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Posted April 14, 2016 16:42:27

Climate change is a looming threat for Indigenous peoples. The 2016 Boomerang Festival brought together leaders in the fight against climate change to share their experiences.

Getano Bann, Torres Strait Islander

When singer, songwriter, storyteller and music therapist Getano Bann talks about climate change he talks about connection to country.

Mr Bann draws on a tradition of telling "life stories" to build empathy, asking people to imagine themselves as an ancestor on an island in the Torres Strait, at the beginning of time.

"This is your island and you grow old and you have children," he said.

"Then for thousands and thousands of years your children have told the story of you: our ancestor who's buried here on the island.

"We don't write our stories. Our stories are the headstones. Our stories are the trees. Our stories are the caves.

"Your whole sense of spirituality, your whole sense of who you are is connected there.

"Now imagine that island is sinking under the water and there is nothing you can do about it. Where is your sense of identity? Where is your connect to country? What have you become now?"

Letila Mitchell, Fijian

United Nations climate change reports warn Fijians to expect sea-level rise and temperatures, and more frequent and intense tropical cyclones.

Letila Mitchell, visual and performing artist from the island of Rotuman in Fiji, believes climate change is not just a risk, it is a reality.

"We are no longer talking about climate change; it has already changed," she said.

"We can never predict when mangoes are going to come out.

"We can no longer predict when particular fish are going to be coming through the waters.

"For us it is about adapting to a climate that has changed already."

Fiji is still recovering from the devastation of Cyclone Winston.

"If you go to the top part of our island it is totally wiped out," Ms Mitchell said.

"We've all been talking about greenhouse gasses and climate change and lots of environmental issues and how it's going to impact our lives in the future, but it changed these people's lives in four hours."

Ms Mitchell performs with Rako Pacifica, a dance troupe that is raising money for Fiji's recovery.

"For Pacific Islanders, we are a lot of small island nations and often our voice tends to get lost in the big world, so we get our message out there by touching people's hearts," she said.

"Rako means to share, to learn, to pass knowledge on. So how we do it is we perform and create an emotion from, and touching, the heart.

"After our show we explain what we were dancing about and then we tell them our story. Then it is a ripple effect. They tag us on Facebook and then more and more people hear our story."

Amelia Telford, Australian

We are the ones that inherit every single decision that is made today. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island young people, we make up half the population of our people.

Amelia Telford is a Bundjalung woman from the NSW North Coast and an environmental activist who wants to get young Indigenous people involved in finding solutions to climate change.

In 2014, Ms Telford became the national director of Seed, the first Indigenous youth climate network.

"It's not a new concept that our people are the first environmentalists or the first conservationists," Ms Telford said.

"It's always been a part of our culture and a part of who we are.

"Growing up, Mum and Dad always told us to look after the land and respect the land and what it provides but to also respect each other and that's really the approach that we take to addressing climate change."

Seed is currently lobbying banks to not finance a new coal development in the Galilee Basin in Queensland.

The organisation is also working with Aboriginal Housing Victoria to develop alternative energy solar farms in an Aboriginal community.

"There's a collective who have formed, who are currently raising money to put solar hot water tanks in the homes of lower socio-economic and Aboriginal housing," Ms Telford said.

Ms Telford said Seed aimed to build the momentum and capacity for young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders to lead change in their communities, and make sure that change was appropriate for Aboriginal people.

"We are the ones that inherit every single decision that is made today," she said.

"Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island young people, we make up half the population of our people.

"We have to do this, it's our responsibility."

Topics: indigenous-aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander, indigenous-other-peoples, cyclones, environment-education, climate-change, byron-bay-2481, torres-strait-islands, fiji

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Indigenous communities facing climate change threats

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Posted April 14, 2016 16:42:27 Climate change is a looming threat for Indigenous peoples. The 2016 Boomerang Festival brought together leaders in the fight against climate change to share their experiences. When singer, songwriter, storyteller and music therapist Getano Bann talks about climate change he talks about connection to country.

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The Federal Government is rushing to amend native title law after a Federal Court decision cast land use agreements into doubt, but critics say the changes are being rushed through without consulting indigenous people.

As the Minerals Council and Queensland Resources Council spoke in support of the amendments before a Senate committee this morning, outside a small group of protesters chanted "Land rights, not mining rights."

The protest was the work of Seed, the youth indigenous climate network, and Nicole Hutton from the group says Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people haven't had the time to have their voices heard.

"[They] are not properly consulted about what's happening, so how can they make changes about us without us?" Nicole said.

Native Title groups barely had a week to give feedback on the amendments that would mean Indigenous land use agreements (ILUAs) could be registered without the support of all native title applicants.

"The changes to native title have a lot to do with our land and our land use and that has often got a lot to do with mining. When mining companies come in to use our land that's something that's really, really important to us," Nicole told Hack.

"If we can't have a say on how that arrangement is made, how can we have a say on the mines that come in and want to destroy our land?"

The Government isn't wasting any time. The Senate committee that held a public hearing in Brisbane on Monday will report back by Friday with a vote in the Senate expected next week. The legislation has already passed through the lower house.

A Federal Court ripple

The Government's move to amend the Native Title Act was sparked by a Federal Court decision in Western Australia in February.

It found a $1.3 billion native title deal with the Noongar people couldn't be registered because it wasn't signed by all the indigenous representatives.

That decision overruled a 2010 court decision which found ILUAs could be registered without the signature of all native title applicants; the people appointed by traditional owner groups to execute their decisions.

ILAUs cover all sorts of activities, sometimes mining, but there are deals establishing national parks and arranging access to cattle properties for traditional owners.

Not all of these agreements have the signatures of every applicant though, as the now defunct 2010 ruling approved, and there are fears these will be declared invalid under the new ruling. While an applicant may not sign because of a dispute, there are also other reasons everyone may not sign. Sometimes applicants don't want to exercise power over someone else country, in other cases applicants have passed away.

The amendments proposed by Commonwealth Attorney-General George Brandis aim to resolve those issues and give some surety to existing, and future, land use agreements.

Too much power to too few

The Government has moved quickly with these amendments because it believes potentially hundreds of ILUAs are in legal limbo. But Colin Hardie, a Brisbane solicitor who's been working in native title since the early 1990s, doesn't agree.

He said it would take much more than the WA case to knock an agreement out.

"There are only very narrow circumstances where [an ILUA] can be removed ... fraud is one example."

Colin is now working with Indigenous opponents to the Adani coal mine, and, while he would like to see the Native Title act updated, he doesn't want it to be done like this.

He fears the amendments put too much power in the hands of the native title applicants without any safeguards to ensure the will of the claim group is executed. He worries these laws will mean mining companies will be able to pay off some native title applicants in order to get an ILUA across the line.

We've had situations where people have been bussed in, mining companies have paid for people, because mining companies want decisions made so they can go ahead with their project," he said.

"If you're talking billion dollar projects, the splashing around of a couple of million dollars is neither here-nor-there.

"But I tell you what, that can buy an awful lot of allegiance of Aboriginal people that may not otherwise have been interested in the decision."

The Adani amendment

While the amendments would effect ILUAs across the country, Murrawah Johnson, from the Wangan and Jagalingou Family Council, believes the Government is trying to address a much smaller issue.

"We are calling these Adani amendments essentially, that's what it's about," she told Hack.

Adani, who are looking to develop the country's biggest coal mine in north-Queensland, have an ILUA that has not been signed by every applicant.

Because that ILUA hasn't been registered yet, a nationwide freeze on new agreements means it could now be in jeopardy.

Murrawah sees the proposed amendments as a way of pushing Adani's ILUA forward.

"I think what the Government is trying to do is take our right to self-interest for our country and what happens to us away," Murrawah said.

Murrawah said the Family Council wasn't notified of the proposed changes. She doesn't think there's been enough consultation.

"It's not adequate at all, one hearing is not enough."

A necessary change

The National Native Title Council does not share Colin's view that these amendments aren't necessary.

CEO Glen Kelly told Hack no-one will ink an ILUA if there's a risk someone won't sign, so at the moment they're dead in the water.

"You never get 100 per cent agreement to anything, that standard doesn't apply to the rest of Australia. Governments get elected on slightly more than 50 per cent of the vote.

So to expect that absolute unanimity needs to come from the Aboriginal community, that's just incredibly wrong. No society can ever have absolute unanimity."

Glen also challenges the idea the amendments disempower claim groups by giving too much power to applicants.

"There's another step, and that's the registration of the ILUAs," he said.

"If things aren't done properly they will not be registered and they will not stand, whether a claim group says or not."

He's not worried about how quickly the amendments are being pushed through.

"This has already been examined years ago by the Australian Law Reform Commission and another report to the [Council of Australian Governments] on land tenure and use, and both of those reports that reported in 2015 recommended the changes... that are taken up in the bill."

"For us it's actually not new, but you can understand from an outside point of view, from people outside the sector, who think 'Hey, hang on, what's going on here?' but in actual fact they're changes we've been seeking for a long time."

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'Rushed' native title changes exclude indigenous Australians, critics say

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The Federal Government is rushing to amend native title law after a Federal Court decision cast land use agreements into doubt, but critics say the changes are being rushed through without consulting indigenous people. As the Minerals Council and Queensland Resources Council spoke in support of the amendments before a Senate committee this morning, outside a small group of protesters chanted "Land rights, not mining rights."

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Climate change is real; it's here, and we are on the frontlines of the battle to save America's land, water and air-that's the message Native American nations will bring to Washington April 29, the eve of President Donald Trump's 100th day in office, when they will march against federal policies they say are putting them in danger.

The march is being organized by a coalition of activists formed after the 2014 People's Climate March, when a record 400,000 people descended on New York City ahead of a U.N. summit on climate change. Among those organizers is Tom Goldtooth (Navajo/Dakota), executive director of the Indigenous Environmental Network, which works to organize North American tribal people around environmental and economic justice issues.

"Populations such as ours that have a close relationship with nature, that still have traditional practices off the land and waterways, are experiencing these real effects, from Alaska to many of our tribal people here in the lower 48," he said. "Climate change is real. It's not, as some believe, just some conspiracy theory."

Goldtooth has seen the effects first-hand in Minnesota, where the New Mexico native now lives.

"We just ended what's called 'Sugar Bush'- maple syruping. The seasons change, the weather is unseasonably warm. And all this has impact on weather and when the sap is flowing," he said. "And it's the same way with the 'wild' rice, which our Dakota people call 'psin'. In certain areas here in the the Great Lakes area, the weather has been very unpredictable, and when water levels are down, it's very hard to have a harvest of this sacred food."

Mild winters have led to an increase in the populations of deer ticks and other disease carrying parasites. These have decimated Minnesota's population of moose, which have provided subsistence to tribes for generations.

Minnesota tribes are not alone, said Garrit Voggesser, director of the National Wildlife Federation's Tribal Partnership program. He is among the authors of a 2011 report, "Facing the Storm: Indian Tribes, Climate-Induced Weather Extremes, and the Future for Indian Country," which details the devastating impact of global warming on tribal peoples.

"If you're asking where climate is most impacting tribes, the simple answer is everywhere," he said. "Look at Alaska-that's always the most glaring example-where sea level rise and melting permafrost have forced whole tribal villages to relocate."

Increasing storm surges in the Pacific Northwest, for example, threaten the cultural and subsistence resources not just of tribes, but the region and nation as a whole. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 40 percent of the nation's hydropower is generated by winter snow in the Pacific Northwest and snow melt in springtime. Lower snow levels could reduce the supply of hydroelectricity.

"Looking at the U.S. Southwest-Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, California-there's been a 15-plus-year drought, and so if you look at the Navajo Nation, you see increasing siltation and the creation of sand dunes, which leads to dust storms that impact many, many other things," Voggesser said.

An when it does rain, the parched earth can't absorb the water fast enough. This results in floods, erosion and mudslides that can destroy buildings and tear out power lines. To wit: floods in July 2010 left the Hopi First Mesa without potable water or sewage, and they were forced to spend more than $900,000 to repair their infrastructure.

"Some tribes have the capacity and resources and are in a better position to address climate change," said Voggesser. "Others have barely even started. That's why it becomes increasingly important for tribes to connect with partners and collaborate, whether that's at the academic, government or nonprofit level, to identify resources that can help build their capacity."
Shift in US policy
Tom Goldtooth says tribes feel a special imperative to speak out, in light of a new White House that has shifted focus from energy conservation to energy independence.

"When we have a U.S. administration that is a denier of science and the facts, we have a serious problem that violates our treaty rights to fish and hunt and gather," said Goldtooth. "Theses aren't just rights that we negotiated in treaties with the United States. These are inherent rights."

One of President Trump's first actions in office was to sign a memorandum advancing the Keystone XL and Dakota Access Pipelines, which tribes fear could contaminate drinking water and destroy sacred sites.

In March, President Donald Trump signed an executive order rolling back the previous administration's Clean Power Plan, including a moratorium on coal mining on U.S. federal land. That same day, the new secretary of the interior, Ryan Zinke, signed two secretarial orders promoting coal, gas and renewable energy extraction on federal and tribal lands.

Trump's proposed 2018 budget that would cut the EPA budget by 30 percent. The Interior Department, which is divided into 9 bureaus including the chronically-underfunded Bureau of Indian Affairs, would see cuts of about 12 percent. Last year, the BIA awarded $8.6 million to 85 tribes as part of its Tribal Climate Resilience Program.

Native communities like Washington State's Swinomish Tribe have reacted with alarm.

"For over 100 years we have lived in a pollution based economy which has caused detrimental damage to the Earth," said Swinomish tribal spokesperson Debra Lekanoff via email. "We have spent just over 40 years in partnership with the United States to restore and protect what the Creator has provided to us. Today, now more than ever is our time to share a strong message to President Trump that we need to continue to support all of those agencies who put resources into cleaning up the environment."

It's a sentiment heard across Indian Country, according to Goldtooth, where tribes are asking Washington, "We're the ones most feeling the impact. Why are we being forced to change? Why doesn't the dominant society change what it's doing to Mother Earth and to our people?

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Native Americans Most at Risk From Impact of Climate Change

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Native Americans and Alaska Natives depend on natural resources to sustain their families, communities and culture

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What does the shrinking of the Colorado River mean for Native American religions? Ken Lund, CC BY-SA

The Colorado River, one of the longest rivers in the United States, is gradually shrinking. This is partly a result of overuse by municipalities and seasonal drought. The other reason is global warming.

The decline in the river reservoir will have serious implications for large U.S. cities, such as Los Angeles, that depend on the Colorado River as their water source. In addition, this will also have an impact on the Native American tribes who view the Colorado River as sacred to their religions.

As Ka-Voka Jackson, a member of the Hualapai tribe and a graduate student working to address climate change on the Colorado River and restoring native plant species along its banks, stated,

"The Colorado River is so sacred not just to my tribe, but to so many others."

As a scholar of Native American religions and the environment, I understand how indigenous people's religions and sacred places are closely tied to their landscape. For the past 100 years, indigenous peoples have been forced to adapt to changes in their environments and modify their religious rituals in the United States. The U.S. government made certain Native American religious practices illegal in the 19th and early 20th century. Although these policies have since been rescinded, they led to changes in many indigenous practices.

Global warming, however, is different. The question is whether indigenous people will be able to adapt their beliefs all over again due to the impact of global warming on the natural world.

Adapting to change

The Blackfeet tribe in Montana brought changes in their relationship with the natural world as a result of the policies of the U.S. government from the 1880s to the 1930s.

For example, the Blackfeet purposefully moved religious ceremonies from one time on their liturgical calendar to completely different times to avoid the U.S. government penalizing native people for dancing or participating in religious ceremonies.

The Blackfeet moved their annual O'kan, or sundance festival, from late summer (usually held at the end of August) to the Fourth of July celebration. They avoided U.S. government punishment by masking their ceremonies within state-sanctioned public events.

Policies related to the mining of natural resources and damming of rivers on indigenous lands have also led to changes in Native Americans' religious practices.

Historian David R. M. Beck interviewed elders and researched how the Menominee tribe in Wisconsin adapted to the loss of their sacred fish, the sturgeon, after a paper mill built a dam across the Wolf River.

USFWSmidwest, CC BY

The sturgeon disappeared after the dam was built in 1892, because they could no longer swim upstream to spawn. For over 100 years, the Menominee tribal members continued to pray and conduct their annual "returning of the sturgeon" ceremony in the spring - even though there were no more sturgeon in the river. The Menominee ultimately won the right to return the sturgeon to the Wolf River in 1992 and the tribe revitalized the full ceremony and celebration of their sacred fish.

In all these situations, Native American tribes learned to adapt to the challenges placed before them, modify their religious practice and embrace a different relationship with the natural world.

Global warming and religion

When it comes to global climate change, it affects everyone, not just specific groups in specific places. But for many indigenous peoples, natural resources are closely linked to religious beliefs and practices.

Historically, indigenous peoples used the natural seasonal cycles of weather, plants and animals as part of their liturgical or religious calendar. The Blackfeet held their annual "beaver bundle ceremony" in the early spring as ice melted off rivers and beavers returned to the open waters. In Blackfeet mythology, a beaver served as a deity who taught humans how to cultivate tobacco, which the tribe used for important religious ceremonies and as a peace offering to their enemies.

Bryn Davies, CC BY-NC-ND

There are signs, though, that beavers are now moving north due to global warming. Biologists are currently studying both beavers and the birch and alder shrubs that beavers eat, as both move north into new regions. Scientists worry that as a keystone species, the movement of beavers will change the northern ecosystems as they cut off waterways and build beaver dams. And shrubs will change the local waterways that they grow by. This will affect local animal species.

What will happen when there are no more beaver in Blackfeet territory? Will their religious traditions adapt similar to the Menominee when they faced the loss of their sacred sturgeon?

Religion and resiliency

From the arctic tundra to the American desert southwest, and places worldwide, indigenous peoples will be facing the impact of global climate change.

Regarding the shrinking of the Colorado River, researchers Brad Udall and Jonathan Overpeck have concluded that, "Failing to act on climate change means accepting the very high risk that the Colorado River basin will continue to dry up into the future."

If this river faces a drier future, it will likely affect the Mojave, a people indigenous to the Colorado River basin, who believe the river was created by their ancient deity Mastamho as part of their sacred landscape.

As the G-20 convenes in Germany this week to discuss global issues including climate change, indigenous scholars, such as myself, are wondering what the future holds for indigenous peoples, their environments and their religions.

Indigenous communities can be resilient and adapt their internal religious beliefs to outside challenges, as Native American tribes from the turn of the 20th century have proven. Climate change presents yet another challenge.

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Will global warming change Native American religious practices?

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The Colorado River, one of the longest rivers in the United States, is gradually shrinking. This is partly a result of overuse by municipalities and seasonal drought. The other reason is global warming. The decline in the river reservoir will have serious implications for large U.S.

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18 November 2016

Maori health leader speaks about climate change and the right to health at COP22

World leaders are meeting in Marrakesh to bring to life the promises made to limit climate change in the Paris Agreement. Earlier this week Rhys Jones, a Maori doctor and co-convenor of OraTaiao: The NZ Climate & Health Council, called for climate action that protects human rights, especially indigenous rights, children's rights and the right to health.

Dr Jones is in Morocco at COP22 participating in an event hosted by the World Health Organization and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

"This year is set again to be the hottest year on record and global inaction on climate change is already harming people's right to health, especially for children and indigenous peoples," Dr Jones said.

"However it's not just climate change itself, but also our responses to climate change that can lead to a breach of these rights. Governments, including New Zealand's, are accountable under international agreements not just to act on climate change, but to do so in ways that protect, improve and uphold human rights.

"In New Zealand and Oceania, Maori and indigenous Pacific communities are being hit first and hardest by the impacts of climate change, undermining their right to health. For example, extreme weather events are destroying communities and blocking access to health services. At the same time, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child has criticised New Zealand for failing to protect children's rights, including through inaction on climate change."

Dr Jones said upholding human rights is one of the fundamental duties of government and a safe, healthy climate underpins many of those rights.

"So to protect human rights, climate policies need to be urgent, transformative and to centralise human wellbeing and fairness."

ENDS

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Maori health leader speaks about climate change at COP22

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World leaders are meeting in Marrakesh to bring to life the promises made to limit climate change in the Paris Agreement. Earlier this week Rhys Jones, a Maori doctor and co-convenor of OraTaiao: The NZ Climate & Health Council, called for climate ...

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The Government is facing fresh legal action over alleged inadequate greenhouse emissions targets.

The new case is being brought by the Mataatua District Maori Council over the Government allegedly failing to fulfil Treaty of Waitangi obligations to protect Maori land and property.

A separate case brought by 26-year-old Waikato student Sarah Thomson, which also questioned emissions targets, wrapped up in Wellington's High Court on Wednesday.

Lawyer Michael Sharp is handling the claim on behalf of the Mataatua District Maori Council, representing Maori from the eastern Bay of Plenty, and said an application had been made to have the case heard under urgency, in order for it to be undertaken before emissions targets under the Paris Agreement were finalised in 2020.
READ MORE:
* Student Sarah Thomson's legal case against Government emissions targets wraps up
* Government lawyers question court's ability to rule on climate change case
* First-of-its-kind case as student takes Government to court
"Under the Treaty of Waitangi, the Crown has a duty of active protection towards Maori in regards to their lands and resources. The allegation is that their climate change policies are breaching that obligation."

"The claim raises various issues about how we are already being affected - by the current flooding in the eastern Bay of Plenty and the effect on Maori forestry of course, and fisheries," Sharp said.

Because the tribunal was a commission of inquiry, not a court, Sharp said it had a broader discretion to inquire into the adequacy of government actions.

"The current targets are a long way behind what we think New Zealand should do, as a developed nation, under the Paris Agreement."

Council spokesman Maanu Paul said the Mataatua district was taking the case on behalf of all Maori.

"The scientific data clearly shows that the New Zealand Government needs to be doing a lot more than it's doing at the moment. It is dragging the chain as far as the rest of the world is concerned.

"The problem is the Crown has not had a conversation with Maori about it, this is the beginning of that conversation."

Environment Minister Paula Bennett said she was limited in what she could say, with the matter currently before the tribunal.

"However, we are very comfortable that our Paris target is fair and ambitious."

In Thomson's case, Justice Jillian Mallon is expected to return her verdict in two months' time, which will constitute a ruling on whether there were failures in the Government's procedure when deciding targets.

Current emissions targets have New Zealand reducing emissions by 30 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030, and a halving of emissions by 2050.

Submissions include an affidavit from one of New Zealand's top climate scientists, James Renwick.

"The guts of it is climate change is a very urgent problem, and the potential risks are extremely large," Renwick said.

"My affidavit refers to the most recent scientific literature, most of which has come out since the Paris Agreement was finalised.

"There's been work showing that things like the sensitivity of the West Antarctic ice sheets, which will lock in the difference between five, 10 or 15 metres of sea level rise, the chances of that happening are much larger than we thought even five years ago."

- Stuff

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Second legal action against government emission targets

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The Government is facing fresh legal action over alleged inadequate greenhouse emissions targets. The new case is being brought by the Mataatua District Maori Council over the Government allegedly failing to fulfil Treaty of Waitangi obligations to protect Maori land and property.

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concentrate on the first few paragraphs, it's quite long!

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On April 16, about 900 comunarios, or communal peasants, of Nor Lípez Province in Bolivia's southwestern department of Potosí staged a daring protest. They invaded the operations area of Minera San Cristóbal, a mining subsidiary of the Japanese multinational Sumitomo, and burned the company office. They overturned two rail wagons loaded with 20 tons each of lead, silver, and zinc ore, and barricaded the rail line that transports the ore to Chile for export. ¹ San Cristóbal, established in 2005 by the Denver-based Apex Silver company, is one of the world's largest open-pit mines. It is much resented in Nor Lípez because it uses some 1.7 million cubic feet of water every day, free of charge, in this drought-prone area high in the Andes. The comunarios, who said they had been petitioning authorities for months to no avail, demanded that the mining company pay local communities for its water use, as well as for electrification projects. ²

The headline-grabbing action took place just three days before the opening of the World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of the Mother Earth, sponsored and hosted by Bolivian president Evo Morales. The climate conference was conceived as an alternative to the moribund United Nations process, which has failed to produce a binding treaty, and brought together some 30,000 people from more than 150 countries in Bolivia, along with a good deal of international media attention. The timing of the Nor Lípez action was clearly meant to draw attention to the Morales government's complicity in the San Cristóbal mine, and more generally to its ongoing support for environmentally destructive industries-just at the moment when Morales was asserting himself, and Bolivia, as leading international forces against climate change. Only after the conference was well under way did the Nor Lípez comunarios agree to lift the barricades on a pledge of dialogue. ³

The symbolism of the comunarios' action in defense of their water resources was heightened by the fact that the climate conference was held in Tiquipaya, a suburb of Cochabamba-the Bolivian city that became internationally synonymous with resource rights in 2000, when its residents fought off an attempt to privatize local water, in what came to be known as the Water War. ⁴

Sadly, the Nor Lípez conflict may portend Bolivian water wars to come. The province has seen almost no rain since 2007, according to Francisco Quisbert, a peasant leader from Calcha K, a key community behind the direct action, about 18 miles from San Cristóbal. Quinoa crops have disappeared, and llama herds are thinning. "The people are forced to migrate to Argentina, Chile," said Quisbert, former president of the Sole Regional Federation of Campesino Workers of the Southern Altiplano (FRUTCAS). "Some local people work in the mine, but it is very mechanized and can't provide for all the communities."

Even if all mining in Bolivia were shut down tomorrow, the country will likely soon face dire water shortages. In 2009, the 18,000-year-old Chacaltaya glacier overlooking the capital city of La Paz vanished-six years earlier than scientists predicted-threatening the city's water supplies. The same year, water levels in Lake Titicaca, which some 2.6 million people depend upon, dropped 2.6 feet, reaching its lowest level since 1949, according to the Lake Titicaca Authority. Finally, Bolivia's National Meteorological and Hydrological Service notes that the rainy season in the Altiplano, the arid tableland near La Paz, has contracted from six to three months in recent years. The drought has prompted water rationing in some Altiplano towns and cities. ⁵

Morales and others in his administration have condemned global climate change as a consequence of rich northern countries' overconsumption of fossil fuels, while demanding that the rights of Mother Earth be respected. And in calling for the conference, Morales emphasized that poor people everywhere bear a disproportionate risk from climate change, and that indigenous cultures and movements should be called upon for their wisdom and leadership on the climate question. Yet it is precisely because Bolivia is a poor country that it faces a formidable conundrum: how to lift people out of poverty without degrading the environment. ⁶

The story of the San Cristóbal mine and the tensions it has raised is emblematic of the larger struggle in Bolivia between a local indigenous leadership that disfavors extractive industry and the national government, which emphasizes that such industries can be harnessed for the benefit of impoverished Bolivians.

*

The comunarios' mine occupation was a wildcat action-not endorsed by the FRUTCAS, the regional campesino alliance. ⁷ FRUTCAS, formed a generation ago to push for the titling of collective lands, is officially neutral on the mine occupation. In April Porfirio Cruz, the federation's director, sat in his office on the dusty outskirts of the desert town of Uyuni under a large portrait of Morales. On the wall a poster read in Quechua: ¡Capitalistas Pachamamata Kankapuchkaku! Below is the Spanish translation: Capitalismo está liquidando al planeta y la humanidad. Capitalism is killing Mother Earth and humanity.

At odds with the government on the San Cristóbal issue, Cruz still has faith in Morales. He showed me correspondence from the Environment and Mines Ministry on the local water issue, and said it is unprecedented that the government is hearing grievances. "This is the democracy that we are practicing in Bolivia, thanks to the process of change that is taking place," he said. "There is no need for blockades and occupations."

From Uyuni, it is some 60 miles across the desert to the mine site and Nuevo San Cristóbal, the nearby company town where residents were relocated to make way for the mine. The most visible exponent of governance in Nuevo San Cristóbal is the mine company's non-governmental San Cristóbal Foundation, which is attempting to promote eco-tourism with a mountain bike rental initiative. The foundation's director, Ascensio Caso, almost portrayed the settlement as a boom town. "There were 20 families in Viejo San Cristóbal; now we have 500," he said. The quinoa and llamas are doing fine, he assured me, and a 10-year development plan for the area will eventually include reforestation programs. He said 90% of Nuevo San Cristóbal residents work in the mine, which he claimed uses "cutting edge" technology to control pollution. About 30 miles across the desert in the canton of Calcha K, the mood was decidedly different. There was clearly widespread support for the mine takeover.

Freddy Cayo, the corregidor (magistrate), took me out to the ayllu, or collectively held farmland, on the edge of the pueblo, which at that time of year is usually full of blooming quinoa, with its brilliant red and yellow hues, ready for harvest. Instead, it is brown and barren. "This is our fourth year without a quinoa harvest," Cayo said. "The level of water is dropping in our wells since operations began at the mine. We demand nationalization of the mine."

Unlike Nuevo San Cristóbal, Calcha K is not on the electricity grid and only received running water in recent years. The same is true of the municipal seat, Colcha K, my next stop. In his office in the pueblo's adobe town hall, municipal officer Julio Huanca warned me that anger is rising.

"The people have always been so peaceable here," Huanca said. "But they are tired of being ignored by the government-no roads, no development, no jobs. We are more economically linked to Chile than to Bolivia. And the mineral wealth of this region is contributing much to the national economy." Do you support the direct action?, I asked. "As an institution [i.e., the township], no," he said, "But as people, yes."

Huanca said the municipality has had dialogue with the mine company on protecting local waters-to no avail. He charged that Huaylla Kjara, a desert lake where Andean flamingos make their habitat, has been contaminated with mine waste, and that the mine has taken no responsibility. Although he did not speak of nationalization, Huanca supports the demand that the mine pay for water. "Sooner or later the mine will leave," he said, "but we will always be here."

The Bolivian foreign minister responded to the Nor Lípez protest by striking a tone sympathetic to the comunarios, denouncing Minera San Cristóbal for "plundering" Bolivia's natural resources and not "paying a cent" for its water usage. ⁸ Mining Minister José Pimentel admitted that the mine's contract was granted under " neoliberal laws"-a reference to the 1997 mineral code-but said that since the law had not been amended, it must be honored. ⁹

But that is not the whole story. The Morales government has accepted the conclusions of a study commissioned by the mining company, which found that the mine's water use is not responsible for the aridity in Nor Lípez. According to Sumitomo, the mine draws water only from the Jaukihua micro-aquifer, which represents only a minute part of the regional watershed. These deep, heavily mineralized waters are unfit for human consumption or agriculture anyway, the company asserts, and the mining is not contaminating the freshwater aquifers. ¹⁰

"I've seen the same situation all over the world," said hydrological consultant Robert Moran, co-author of "Mining the Water," a study commissioned by FRUTCAS and the municipality of Colcha K, with aid from NGOs, in response the mine's official study. "The source of information is always the company itself, so they can make any claim they want. It's very facile to say it's all salty, but that's not true. We don't have the data to answer the question, but they're just making blanket statements. They haven't dug the test wells to do the measurements." "Mining the Water" asserts that even if the mine is only extracting deep saline waters, this is almost certainly drawing down the freshwater aquifers above. "They are clearly dropping water levels," Moran charged. "If you're a local farmer, you're going to have to dig deeper wells, pay more money to pump it up, and find that it is degraded." He added on a sarcastic note: "But the nice thing is, there's no data to back this up because the company wasn't required to do the kind of studies they'd be required to do in the U.S. or Canada or Western Europe."

Moran was not surprised that the government is backing the mine's position. "The Bolivian government has an interest in having revenues come in from San Cristóbal," he said. The Bolivian government collects $35 million each year from the mine, out of a $1 billion in total profits. ¹¹

*

The comunarios' revolt had a direct impact on the proceedings at the Cochabamba climate conference. When it opened on April 19, a controversy emerged over an unauthorized working group, demanded by Aymara indigenous leaders, on social conflicts in Bolivia related to climate change. Table 18, as it was known, demanded its place alongside the conference's 17 official "tables," or working groups, with titles like "Structural Causes," "Indigenous Peoples," and "Rights of Mother Earth." Grievances aired by Aymara and Quechua leaders at Table 18, officially dubbed the table on "Collective Rights and the Rights of Mother Earth," centered on the San Cristóbal mine, as well as the state-owned Corocoro mine in La Paz department.

Bolivian environmental vice minister Juan Pablo Ramos was dismissive. "In reality, there is no Table 18," he said, asserting that since it proposed discussion of Bolivia's "internal problems," it was therefore not appropriate to an international forum. But Rafael Quispe, leader of the National Council of Ayllus and Markas of Cullasuyu (CONAMAQ), countered: "Table 18 is going ahead whether the government likes it or not, and it does not only deal with Bolivia's problems." He said the table would be held on the streets of Tiquipaya, outside the official conference, if it weren't allowed in. Referring to the Bolivian government, he said: "We are not opposed to the process of change, nor are we against the forum, but it is important to deal with the problems in our own house." ¹²

Barred from the official summit grounds on the Tiquipaya campus of the University del Valle, the dissident Aymara elders convened Table 18 in a Brazilian restaurant just off the campus on April 20. Cleared of tables to make room for rows of chairs, the premises filled with pungent smoke as incense and coca leaves were ritually burned for the opening ceremony. With many drawn by the controversy, Table 18 was well attended- despite a contingent of UTOP, the national anti-riot police, stationed at the restaurant's door. Table 18's panelists credited the Morales government with recognizing the collective rights of Bolivia's "original nations," Afro-Bolivians, and "inter-cultural communities" ( mestizos). But as panelist Pablo Regalsky of the Andean Center for Communication and Development (CENDA), stated: "Here in Bolivia, we are building a new model-in practice, not theory-so we have to discuss the problems that arise in the creation of this new model." He warned that some in the Morales government, especially the Finance Ministry, are seeking a "forced march to industrialization."

Regalsky charged that despite "the anti-capitalist discourse of Brother Evo," "foreign capital" still often plays a decisive role in Bolivia's development policies. He cited moves toward reviving plans for an inter-oceanic transport link through Bolivia, and mineral and gas exploitation on indigenous lands. Refuting government charges that Table 18 was dealing only with internal Bolivian issues, Regalsky added, "These questions also have implications for Paraguay, Brazil, Chile, and Peru. And they have implications for the rights guaranteed by the Bolivian constitution." Figures in the Bolivian government attempted to discredit Table 18 by linking it to the right-wing opposition.

Chancellor David Choquehuanca, for example, said any effort to divide the summit-which was how he evidently viewed Table 18-is the work of "opponents and capitalists." ¹³ Yet when Norma Pierola, a national legislator from Cochabamba with the right-opposition National Convergence party, tried to enter the restaurant to address Table 18 (on environmental concerns, she said), attendees blocked the entrance, chanting " ¡No pasará! " (she will not enter).

At the end of the conference's third day, the Aymara elders who convened the dissident table held a final meeting, where CONAMAQ's Rafael Quispe announced that Morales had agreed to meet with the Table 18 leaders and hear their demands. Morales, however, really had no choice but to meet with Quispe, because he had also convened the official Table 3, "The Rights of Mother Earth." Quispe said the Table 18 representatives would demand "the expulsion of all extractive resource industries" from Bolivia, and that the government adopt a new development model based on ayllus and local self-sufficiency, or what indigenous political leadership calls the "Andean cosmo-vision." Table 18's final resolution was handed in to Morales with the "official" resolutions on the morning of Earth Day, April 22-but not formally adopted by the conference.

The People's Accord produced by the climate conference, presented by Morales to the United Nations after the summit, calls for a 50% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by developing countries over the next seven years. It demands that the United Nations adopt a Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth; that the industrialized nations provide annual financing equivalent to 6% of their GDP to confront climate change in the developing world; and that an International Tribunal on Environmental and Climate Justice be created, with its seat in Bolivia. The summit called for a new global organization to press for these demands, tentatively dubbed the World Movement for Mother Earth-or MAMA-Tierra by its Spanish acronym. ¹⁴ Morales told the press at Tiquipaya that he would demand that the resolutions be endorsed at the UN climate summit to be held November 29-December 10 in Cancún, Mexico, and warned that he would otherwise seek redress at the International Court of Justice. ¹⁵

A week after the conference, however, Morales hadn't shown for a follow-up meeting at the CONAMAQ office in La Paz to discuss Table 18's demands. "There's still no response," Quispe said. "There's just a lot of bureaucracy." Angered, he accused Morales of hypocrisy. "The government says 'capitalism or Pachamama,' " he said. "But this government is neoliberal and capitalist. It's all a political show. Evo's election was a step. But the marches, strikes, blockades that brought him to power are continuing." (For more on Quispe's position, see "Beyond Extraction").

*

One of the top priorities of the Morales administration has been to establish greater state control over Bolivia's hydrocarbon and mineral resources. But how does this affect global climate change? After all, the carbon under Bolivia's earth will still be burned and released into the atmosphere as greenhouse gases. "The nationalization, as a method of recovering the property rights of the Bolivian state, does not imply change in technology," conceded Mario Katari, environmental director at YPFB, the Bolivian state hydrocarbon company, via e-mail. "If the environmental controls do not change and the consciousness does not change, it cannot be said that nationalization averts climate change."

But he added that the nationalization has coincided with a commitment to protect the environment. He noted that the new Hydrocarbon Law bans the use of flares to burn off excess gas and that there has been a "significant decrease in exploration and exploitation" since nationalization. But he also admitted that the government policy is to "increase production and all activities related to the hydrocarbon cycle," and that this could lead to "greater foci of greenhouse gas emissions if there isn't a corresponding environmental control."

His words on Table 18 were harsh. Evidently referring to Rafael Quispe, he said, "I think [Table 18] was led by someone influenced by the first world and out of touch with the national reality." He said that if the demand to end all extractive activities in Bolivia were fulfilled, there would be a "dramatic contraction in the national economy, with consequences that cannot be predicted." Therefore, he said, fulfilling this demand would be acceptable only "if the compensation Bolivia receives for putting an end to all extractive activities in the country is equivalent to or greater than the amount that would be received from these activities."

Despite such accusations, Quisbert defended the airing of concerns about San Cristóbal at Cochabamba- and the ongoing indigenous and campesino protests over resource issues. "The international debate on climate change needs to be had, and it is good that our compañero Evo is doing this," he said. "But in our own house, we are not guarding the environment. This is my difference with President Morales."

1. Bloomberg, "Sumitomo to Boost Zinc, Lead Output at Bolivia Mine," June 3, 2009.

2. Los Tiempos (Cochabamba), "El Gobierno no descarta usar la fuerza pública para solucionar el conflicto en San Cristóbal," April 17, 2010.

3. EFE, "Campesinos bolivianos suspenden bloqueo de vía férrea hacia Chile," April 23, 2010.

4. Óscar Olivera and Tom Lewis, Cochabamba! Water War in Bolivia (South End Press, 2004); Jim Shultz, "The Cochabamba Water Revolt, Ten Years Later," Yes!, April 20, 2010.

5. Bloomberg, "Vanishing Bolivian Glacier Ends Highest Ski Run," August 5, 2009.

6. For more on this problem, see Linda Farthing, "Bolivia's Dilemma: Development Confronts the Legacy of Extraction," NACLA Report on the Americas 42, no. 5 (September/October 2009): 25-29.

7. Los Tiempos, "Nor Lípez: inician diálogo en la zona; sigue bloqueo," April 22, 2010.

8. Agence France-Press, "Bolivia Slams Japan Mining Firm for 'Plundering' Resources," April 18, 2010.

9. Erbol Comunicaciones (Bolivia), "Gobierno prevé reunión con pobladores de Nor Lípez para esta semana," April 19, 2010.

10. Minera San Cristóbal, "A la opinión pública," paid statement, La Prensa (La Paz), April 25, 2010.

11. Erbol, "Minera San Cristóbal gana mil millones de dólares y sólo tributa 3,5 por ciento al año," March 17, 2010.

12. Ramos and Quispe are quoted in Erbol Comunicaciones, "Darán el primer paso para un referendo mundial, pero sin reconocer la mesa 18," April 18, 2010.

13. Los Tiempos, "Sectores y 'mesa 18' piden parar labor extractiva," April 21, 2010.

14. World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of the Mother Earth, "Bolivian President Evo Morales to Deliver Results of People's Conference on Climate Change to UN," press release, May 7, 2010.

15. Los Tiempos,, "Evo amenaza con una demanda si no se toma en cuenta la Declaración de Tiquipaya," April 22, 2010.

Bill Weinberg is the editor of World War 4 Report and author of Homage to Chiapas: The New Indigenous Struggles in Mexico (Verso, 2000). He is working on a new book titled Pachamama Returns: The New Indigenous Struggles in the Andes. Elements of this article originally appeared in April on ww4report.com.

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New Water Wars in Bolivia: Climate Change and Indigenous Struggle

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On April 16, about 900 comunarios, or communal peasants, of Nor Lípez Province in Bolivia's southwestern department of Potosí staged a daring protest. They invaded the operations area of Minera San Cristóbal, a mining subsidiary of the Japanese multinational Sumitomo, and burned the company office.

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How is deforestation and climate change affecting the lives of indigenous women?

Women play a very important role in food production and often have to bear the brunt of the added burden of adapting to climate change in forests and farmland. Natural resource developments such as oil palm plantations or oil and gas exploration damage their fragile ecosystems and affect their ability to produce food. Despite this, they seldom have the rights to their lands. Without these rights they stand to lose their sole source of food, income and shelter.

Additionally they are often not allowed to participate in national and international strategies to tackle the issues that affect them. These are challenges that exist right across Latin America.
How is the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) helping to address the issues of insecure and unclear land rights for indigenous people in Latin America?
As a coalition we encourage collaboration between our partners and community organisations, who work through research and advocacy to catalyse major breakthroughs in forest and land rights priorities.
Is the lack of strong and effective legislation the underlying issue?
We campaign to ensure policy and market reforms allow indigenous peoples and local communities to benefit from the lands they have lived on for generations.
How could enhancing women's presence in forest governance improve resource conservation and regeneration?
Currently, one of our focuses is on mainstreaming the issue of gender justice and the promotion of collective rights of women to land and forest.

Not necessarily. The underlying issue is that women's rights are often not respected at many levels. Their contributions are not acknowledged within their own communities, in the legal frameworks of their countries, nor are women included in global discussions around natural resource management.
How are you working to address this?
Enhancing women's participation in decisions over land and resources will ensure their knowledge, initiatives and needs are accounted for.

Their lives are intertwined with the forests and they are integral members of indigenous and local communities, and have contributed to the governance of their territories and resources. Their knowledge is important in decisions related to climate change mitigation and adaptation.

We work with our partners and collaborators, like the National Organization of Andean and Amazonian Indigenous Women of Peru, to intervene through research, convenings and international networking opportunities, technical assistance, and communications support.
What recommendations have come of the forum?
Two years ago, the Conference of Parties (COP), decided to improve the participation of women in the negotiations on national climate change strategies. However, the United Nations (UN) has yet to address land rights as part of the structural foundations of women's inequality. Without this no gender equality or climate change solutions can be complete or effective.

To address this gap, we recently brought indigenous women from across the world to Lima for the International Indigenous Women's Forum, Land and Climate Change: Challenges and Opportunities in COP 20. Our goal is to generate recommendations for the Peruvian government to bring to the forefront of discussions at the COP in December, around women's role and contributions.

The forum has come up with 12 recommendations centered on land rights and the contributions of indigenous women and communities to climate change policy at the national and international level.
Ultimately what do you hope to see in UNFCCC's 2015 climate change agreement What challenges does RRI face??What best practice can you share?
They include considering women in the tenure and collective titling of lands and territories, requiring states to prioritise empowering communities to adapt to climate change, and creating participatory mechanisms to develop, enhance and strengthen the capacity of indigenous women and our organisations.
Read more stories like this:
There is also a proposed review of legal frameworks to ensure the active, effective and equal participation of indigenous women at all stages and levels of decision-making.

We would like to see the promotion of collective land tenure rights, and the critical role of women within these collective land tenure systems, as major principles for countries to adhere to as a part of any international climate change mitigation and adaptation strategy.

As a coalition, RRI has had to overcome challenges experienced by all coalitions in aligning the priorities of our diverse organisations. Our job then has been to connect organisations that perhaps would not have otherwise been working together, and help them see the 80% of their agendas that they agree on, rather than the 20% of their agendas where they diverge.
Join the community of global development professionals and experts. Become a GDPN member to get more stories like this direct to your inbox
Listen to the people who live and depend on the lands and forests. Consider women as equal actors and respect their knowledge and contributions. Giving women an equal voice is the best approach to addressing climate change issues in indigenous communities.

* Caught in the crossfire: indigenous people in conflict zones

* Meet the women trading Sudan's first carbon credits

* Forests: time to reclaim the 'wastelands'?

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Land rights in Latin America: where are the voices of indigenous women?

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How is deforestation and climate change affecting the lives of indigenous women? Women play a very important role in food production and often have to bear the brunt of the added burden of adapting to climate change in forests and farmland.

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It's a monster. As the eye of Hurricane Irma approached the tiny island of Barbuda this morning, wind speeds soared to 250 kph before the instrument broke.

At the time of writing, all contact with the island had been lost and it is unclear how the 1600 inhabitants have fared. But already reports of severe destruction are coming in from other islands in Irma's path.

The destruction could be extreme. Hurricane Irma has the strongest winds of any hurricane to form in the open Atlantic, with sustained wind speeds of 295 kph.

It is also huge. The strongest winds are limited to a relatively small area around its centre, but hurricane-force winds of 118 kph or more extend out 85 kilometres from its eye.

Irma could yet grow stronger and is going to graze or directly hit many densely-populated islands in the Caribbean before possibly making landfall in Florida on Sunday - but there is still a lot of uncertainty about its path and intensity this far ahead.

Warmer waters

So why did Irma grow so strong? Most likely because climate change is making Atlantic waters ever warmer.

Tropical cyclones are fuelled by warm surface waters of around 26°C or more. They draw in moist air from all around them, and as it rises, the water vapour condenses out and releases latent heat, which drives further uplift. Irma's clouds are 20 kilometres high.

However, as tropical cyclones grow stronger they churn up the ocean and bring deeper water to the surface. Usually this deeper water is cooler, and cuts off the energy supply.

The strongest hurricanes, then, can only grow if warm waters extend down to depth of 50 or 100 metres - conditions normally only found in the Gulf or Caribbean.

In 1990, Hurricane Allen reached 305 kph winds, fuelled by these warmer waters. In 2017's warmer world, Irma began growing way out in the Atlantic, thanks to sea surface temperatures that were more than 1°C above average.

Stronger storms

Hurricane intensity depends on many other factors, too, though. For instance, winds high in the atmosphere are often faster than those lower down, blowing away rising air and preventing hurricanes from forming, or growing very strong. Low wind shear helped Irma grow into a perfect storm.

Computer models suggest global warming is likely to increase wind shear over the Atlantic, meaning there could no more or fewer hurricanes overall, but that storms grow stronger when they do form.

While tropical cyclones are currently ranked according to their wind speed, storm surges and flooding from high rainfall typically cause most of the damage, as we saw with Harvey.

The height of a storm surge depends not just on the strength of winds, but on their extent. Hurricane Sandy's winds were not that strong but the size of the storm piled up the huge storm surge that caused most of the damage in New York and elsewhere.

So strong winds don't necessarily mean big damage. The record is held by Hurricane Patricia in the eastern Pacific in 2015, with sustained winds of 345 kph. Fortunately Patricia was small, weakened dramatically before landfall and struck a sparsely populated area.

Irma, ominously, is both big and intense, and could cause big storm surges in highly populated places. Barbuda recorded a storm surge of 2.4 metres.

The amount of rainfall dumped by hurricanes can also vary widely depending both on a storm's intensity, local factor and how fast it moves. Harvey produced huge amounts of rain because it barely moved for days.

Irma, thankfully, is moving faster - but its behaviour more than two or three days ahead remains highly uncertain.

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Hurricane Irma's epic size is being fuelled by global warming

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It's a monster. As the eye of Hurricane Irma approached the tiny island of Barbuda this morning, wind speeds soared to 250 kph before the instrument broke. At the time of writing, all contact with the island had been lost and it is unclear how the 1600 inhabitants have fared.

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Posted September 07, 2017 19:26:46

Aid agencies fear a humanitarian catastrophe in impoverished Haiti if Hurricane Irma hits the Caribbean island with full force as expected.

The US National Hurricane Centre predicted Irma would remain at category four or five as it swept over Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

Forecasts suggested the northern part of Haiti could receive up to 25 centimetres of rain, which along with ferocious winds, would destroy homes and buildings and devastate crops.

Haiti is the poorest country in the Americas, with well over half the population estimated to be living below the poverty line.

The loss of homes and livelihoods would only add to the woes of a country still reeling from devastating Hurricane Matthew less than a year ago.

Australian aid worker Ascension Martinez - deputy country director at Save the Children in the Haitian capital of Port au Prince - said many Haitians were ill equipped to deal with the impact of a major hurricane.

"You have got an extremely large population of really vulnerable people," she said.

"They're people who are poor and vulnerable, who don't have anything to fall back on.

"If a crop is wiped out, if their house is flooded, if they do what most people do here, which is to be involved in small businesses, they will lose all of that. They've got nothing, and they'd have to start again."

Because of the country's impoverishment, Haitians are being urged to take extra care during the hurricane, not just to stockpile food or find shelter, but also to protect documents that prove their ownership of land or property.

"We're advising ... get food in, [but] get your essential documents into an airtight plastic bag," Ms Martinez said.

"If you lose your documentation, you lose your land title, your birth certificate, all of these things ... you've got nothing, and it will take a long time to get all that documentation back.

"Plus, people don't have the money. So get things into airtight bags, have them safely stowed so they'd be above any flood waters."

Haiti has been blighted by natural disasters, poor governance and violence in recent years, a turnaround from its days in the 18th century as one of the richest colonies in the French empire, with huge wealth from sugar cane and coffee plantations.

In less than 10 years, the county has dealt with two destructive hurricanes, a devastating earthquake in 2010 and a severe drought.

The latest predictions indicate Hurricane Irma will hit Haiti coast in the early hours of the morning, with the worst impact in the country's north and central plateau.

Humanitarian agencies hope the capital will be largely spared because it is surrounded by mountains.

However, deforestation could still leave much of the country prone to mudslides and flooding in heavy rain, and communities in low-lying areas are most vulnerable.

There are particular fears for children, given the risk of water-based diseases in times of flood and the poor state of school infrastructure.

Many schools and healthcare services have been disrupted by the worsening weather.

The United Nations has deployed peacekeepers - who are wrapping up their mission in Haiti - and some engineers to northern areas which are likely to be impacted.

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Fears for impoverished Haiti as Hurricane Irma looms

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Posted September 07, 2017 19:26:46 Aid agencies fear a humanitarian catastrophe in impoverished Haiti if Hurricane Irma hits the Caribbean island with full force as expected. The US National Hurricane Centre predicted Irma would remain at category four or five as it swept over Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

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While world leaders meet at the UN climate summit in Paris, Australia's politicians are putting the big polluters ahead of the people that they were elected to represent. They are prioritising dirty coal and gas ahead of healthy communities and a safe climate.

So that's why hundreds of people peacefully occupied Parliament House with their very own People's Parliament - a Parliament that is for and by the People, a Parliament that puts people ahead of Polluters, a Parliament that recognises the need to stand up for what is right, and to work for climate justice for all.

From farmers, parents and workers, to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders and young people, together we are stepping up to demand that our politicians keep fossil fuels in the ground so that we can have a liveable future .

The People's Parliament is just the beginning. In 2016, people everywhere will continue to take action like this until our politicians do what is right. With a Federal Election around the corner, they ignore us at their peril.
Send a message of support

On December 2nd, 250 Australians held a People's Parliament inside Parliament House - calling upon our Politicians to put People ahead of the big polluters in Paris.

Let them know that the rest of the world is watching and that they have your support.
You can fill out the form or post your message on social media using the hashtag #PeoplesParliament.

See how the action unfolded

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The People's Parliament - Put People ahead of Polluters in Paris

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While world leaders meet at the UN climate summit in Paris, Australia's politicians are putting the big polluters ahead of the people that they were elected to represent. They are prioritising dirty coal and gas ahead of healthy communities and a safe climate.

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My people, the Turkana, live in Turkana county, one of the poorest regions in Kenya. As pastoralists who practise nomadism and tend to goats, camels, donkeys and zebus, we have lived off this dry, hot stretch of land near the Ugandan border for centuries. But like fellow Kenyans - and Africans - the changing climate has made our daily lives more difficult.

With less rain, the lake and rivers we rely on for our drinking water - and to care for our animals - keep getting drier and shallower. Droughts and famines have resulted in death to our animals as well as disappearance of livestock watering holes that have served my people for ages. As a result, our jobs as herders are in peril and our life generally has become one of a struggle for survival.

When oil and gas extraction companies came into our territories in 2011, my people were hopeful that they would improve our lives by offering desperately needed jobs. But they only recruited from some villages, not others, leading to tension among our once-harmonious communities. And once these companies started oil and gas exploration, it had an impact on the water supply to our pasturelands, as there was less to go round.

The Turkana have always been in harmony with their land. In this pastoralist community, land has cultural and social importance and is believed to belong to our ancestors. The people have noticed the changes to their environment, and are very worried about the future. But more than 80% of my people are illiterate. They don't fully understand the link between these changes and climate change - and the further pressures that the oil and gas companies are putting on our scarce resources.

After I earned my law degree from the University of Nairobi, I returned to my village to help my community fight against climate change and other pressures. I meet with villagers of all ages and talk to them about what they can do to protect themselves and their land against extreme weather and the impact of oil and gas exploitation.

Every week, I meet with a group of young people in my community to plan action and empower the local community. For example, we organise youth summits to outline our demands to the oil and gas companies, which include respecting our traditional practices, safeguarding our sacred lands, shielding our grazing sites and upholding environmental standards.

Even if the results of the Paris talks disappoint, I will continue to defend my home against drought and developers

We are not alone. Turkana youth in my village and neighbouring ones have also taken a stand to protect our lands, our culture and, most importantly, our people from the perils of climate change. Our collective success include installing a new drinking well that makes it easier for 1,000 community members to gather fresh, clean water.

Young people in my community have also led a tree-planting campaign that has added 77,000 new indigenous and exotic trees to our villages. We intend to carry out these activities now and in the future and contribute to the improvement of our environment in our small ways.

Unfortunately, we don't have a choice when it comes to implementing simple but powerful solutions to climate change in our own backyards. If we don't take action, we could lose our homes and our way of life. Many young Africans have already been forced by the impacts of climate change to migrate to city slums, where they have lost their way of life, and their hope for the future.

But I am still hopeful. And I have come to learn that young people in countries around the world facing similar prospects are also taking matters in their own hands. In December, I will join a group of these youth activists from Africa, Asia and Latin America in Paris for the global climate change talks. We'll share our stories so that negotiators and world leaders realise that we are an important part of the climate change solution, and that if they support us, we can continue to help our people. And we'll let them know that we're watching, and expecting that they'll take bold action to ensure that future generations don't lose out against the changing climate.

To live, the Turkana people rely on animals, and we rely on the environment. Even if the results of the Paris talks disappoint, I will continue to defend my home against drought and developers - and anything else that comes our way. After all, if the youth of the world do not act, who will?

Ekai Nabenyo, 24, is the founder and chair of Lorengelup Community Development Initiative, which focuses on youth empowerment, community development and environmental conservation in Turkana county, Kenya. The initiative has been supported by grants from Global Greengrants Fund

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cop 21: un climate change conference | paris

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Climate change in Kenya: if we don't act now, we Turkana could lose our homes | Ekai Nabenyo

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My people, the Turkana, live in Turkana county, one of the poorest regions in Kenya. As pastoralists who practise nomadism and tend to goats, camels, donkeys and zebus, we have lived off this dry, hot stretch of land near the Ugandan border for centuries.

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ministry of environment and mineral resources

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In order to enhance investment that aims to reduce vulnerability and build resilience of the society, and in line with the provisions of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and its implementing instrument the Kyoto Protocol, the Government of Kenya launched the National Climate Change Response Strategy (NCCRS).

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While attention in the sector has recently been focused on the IPCC's latest report on climate change, in Sudan women have been quietly making breakthroughs by issuing the country's first carbon credits. In a country blighted by conflict and drought, the Women's Development Association Network (WDAN) representing over 50,000 women in Sudan, is driving economic growth and reversing deforestation.

The town of El Fasher, the capital of the North Darfur region, is an area considered high risk by international markets because of its history of civil war, conflict and reliance on humanitarian aid. It is here that the Darfur Low Smoke Project, financed entirely by private sector money, was launched in 2007 by the WDAN, the international NGO Practical Action and the UK-based company Carbon Clear.

North Darfur is typical of areas in the region in that most of the poorest groups of women depend upon wood and charcoal for cooking. The result has been widespread deforestation and increasing desertification, made worse by extreme climate variability. To help reverse this process, women are being sold modern, energy-efficient, clean-burning liquid petroleum gas (LPG) cookstoves.

Setting up the project has been challenging. A year after it started several audit firms were contacted to check documentation and verify activity on the ground, an essential prerequisite for issuing carbon credits. All of the companies contacted refused to visit North Darfur, stating it was too unstable. Eventually an auditor was found but the site visits only took place in 2010, losing two year's credits. This financial uncertainty meant the project was nearly wound up in 2009.

Despite these initial setbacks, the project is now making headway. Out of a target of 10,000 cookstoves, 6,000 have been delivered, saving over 36,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions. Over half of the stoves have been registered by the Gold Standard Foundation in Switzerland, meaning that their emissions savings are eligible to be sold as premium carbon credits.

One of the women who has been using the stoves is Randa Faudul Ali, who lives in the village of Kafut. "Cooking with wood meant that the whole house was full of smoke. It's a house made of hay and inside it is completely black. I have serious eye problems as a result of the smoke - I was going blind because of the smoke. I think the LPG stove has saved my sight."

Ali adds: "I belong to the Women's Development Association in my village and other women come to my house to see the LPG stove and have learned about this new, safe way of cooking. I am helping to distribute 19 stoves to families across my village and 61 to other communities nearby."

In Sudan, charcoal costs a household around £20 a month, while LPG costs roughly £7 a month. But, the initial cost of the stove and gas canister place them beyond the reach of most families. To overcome this obstacle, Carbon Clear introduced a micro-loan scheme, which is operated by the WDAN. After six years, repayment rates are above 90% - very high for an area where nearly half of the people live below the poverty line.

As a result, local women's groups have been trained in how to manage money - enabling them to issue loans and collect repayments. They have also set themselves up as the main dealers for the Nile Petroleum Company in North Darfur and have established a series of community forests. To date over 43 community forests have been planted, each between 10-40 acres in size, to help replace North Darfur's scant tree cover.

Over the next decade it is hoped that the project's stoves will save over 300,000 tonnes of carbon and hundreds more community forests will be planted. The first credits from the Darfur project were recently sold to an insurance firm based in the UK.

"The Darfur Low Smoke Stoves Project demonstrates how businesses can successfully reduce emissions and make a positive contribution to communities," says the CEO of Carbon Clear, Mark Chadwick.

The project has brought carbon finance to some of the poorest communities in the world and at the same time shown the potential of women to lead the way in tackling climate change.

"It is essential that carbon finance reaches poorer countries, regions and communities - and it must both deliver climate and development outcomes," says Adrian Rimmer, CEO of Gold Standard. "Our goal is to drive finance into thousands more projects that will help to mitigate climate change and bring development benefits to millions of people in Sudan and around the world."
Mary Gallagher is policy officer at Join the community of global development professionals and experts. Become a GDPN member to get more stories like this direct to your inbox Practical Action.

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Meet the women trading Sudan's first carbon credits

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While attention in the sector has recently been focused on the IPCC's latest report on climate change, in Sudan women have been quietly making breakthroughs by issuing the country's first carbon credits. In a country blighted by conflict and drought, the Women's Development Association Network (WDAN) representing over 50,000 women in Sudan, is driving economic growth and reversing deforestation.

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Sweden, Germany and France are the EU's climate leaders, says study

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Only three EU countries are heading in the right direction to deliver on the Paris agreement, according to a new study.

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Swedish National Knowledge Centre for Climate Change Adaptation | SMHI

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The Swedish National Knowledge Centre for Climate Change Adaptation provides tools and information to help society cope with a changing climate, now and in the future. We link science, policy and practice, bringing together the decision makers, businesses, research providers and organisations that make climate change adaptation happen.

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Sweden has committed to completely phase out greenhouse gas emissions by 2045 and called for all countries - including the US - to "step up and fulfil the Paris Agreement".

In one of the most ambitious emissions plans published by a developed nation, the Swedish government has reaffirmed the urgency of tackling climate change, ignoring uncertainties about global policies under Donald Trump's administration.

"Our target is to be an entirely fossil-fuel-free welfare state," said Climate Minister Isabella Lovin.

"We see that the advantages of a climate-smart society are so huge, both when it comes to health, job creation and also security. Being dependent on fossil fuels and gas from Russia is not what we need now," she added.

All parties but the far-right Sweden Democrats party agreed to pass the law in the coming month, which will oblige the government to set tougher goals to cut fossil fuel emissions every four years until the 2045 cut-off date.

Plans also include a 70 per cent cut to emissions in the domestic transport sector by 2030.

The Government said the target would require domestic emissions to be cut by at least 85 per cent and the remaining emissions would be offset by planting trees or by sustainable investments abroad.

The law is expected to enter into force as early as 2018.

Britain has committed to cut its emissions by 57 per cent by 2032 but so far, the government is nowhere near on track to meet its goal and the latest report predicts the target would be missed by the equivalent of all the greenhouse gases currently produced by industry.

The Independent previously revealed the Government's Emissions Reduction Plan, which was supposed to be published in March after being delayed twice, will no longer be made public by that deadline.

Activist group Client Earth is now considering legal action against the Government over its failure to come up with a plan to dramatically reduced fossil fuels and meet its target.

Meanwhile, Sweden's Prime Minister Stefan Lofven criticised climate sceptics inside the Trump administration as "worrying", since the US' greenhouse gas emissions would affect everyone. He warned all countries need to "step up and fulfil the Paris Agreement."

Mr Trump previously called climate change a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese, and there are suggestions he will pull out of the legally-binding Paris Agreement.

Climate minister Ms Lovin urged European countries to take the lead in tackling climate change now "the US is not there anymore to lead".

She warned climate sceptics were "really gaining power in the world" and that Sweden wanted to set an example of continued action to its international pledges.

Last year in Paris, nearly 200 countries agreed to limit temperature rise above1990s industrial levels by 2C and work towards a 1.5C target.

The EU has set a target of an 80 to 95 per cent reduction in greenhous e gas emissions by 2050.

Meanwhile, China is "investing billions and billions of dollars in solar (...) it's a game changer. Those that are still wanting to invest in fossil fuels will be ultimately the losers," Ms Lovin warned.

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Sweden just committed to having zero carbon emissions, and perfectly trolled Trump at the same time

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Sweden has committed to completely phase out greenhouse gas emissions by 2045 and called for all countries - including the US - to "step up and fulfil the Paris Agreement". In one of the most ambitious emissions plans published by a developed nation, the Swedish government has reaffirmed the urgency of tackling climate change, ignoring uncertainties about global policies under Donald Trump's administration.

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In America.

MICHAEL BREEN, PROTESTOR: Every human being on earth lost today, but no one lost more than the American people.

And around the world, news that the US would be pulling out of the Paris Agreement caused a sensation.

MALCOLM TURNBULL, PRIME MINISTER: It is disappointing. We would prefer the United States to remain part of the agreement.

But what's the Paris Agreement all about? And why do people care if the US remains a part of it?

Well, the Paris Agreement, or Paris Climate Accord, was made back in 2015, when leaders around the world got together in Paris. And it was here, in Paris, they created a plan to fight climate change on a global scale (not just in Paris).

This mission: stop average global temperatures rising 2 degrees by 2100. Two degrees doesn't sound like much, but experts say temps rising by any more could lead to more extreme weather, dangerously high sea levels, and food and water shortages.

So, to make sure that doesn't happen, countries pledged to limit the amount of greenhouse gases they produce. And rich countries said they'd give money to poorer countries to help them move towards renewable energy. Countries would also set their own targets and choose how to cut back, because leaders agreed one set of rules might not work for everyone.

195 countries agreed to it, including Australia, and America. But back then, Barack Obama was its leader. Now his successor, President Trump, has officially backed out. He said the deal wasn't fair to the US, would punish American businesses and lead to workers losing their jobs.

DONALD TRUMP, US PRESIDENT: As someone who cares deeply about the environment, which I do, I cannot in good conscience support a deal that punishes the United States.

But once the US leaves, they'll join Syria and Nicaragua as the only countries not involved. Nicaragua refused to sign because it believes the agreement isn't tough enough, and Syria is in the middle of a civil war. The US is the world's 2nd biggest polluter, and experts worry that their withdrawal will weaken the agreement, and make the targets harder to achieve.

Nearly 6 out of 10 Americans are actually against the President's decision to pull out. And the rest of the countries involved in the agreement, say they're sticking to it. Including, China, the world's biggest polluter. It's already taken matters into its own hands making a deal with one big US state, California, to reduce emissions together. While the European Union says it plans to encourage other US states and big companies to do their bit as well.

President Trump says he wants a new agreement to be made that won't affect American workers. But most of the world is still committed to the existing Paris Agreement, and to fighting against climate change together.

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In America. MICHAEL BREEN, PROTESTOR: Every human being on earth lost today, but no one lost more than the American people. And around the world, news that the US would be pulling out of the Paris Agreement caused a sensation. MALCOLM TURNBULL, PRIME MINISTER: It is disappointing.

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With the US shrinking from the Paris Agreement, all eyes are on China to become the world leader on climate change. How China balances economic growth with environmental responsibility, could change the environmental trajectory of the entire planet.

Academic James Miller argues there is just one stumbling block: Western ideas on how to save the planet don't resonate deeply in China. But he says, that the ancient Chinese religion of Daosim might fill the gap.

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With the US shrinking from the Paris Agreement, all eyes are on China to become the world leader on climate change. How China balances economic growth with environmental responsibility, could change the environmental trajectory of the entire planet. Academic James Miller argues there is just one stumbling block: Western ideas on how to save the planet don't resonate deeply in China.

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Comparing countries' emissions targets | Climate Change Authority

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This table shows the greenhouse gas reduction targets of different countries or regions, and the implied reduction in emissions in 2030. They include national commitments and international commitments through the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Note that the US has proposed a 2025 target, and the UK has nominated a target for 2023-2027.

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search other nations

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In February 2015, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) and the Finance Ministry released the 2015-2020 action plan on the efficient use of coal, aiming at decreasing coal use by 160 million tonnes in the next five years (Xinhua 2015).

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As world leaders try to hammer out a deal on climate change in Paris, a number of Pacific nations will be watching with interest. The impoverished country of Kiribati is one of them, having little resources to combat the issue. The BBC's Tim McDonald details its dilemma.

Bwebweata Atiana ties his tiny hut to a pandanus tree. Almost every month, the high tide batters the beach next to it.

Water washes all the way up to the main road that runs through his village here on Marakei, a small atoll about a 20-minute flight from Kiribati's main island, Tarawa.

"During the high tide, the waves come and the strong winds and these ropes are to make it steady. To keep it in place during the high tide," he says.

Even by Kiribati's basic standards, it's a rudimentary fix. But the people here have little to work with. And really, that's the problem at the heart of Kiribati's climate dilemma.

The notion that Kiribati will sink because of rising sea levels is a narrative that's powerful in its simplicity. But scientists have their doubts.

Atolls constantly expand and erode. Storms and tides deposit material on one side of the island even as they wash it away on the other.

If more washes up than washes away, the atolls grow, and Kiribati will rise with the tide. In short, many scientists think the islands will shift rather than sink, and climate change will speed up the process.

President Anote Tong insists that the risk of sinking is real. But he points out that even if it's not, Kiribati will still have great difficulty keeping up, as islands erode in some places and grow in others.

"It doesn't matter, because you can't keep moving houses," says Mr Tong.

Kiribati faces a Catch-22: it needs to advance economically to defend itself, but sea-level rise is certain to slow or even stop its progress.

It's a dilemma the president struggles with. The option of abandoning the country altogether is squarely on the table, although he still holds out hope.

"There is no doubt in my mind that it is doable. But I think where the doubt is, will the resources required be available," he says.

At the moment, the answer appears to be no.

The only significant industry here is fishing, and even then, an alarmingly small amount of the wealth that it generates stays in the country.

The World Bank puts per capita GDP at about $1,500 (£996), which is below Laos and Zambia. Add to that high infant mortality rates, a dearth of university graduates, unemployment that tops 30% and slapdash infrastructure.

Water crisis

Life is simple on Marakei, the ring-shaped atoll where Mr Atiana lives, but it's becoming more difficult.

Those who cut toddy (sap from the palm leaves) are losing trees to high tides and erosion. Others who grow giant taro in ponds known as bwaibai pits worry about salinity.

Mr Atiana drinks a handful from one and spits it out again to demonstrate.

Down the road at the Kiribati Uniting Church, Pastor Teieka Iaabeitie says his flock sees the changes, and they worry.

"The people here are afraid. The effects of the climate change are more dangerous to our community. Because in our village, more people live in the coastal area, but the high tides are [higher than they were] years ago." he says.

A few reject climate change, or at least the threat it poses, saying the Bible lays it out in black and white. After the great flood, God told Noah that "neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of a flood; neither shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth".

But if that prophecy is true, there's a loophole.

Because Kiribati might become unliveable, even if it never goes under. The great fear is there could be mass migration to Tarawa, the main island, and the fragile, already-stressed environment there could collapse.

The UN says more than 70% of households in Kiribati and Tuvalu would consider leaving home if droughts, sea level rise or floods get worse. In Kiribati most would end up in Tarawa, and the population there could grow by 72%.

That's a huge problem for the water supply, which is already under immense pressure.

Tarawa's groundwater sits a little more than a metre below the surface. On an overcrowded island where everyone has pigs and dogs, and open defecation is still a problem, that means it's contaminated to the point of being undrinkable.

One man, who lives next to a fuel depot, can even set his water on fire, because it's so contaminated with petrol. The depot told the BBC it was unaware of the problem, and it didn't know of any leaks.

A report commissioned by the New Zealand government suggests Tarawa might run dry, as the water supply won't keep up with the population growth.

Already, many people are down to rainwater only, and during a dry spell they have trouble getting enough. Desalination is an option, but public servants say there aren't enough skilled personnel to keep it working properly.

One estimate puts the coastal protection alone at about $2bn, which is roughly four times the country's GDP. And money that's spent on seawalls can't be spent on health, education, new business or indeed fixing the water system.

Some countries have found a climate change silver lining in the form of a renewables industry, for example.

But patching up seawalls does little to generate new streams of income or build new skills. It's often a dead loss, and the walls themselves are almost always a temporary fix.

Seawall irony

"Look at this! How many more years will we build these things. How much more money will we spend and waste that we will build these seawalls?" says Claire Anterea from the Kiribati Climate Action Network.

"This is a very big question for us, and I think we will come to the stage that we can't build more seawalls around the place."

She's sitting atop a seawall that collapsed during a monthly high tide, and destroyed a large community hall. This kind of damage is extremely common.

And it's a terrible irony that the seawalls themselves often contribute to erosion - because they're made from sandbags filled from the beach.

Local factors like poorly engineered causeways and sloppy land reclamation also affect the tides here, and at the moment they're a more significant problem than climate change.

But the tides are a harbinger too. They're likely to get worse with sea-level rise, and changes in weather patterns could add to the problem.

On islands that are just a few hundred metres wide and just a few metres above sea level, it's abundantly clear why people are worried.

"It's happening faster than I thought it would happen. I mean Cyclone Pam that hit Vanuatu hit our southern islands. We don't have cyclones, or we thought we didn't and that is a change in the weather pattern, and that might be a more immediate danger than the sea-level rise," says President Tong.

He's not giving up hope though. He points to the Netherlands, a country that's densely populated and mostly below sea level, as an example of a country that has overcome its vulnerabilities.

It aspires to coastal defences that can protect against weather events so severe they're only likely to occur once every 10,000 years.

But like most wealthy countries, the Netherlands has everything Kiribati lacks.

Recently, these pictures did the rounds on social media, purporting to show what London, New York, Sydney and Shanghai would look like with after the sea level rise caused by two or four degrees. Engineers have their doubts.

"Flooding of this severity in major cities that are economically important and densely populated is highly unlikely due to the level of protection that is already in place, or would be built in the face of rapid sea-level rise," says climate and environmental risks professor Jim Hall of Oxford University.

Kiribati, by contrast, is a nation of amateur civil engineers, without the skills, materials or money they need - forever locked in battle with the ocean.

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Kiribati's climate change Catch-22 - BBC News

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As world leaders try to hammer out a deal on climate change in Paris, a number of Pacific nations will be watching with interest. The impoverished country of Kiribati is one of them, having little resources to combat the issue. The BBC's Tim McDonald details its dilemma.

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The Trump administration has officially told the United Nations the US intends to pull out of the Paris climate change agreement.

President Donald Trump announced in June the US would leave the pact, and now Washington has formally communicated this to the UN.

The US State Department described its communication with the UN as a "strong message" to the world, but the move was largely symbolic.

Mr Trump was still "open to re-engaging in the Paris agreement if the United States can identify terms that are more favourable to it, its business, its workers, its people and its taxpayers", the State Department said.

"The State Department is telling the UN what the President already told the world on June 1 and it has no legal effect," said Nigel Purvis, a US climate diplomat.

The earliest date the United States can completely withdraw from the agreement is November, 2020, the time of the next US presidential election.

The State Department said the US would continue to participate in international meetings and negotiations on current and future climate change deals.

The next meeting is in Bonn, Germany, in November.

US business leaders react to Paris exit

Business leaders - including the heads of Tesla, Google, GE, Facebook, Amazon and oil giant Shell - say they do not support the US exiting the Paris climate accord.

Read more

The Paris agreement came into effect in November 2016 and aims to prevent the Earth from heating up by 2 degrees Celsius since the start of the industrial age.

Under the agreement, countries set their own national plans for cutting climate emissions.

That means Mr Trump can come up with different targets for the United States than those set by former president Barack Obama.

Under Mr Obama, the US agreed to reduce polluting emissions more than a quarter from 2005 levels by the year 2025. There is no climate court. All that is required in the agreement is a plan and reporting on progress toward reaching self-set goals.

The world has already warmed about 1.1 degrees Celsius since the Industrial Revolution. The overwhelming majority of scientists say the burning of coal, oil and gas is causing the Earth's climate to change because of heat-trapping gases.
AP

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US formally tells UN of withdrawal from Paris agreement

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The Trump administration has officially told the United Nations the US intends to pull out of the Paris climate change agreement. President Donald Trump announced in June the US would leave the pact, and now Washington has formally communicated this to the UN.

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Kyoto Protocol The Kyoto Protocol is an international agreement linked to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which commits it...

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Updated June 21, 2017 10:58:59

You have no doubt been hearing a lot about the Paris agreement and know that it pertains to climate change, but are too embarrassed at this stage to ask for an simple explanation of what it's all about.

That's where we come in. Here's an simple explanation of what it's all about.

First, you need to know what came before the Paris agreement.

UN Framework Convention on Climate Change

The Convention entered into force on March 21, 1994, and now has near-universal membership. It has been ratified by 197 countries. It represented the first time there had been universal recognition that there were a global warming problem.

It called for:

"The stabilisation of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic (human) interference with the climate system".

The Kyoto Protocol

Though adopted on December 11, 1997, the Kyoto Protocol only entered into force on February 16, 2005, due to a complex ratification process.

It essentially operationalised the Convention. While the Convention only encouraged industrialised countries to stabilise greenhouse gas emissions, the Kyoto Protocol forced them to commit to doing so.

Paris Agreement: A reaction to the growing threat of global warming

At the Paris Climate Conference, in November/December of 2015, the need to accelerate anti-global-warming efforts was acknowledged.

The aim was to strengthen the worldwide response by:

Bringing all nations into a common cause, combating climate change and adapting to its effects

Enhancing support for developing countries in order to carry that out (The goal is to provide $100 billion a year)

Keeping a global temperature rise this century well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels

More ambitiously to pursue efforts to limit that rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius

The Paris Agreement came into force on November 4, 2016.

The agreement caps and reduces the use of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), described as the world's fastest-growing climate pollutant, in a gradual process beginning by 2019, with action by developed countries including the United States, the world's second-worst polluter.

More than 100 developing countries, including China, the world's top carbon emitter, will start taking action by 2024, when HFC consumption levels should peak.

Pull your weight, the world will be watching

The Paris Agreement focussed on nationally determined contributions (NDCs), which basically amounts to each country doing the best it can, depending on its specific circumstances. Each country has its own set of targets.

This means each country has to show that it is pulling its weight by reporting back regularly on its emissions and implementation efforts.

The Agreement states:

"Developed [countries] should continue taking the lead by undertaking economy-wide absolute emission reduction targets. Developing [countries] should continue enhancing their mitigation efforts, and are encouraged to move over time towards economy-wide emission reduction or limitation targets in the light of different national circumstances."

The idea is that a one-size-fits-all approach wouldn't be fair when wealthy industrialised countries are in a better position to move towards renewables without jeopardising their economies (plus they've been polluting for longer).

This is to reinforced by a global stocktake every five years to assess whether everyone is on track. The first of these stocktakes will take place in 2023.

Australia's target

On ratifying the Paris Agreement on November 9, 2016, Australia indicated it would reduce emissions to 26-28 per cent on 2005 levels by 2030.

This target represents a 50-52 per cent reduction in emissions per capita and a 64-65 per cent reduction in the emissions intensity of the economy between 2005 and 2030.

And this is where Australia looks like it may come a cropper, with a leaked report indicating the country is not on track to meet its commitments.

Topics: climate-change, environment, environmental-impact

First posted December 09, 2016 16:13:08

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Updated June 21, 2017 10:58:59 You have no doubt been hearing a lot about the Paris agreement and know that it pertains to climate change, but are too embarrassed at this stage to ask for an simple explanation of what it's all about. That's where we come in.

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The EU Emissions Trading System explained

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The EU emissions trading system (EU ETS) is a cornerstone of the European Union's policy to combat climate change and its key tool for reducing industrial greenhouse gas emissions cost-effectively. Find out how it does so: http://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/ets Español: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbnbrK9jgRw Francais: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YK6IZYtLB5M Polski: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AfRyb4F3kk 中国 (Chinese): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sH-IMxNH13o

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Responding to user-generated questions

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The ultimate climate change FAQ | Environment | The Guardian

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Facts and resources about about climate change, covering science, politics and economics

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8 November 2007

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Education resources for schools teachers and students - ABC Education

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ABC Education has 4000+ educational games, videos and teaching resources for schools and students. Free Primary and Secondary resources covering history, science, English, maths and more

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International commitments

Sweden's reputation as an environmental pioneer began with a number of proactive moves in the 1960s and 1970s. Recognising a loss of limited natural resources, Sweden was the first country to establish an environmental protection agency, in 1967.

In 1972 Sweden hosted the first UN conference on the environment, which led to the creation of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the leading global environmental authority to this day.

Sweden was also one of the first nations to sign and ratify the international climate change treaty Kyoto Protocol, in 1998 and 2002 respectively.

The Stockholm Convention (2001), a global treaty aimed at phasing out the production and use of persistent organic pollutants, was largely a Swedish initiative. Waste management, acid rain prevention, sustainable city planning and recycling are other environmental areas in which Sweden have made progressive headway and challenged the status quo.

Sweden continues to create momentum and is looking to intensify negotiations at international settings such as the annual United Nations Climate Change Conference. Sweden's stance is that a sustainable and secure energy supply is best achieved by focusing on long-term energy efficiency and a greater supply of renewable energy.

Public awareness

Perhaps what sets Sweden apart is a combination of citizen engagement, high ambition levels and international solidarity. Even when ranked as one of the most sustainable countries in a number of international indices, the focus is not on what has been accomplished but rather on what remains to be done.

Largely this comes from a public that is keenly aware of and concerned with environmental issues and used to stand up for its own clean water and air. Air pollution (PM10) in urban areas of Sweden is at 10.2 micrograms per cubic metre compared with the OECD average of 20.1. In the 2015 Standard Eurobarometer survey, 26 per cent of Swedes note environment and climate change as a main concern, compared with 6 per cent at EU level.

Aiming high

Climate change caused by the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases is one of the foremost global environment problems today. Since Sweden accounts for less than 0.2 per cent of total global emissions, the country could easily have gone unnoticed in the climate debate. Instead, Sweden has chosen to do more than many other countries on issues regarding energy and the climate.

Recognising that scientific research has become more uniform in its message about climate change resulting from human activity, the government is continuing to set clear domestic goals for the future regarding pollution, clean air, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and energy efficiency.

Roadmap 2050

Sweden's goal to reduce GHG emissions compared with 1990 by 40 per cent by the year 2020, and to have a vehicle fleet completely rid of fossil fuels by 2030 are stepping stones to the overarching goal of a society with no net GHG emissions by the year 2050.

That is Sweden's commitment under Roadmap 2050, an EU initiative whose objective is to reduce GHG emissions by at least 80 per cent below 1990 levels for all of EU.

To accomplish the 40 per cent reduction in GHG emissions by 2020, emissions would need to decline by an additional 20 million tonnes. According to current projections, emissions will have decreased by about 16 million tonnes in 2020, so in order to speed up the reduction the government has to come up with more drastic measures.

Looking further ahead, however, a recent study by the Swedish National Institute of Economic Research found that Sweden has strong chances of reaching the 2050 goal, thanks both to developments in the economy and to political incentives.

Energy efficiency

Besides moving to less carbon-intensive means of producing energy, efficiency has been a major focus in Sweden. By 2020 the government goal is to make energy use 20 per cent more effective compared with 2008.

One move first introduced in 2005 has been to offer tax reliefs to power-intensive industries in exchange for their drawing up energy plans and taking steps to reduce energy use.

For households, government information on how to save energy is widely available. Each municipality - there are 290 in Sweden - has an energy adviser to whom people can turn for help and guidance. Advice is available on topics such as replacing windows, using low-energy lights and switching to different heating systems.

Sustainable solutions

Another way in which Sweden is trying to lead the way to a more sustainable planet is through innovative sustainable solutions. Expenditure on R&D (research and development) represented 3.3 per cent of GDP in 2013, the fourth highest percentage in the OECD.

According to the OECD Environmental Performance Review 2014, Sweden is one of the most innovative countries when it comes to environment-related technology. Investments in environmental R&D have made Sweden an innovation leader for several clean energy technologies, including biofuels, smart grids and carbon capture and storage.

As a result of these investments, Sweden has developed a competitive advantage in technologies related to sustainability. In 2014, Sweden ranked fourth in the Global Cleantech Innovation Index.

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Sweden's reputation as an environmen­tal pioneer began with a number of pro­active moves in the 1960s and 1970s. Recognising a loss of limited natural resources, Sweden was the first country to establish an environmental protection agency, in 1967.

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It is a stark and frightening fact that, despite more than two decades of international effort - including enormous time and energy expended on the Kyoto Protocol - and significant economic costs, carbon emissions are now rising even faster than they were in 1990. Back then they were going up by about 1.5 parts per million (ppm) per year. Now it is 2 ppm. The critical 400 ppm global threshold will shortly be crossed, and there is little reason to believe that this trend is likely to be halted any time soon.

This raises two obvious questions. How could so much effort lead to so little result, and how could so much political capital and economic cost be expended to so little effect? The second follows from the first: Given that current approaches have so lamentably failed, what new directions do we need to take if climate change is to be cracked?

The obvious place to start is with the causes of these emissions. The answers are straightforward: Coal has been the big winner in meeting the growth of energy demand since 1990, particularly for electricity generation. It has increased from around 25 percent of world primary energy demand to nearly 30 percent - a rising percentage on a sharply growing underlying demand. Much of that extra coal has been burned in China, and despite moves to reduce coal's share of electricity generation, China is going to burn a lot more over the rest of this decade. China and India together currently add around three new coal stations a week, and between now and 2020 around 400 to 600 gigawatts of new coal is likely to come onto the world's energy systems.

But before we get carried away blaming China, it is important to work out why this increase has taken place. China's phenomenal economic growth has been based on exports, notably of energy-intensive goods, from steel and petrochemicals to a host of manufactured products. These have been bought largely by the U.S. and Europe, which together account for nearly 50 percent of world GDP.

It is carbon consumption that measures the carbon footprint and hence responsibility, not the carbon production in particular geographical areas. Yet remarkably the Kyoto framework does not take consumption into account. Instead it focuses on carbon production, and mostly in Europe, where deindustrialization and the collapse of the former Soviet Union make compliance with the targets easy. For example, the UK's carbon production fell by more than 15 percent between 1990 and 2005, but once imported carbon is taken into account, carbon consumption went up more than 19 percent. This explains how carbon production can be falling in Europe in line with its Kyoto targets, while global carbon emissions keep going up.

This sadly is not the only fault line in the Kyoto-style approach. It is riddled with free rider problems - in which some nations reduce emissions while others do nothing - and it does not target the countries where the emissions really matter. No wonder the U.S. kept out. Indeed it is a miracle that the Kyoto Framework could even hold itself together at the Durban climate conference in December 2011. The price was inaction: All that could be agreed was that the parties would try to agree by 2015 what might happen after 2020. By that time, all those new coal power stations will have been built and atmospheric concentrations of CO2 will be well above 400ppm. The upcoming summit in Doha, Qatar, will not make much difference to this timetable.

It is time to recognize that while talking is usually a good idea, the fabric of Kyoto is not going to head off climate change. So the answer to our first question - why there has there been no dent in emissions? - leads to the second: What would we need to do to make such a dent?

There are three parts to the answer. The first two are related. Unless people pay the cost of their pollution, they will not do much about it. And that pollution is best measured by carbon consumption, not carbon production. Therefore there has to be a price (a tax) on carbon consumption - a carbon tax with border adjustments to ensure that imports of carbon-intensive goods from countries without a carbon price are treated on the same basis as domestic production.

Immediately howls of political protest will be heard. Politicians do not like carbon taxes, because they fear we the voters will chuck them out if they dare to make us pay for our pollution. Carbon border taxes are claimed to be protectionist, interfering with world trade. Yet a moment's reflection tells us something quite profound: If we don't want to pay for the pollution we cause, we don't really want to address climate change, since a carbon price is almost certainly cheaper than the alternatives of command-and-control and detailed government intervention. Setting specific pollution controls on large industrial installations, picking "winners" among technologies, setting quotas, and targeting subsidies to influence investment decisions are all open to interference by lobbyists seeking to profit from the interventions.

So if climate change is to be dealt with, there is no real alternative but to face down the critics of carbon pricing. Whether politicians rise to the challenge remains to be seen. Yet a combination of the need for new sources of revenue, coupled with the piecemeal emergence across a number of countries of some form of carbon pricing, suggest some limited grounds for optimism.

Not to have a carbon price is an export subsidy and hence a distortion to trade. Making sure we have a level carbon-pricing field is pro-trade and enhances efficiency. It might of course be complex, but it turns out that a small number of large, energy-intensive industries make up the bulk of the carbon trade and so in practice it will not require much to make a big difference to the outcome. It is better to be roughly right, than precisely wrong.

A carbon consumption tax would comprise two elements - a domestic tax on carbon, and a tax on carbon imports. There are a variety of ways of approximating the domestic dimension, from upstream taxes at the point of extraction, to downstream taxes on enterprises or consumers. Externally, the border tax could start with steel, aluminium, petrochemicals, and fertilizers, and then be gradually expanded. The added attraction is that this can be done bottom-up: Countries can do this individually, rather than wait for an international agreement. In other words, it gets around the free-rider problem facing countries that want to be early movers. They can act without disadvantaging their own industries.

A carbon price signals to both the demand and supply sides of the market, and gives a long-term signal to investors. Its immediate effect, however, is almost all on the relative economic costs of coal and gas, making coal proportionately more expensive. In Europe a pathetically low, volatile and short-term carbon price generated through the EU's Emissions Trading Scheme has had no significant impact, and indeed it has allowed a major dash from nuclear to coal and from gas to coal. Germany leads the way - it is burning more coal in its existing coal power stations and it is adding new lignite coal stations.

The immediate priority is to deal with this coal problem. Coal is really dirty stuff. It kills lots of miners - several thousand a year in China, for example. Coal mines leak methane, they pollute the water table with heavy metals, and it takes a lot of energy to dig out the coal and transport it to power stations, which then emit not just carbon but other major pollutants. Coal-fired power plants use lots of water for cooling and the ash needs to be disposed of.

Gas provides a temporary stopgap, with half the carbon footprint of coal and few of the other pollutants. In the U.S., with little or no energy or climate policy, shale gas is making major inroads into coal, resulting in some of the biggest drops in emissions in the developed economies, outside the Kyoto agreement. In Europe, by contrast, governments (notably France) have been banning shale gas, on the grounds that it might lead to methane leakage and water table contamination. These are real problems that need regulating, but a moment's reflection should lead to the conclusion that if shale gas is to be banned, then all coal mining should be illegal, too. Yet in Europe the shackles being placed on gas mean yet more coal is being burned.

Gas is a temporary fix, and unless there is some massive success with carbon capture and storage it will eventually need to be phased out, too, in a decarbonized world. This brings us to renewables. It is a sad fact that none of the current renewables are capable of bridging the gap toward decarbonization. Wind, conventional rooftop solar, and various biofuels and biomasses require areas of land and water resources that are simply impossible to provide. It takes an enormous number of intermittent wind turbines, at best a few megawatts each, to deliver the output of a conventional power station. It takes a lot of roofs and more agricultural land than currently in total use in the U.S. and Europe to make much inroads into car fuels.

Yet it is these current renewables where all the effort - and money - is going. Europe in particular is determined to meet the short-term renewables and biofuels targets by 2020, spending billions on offshore wind and rooftop solar. Not only does this undermine Europe's competitiveness against the shale gas-powered U.S., but it means that the money is not available to spend on future renewables and all the new technologies that might just crack climate change. These include next-generation solar, which involves improving the chronic inefficiency of existing solar panels, in particular through the infrared part of the spectrum, and a host of new materials to capture solar energy. Then there is solar thermal; artificial photosynthesis; geothermal, still in its infancy; next-generation nuclear; and a number of ancillary transformational technologies like smart grids and meters, which influence demand, and batteries and storage, which might solve the inherent storage problem that has long bedeviled the electricity industry.

Current renewables cannot bridge the gap, so either it's climate change or it's new technologies. Yet if, in the meantime, a serious carbon price can be introduced based upon carbon consumption and we can get off the coal escalator into gas quickly, then there is a hope that the 500 ppm threshold will not be crossed by 2050. But carrying on as we are, hoping Kyoto will solve the problem, is worse than wishful thinking: It carries lots of cost for almost no benefits.

* Dieter Helm is professor of energy policy at the University of Oxford, Fellow in Economics at New College, Oxford, and author of The Carbon Crunch: How We Are Getting Climate Change Wrong and How to Fix It.

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Dieter Helm for for Yale Environment 360, part of the Guardian Environment Network

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Kyoto won't save us from climate change - but a carbon tax could

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It is a stark and frightening fact that, despite more than two decades of international effort - including enormous time and energy expended on the Kyoto Protocol - and significant economic costs, carbon emissions are now rising even faster than they were in 1990.

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Australia's Political Climate Change Timeline

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Australia's Political Climate Change Timeline

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Updated July 17, 2014 12:08:10

The Senate has, for now, rejected legislation to scrap the carbon tax.
Here are the key events in the tortuous history of one of the most divisive issues in Australia's contemporary politics.
1997

Australia refuses to ratify Kyoto Protocol

Australia and the United States are the only major industrialised nations not to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, a landmark treaty requiring cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.

2002

Britain adopts ETS

Britain becomes first country to adopt emissions trading scheme in 2002, then joins the European Union scheme in 2005.

July 17, 2007

Liberal prime minister John Howard announces a carbon trading scheme will be set up if he wins the 2007 federal election.

"Implementing an emissions trading scheme and setting a long-term goal for reducing emissions will be the most momentous economic decision Australia will take in the next decade," he tells ABC's AM program.

December 3, 2007

After Labor wins the November 2007 federal election, prime minister Kevin Rudd ratifies the Kyoto Protocol.

Late 2008

Labor commits to a (CPRS) cap-and-trade scheme which it wants to start by July 2010.

Mr Rudd says Australia will cut its greenhouse gas emissions by at least 5 per cent of 2000 levels by 2020.

August 2009

Emissions trading legislation voted down in Parliament for the first time.

November 24, 2009

The Federal Government revises its emissions trading scheme.

But industry groups - particularly the Minerals Council - mount a forceful campaign against it, warning the scheme will cause massive job losses.

November-December 2009

Prime minister Kevin Rudd negotiates a deal with opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull on amendments to the CPRS. Mr Turnbull urges Coalition MPs to support the revised scheme.

But on December 1, Tony Abbott replaces Mr Turnbull as leader and withdraws Coalition support for the scheme.

The CPRS is voted down in Parliament for a second time.

December 2009

Two weeks of United Nations talks in Copenhagen fail to achieve a binding commitment to limit global warming.

Environment ministers reject a draft proposal circulated at the summit because it does not commit the developing world to cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.

February 2, 2010

Opposition leader Tony Abbott announces a policy for a fund, now worth $2.5 billion, to provide incentives to farmers and industries to reduce emissions.

"Our policy will deliver the same emissions reductions as the Government's, but without the Government's great big new tax," he said.

He says the Coalition's policy is vastly cheaper than the ETS, which he says will cost $40 billion over the same period.

April 27, 2010

Prime minister Kevin Rudd puts its emissions trading scheme on hold until at least 2013, after accepting the Senate is unlikely to pass the legislation any time soon.

Support for Labor drops in opinion polls.

June 24, 2010

Julia Gillard replaces Kevin Rudd as prime minister.

Within days, she indicates she will revise Labor's policy on emissions trading before the federal election.

Greens leader Bob Brown says if Labor is re-elected, his party will help the Government pass a carbon tax through the Senate within three months of polling day.

July 8, 2010

Prime minister Julia Gillard rules out a carbon tax as an interim measure.

She says the Government will review global progress at the end of 2012 before deciding whether to proceed with an emissions trading scheme.

"The pricing of carbon I think is best done through a market-based mechanism, that is the carbon pollution reduction scheme, and the 2012 timeframe stands there," she tells ABC TV's Lateline.

July 18, 2010

Opposition leader Tony Abbott says there will not be a price on carbon in Australia if the Coalition wins government.

"We won't have an ETS ... and we won't be having a tax as part of our policy going to the next election," he said.

"The right time, if ever, to have an ETS is if and when it becomes part of the international trading system and that is not going to happen prior to its adoption in America."

February 24, 2011

Prime minister Julia Gillard unveils plans for a carbon tax from July 2012.

Opposition leader Tony Abbott describes it as a "historic betrayal", given Ms Gillard's promise before the election that her Government would not implement a carbon tax.

He predicts the public will respond in a "people's revolt".

Later in the month he confirms the Coalition will repeal the carbon tax if it wins the next election.

"If the Coalition wins the next election you can be absolutely confident there will be no mining tax and no carbon tax," he said.

November 8, 2011

The carbon tax passes the Senate 36-32.

Prime minister Julia Gillard hails the passage of her controversial carbon pricing regime as "a win for Australia's children".

European businesses are paying between $8 and $13 for a tonne of carbon while Australia's carbon price will start at $23 per tonne.

July 1, 2012

The carbon tax begins on July 1, 2012 and raises $3.8 billion in its first six months, according to a budget update in February 2013.

April-May 2013

In April, the carbon price in Europe collapses to as low as $3.34 a tonne, due to slowing economic output, compared to the fixed rate of $23 a tonne in Australia.

In May, the Treasury says it now expects carbon price revenue to drop by $6 billion over the next four years.

As a result, the Government defers $2.8 billion in tax cuts it planned for 2015, which were linked to a prediction that the carbon price would rise.

July 14, 2013

After returning to the prime ministership in June, Kevin Rudd again changes the Government's stance on carbon emissions, announcing it will "terminate" the carbon tax and move to an emissions trading scheme (ETS) in 2014 - a year earlier than planned.

It plans to remove the fixed carbon price of $24.15 a tonne, replacing it with a floating price of possibly $6-12 a tonne. Later in July, Mr Rudd says it will cost the budget $3.8 billion over the next four years.

Opposition leader Tony Abbott says the Government is not really abolishing the tax but merely changing its name.

He says the election will be a referendum on the carbon tax.

September 7, 2013

Tony Abbott says legislation to abolish the carbon tax will be before Parliament within 100 days of his victory.

He says ditching the tax will save households $550 per year.

The Coalition plans to replace the carbon tax with its Direct Action policy, with the same goal to reduce emissions by 5 per cent by 2020.

The plan involves paying companies to increase their energy efficiency and funding for schemes to replenish soil carbons and plant 20 million trees.

According to a 2010 policy document, it is slated to cost $3.2 billion over four years.

September 9, 2013

Prime Minister Tony Abbott wants the carbon tax to be repealed by Christmas 2013.

However, Labor and the Greens say they will not support moves to dump the carbon pricing scheme.

November 1, 2013

Labor's frontbench team votes to oppose the repeal of the carbon tax, unless it includes a move to an emission trading scheme.

Opposition Leader Bill Shorten says he is confident the Labor Caucus will endorse the position.

November 13, 2013

Prime Minister Tony Abbott introduces legislation to axe the carbon pricing scheme into Federal Parliament.

The bill to repeal the tax passes the Lower House of Parliament on November 21 but is headed for defeat in the Senate.

March 20, 2014

Labor and the Greens combine to vote against the carbon tax repeal laws 33 votes to 29 in the Upper House.

Labor says the Coalition's alternative policy to tackle climate change, called Direct Action, will be ineffective and too expensive.

Greens leader Christine Milne says the current law should stand because Prime Minister Tony Abbott has a "do-nothing approach on global warming".

June 25, 2014

Clive Palmer says his political party PUP will back the repeal of the carbon tax only if lower power prices for consumers are guaranteed "by law".

Making his announcement with former US vice-president and climate change campaigner Al Gore, Mr Palmer also reveals he wants an emissions trading scheme similar to the one proposed by former Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd.

However, this would "only become effective once Australia's main trading partners also take action to establish such a scheme," he said.

The next day Prime Minister Tony Abbott says he is receptive to Mr Palmer's suggestions.

July 1, 2014

If Labor and the Greens oppose legislation the Coalition will need the support of six of the eight crossbench senators.

July 10, 2014

The Senate rejects legislation to scrap the carbon tax 37 votes to 35, after a last-minute intervention from the Palmer United Party.

The vote caps off a chaotic few hours, after crossbench MP Clive Palmer accuses the Government of double-crossing his party over amendments to the legislation.

July 17, 2014

After a lengthy debate, the Senate votes to get rid of the price on carbon, with 39 senators voting for and 32 voting against.

The legislation passes with the support of all of the micro-party crossbench, dominated by the Palmer United Party.

Topics: climate-change, political-parties, government-and-politics, world-politics, environmental-impact, environmental-policy, environment, australia

First posted July 10, 2014 13:45:33

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Updated July 17, 2014 12:08:10 The Senate has, for now, rejected legislation to scrap the carbon tax. Here are the key events in the tortuous history of one of the most divisive issues in Australia's contemporary politics. Australia and the United States are the only major industrialised nations not to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, a landmark treaty requiring cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.

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With the Australian federal election just over a week away, it's a good time to review the key milestones in Australian climate policy since the last federal election in September 2013.

After winning office, the Abbott government successfully repealed the "carbon tax". However, an eclectic group of senators banded together to thwart attempts to remove other elements of Julia Gillard's carbon price package, including several influential climate change agencies.

Heading into the July 2 election, both parties are clear on their climate policy platforms, committing to distinct approaches to meet international and domestic obligations.

Labor has pledged to establish two emissions trading schemes and achieve a goal of 50% renewables by 2030. While the Coalition, under prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, is standing by its Direct Action plan and the pursuit of technological innovation.

The timeline below highlights Australian climate policy interventions from the past three years. A more comprehensive survey of the climate and clean air policy landscape since the last election is detailed in a working paper from the Australian-German Climate and Energy College.
The timeline below is best viewed on a full screen browser window. To navigate, click on the arrow on the right to move forward (and on the left to move back).

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With the Australian federal election just over a week away, it's a good time to review the key milestones in Australian climate policy since the last federal election in September 2013. After winning office, the Abbott government successfully repealed the "carbon tax".

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The free market won’t stop climate change, but its failure is inspiring the people who will

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In Your Wildest Schemes: The Market vs. Climate Change

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In Your Wildest Schemes: The Market vs. Climate Change. The free market won't save the planet, but its failure is inspiring the people who will.

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The toxic political debate of climate change

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Public support for climate change has diminished and as the election looms, the two parties have similar targets for reducing carbon emissions but totally different policies for how to get there.

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After Julia Gillard deposed Kevin Rudd and narrowly won the 2010 election, the political conversation was centred around the morality of leadership challenges. This was increased when Gillard introduced a Carbon Tax policy, with the Opposition claiming she broke an election promise.