UNEP Year Book 2009 Makes the Green Economy Case

UNEP Year Book 2009 Makes the Green Economy Case

25th Session of UNEP’s Governing Council/Global Ministerial Environment
Forum 16-20 February

Nairobi, 16 February 2009--The importance of realizing a Global Green New
Deal and the urgent need for a transition to a low carbon and resource
efficient Green Economy are spotlighted in the UNEP Year Book 2009,
launched today at an international gathering of environment ministers.

The Year Book, compiled at the request of the UNEP Governing Council,
presents the hard facts and worrying trends while also underlining some of
the transformational and innovative ideas already being piloted in both
the developed and developing world.

Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary General and UNEP Executive Director,
said:” The Year Book serves as a reminder to the international community
as to why a Green Economy is so urgently needed from the bubbling up of
methane gas in the Arctic to the shrinking availability of croplands”.

“But it is also about optimism and the power of positive policies: from
the way a building in Africa passively cools itself by mimicking termite
mounds to the way some countries and cities are pioneering industrial
symbiosis—co-locating businesses and factories to recycle and re-use
wastes as raw material inputs, saving finite natural resources, millions
of dollars and the planet too,” he added.

Highlights
Waste
Over two billion tones of waste are being generated throughout the world
annually with someone in a developed economy throwing away around 1.4 kg
of solid waste refuse daily.
This is however leveling off perhaps as a result of waste minimization and
recycling measures.
Developing nations, in particular rapidly developing economies are
producing more waste with China expected to produce 500 million tones of
solid waste a year, and India about 250 million tonnes by 2030 based on
current trends.

Construction and Buildings
There are some positive developments in particular in the building and
construction sector, not least in energy efficiency improvements aimed at
cutting the estimated 30 to 40 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions
linked with the built environment.

A world-wide survey conducted by McGraw-Hill Construction Analytics found
that one third of industry professionals believe more than 10 per cent of
domestic construction is already moving to higher resource efficiency.

A further 50 plus per cent said principles of resource efficiency will be
applied to 60 per cent of their projects in the next five years.

Canada, France and the United Kingdom are among several countries that
have launched programmes to make buildings energy neutral—the buildings
generate via technologies such as solar and combined heat and power
systems as much energy as they consume

The United Kingdom for example has launched a voluntary industry agreement
aimed at cutting by half (12.5 million tones) in 2012 the amount of
construction waste going to landfill. It could recover materials worth an
estimated $1 billion.

The Year Book highlights how copying nature—so called biomimicry—can offer
intriguing solutions. The Eastgate building in Harare, Zimbabwe has
passive, self-cooling systems modeled on termite mounds.

The building, a mixture of offices, shops and car parking, uses an average
of 90 per cent less energy than a comparable structure saving more than
$3.5 million since opening in the 1990s.

‘Materials substitution’ is another emerging field with researchers around
the world in a race to produce cement and concrete that can be made at
temperatures lower than the current 1,000 degrees C.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology are currently looking at using
magnesium compounds—a waste material of many other industrial processes—as
a substitute for conventional concrete’s calcium-silicate-hydrate
particles.

Others are looking at using substitutes based on silicon and aluminum
harvested from waste by-products such as coal ash and iron slag. They have
the potential to cut C02 emissions from cement industry by an estimated 20
per cent, while utilizing an industrial waste and producing a final
product less prone to weathering—the kind of multiple economic and
environmental benefits at the heart of the Green Economy initiative.

Dematerialization is another term in the emerging area of industrial
ecology. At its simplest it can be captured in consumers demanding less
packaging for example on products. A producer of unbleached cotton, who
uses fewer resources, might also be able to charge a higher price and
certainly achieve higher profit margins.

Industrial symbiosis, or what is known in China as the Circular Economy,
is an off-shoot of this concept. The idea is to co-locate businesses and
facilities in such a way that their wastes are raw materials for other
nearby ones.

Pioneering Industrial Symbiosis Network in Kalundborg Denmark, now has
more than 25 industrial waste management processes integrated in one
system.

The United Kingdom’s Industrial Symbiosis Programme involves more than
8,000 participant companies.

It has diverted more than four million tones of business waste from
landfills.

Eliminated over 350,000 tonnes of hazardous waste from the environment.

Saved over nine million tones of water, avoided the use of 6.3 million
tones of virgin raw materials and reduced carbon emissions by over 4.5
million tonnes.

Generated $208 million in new sales for members and saved them nearly $170
million.

Chicago in the United States and Shanghai in China have adopted similar
symbiosis projects.

China’s Circular Economy initiative is also looking at labeling products
for their resource consumption backed up by tough penalties for companies
who use processes, materials and techniques on a so called ‘eliminated’
list.

If items on the eliminated list are used, the government can confiscate
the equipment, materials or product; impose fines of up to $30,000 or shut
the enterprise down.

Imported items on the ‘eliminated’ list must be returned and a fine of up
to $150,000 can be imposed under the plan.

If the importer cannot be identified, then the carrier can be made
responsible for returning the items or paying for their disposal.

Banks or other financial institutions are also banned from supporting
enterprises that manufacture, import or distribute items on the
‘eliminated’ list.

Transport
Transport accounts for over 20 per cent of global greenhouse gas
emissions. In 2005 there were an estimated 650 million vehicles on the
road with that number expected to double by 2030.

The Indian city of Chennai is working with the Sustainable Mobility and
Accessibility Research and Transformation initiative (SMART) at the
University of Michigan in the United States in order to tackle the twin
economic and environmental challenges of congestion and pollution.

Railway and bus systems are to be kitted with wireless technology so that
thousands of computer and software industry commuters can work en route.

At the stop closest to work, the commuters can choose from privately-run,
low-polluting shuttle buses; taxis; rental cycles or walking paths.

The system uses the commuters’ mobile phones to forecast anticipated
transport and traffic conditions and needs. Eventually commuters will be
able to use their phones to check up on the transport networks and choose
the most efficient mode based on prevailing conditions.

Industrial Water
Currently close to 880 million people lack adequate access to clean water
and 2.5 billion are without improved sanitation in their homes. By 2030,
close to four billion people could be living in areas suffering severe
water stress mostly in South Asia and China.

Industry uses 10 per cent of water in low and middle-income countries and
up to close to 60 per cent in high-income ones.

A Finnish paper mill has switched from chemical to thermo-mechanically
treated pulp and installed a biological wastewater treatment
facility—water savings of 90 per cent have been achieved.

An Indian textile manufacturer has switched from using aluminum to zinc in
synthetic fabrics—water consumption has been cut by 80 per cent with the
cleaner waste water produced suitable for irrigation uses on nearby farms.

By separating process water from sewage water, a Mexican sugar cane
company has cut water use by 90 per cent.

A Spanish company, managing 300km of highways in Sao Paulo state, Brazil
has designed the roads to funnel rainwater into 250 containment dams with
a capacity of 2 million cubic metres. The system allows the rainwater to
seep slowly into the ground, assisting in replenishing the Guarani aquifer
while saving money in terms of reduced road maintenance.

While some progress is being made, the Year Book underlines the scale of
the challenge facing the world towards the end of the first decade of the
21st century.

Climate Change
2008 had the second smallest area of Arctic sea-ice left following the
summer thaw since satellite monitoring began in 1979. The National Snow
and Ice Center in the United States found that the minimum sea-ice cover,
which occurred on 12 September, was somewhere over 4.52 million square
kilometers.

“While 2008 saw 10 per cent more ice cover than in 2007, the lowest figure
on record, it was still more than 30 per cent below the average for the
past three decades. Taken together, the two summers have no parallel,”
says the Year Book.

For the second year in a row, there was an ice-free channel in the
Northwest Passage through the islands of northern Canada.
2008 also witnessed the opening of the Northern Sea Route along the Arctic
Siberian coast—the two passages have probably not been open simultaneously
since before the last ice age some 100,000 years ago.
The Greenland ice sheet, which could raise sea levels by six metres if it
melted away, is currently losing more than 100 cubic km a year—faster than
can be explained by natural melting.
Losses from the West Antarctic ice sheet have increased by 60 per cent
between 1996 and 2006.
Losses from the Antarctic Peninsula increased by 140 per cent.

In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimated
that sea levels might rise by between 18cm and 59cm in the coming century.
But many researchers now believe the rise even higher in part as a result
of new assessments of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica.

One study estimates a sea level rise of between 0.8 and 1.5 metres, while
another suggests a sea level rise of two metres in the coming century from
outflows of ice from Greenland alone.

A one metre rise in sea levels world-wide would displace millions of
people. Around 100 million people in Asia, mostly Bangladesh, eastern
China and Vietnam; 14 million in Europe and eight million each in Africa
and South America.

The Year Book argues that urgent action is needed to curb greenhouse gas
emissions, not least because some of the natural carbon storage systems or
‘sinks’ may be losing their absorption capacity raising the spectre of a
runaway greenhouse effect.

Studies in 2008 indicates that one key ‘sink’—the oceans—are now soaking
up 10 million tones less C02.

The Year Book also flags up increasing concern among scientists about
releases of greenhouse gases such as methane from the Arctic as ice melts
and permafrost thaws in part as a result of new studies indicating that
the western Arctic is warming 3.5 times more than the rest of the globe.
This concern has taken on even greater importance as a result of two
recently published studies.

A study focusing on North America suggests that upwards of 60 per cent
more carbon could be stored in the permafrost than previously supposed.

An international study has now doubled the amount of soil-carbon in the
permafrost across the entire Arctic.

Marine researchers have discovered more than 250 plumes of methane
bubbling up along the edge of the Continental shelf northwest of Svalbard.

The International Siberian Shelf Study has found higher concentrations of
methane offshore from the Lena River delta.

Researchers calculate that, once underway, thawing of the east Siberian
permafrost—thought to contain 500 billion tones of carbon—would be
irreversible and that over a century 250 billion tones could be released.

Monitoring of methane levels in the atmosphere indicate that
concentrations rose in 2007 and 2008 after nearly a decade of stability.
Intriguingly higher concentrations were detected in both the northern and
southern hemispheres.

Meanwhile, the Year Book raises concerns over another carbon sink—forests.
Rising temperatures may be stressing trees leading to photosynthesis and
thus carbon sequestration halting sooner in summer months. Stressed
forests may also be more vulnerable to pollution, disease and pests, again
undermining their carbon storage potential.

The Year Book also focuses on new research from the Amazon.

A doubling of C02 could warm the oceans to such a point that rainfall in
the Amazon could decline by 40 per cent.
Overall an estimated 53 per cent decline in vegetation growth could occur.

Forest loss on this scale could in turn raise temperature ‘locally’ by up
to eight degrees C triggering further droughts and putting pressure on the
Amazon River, the world’s largest river that carries one fifth of the
world’s river water.

The melting of the world’s icy regions, including mountain glaciers is
also triggering other hazards above and beyond the very serious threats to
water supplies if glaciers melt away: nearly a billion people in South
Asia rely on seasonal melt waters from the Himalaya-HinduKush mountain
system for example.

Hazardous substances, deposited from the atmosphere and locked away in
glaciers, are now being re-released.
The pesticide DDT is turning up in unanticipated amounts in Adelie
penguins that live in parts of the Antarctic coastline.
Organic pollutants are being carried back into the environment from
melting glaciers in the Rocky Mountains of North America.
Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) can be found downstream of European
glaciers.

Disasters and Conflicts
The Year Book also discusses the links between natural disasters,
environmental degradation, conflicts and human or social vulnerability as
well as the importance of disaster preparedness—issues becoming of
increasing concern in a climate-constrained world.

While geological disasters such as earthquakes and volcanoes have remained
fairly constant over the past century, hydro-meteorological disasters such
as storms, floods and droughts have increased dramatically since 1950.

The frequency of these events has increased by an average of 8.4 per cent
a year between 2000 and 2007.

Another new assessment says that the total number of disasters has
increased from about 100 events per decade in the period 1900-1940 to
almost 3,000 per decade by the 1990s.

A further study puts the total number of disasters between 2000 and 2005
at 4,850 and links this to both ‘technological disasters’ such as train
wrecks and building failures as well as weather events.

The Year Book spotlights Cyclone Nargis that struck Myanmar with a peak
wind speed intensities of 215km per hour on 2 May 2008 leaving more than
140,000 people dead or missing and 2.4 million people homeless and
‘catastrophically affected’.

As with the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the loss of ‘environmental
infrastructure’ made coastal communities more vulnerable.

In the early 20th century, mangrove forests covered an estimated more than
242,000 hectares in the Irrawaddy River Basin, but by the end of the
century just over 48,500 hectares remained with the loss linked to
clearance for charcoal and latterly for agriculture and shrimp farms.

Ecosystems
The 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment concluded that 60 per cent of the
Earth’s ecosystems—from forests and soils to coral reefs and
grasslands—are damaged or being degraded.

The Year Book underlines that this trend is continuing through 2008.

Increasing demand for food and agricultural production is, under current
systems and economic models, triggering a dramatic increase in land under
the hoe and the plough.

Today farmland covers nearly a quarter of the planet’s surface.

Entire forest systems have effectively disappeared in at least 25
countries and have declined by 90 per cent in another 29 countries.

Marine fisheries are in a state of stagnation and have been that way for
nearly a decade.

Since the onset of industrial fisheries in the 1960s, the total biomass of
large, commercially-targeted marine fish species has declined by a
‘staggering’ 90 per cent says the Year Book.

Annual economic losses as a result of over-exploitation and near depletion
of the most valuable fish stocks are estimated in 2008 at $50 billion.

Biofuels and their impacts on food production, poverty and ecosystems can
trigger polarized views with opportunities for income diversification and
a way of reducing pressures on cropland possible in small-scale rural
models.

At industrial scales, different crops can have different impacts. A new
study has assessed the impact on water use in 2030 based on growing
industrial-scale energy crops under current trends.

An estimated 50 billion litres of maize-based biofuel produced in North
America would require 20 per cent of the region’s irrigated water supplies

Producing just under 34 billion litres of sugar-cane derived biofuel in
Brazil would require eight per cent of irrigated water supplies.
Rapeseed-derived biofuel made in the European Union has perhaps the lowest
potential water footprint. Producing just over 20 billion litres of fuel
would require just one per cent of the EU’s irrigated water.

The Year Book points out that it is the poor, and especially the rural
poor who depend on healthy and functioning ecosystems.

An estimated 90 per cent of rural poor depend on forests for at least a
portion of their income.

In rural Africa, small-scale agriculture is the principal source of income
for some 90 per cent of people.

Nature-based income accounts for more than half of the total income stream
for the world’s rural poor.

Better and more intelligent management of ecosystems and their goods and
services will become increasingly critical as the century unfolds and the
population climbs to over nine billion by 2050.

On current projections the availability of cropland per person is set to
drop to 0.1 hectares requiring a rise in agricultural production
“unattainable through conventional means”.

Soil degradation, linked with intensification, has now and already
affected all but 16 per cent of the world’s croplands—healthy croplands
are now confined to temperate areas of the midwestern United States,
central western Canada, Russia, central Argentina, Uruguay, southern
Brazil, northern India and northeast China with a scattering across the
Tropics.

One possibility is to manage land and landscapes as ‘mosaics’ in which
food production is one of several central ecosystem services.

So called eco-management as it is now being termed can date back in some
cases millennia from the grasslands of Europe to the indigenous peoples of
the Americas who managed woodlands to create meadows for deer grazing.

The Terra Preta soils of central Amazonia have three times more soil
organic matter, nitrogen and phosphorous and 70 per cent more charcoal
when compared with adjacent soils—the soils were generated by
pre-Columbian native populations by adding “charred residues, organic
wastes, excrement and bones” to the soils.

Market mechanisms and financial instruments have a role to play including
payment for ecosystem services.

Clearing of forests continues at some 13 million hectares annually, equal
to an area half the size of the United Kingdom. Tropical forest loss
accounts for an estimated 17 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions.

Countries are currently assessing the inclusion of funding for forests in
the UN climate change arrangements to be agreed in Copenhagen later this
year under the term Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest
Degradation.

Granting fishing communities and fishers rights and responsibilities in a
fishery may also be a way forward.

Surveys of various rights-based catch shares for example in Canada, Chile,
New Zealand, Mexico and the United States, indicates that they reduce the
risk of fishery ecosystem collapse while boosting livelihoods.

Harmful Substances and Hazardous Waste

2008 has been a year of food and product-contamination crises.

In March Italy was rocked by incidents involving dioxin-contaminated
mozzarella cheese. Dioxins, substances linked with cancer, are by-products
from a range of industrial processes including combustion.

The cases, centering on the region of Calabria, were tracked by
authorities to suspected contamination of pastureland.

In September, China was involved in incidents where milk including baby
formulas was found to be contaminated with the toxic chemical melamine.

In Japan in October two major companies recalled noodle products after
discovering insecticide contamination.

Days later the country’s largest meat processor recalled products after
discovering that underground water used at a plant near Tokyo contained
levels of cyanide compounds.

Meanwhile in December in Ireland, the authorities recalled pork products
again after dioxin contamination via tainted feed.

Over the past two decades, arsenic contamination has been detected in a
growing number of countries in South Asia, says the Year Book.

About 30 per cent of private wells in Bangladesh show high levels of
arsenic, at over 0.5 milligrams per liter, and more than half of the
country’s administrative units are affected by contaminated drinking
water.

The Year Book indicates that deforestation is aggravating the situation in
the Amazon. Here forest soils naturally contain up to three times more
mercury than pastureland with deforestation releasing mercury to the air
and to rivers.

Notes to Editors

The UNEP Year Book 2009 can be found at
http://www.unep.org/geo/yearbook/yb2009
It can be purchased at Earthprint www.earthprint.com

To read previous UNEP and GEO Year Books, visit
http://www.unep.org/geo/yearbook/

The 25th Session of the UNEP Governing Council/Global Ministerial
Environment Forum takes place in Nairobi on 16-20 February 2009
http://www.unep.org/gc/gc25/

For more information on UNEP’s Green Economy Initiative, visit
http://www.unep.org/greeneconomy/

ENDS

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