Industrial emissions are a major source of CO2 contributing to climate change. Photo: United Nations Photo (flickr)

The ongoing global financial crisis should not impede the fight against climate change. That's the concern coming from a surprising corner of the world: China.

As the latest round of UN-sponsored climate talks continue in Durban, South Africa, Chinese officials warn that financial hardships in Europe, the United States and elsewhere are no excuse for inaction on climate change.

With the Kyoto Protocol about to die, the global financial crisis could add another dimension to the already complex relationship between rich and poor countries when it comes to climate change.

China’s top climate official said a global pact to fight climate change should be a top priority for developed countries, even as they face severe economic challenges at home. "After the financial crisis, every country has had its problems, but these problems are just temporary," Xie Zhenhua, vice-director of the National Development and Reform Commission, told reporters, according to Reuters. He expressed concern that rich countries will break their promises to help poor ones mitigate and adapt to climate change.

According to The Economist, the vast majority of ‘climate finance’ for developing countries comes from western nations. Over $75 billion a year, or more than 75 percent of climate finance to the developing world, comes from a combination of private donors and multilateral and bilateral banks funded by taxpayers in wealthy countries. These sources have been hit the hardest by the global financial crisis.

"Climate change hasn't become less important because of the international financial crisis, but it has become less prominent," Xie said.

Developing countries, meanwhile, would be hit hardest by climate-related disasters. They lack the infrastructure and financial resources to deal with problems they have had less of a hand in causing. The 2010 climate talks in Cancun included a commitment of $30 billion to poorer nations to adapt to impacts of climate change, and an increase to $100 billion a year by 2020 for this ‘green climate fund.’ Now, says China, even the initial $30 billion commitment seems unlikely to be met.

China might seem an unlikely voice of support for carbon cuts, as it has surpassed the United States as the world’s leading producer of CO2 emissions. Under the Kyoto protocol, China was deemed an emerging economy, and not bound to the stipulations placed on developed countries. Yet China has pledged to reduce its emissions intensity by 40 to 45 percent by 2020, and hopes western countries sign on for an extension of the protocol’s commitment period. Kyoto signatories Canada and Japan have already refused to extend the protocol’s requirements. The United States has also said further negotiations are off the table.

That means the Durban discussions themselves may well determine the direction of climate funding and its impacts. And without climate action, the financial crisis could soon seem like a small-scale problem.

Erik Mandell is a graduate of Middlebury College in Vermont. He is currently pursuing a master's degree in public administration and global leadership at Portland State. Read his other contributions to Global Envision.

Visions of today's world work to sustain tomorrow's planet. Photo: NASA Goddard Photo and Video (flickr)

How do you create and sustain a movement around climate change? Why not use art, suggests writer and environmental activist Bill McKibben.

"We need a big movement, and big movements come from beauty and meaning, not columns of statistics,” writes McKibben for the Huffington Post.

That's why McKibben's nonprofit 350.org and Planet Mag are working with contemporary artists to create visual interpretations of Earth to build awareness around climate change and sustainable living. Ten percent of the proceeds are going to Charity: Water, which works to provide safe drinking water to the poor. You can check out pieces by Chris Scarborough and Allison Schulnik — among others — here.

Thousands of Bangladeshi environmental refugees migrate to Dhaka every year as a result of climate change. Photo: uncultured (flickr)

Big cities are likely to strain under the weight of "environmental refugees" as climate change takes effect, according to a recent story in The New York Times. The story looks at the capital city of Bangladesh where three million people came from rural areas hit by natural disasters.

Dhaka is the last resort for people like Mukhles Rahman, who have lost their homes in floods and other natural disasters. “We are trying to find another place to go, because all the land back home is dissolving,” Mukhles said to the Times, “But there aren’t jobs in other cities or villages.” However, Dhaka's already scarce resources like water, electricity and waste disposal are being stretched by the influx of environmental refugees. Like Mukhles, half of Dhaka's 12 million residents already live in slums that lack basic sanitation and drinking water.

Experts say that climate change is likely to cause more severe and frequent storms over the coming years, says the New York Times. Which means that that that even more people will become environmental refugees.

Climate change has wreaked havoc on the farmers of Ladakh. Can artificial glaciers help them adapt to global warming? Photo: Nokes (flickr)

Millions of farmers around the world depend on glacial run-off to irrigate their crops. But what happens when the glaciers disappear?

The people of Ladakh are already facing this challenge. About 80 percent of Ladakhis rely on water from glacial melting to irrigate their crops. But today, most of the low-level glaciers that were near the Himalayan villages of north India have already melted due to climate change.

The Christian Science Monitor recently profiled the efforts of Chhewang Norphel, a local engineer who started building artificial glaciers to help farmers have a reliable source of irrigation. Building artificial glaciers is surprisingly simple, the Monitor reports: "Chhewang diverts the unneeded autumn and winter runoff into a series of large, rock-lined holding ponds. As the days grow colder, the ponds freeze and interconnect into a growing glacier." This icy reservoir melts in early June, just in time to water the new crops.

But Chhewang's efforts aren't a long-term solution for the farmers in Ladakh, writes the Monitor. Man-made glaciers need to be restocked from glaciers high up in the Himalayas. If these glaciers melt, there will be no way for Ladakhi farmers to water their crops and the land could become barren.

China's carbon-capture technologies help reduce emissions from coal plants. Photo: ishmatt (flickr)

At first glance, China appears to be exacerbating global climate change. The world's most populous country is the fastest growing industrial economy and the single biggest source of carbon emissions.

On the other hand, China may be helping green the world by making environmentally friendly technologies more affordable, says The Wall Street Journal.

China's vast market and economies of scale are bringing down the cost of solar and wind energy, as well as other environmentally friendly technologies such as electric car batteries. That could help address a major impediment to wide adoption of such technologies: They need heavy subsidies to be economical.

In other words, manufacturing anything in China makes it cheaper, and that applies to green technologies, too. That's been a major factor in the 30-percent drop in the price of solar panels over the past year, reported NPR.

The WSJ goes on to note that the country's research into carbon-capture technologies is also cutting-edge, working on procedures that could cut down on emissions from coal plants by storing some of the carbon produced underground rather than releasing it into the atmosphere. Manufacturers in developed countries are already interested in how they can apply it to their own facilities.

It's hard for any country to make the switch to greener energy sources, but if China succeeds in fostering innovation and cutting technology costs, the process could make the transition easier for countries all over the world.

Jared Diamond praises Chevron's environmental stewardship in Papua New Guinea. Photo: Arthur Chapman (flickr)

From Michael Moore to Jonathan Safran Foer, American liberals love to criticize corporations for violations on everything from the environment to human rights to animal rights.

But in some cases they're dead wrong, writes Jared Diamond — an American liberal himself. In a recent New York Times Op-Ed, he argues that big corporations can be a force for good in the fight against climate change, simply because they also stand to benefit by preserving the resources they depend on and reducing their costs through lower consumption.

Diamond draws on examples from three companies: Coca-Cola, Wal-Mart, and Chevron. All three are working to protect the environment in different ways for their own reasons. Coca-Cola depends heavily on water resources and is working to make its plants water-neutral, while Wal-Mart is making its operations more energy-efficient and reducing packaging waste. Chevron, on the other hand, practices a degree of environmental stewardship on the land it owns overseas that Diamond believes is superior to government stewardship of many national parks.

Why would these companies take on such projects? Diamond explains:

Lower consumption of environmental resources saves money in the short run. Maintaining sustainable resource levels and not polluting saves money in the long run. And a clean image — one attained by, say, avoiding oil spills and other environmental disasters — reduces criticism from employees, consumers and government. [...] [I]n the long run (and often in the short run as well) it is much more expensive and difficult to try to fix problems, environmental or otherwise, than to avoid them at the outset.

Diamond readily admits that not all big businesses are so admirable. But he maintains that when working to stop climate change, activists should focus less on working against corporations, and more on working with them to help them realize how much their own economic interests can be aligned with environmentalists' goals.

A man delivers his goods through a flooded street in Mumbai, India. Photo: Hussain_Quantum (flickr)

It should be no surprise that armed conflicts force millions of people from their homes each year. In fact, 4.6 million people were displaced by conflict and war in 2008. But I was shocked to learn that the number of people displaced by climate change is four-times greater than those displaced by conflict. That's about 20 million people — roughly the population of Australia — that have been forced to relocate because of natural disasters like flooding, earthquakes and storms.

This figure comes from a joint study by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre and is the first large-scale look at how climate change is effecting human populations. It provides data on exactly how carbon emissions have affected human lives, and it offers a somewhat harsh glimpse into what will happen if the situation is left unchecked.

Ditch your car keys and tie up your laces. Photo: Geir Halvorsen (flickr)

Does your neighborhood influence your driving habits?

A University of California at Davis study has found that neighborhoods boasting corner stores, restaurants, coffee shops, hardware stores and other small businesses inadvertently encourage residents to run their errands by foot, rather then by car. About 87 percent of respondents that live less than .5 miles from a grocery store said that they chose to walk instead of drive about six times a month. In contrast, about a third or respondents from less walk-friendly neighborhoods said they walked to complete a single errand in a month's time.

When you add it all up, people living withing walking distance of stores end up driving 42 percent fewer miles than their car-dependent counterparts. Grist points out the importance of this reduction on a global scale. If more people lived in walk-friendly neighborhoods, they would drive fewer miles, and thus, reduce carbon emissions.

By the summer of 2008, the price of rice had increased five times from the average price in 2005. Photo: Thatcher Cook for Mercy Corps

The following post is from One Table, a Mercy Corps campaign to fight world hunger by investing in the world's women.

Today almost a billion people worldwide are unable to buy or grow enough food to avoid malnutrition. That's 120 million more than were hungry in 2006.

What happened? Basically, the world saw dramatic spikes in food prices. But there were many underlying causes of what's known as the global food crisis:

• Drought and other climate-related problems that resulted in smaller harvests
• Changing diets — rise of the middle class in India and China and an increased demand for food, especially meat, which requires large amounts of grain to raise
• Diversion of crops from food production to the production of biofuels
• High fuel prices during 2008 — if it costs more to transport food, prices go up
• Declining investments in agricultural productivity — total agriculture development aid to poor countries plunged from $8 billion in 1984 to $3.4 billion in 2004. At the same time, the developing world's cities have been ballooning with people who do not grow any of their food
• Export bans and restrictions last year in several major grain-producing countries like China as governments sought to lower food prices for their own citizens, with the result of reducing the global supply on hand.

While food prices have come down from their highs of 2008, they remain substantially above historic levels. Many economists feel this trend, which most severely affects those who can least afford it, is likely to continue for some time.

The economic, health and societal costs of the global food crisis have been severe. One of the first things Mercy Corps did to figure out how and where to direct our efforts was to survey the communities where we work. We discovered that within communities Mercy Corps serves, roughly 70 percent of income is spent on food, and 80 percent of the population had been affected by rising food prices over the past year. The survey also confirmed something we already suspected: that families were coping with higher prices by eating fewer meals, selling off household belongings, going into debt and removing children from school so that they can work.

In addition to being a record year for food prices, it's also been a record year for our food security team, allowing Mercy Corps to aggressively respond to this crisis. We now have 17 programs in 13 countries designed specifically to respond to this on-going problem. Through support from donors including USAID, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Gap Foundation, the Hunger Site, and private individuals, our Food Crisis Response employs a strategy designed to ensure that the groundwork for increased prosperity in the future is laid — even while addressing the immediate problem of accessing sufficient food.

Food distributions, much of which are specifically targeted to improve child nutrition, are taking place in Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Zimbabwe. Meanwhile, in the Central African Republic, India, Indonesia, Liberia, Nepal, Niger, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Uganda and again Zimbabwe, Mercy Corps is helping hungry households to access food by providing employment opportunities, agricultural training and inputs (such as seeds and tools), and helping people establish and grow small businesses.

Combined, these programs are reaching almost 1.5 million individuals who have been directly impacted by higher food prices. Overall, Mercy Corps’ Crisis Response will lead to a sustainable increase in income for these people, leading in turn to greater food security over the long-term.

Are the people who've lived on this planet the longest the best-suited to protect it?

Liza O’Reilly thinks so.

She's a researcher with the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy who spent last week in Alaska at a climate change summit with native peoples around the world. Participants from Borneo, Mexico, Kenya, Nepal traveled to attend … like the rest of us, they all recognize the earth is in peril. What they're saying is, "Let us help save it."

O'Reilly says it makes sense to take them up on their offer, in part because many indigenous groups are themselves affected by climate change. Not far from the conference site, even, the village of Newtok has lost 320 residents because of swollen rivers and melting permafrost.

Another reason for inviting indigenous peoples to the table is their strong spiritual connection with the earth, O'Reilly says. Because of this, they're more likely to come up with solutions that are sustainable over the long haul.

This very timeless wisdom recognizes [Indigenous peoples’] capacity to lead "developed" Nation/states, corporations, and other failed institutions and models out of the dark, wiping the soot out of their infirmed and capitalistic eyes to look at the Indigenous-based model of micro-energy, developed and controlled by the people.

So what would a climate change solution engineered by indigenous peoples look like? Well, it wouldn't involve massive-scale energy solutions like big dams and new nuclear power plants. Instead, it would curb the production of new fossil fuels and call on the various UN agencies to work with indigenous peoples to "address climate change impacts in their strategies and action plans."

Check out O'Reilly's posts on the Indigenous Peoples' Global Summit on Climate Change.

Wood-burning cook stoves, diesel engines and coal plants are the primary emitters of black carbon — and the second-leading contributor to warming temperatures. It's estimated that black carbon is responsible for 18 percent of the atmosphere's warming. But an article in yesterday's New York Times points out ways to make significant reductions in black carbon emissions by making simple changes.

The good news is that methods to reduce black carbon emissions already exist and are pretty cheap. One of the most effective ways to reduce black carbon is to replace cook stoves that use wood or dung as fuel with more modern low-soot versions solar-powered stoves. Reducing black carbon emissions makes a difference right away — soot only stays in the air for about two weeks, according to researchers with the Energy and Resources Institute

Dr. Veerabhadran Ramanathan, a professor of climate science at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography tells the New York Times that decreasing soot now could slow the effects of climate change. “In terms of climate change we’re driving fast toward a cliff, and this could buy us time.”

Photo: BBC World Service (flickr)

Recently, decades of climate change warnings seem to have gained traction in political circles. Long-overdue conversation about the environment is finally underway; but is political will enough to enact environmental legislation in the face of a full-fledged economic crisis?

California is seen as one of the U.S.’s environmental leaders, having been one of the first states to pass a cap-and-trade model requiring businesses to cut carbon dioxide emissions to a certain level or pay fees if they generate more than the limit. But resistance to these efforts has increased as the economy declines, with some of California’s businesses and manufacturers saying that they are unable to afford the costs of the new legislation. According to state budget analysts, the up-front costs of this legislation are more than $30 billion, which outpace any initial savings generated from the law. These same state officials claim that, by 2020, a yearly savings of $40 billion will more than make up for this initial cost. Other analysts have openly derided these figures, however, calling them “unrealistic,” and maintaining that costs will be far higher than the forecasted estimates.

The U.S. isn’t the only country that is wrestling with this problem. Low-income countries are also wondering if their environmental efforts will be cut short due to global economic woes. In Bangladesh, a country vulnerable to global warming-induced natural disasters, the government is developing an ambitious plan to protect the country from rising sea levels, cyclones, and droughts. Estimated costs for this plan are $5 billion for the first five years, with a good chunk of the funding coming from international donors. Now, faced with economic uncertainty in their own countries, it’s not clear that donors will come through with funds to support these efforts.

Stopping or undoing environmental damage is an expensive prospect, with large upfront costs and no definitive reassurance that initial investments will pay off quickly. With daily reminders of the global economic slowdown, nearly every country is exercising more caution in choosing their investments. As a result, it’s uncertain whether local, national and international communities will be able to keep in mind that the long-term benefits of prompt environmental action surely outweigh the short-term costs. With scientists issuing dire warnings about global warming-related “floods, drought, disease and extreme weather,” ignoring these predictions is too risky a gamble to make.

The Brooks World Poverty Institute is holding a conference in Dhaka, Bangladesh about adapting cities to climate change. But it's not what they're talking about that's revolutionary, it's who's doing the talking.

Studies, papers, and articles are released everyday discussing the effect of climate change on the world's poorest. Journalists, politicians, academics, bloggers, everyone seems to have an opinion on how, why, and what to do. The only people whose voices aren't being heard seem to be the people most affected.

Well the academics are stepping down from their ivory towers to the streets of Bangladesh. Climate change seems like an appropriate topic for the capital of a country where predictions of rising sea levels put 55 percent of the Bangladesh population at risk. Medical News Today reports Professor David Hulme, Associate Director of BWPI as saying:

"Our engagement with poor people from the outset means that their knowledge and their preferences will help shape the projects designed to improve their lives. In the past, poverty researchers have been guilty of exploring solutions that they believe will work for the poor, rather than listening to what poor people really want."

One project to be discussed at the conference, which is co-sponsored by a Bangladeshi NGO, is a barge for traders in Dhaka's market to use during flood season.

This is the first of an annual conference on poverty that will be hosted by various developing countries. Although discussing city plans with citizens seems like a no brainer, the conference is being hailed as "groundbreaking" for discussing poverty and climate change with the poor. Let's hope the experts won't be afraid to get their feet wet and their hands dirty, and the academics and "the people" continue their conversation.

A group of gypsies on a street corner in Dhaka. Photo: A@Dhaka (flickr)

Condoms prevent transmissions of disease, and could be key to population control. Photo: Rampant Gian (flickr)

CIA director Michael Hayden recently identified one of the biggest threats facing the U.S., something that occurs over 215 million times a day — sex.

“Population is the essential multiplier for any number of human ills," Hayden said recently. He said overpopulation in the poorest parts of the world is causing global political instability and extremism, climate change, and the food and fuel crises.

In the 1970s, environmentalists frequently discussed the problems of overpopulation, but in the last 30 years, rigid population control has been condemned.

Robert Engleman, vice-president at the Worldwatch Institute and author of the new book More: Population, Nature and What Women Want, says that after China's controversial one-child policy, "Environmentalists came to realize how complicated and sensitive this issue was.”

As food and fuel prices rise, so do concerns that the planet’s limits are finite. Population growth has slowed in developed countries, but is still rising in much of the developing world. With climate change forcing a fresh look at overpopulation, Engleman’s new book argues that “the key to limiting population growth is to give control over procreation to women.”

What Engleman is suggesting is not feminism, it’s just common sense. He says that even in societies with traditionally large families, when women gain control over family sizes with contraception access, birth rates shrink.

Fifty-year-old Linganni, who earns $2.50 a week sweeping streets in Burkina Faso, would certainly agree that too many children and not enough food is a problem. In an article that discusses how the food crisis is hitting women the hardest, The Washington Post describes how her 25 children share one meal a day. And Linganni always eats last.

In his recent article "What Condoms Have To Do With Climate Change", Time's Bryan Walsh suggests the best policy for the U.S. would be “vigorous foreign aid that helps make contraception safe, reliable and accessible in every country — too often women in the developing world who want to use contraception, can't get it.”

Contraceptive aid from the U.S. may be a difficult sell, considering that Americans are still obsessing over abstinence-only sex education and holding father-daughter purity balls. And around the world, contraception is often taboo, and the decision whether to use it is up to the man.

One solution is to support forms of contraception that give women control and are invisible to men, like the Pill or IUDs. But whatever the approach, women need to have control over the number of kids they have. Population control will only happen, Engleman reminds us, when "women are in charge."

The Green Wall for the Sahara Initiative will plant a wall of trees to stop the spread of the Sahara. Photo: Dale Gillard (flickr)

Ever heard of the Great Green Wall?

Concerns about the rapid southern spread of the Sahara desert have prompted African nations to build a wall – out of trees.

The Sahara has been moving south at a rate of almost a square kilometer a year, consuming villages and wiping out agricultural lands.

Slowing the desertification has become a huge priority — and a huge community effort.

International aid groups are helping build community gardens, institute new irrigation techniques, and teach sustainable farming. Projects are especially successful in the areas of the Sahara, like northern Burkina Faso, where new farming techniques are taking advantage of increased rainfall due to climate change.

The biggest project to date is the Green Wall for the Sahara Initiative. The $3-million, two-year initial phase will plant a belt of trees 7,000-kilometers long and 15 kilometers wide, and was formally approved at the Community of the Sahel-Saharan States in Benin last month.

The African Union says future phases will plant trees from Mauritania to Djibouti in two parallel belts, creating a strip of protected topsoil for high-yield farming. Nigeria has launched its own complimentary Desert-to-Food Program.

The AU hopes the Green Wall Initiative will arrest soil degradation, reduce poverty, conserve biodiversity, and increase land productivity in more than 25 countries. Others hope the project will create millions of jobs, promote ecotourism, alleviate the food crisis, and even introduce new fishing and livestock-breeding industries.

Who would have thought a wall of trees could have such a big impact?