There can be little doubt that the tourism, aviation and transport sectors are particularly at risk both from direct effects – such as sea-level rise, changing ecosystems, species extinctions, extreme weather events, etc. in the case of tourism – as well as from attempts to mitigate climate change by cutting carbon emissions. Regulated reductions in travel-related carbon emissions, carbon taxes and rising fuel prices precipitated by the looming oil crisis will all conspire to seriously crimp long-haul tourism (bad news for ecotourism) and air travel, assuming that substantive goals are agreed on at Copenhagen. Even if the world’s politicians lack the courage to agree to substantive emissions reductions, as might be the case, “peak oil” will eventually force what we fail to do voluntarily.

KPMG's Risk Preparedness Framework (Source: KMPG IT Advisory: Find your shade of green. Copyright KPMG 2009 All rights reserved)

KPMG’s Risk Preparedness Framework, reproduced here (click to view full size), shows the transport, tourism and aviation sectors in the “danger zone” where risk as a result of climate change is perceived to be greater than preparedness. What might “preparedness” mean? Prepared to mitigate (or prevent) climate change as the designers of Copenhagen envisage? Or prepared to adapt to the inevitability of climate change?

Should Copenhagen fail we all enter a brave new world of adaptation to climate change, where we place our trust in geo-engineering technologies and where, without massive transfers of technology and resources to developing nations, they will be cut loose and left at the mercy of the elements. Failure at Copenhagen will amount to a vote for vested interests – and some of those interests may include the airline industry, economies dependent on mass and growing tourism, etc.

The language in the World Tourism Organization’s (WTO) Davos to Bali declaration suggests that adaptation is the preferred and expected course for most of its members. Developing countries, it seems, have resigned themselves to adapting to the “inevitability” of climate change. Consider the Indian delegation’s statement at the Ministers’ Summit on Tourism and Climate Change in London in 2007:

…we must significantly shore up our abilities to cope with and adapt to climate change. To be able to do so, we need development, which is also the best form of adaptation. … we need to …. see what can be done to adapt to the inevitability of further global warming.

One wonders whether “development” will be enough when a 100 million Bangladeshi climate refugees stream into India as they flee their flooded delta?

Brazil’s delegation also weighed in with a plea for assistance with adaptation:

Assist developing countries where the tourism sector is particularly vulnerable to the adverse effect of climate change, in order to allow them to meet the related costs of adaptation.

Never mind that the continuing assault on its Amazon rainforests contributes massively to climate change, or that the country is banking on exploiting recent deep-sea oil finds.

Australia, a developed country which has distinguished itself by failing to ratify the Kyoto Protocol along with the USA, and probably informed by its economic vulnerability as a long-haul tourism destination dependent on air travel, put a different spin on it:

The tourism sector … should not be disadvantaged through the imposition of a disproportionate burden either on tourism as a whole or on vital components such as aviation.

The tourism-sector-as-victim argument.

If all else fails however, reach for the jobs/poverty alleviation/economic growth arguments – as the WTO Secretary-General did in Bali. The message seems to be: yes climate change is potentially catastrophic, but don’t touch tourism (and by extension, air travel) as it creates jobs, grows economies and benefits the poor in far-off destinations (Australia excluded).

I have also wrestled with the dilemma of the climate implications of long-haul travel versus the dependence of biodiversity conservation on ecotourism, especially in Africa. This is however not an environmental-socio-economic trade-off, but an attempt to weigh ecological alternatives. One could, however, argue that biodiversity is doomed by climate change over the long-term, notwithstanding short-term attempts to mitigate biodiversity destruction… And when biodiversity goes, species, livelihoods and the ecosystem services that sustain all life will follow in short order.

Another indication that the tourism industry has not quite come to terms with what sustainability might entail is a reference to the need for “tourism to grow in a sustainable manner” in the Davos Declaration after the Second International Conference on Climate Change and Tourism at Davos in 2007. Besides the incongruous proximity of the words “grow” and “sustainable” in that phrase, the methods of achieving this through mitigating emissions, adapting to climate and employing technology to improve energy efficiency are insufficient, although laudable. True (strong) ecological sustainability means that material and energy throughputs must be limited to what the ecosphere can sustainably supply (resources) and absorb (waste, emissions). Best effort mitigation and minimisation are not going to cut it.

Take as an example the need to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 60%-80% of current levels by 2050 in order to limit the average global temperature increase to 2^oC. Suppose air travel volumes and aircraft-miles were clamped at current levels and that all airline fleets were replaced with Boeing Dreamliners tomorrow. Even in this unlikely, zero-growth scenario aviation emissions would be reduced by only 20%, which means that tourism would not be contributing anywhere near its share of reductions. Outside of hoping for a technological silver bullet to come to the rescue, the implications for tourism are pretty stark and understandably nobody wants to really deal with them.

So, no – the tourism industry is not ready for climate risk.

Prof Dave Richardson of the Centre of Excellence for Invasion Biology at Stellenbosch University is the lead author of a ground-breaking paper that describes a tool to help policy-makers and scientists employ “managed relocation” to move species into “more accommodating habitat” where they are currently absent.

“We hope that the tool will help to reduce the polarity that has emerged in the debate on whether managed relocation should be added to the conservationist’s toolbox,” says Prof Richardson.

“Scientists are, for the first time, objectively evaluating ways to help species cope with rapidly changing climate and other environmental threats by implementing strategies that were considered too radical for serious consideration as recently as five or ten years ago,” explains Prof Richardson, one of the world’s leading minds on matters pertaining to invasive species.

“Our decision-making tool is ground-breaking because managed relocation has traditionally been categorically eschewed by scientists for fear that relocated species would harm receiving habitats by reproducing wildly out of control, causing extinctions of local species,” says Prof Richardson, who cites the way in which invasive alien trees have reduced water production from mountain catchments in the Western Cape as an example of the damage that translocation can do.

Now that is radical. It seems climate change is so rapid, that a more than 2 degrees C average global temperature increase this century is inevitable, that we are going to intervene radically in ecosystem functioning in order to help our fellow species survive. I wonder where we can relocate the polar bears to?

Ralph Pina is an ecoAfrica.com founder

Recently George Monbiot (UK Guardian) posted on his blog about the supposed (my skeptic kicking in) relocation of the people of the Carteret Islands due to global warming. This little island with its highest peak being a mere 5ft above sea-level is slowly but surely becoming a victim of global warming as the water level is annually rising; causing flooding of crops, etc.

For some this is alarming, 2,600 people after all stay on this island but for others who stay 1000 miles away in their penthouse apartments it might not be. Some extremists even view it as something we deserve.

What interests me the most is the responses you usually read

Now questions can be asked about these findings. For example:

• Living on Earth is like sitting in a tub. If water rises 5 cm in one end, it should also rise 5cm at the other end. Not so?
• Are the Carteret Islands sinking or are the waters rising?

Without a doubt global warming is a problem, but if you based your truths on muddy foundations, the truth gets judged by it and until eventually it loses integrity.

Supporters of global warming should be vigilant against people with muddy facts, because it erodes the truth their foundation is built on and there is nothing left for them to stand on. Then the truth will no longer matter and we will be lost.

Deforested slopes under cultivation

A few kilometres outside Lilongwe the contrast could not be starker. Lumbering 4×4′s give way to the dominant mode of transport – bicycles. Bicycles by the thousands, bicycles loaded with towers of wood and charcoal, bicycles as taxis. So while the inexorable rise in the oil price over the longer term has serious consequences for Malawi’s small formal economy as it gets priced out of the world oil market – not to mention for the operations of the 4×4-mounted NGOs et al – 85% of the population who live and sustain themselves in the rural areas could well be less affected by peak oil. However, there is a new indirect and perverse threat as indigenous woodland is replaced with Jatropha, a cash crop for biofuel, in a country already suffering severe and accelerating deforestation and destruction of biodiversity. I’ll return to the issue of deforestation later.

Bicycles everywhere

It is difficult to comprehend how dependent Malawi is on agriculture until you have travelled there (of course we all are ultimately; supermarkets alone are not sufficient – Bartlett’s 16th law of sustainability). Agriculture accounts for a third of GDP and 90% of exports. But dependence on agriculture is more fundamental: almost everybody is a farmer and a subsistence farmer at that. Malawi suffers from an ongoing food security crisis that affects more than five million people in the south of the country. Every scrap of land is cultivated, even the road verges in Lilongwe, to feed a burgeoning population growing at 2.39% annually. No wonder that much of the development aid is targeted at developing agriculture. While I am no agricultural expert it did bother me somewhat that the input of chemical fertiliser, which has as feedstock natural gas, to improve agricultural yields is regarded as one of the major interventions. To my mind this creates a new dependency on an imported resource, which is in any case unsustainable, and over the long term and with injudicious use, destroys the soil.

Bags of charcoal at the roadside

Almost as critical as the food security situation is hunger for basic energy in the rural areas. From simple observation I concluded that the average rural peasant’s day consists of cultivating, collecting and preparing food, and collecting building materials, wood and charcoal. Access to electricity, almost all of it generated by the hydro plants on the Shire River, is limited to the towns and cities and to only 7.9% of the population. Ninety percent (90%) of the country’s energy demand is met by burning wood or charcoal. And the effect of this hunger for biomass can be seen in a landscape denuded of woodland. Rural people are having to travel further and further for wood, and the production and sale of charcoal for cash is a serious problem.

At the same time small, informal brickworks dot the countryside and consume massive amounts of wood. Perhaps there is a perception that a house is only truly a house if it’s built from brick.

In summary there seem to be two drivers of deforestation:

1) energy demand: for cooking, for firing bricks, somebody else’s demand for biofuel crops

2) food cultivation.

As we climbed out of Lilongwe on the flight back to SA, the difference in vegetation cover along the border between Malawi – stripped and cultivated – and Zambia – forested – was stark, a light-dark line of contrast. Between 1990 and 2005 Malawi lost 12.7% of its forest cover. The situation is plainly unsustainable.

Charcoal transporter

Firing bricks with forest

All this got me wondering about development projects that address rural energy needs, deforestation and loss of biodiversity. In my short week in Lilongwe and 500kms of driving to Cape Maclear and back I had seen little or no evidence of rural energy projects, although clearly there must be. And there are – as a cursory Google search will reveal.

The obvious solution to the demand for cooking fuel is solar cooking, and it seems to be getting wide attention and government support. An alternative project involves the production of briquettes from wood and paper waste and other agricultural residues, and another promotes the use and manufacture of clay stoves. Clearly a wide array of technologies, methods and resources are being employed to address the problem of basic energy production.

So, if you want to make a contribution to sustainable development and biodiversity conservation in Malawi, make a contribution to these basic energy projects, especially the solar cooking projects. They need to be scaled up drastically to make a substantive difference. Some links are provided below.

Livestock transport

There are alternative paths too. Africans are resourceful and this young Malawian built a home-made wind turbine to power the family compound from what he had to hand from ideas that he read in a text book. You must watch this remarkable story:

Ralph Pina is ecoAfrica‘s chairman and is currently studying renewable and sustainable energy

References:

Ndirande Nkhuni Biomass Briquette Programme: http://www.undp.org/energy/publications/2001/files_2001a/06_Malawi.pdf

Electricity Supply Corporation of Malawi: http://www.escommw.com/distribution.php

Programme for Basic Energy and Conservation in Southern Africa (ProBEC): Malawi: http://www.probec.org/displaysection.php?czacc=&zSelectedSectionID=sec1192918473

The World Fact Book: Malawi: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/mi.html

Malawi Deforestation Rates and Related Forestry Statistics: Malawi: http://rainforests.mongabay.com/deforestation/2000/Malawi.htm

Malawian Food Crisis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malawi_food_crisis

The Solar Cooking Archive Wiki: Malawi: http://solarcooking.wikia.com/wiki/Malawi

So it is with anger that I witnessed the G8 powers’ leaders back away from substantive and immediate reductions in their countries’ emissions and vaguely promise halving of emissions by 2050. Halving with reference to what baseline? 2008 and not 1990? What about intermediate emissions targets? What happened to some of these countries’ undertakings under Kyoto? A spectacle of spinelessness.

Not that China and my own South Africa can simply claim the moral high ground and point accusing fingers at the rich nations. South Africa is one of the most carbon-intensive economies in the world, and China’s aggregate emissions are already approaching those of the USA, albeit on a much lower per capita basis.

But others are able to express outrage and apply pressure better than me. What interests me is the static nature of protected areas (PAs) like the Kruger Park in the face of changing climatic conditions. Protected areas are human creations and like human settlements their locations have been determined by our experience of relatively stable and benign climate conditions over the last millennia, but mainly the last 500 or so years.

In fact many PAs are what and where they are because the areas were less attractive and habitable for humans, more specifically colonial humans. They are opportunistic creations. The lowveld plain east of the escarpment where Kruger is located was a fever-ridden area for the boers at the time (the late 19th century) that the reserves that would make up the park were proclaimed. Modern-day Kruger is a north-south oriented, 300km-by-60 km sliver of land (see our Kruger Park layer in Google Earth for a spatial exploration) jammed between the escarpment and Mozambique. Although relatively large, its ecosystems and wildlife populations are artificially managed – man-made waterholes and fences determine the distribution and movements of wildlife.

Species have always migrated as climate has changed over the millennia, but neither national park boundaries nor national borders will be able to move. They are locked in. That is one problem; another is that climate may be changing faster than species can adapt. There is a further problem too: patterns of human settlement and land transformation have limited the options for natural systems. It is only fairly recently that conservation priorities have shifted away from conserving species and landscapes to protecting the integrity of ecosystem processes that ensure that Nature has options so that species can adapt. Re-establishing migration routes and ecosystem functioning are some of the rationales behind transfrontier parks such as the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park that comprises Kruger, Limpopo and Gonarezhou national parks.

It is predicted that as temperatures rise and rainfall decreases in the Cape, so fynbos plant species will migrate south-eastwards – that is if there are corridors for them to migrate along. Let us for a moment imagine a similar scenario for the vegetation in Kruger, where it migrates eastwards into Mozambique, into its mirror-image park, Limpopo National Park, and beyond. When the fences are eventually down, the herbivores will follow their food and the predators will as well, but Kruger’s tourism infrastructure and its restcamps won’t be able to cross the border. In fact it is highly unlikely that South Africa’s tourism and parks authorities would be pleased about ceding their tourism income to Mozambique. Rather, artificial interventions to retain species within Kruger might be intensified. [Note: this is not a scientific, real scenario, but a thought experiment]

We have fixed cities, parks and borders in space, but the elements and conditions that support life – biodiversity, ecosystems, biomes, climate – are not fixed in space, never have been and never will be.

Ralph Pina is ecoAfrica‘s chairman

As these islands encounter increasingly erratic weather patterns, extreme droughts and floods will force the animals to seek forage and refuge outside the protected areas.  Here they will be met by more desperate and suffering people who, too, try and eke out an existence in harsh and hostile environments.  It requires no imagination as to who will “win” this immediate clash.  Humans will.   But winning the battle isn’t the same as winning the war.  In the long term, sustainable human societies act as a barometer of healthy wildlife populations and vice versa.  At least this is true in Africa – all we need to do is look to the Sahel for recent examples.   So people, their domestic animals and wild animals are in the same boat – Noah’s Arc?  I think this is a very important theme to admit and carry in our imaginations, if we are to take the sensible fork in the road ahead. 

The idea of conservation corridors is to link the islands of protection so that animals can move between them as climate dictates.  Richard Leakey has pronounced how important the corridors are to conservation.  Conservation International is currently implementing one such corridor between the Central Kalahari Game Reserve and the Kgaligadi Transfrontier Park; which brings me to the news of the proposed new veterinary control fence to be erected in Botswana, just north of the Kalahari Corridor. 

Veterinary control fences are not new to Botswana.  They have been a method of controlling cattle disease for many years.  But what is behind the cattle “industry”?  And why is the normally level-headed Government of that country prepared to risk the damage that it will do to its natural heritage, to its environment and to the future health of its people?   After all, beef is a terribly inefficient method of protein production.  And Botswana doesn’t exactly have high rainfall. 

When you look at the figures, beef exports account for a paltry 2.5% of GDP.  And mining and, yes, WILDLIFE tourism account for 30% and 12% of GDP respectively.  But reading the literature you learn that the importance of cattle to Government is that it “remains a social and cultural touchtone”, which in a democratic country, one cannot ignore. 

What a hard place for Government to be.  It knows that climate change is rearing its ugly head and that Botswana will be terribly affected by drought and spreading desertification.  But the rural people, those who vote, probably haven’t even heard the words “climate change”. 

I remember Edward de Bono, the renowned lateral thinker, asking “What is wrong with democracy?”  Here’s one answer, Mr. de Bono.  Or put another way, how do you save people from themselves? 

So while countries in Africa with a checkered democratic history are coming to the realisation, albeit slowly, that there is an interdependence between human beings and nature; Botswana, the model democratic country, is going the other way as a consequence  of democracy.  There is some irony in that.

Yes, at this rate of growth we will double our economy. What is it we will be doubling? We will double our GDP. This means we will double what we produce. In order to double what we produce we will need to double what goes into what we produce. This includes raw materials and crucially, energy. Yes. Roughly speaking, on this growth path, in the next 11 years we are going to need to double the amount of energy we are currently consuming.

As Albert Bartlett, Professor Emeritus, Physics Department, University of Colorado, once wrote: “The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function”.

Predictably, the local media latched on to these statements, which I agree are rather sensationalist, and trumpeted them loudly, but failed to even mention the other half of his statement which asks what we as citizens and businesses are doing to curtail our consumption of energy. (Also see my post on this subject recently)

Tatalias asked:

We in civil society all bear our fair share of the responsibility too. What have we done to make our homes, offices and companies as energy efficient as possible? To be fair the rumblings and warnings of impending power disaster have been building for a while now for anyone who cared to listen. … Al Gore was imploring us to make changes two years ago. Our own industry has been grappling with Green aspects of Responsible Tourism for a few years with conferences and awards, but few have implemented. Time to stop grumbling and blame-storming; time to become part of the solution and change our own personal habits. If we all reduce our energy consumption we save ourselves money, and at the same time collectively solve a national crisis.

Right on! Now why would the media have missed this I wonder…?

But what interests me are the reactions to the crisis from my fellow citizens, which only serve to show how difficult it is to change behaviour and how invested in our energy-intensive consumer-age paradigm we are.

But first some background about power generation in South Africa. Eskom generates more electrical power than the rest of Africa together. However, most of this is generated by burning low-grade coal, of which the country possesses massive reserves. The consequences are twofold: a) our electricity remains amongst the cheapest in the world, not least because the costs of air and groundwater pollution and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have been conveniently externalised; b) we are the twelfth largest emitter of carbon dioxide in the world and our per capita emissions are higher than China’s. Access to cheap electricity has come to be a given, an entitlement and even a right, over many years. So the crisis has come as a rude shock to the populace and business in general, leading to disbelief and anger.

ecoAfrica has not escaped unscathed either. Our operations are interrupted for a couple of hours on a daily basis at present, meaning that our “shop” is effectively closed and productivity and service levels are negatively affected. However, I am aware that the situation in many other African countries is a lot worse, and has been so for years. Many countries are dependent on oil-fired generation and the inexorable increase in oil’s price threatens those countries’ development, and even social stability.

But I digress. In my “other” life I am an IT director at a leading South African university located in a university town. We have spent millions installing emergency diesel generators because as you can appreciate, power cuts are enormously disruptive to academic programmes. But that can be but one short-term response. Given that the university accounts for the lion’s share of the town’s activity and thus a significant proportion of its power consumption, the actual and rational response should be an immediate and intensive campaign to conserve energy on campus. This also makes good sense for reducing the university’s carbon footprint, thus exercising leadership in climate change responses – and now we have a compelling motivation to take the requisite steps. Obvious, isn’t it?

Apparently not. The first stage in dealing with trauma is denial. Although they cannot deny the existence of blackouts, many people are still engaged in the “anger” stage of apportioning blame either to the government, Eskom or affirmative action. Many rail against poor planning and increasingly, lately, against the unpredictability of the blackouts and the way in which “load-shedding” – what a wonderful engineering euphemism – is managed. Amongst some there is an attitude that “they got us into this, so let’s see if they can get us out”. Only a few seem to accept that demand is too high for the supply and that we as consumers of electricity need to review and curtail our own usage.

I have started to note how few households hang out their washing to dry since my daughter, who did some house-sitting recently, recounted how the home only had a tumble-dryer and no washing lines. And this in a Mediterranean climate characterised by “hot, windy and long summers”.

In the university IT building, since Eskom indicated more that a year ago that blackouts would occur, we have added tens of office air-conditioning units, and there are plans to add more. Proposals to rather invest that money in more energy-efficient equipment are not met with nearly the same levels of enthusiasm. An attitude of “we pay for the power, so we are entitled to use as much as we can afford to” sometimes seems to prevail. And while our electricity remains so cheap, this is a rational economic response.

Some of the most intransigent naysayers are amongst a few of my fellow engineers. As an engineer myself I can state, without fear of being accused of bigotry, that a fair number regard “green” initiatives, movements and “greenies” as a bit “soft” and consequently tend to frown upon any action or proposal that carries the emerald tinge. Concern for the environment and conservation, whether it be of energy or biodiversity, are regarded as fringe concerns. Also, many engineers, amongst others, have an unshakable faith that technology will solve all problems. I don’t wish to denigrate technological innovation and human ingenuity, but too often this faith is blind. William Catton referred to such faith as “technological cargoism”.

As I think about the situation more, I perversely welcome the crisis. Although it is a crisis of our own making that has not been precipitated by any constraint on reserves of non-renewable resources – such as would play out in a “peak coal” scenario – it is forcing people to think and consider their alternatives well before the inevitable shortages in fossil fuels occur. More importantly, it’s good for our carbon footprint and combating climate change. But climate change is too long-term, too remote, so a shortish-term, man-made crisis will have to suffice to change behaviour.

There are no words spoken in the film. “I wanted to choose images which are simple and visually based”, said van Meygaarden. The storyline? Well see for yourself.