Jim Jarvie's blog

Next week London will host the Planet Under Pressure conference, a gathering designed to discuss solutions to the global climate challenge. It's a discussion in which we're heavily invested at Mercy Corps, and Ratri Sutarto, from our Indonesia team, will be there to present on our experience integrating urban climate resilience strategies into city planning and governance in Indonesia.

Over four days, senior policymakers, industry leaders, NGOs, scientists, health specialists and other experts will focus on how to move societies toward sustainable practices and will create leadership for the Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in June. Our contribution features work in Semarang, Indonesia, which in 2009 became part of the Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network (ACCRN), funded by the Rockefeller Foundation.

Mercy Corps has worked with Semarang's government to develop a Climate Resilience Strategy for the city, which recognizes that climate change is exacerbating current hazards from flood, drought and landslides.

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In Timor-Leste (East Timor), this year’s weather has caused more serious problems than ever encountered in living memory and beyond. The dry season was meant to start last March. That should have signaled the start of a planting and harvest season through to now in November, when the wet season would augur the next crop season. Except the dry season never arrived. It’s rained.

Photo: Paul Jeffery/Mercy Corps

We went to speak to farmers in dire straits in the remote area of Same, in the south of the world’s newest nation, one of the poorest countries in the world with half the population living on less that US$ 1 a day.

The charity and kindness that those in real need show to guests never ceases to amaze in this work, and our hosts in the fields, among their grass-thatched houses without power, clean water or incomes was no exception. A leading local farmer, Donatus, described the issues.

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Energy poverty and community-based energy solutions have been back in the news lately, and have been a focus of Mercy Corps’ programming for the last couple of years.

Energy poverty limits economic growth where it is needed most. It impacts crosscutting issues including ill health and environmental degradation, as well as contributing to poor education and gender inequities. Smoke from poor-quality stoves or open fires impacts half the world’s population.

For the 25 percent of humanity off the power grid — and, in addition, those hooked up to unreliable and potentially dangerous power supplies — night time hours are unavailable for activities including small business, other income generation and school homework.

In many areas, the impact of wood-fuel dependence is also causing escalating environmental problems, leading to significant decreases in forest and mangrove cover; fires increasing in frequency and severity; and degraded land being overtaken by invasive species that are unsuitable even for livestock grazing.

Despite current energy-use patterns, there is a huge potential for small-scale renewable energy solutions applied across vast geographies. To date, most projects have had limited impact because of insufficient community mobilization around broader energy-use patterns, a failure to train community members responsible for maintaining the systems, and a failure to link communities with the service providers and financial support that would make the model replicable on a meaningful scale.

Mercy Corps’ approach to alleviating energy poverty is firmly embedded in economic development and market access — opening localized, appropriate and affordable market opportunities in energy products. It applies principles of understanding market systems around energy poverty, placing the poor within the energy market, defining sustainable outcomes and facilitating change. Our approach stays out of the direct market and instead works to build functioning markets that support access to energy products.

Mercy Corps has energy poverty initiatives operating in Africa and Asia with a basis in energy poverty surveys and market analyses intended to expand access for the poor in clean cooking and lighting technologies. These are based on a pair of complementary approaches to addressing energy poverty:

• An energy poverty assessment methodology, identifying the root causes and impacts of energy poverty within complex environments, and
• Market access and marketing strategies, contributing best practices for accessing ‘bottom of the pyramid’ markets across a diversity of cultures and geographies

Energy poverty assessments are made relevant at local levels, using metrics that can be applied at broad scale. They investigate energy needs, opportunities and challenges in meeting them through surveys of representative communities. They cover experiences from past and present projects trying to address energy poverty, and supporting government policy.

Outcomes of the assessment process include baseline analyses and studies, identifying poverty energy gaps, appropriate energy markets and conducting a market analysis/ mapping exercise of target products and services. This forms the basis of robust program design, based on socially-acceptable models to address constraints to alleviating energy poverty.

Part of program design may incorporate identification of financing issues identifying and overcoming financial barriers to product uptake for the retailer and consumer, including accessing carbon finance. This design and approach can include: pilot program implementation; deploying national and international advisors; testing market approaches; addressing government and private sector capacity development; assessing product compatibility with cultural norms; and, finally, commencement of educational and outreach campaigns.

The final goal? Scale up and reach the maximum number of people over the largest area we can.

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Week 9 post-earthquake: Mercy Corps, like our partners and peers, has been focused on emergency response. We’ve been busy with distributions, Comfort for Kids, water and sanitation provision, and more.

But what should we do now that contributes to long-term recovery? The context is challenging at best. Consider these statistics:

• Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere
• It is ranked 146th out of 177 countries in terms of human development
• 80 percent of Haiti's people live in abject poverty
• Unemployment here is somewhere between 70 and 80 percent
• Literacy is only 62 percent
• About 96 percent of the land is deforested and its soils and slopes eroding — which makes it more vulnerable to hurricanes and other storms

Then, of course, there's the impact of the earthquake. There’s a lot to do. And so the Mercy Corps Haiti team took a pause last Sunday to prioritize focus and direction, to consolidate thinking and strategy. Program managers who'd helped direct emergency responses in places like Darfur, Indonesia's Aceh Province and Sri Lanka shared their experience in moving from disaster to long-term recovery.

The strategy that arose — which reflects what we've been planning since shortly after the earthquake — is that we’re going to roll out a recovery strategy based on job creation through urban regeneration and resilience, rural infrastructure development, and business development focused through small and medium enterprises. All of these things are interlinked and will integrate issues surrounding youth, education and vocational training, environmental responsibility and disaster risk reduction (DRR).

It's a complex but complementary strategy to address a wide range of challenges, many of which existed well before the earthquake struck.

In the short-term, we’ll still need to focus on emergency recovery, but we want to start targeting activities in ways that will blossom into long-term revitalization. In rural areas — where we're focusing on places hosting displaced people from earthquake-shattered cities — this will likely include working on improving feeder roads to help deliver produce to markets; improving irrigation; and recovering degraded land for tree planting for cash crops and fuel wood.

In urban areas, we’re looking at DRR measures in anticipation of coming rains and the hurricane season; waste management measures — particularly those focusing on income generation such as organic waste composting; and critical upgrades to water and sanitation service delivery.

For the long-term — through approaches including small business development, community associations, microfinance and related services — we intend to build on current activities to create sustainable jobs in agricultural markets and urban recovery.

In a post-disaster environment clear goals are needed, but plans need to flexible to make sure we achieve them on a road that’s bound to be full of surprises. We have those goals now, and hope to be on the road to achieving them.

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The Climate One Stop homepage.

On December 14 at 9 A.M. here at the Climate Change Conference here in Copenhagen, Mercy Corps was part of a presentation hosted by USAID, as part of the U.S. delegation tent. Our presentation was part of the launch of Climate One Stop, a website acting as a one-stop shop for climate facts and figures.

The website brings together heavy duty data providers like NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), data consolidators like the United Nations Development Programme and World Resources Institute, and data users like Mercy Corps and our sister agencies. You can read the NASA press release here 
and visit our startup site at http://climateonestop.net. Its basic task is to help us filter out and select quality, applicable data and information from the blossoming number of climate-related news feeds, then use that information to help the communities where we work.

Why has Mercy Corps been placing an emphasis on this? The starting point is our mission: helping people build secure, productive and just communities. A dilemma is that doing this successfully means taking a long-term view, which increasingly requires taking climate change adaption into account. But, in transitional countries where short-term needs are paramount, making the case for thinking ahead is tricky. It needs compelling data and argument, and this is where Climate One Stop comes into play.

Let me give some examples from where we have boots on the ground.

Take Afghanistan where we naturally think of the ongoing conflict, violence and need for stabilization. Obviously these challenges require the focused attention and resources currently being applied. But what happens when short-term objectives are met? A recent report to DFID, the United Kingdom's development agency, recently said "At present, climate change is not a consideration into the national or sectoral plans of the Government of Afghanistan, despite it presenting a significant threat to cross sectoral development."

But Afghanistan is literally running dry. That impacts agriculture and will therefore reduce food security. Unless we take that into account during short-term stabilization measures, how long will the benefits of any short-term gain last? We need reliable data to share with communities and governments to help them address long-term environmental and climate threats needing urgent consideration to bolster successes in security. We need reliable data to show stakeholders and partners like the Government of Afghanistan what is happening, and what needs to be done.

Mercy Corps and colleague organizations need solid, reliable data to share with communities and governments to help them address long-term environmental and climate threats.

In Indonesia, Mercy Corps has been active in helping urban poverty reduction. More than 50 percent of the world's population are in cities that concentrate squalor and suffering. Yet, as we help people move forward in megacities like Jakarta, the communities we work with are increasingly hit by floods from increasing numbers of storms with strengthening intensity, and now face rising sea levels. We need reliable data to best predict how strongly climate change will worsen current hazards and set about planning responses with communities and government. As in Afghanistan, we need to merge short-term response with informed, long-term programming and protection of the legacy of our projects.

Finally, consider the disasters we respond to like the tsunami in Indonesia's Aceh Province and Sri Lanka, and the more recent earthquake that hit the western part of Indonesia's Sumatra Island. These areas suffered the unimaginable consequences of natural, rapid-onset catastrophe. Yet, as they are coastally located, they are certain to also suffer the impact of human-based, slow-onset disasters from climate impact, including rising sea levels and storms.

When we respond to immediate disaster, we hope to put in place disaster risk reduction strategies to protect people from future, similar events. Now we realize we need to incorporate the threat from the gathering tide of climate risks.

Areas as diverse as conflict states, peaceful urban centers and disaster sites all need to start thinking about climate adaptation to secure long-term stability. Yet to do that, solid data from multiple sources needs to be considered and applied. The work at Climate One Stop gives us a head start. This is why Mercy Corps supports it. We hope that you will too.

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Photo: Haja Nirina (flickr)

The UN Climate Change Conference has started in Copenhagen, and it is overwhelming. Bella Center, an efficient and vast venue, is chockablock with the 15,000 people it can hold — amid rumors that more than 40,000 people have registered. Security is smooth and polite. Among the cavernous halls and corridors, myriad Internet spots and meeting rooms, the hosting is friendly, unflustered and chirpy; most first timers to Denmark are thinking of returning one day for a holiday to really see the place properly.

The flow of humanity, from almost every nation on Earth — women and men from seemingly every ethnicity, religion, age group on the planet — flow past each other from event to meeting to rest stop at a frenetic pace. It brings home the message that, whatever the outcome of whatever form of agreement emerges from this conference, climate change as a threat unites us as no other in history.

This is a historic event.

Two parallel universes seem to exist here. The negotiators, between the forums and country booths to which they retire to regroup and head out again, exist in the same space but barely the same context as the plethora of side events that run across the Bella Center and other nearby venue spots in Copenhagen. The world outside of the conference center has a better overview of the deals and promises, raised hopes and disappointments than those in the side events.

The side events arise from non-governmental organizations (NGOs), campaigners, practitioners and others from civil society involved in the climate debate, as well as the actions already being taken to counter its impacts across the world.

Mercy Corps was directly involved in one of these today. Pramita Harjati, an urban planner from our Indonesia program, presented her work with ACCCRN (the Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network). ACCCRN — funded by the Rockefeller Foundation — joins us with sister programs in India, Thailand and Vietnam. Together, they share experiences in analyzing how the challenges that the urban poor already face will be exacerbated by climate change. They discuss how they work with government and the private sector to find solutions.

Pramita talked about how increased storm frequency and intensity have immediate impacts on human life and — in the longer term — their livelihoods as houses are damaged and shrimp and fish farms are destroyed. Other members of the network and the wider audience then heard complementary reports from India about how in Surat, the diamond and textile industries can close for extended periods because workers lose their homes and belongings to flooding. And then we heard similar tales from Vietnam.

It was a microcosm of what these side events are about. Numerous small conferences sharing reports of climate impacts and possible solutions across sectors including government, the private sector and agencies like Mercy Corps.

Together, these events represent the collective knowledge of millions of people, and give voice for advocacy for the negotiators to come to a deal that sets the world on a direction to take on the climate challenge we have created for ourselves. These parallel universes may merge yet.

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In the days before the United Nations Climate Change Conference — which will begin in Copenhagen, Denmark on December 7 — there are deflated feelings of anticipation. It is becoming increasingly apparent that a global climate deal is not going to emerge at the tail end of the worldwide get-together. There is hope that examples will be set, and that newly minted unilateral declarations and bilateral accords might together accelerate the path toward a truly global agreement.

Well, maybe next year.

The headlines over the last week have therefore turned to the policy dramas behind the scenes.

Will President Obama's attendance make a difference? Will 60 other presidents and prime ministers from the 192 countries attending be enough to maintain global momentum on climate change policy into the future? Will the U.S. proposal to cut emissions by up to 20 percent be enough to make a difference and inspire others to change?

Science has also shared its drama and scandal. A recent report says unless we change course on current emissions behavior, the world temperature will raise by six degrees centigrade — a terrific plot for a blockbuster disaster movie.

Then, a leaked bunch of emails from a small group of now-dubious climate scientists raised a ruckus for allegedly stifling reports skeptical of climate change. To skeptics, this is the "smoking gun" that there is a global conspiracy to fabricate the evidence pointing to global warming.

Photo of the Athabasca Glacier in Alberta, Canada. Photo: Maggie T (flickr)

The truth, however, is that this is a case of limited academic dishonesty, and that current conclusions of the vast majority of dependable scientists, research institutions, governments and more hold that climate change is as real as gravity.

So where does that leave us as Copenhagen approaches?

Quite possibly we will have a situation where a lack of a deal in Copenhagen signals a lack of urgency, and the debate retreats to questions over the veracity of climate change, not how we slow it down and deal with the impacts felt now and held in store for us in the future. With 43 percent of the U.S. population recently reported as not thinking that climate change is real, as well as 20 percent in the United Kingdom, the likelihood seems high.

What should we do? As dull as it sounds, we need to get onto our political representatives and ask them to take this seriously. They are working for you and, together, you leave the legacy for the world future generations are born into. There is a danger in the democratic world, where 24-hour news cycles and four to six year election cycles hold sway, that the impetus for the politicians, the only people with the power to mandate change, will dwindle. Hold them to their jobs representing your interests. Make it clear climate change matters for your vote, their mandates and terms in office.

Follow those organizations — like Mercy Corps and our partner agencies around the world — that are sending representatives to Copenhagen to keep pressure on the policy makers to address climate change and its impact on the worlds’ poorest and most vulnerable communities.

We will be there representing the work we do around the world in some of the planet’s most difficult places. We want to find more ways to utilize carbon funds to help the poor switch to cleaner and better energy, especially those who will not see an electricity pylon for decades to come. We want to help the many millions in massive coastal slums prepare for rising seas and more flooding on top of the miserable conditions they already face. We want to prepare countries facing food insecurity and the risk of famine in readiness for increasingly erratic weather and access to irrigation water affecting the harvests sustaining life and civilizations across the globe.

We'd like you to join us in saving not only our planet, but its people. Ask President Obama to protect the world's poorest from climate change.

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Flying in to Padang to help our team with earthquake response, an aerial view makes it clear that earthquakes are not the only problem people have to deal with now or anticipate in the future.

The landscape has a beauty that sits in stark contrast to the recent disaster — but its reading is full of warning signs. The flight along the coast by the city, before circling inland and making our final approach for landing over rugged hills, shows telltale warning signs.

Looking inland, the city sits on a large plain, barely above sea level. Two hazards call out. If there were to be a future tsunami, as we saw in similar landscapes in Aceh and Sri Lanka, that water could travel a long way inland. Coastal protection is minimal. Ironically, where the few stone and concrete protrusions emerge into the sea like a giant’s comb running parallel to the shore, there is no mangrove behind them — just exposed habitation. The areas with remaining mangrove look as though they will give better protection to those behind them.

Either way, if even the moderate climate projection models hold true, sea level rise threatens the city. With the added hazard of more frequent, and likely more intensive storms, Padang has a lot to protect itself from.

Deforestation and overcultivation contributed to earthquake-triggered landslides, in which hundreds of people perished. Photo: REUTERS/ IFRC/Wayne Ulrich, courtesy of www.alertnet.org

The plane wheels around, taking us inland over the hills before descending to the ground. We scan for the landslides reported in the UN situation reports and now covered by the media. It becomes obvious what weaknesses the earthquake tremors could work upon. Large patches of forest are felled by human hands, weakening the soil and making the earth more vulnerable; hillsides are exposed by slash and burn agriculture, again exacerbating the chance of a hill giving way.

Under regular circumstances this is already a dangerous issue; there are regular reports of houses swept away, many killed by landslides after heavy rains. The government had already tried to run a program giving cash incentives for people to adopt better upland agriculture practices. These are just the sorts of landscapes that climate change will make more vulnerable. Add inevitable earthquakes because they sit along the dangerous Alpide Belt, which is the second most seismic region in the world with 17 percent of the world’s largest earthquakes, and disasters are bound to happen.

This does not mean that people are defenseless. But what is needed is a disaster risk reduction plan that incorporates current and future risks and places them in the context of human vulnerability and activity. Mercy Corps is right now working on a strategy to foster and integrate earthquake recovery, economic stability and sustainable disaster risk reduction to protect interventions in all of these areas.

The indicator of success is how well we help communities deal with the next big calamity, whether a spontaneous and acute event like an earthquake, or a long and chronic challenge like rising seas. Or — more challenging and likely still — a combination of them both.

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We all like the idea of quick fixes to big problems, but the wiser among us know they do not work. Big problems are complex and usually need an array of tools to come to the rescue.

Think of a friend whose health is in danger through heavy smoking, over eating or drinking, or a mix of the three. What advice would you give them? Most likely it would be to make a series of lifestyle changes, to moderate, to adapt behavior. If the friend insisted that a quick fix of a liver transplant, liposuction and change to low tar cigarettes would do the trick, you would likely try to make them see better sense.

There’s no better friend than our planet, which we are poisoning with the greenhouse gasses that cause climate change, and through that poisoning ourselves. Yet as we approach the Copenhagen climate meeting in December, where we will counsel ourselves on how to address the big problem we have created, the quick fix answers are sadly coming to the fore.

Climate news is increasingly focused on "planetary engineering" to avoid the worst of the global warming impacts we are inflicting on ourselves. There are a host of big ideas: giant mirrors in space, massive CO2 scrubbers more efficient than trees, filling the sea with iron filings to enhance growth of algae that would clear out atmospheric greenhouse gasses. The scientists making these plans are aware of the equally massive risks they pose if the fundamentals of the projects are wrong. And this is sound; if our best scientists cannot get a computer platform right the first time, what chance we can get planetary engineering off the ground without increasing the risk of a global systems collapse?

The reason these quick fixes are coming to the fore is that there are fears that the Copenhagen conference will not lead to a breakthrough in changing our behavior. As Ban Ki-Moon, the UN Secretary General just said, "Despite the evidence, despite the science, despite the growing call from enlightened business, we still face inertia."

This is like our fat friend going for a session of liposuction rather than dieting and jogging, leading the way to a longer and happier life.

We need to pressure our local and global representatives to make Copenhagen work. This will need investment in green technologies that will benefit developing as well as developed countries. These solutions, including simple technologies like fuel efficient stoves and solar lanterns, will reduce CO2 emissions while providing power to those trapped in energy poverty, and massive numbers of jobs in brave, new markets.

Targeted climate adaption interventions, protecting the poor and vulnerable in the areas most likely to be flooded, to be turned into desert, to suffer storms, are the difficult but necessary investments we need to make to help people in the short term, and reduce the potential for conflict in the longer time horizon as the poor get more poor, more marginalized and more fed up.

Time is short. The problem is big. The answers need discipline and a long-term view.

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The climate community is under increasing pressure to help the developing world, especially those at the “bottom of the pyramid.” The people who did the least to cause climate change will suffer its effects the most.

A critical part of the solution to this problem will be enhancing market-based incentives for climate-friendly behavior. The projects that generate credits for sale in the carbon markets vary widely in scale. However, the most successful have focused on large, localized sites, such as the smoke stack of a single plant. These “centimeter-wide, kilometer-deep” projects are easy to monitor and verify.

In contrast, most projects that benefit the poor are “a kilometer wide, a centimeter deep,” with each family across a large territory producing a small emissions reduction. Monitoring and tracking these community-based projects is usually cost-prohibitive.

DRC: Reducing Emissions and Improving Security

A Mercy Corps project in the refugee camps in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) seeks to improve the security of women and children while simultaneously reducing carbon emissions.

In the war-ravaged province of North Kivu, the total number of Internally Displace Persons (IDPs) exceeds 850,000. Demand for resources, particularly fuel wood, vastly exceeds the available supply. To collect wood, women and children have to leave the relative safety of the refugee camps, making them vulnerable to sexual assault and child abduction by rebel groups and the army. Mercy Corps surveys indicate that nine percent of women in camps have been raped or otherwise assaulted.

Mercy Corps installs fuel-efficient stoves that reduce the need for dangerous trips into the forest. A commercial carbon broker develops carbon credits from the reduction in emissions that arises from the use of stoves instead of open fires. The upfront funding from the broker supplements a UNHCR grant supporting the project, and serves to help more than 20,000 families in one of the most dangerous places on Earth.

This extreme example is one of relatively few carbon projects generating revenue that benefits vulnerable people. Yet if this kind of project can be successful in the DRC, larger projects in safer countries may be able to generate massive emissions reductions. The Copenhagen conference needs to set the stage for these types of market incentives for better climate behavior.

Raising a REDD Flag

A relatively new, UN-backed initiative known as Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) seeks to compensate forest-rich countries for protecting or regenerating their forests. However, REDD may have the unintended consequences that further erode the human rights of marginalized people dependent on those forests.

For decades, tropical forests have been logged legally and illegally by states and private companies, without any input from or compensation to indigenous forest communities, who, in many cases, were displaced or worse.

REDD thus raises a troubling question: If countries can generate carbon revenues through REDD, to whom do the revenues belong, and how will they be allocated? Many forestry ministries have a long history of corruption and mismanagement. There are already signs of ministries competing over putative REDD funds. And high-level discussions in only a few countries have included the role of communities and civil society in implementing REDD and distributing revenues.

The Copenhagen conference will be a critical milestone in the global fight to address climate change. Yet it raises significant and far-reaching questions concerning economic development and human rights of the world’s most vulnerable citizens that must not be swept under the rug.

This piece was originally published on The New Security Beat.

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