing.com.cn/2011-07-28/110791023.html (accessed 28 October 2012).

[23] Xinhua, “Half of China’s urban underground water polluted,” China Daily, May 28, 2012, available at http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2012-05/28/content_15404889.htm (accessed 28 October 2012).

[24] David Stanway, “Pollution makes quarter of China water unusuable: ministry,” Reuters, July 26, 20120, available at http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/07/26/us-china-environment-water-idUSTRE66P39H20100726 (accessed 28 October 2012).

[25] Wen-Qing Lu, Shao-Hua Xie, Wen-Shan Zhou, Shao-Hui Zhang, and Ai-Lin Liu, “Water Pollution and Health Impact in China: a Mini-Review,” Open Environmental Sciences 2 (2008), 1-5.

[26] US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, “Chinese River Dolphin, “ February 17, 2012, available at http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/pr/species/mammals/cetaceans/chineseriverdolphin.htm (accessed 28 October 2012).

[27] World Bank, Water Pollution Emergencies in China: Prevention and Response. Washington, DC: World Bank, June 2007.

[28] Tang Zhen and Zhou Haiwei, “Chang Sandiao diqu kuajie shuishi jiufen xieshang mianlin de wenti ji duice [Problems and Solutions Faced in the Resolution of Yangtze Delta Trans-boundary Water Disputes],” Shuili Jingji [Water Conservancy Economics], Vol. 25 No. 2: 2007, pp. 70-77.

[29] Xinhua, “Tougher law to curb water pollution,” China Daily, February 29, 2008, available at http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2008-02/29/content_6494712.htm (accessed 28 October 2012).

[30] Scott Moore, “Shifting Power in Central-Local Environmental Governance in China: the Regional Supervision Centers,” China Environment Series, 11: 2010/2011, 188-200.

[31] Shanghai Daily, “Stricter water standards to be applied nationwide,” May 14, 2012, available at http://english.cri.cn/6909/2012/05/14/1461s699430.htm (accessed 28 October 2012).

[32] Global Water Intelligence, “Five years to clean up China’s wastewater,” Global Water Intelligence 13(1): January 2012, available at http://www.globalwaterintel.com/archive/13/1/general/five-years-clean-chinas-wastewater.html (accessed 28 October 2012).

[33] Interview with foreign consultant to Yellow River Conservancy Commission.

[34] Andrew Mertha, “China’s ‘soft’ centralization: shifting tiao/kuai authority relations,” China Quarterly, 184, December 2005, pp. 791-810.

[35] Abigail Jahiel, “The Contradictory Impact of Reform on Environmental Protection in China,” The China Quarterly, Vol. 149 (1997), pp. 81-103.

[36] For an English account see Dolly Wu, “Two govt officials fired over China’s Yancheng pollution,” ICIS, March 4, 2009, available at http://www.icis.com/Articles/2009/03/04/9197274/two-govt-officials-fired-over-chinas-yancheng-pollution.html (accessed 28 October 2012).

[37] Jean-Francois Tremblay, “Chinese mayor orders chemical plant closures,” Chemical and Engineering News, March 5, 2009, available at http://pubs.acs.org/cen/news/87/i10/8710news4.html (accessed 28 October, 2012).

[38] Li Dong, “Guowuyuan Huanghe fenshui yu shuidiao fangan [State Council Yellow River Water Division and Water Transfer Plan],” Shui Xinxi Wang [Water Information Net], available at http://www.hwcc.gov.cn/pub/hwcc/wwgj/bgqy/jjqk/201003/t20100302_314548.html (accessed 5 April 2012), Guowuyuan [State Council], “Guowuyuan Bangongting Zhuanfa Guojiajiwei he Shuidianbu guanyu Huanghe Kegong shuiliang fenpei fangan baogao de tongzhi [Notice by the State Council Office to the State Planning Commission and the Ministry of Water and Power regarding the Report on the Yellow River Water Use Quantity Allocation Plan],” Guowuyuan Wenjian [State Council Document] 1987, No. 61.

[39] Michael Giordano, Zhongping Zhu, Ximing Cai, Shangqi Hong, Xuecheng Zhang, and Yunpeng Xue, “Water Management in the Yellow River Basin: Background, current critical issues and future research needs,” Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management in Agriculture Research Report 3. Colombo, Sri Lanka: Comprehensive Assessment Secretariat, International Water Management Institute, 2004, p. 19.

[40] Shuilibu [Ministry of Water Resources], “Huanghe Shuiliang tiaodu guanli banfa [Yellow River Water Quantity Dispatching and Management Measures],” 14 December 1998, Tongzhi [Notice] No. 2520.

[41] China Daily, “Yellow River gets digital hydrological station,” China Daily, June 16, 2002. Available at http://www.china.org.cn/english/environment/34780.htm (accessed 28 October 2012).

[42] Giordano et al. 2004, p. 28.

[43] Huangshuihui [YRCC], “’Huanghe shuiliang tiaodu tiaoli’ zhiding yu shijian [Formulation and Implementation of the ‘Yellow River Water Quantity Dispatching Regulations’],” 14 August 2011, available at http://www.yellowriver.gov.cn/zlcp/kjcg/kjcg07/201108/t20110814_103291.html (accessed 5 April 2012).

[44] Caijing [Finance and Economics], “Huanghe shui zhengdouzhan: shuiquan zhuanrang shichanghua jincheng shouzu [Struggle over Yellow River water: water rights transfer and marketization process hits a snag],” 28 July 2011, Caijing Wang [Finance and Economics Net], available at http://www.caijing.com.cn/2011-07-28/110791023.html (accessed 5 April 2012).

[45] Kai-yuen Tsui and Youqiang Wang, “Between Separate Stoves and a Single Menu: Fiscal Decentralization in China,” The China Quarterly, Vol. 177 (2004), pg. 75.

Authors

Scott Moore

Image Source: © Jianan Yu / Reuters

A Guide to the Post-2015 Debates for the Millennium Development Goals

John McArthur — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 13:51:00 -0500

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have been a remarkable global political success. As targets established in 2000 to cut extreme poverty in its many forms in half by 2015, the MDGs have focused the world’s attention on tackling the integrated challenges of the poorest billion people on the planet – those who live on less than $1.25 a day and lack reliable access to food, safe drinking water, sanitation, or even the most basic education and health care. The MDGs have been fruitful enough in focusing attention that they have prompted a burgeoning global debate on what international goals should come next.

The post-2015 arguments have so many dimensions that any subset of global constituencies focused on resolving its own piece of the puzzle risks spending large amounts of time finding “solutions” that are untenable among players working on other key pieces. Even the jargon is tricky, since labels like “sustainable development goals” that took hold around the 2012 Rio+20 summit are loaded with disparate embedded meanings across a range of key constituencies, with some deeming the term essential while others consider it politically toxic. Meanwhile, in a case study of political semantics, the notion of setting “goals for sustainable development” has broader agreement as a more impartial conceptual starting point, surpassed by the even more neutral term of “post-2015 development agenda.”

To help distill the issues as the post-2015 debate grows, here is a cheat sheet describing what is on the table, who is involved, a typology of perspectives, the rough contours of a roadmap, and the implications for Canada.

The Substance

The post-2015 deliberations include four basic categories of topics, any or all of which might be included in a final intergovernmental agreement. First is the core MDG extreme poverty agenda, which has been most effectively advanced in recent years in areas of health and education. The world has made tremendous gains towards improving living standards and cutting the many forms of extreme poverty in half over the past generation. Many believe the time is now ripe to finish the job and set a goal of “getting to zero” on extreme poverty by 2030.

Concerns over the shortfalls have grown over the past decade as fast-growing emerging economies have struggled to manage their environmental footprints and we have seen an increase in global awareness of the threat of climate change.

Second is the issue of environmental sustainability, for which the MDGs have prompted less success, even though one of the MDGs’ eight headline goals draws some attention to the issue. Concerns over the shortfalls have grown over the past decade as fast-growing emerging economies have struggled to manage their environmental footprints and we have seen an increase in global awareness of the threat of climate change. Neither climate nor so-called “green growth” issues are addressed in the MDG framework, and many believe planetary boundaries can no longer be ignored in any global development strategy, especially as the world’s population is slated to grow by two billion people by mid-century. The politics around climate issues are particularly tricky, since the post-2015 discussions cannot outrun the UN intergovernmental process for climate negotiations, which has a 2015 deadline for a new agreement but faces formidable challenges to reaching a comprehensive global policy solution.

A third category focuses on governance, broadly defined. The term means many things to many people, from transparency to fiscal accountability to human rights to democratization to system building in fragile states. The MDGs did not include governance targets, in order to avoid ideological debates and focus on ends rather than means. But many think the global views have evolved to a point where at least issues like budget transparency can be agreed upon by all countries.

A fourth category focuses on inequality and social inclusion, in line with the growing concern that the spoils of global development are disproportionately benefiting the most privileged – whether the top 10 per cent, one percent, or even 0.1 per cent of any society – while the less privileged are either left behind or directly excluded. Many advocates worry that global goals based on country averages overlook primary concerns of discrimination, whether by gender, ethnicity, or age. Others are focused on jobs and unemployment, especially among youth. Concerns around inequality reflect perhaps the deepest zeitgeist of the post-2015 discussions, even if they remain among the most difficult to tackle through internationally agreed-upon targets. Everyone agrees, for example, that less child mortality is better, but there is ample room for debate on what counts as an optimal level of income inequality, and countries like the U.S. are unlikely to endorse an internationally agreed-upon number as a benchmark any time soon.

Who Is Involved

The MDGs took shape at the turn of the millennium, when concerns were rife over the divisions between the rich and poor countries. Amidst the ongoing transformation of the global economy, today’s world can no longer be neatly geopolitically divided between developed and developing states. Accordingly, there are big debates as to which countries should even be implementing post-2015 goals. There are still three-dozen low-income countries with annual per capita incomes of $1,025 or less. This includes an array of fragile states where governments still struggle to provide even the simplest services and progress is generally stuck. But the majority of the world’s extreme poor now live in relatively fast-growing middle-income economies, which face rapidly changing social and environmental pressures, with enormous consequences for the entire planet. Most of those emerging economies want to tackle domestic challenges, but have little patience for rich-country dictums on governance or the environment that might form roadblocks to shared prosperity. Meanwhile, many of the high-income countries are struggling to balance domestic and global priorities amidst long-term fiscal strains. Countries like the United Kingdom stand out for their courageous ongoing leadership on the MDGs, including the forthcoming achievement this year of the longstanding foreign aid target of 0.7 per cent of national income.

It remains to be seen whether a global intergovernmental framework of goals can foster a consistent yet decentralized system of goals for actors outside of government, too.

At the same time, there is a growing sentiment that global development goals should no longer be the preserve of governments alone. Companies increasingly want to contribute, and want transparent and predictable metrics for holding themselves accountable. Non-governmental organizations similarly want a voice at the table, and seek to ensure that powerfully resourced actors are accountable to citizens of all forms. Meanwhile, some key players like the Gates Foundation play a unique role in catalyzing and bridging innovations across governments, civil society, and scientific communities all at once. It remains to be seen whether a global intergovernmental framework of goals can foster a consistent yet decentralized system of goals for actors outside of government, too.

A Typology of Views

Across the complex range of issues and stakeholders, four distinct types of perspectives seem to be taking shape.

A “conservative” view wants to stay focused on the specific challenges of extreme poverty, tweaking the MDG targets as needed, but warning that broadening the agenda weakens the focus on one of the greatest successes ever to come out of the United Nations.
An “upgrading” view wants an MDG-plus agenda, modestly expanding the existing goals to include one or two other top-tier global priorities, like governance, inequality, or climate change.
A “geostrategic” view wants to focus on the priorities of the rapidly growing large economies like Brazil, China, India, and Indonesia that account for nearly half the world’s population. Such countries face, in varying degrees, the middle-income challenges of managing very modest domestic resources, rather than the low-income challenge of having incredibly scarce resources. Their voices are increasingly heard in venues like the G20. In many respects, these countries’ forthcoming challenges of economic transformation amount to the world’s overarching challenge of sustainability.
A “comprehensive” view sees 2015 as the one big chance to forge an integrated global agreement tackling all countries’ challenges of extreme poverty and social inclusion while operating within planetary boundaries. In this view, the fates of people and planet are too deeply interwoven to be subject to separate agreements.

How Will the Arguments Be Resolved?

It is impossible to predetermine political outcomes on any contemporary global issue. Nonetheless, there are a few key players and checkpoints on the road to 2015. The first is UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who is responsible for convening the global political negotiations and using his good offices to help distill and shape the agenda among UN member states. He has a talented team helping to guide the process, including Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson and Assistant Secretary-General Amina Mohammed. He has also commissioned a high-level panel co-chaired by U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. That panel is scheduled to recommend its priorities later this spring, in time for the General Assembly’s consideration before a major MDG-focused event in September.

Concurrently, the General Assembly has formed its own “expert group” to recommend a path forward on sustainable development goals (however those end up being defined), in line with the agreements of the Rio+20 conference. Meanwhile, the UN Development Programme is actively engaging in country-level consultations in more than 60 countries, alongside the “MY world” online collaboration with NGOs to solicit citizen votes on priorities from around the world. It remains unclear how all of these pieces will fit together, and how they will align with the practicalities of negotiation among global powers. But there is a good chance that 2013 will bring clarity on the substantive priorities to be tackled through post-2015 goals, and that 2014 will then see gradual convergence around specific goals. By September 2015, there needs to be enough convergence for an intergovernmental agreement with teeth. Hopefully, this will include a serious agreement on climate change, either as part of a post-2015 deal or as a parallel UN agreement.

How Does Canada Fit In?

The post-2015 negotiations prompt two key questions for Canada, each of which merits significant public analysis and debate. First, how has the country performed on the MDGs? Canada has supported the MDGs rhetorically, and has made important contributions to global health and, more recently, hunger. But by any quantitative standard, the country has fallen short in matching the MDGs’ core issue of scale. The divergence between Canada’s relative stasis and the U.K.’s leadership path over the past decade is striking in this regard.

Second, what does Canada want to prioritize globally and how does it want to position itself in a post-2015 world? A senior government official recently told me, for example, that the further the post-2015 negotiations delve into climate issues, the less supportive Canada will be. Will the government ramp up its efforts on extreme poverty in order to divert attention from environmental issues? Will it latch onto governance as either a legitimate priority in development or perhaps a bargaining chip with emerging economies? Is there a possibility of changing course on climate and environmental policy if the second Obama administration takes a new approach? Everything is on the table.

Canada’s political leaders have ultimate responsibility to set these policies on behalf of the nation. But their decisions must be the product, rather than simply the driver, of active societal debate. Such deliberations require years to evolve and take shape. Canadian voices need to be heard, and to engage with the broader world. The year 2015 is fast approaching, but there is still time for rich discussion. On that note, let the deliberations begin!

Authors

John McArthur

Publication: OpenCanada.org

Image Source: © Rupak De Chowdhuri / Reuters

A ZEN Approach to Post-2015: Addressing the Range of Perspectives across Asia

Douglas H. Brooks, Kaushal Joshi, John McArthur, Changyong Rhee and Guanghua Wan — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 14:12:00 -0500

INTRODUCTION

Among the world’s developing regions, Asia has undoubtedly seen the most dramatic overall transformation since 2000. Fifteen years ago, just before the dawn of the new millennium, the region was struck by a profound macroeconomic crisis, plunging several economies into recession and highlighting a sense of fragility in the long-term stability of many countries’ policy strategies. Yet in the intervening period, the region has enjoyed widespread economic growth, lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. The progress has extended well beyond measures of growth and income poverty. Assessed against the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) targets, Asia’s success in areas like health, education, and access to drinking water all stand out globally. At the same time, Asia’s progress is far from complete. It still has huge poverty challenges and its environmental challenges are growing rapidly.

Asia’s remarkable development trajectory has many important implications for global partnership strategies moving forward. The MDG targets became the central reference point for development collaboration following their establishment at the Millennium Summit in September 2000. Their success lies partly in their integrated articulation of extreme poverty as a multidimensional agenda spanning issues of income, hunger, education, health, gender equality, and environmental sustainability. It also lies partly in their clear and quantified nature, which has helped to stimulate progress across many issues and geographies where it was lagging. At the same time, the MDGs have been far from a panacea for the world’s evolving sustainable development challenges, spanning economic, social and environmental tensions. Indeed the MDGs have been least effective in promoting progress on the environment, as evidenced by many trends in Asia.

The final MDG deadline will be at the end of 2015, and much work remains to be done before then. Nonetheless, international deliberations are actively underway regarding the vision and goals for a post-2015 global development framework. At a time of significant change in the global economy and in the nature of the world’s sustainable development challenges, a large and growing number of stakeholders are already engaged. The United Nations (UN) system has made significant efforts to consolidate the perspectives of its own staff (e.g., UN 2012) and to consult with stakeholders around the world. The Secretary-General has launched an eminent High-Level Panel of experts to provide recommendations on related issues, and the General Assembly has committed to launch its own expert group. Meanwhile a variety of regional bodies, nongovernmental organizations, think tanks, and individual experts have also presented an array of views regarding recommended priorities for the next generation of goals.

Amidst the emerging debates, there has been significant emphasis on which specific goals should be included in the post-2015 framework. For example, many analysts are focused on which of the MDG goals should be kept, which should be dropped, and what new goals should be added. Such discussions lend themselves to complexity and are inherently zero-sum in their structure. Ultimately, they amount to competition for limited space on a single political agenda amidst a legitimately growing number of influential stakeholder voices around the world, both inside and outside of governments.

This paper takes a different approach. Rather than focusing on the intricacies of which specific goals might be added, kept, or dropped, we focus on the three basic types of goals that need to be addressed in a post-2015 framework. We call this the “ZEN” approach, with each letter of the acronym reflecting a central component, or goal, of sustainable development: achieving “zero” extreme poverty in its many forms (Z), tackling country-specific “Epsilon” socioeconomic challenges beyond extreme poverty (E), and addressing the environmental imperatives that underpin long term development (N).

Building on this ZEN framework, the paper considers global design and implementation issues for E and N goals in particular. It describes different underlying challenges inherent in various types of goals, and suggests an approach to tackling them, anchored in common indicators, voluntary targets, coordinated monitoring and reporting, and peer review. These suggestions are presented with an eye to the diversity of challenges across Asia, including fast growing economies that still face deep poverty alongside growing environmental challenges, in addition to a range of circumstances faced by the many slower growth economies, fragile states, challenged island economies, and landlocked countries. As an overarching caveat, we note that the conceptual and practical ideas in this paper are only intended to inform deliberations on potential directions for post-2015. The paper’s proposals offer broad strokes in direction, and would certainly benefit from improvement and refinement through active discussion and debate.

The paper proceeds in six sections. Following this introduction, the second section provides context by describing Asia’s progress on the MDGs, in addition to the region’s emerging challenges. Section III briefly describes broader lessons from the MDG experience. Section IV begins the heart of the paper’s contributions, introducing the ZEN conceptual approach to post-2015. Section V then outlines some key issues for implementation, with particular emphasis on mechanisms for pursuing voluntary country-level targets that aim above the thresholds of extreme poverty. A final section concludes.

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Authors

Douglas H. Brooks
Kaushal Joshi
John McArthur
Changyong Rhee
Guanghua Wan

Publication: Asian Development Bank

Image Source: © Andrew Biraj / Reuters

Doha Climate Conference: Key Issues Up for Negotiation

Nathan Hultman and Claire Langley — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 10:00:00 -0500

For the next two weeks, delegates will meet in Doha, Qatar to attend the annual round of negotiations on the climate change agreements under the United Nations Framework Agreement on Climate Change (UNFCCC). While there are a number of issues under discussion, the primary objective of the Doha meeting is to wrap up discussions on the future of the Kyoto Protocol and to consolidate talks on a new post-2020 global climate treaty under the Durban Platform process launched last year.

Moderate progress across these tracks is expected at Doha, but with contentious political issues unresolved and major negotiating Parties (i.e., China and the U.S.) unprepared to enter into serious negotiations, no major breakthroughs are expected. Given recent indications that the world is on a trajectory to reach temperature increases from 4°C to above 6°C with current emission reduction pledges, observers are arguing that filling this “mitigation gap” by raising the level of ambition between 2013 and 2020 is crucial. Another key issue at Doha is addressing the difference between the level of new and additional finance for climate mitigation and adaptation for the post-2020 regime. The so-called “Fast Start Finance” will finish at the end of this year, and countries have so far contributed or committed about 80 percent of the pledged $30 billion by 2013. At the same time, long term finance pledges of $100 billion by 2020 have yet to materialize, and the new Green Climate Fund remains an empty pot. Finally, measuring, reporting and verifying (MRV) both emissions and funding contributions for developed and developing countries remains a contentious issue as well, with technical negotiations ongoing.

The negotiating context: Interest, but lack of priority
In the wake of the economic crisis, the focus on sovereign debt and austerity measures has resulted in a lack of engagement on climate by political elites accompanied by a political vacuum at the international level. As such, constructing an international “grand bargain” in the near future is unlikely. The current political cycle means that it will take several years to build towards an agreement whereby global ambition can be increased to a level consistent with a below 2oC trajectory. The agreement of the Durban Platform in 2011 has instituted a pathway toward a new agreement in 2015, but its success will be contingent on politics and domestic conditions in key countries.

Given the dynamics of its domestic politics, the U.S. is unlikely to show leadership on a legally binding international climate agreement, even with the re-election of President Obama. A moderatly growing economy accompanied by squeezed budgets will limit U.S. political engagement in the negotiations. Moreover, the U.S. favors a country-level approach that captures domestic efforts that can be brought into an international mechanism. This approach was embedded in the recent the Copenhagen/Cancun agreements, and the U.S. is unlikely to endorse a new approach that does not contain obligations for all countries. Domestic actions such as further clean energy and pollution standards and discussions on a carbon tax within wider fiscal reform may take place, but the U.S. is increasingly looking toward external fora, such as the Major Economies Forum (MEF), as a venue for agreeing climate goals.

Chinese leadership is also changing this year, limiting the operating capacity of a new administration to offer substantial new concessions Doha. The Chinese government is unlikely to revise low carbon ambition in its 12th Five Year Plan in the short-term, however there is speculation that the new Chairman of the Energy Commission, Li Keqiang, may be more ambitious on clean energy and climate change. Changes will not take place until at least March 2013, therefore a more realistic prospect would be to build greater ambition into discussions on the development of energy policies feeding into the 13th Five Year Plan, which would commence in 2016.

Other key international events leading up to 2015 increase pressure on negotiators to come to an agreement and will mean that 2013-15 is the likely medium-term window to build towards a review of adequacy and increase levels of ambition. These include the IPCC fifth assessment report scheduled to be released in 2013/14; the expiration of Fast Start Finance flows on December 31, 2012; and the expiration of the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol on the same day.

Outcomes from Cancun (COP16) and Durban (COP17) set the stage for negotiations at Doha
The 2010 negotiations at Cancun secured a lifeline for the UNFCCC and were able to deliver agreement on a “balanced package” (the Cancun Agreements) by managing expectations around outcomes and effective climate diplomacy. The Cancun Agreements are an interim deal which resulted in a few key outcomes: They brought the Copenhagen mitigation pledges under the formal UNFCCC system, agreed to a system on MRV, established the Green Climate Fund, and set up the technology and adpatation mechanisms (see The Cancun Agreements on Climate Change).

The 2011 meeting in Durban resulted in key outcomes from the two main tracks of the negotiations: the Ad Hoc Working Group on Long Term Cooperation (LCA) and the Ad Hoc Working Group on the Kyoto Protocol (KP). Only some countries agreed to participate in binding emissions limits during a second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol to begin in 2013 with the expiration of the first commitment period, but all agreed to complete the work of the LCA by the end of 2012. Durban also concluded with the establishment of a new third track to negotiate a global agreement with “legal force” to replace Kyoto and covering all countries (the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action), effectively providing a roadmap for a legally binding instrument to be agreed by 2015 and implemented in 2020. Other important elements were agreed; the new Green Climate Fund and the Technology Mechanism were both officially launched.

Doha expectations (COP18) and key elements on the table
Political issues and disagreements on process and priorities remain the largest obstacles to progress going into Doha. There is tension between focusing on “new” negotiation issues (i.e., the Durban Platform, which developed countries are championing), and “old” issues such as the Kyoto Protocol, key elements under the LCA, and Convention principles (the “BASIC” bloc—Brazil, South Africa, India and China—recently issued a statement outlining their position on this). The agenda for Doha is long, with seven different tracks open and resolution needed across several. The LCA is expected to close by 2013. The parameters of a second commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol need to be defined. There is not yet an agenda or timeline on the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action (ADP). There are major gaps in terms of mitigation reduction targets and financing commitments between 2013 and 2020.

Long-term Cooperative Action (LCA) track: Before this track closes at the end of 2012, it must agree to launch a scientific review of the mitigation pledges to allow for scaled up ambition. A signal for this should be indicated at Doha. There is some disagreement on the sequencing of negotiations, with some Parties arguing work on the ADP cannot begin until this track has been successfully closed. However, without clarity on the full agenda of the ADP, other Parties do not want to close discussions under the LCA in the fear that key issues will not be carried over. There is a risk in Doha for these talks to stall, for key issues to be lost (as part of the “pre-Durban world”) or for duplication of efforts on issues that have taken years to negotiate.
Kyoto Protocol (KP) track: The negotiation of the second commitment period (now in its seventh year) is largely about agreeing a new set of emission reduction targets for developed countries before the period begins in 2013. The issues on the table at Doha involve the length of the commitment period—an eight year period (championed by developed countries led by the EU), or a five year period (championed by developing countries on the grounds of avoiding locked in low ambition). In past climate talks this year held in Bangkok (September 2012), the EU and Australia proposed a compromise mechanism to establish a midterm review designed to increase ambition. Some countries are of the position that the KP must be prioritized in Doha before the ADP can be discussed, and tensions remain around recent announcements to leave the Protocol by Canada, Russia, Japan and New Zealand—other economies in transition are on the fence and more announcements may be imminent.
Durban Platform for Enhanced Action (ADP) track: Questions remain about the scope and role of the ADP going forward, and an agenda needs to be set at Doha to ensure adequate progress on negotiating the legal form of the new agreement that will begin in 2015 and be implemented in 2020. There is a lack of agreement on the outcome of the ADP, and the timeline and relationship with the LCA (see above). The main issues present in this track are the mitigation gap, raising ambition, and the form of the legal framework. Deep divisions remain between Parties on the form of the agreement under the ADP with different interpretations of the Durban Package (i.e., will it be a protocol, another legal instrument, or an agreed outcome with legal force?).

Doha is expected to be a relatively low-key meeting with no new initiatives or processes launched. Much is at stake however, with current ambition levels low, uncertainty on future financing for climate action, and disagreement on negotiating priorities between the major blocs. The key contributions from Doha would be to wrap up efficiently the outstanding negotiating tracks; to secure reasonable commitments for funding for the GCF; to establish helpful modalities for the Technology Mechanism; and, by avoiding opening and re-negotiating old issues, to establish a solid foundation for the next two years of negotiations—one that presents the most constructive pathway for all major emitters—to embrace an ambitious and effective future regime.

Authors

Nathan Hultman
Claire Langley

Image Source: © Pawel Kopczynski / Reuters

The Doha Climate Talks and Long Term Treaty Goals

Nathan Hultman — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 12:20:00 -0500

Many key countries—through choice, duress or lack of resources—have sidestepped any substantial domestic commitments to reduce greenhouse gases over the past decade. As such, there remains a large gap between the level of ambition embedded in existing international agreements and the necessary steps for managing climate risks at reasonable levels. Against this backdrop, delegates will soon be meeting for another round of international climate negotiations in Doha, Qatar from Nov. 26 to Dec. 7, 2012. While this meeting is not intended to produce any major new treaty or agreement, the central goal is to begin discussions for a new legal structure that will conclude by 2015. Naturally, the imminent nature of this deadline is focusing the attention of interested stakeholders and countries, with many saying that the time for bolder action is upon us. The Doha negotiations will help lay foundations for bolder action, but the level of ambition for a new approach to international climate policy will depend on avoiding problems that have plagued previous discussions—particularly those surrounding unequal obligations for different groups of key emitters.

Before discussing the specifics of this Doha agenda, it is worth reviewing several existing climate agreements: the Framework Convention, the Kyoto Protocol and the Copenhagen Accord.[1] The longest standing treaty is the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which was negotiated at the first Rio Earth Summit in 1992. The UNFCCC contains some basic principles for how the international community should address the risks of climate (see Analyzing the Scene at Copenhagen) and establishes a regular meeting schedule—Doha will constitute the 18th such meeting. Several years after the UNFCCC entered into force, delegates sought to take the first step in “solving” the problem of rising greenhouse gas emissions via the Kyoto Protocol (1997). At Kyoto, there was a choice between an approach that would encourage specific policies at the national level and an approach that would negotiate specific deadlines for emissions reductions at the national level (not unlike arms control). Delegates chose the latter, combined with a market-based approach allowing emissions trading, modeled on the largely successful sulfur dioxide cap-and-trade program in the United States. In addition, the Kyoto Protocol divided the world into two categories; only developed countries were expected to take on emissions reduction targets.

That fundamental division of obligations critically led to the U.S. leaving the Kyoto process. The division of developed and developing countries is a long-standing element in climate negotiations and one that has become increasingly fraught, particularly as many countries are making great strides in economic development and poverty alleviation. A different approach emerged at the Copenhagen meeting of 2009, where, with U.S. backing, countries agreed to a “pledge and review” procedure whereby they could publicly state their emissions reduction goals, however construed, and then allow progress toward those claims to be periodically evaluated by the international community. (This Copenhagen approach was not officially endorsed by the U.N. until the 2010 Cancun meeting, so is sometimes referred to as the Cancun Agreements.)

Some countries remain unsatisfied with the pledge-and-review process under the Copenhagen/Cancun agreements, arguing that it does not push countries enough to reduce their emissions. So last year, delegates in Durban, South Africa initiated a process to conclude this new “legal outcome” by 2015 (see The Durban Platform). Doha will present the first opportunity to open those discussions. Nevertheless, there are a few potential stumbling points. On the one hand, any serious agreement really must include the world’s biggest emitters of greenhouse gases—including the U.S., China, and India. Moreover, pragmatically speaking, the U.S. cannot politically accept an agreement that does not include—on some reasonable timeline— the large and fast-growing emerging economies. Consequently, this means that dividing the world into two categories, of which only one has obligations, will be a non-starter in terms of solving any actual emissions problem. The Montreal Protocol, which governs ozone depleting substances, provides a model for reasonable compromise: All countries have the same obligations, but some are allowed a delay (in the case of the Montreal Protocol, it was 10 years).

In this context, one of the major questions to be addressed in the UNFCCC is the longstanding principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities,” or CBDR. This principle basically holds that all countries have some obligation to protect the climate but the exact level of obligation and form of action is different depending on the country (see International Climate Governance: Will Redefining "Insiders" Enable Global Progress?). Many countries have extended the legal reality of this idea to mean different things—for example, that developing countries ought to have collectively a different set of obligations that developed countries. The principle appears in the original FCCC and in theory covers all subsequent negotiations, but there is already some disagreement about re-introducing it during this next round of negotiations, in part because it could lead to a similar deadlock should it lead to a system that fixes countries in specific categories. The most fruitful approach will likely be to focus on negotiating vigorous but attainable goals that all major emitters would find palatable on some reasonable timescale.

A final note concerns the position of the U.S. Of course, Barack Obama was recently re-elected and therefore the overall U.S. negotiating position is unlikely to change substantially at Doha. However, the more interesting question is what will be happening in U.S. domestic politics over the coming year and how that might influence international negotiations on the 2015 legal outcome. The U.S. is a country of great importance to this debate, in that U.S. involvement in reducing emissions will be essential for reaching global emissions goals. But U.S. involvement can take many forms, and it appears that the U.S. domestic perspective on climate policy may again be shifting. Four years ago, both U.S. presidential candidates agreed that climate change was a serious risk to be addressed, and even broadly agreed on a policy approach to tackle it (a form of carbon pricing). Two years ago, the two U.S. political parties were so antipathetic that they could scarcely agree on anything, but clearly they did agree that addressing climate change was “off the table.” Hurricane Sandy recently reminded residents in the eastern United States—including in Washington D.C. and, of course, New York—about our own dependence on climate and weather and our potential vulnerabilities should such events threaten more frequently or with more severity. Political trends rise and fall, but climate change continues to loom as a risk to global and national security. While it is too early to tell what direction the U.S. domestic policy is heading, there are indications that the topic of climate change may once again be open for discussion, including the outside possibility of carbon pricing or a carbon tax as part of an approach to solving the country’s large fiscal imbalance. The outcomes of such discussions could be a key driver of success in reaching global agreements—but only if the negotiations remain on track to deliver an agreement viewed as workable by all major emitters.

Note:

[1] The Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer (1987 with subsequent amendments) also happens to address, by accident, some greenhouse gases.

Authors

Nathan Hultman

Image Source: © Stringer China / Reuters

Global Trade

Joshua Meltzer — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 13:59:00 -0400

Editor's Note: This is an excerpt from a chapter titled "Global Trade" from The Encyclopedia of Sustainability, Vol. 10: The Future of Sustainability.

In 2011, total world exports amounted to almost $US18 trillion dollars, representing over a quarter of global GDP and an increase of almost 500 percent since 1991 (author’s calculations). This exponential increase in trade has been at the forefront of globalization, which has created economic growth, raised standards of living, and exposed people to new goods, services, ideas, and lifestyles. At the same time, global trade has presented a range of challenges, especially through its impact on the environment. How countries reap the benefits from trade while managing it in ways that are environmentally sustainable is a key goal of sustainable development. The World Trade Organization (WTO) is the primary multilateral agency responsible for regulating world trade. Based in Geneva, Switzerland, and comprising 155 members, the WTO plays an important role in balancing the development and growth opportunities from trade while allowing members the scope needed to regulate access to their markets in order to achieve environmental goals.

International Trade and Sustainable Development

The linkages between international trade and the environment are key elements of the broader question about how international trade contributes to sustainable development. The rising global environmental consciousness can be traced back at least as far as the 1972 United Nations (UN) Conference on the Human Environment, which agreed to a set of principles that made protection of the environment central to human development and recognized the need for international cooperation to address transboundary and global environmental challenges. Recognition of the need for economic growth to address development issues while also protecting the environment was the beginning of the economic and environmental strands of what is referred to as sustainable development. Yet the implication of international trade on the environment was little explored at this time and was not mentioned in the report on the UN Conference on the Human Environment.

Authors

Joshua Meltzer

Publication: Berkshire Publishing

Image Source: © Romeo Ranoco / Reuters

Is Rwanda Exportable?

Mwangi S. Kimenyi — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 14:55:00 -0400

For a period of about 100 days in 1994, the people of Rwanda were embroiled in a murderous rampage that left an estimated 800,000 dead—the chilling memories of which are enshrined in the Kigali Memorial Center built at a site where 250,000 victims of the genocide are buried.

Eight years after the genocide, I visited Rwanda for the first time at the invitation of the government to assist in the establishment of a national public policy think tank—the Institute of Policy Analysis and Research (IPAR)-Rwanda—now up and running. I was then impressed by the determination of the people of Rwanda to forge ahead as one country notwithstanding the bitter memories of the recent past. Ever since that first visit, I have been visiting Rwanda frequently on official assignments. As I am now in Kigali participating at the 2012 Africa Economic Conference, it is mind boggling that this is the country that less than two decades ago was the shame of Africa and indeed of all humanity. It is hard to imagine that these were the same people that were killing each other in barbaric ways.

Probably most impressive has been the institution of programs and policies for economic development. Today, Rwanda has the best record of economic reforms—topping all African countries in terms of improvements in its business environment. The country has been ranked the second best global reformer in the World Bank Doing Business Report for the past six years and is the third most competitive place to do business in Africa. Whereas it takes weeks and often months to register a business in most African countries, it only requires six hours in Rwanda. Unlike many African countries that initiate reforms and then abandon them, Rwanda has been persistent in implementing reforms that result in policy credibility. In addition, the government of Rwanda has an outstanding record of speedy implementation of policy decisions—a rarity for most of African countries.

But there is more. Rwanda is the most open of all the African countries in terms of investments and labor mobility. The leadership has embraced well thought out strategies to attract both foreign direct investment and human capacity to help build the poor country. No wonder this small, land locked, natural resource-poor country is among the fastest growing economies in Africa. Rwanda is embracing modern information technologies and is investing heavily in human development. It is a poor country but the improvements during the post-genocide period are impressive. Of particular note is the leadership’s uncompromising stance on inclusive development.

At the opening ceremony of the Africa Economic Conference (October 30, 2012), the theme of which appropriately is “Inclusive and Sustainable Development in an Age of Economic Uncertainty,” President Paul Kagame stressed some key factors that have contributed to the impressive performance including: ownership of programs, citizen participation, accountability, collaboration with development partners and the establishment of strong institutions. These factors appear to be common sense and yet have not been institutionalized in the policy processes of most African countries.

Rwanda has a long way to go, especially in deepening political reforms to broaden the political space and expand citizen voice. There is still mistrust among the population, and the post-genocide peace process remains a work in progress. By all accounts, however, there is much that other African countries can learn from Rwanda’s approach to policy reforms and implementation for development. Development is a choice, and the people and leadership of Rwanda appear to have made that choice.

Authors

Mwangi S. Kimenyi

Image Source: © Finbarr O'Reilly / Reuters

Never a Better Time for Philanthropists in Global Education

Xanthe Ackerman and Rebecca Winthrop — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 10:10:00 -0400

There has never been a better time for philanthropists to engage in global education. The launch of the United Nations secretary-general’s flagship, five-year initiative, Education First, marks a new phase for international education – one in which the enabling environment is better than ever before. Special Envoy for Global Education Gordon Brown is rallying heads of state, donor governments, corporations and foundations to do more to ensure that all children have access to quality education. Meanwhile, heavy-weight actors in the sector are working to identify the investments that have the greatest impact. For example, the United States Agency for International Development, under the leadership of Administrator Raj Shah, is focused on measurement and research to inform programming, and the United Kingdom development agency is bringing wide-ranging donor governments together to build a base of shared evidence for factors that promote learning outcomes.

The state of affairs in international education is urgent, yet individual philanthropy to the sector is a pittance compared to giving for domestic education or international health. An estimated 132 million children are out of school (when considering children of primary or lower secondary school age) and millions more children are in school but are not learning basic skills because their school systems are not delivering a quality education. Many corporations and institutional foundations recognize that the sector’s funding is low in relative and absolute terms, and are working together to change the state of play. As corporate and institutional funders prepare to ramp up their efforts, it is all the more important that individual philanthropists engage in the field.

Individual donors play a critical and unique role in the ecosystem of international education giving. They have more flexibility than any other type of donors and may chose to offer life-sustaining core support for organizations. Individuals are more likely to serve on boards that other funders, often leveraging their gifts by drawing on their networks and professional expertise. Individuals’ engagement at any level of giving offers international organizations a domestic constituency for their international work, and because individual donors are often outside of the professional field of international education, their perspective helps organizations to communicate with their broader domestic base.

Some philanthropists avoid giving to international education because of the misperception that the sector is not strategic because it is unsustainable, and that impact is intangible. The following paragraphs provide suggestions on how to give strategically, with a long-term view, and how to perceive and measure impact as a donor.

Strategic Giving

Strategy begins with information. A sound understanding of the international education field will allow philanthropists to target their investments to have the highest possible social return and identify approaches that match with their values and priorities. Many resources are available to aid in this initial self-education. In addition to our Center for Universal Education at Brookings, the Center for Global Development and Results for Development produce wide-ranging research and events to inform all actors in the field. Outside of the eastern corridor of the U.S., there are other organizations that can provide specialized information, including the Oversees Development Institute and country and region-specific think tanks and university centers.

The global education sector is diverse, spanning not only geography and stages of schooling, but also approach. For instance, some organizations prioritize human rights and empowerment, others focus on the need to develop agents of economic growth. As a first stage in giving to the sector, some may consider a “blended-giving learning period” that privileges a number of smaller gifts to a diverse set of organizations that do a good job of educating their donor base through their communications materials.

For a more targeted synthesis of the field that is informed by your personal priorities, donors can commission a landscape analysis of the field from a philanthropic consulting firm. The scope of such reviews can vary greatly, ranging from a simple synthesis of available literature, to a more robust study that includes interviews and surveys. As donors develop their priorities, advising firms can also help to think creatively about approaches and mechanisms to generate change – for instance by working with corporate and nonprofit actors through pooled funds or by launching a public campaign.

Tangible Results

Another important driver of individual philanthropy is the gratification of touching others’ lives. Although the beneficiaries of international education programs are abroad, there are many ways to experience the tangible impact of giving in this field.

Because the pool of individuals who invest in international education is relatively small compared to the domestic sector, the impact on the organization itself has the potential to be great. Considering personal preferences and professional experiences can help to identify ways to leverage giving in both the organization’s development at home and efforts abroad. For instance, investors with venture capital experience may play an important role locally on the board of an early-stage organization. A person who prefers indirect involvement and feels gratified by evidence of results can engage by offering mezzanine funding to sustain a proven organization with excellent metrics. Geographic specialization, based on your past and planned travels and experiences, offers opportunity to connect more deeply with beneficiaries abroad given that many organizations offer service trips to regional or country-specific investors. Although some organizations will offer meaningful personalized giving experiences, for instance the founding of a new school in a donor’s name, this special effort can at times cause the organization to diffuse energy from other programmatic objectives.

Sustainable Investments

Giving to education is a sustainable investment because education creates a positive and reinforcing cycle of development: An educated person will earn more; contribute to society economically and socially; and pass on economic, social, educational and health-related benefits to their children. Still, much of international education work centers on service provision, which by nature requires constant and sometimes unsustainable sources of funding. Organizations may promote a long-term impact that goes beyond individuals by working at the community level to create broad-based support for change or by mainstreaming programming into the government system.

For philanthropists who value sustainability over other imperatives, understanding an organization’s theory of change can provide insight into the extent to which programming aims to be sustainable in the long term. The theory of change may be implicit or explicit, but should define the barriers to education and the organization’s unique role within the sphere of other stakeholders. Programs that are driven by the goal of solving an identified problem, rather than reacting to recurring symptoms are likely to deliver more sustainable results.

Authors

Xanthe Ackerman
Rebecca Winthrop

@ Brookings Podcast: Global Progress in Sustainable Development

Nathan Hultman — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0400

Emerging economies may chafe at international agreements calling for sustainable development, but Nonresident Fellow Nathan Hultman says many governments are putting plans for sustainability and green innovation in place out of self-interest, and cooperating with neighbors across the globe.

Video

Nathan Hultman: Global Progress in Sustainable Development

Authors

Nathan Hultman

Displacement and Development: Moving Forward from Rio +20

Megan Bradley — Thu, 12 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0400

The United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio late last month ended not with a bang, but a whimper. The Future We Want, the conference’s 283-paragraph outcome agreement, contains no enforceable commitments on the critical threats facing our planet and its people, including climate change. It also contains no mention of some of the groups who bear the brunt of inadequate development and environmental degradation, such as refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs).

The failure to include displacement more centrally on the Rio agenda is striking as the links between refugees, IDPs and development are gaining increased attention in other quarters, particularly given the growing numbers uprooted by natural disasters associated with climate change. As the dust settles after another failed mega-summit, governments, international agencies and civil society leaders face the challenge of devising a new set of internationally supported sustainable development goals (SDGs) to replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that are to be met by 2015. How might displacement figure in this process?

For all its shortcomings, Rio +20 provided some openings for more effectively integrating displacement into the post-2015 sustainable development framework. The Rio +20 outcome document calls for states “to promote and protect effectively the human rights and fundamental freedom of all migrants regardless of the migration status, especially those of women and children, and to address international migration through international, regional or bilateral cooperation and dialogue and for a comprehensive and balanced approach, recognizing the roles and responsibilities of countries of origin, transit and destination in promoting and protecting the human rights of all migrants, and avoiding approaches that might aggravate their vulnerability.”

The document also acknowledges migrants as significant stakeholders in sustainable development processes, and devotes attention to disaster risk reduction, a critical issue for preventing and responding effectively to displacement. Advocates may build on these provisions to ensure that the post-2015 framework is better attuned to the development dimensions of not only cross-border migration but also internal movements.

With one in seven people around the world in what the International Organization for Migration (IOM) calls a “migratory state,” including refugees and IDPs, and remittances outstripping global rates of official development assistance, it should go without saying that people “on the move” are a critical constituency in the sustainable development process. However, neither refugees nor IDPs are explicitly addressed in any of the eight MDGs or their related targets and indicators. Since the MDGs are nonetheless directly relevant to the rights and wellbeing of the displaced, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has taken an active role in monitoring the inclusion of forced migrants in the pursuit of the MDGs, and progress in achieving the MDGs in communities affected by displacement. Yet UNHCR’s monitoring work has focused almost exclusively on refugees and asylum seekers, overlooking other key groups such as IDPs and returnees.

Moving forward, concerted efforts will be needed to ensure that the new sustainable development goals take into account the development challenges and opportunities associated with both internal and international migration, including displacement, and that monitoring activities are expanded to cover IDPs and returnees. Important new initiatives are presently unfolding that underscore the critical link between displacement and development, including the piloting of the UN Secretary-General’s Framework on Ending Displacement in the Aftermath of Conflict (PDF) and the development of principles to protect those forced across borders because of disasters, particularly those associated with climate change. Building on this momentum, displacement should be better integrated into the post-2015 sustainable development framework, moving beyond the neglect of this issue that was one of the many failings of Rio+20.

Authors

Megan Bradley

Image Source: Ueslei Marcelino / Reuters

The Rio+20 Conference: A Useful Forum for External Commitments, but No Transformational Vision

Nathan Hultman — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 13:51:00 -0400

Delegates met last week in Rio de Janeiro for a third major international conference to discuss new approaches to reaching sustainable development goals. They have approved a 53-page document that purports to outline “The Future We Want.” While this outcome document contains many reasonable statements of consensus, it is neither transformational nor visionary, and the delegates also missed several opportunities to produce even small victories. Judged simply against the document, the Rio+20 meeting delivered nothing as substantive as the previous conferences in 1972 and 1992. Moreover, it is quite likely that the media will focus almost exclusively on this uninspiring document — alternating statements of disappointment among environmental advocates with the official statements of the delegations. However, the Rio+20 meeting would be better judged more comprehensively across several areas in which it might have effected changes.

While many people would argue, with good justification, that transformational or visionary approaches are needed to address the environment and development challenges of the coming decades, few international conferences produce such sweeping consensus. Accordingly, it can be helpful to focus on what can really be achieved by a large group of diverse actors, working across a broad and diffuse set of goals, and with limited ability to impose regulatory burdens on countries. Mindful of these challenges to success, there are four ways in which such meetings can ultimately produce something of value: outcome documents; catalyzing external commitments; reinforcing and expanding communities of expertise; and establishing norms, expectations and pathways for domestic policy.

Establishing new agreements. The obvious model for the Rio+20 conference is the previous Rio Earth Summit in 1992. That conference produced a short statement of consensus on sustainable development, a long exposition of principles to guide actions, and three treaties covering biodiversity, climate change, and desertification. The Rio+20 meeting produced only a consensus statement that is essentially a simple affirmation of existing ideas.
Catalyzing external commitments. In the circumstance that new treaties are not being negotiated, there are other ways that they can influence policy and effect real outcomes. Such forums can have high international legitimacy, but have little jurisdictional authority or ability to command funding or implement projects. However, many institutions with those powers, such as states and multilateral development banks, participate actively in these events. As part of their involvement, these entities are prompted to evaluate how their own mission might benefit from or contribute to the overall goals of the conference.
Creating communities of expertise. Conferences aspire to create and strengthen networks and communities of expertise. These communities interact with policy in two ways. First, interacting with others can provide participants with new ideas and expertise. To the extent that this does happen, those people will be able to bring ideas home to their own domestic policy contexts and potentially contribute in new ways with their own organization, government department or constituency. The meetings operate in a second way as well, by conferring some additional authority to those people who have attended. Neither of these mechanisms is universally effective, but both have the potential to enhance the ability and interests of individual delegates in bringing the ideas from such conferences back home, where policies can be implemented more directly and effectively.
Establishing new expectations. Outcome documents do matter as statements of principle, and to the extent that these documents can codify evolving norms, they can be helpful in gradually affecting domestic policy. The incorporation of a 2-degree warming target in the 2010 Copenhagen Accord on climate change is one example of this. However, expectations and norms can evolve even without being codified, and this is to be expected in periods when an idea is making the transition from a minority to a consensus viewpoint.

The Rio outcome is best evaluated in light of these four dimensions.

First, undoubtedly the most important and most visible product of the conference is the outcome document. Many environment ministers and delegations will be framing this document as a partial success: we will hear statements like “it is a step forward” or “it provides guidance for future action.” All of that is true, to a point, but there are many degrees of tepid. The outcome document is nearly empty of new actions, initiatives, or concrete steps that will lead directly to new and enhanced sustainable development. It is not just a glass half full/half empty question; the issue is whether the few drops of water in the glass constitute any reason for notice.

Notable aspects of “The Future We Want” outcome document include:

A clear statement of sustainable development being comprised of three “pillars”: poverty alleviation (or eradication), economic vitality and environmental protection, with a clear statement of poverty alleviation as the top priority. While many people have already criticized the document for being simply a restatement, this shift toward emphasizing both economy and poverty alleviation is new.
A reaffirmation of many principles of sustainable development from earlier documents (such as the 1992 Earth Summit and the 2002 Johannesburg summit).
An agreement to improve the “Institutional Framework for Sustainable Development.” This will involve restructuring some of the internal bureaucracy in the UN’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC); establishing new procedures for budgeting and expanding representation in the UN Environment Programme; and a decision to establish a “universal intergovernmental high-level political forum” that “could” undertake a number of convening activities.
Statements about most conceivable aspects of sustainable development, across topic areas, regions, and governance.
A decision to begin a process “on” sustainable development goals (SDGs). The choice of vague language, without a specific end goal specified, is not accidental. There had been some confusion about the relative position with possible SDGs in relation to the existing Millennium Development Goals, and this document seeks to underscore that such activities would not supplant the MDG process. Now there is a process that will likely lead to creation of the SDGs but the details remain to be determined.

Equally interesting about the document is what was left out. The agreement was progressively watered down as individual countries objected to phrases or commitments. Words like “equitable”, and concepts like a right to food or gender equality, “unsustainable consumption and production patterns” and “common but differentiated responsibilities” were eliminated. Rather than endorsing “sustainable energy for all” and the multilateral initiative already working to support it, the outcome document merely “notes” it. The net result is a document that is excessively cautious about anything other than “reaffirming” existing commitments and making the most incremental of changes to the institutional approach to sustainable development.

“The Future We Want” represents perhaps a few very small steps and it would be disappointing if this were the only outcome from the meeting. However, the occasion of the conference did stimulate some decisions and initiatives that were not directly a result of the negotiations; most of these were the culmination of discussions held within organizations focused on the Rio+20 conference as a deadline of sorts. Such activities included the release of a number of reports (such as UNEP’s GEO-5, and the new Global Energy Assessment) and the announcement of new funding support. The most noteworthy new funding announcement was a new $175 billion transportation financing program from several multilateral development banks. In addition, the U.S. offered a $2 billion commitment to the Sustainable Energy for All initiative, which is a collaboration of a number of international organizations.

In addition to this catalytic function, the Rio+20 conference undoubtedly fostered productive conversation among the estimated 30,000 attendees. Like any conference, it sought to offer a useful opportunity for representatives from government, development aid organizations, financing institutions, the private sector, research organizations, and other stakeholder groups to discuss issues of mutual interest. For example, one consistent message voiced across many of the major participating organizations (e.g. UNDP) was an interest in generating better methodologies for environmental accounting. Such measures of “green GDP” would incorporate changes in natural assets or environmental services into national accounts. While this idea has been around for decades, and was mentioned in the 1992 Rio documents, participating organizations at Rio+20 have initiated a process to develop these methodologies over the coming several years. Whether they mature into real and usable procedures is yet to be seen, but the Rio+20 meeting did unquestionably provide a forum to focus on this conversation.

Even compared with other international meetings, the agenda for the Rio+20 Conference was diffuse, covering nearly every aspect of the environment and development agenda. The final outcome document, as a statement of current consensus, contains a number of principles that are solid but unremarkable. It offers few new initiatives or even new concepts to set a destination and a pathway for the next 20 years. It is unlikely that much of the text will be influential. The dialogues that it initiates will likely lead to new sustainable development goals that would complement or feed into the renewed conversation about refreshing the Millennium Development Goals in 2015, and the movement to assert the economic and development elements of sustainable development is notable. Probably the largest contribution will come from the many smaller conversations around individual regional and topical issues, such as energy, transportation and oceans.

The largely self-evident and uninspiring outcome document should prompt some reflection upon the utility of major integrative meetings such as Rio+20. However, one of the measures of success from these meetings is the degree to which they encourage or influence the generation of new domestic goals, policies, or regulations—at the national level—and for that reason it is of course far too early to assess the true value of the conference. The best way for those who were disappointed with the Rio outcome is to ensure that the principles that were guiding discussion are brought home, applied and improved upon in individual country contexts.

Authors

Nathan Hultman

Image Source: Sergio Moraes / Reuters

A Flop and a Debacle: Inside the IMF's Global Rebalancing Acts

Paul Blustein — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 13:41:00 -0400

Cooperation among major countries to shrink global imbalances in trade and capital flows is highly desirable for the sake of promoting a sustainable recovery from the financial crisis that erupted in 2008. The story that unfolds in this paper does not bode well for such cooperation. It is a detailed account of the initiatives, led by the IMF, to address imbalances prior to the 2008 global financial crisis.

The paper is based on interviews with scores of policy makers who were involved in the initiatives, and on thousands of pages of confidential documents that have never been disclosed. It focuses on two undertakings. The first is the Fund’s 2007 decision to strengthen its surveillance of exchange rates, which was aimed at prodding countries — China being the most prominent example — to take action when their currencies were seriously under- or overvalued. The second is the multilateral consultations, in which the IMF convened representatives of five major economies to discuss plans for shrinking imbalances.

Download the full paper at CIGI »

Authors

Paul Blustein

Publication: CIGI

Image Source: Kim Kyung Hoon / Reuters

The Insufficiency of Sustainable Development

Nathan Hultman — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 16:21:00 -0400

As a principle, sustainable development has served us well. But it provides only an incomplete roadmap for organizing policy to address the multiple global challenges of the upcoming two decades. Going beyond simple exhortation to balance environment and development requires a vision for the destination and a policy pathway. Innovation, technological change and market transformations need to be centrally embedded in the development agenda, across all country contexts—from the OECD to the least developed countries.

Country delegations and thousands of representatives from non-governmental organizations are convening this week in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil for the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development. This is the third in what has become a generational reassessment of global progress and goals at the intersection of development, poverty alleviation, economic vitality and environmental protection. While these large and diverse international confabulations are not ideal venues for addressing the specific details of many of the world's problems, they do, in contrast, provide unusual opportunities for focusing thought and attention on articulating a vision for the future, establishing norms and expectations, and presenting an idea for country delegates to bring back and improvise upon within their own domestic spheres.

The largest potential contribution for the long-term impact of the Rio+20 meeting is, to articulate both a vision for the future and a guiding principle for getting there. The previous two conventions of these environment and development conferences—in Stockholm in 1972, and then Rio de Janeiro in 1992— each facilitated difficult conversations about whether tradeoffs exist between those two goals, and how best to approach them simultaneously. At the first such meeting held in Stockholm 40 years ago, there were arguably even greater disparities across the developed and developing countries, and widespread poverty within many economies, such as China’s and India’s that are now economic forces in their own right. At the same time, ecological scientists and the new environmental movements in the United States and Western Europe had become increasingly concerned about industrial impacts on air, water, and ecosystems. But many developing countries whose priority was development began to feel that the environmental agenda dis not help them. Concerns about population, particularly in fast-growing and often less developed areas of the world, exacerbated tensions between the developed and developing blocs. The 1972 Stockholm meeting was a first step at resolving such conflicts, and today’s feeling of ‘obviousness’ of synergies between development and environmental protection is evidence of that meeting’s at least a partially successful legacy.

This first Rio meeting helped crystallize the vision and the consensus around sustainable development. This was a notable achievement even without counting the three major international treaties that emerged from that same conference.

Twenty years ago, the world was reaching for a global consensus on how to balance environmental protection and economic development. The Stockholm meeting provided the initial movement toward a new model, which was advanced in the mid-1980s by the so-called Brundtland Commission (named after it chair, Gro Harlem Brundtland of Norway). This commission articulated the idea of sustainable development in a document called “Our Common Future” in 1987. Shortly thereafter, the international community successfully tackled the global problem of stratospheric ozone depletion and began a collective approach to addressing other global environmental problems like climate change and biodiversity loss. As such, when these stakeholders convened at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the concept provided a surprisingly robust organizing principle that commanded support across a broad spectrum of actors, from small rural NGOs to the World Bank, from farmers’ collectives to large multinational corporations. This first Rio meeting helped crystallize the vision and the consensus around sustainable development. This was a notable achievement even without counting the three major international treaties [1] that emerged from that same conference.

However, while sustainable development remains a useful principle to guide decisions, it is regrettably insufficient for the major challenges facing the global community in the upcoming two decades. One of the challenges of sustainable development was also what made it appealing: As a principle, it could be a point of consensus but as a guide to practice, it was—and is—silent. Several new ideas have been injected into the discussions; indeed, the Rio+20 meeting set its sights on broadening the concept of sustainable development to “sustainable development in the context of green economy and poverty eradication.” While this principle stands as sound and laudable, it unfortunately provides little new guidance on how we might reach any new goals that emerge from the meeting. We have had 20 years to create the roadmap toward these next goals, but the level of ambition heading into the Rio+20 meeting is trending toward diminishing battles and exhortations rather than setting forth an expansive new vision for the next 20 years.

The environmental dimension of development is no longer controversial, and the improvements in technical and economic capacity in many countries open tremendous new opportunities for setting and reaching new goals. The challenge now is not simply to reaffirm the need for sustainable development, but to articulate and realize different futures.

The reality is that the while the value of sustainable development hasn’t wavered, the world has changed since the 1992 Earth Summit. The environmental dimension of development is no longer controversial, and the improvements in technical and economic capacity in many countries open tremendous new opportunities for setting and reaching new goals. The challenge now is not simply to reaffirm the need for sustainable development, but to articulate and realize different futures. This involves the combination of policy choices and market realignments that enable transformational technologies to become commonplace.

Innovation and deployment of new technologies will be a key component of this process. A renewed focus on encouraging transformational innovation, and embedding it in diverse development contexts is necessary for reaching the sustainable development vision that we have inherited from the first Earth Summit. Unfortunately, the halting steps that are being discussed in Rio are not grappling with innovation either systematically or broadly. The innovation “ecosystem” in any given country draws on many aspects—the policy environment, governance and bureaucratic effectiveness, the domestic science and technology system, networks of entrepreneurs and financiers, and more. International and domestic policies can contribute to enhancing all of these elements—for example, through boosting support to research funding, establishing business development incubators, and providing better access to capital or reducing risk premiums (For a fuller description, see “Toward an International Architecture to Support Green Growth Innovation” and “Rio+20: Coalitions Driving Bottom-up Change”).

One of the themes of the Rio+20 conference, and the likely title of the final outcome document, is “The Future We Want.” While at first it may sound a bit petulant, this phrase is rooted in an appropriate attempt to frame our future as one of choice. In other words, we are not bound to follow a current trajectory just because that is where we happen to be heading today. Changing course, though, requires two conditions: First, to determine what new course to take, and second, to have a vehicle to take us there. The Rio+20 meeting is an opportunity to re-imagine our approach to both. Discussions thus far have seem to have established a number of points of consensus on those global goals and process for crystallizing them—but that is only the destination, not the vehicle. While sustainable development has proven to be a useful point of international consensus, it does not go far enough toward making that “Future We Want” a reality. Neither, unfortunately, does “Green economy in the context of sustainable development and poverty eradication”. Embedding transformative innovation in the environment and development agenda, in contrast, could build the vehicle we need to get there.

[1] The Convention on Biodiversity, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and the UN Convention to Combat Desertification

Authors

Nathan Hultman

Innovation in Green Growth Technology for Developing Countries

Tue, 19 Jun 2012 08:30:00 -0400

Event Information

June 19, 2012
8:30 AM - 10:00 AM EDT

T-3
Riocentro Convention Center
Av. Salvador Allende, 6555 - Barra da Tijuca
Rio de Janeiro

A Brookings Side Event at the Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development

The United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD), or Rio+20, will take place in Brazil on June 20-22, 2012 to mark the 20th anniversary of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, and the 10th anniversary of the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. The conference will focus on two themes: a green economy in the context of sustainable development poverty eradication; and the institutional framework for sustainable development. The challenge will be to reenergize international will for meaningful progress in addressing climate change, achieving sustainable growth and development, and protecting the environment. Central to the concept of sustainable development is technological innovation, from basic research to commercialization.

To date, the vast majority of clean technology innovation has occurred in developed countries, where strong research universities, publicly- and privately -funded laboratories, and intellectual property regimes have successfully encouraged entrepreneurship for green growth. The challenge for developing countries is to ensure that they – particularly the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) – do not miss out on this technological transformation and the opportunity to ‘leap frog’ their own development pathways onto more environmentally -friendly development trajectories.

The Global Economy and Development team at Brookings, with the support of the Global Green Growth Institute, has reviewed existing international green growth capacity-building activities around the world, with an eye toward understanding what type of international mechanism could stimulate R&D innovation in LDCs themselves. The results will include a publicly available listing of existing initiatives, a gap analysis, an options analysis, and finally a proposal for a new international architecture. Please join us for an overview of our research at this side event.

Please note there is no registration for this event. It is an open event held onsite at the Rio+20 conference, from 9:30am to 11:00am BRT.

Participants

Panelists

Jason Eis

Deputy Director

Jose Goldemberg

Steven Griffiths

Executive Director of Institute Initiatives and Professor of Practice, Chemical Engineering

Nathan Hultman

Nonresident Fellow, Global Economy and Development

The Absurd Politics of Green Jobs Counting

Mark Muro and Jonathan Rothwell — Fri, 08 Jun 2012 15:00:00 -0400

This week, the debate over the economy and environmental policy reached a new low. Rep. Darrel Issa (R-Calif.), and the House Committee on Oversight and Reform which he chairs, made Bureau of Labor Statistics officials go through a list of jobs and say whether or not they were counted as green in their “Green Goods and Services Survey” in order to ridicule it.

In a comical exchange between Issa and BLS Commissioner John Galvin, Issa lists at least seven jobs that are both pedestrian and far from the sorts of cleantech jobs highlighted as dynamic jobs of the future. These included putting gas in a school bus, being an oil lobbyist, working at a bike shop and working at an antique dealer, used clothing, or used record store. Galvin didn’t know if some of these were considered green or not. Issa, on the other hand, was sure that the BLS did count them as green jobs.

Issa and Galvin were both misinformed. In doing our own green jobs study, we largely followed the BLS lead, which was based, in part, on prior work by statistical agencies like Eurostat, as well as the EPA.

How do we know? Because the BLS released a super-detailed list of every industry that they included in their survey and those that they did not. Gassing up school buses did not make the cut.

Certainly, there are legitimate questions about this. Our research team believed that repairing Energy Star products, which the BLS counted, was not inherently green and was not fundamentally different than repairing non-Energy Star products, so we did not count them.

Yet, by and large, we were in agreement on most of what the BLS did, and even these disagreements are relatively minor and debatable points.

Measuring green jobs is difficult. Not only is there confusion and debate about what “green” means, classifying workers into any industry or sector of the economy is an inherently complicated analytical process. Yet, it really is not significantly more difficult than measuring jobs in other cross-cutting super-sectors like the “oil and natural gas industry,” or the biotech or IT industries.

The bland and inherently non-partisan facts of the BLS report have not stopped critics of the Obama administration from seizing upon it as an example of malfeasance and exaggeration. Of course, the administration set itself up for all of this by taking credit for the 2.7 million green jobs that we found existed as of 2010, whereas most of them were created long before they came into office and have little to do with signature presidential policies. Republicans rightly noted this fact, but then went overboard trying to illustrate the folly of any effort to study green jobs. Alas, lobbyists on both sides are eager to portray their clients as more important to the economy and therefore more deserving of favorable political treatment, which is obviously not how policy decisions should be made.

And so the problem with all of this is that it has been unnecessarily infused with political importance. The relevant political questions are not: “How many green (or non-green) jobs do we have, or which party created them?”, but “How do we best promote environmental sustainability and energy efficiency, while continuing to raise living standards?” The proliferation of green goods and services help us reach that goal. Knowing something about which sectors are providing these jobs, there geographic location, and how quickly they are growing can shed light on which policies might best reconcile the potentially competing goals of economic prosperity and sustainability. Whether or not a bus driver is counted is really beside the point.

Authors

Mark Muro
Jonathan Rothwell

Publication: The Avenue, The New Republic

Image Source: Kevin Lamarque / Reuters