Posts Tagged ‘governance’
UK Solar Feed-In Tariff (FiT): Ongoing Debate
Posted in Opinion by Kate Archdeacon on March 17th, 2010
Source: Environmental Research Web
FiT for purpose? by Dave Elliott:
The debate on the UK’s new Feed-In Tariff (FiT) has been quite lively, with the Guardian’s George Monbiot arguing that, with solar PV being still very expensive, the way the FiT provided the support needed was economically regressive.
It does look that way at first glance – those that could afford to invest say £10,000 in PV might get £1000 p.a. back for the electricity they generated and used, paid for by all the other consumers, who would be charged extra via their electricity bills. It’s been suggested that this would lead to a £11 p.a. surcharge on bills by 2020. However, in a rebuttal to Monbiot’s analysis, Jeremy Leggett from Solar Century said “the average household levy in 2013, when tariff rates are all up for review, is likely to be less than £3” and he added “this is far less than the average saving from the government’s various domestic energy efficiency measures over the same period. So there is no net subsidy. The levy is not ‘regressive’ at all”.
The extra cost is certainly small, since the expected size of the FiT scheme is small, only maybe leading to 2% of UK electricity by 2020, so maybe this is not a major issue. But it is good to see that the government has now announced a “green-energy loan” scheme (part of its new “Warm Homes, Green Homes” strategy) under which energy-supply companies and others (e.g. the Co-op) may offer consumers zero or low interest loans for installing new energy systems, to be paid back out of the resultant energy savings. Details have yet to be agreed, but up to £7 bn may be made available over the next decade in this way – although it seems it will start off slowly, from 2012 onwards.
City Farms in Cuba: Periurban agriculture
Posted in Movements by Kate Archdeacon on February 19th, 2010
Source: guardian.co.uk
Image: tardigrade via flickr CC
From “Cuba plans city farms to ease economy woes“, by Marc Frank
Project launched to ring urban areas with thousands of small farms in bid to reverse agricultural decline
Cuba has launched an ambitious project to ring urban areas with thousands of small farms in a bid to reverse the country’s agricultural decline and ease its chronic economic woes. The five-year plan calls for growing fruits and vegetables and raising livestock in four mile-wide rings around 150 of Cuba’s cities and towns, with the exception of the capital Havana. The island’s authorities hope suburban farming will make food cheaper and more abundant, cut transportation costs and encourage urban dwellers to leave bureaucratic jobs for more productive labour. But the government will continue to hold a monopoly on most aspects of food production and distribution, including its control of most of the land in the communist-run nation.
The pilot programme for the project is being conducted in the central city of Camaguey, which the Cuban agriculture ministry has said eventually will have 1,400 small farms covering 52,000 hectares (128,490 acres), just minutes outside the town. The farms, mostly in private hands but also including some cooperatives and state-owned enterprises, must grow everything organically, and the ministry expects they will produce 75% of the food for the city of 320,000 people, with big state-owned farms providing the rest.
On a recent day, dozens of people were hard at work plowing fields, hoeing earth, posting protective covering for crops and putting up fencing as the sun came up. “This land they gave to us, the private farmers. I have four hectares (10 acres) and now they have leased me eight (20 acres) more,” one of the farmers, Camilo Mendoza, told Reuters. “Look, on this side and the other side are other plots, and over there another. Here they have given quite a bit of land and support to private farmers,” he said.
Climate-change affordability: Economic study
Posted in Research by Kate Archdeacon on November 19th, 2009
Source: Environmental Research Web
Image: D Sharon Pruitt via flickr CC
From “Climate-change policy is affordable after all” by Liz Kalaugher
Climate policy is cheaper than most economic studies have suggested. Indeed it is affordable without causing any disastrous effects on our economies. That’s according to Jeroen van den Bergh of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain, and Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. “I wasn’t satisfied with the dominant economic approaches, notably cost-benefit analysis of climate policy,” van den Bergh told environmentalresearchweb. “In addition, I had the feeling that many important arguments, including very down-to-earth ones, were being left out of the debate on climate policy. I decided therefore to list all the relevant alternative perspectives on the cost of climate policy I could come up with in a single paper.”
Writing in Climatic Change, van den Bergh details twelve new angles on climate policy cost that haven’t received any attention so far. He believes that cost-benefit analysis isn’t appropriate for climate change policies as it’s hard to be certain about the costs of climate damage, to put a cost on the value of a human life, or to handle scenarios that have a small probability of taking place but would have a high impact, including irreversible changes such as a slow-down of the global thermohaline circulation, or the collapse of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets. The studies tend also to neglect the impact of climate change on human conflict, biodiversity, economic development and human populations. Cost-benefit analyses carried out to date have come up with a wide range of estimates for climate costs. Instead van den Bergh prefers to assess the cost of a reasonably safe climate policy.
“If it can be argued that a safe climate policy means considerably lower net costs than the absence of such a policy, it is rational to be in favour of such a policy,” he writes. “This represents a kind of cost-effectiveness combined with precaution, given the uncertainties involved, aimed at avoiding extreme damage costs due to climate change.”
Resource: Climate Change Map
Posted in Research by Kate Archdeacon on October 30th, 2009
Source: Met Office, UK
Image: Met Office
A new map illustrating the global consequences of failing to keep temperature change to under 2 °C was launched [last week] by the UK Government, in partnership with the Met Office. The map was developed using the latest peer-reviewed science from the Met Office Hadley Centre and other leading impact scientists. The poster highlights some of the impacts that may occur if the global average temperature rises by 4 °C above the pre-industrial climate average. Ahead of December’s international climate change talks in Copenhagen, the Government is aiming for an agreement that limits climate change as far as possible to 2 °C. Increases of more than two degrees will have huge impacts on the world.
The poster shows that a four degree average rise will not be spread uniformly across the globe. The land will heat up more quickly than the sea, and high latitudes, particularly the Arctic, will have larger temperature increases. The average land temperature will be 5.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels. The impacts on human activity shown on the map are only a selection of those that may occur, and highlight the severe effects on water availability, agricultural productivity, extreme temperatures and drought, the risk of forest fire and sea-level rise. Agricultural yields are expected to decrease for all major cereal crops in all major regions of production. Half of all Himalayan glaciers will be significantly reduced by 2050, leading to 23% of the population of China being deprived of the vital dry season glacial melt water source.
“The map’s release marks a significant shift in political discourse on climate change, with many politicians until recently unwilling to discuss the possibility of a failure to hit the 2C target “, David Adam and Allegra Stratton, guardian.co.uk.
Read the full article.
Climate Change Adaptation Futures
Posted in Events by Kate Archdeacon on September 1st, 2009
Source: Rural Climate Network
Image: SMH
Conference: Climate Change Adaptation Futures: preparing for the unavoidable impacts of climate change
29 June – 1 July 2010, Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia
Co-hosted by Australia’s National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility and the CSIRO Climate Adaptation Flagship, this conference will be one of the first international forums to focus solely on climate impacts and adaptation.
It will bring together scientists and decision makers from developed and developing countries to share research approaches, methods and results. It will explore the way forward in a world where impacts are increasingly observable and adaptation actions are increasingly required.
The Climate Adaptation Futures Conference will showcase leading impacts and adaptation research from around the world.
It will explore the contribution of adaptation science to planning and policy making, and how robust adaptation decision making can proceed in the face of uncertainty about climate change and its impacts.
Registrations open online Monday 31 August, 2009.
Bus Rapid Transit System, Bogota
Posted in Models by Kate Archdeacon on August 27th, 2009
Source: By Degrees, NY Times
From “Buses May Aid Climate Battle in Poor Cities“, Elisabeth Rosenthal
Image: Scott Dalton, NY Times
BOGOTÁ, Colombia — Like most thoroughfares in booming cities of the developing world, Bogotá’s Seventh Avenue resembles a noisy, exhaust-coated parking lot — a gluey tangle of cars and the rickety, smoke-puffing private minibuses that have long provided transportation for the masses.
But a few blocks away, sleek red vehicles full of commuters speed down the four center lanes of Avenida de las Américas. The long, segmented, low-emission buses are part of a novel public transportation system called bus rapid transit, or B.R.T. It is more like an above-ground subway than a collection of bus routes, with seven intersecting lines, enclosed stations that are entered through turnstiles with the swipe of a fare card and coaches that feel like trams inside.
Versions of these systems are being planned or built in dozens of developing cities around the world — Mexico City, Cape Town, Jakarta, Indonesia, and Ahmedabad, India, to name a few — providing public transportation that improves traffic flow and reduces smog at a fraction of the cost of building a subway.
San Francisco Peak Oil Report
Posted in Movements, Research by Kate Archdeacon on August 10th, 2009
Source: PostCarbon Institute
Image: Dustin Jensen via SFGate
“…And most importantly, with all of these policies, start now. Conditions will be far better in the long run if the City begins addressing this unfolding challenge immediately. The transition cannot be done quickly; the City faces a limited window of opportunity to begin, after which adaptation will become enormously difficult, painful, and expensive. There is no time to lose.”
Extract from the report on Energy Bulletin, here.
In March 2009 the the San Francisco Peak Oil Preparedness Task Force published its report on the city’s vulnerability to peak oil and gas. The report acknowledges the threat to San Francisco from peak oil and gas and includes a raft of recommendations. On 23 July the report was slated to be presented to the Board of Supervisors at the Government Audit Committee meeting.
San Francisco was born at the beginning of the oil age, and the city has flourished during an era in which fossil fuels became the foundation of our economy and society. Petroleum and natural gas heat our homes and light our offices; they fuel the trucks that bring us our food and the cars and buses that move us around; they drive our industries and power the information technologies that marvel the world. Today, the City and its inhabitants are utterly reliant on fossil fuel energy: 84% of the energy consumed in San Francisco comes from oil and natural gas.
Because petroleum and natural gas are finite resources, this situation cannot last. If San Francisco is to thrive in the 21st century and remain a world-class city, it must begin planning today for how to maintain itself in a postfossil fuel age….
Salisbury Aquifer Recharge and Recovery Scheme
Posted in Models, RDAG by CBiggs on August 7th, 2009
Location: Salisbury, Adelaide, Australia
The scheme started in the 90’s with progressive thinkers in the City of Salisbury authority trying to find a way to store water that could be used in summer and cut water costs. This original effort has expanded to include stormwater collection, wetland treatment and aquifer injection and retrieval.
One of triggers for the project was the prospect that a major water user (a wool processing facility) was considering relocation due to the cost of bringing over 1bn L of water per year from the river Murray which would have put hundreds of jobs at risk. In a joint project with the council, stormwater is now diverted from drains flowing to the sea and treated in nearby wetlands supplying the wool processor with an alternative local source.
Australian PM’s Blog on Climate Change
Posted in Models by Kate Archdeacon on July 20th, 2009
Source: Climate Action Calendar
Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has established a BLOG and the first focus is Climate Change!
The current focus is only open until Wednesday 22 July 2009.
NZ Council: Pro-Greywater
Posted in Movements by Kate Archdeacon on July 15th, 2009
Source: Watersmart
The Kapiti Coast District Council has become the first New Zealand local government body to regulate for the use of greywater to solve a serious water shortage.
The Kapiti district is about an hour’s drive from the national capital, Wellington and has around 46,000 ratepayers. However this number is predicted to grow by more than 50 percent in the next 40 years, further straining the district’s limited water supply. Read the rest of this entry »