Nature's Ability to Supply Essential Services

Issues such as climate change and sustainable development requires us to reassess our relationship with the natural environment, and consider our identity as an element within it, rather than outside it. Somehow modern societies need to reconnect psychologically with the natural world if we are to create the conditions in which the actions necessary to confront environmental problems are socially acceptable. This day-to-day isolation from the vicissitudes of the physical environment is associated with a psychological dissociation from the “natural” world, dissociation evident in prevailing political philosophies in which the environment is seen as external to human affairs, and environmental concerns are viewed as peripheral “add-ons” to policy.

The physical environment has been replaced by the economic environment as the main arena providing the context for human actions. This psychological separation of the “natural” and “human” worlds may be traced back to early urbanism and modern life style. But advanced technologies can do service for human beings, allowing a return to nature while maintaining advantages of urban living standards. This requires more efforts to mitigate the damages that it was done to natural system to cope and repair.

Resort to new technologies to address problems of climate change put forward new ideas about how to disentangle knots in the way of growth and establishing sustainable economy at this juncture in history when there are clear signs that the global economy cannot move much further along business as usual of industrial growth without ending up in disaster. The efforts for finding technological solutions reflects the growing worldwide demand for new ways of economic life and thought that will conserve nature and its resources, and empower people to meet their own needs and the needs of others. New technologies restore the lack of ability in what nature has been doing systematically to supply essential services like water and moisture, especially at hard times. This is partly due to increase of population that is beyond nature’s capacity to respond.


However, the acceptability of various approaches towards climate change has become increasingly polarized in recent times, as mutual accusations of downplaying or exaggerated risk, sensationalism, “bad” science, inciting public hysteria, and even conspiracy abound (Weingart et al., 2000). Misreporting and misrepresentation are important because they can lead to a loss of trust at a time when public support for pro-environmental policies is most crucial. Poor reporting of environmental science may also have a disproportionate effect on children who are increasingly turning the new technology as their preferred source of information and who are least able to judge the validity of claims.

Nonetheless, there is collective consensus on the role that technology can play to find solutions and even take advantage of opportunities that are emerging for the use of clean energy and less polluted modes and materials. Until recently, recalls a 30-year veteran of the solar-power business, venture capitalists were far too busy catering to captains of the information-technology industry to waste time on “hippy-dippy tree-huggers” like himself. But now the tree-huggers are in the ascendant and the IT barons are busy investing in clean-energy technology. Investors are falling over themselves to finance start-ups in clean technology, especially in energy. Venture Business Research reckons that investment in the field by venture capitalists and private-equity firms has quadrupled in the past two years, from some $500m in 2004 to almost $2 billion so far this year (Economist).

Other encouraging news came out when studies showed that investors react immediately to the release of new information about a firm’s environmental performance (David Deephouse, 2004). The release of new environmental information has an enduring impact on firms. In other words, firms perceived as environmentally illegitimate will experience higher unsystematic risk than those seen as legitimate.

Business opportunities can be realised and accelerated through collaboration, be this with other like-minded industrial organisation or academia. Confidentiality and intellectual property issues are sometimes perceived as problems which can delay the development of new technologies and tools, but these can be alleviated through relatively straightforward legal documentation. Other bottlenecks in this process also include the time required to identify appropriate collaborators/business partners, finding the right networking mechanism or information resource, identifying an innovative concept or cross-linkage opportunity and accessing funding and finance.

Pollution management businesses are growing and benefiting from initiatives such as IPM-Net which offers environmental professionals, regulators, academics and other stakeholders working in the field of environmental pollution access to an array of relevant and timely information, innovation, networking and business opportunities, and mechanisms which equip professionals with the appropriate knowledge and skills. The transition into a Knowledge Transfer Network has enabled the network to broaden its remit to assist industry to address environmental pollution issues also associated with the sectors of water and waste. By drawing these traditionally divided sectors together, IPM-Net making effort to offer opportunities for industry through accelerating knowledge transfer, identifying cross-cutting business opportunities and stimulating innovation aimed at protecting the environment.


Global Challenges

A new model of development is called for, one in which strategies to increase human resilience in the face of climate change and the stability of ecosystems are central. It calls for a new test for every policy and project, in which the key question will be, “Are you increasing or decreasing people’s vulnerability to the climate?”. [1]

Too much or too little rain can be a matter of life or death in Africa. At different times and in different places across the continent, climate change threatens both. Today, new scientific research and evidence from works in the field find that the climate change threat to human development in Africa is even greater.

In Britain and Ireland the new environment and development campaigning network Stop Climate Chaos [2] is calling for governments to do their fair share by setting a legally-binding, annual, constantly contracting “carbon budget”, which plots a course, year on year, towards a two-thirds reduction in emissions on 1990 levels by 2050. This would create cuts of between 60 and 80 per cent.

The negotiations in international frameworks must deliver a fair, effective and equitable Protocol beyond 2012 that deepens the GHG reduction targets in the industrialized countries and allows greater mitigation contributions from some of the larger developing countries. The expanded framework needs to revive the original intent of international initiatives for developed countries to take leadership by reducing emissions at home. It must also provide the opportunity for poor countries to escape poverty through massive investments in adaptation and renewable energy and support their sustainable development.

Although spending on adaptation to climate change may be difficult to define and calculate precisely, the level of support for adaptation remains limited. Its integration within aid budgets is weak at best, and according to the latest report on the status of contributions to the two UNFCCC funds (the Least Developed Countries Fund and Special Climate Change Fund), these amounted to just $43 million in 2005-2006 (of which the first UK annual contribution was $12 million ( £6.6 million) in total for both funds [3] ).

The role of new technology in empowering poor communities is emphasized to implement policies that bring people to be part of the climate change solution. Particularly, how to improve weather forecasting in Africa has been highlighted. Development groups, however, believe adaptation must be more than this: it has to be about strengthening communities from the bottom-up, building on their own coping strategies to live with climate change and empowering them to participate in the development of climate change policies. Identifying what communities are already doing to adapt is an important step to be able to discover what people’s priorities are and to share their experiences, obstacles and positive initiatives with other communities and development policy-makers.

Giving a voice to people in this way can help to grow confidence, as can valuing their knowledge and placing it alongside science-based knowledge. Policies to strengthen disaster risk reduction (DRR) are excellent method of building adaptive capacity for the future. Communities can be protected from disasters relatively cheaply and simply – tools and methodologies are well developed and can be employed immediately in communities. Thousands of lives could be saved and economic losses prevented each year if more emphasis was placed on this. The climate change community therefore needs to recognise that DRR is a vital component of climate change adaptation. It should work with the disaster management community to advance both fields and avoid duplicating activities. Governments must act effectively, held accountable in fulfilling their previous commitments on DRR.

Failures to address undernourishment stem in part from the fact that for over 40 years emergency aid, and food aid in particular, has remained the chief instrument to address food crises. Food aid does save lives, but it does not offer long-term solutions, and at worst it may exacerbate food insecurity. The emergency, or ‘humanitarian’, system must be overhauled, so that it is truly able to deliver prompt, effective assistance on the basis of need. Policies should hasten the pace of urbanisation in Africa, where the majority of the continent’s poorest and most undernourished people live in rural areas – especially smallholders, nomadic pastoralists and women.

"Drought is a natural climatic phenomenon, but what has dramatically changed in recent decades is the ability of nature to supply essential services like water and moisture during hard times………This is because so much of nature's water and rain-supplying services have been damaged, destroyed or cleared. We have got to fight climate change by realising meaningful and ultimately substantial reductions in greenhouse gases, and we must help vulnerable communities adapt to the climate change which is already here and that which is to come” [4].


1. Africa – Up in Smoke? Download PDF (1.4MB)
2. See Stop Climate Chaos
3. Source: Andrew Simms, new economics foundation
4. Irinnews interview with Klaus Toepfer, Nairobi, 14 March 2006


Sources:
www.oxfam.org.uk/climatechange
www.eci.ox.ac.uk, Oxford Univ’s Environment Change Institute
(IPM-Net) Integrated Pollution Management Knowledge Transfer Network, DTI business support solution and Oxford university’s Center for the Environment, OUCE
Economist, Tilting at windmills, 16 Nov, 2005
BBC, 23June 2006, Blagging in the blogosphere, Dr Richard Ladle director of MSc Biodiversity, Conservation and Management at Oxford University







Commonality

The most depressing element of today’s life is manifested by dissolving in collective anonymous being – like coins that are coined under a unitary economic sign - our unique experience of self, suffering, injustice, and abuse is lost among many, our suffering doesnt move anybody, all are ignorantly calling for saviour. Human decency is dying out in the swamp of commonality of the mass. Populism thinking has reduced this society and our identities into commodity of mass production, one ignorant among many.