Bad news behind the no news

Midway through the 194-nation United Nations conference on climate change at Cancun in Mexico, which ends this coming Friday, the biggest news is that there has been no real news. But on the sidelines there have been some interesting events with huge implications for Africa among others.

While the global divide between rich and poor nations still seems to be dogging the search for consensus on how to meet the challenges posed by climate change, the Canadian-based ETC group warned  at a side event that some of the present efforts at climate-engineering are dangerously counter-productive.

At the same time that a huge demand for biomass is being created, the use of lands for carbon sequestration (as offsets via REDD, for example) is being promoted. Creating an industrial demand for biomass is clearly incompatible with slowing deforestation. Yet, predictably, industry players are pushing to ensure that the expansion of industrial monocultures, plantations and practices associated with growing, harvesting and using biomass will be rewarded by offset-financing.

"The example of biofuels should serve as a warning," said Silvia Ribeiro from the ETC Group. "They have resulted in increased deforestation, hunger and land grabs, without reducing carbon emissions. Biotech companies are now pursuing 'synthetic biology' to create artificial microbes that can convert plant biomass into all manner of fuels, chemicals and products. This is shortsighted and risky,” she said.

We have no regulatory structures to oversee the production and use of synthetic life-forms. What will happen if biomass-digesting, engineered microbes are accidentally released into the environment, as is likely?

"Creating new demands for plant materials will never solve the problem of climate change," stated Rachel Smolker from Biofuelwatch.

"Incredibly, some are now advocating that we burn massive quantities of plant material to make charcoal (aka biochar) and bury it in soils. Proponents make all sorts of claims about the capacity of biochar to sequester carbon, for which there is little scientific basis, and they fail to consider the impacts of dramatically increasing the demand for plant matter."

Finally, Teresa Anderson from the Gaia Foundation said that "false solutions add insult to injury for people in the global South.  Small farmers, indigenous peoples and pastoralists are not the people who caused climate change, yet they are already suffering the consequences.

“Now these false solutions are making them suffer even more as they face eviction from their lands to make way for biofuels and the bioeconomy.  Our new report "Biofuels - a Failure for Africa" exposes the false claims made about biofuels, and how they are failing farmers and Africa as a whole."

In a briefing released at the same time by the African Biodiversity Network, Biofuelwatch and the Gaia Foundation it is also warned that “the negative impacts of large-scale biochar development in Africa are likely to be dramatic, including exacerbating land-grabbing.

“A recent article by leading biochar proponents, published in the science magazine Nature Communications claims that the global sustainable biochar potential could involve the conversion of 386 million hectares of land to grow crops and trees for biochar production, as well as the conversion of a further 170 million hectares of tropical grasslands to dense monocultures of fodder trees which would be cut down on a short-rotation basis to produce biochar. This means that 556 million hectares in total would be targeted for biochar, much of it in Africa.”

The briefing points out that Africa is already experiencing massive land-grabbing. “Indigenous communities, forests, water resources and food production are already impacted by large-scale land grabs and agrofuels (biofuels) production and foreign agricultural investment. This has exacerbated evictions, food security and land conflicts at a time when the continent is already suffering from the impacts of climate change.”

It also goes on to warn that the “positioning of biochar as a climate change solution is dangerously premature. Claims about the potential for long-term carbon sequestration, soil fertility improvements and other stated benefits do not stand up to scrutiny – the tests have simply not been done. In  fact, there is potential for biochar to worsen climate-change and pose health risks to rural Africans”.

In yet another report, Biochar for Climate Change Mitigation: Fact or Fiction Almuth Ernsting and Rachel Smolker write about biochar technology that “unfortunately, like other such systems, is based on a dangerously reductionist view of the natural world, which fails to recognise and accommodate ecological complexity and variation”.

While the world becomes desperate, more to meet the challenges posed by the end of the fossil fuel-driven global energy regime than the fears surrounding climate change, Ernsting and Smolker’s final conclusion, clearly illustrate the dangers inherent in this desperation: “Lobbying is underway for a missive scaling-up of biochar production and yet there is little to substantiate the many proclaimed benefits. It is critical that we address this issue with caution, especially given the many dire consequences associated with any technology that involves large biomass demand and manipulation of poorly understood soil ecosystems.”