The environment in the news monday 13 October 2008
UNEP or UN in the news It pays to go green
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- Don’t blame cities for climate change, see them as solutions
UNEP or UN in the newsIt pays to go greenScience, Written by Wolfgang Kerler/ Inter Press Service Sunday, 12 October 2008 19:38 UNITED NATIONS—A new report shows how a greener economy could eradicate poverty by creating tens of millions of new jobs. But it will not happen solely through the market’s “magic hand.” “We are sending signals that low-carbon, energy-efficient and less polluting technologies and production processes will be the winners in the new emerging economy,” Achim Steiner, head of the UN Environment Programme (Unep), told Inter Press Service (IPS). Together with the International Labour Organisation (ILO), the International Organization of Employers and the International Trade Union Confederation (Ituc), Unep released a new report entitled ”Green Jobs: Toward Decent Work in a Sustainable, Low-Carbon World.”
The current pace of economic transition ”is absolutely not fast enough” to tackle the challenges of climate change and to substantially reduce unemployment and poverty, Steiner said. “It requires governments to take their responsibilities, to invest and to plan,” Ituc general secretary Guy Ryder told IPS. Sustainable development will require more cooperation between governments, employers and trade unions. However, as the economy changes in a way that creates new jobs, many already existing workplaces will also change—meaning the environmental impact of enterprises and economic sectors will be reduced, ultimately to sustainable levels—and other jobs will be lost. “You can have greener workplaces in any industry,” Ronnie Goldberg, vice president of the International Organization of Employers, told IPS. “But some industries eventually may disappear or certainly become much smaller.” For this reason, the Ituc calls for “just transitions” as Ryder said: “It means transition with protection for displaced workers, which provides alternatives for them—like retraining and new investment—so they can move with a minimum of suffering from where they are today toward new opportunities.” The director general of the ILO, Juan Somavia, stressed that ”green jobs are not decent by definition.” Especially in industries like waste management, many jobs are dirty, dangerous and difficult. As natural resources grow scarce and expensive, many new business ideas are born—for example the recycling of mobile phones. Unheard-of in the past millennium, it has emerged to a multimillion-dollar business in recent years. “Consumers’ demand for pro-environmental goods and services is exponentially increasing,” Tim Augustin, PR and marketing manager of the firm Greener Solutions in Germany, told IPS. With branches in Britain and Germany, it focuses on the recycling and trading of mobile phones. “In 2007 Greener Solutions Germany collected around 450,000 mobile phones—a growth of 175 percent compared with 2006,” Augstin said. An estimated 100 million mobile phones are replaced every year in Europe alone. Examples like this make Achim Steiner feel optimistic. “When you look 30, 50 years down the line, we will be producing the same quantity of goods with far less input and far less waste coming out of it. The waste from one production process becomes the input for another.” http://businessmirror.com.ph/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&catid=44:science&id=211:it-pays-to-go-green ………………………………………………………. Don’t blame cities for climate change, see them as solutionsScience, Sunday, 12 October 2008 19:36 Cities are being unfairly blamed for most of humanity’s greenhouse-gas emissions and this threatens efforts to tackle climate change, warns a study in the October 2008 issue of the journal Environment and Urbanization. The paper says cities are often blamed for 75 percent to 80 percent of emissions, but that the true value is closer to 40 percent. It adds that the potential for cities to help address climate change is being overlooked because of this error. “Blaming cities for greenhouse-gas emissions misses the point that cities are a large part of the solution,” says the paper’s author, David Satterthwaite, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Environment and Development. “Well-planned, well-governed cities can provide high living standards that do not require high consumption levels and high greenhouse-gas emissions.” United Nations agencies, former US President Bill Clinton’s climate-change initiative and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg have all stated that between 75 percent and 80 percent of emissions come from cities. Satterthwaite used data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to show that only two-fifths of all greenhouse gases from human activities are generated within cities. Agriculture and deforestation account for around 30 percent, and the rest are mostly from heavy industry, wealthy households and coal, oil or gas-fueled power stations located in rural areas and in urban centers too small to be considered cities. But the paper also highlights how it can be misleading to allocate greenhouse-gas emissions to places. For instance, emissions from power stations should be allocated to those that consume the electricity, not the places where the power stations are located. Emissions generated by industries should, likewise, be allocated to the person consuming the goods the industries produce. “Consumer demand drives the production of goods and services, and therefore the emission of greenhouse gases,” says Satterthwaite. “Allocating emissions to consumers rather than producers shows that the problem is not cities but a minority of the world’s population with high-consumption lifestyles. A large proportion of these consumers live not in cities but in small towns and rural areas.” In addition, allocating greenhouse-gas emissions to consumers increases the share of global emissions from Europe and North America and highlights the very low emissions per person of most city inhabitants in Africa, Asia and Latin America. In general, wealthy people outside cities are responsible for more greenhouse-gas emissions than those in cities as they have larger homes that need to be heated or cooled, more automobiles per household and greater automobile use. “The way cities are designed and run can make a big difference,” says Satterthwaite. “Most cities in the United States have three to five times the gasoline use per person of most European cities but not three to five times the living standards.” Satterthwaite points out that cities offer many opportunities to reduce per capita greenhouse-gas emissions, such as by promoting walking, bicycling and public transport and having building designs that require much less energy for heating and cooling. “Achieving the needed reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions worldwide depends on seeing and acting on the potential of cities to combine a high quality of life with low greenhouse-gas emissions,” he says. http://businessmirror.com.ph/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&catid=44:science&id=210:dont-blame-cities-for-climate-change-see-them-as-solutions ………………………………………………. 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