Locust Plague in Madagascar

Locusts swarm over field in Madagascar Photo: Yasuyoshi Chiba/FAO/Afrol News

Locusts swarm over field in Madagascar
Photo: Yasuyoshi Chiba/FAO/Afrol News

In Madagascar, "a largely uncontrolled locust plague" is in development, which by September is expected to infest two-thirds of the large island. If not checked, the locusts will finish off the entire crops of more than half of the population. The UN's food agency FAO today issued a warning about the development of an uncontrolled locust plague being in development in Madagascar. The agency warns that emergency action must be taken to avoid a large-scale food crisis on the island. "Some 13 million people's food security and livelihoods are at stake, or nearly 60 percent of the island's total population. Nine million of those people are directly dependent on agriculture for food and income," according to FAO. The UN agency says it urgently needs funding to start emergency operations on Madagascar to prevent "a serious food crisis." FAO has issued various warnings since August 2012 calling for financial support. FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva emphasised that prevention and early action are key to meet locust plagues. "If we don't act now, the plague could last years and cost hundreds of millions of dollars. This could very well be a last window of opportunity to avert an extended crisis," he said. Due to lack of efficient locust control programmes so far, the pest has already infected parts of the island. According to FAO, in parts of the country rice and maize losses due to the locusts vary from 40 to 70 percent of the crop, with 100 percent losses on certain plots. The main food crop in Madagascar is rice, which is also on the menu of the swarming locusts. According to FAO estimates, there could be losses in rice production of up to 630,000 tonnes, or about 25 percent of total annual demands for rice in Madagascar. The typical treatment of a locust plague is the large-scale spraying of insecticides. Swarming locusts occur periodically in most parts of semi-arid Africa, but can be controlled with preventive use of insecticides. When they first start swarming, the mighty plague is almost impossible to get under control. Source: AFROL News

Lake Baikal one of the world's wonders

The unique life that's evolved over millions of years in Earth's deepest body of freshwater is under threat, says Anson Mackay.

Lake Baikal in central Asia is one of the natural wonders of our planet. Known as the 'Galapagos of Russia', it contains a unique flora and fauna - most of the 2000 plus plants and animals that live in its deep waters are endemic - found nowhere else.

A top predator in the lake, Pusa sibirica, is one of the world's very few species of freshwater seals, and up to 40 per cent of Baikal's species have not even been described yet. It is a major biodiversity hotspot, declared a World Heritage Site by the UN in 1996.

Baikal's endemic species have evolved over tens of thousands, perhaps millions, of years, to occupy niches that may never have been disturbed before the last three or four decades.

The lake's unique ecology stems from its physical properties. Baikal is the oldest lake in world; it started forming over 25 million years ago when a fissure in the continent began to open up. It is also the planet's deepest lake, averaging 744m deep and going down to 1642m in places, due to a tectonic pulse that made the rift's shoulders rise up while the bottom continued to deepen.

Astonishingly, Lake Baikal accounts for over a fifth of all surface fresh water on Earth, outside polar ice caps and glaciers. And unlike other deep lakes, it contains dissolved oxygen right down to the bottom.

Read the whole article here.

The Moon and the Mysterious Nautilus

G. Tracy Mehan, III

Noted ecologist Daniel Botkin provides a remarkable description of a natural phenomenon which is also the title of his new book, The Moon In The Nautilus Shell: Discordant Harmonies Reconsidered. Botkin describes the chambered nautilus (Nautilus pompilius Linnaeus), one of “the humblest and most obscure creatures”, which dwells in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It is “a cryptic creature with nocturnal habits, living in the depths of the ocean, as much as 1,000 feet below the surface, and rarely seen alive by human beings.” Its oldest fossil ancestors date back 420 million years.

The nautilus lives in the outermost chamber of its shell. As it grows it needs a larger protective shield, and the chambers grow in size, the shell “coiling into the convoluted shape of a logarithmic spiral, following a simple but elegant mathematical formula.”

Along the opening of the outer chamber of its shell, small deposits of calcium carbonate are laid down in groups of three to five, separated from the others by a ridge or “growth line.” On average there are 30 growth lines per chamber, one for each day in the lunar cycle, “suggesting that a new chamber is put down each lunar month and a new growth line each day. From this it can be inferred “that the chambered nautilus contains in its shell two clocks: one timed to the sun, the other to the moon.”

“Strangely, the number of growth lines per chamber has increased over time,” writes Dr. Botkin. Older fossil shells have only nine growth lines per chamber. Modern shells have thirty. This, in turn, suggests “that the lunar month has grown longer and that the moon used to revolve faster around Earth than it does now.” Ergo, “the moon must have been closer to Earth, since the closer a satellite is to a planet, the faster it must revolve to remain in orbit.” It would seem that the revolution of the moon 420 million years ago took only nine days. Since then there has been a loss of energy from friction of the tides, causing the moon to recede slowly as it continues to do.

This loss of energy from friction increased when the continents emerged about 600 million years ago. “Thus in the chambered nautilus, the solar system, the physical Earth, and life on Earth are linked,” Botkin writes.

An interesting question arises: if the moon’s orbit continues its drift, what might its impact be on inter-tidal life at some future point in time? As Heraclitus said, “All is flux.”

Professor Botkin sees in the image of the chambered nautilus a model for a new unity in which human beings can live and thrive within a wondrous, unsettling, and dynamic ecosystem. No longer should nature be characterized in terms of a “balance of nature” which assumes that nature, undisturbed by human beings, achieves a steady state or equilibrium, a kind of constancy in terms of maximum biomass and diversity. It is the deconstruction of this old view of nature which takes up most of the book.

The Moon In The Nautilus Shell is an expanded and updated version of Botkin’s 1990 landmark book Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the 21st Century.In it he challenged the idea that nature maintains its equilibrium indefinitely as long as people just leave it alone -- since they can only have negative effects on it. Take the case of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area in northern Minnesota, a remarkable place which would meet most people’s conventional idea of wilderness. According to Dr Botkin it has, from the end of the last ice age until the time of European colonization, “passed from the ice and tundra to spruce and jack pine forest.” From there it shifted to paper birch and adler, and then back to spruce, jack pine and white pine driven by variable climate. Botkin asks: “Which of these forests represented the natural state?”

“If natural means simply before human intervention, then all these habitats could be claimed as natural, contrary to what people really mean and really want,” claims Botkin. “What people want in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area is a wilderness as seen by the voyageurs and a landscape that gives the feeling of being untouched by people.” Nothing wrong with that, but a choice must be made.

Botkin offers numerous case histories where failure to appreciate the role of change and disturbance led to bad management decisions such as the total suppression of fire in forests. This resulted, for instance, in the decline of the giant sequoia trees on the west coast of the United States. However, letting nature take its course, without any human intervention, can also be fatal as in the case of the elephant herd in Kenya’s Tsavo national park in which game managers ignored a population explosion, stood by and waited for “the attainment of a natural ecological climax.” That elephant population crashed and did not recover for years.

Another contributor to this conversation is Emma Marris, a writer for the science journal Nature and the author of Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World. She uses the metaphor of an unruly garden to illustrate the dynamic, changing nature of nature, and the predictably unpredictable role of human beings. “We are already running the whole Earth, whether we admit it or not,” asserts Marris. “But from the point of view of a geologist or paleo-ecologist, ecosystems are in a constant dance, as their components compete, react, evolve, migrate, and form new communities.”

It may be impossible to restore conditions, say, in an Australian sanctuary to 1770 by trapping and killing thousands of introduced rabbits. Yet, it might be possible to manage it for something achievable such as avoiding extinction of rare or endangered species. Humans have lived in Australia for 50,000 years. “Aborigines increased the amount of flammable plant material… This, combined with their fire-setting ways, may have changed the dominant species in many parts of the country,” she writes.

“A consequence of throwing out the ‘pristine wilderness’ ideal is that conservationists, and society at large, now have to formulate alternative goals for conservation,” says Marris. “In a nutshell, give up romantic notions of a stable Eden, be honest about goals and costs, keep land from mindless development, and try just about everything.”

Marris echoes Botkin who observes, “Nature in the twenty-first century will be a nature that we make; the question is the degree to which this molding will be intentional or unintentional, desirable or undesirable.” Botkin recognizes that abandoning the belief in the constancy of nature is very discomforting leaving us in “an extreme existential position.”

Environmental historian and Bancroft prize winner William Cronon wrote a challenging essay in 1995, “The Trouble with Wilderness; Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature”, in which he claimed it was time “to rethink wilderness.”

Wilderness is “profoundly a human creation” and a “flight from history that is very nearly the core of wilderness represents the false hope of an escape from responsibility, the illusion that we can somehow wipe clean the slate of our past and return to the tabula rasa that supposedly existed before we began to leave our mark on the world.” This results in a dualism that sets humanity and nature at opposite poles. “We thereby leave ourselves little hope of discovering what an ethical, sustainable, honorable, human place in nature might actually look like,” wrote Cronon.

Still, many resist this admittedly disturbing revisionism. Tulane environmental law professor Oliver Houck demurs on the question of deconstructing nature and ecology. In a 1998 article he declared, “While ecosystems contain humans, human actions are not their measure. The best available measures of ecosystems are representative species that indicate their natural conditions.”

“This measure taken, the role of human beings is to manage ecosystems, and themselves, toward that goal,” maintains Houck.

The environmental historian Donald Worster worries about a new “era of agnosticism” in which the very idea of the ecosystem or nature is nothing more than fiction. Is the idea of “some comprehensive order in organic nature now totally suspect?

The famous Jesuit palaeontologist Teilhard de Chardin wrote in The Phenomenon of Man (1952) that, “The order and the design do not appear except in the whole. The mesh of the universe is the universe itself.” One must recognize great variability and discontinuities in the here and now, in the realm of contingency so to speak, with chance and randomness playing their part within a broader context of probabilities and logic. Botkin pulls back from describing this dynamism in nature as chaotic. Chance and randomness, yes. But not chaos. Is this new, dynamic view of nature really disorder or just a more sophisticated, non-static version of order?

Nevertheless, there is a bit of irony in the image of the moon in the nautilus shell in a book on discontinuities and disequilibrium in nature. Just how random is the interaction of life, tides, lunar orbits and continents rising from the sea? Neither Botkin nor Marris engage in a discussion of final causes at least in these books. But the philosopher or theologian might, understandably, be drawn into such a stimulating and important discussion of questions which science can only inform but not answer.

END

G. Tracy Mehan, III, served at the U.S. E.P.A. in the administrations of both Presidents Bush. He is consultant in Arlington, Virginia, and an adjunct professor at George Mason University School of Law. Parts of this article were previously published in The Environmental Forum (Environmental Law Institute www.eli.org) and The American Spectator (www.spectator.org).

Carbon Capture and Storage

World-first experiment tests carbon capture and storage in Scotland

Adele Rackley

The critical stage of a world-first experiment, to monitor what might happen if CO2 leaks from an underground storage reservoir, was successfully completed under the seabed near Oban in Scotland this week.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is emerging as one of the front-runners in the search for climate-change mitigation strategies. The process involves capturing CO2 from power plants and industrial activity before it is emitted into the atmosphere and pumping it into deep sub-seabed reservoirs or geological structures for permanent storage.

The QICS experiment.

While leaks from storage sites are thought to be unlikely, all the potential risks of new technologies like CCS need to be investigated early in their development.

The project, led by Plymouth Marine Laboratory in collaboration with the Scottish Association for Marine Science and four other institutions, involved the injection of CO2 from a shore-based lab into shallow marine sediments so scientists could work out whether (and how) a leak from a CCS storage site below the seabed might affect marine life. The experiment also gave scientists a chance to assess various ways of monitoring for CO2 leakage.

The project is Quantifying and Monitoring Potential Ecosystem Impacts of Geological Carbon Storage (QICS). You can see the experiment in action on YouTube and learn more about QICS on the project web pages.

Source: Planet Earth Blog, June 29, 2012

Africa's Underground Water Resource

A scattergun approach to borehole drilling in Africa is likely to be unsuccessful.

This is the message from a group of UK researchers who have, for the first time, quantified the amount, and potential yield, of groundwater across the whole of Africa.

They estimate the total volume of groundwater to be around 0.66 million km3 – more than 100 times the available surface freshwater on the continent – and hope that the assessment can inform plans to improve access to water in Africa, where 300 million people do not have access to safe drinking water.

The results have been published today, 20 April, in IOP Publishing’s journal Environmental Research Letters.

The researchers, from the British Geological Survey and University College London, warn that high yielding boreholes will not be found using a scattergun approach and a more careful and exploratory approach that takes into account local groundwater conditions will be needed, which they hope their new study will encourage.

Shallow groundwater in rural Africa

Their results show that in many populated areas in Africa, there is sufficient groundwater to supply hand pumps that communities can use for drinking water. These hand pumps can deliver around 0.1-0.3 litres per second.

Read it all here.

Are all Bioethicists Crazy?

The next crazy idea from bioethicists involves children.  They want to genetically engineer our children so they will be environmentally friendly.  This obvious lack of common sense characterizes the transhuman and utilitarian ideology that is so common among bioethicists these days.

As Michael Cook, the editor of MercatorNet, explains: "A utilitarian bioethicist is always going to be a loose cannon, rolling wildly around the deck in ethical storms, splintering and smashing the fragile public image of his or her profession. If other bioethicists want to repair their dented prestige, shunning utilitarian colleagues would be a good place to start."

Consider Oxford bioethicist Rebecca Roache, who told the Guardian that most great ideas seem preposterous at first.

“Human engineering may seem bizarre and unrealistic, but this does not mean it could not turn out to be feasible and promising: telephones, ‘test tube babies’, and personal computers are all important aspects of modern life that were once regarded as bizarre and unrealistic.”

Socially Responsible Investors Balance Values and Returns

American Socially Responsible Investors Don't Want to Sacrifice Returns, Wharton Study. -  "Investors interested in socially responsible investing do not necessarily expect to sacrifice a portion of their gains. Thus, to encourage socially responsible investing, its returns should be comparable to returns for conventional investing."

Fortunately, the conclusion generally drawn from the dozens of studies indicate that over the long term, socially responsible-ethical investors don't have to sacrifice returns. However, this study does contradict many surveys that show SR-ethical investors would tolerate lower returns if they are invested in industries and companies that relate to their values.

It could be that many newly converted SR-ethical investors, investing in green-sustainable companies, don't really share the same values of the more traditional SR-ethical investors.

Socially Responsible Investing, by Olivia S. Jung, January 12, 2012, Wharton, University of Pennsylvania, USA.

Reported by Ron Robins at Investing for the Soul

USA Behind in ESG Investments

The US is falling behind other countries and regions in integrating environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors into mainstream investment decisions, largely due to perceived legal or fiduciary risks, experts said.

“There’s no question in my mind that Northern Europe has got sustainable investing in its sights,” Roger Urwin, global head of investment content for consultancy firm Towers Watson, told attendees of the ESG USA 2011 conference in New York on December 13.

Australia and the UK look to be next to jump on the ESG bandwagon, but there are “big and very ugly roadblocks in the US” to sustainable investing, he said.

The issue of fiduciary duty is a major barrier to the incorporation of ESG factors in investment decision-making in the US, said Jay Youngdahl, trustee for a $650 million benefit fund and a partner at law firm Youngdahl & Citti in Houston, Texas. A fiduciary duty is an obligation to act in the best interest of another party, in this context, the investors in a fund.

“It is holding it back,” he said. “It is a refuge for people who do not want to see ESG put into investments. It does not need to be. This roadblock is an incorrect roadblock legally.”

Any time trustees want to do anything in the ESG space, lawyers tell them this would be a violation of their fiduciary duties, Youngdahl said. “That’s wrong generally speaking,” he said. “On fiduciary duty, there is an extraordinarily high level of intellectually sloppiness that is a major problem for lawyers who work in this area.”

But the Occupy movement in the US has provided a spur to rethink many things, including fiduciary duty as it relates to ESG investing, Youngdahl said. “But it takes courage,” he said. “The American legal establishment at this point does not have that courage.”

In August, investment manager Pimco signed up to the UN-backed Principles for Responsible Investment (UN PRI) and adopted ESG integration into its overall investment process. But more market-leading investment firms need to follow in Pimco’s footsteps and commit to the UN PRI to create momentum in the US and foster widespread adoption, said Michael Burns, Pimco’s executive vice-president.

The firm had extremely strong management support for this initiative, and pressure from and endorsement by clients around the world “definitely accelerated the process”, he said.

“We’ve had a number of Northern European investors help us to understand at an early stage the value of ESG factors in investment decision-making,” Burns said.

During a review, Pimco discovered it was already taking a number of steps that were ESG-related, such as imposing a rigorous standard in evaluating the governance structures of companies. “We were just terrible at communicating it to the broader investment community,” he said.

But there are potential impediments for investment managers considering adopting ESG integration, including the fiduciary duty issue and the need for firms to become comfortable with the legal representations they will make about incorporating ESG, Burns said. For example, when signing on to the UN PRI, a company is making a representation about what it will do and companies need to understand the ramifications and be sure they won't expose themselves to liability.

“I think the legal uncertainty is something that makes some firms step away,” he said.

Another key issue is managers’ lack of information about investors’ true interest in ESG integration, with some investors opposing such initiatives.

“Being able to speak to that audience is equally important as being able to speak to the audience that’s very supportive and I don’t think many investment managers are willing to have those tough conversations,” he said.

Incorporating ESG also requires significant time, resources and training. “It is a costly investment, but it’s one we think will pay off over time,” Burns said.

Source:  Environmental Finance


H/T to Ron Robins MBA at Investing for the Soul. Ron has this to say: "In the US, the degree of scepticism about human induced climate change is much greater than it is in Europe. Just look at what the Republican presidential hopefuls say on this issue! Thus, such attitudes influence American's beliefs of the relevance of ESG issues.

Meanwhile, we all know that companies who lead in responding most effectively to ESG issues are generally 'best of sector,' both financially and in comparative stock performance."

New Study on Peatlands and Drought

Drought makes peat release far more carbon into the atmosphere and into watercourses than scientists had previously thought, a new study shows.

Once a peat bog dries out, it starts emitting carbon by giving off carbon dioxide gas (CO₂) and methane into the atmosphere, and by releasing it into rivers and streams in the form of dissolved organic carbon (DOC).

This loss can carry on for a decade or more, and can continue or accelerate even after the bog is submerged again. And the type of bog habitat that's worst-affected accounts for some 60 per cent of the world's peatlands.

'Our findings on re-wetting were a huge surprise,' says Dr Nathalie Fenner of Bangor University, lead author of the paper, which appears in Nature Geoscience. 'There has been a lot of research on the impact of drought on peatlands but this is the first study that shows it can carry on for years after the drought has ended in a range of peats, but more importantly why - it seems to turbo-charge carbon emissions even once the water table has risen again.'

Read more here.

Amazon: Two Distinct Rainforests

From above the Amazon rainforest may look like an endless, uniform sea of greenery, but it turns out there are sharp lines through it separating very different ecosystems with distinct inhabitants. And these lines are drawn by the region's geology.

An innovative study published in Journal of Biogeography and led by Mark Higgins of Duke University is the first to combine large-scale data from satellites with painstaking work on the ground, sampling the plant types found in particular areas.

It shows an abrupt boundary between two distinct kinds of forest, running some 300km through northern Peru. The method also reveals a similarly sharp disjunction in western Brazil, running from north to south for more than 1500km. The researchers suggest this effectively marks the boundary between western and central Amazonia.

The earth is very different on either side of these boundaries. On average the soil on one side contains 15 times as many cations - tiny particles that plants need for nourishment - as that a short distance away on the other side. The plant communities living in these different kinds of soil are almost completely distinct.

Read it all here.

Fresh Water from the Sea

Ker Than

for National Geographic News
Published August 5, 2011

This story is part of a special National Geographic News series on global water issues.

With 1.8 billion people predicted to live in areas of extreme water scarcity by 2025, desalination—the removal of salt from water—is increasingly being proposed as a solution.

But before desalination can make a real difference solving in the looming water crisis, officials and experts need to commit to overcoming obstacles that make the process expensive and inefficient, a new paper argues.

(Read National Geographic magazine's special water issue online.)

Scientists predict that by 2016, the amount of fresh water produced by desalination plants will exceed 10 billion gallons (38 million cubic meters) a year, or double the rate in 2008.

Read it all here.

ESG Reduces Investment Risk and Yields Profits

By Ron Robins, Founder & Analyst - Investing for the Soul


When I started my career as an investment analyst in 1970, the idea that a company’s environmental and social activities would be important in helping predict its future financial and stock performance was seen as largely irrelevant. Well, not anymore!

Inclusive of governance issues and abbreviated as ESG (environmental, social and governance), factors pertaining to ESG are now included in mainstream corporate stock and bond analysis in numerous investment firms, funds and managers globally. Why? Because it provides analysts better insight into companies and a possibility of producing higher investment returns with less risk.

ESG has its beginnings in ethical and socially responsible investing (SRI), which have their roots in some religious traditions. Now, with mounting environmental and climate change concerns, ‘green’ or sustainable investing has emerged. It was with these asset classes that ESG issues first began to play a pivotal role. However, ESG issues are now becoming a significant factor in all asset classes.

Evidencing the enormous shift towards inclusion of ESG issues in investment analysis among global financial institutions, were the findings reported in a September 14, 2010, press release of the United Nations (UN) Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI). The PRI is a “ …framework to help investors achieve better long-term investment returns and sustainable markets through better analysis of environmental, social and governance issues in investment process and the exercise of responsible ownership practices.” Companies sign on as signatories to the PRI framework.

In the PRI press release, Executive Director James Gifford said, “every large, world-class listed company is now monitoring and reporting on its ESG performance, and so too are an increasing number of investors.” The PRI reported that, “total [PRI] signatory numbers… has jumped in the last year by more than 30 per cent… The value of the assets under management of PRI signatories now stands at $22 trillion, over 10 per cent of the estimated total value of global capital markets…”

Continuing, “signatories are now drawn from 45 countries… Over 95 per cent of asset owners and 87 per cent of investment managers have an overall investment policy that addresses ESG issues... The percentage of asset owners involved in dialogue with regulators on ESG issues rose to 85 per cent.”

And governments and regulators everywhere are listening. Countries that are taking big steps in promoting ESG issues in corporate reports include the USA, the UK, France and Sweden. Also, the European Union might soon have a policy for all member countries on ESG corporate reporting as well.

Even stock exchanges are becoming proactive on ESG issues concerning their listed companies. For instance, in South Africa, the Johannesburg Stock Exchange became the first exchange to require all listed companies to produce fully integrated financial and ESG reports. In Malaysia, its major stock exchange, the Bursa Malaysia, actively pursues ESG reporting among its listed companies.

As a result of such interest, especially by global investment institutions and individual investors, ESG stock and bond indexes are becoming commonplace everywhere. All the major stock/bond index producers—Dow Jones, FTSE, MSCI, S&P etc.—have global, continental, country and often even industry specific ESG stock indexes.

Encouraging the ESG cause are studies demonstrating improved financial, portfolio and stock performance where ESG factors are analytically applied. One study, published in March 2009 is by risklab, a division of Allianz Global Investors. It is “… a landmark study [that] strengthens the position of ESG advocates. The results reveal that a focus on ESG (environmental, social and corporate governance) factors can significantly reduce portfolio risk or enhance returns. The study… is the first systematic quantitative analysis explicitly examining ESG risk in a portfolio context… [it] concludes that investors ‘not only have a right to feel good about promoting ESG, but that clear financial benefits can be expected.”

Another study finds that, “… [ESG] improves portfolio diversification through a reduction of the average stock’s specific risk …ESG criteria probably leads best-in-class ESG screened funds to be better diversified than otherwise identical conventional funds… pension funds should at least contemplate about the use of ESG criteria, as an ignorance of ESG criteria could violate their fiduciary risk management duties.” (From, Portfolio Diversification and Environmental, Social or Governance Criteria: Must Responsible Investments Really Be Poorly Diversified? By Andreas G. F. Hoepner of the University of St. Andrews, School of Management, Principles for Responsible Investment, UN.)

And a third study also by risklab, reported in Global Pensions on April 18 found that ESG can reduce the risk of negative or ‘tail’ risk impacts on portfolios in emerging as well as developed markets. “ … The tail risk of an ESG risk neutral emerging market equity strategy defined by the MSCI Emerging Markets Index can be reduced from -64.5 per cent p.a. to -38.8 per cent. The same is true for corporate bonds defined by the Merrill Lynch Global Broad Market Corporate Index, it added, where the tail risk—measured as conditional value at risk (95 per cent) of the default strategy—can be reduced from -8.1 per cent p.a. to -4.9 per cent... [and for developed market equity, the] tail risk optimisation potential of the ESG neutral default strategy defined by the MSCI World Equity Index [went down] from -38.1 per cent p.a. to -25.7 per cent.”

With increasing social, environmental and climate change risks, it makes dollars and cents to now include ESG issues in investment decisions. And that is why asset managers and investors everywhere are adopting ESG criteria in the selection of individual stocks and bonds as well as aiding in their structuring of entire portfolios.


copyright alrroya.com
E-mail the writer: r.robins@alrroya.com or comment here.

Developing Countries Lead in Cutting Emmissions

BANGKOK - Today, as the UN climate talks came to a close in Bangkok, Ambassador Pablo Solon of the Plurinational State of Bolivia released UN statistics that showed, contrary to conventional wisdom, that developing countries are taking more climate action than developed countries.

"What's on the table in these negotiations is that 65% of emission reductions happen in developing countries and just 35% happen in developed countries, even though it is they who caused the problem of climate change. This is like someone burning down your crops, making you do all the work to replant them and then acting like a hero when they give you a tiny discount on the seeds . " Ambassador Solon said.

"Developed countries have decided that a limitation of a 2 degree temperature rise should be the object of the climate negotiations, despite that goal being unsafe for millions of lives and livelihoods across the world." Ambassador Solon said.

"Nevertheless, to achieve their inadequate goal, countries across the world would need to cut their emissions by 14 gigatonnes per year by 2020." Ambassador Solon said.

"At best, countries of the world have currently pledged to do 8.7 gigatonnes of emission reductions and at worst 6.6 gigatonnes - which shows how far we are from achieving an outcome that reflects the science and preserves life." Ambassador Solon said.

"Of these inadequate pledges, in the worst case scenario, only 3 gigatonnes are included in rich countries pledges, in contrast to 3.6 gigatonnes in developing countries- giving up the lie that it is developed countries which are "leading" emission reductions." Ambassador Solon said.

"Rich country promises are even more hollow when the use of 'offsets' are included to their low pledges, those offsets transfer 1.1 gigatonnes of emission reductions from developed countries to developing countries." Ambassador Solon said.

"In total this analysis shows that, with the use of offsets 3.6 gigatonnes of emission reductions will happen in developing countries in contrast to just 1.9 gigatonnes in developed countries." Ambassador Solon said.

"To spend five days discussing an agenda seems insane but what is behind the discussion of the agenda is what kind of outcome we will have in South Africa." Ambassador Solon added in answers to questions.


A copy of the presentation is available here.

Two Environmentalists Knock Heads

 Rex Weyler, a director of the original Greenpeace Foundation and author of a history of the organisation challenges Patrick Moore, a Greenpeace "dropout." Below is a portion of debate between the two men which summarises many of the key disputes over climate change policies.

Rex Weyler: You portray yourself as “sensible” and disparage all non-corporate environmentalists, but you don’t act scientific. You employ rhetorical devices such as: “There is no alarm about climate change,” since “the climate is always changing.” I’m sure this plays well at corporate speaking gigs, but you should google the fallacy of “misplaced concreteness.” I assume you are aware that you erroneously presume a word means the same thing in different contexts.

Patrick Moore: I hardly think Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalogue, is a corporate environmentalist, more of a loveable hippie with a big brain. Do you think Bjorn Lomborg is “corporate”. I don’t agree with either Brand or Lomborg on everything but at least they cause me to think rather than people who repeat a memorized party-line. I also admire James Lovelock even though I find him enigmatic. All three of these environmentalists that I admire are non-corporate. Which “corporate environmentalists” am I allegedly admiring?

I believe I am sensible and have been all my life, as in common sense. But I suppose that is a matter of opinion.

As to acting “scientific” the highest duty of a scientist is to retain a healthy scepticism about all hypotheses, especially regarding subjects that have many variables like climate. I think you are aware that I hold an Honours BSc in Biology and Forest Biology, a PhD in Ecology, an Honorary Doctorate of Science and have received the the US National Award for Nuclear Science and History from the Einstein Society, affiliated with the Smithsonian Institute. Would this not make me at least as credible as any member of the IPCC?

If you are referring to the word “climate” you must elaborate as I fail to understand what you mean here. First, you have added in the word “since,” which makes my statement a syllogism. When you do write your critique of my new book, I do hope you will not manipulate my words in that way.

Second, I did not say “there is no alarm about climate change,” but that “there is no REASON FOR alarm about climate change.” The fact that there is such alarm I blame in part on Greenpeace itself.

And finally, as to the “misplaced concreteness”, I refer to climate as a scientific subject, measurable and real. Following Alfred North Whitehead’s definition of this fallacy, I see no misplaced concreteness there.

My belief that there is no reason for alarm has no bearing on the fact that the climate is always changing. I can imagine the public outcry when you accuse me of “misplaced concreteness”, Lordy Lordy.

You and your allies love to use the words “corporate” and “industry” as if they are epithets, swear words, put-downs, etc. with the implication that something sinister is going on. My public appearances are in public, usually with media present.

Read it all here.
 
 
Alarmists and those profiting from the global warming “crisis” stress the melting of the Artic glacial ice but conveniently fail to point out that the snow caps on South America highest mountains and the glacial mass in Antarctic are growing. Here is the latest science report:
 
An International Polar Year aerogeophysical investigation of the high interior of East Antarctica reveals widespread freeze-on that drives significant mass redistribution at the bottom of the ice sheet. While surface accumulation of snow remains the primary mechanism for ice sheet growth, beneath Dome A 24% of the base by area is frozen-on ice. In some places, up to half the ice thickness has been added from below. These ice packages result from conductive cooling of water ponded near the Gamburtsev Subglacial Mountain ridges and supercooling of water forced up steep valley walls. Persistent freeze-on thickens the ice column, alters basal ice rheology and fabric and upwarps the overlying ice sheet, including the oldest atmospheric climate archive, and drives flow behavior not captured in present models. (Source: Science Magazine)

The rise and fall of ice ages is caused by changes in the Earth's orbit around the Sun due to the influence of the other planets. These changes are slight and can be triggered by events like the earthquake and tsunami recently experienced in Japan.

The earliest ice ages came about every 41,000. Later ones came every 100,000 years. Scientists do not know what caused the change from 40,000 to 100,000 years, but they have noticed that the 100,000 year cycle aligns with periods of Earth’s more-elliptical orbits. Earth's orbit around the sun changes shape every 100,000 years, becoming either more round or more elliptical. The shape of the orbit is known as its "eccentricity." The 41,000-year cycle of the tilt of Earth’s axis is related. The original research correlating climate, glaciation and orbit and was done by University of California (Santa Barbara) geologist Lorraine Lisiecki.

Lisiecki believes that climate change involves complicated interactions between different parts of the climate system and three orbital systems: 1) eccentricity of Earth’s orbit; 2) tilt of Earth’s axis; and 3) precession or change in the orientation of the rotation axis.

 
Related reading: Antarctic Ozone Hole Smaller; Climate Cycles and Noah's Flood; Lower Solar Irradiance, Higher Atmospheric Temps?; Antarctic Once Had Baobab Trees; Global Temps Dropping

Religion and Green Investing

Ron Robins

Religious and faith groups have huge investment portfolios representing the third largest category of investors globally, says UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. And their investments are increasingly focused on ethical and green investing.

Though religion’s main interest is spirituality, we also know it is concerned with ethics, morality and stewardship of our environment. In Christianity, Islam and Judaism, God has dominion over all creation and everyone is expected to be good shepherds of it. In Hinduism, the earth is divine and to be respected. Buddhism preaches compassion for all life forms and the unity of all creations. Similar sentiments are expressed in most other religions too.

Thus, it is not surprising to hear that it was probably religious groups who pioneered ethical investing. The foundations of Western ethical investing are traced to biblical times when directives were found on investing according to ethical values.

Increasingly, religious and faith groups focus on aspects of ethical investing that relate to environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues, sometimes referred to as ‘impact’ investing. In a 2010 study by 3iG, the Spain based International Interfaith Investment Group, found that, “more than 70 per cent of religious institutions.... practice some form of impact investing, in areas such as community development, micro-finance, affordable housing and fair trade, and not just negative and positive screening [for ESG issues].”

The 3iG organisation itself represents a growing awareness among religions to better reflect religious values in their investments. 3iG is “designed to assist the Faiths in facilitating and advancing their engagement in the area of faith-consistent investing and to provide high-level research and information to enhance its development. The great challenge is to integrate faith-based principles into the world of business, particularly via investing.”

Unfortunately, it is usually difficult to obtain information on investment portfolio holdings of many faith based organisations. And even when they are revealed, real estate holdings are often not included. Nonetheless, there are some examples of how large and important are religious ethical investment activities.

One example is the bank administered by the Roman Catholic Church, based in the Vatican and known as the Institute for Works of Religion (ICW). It has assets somewhere around €5 billion, (according to the Financial Times) and these are said to be second in size to those of the UN. Its focus is on ethical investments with profits going to charities and religious organisations around the world. (Note though, that the assets of Roman Catholic Churches globally are many times that of the ICW.)

Some other Christian churches, particularly in Britain and Ireland, are however, quite transparent with their investments. According to the Church Investors Group (CIG), British and Irish churches have assets of £12.6bln. The CIG organisation aims at helping make church “investment portfolios reflect the moral stance and teachings of the Christian faith.”

In the US the Interfaith Centre on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR) has nearly 300 religious and faith groups with $100bln. in assets. The “ICCR and its members work with conscientious individual and institutional investors as well as advocacy organisations, who share all or part of ICCR's commitment to a just and peaceful world.”

Besides the above organisations, there are other international influential faith groups assisting and promoting ethical and green investing as well. Two of the better known ones are the Alliance of Religions and Conservation (ARC) and the Ecumenical Council for Corporate Responsibility (ECCR).

The ARC “is a secular body that helps the major religions of the world to develop their own environmental programmes, based on their own core teachings, beliefs and practices... [it] now work[s] with 11 major faiths… These faiths and their networks embrace 85 per cent of the world's population: some 5 billion human beings.”

The ECCR “is a church-based investor coalition and membership organisation working for economic justice, human rights, environmental stewardship, and corporate and investor responsibility. ECCR's British, Irish and international members include representatives of many Christian denominations, faith-based investors, religious communities and orders, non-governmental organisations, [and] ethical investment managers.”

Religious investing by individuals has seen extraordinary rapid growth as well, especially in the US. According to David Kathman, a Morningstar analyst, there are now about 80 US Catholic, Protestant and Islamic-compliant mutual funds with about $29.8bln. in assets, up from around just $500 million. in 1997.


Similarly, among Muslims, there has been vigorous growth of Islamic financial products in many countries with institutional and private assets now exceeding $1 trillion. Islamic financial assets are mostly channelled into ethically screened investments, with some portion of their profits mandated for social and humanitarian causes.

Religion’s roots go deep into our psyches, relating to not only the caring of peoples’ spiritual welfare but to their material sustenance as well. To help fulfil their aspirations to provide the material sustenance of humanity, religious organisations are increasingly applying their staggering financial resources to ethical and green investments. They are thereby a huge and growing force in ethical and green investing.


E-mail the writer: r.robins@alrroya.com

Buddhist Charity Aids Flood Victims

TAIPEI (Taiwan), Sept 14: A Taiwanese Buddhist charity is helping disaster victims stay warm — and eco-friendly — with fleece blankets made from recycled plastic bottles.

The Tzu Chi Foundation, known for performing good works for those in need, dispatched thousands of the eco-blankets to survivors of this year’s massive earthquake in Haiti and soon will be shipping more to flood survivors in Pakistan.

Thousands of volunteers produce the blankets after washing and sorting plastic bottles at garbage yards around Taiwan.

Retiree Lan Li-yue says she and her co-workers are happy to work for free because they are heeding a call from Tzu Chi head Cheng Yen to reduce non-biodegradable garbage to a minimum.

“Others had given up turning recycled bottles into blankets because of the high wage bill involved,” she said. “But we do the work for nothing.”

Even without wage costs, producing the eco-friendly blankets costs three to five times what conventional blankets cost to produce, but Tzu Chi insists the expenditure is well worth it. Foundation official Liu Tsong-yen says the process makes a lasting product out of garbage.

“We try not to recycle pollution in dispensing our aid items,” Liu said. “People don’t dump our blankets after use like they do with plastic bottles.”

The blankets are produced at Taiwanese textile factories that collaborate with a company Tzu Chi established to make a series of eco-friendly items, including shirts, scarves and tote bags. The finished blankets are grey, and, after being cut from huge rolls, measure about two metres by two metres.

Much of Tzu Chi’s success stems from its transparency in dispensing funds and its efforts to ensure that aid items go to those who need them most.

Liu said the blankets will be distributed, along with food and medical supplies, next month after staff inspects afflicted areas to get the lay of the land.

From here.

BP's Obstruction of Independent Journalists

I caught this satellite photo from a Saudi News source.

SOURCE: Reporters Without Borders
(RSF/IFEX) - Between 2.9 and 4.9 million barrels of oil have spilled into the Gulf of Mexico since the explosion on BP's Deepwater Horizon oil rig on 20 April 2010. It is a major environmental disaster that is rapidly turning into a national disaster. Yet the media have often found it impossible to obtain verifiable, independent information and have had to settle for what they are told by BP. And it took until 12 July for the restrictions BP imposed on journalists covering the spill to be lifted.

The journalists questioned by Reporters Without Borders for the most part said they had been shocked by the lack of information.

The Federal Aviation Administration imposed restrictions on overflights on 9 June, three weeks after the oil started pouring into the gulf. It announced that the media could not fly over the affected area at an altitude of less than 3,000 feet (914.4 metres) "for safety reasons" (http://tfr.faa.gov/save_pages/detail_0_5100.html#areas).

The New York-based Associated Press news agency objected in a letter to the White House on 10 June: "We disagree strongly that journalists could not be permitted to fly safely below 3,000 feet ( . . . ) Media aircraft covered the spill without incident from between 500 and 1,000 feet before the Temporary Flight Restriction was imposed."

Ted Jackson, a photographer who has worked for the New Orleans-based "Times-Picayune" newspaper for the past 26 years, said: "It has changed since then and now we can fly lower. But during the third week of the oil spill, when the limit was 3,000 feet, I could not even go there because I said I was media. I was in a plane and I was denied access because I said I was a media photographer. But worse still, the decision was taken by a BP consultant, not by anyone from the government!"

CBS News journalists were threatened with arrest when they tried to visit polluted beaches on 20 May to do a report on the environmental damage. According to the Associated Press, there were at least four incidents of this kind involving journalists from 6 to 13 June.

Louisiana announced on 30 June that anyone approaching within 65 feet (20 metres) of any of the booms deployed to block oil slicks risked a fine or a felony conviction. Florida followed suit on 3 July. A felony conviction is punishable by 1 to 5 years in prison and a fine of $40,000.

All these restrictions have been widely reported and commented on by journalists on the Internet. According to Tamara Lush, the AP's correspondent in New Orleans, AP president Tom Curley wrote to White House press secretary Robert Gibbs as early as 5 June requesting better access to information. Gibbs replied that if journalists had any complaints, they should call an information centre being operated by the federal government and BP at Houma (southeast of New Orleans).

But if you call the centre, it turns out that its job is not to field to media complaints but to manage clean-up operations. In fact it is run by the US Coast Guard. One of its employees nonetheless said: "We did not receive complaints in the past two and a half weeks. If a journalist is having a particular issue, he or she would have to send the complaint by phone or letter for us to take that request and take care of it. But I work for the coast guards so it would have to deal with the coast guards."

Such confusion is commonplace and it is hard for journalists to know where to turn. Mac McClelland of the magazine "Mother Jones", who has been down in the gulf covering the disaster since the outset, offers this advice: "If you are having encounters with police officers, you should ask them if they are private security for BP or actually Louisiana cops. Some wearing Louisiana cop uniforms can earn extra money by being a security guard for BP."

After so much bad publicity, the US authorities reaffirmed the supremacy of the First Amendment on 12 July, making it possible for more media to cover the oil spill. One of the first organisations to react was the American Civil Liberties Union. Its Louisiana representative, Marjorie Esman, said: “This change is needed to ensure public access to information about this catastrophe. This was a significant improvement for media but it still was not enough because it does not allow the general public the access that they are entitled to have. Everybody has the right to access the beaches. They are public land.”

Read it all here.

BP to Sell Assets in Pakistan and Vietnam

NEW YORK: BP Plc said on Tuesday it plans to sell company assets in Vietnam and Pakistan to help pay for the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

A spokesman for the British oil giant said the company has notified the governments of both countries about its plans.

Spokesman David Nicholas said BP would use proceeds from the sale of various facilities in those countries to help raise $20 billion for a Gulf spill relief fund.—AP

The Devastation of Gulf Wildlife

Go here for photos that will make you weep.

The Chevron Oil Spill

In the documentary film “Crude,” director Joe Berlinger follows one of the largest and most controversial environmental lawsuits in the world, a David and Goliath story that pits 30,000 rainforest dwellers from the Ecuadorian Amazon against the oil giant Chevron.

The plaintiffs allege that Texaco (which was bought by Chevron in 2001, hence Chevron’s involvement) dumped oil — at least 10 times the amount seen in the BP spill — into their water supply, causing birth defects and increased rates of cancers and other illnesses. In the film, Chevron denies the allegations and argues that the Ecuadorian rainforest dwellers and their lawyers are in it for the money.

Now, Berlinger is fighting his own battle with Chevron. This past May, the company subpoenaed him to turn over 600 hours of outtakes from the film.


“Little did I know that I would be dragged into my own David and Goliath struggle,” Berlinger said.

Chevron claims that Berlinger’s footage could help the company show corruption and misconduct on the part of the plaintiffs. Berlinger argues that his outtakes are protected by journalistic privilege, which shields reporters from revealing confidential sources or divulging confidential material. A Federal District Court judge in New York ruled in favor of Chevron, saying that the filmmaker did qualify for journalistic privilege but that conditions for overcoming that privilege had been met.

On Wednesday, Berlinger takes his case to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York.

“To me this is a battle about the First Amendment,” Berlinger said. “If we lose, if the appeal is rejected and this decision to turn everything over remains in place, this will have a chilling precedent on investigative reporters, on documentaries, on anybody who digs into a story for the long hall.”

From here.