[Comment] Recession could give birth to EU sustainability treaty
PETER SAIN LEY BERRY

28.11.2008 - EUOBSERVER / COMMENT :

I suppose there could be a sense in which the current recession may come in later years to be seen as a blessing in disguise.

That is not in any way to understate the pain of those who have lost or will lose their jobs and savings now. There is always pain in any transition. But if Europe comes out of the present recession facing in a different direction, then perhaps we shall be better able to avoid even greater pain in the years to come.

Could 200 billion euros be spent better than on clothes, cars and cosmetics? What do I mean? Well, it’s been pretty clear that our way of life in Europe has become unsustainable in terms of the resources it demands and the load that it puts on the planet.

We have learned to recycle but our appetite for energy, of course, and for steel, aluminium, tin, copper, coltan and so on seems practically inexhaustible. Moreover, we export our lifestyle and our consumption to the developing and the emerging worlds. They soon will overtake us, where they haven’t done so already, in their demands on the planet.

The rain forests are shrinking, our seas are polluted with fish stocks decimated; biodiversity is everywhere only a fraction of what it was a century ago. All this we know and now we see the visible effects of climate change in the melting of the permafrost, rising sea levels and drastic perturbations in the weather.

***

Stable and sustainable:

We know this cannot go on. We know that mankind needs to arrive at a point at which the burden that it lays on the planet is both stable and sustainable.

Technology may take us so far. With plant breeding techniques or genetic modification we may learn in the future to double the yield from an ear of wheat, but we know that we shall not be able to treble it.

Though technology may take us a long way from where we are now, we know that its capacity to assist us is not unlimited. We know there will come a point when we shall have to stop the headlong expansion of demand. The world and its resources are finite: we cannot place an infinite load upon it.

Climate change is pushing us towards a more sustainable future, towards using less energy, for instance, and towards recycling of consumables. Here the response from the European Commission and from national governments is clear. We are marching away from profligacy and towards sustainability. Industry must adapt.

Go out and spend:

Now comes the recession in whose icy grip most of western Europe’s economies are firmly held. Unlike climate change economic decline poses an immediate threat to our way of life. So the authorities have acted.

On Wednesday the Commission announced a programme - or rather it exhorted that a programme should be brought into being seeing as it is the Member States who will pay for most of it - of €200 billion of financial stimulus, approximately 1.5 percent of Europe’s GDP.

These measures are directed simply at returning Europe’s consumers to Europe’s High Streets again and to kick-starting the same old cycle of unsustainable consumption.

“Go out and spend,” the Commission says in a crude reversal of its usual financial prudence. “We shall lock the Stability and Growth Pact (the agreement that sets limits on Member State debt and fiscal deficits) in a cupboard until 2011. Do whatever you like. We shall bless your expenditure, save only that it should be “targeted” and “temporary” whatever those words may mean.

It all seems madness to me, I have to confess. Not that the situation is not serious. I know of three people already in my small circle of friends and acquaintances who have lost their jobs. And each firm that folds places a greater strain on all the others until the next weakest folds too. It is a vicious circle. Everyone in business is in survival mode, hoping they will struggle through and trying to safeguard reserves.

No, it seems madness to me to imagine that an undirected and barely co-ordinated financial stimulus of this sort will be sufficient to arrest this recessionary juggernaut.

The stimulus amounts to a few helicopter loads of water against a forest fire. There may be a temporary discernible effect, but the fire will take its own course and burn itself out according to natural factors.

A Treaty of Sustainability:

It seems madness to me to think of such sums of money which, though they may pale in comparison to the magnitude of the recession are nevertheless stupendous sums in their own right, being thrown away like this with so little expected benefit.

It seems madness because that money will have to be paid for. Whether I borrow €20,000 for a new car, or whether my government does so on my behalf, I shall still have to pay for it later - either by direct debits to my bank or by large cheques to the Inland Revenue.

And while I am paying such large cheques - and governments are repaying their financial stimulus debts - I am not in a position, and neither are they, to pay for the investment that should be leading us all towards a more sustainable and a more socially just world.

Instead of these €200 billion being spent on clothes, cars and cosmetics, how much better might it have been to have seen a massive increase in the funding available for research - into energy storage for instance, or hydrogen cars or energy efficiency and renewables, or - given the rise in food prices - into increased yields from sustainable agriculture.

Instead of cutting VAT across the board (as we have done in the UK) could the cut not have been selective to reward those industries that would lead us down more sustainable paths - recycling, repair and re-use, energy saving and so on?

Still in times of difficulty, the EU has the knack of conceiving a vision for the future. In the seventies, after the oil price shock, it conceived the idea Monetary Union; in the nineties - a grand expansion of the Union towards the east, re-uniting our Continent. What now?

Could we be looking in 20 years at a new treaty setting out a new vision? A treaty that dealt not with regulations or constitutional provisions or accessions but one which dealt with a way of living in the world of tomorrow. A Treaty of Sustainability in fact.

—————–

Peter Sain ley Berry is an independent commentator on European affairs.

Trade Carbon for Food Security. This Could Be Another Way To Achieve The Goals of Global Decrease in CO2 Emissions.

By Busani Bafana for IPS.

NAIROBI, Nov 28, 2008 (IPS) - Forget the view of climate change as impending catastrophe for a moment: if negotiators can recognise sustainable agriculture by African smallholders and forests as mitigating factors in climate change, carbon trading could become an important support for Africa’s food security.

There’s no doubt that climate change is a threat: Africa contributes only 3.8 percent of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, but it will suffer worst impacts of climate change.  This is because of limited mechanisms and resources to mitigate and adapt to this significant change from one climatic condition to another. Examples of adaptation activities include introducing different crops to compensate to local climate change and protection of coastal areas from sea-level rise.

But when the UN Climate Change summit opens in Poznań, Poland on Dec. 1, a delegation from the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) will be pushing for changes in the carbon trading market.

“More than four billion people in developing countries around the world who live off agriculture are excluded from this trade and Africa should use this trade to invest in food security which is under threat,” COMESA Secretary General, Sindiso Ngwenya told delegates at a meeting earlier this month in Nairobi Kenya.
***

How carbon trading works:

Carbon trading places limits on emissions at agreed levels; polluters who exceed their assigned limit must buy credits to do so. This is where African farmers can help — if climate-friendly practices in agriculture or preservation of forests are recognised. Polluters in rich countries could then buy offset carbon credits from farmers in Africa.

The global market for carbon emissions is expanding. In 2007, it was estimated to be worth 30 billion dollars — two and a half times the value of average annual aid to Africa.

“Unless the successor to the Kyoto Protocol values the contribution that sustainable agriculture can make to the global carbon market, Africa is still outside the fence,” said Sibanda.

COMESA has mandated FANRPAN to coordinate the Africa-Wide Civil Society Climate Change Initiative for Policy Dialogues (ACCID). The project equips governments and Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) to ensure the post Kyoto Protocol includes sustainable agriculture and forestry management.

Continued exclusion, African delegates warned, could undermine efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and combat climate change.

Eric Bettelheim, Executive Chairman of UK-based Sustainable Forestry Management, said developing countries must be paid to keep their remaining forests but the credits could triple the value of existing forests as well as provide a tasty incentive to set more land aside for afforestation programmes.

“This kind of money can transform economies because it is trade not aid,” said Bettelheim. “Poor farmers must receive increased payments and productivity or there will be no solution to global warming, no post-2012 treaty and no functioning tropical forest ecosystems by the end of the century.”

From:    emma.barnes at earthscan.co.uk
Subject: Earthscan’s new journal Climate and Development
Date:      November 25, 2008

For more information on the journal “Climate and Development” - please visit http://www.earthscan.co.uk/Journals

Emma Barnes
Dunstan House,
14a St Cross Street
London EC1N 8XA
+44(0)20 7841 1930
www.earthscan.co.uk

The UNU on Arid Aquaculture.
11 November, 2008

The UNU researchers issued a report “Arid Aquaculture Among Alternative Livelihoods Promoted to Relieve Worsening Pressure on World’s Drylands” as a result of the four-year study in cooperation with the International Centre on Agricultural Research in Dryland Areas (ICARDA), and UNESCO’s Man and the Biosphere (MAB) Program.

“Arid aquaculture” using ponds filled with salty, undrinkable water for fish production is one of several options experts have proven to be an effective potential alternative livelihood for people living in desertified parts of the world’s expanding drylands.

While it may sound far-fetched, researchers say using briny water to establish aquaculture in a dry, degraded part of Pakistan not only introduced a new source of income, it helped improve nutrition through diet diversification. The researchers also showed it possible to cultivate some varieties of vegetables with the same type of brackish water.

The project based on the results of the research will be launched by the project partners in Istanbul, Turkey, at 1:00 pm local time Nov. 12 at meetings of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification.

A policy brief based on the Sustainable Management of Marginal Drylands (SUMAMAD) project and News Release on “Arid Aquaculture Report” are available on-line.

People in Marginal Drylands. Managing Natural Resources to Improve Human Well-being. A policy brief based on the Sustainable Management of Marginal Drylands (SUMAMAD) project Drylands_policy_brief.pdf

Arid Aquaculture Among Alternative Livelihoods Promoted to Relieve Worsening Pressure on World’s Drylands. Four-year Study Calls for Urgent Reforms to Avert Further Desertification That Threatens Millions of “the Poorest of the Poor” Worldwide.

Dryland policy brie new release.doc

 Brazil imports GNH from Bhutan.

25 November, 2008 - As Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness (GNH) continues to draw international attention, its most recent destination is Brazil, one of the largest and most populous countries in South America.

Last month, when a team from Bhutan visited the country to attend a conference on GNH, they were greeted with an overwhelming response. GNH found its place in the hearts of Brazilians, or so the coordinators say.

“GNH seeds are planted in Brazil. Now we have to water it with care,” said a psychologist and educator Dr Susan Andrews, the founder of the Future Vision Ecological Park, who coordinates GNH in Brazil.

“There is a tremendous yearning in people’s hearts for an integrated solution to problems and GNH shows a systematic approach to all of them. People want to work together towards that,” said Dr Andrews, who was in the capital to attend the GNH conference scheduled to begin next week.

“More and more people in the world are material-oriented but there is also a yearning of the human soul beyond material possession, that’s why GNH has touched so many hearts,” she said.

According to her, Brazil today was becoming one of the superpowers in the world with vast resources of water, energy, food and forests, but had reached a threshold where they had to choose a path to follow.

“Will it follow USA where Gross National Product increased three times in the past 50 years but people are less happy? Where community vitality has been extremely degraded, number of people who don’t visit neighbours increased by four times, violence tripled, one in every 100 people jailed and one in every four people unhappy or depressed,” she said.

“Or should Brazil become like China, a country where a recent earthquake killed thousands of people but the count was less than the number, who died of respiratory diseases caused by pollution every year,” she said.

***

She said that one Chinese environment minister recently admitted that, even though their GNP increased by 10 percent every year, the same percentage was spent in cleaning environmental problems created by development every year, so there was no progress.

“We hope you won’t disappoint us,” she told Kuensel.

By Kesang Dema
 kesang64 at kuensel.com.bt

Kuensel Newspaper - Brazil imports GNH from Bhutan
25 November, 2008 - As Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness (GNH) continues to … in the capital to attend the GNH conference scheduled to begin next week. …
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Wednesday, Nov. 26, 2008

Too much for the Earth to bear.

By KEVIN RAFFERTY
Special to The Japan Times
HONG KONG — The global financial crisis that has sent economies teetering from recession toward slump is preoccupying politicians and families worldwide, who see their livelihoods being snatched away by the consequences of the inventive greed of financial whiz kids.

But a worse crisis lies waiting — involving the very future health and life of Earth. How long before human beings go the way of the dinosaurs?

Politicians and climate experts will meet in Poland’s 1,200-year-old city of Poznan at the start of December, hoping to negotiate a successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol and to bring growing carbon-dioxide emissions under control to prevent further global warming.

A troubling assessment of Earth’s disastrous ecological imbalance came in late October with the “Living Planet Report 2008″ — which claims that people are consuming resources so rapidly that by 2030 two Earths will be needed to support current lifestyles. The report, by WWF (the global conservation organization), the Zoological Society of London and the Global Footprint Network, calculates that global biocapacity — the area available to produce our resources and capture our emissions and keep Earth’s biosystems in balance — is 2.1 hectares per person. The actual footprint is 2.7 hectares.

There are huge differences across the globe. U.S. citizens require 9.4 global hectares — meaning that if everyone on the planet lived like an American, we would need 4.5 Earths already — whereas average Chinese consumption is 2.1 hectares, so if everyone on Earth lived like a Chinese we would be OK, just.

Cynics might ask, “Why bother?” with Poznan or the successor meeting in Copenhagen next year because we are gobbling up Earth’s resources so quickly that we are not going to get to 2050 or any of the other target dates used in the proliferation of position papers. This world will probably end in a big bang of fighting over diminishing resources — what are the odds of the great U.S. fighting machine capturing them, or the more frugal Chinese, who have been assiduously wooing friends and their oil and other precious resources — rather than the whimpering of people slowly suffocating from global warming.

Even cynics would become more cynical if they read the Web site of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Control, which says that the Poznan conference “provides the opportunity to draw together the advances made in 2008 and move from discussion to negotiation mode in 2009.”

Bureaucrats may find buzz phrases such as “plan of action,” “significant progress,” commonality of views on “shared vision,” and “strengthen momentum and commitment” dynamic. But the agenda and position papers lack the blood and guts of the real world and fail to understand the dramatic changes in climate starting to occur faster than experts imagined.

British researchers reported in October that summer shrinkage of Arctic ice, which this year led to the opening of the Northwest Passage, is continuing in winter, suggesting radical melting. A world away in the highest Himalayas, glaciers are disappearing.

On the Chinese side, the World Bank’s David Dollar said scientists project their glaciers will be 80 percent gone by 2035; in India, scientists predict that the glaciers may disappear in 20 to 30 years.

At stake is one of the world’s great river systems; not just a single river but eight: the Yangtze and Yellow, the Brahmaputra, the Indus, Mekong, Irrawaddy and Salween, from the Tibetan plateau, and the Ganges on the Indian side.

Since the Industrial Revolution there has been a significant, albeit slow, change in Earth’s atmosphere. The concentration of carbon dioxide has climbed from 280 parts per million (ppm) to 387 and is set to go higher. James Hansen, the father of global warming, warns, “We’re toast if we don’t get on a very different path.”

He would like to reduce emissions to 350 ppm. The consensus is that the limit should be 400 to have a good chance of restraining the temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius. But some climate specialists warn that it will be impossible to restrict the rise in carbon dioxide levels to below 550 ppm, and probably difficult to keep them to 650 ppm, implying temperature rises of 4 C and higher and throwing the global cycle out of balance with potentially disastrous consequences — not merely for the climate but also for the very existence of some species and the whole of Earth’s ecology.

John Donne’s claim that “No man is an island” is proving prophetic: A small event in an insignificant place can send ripples far and wide. Plastic bags and toothbrushes discarded in the United States have turned up in the stomachs of albatrosses on remote Midway Island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. China’s pollution from factories has gone across the Pacific to Los Angeles. Cutting down of tropical rain forests adds more to global greenhouse gases than all the pollution caused by cars and aircraft, and almost as much as industry.

Against this, progress toward curbing greenhouse gas emissions has been slower than the modest ambitions of the Kyoto Protocol. Emissions of carbon dioxide have risen. Emissions from the U.S. rose by 16.3 percent between 1990 and 2005. The U.S. has not ratified Kyoto, so has no binding target.

Nor has China, which, thanks to double-digit economic growth, has passed the U.S. in total emissions. Global greenhouse gas emissions have increased by 75 percent since 1970. Perhaps the most worrying sign is that Japan, traditionally the most stingy developed country in energy efficiency, has shown a 7 percent increase in its gas emissions between 1990 and 2005 as Japanese changed their lifestyles. Japan’s Kyoto target is for a 6 percent decrease.

The daunting size of the task has led some economists to say that it is too expensive, in social as well as economic terms, to dream of tackling climate change. Skeptic Bjorn Lomborg believes that there are better things to do with the money, and that there are benefits from higher temperatures — from farming in Greenland to immense oil, gas and mineral riches uncovered under the Arctic ice cap. The problem with this philosophy of complacency is that the people who will suffer most from global warming are already poor, and those who will benefit are already rich.

The Arctic may hide 20 percent of the world’s oil and gas resources, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. That oil is equivalent to a mere three years of global demand, or the estimated amount of Russia’s huge reserves. But getting them out could trigger a potential world war over ownership, besides causing further damage to the environment.

The numbers of vulnerable people whose lives would be devastated by rising temperatures are awful. It is not just the less than cuddly majestic polar bear whose future is at stake, but also the Royal Bengal tiger along with 1.5 billion people in the threatened Tibetan-Himalayan eco system and up to half of humanity beyond. Imagine if Bangladesh and its 160 million people were squeezed by encroaching sea waters from the south and by desertification of green land as glaciers feeding the river system disappear. The poorest parts of Africa would also be especially at risk.

U.S. President-elect Barack Obama has put climate change on the front page of his agenda, but even if he can find the right policies, the president does not have a magic wand to change American lifestyles or to combat the immense strength of the industrial complex dedicated to gas guzzling.

The attitude from Beijing is, by these standards, measured. China has finally admitted that its greenhouse emissions have caught up with the U.S., but refused to give its own figures. China added that its emissions will not fall anytime soon and it will not allow the battle against emissions to impede its quest for growth.

Beijing also offered its solution — the rich countries should pay 0.7 to 1 percent of its gross domestic product to clean up the mess that their industrial pollution has caused and to transfer clean technology to the developing world. That would be about $500 billion or more than five times total annual aid from the rich countries.

India’s paper on long-term cooperative action to UNFCCC stresses equity, the rights of developing countries to be allowed to develop and the responsibility of industrialized countries for existing greenhouse gases.

The Kyoto Protocol is a flawed document, not least because of what it omits as what it contains. The three biggest emitters, China, the U.S. and the relentless march of deforestation are effectively excluded, as are emissions from transport. It seems odd at a time of global meltdown, when financial markets have been manipulated and distorted by bright young things on the make, that leaders of industrialized countries pin so much faith in carbon markets that have already been shown to be open to distortion and manipulation and outright lying and cheating.

One of the flaws of Kyoto is the assumption that governments can make promises that will be instantly fulfilled. Climate change is a wickedly complicated issue. On the supply side, there is no easy new — or cheap — technology readily available to replace fossil energy. Even nuclear power, seen as a panacea by some who want a quick fix, may be in shorter supply than advocates imagine.

Expert Daniel B. Botkin cautions that known reserves of uranium are 5.5 million tons, enough for 80 years at current use in which nuclear power supplies 15 percent of world electricity. If decisions were made to build new plants to allow nuclear power to rise to 50 percent of the world’s energy (and let issues of waste disposal and proliferation go hang), there would be enough known uranium reserves to last to 2019.

On the demand side, the writ of governments is still less certain. Americans were insistent as oil prices soared in 2008 on their right to gas at below $3 a gallon (3.8 liters) even though that is a third of prices paid in Europe. As soon as prices started to fall, the enthusiasm for alternative energy began to fade. Do governments have the guts to challenge their own people and tax instant gratification that comes at the cost of the planet and make consumers pay for their gas and emissions?

There is, of course, the question of the cozy club of governments, the people who will take the decisions at Poznan and Copenhagen. Ex-U.S. President Bill Clinton, who no longer has to seek the votes of the electorate or of Congress, declared that there is no problem on Earth that any one country can solve on its own, even the U.S. His wisdom seems to have eluded his own countrymen and the Chinese alike.

As I write this, the Financial Times is open at the paper’s glossy 72-page “How to Spend It” magazine with an article featuring a virgin wool/alpaca sweater, attractive at £2,500. BBC news shows sad lines of refugees in the Congo living in the open rain and queuing for food handouts.

It is a reminder that Earth’s climate is heating up, resources are being guzzled at an unsustainable rate, the really poor of the world do not have a fingertip grip on the necessities of water and food for survival, while the super rich gobble enough for every 100 people.

For all the hot air that will blow at Poznan, how can Earth be brought into balance until all of us reduce our ecological and carbon footprints?

Kevin Rafferty is editor in chief and principal author of “Words into Action,” delegate publication for the Poznan Climate Change Conference.

Wednesday, Nov. 26, 2008

OUR PLANET EARTH: Junk0 Edahiro -Asia’s first lady of the environment.
 http://search.japantimes.co.jp/mail/fe20…

By STEPHEN HESSE for Japan Times online.

If Barak Obama is serious about developing proactive environmental policies that are international is scope, he would do well to work closely with Japan.

Green queen: Junko Edahiro, translator of Al Gore’s book “An Inconvenient Truth,” is a champion of Asian environmentalism in her own right.

But for the inside scoop on Japan’s most creative initiatives, I suggest he bypass the bureaucrats and the prime minister. The person to talk to is Junko Edahiro.

***

Edahiro is widely known in Japan as the translator of Al Gore’s book “An Inconvenient Truth,” but that’s just one tip of her professional iceberg.

Besides translation, Edahiro, 46, is perhaps Japan’s most dynamic and prolific environmental writer and speaker, and a valued adviser to top corporations, civic organizations, local and national bureaucrats and the prime minister. She is also Executive Director of Japan for Sustainability (JFS), which oversees a network of more than 400 volunteers across Japan who search for environmental news and draft articles that are posted on the JFS Web site in Japanese and English.

In an interview earlier this month, Edahiro explained that she sees herself as an agent for environmental and societal change, her goal being to share information and translate awareness into action, both nationally and internationally.

Last month, for example, she was in China to address government leaders on the history of NGOs and civil society in Japan, but she also learned about encouraging changes taking place in Chinese environmental policy.

This week she is in Bhutan at the International Conference on Gross National Happiness (GNH), where participants are discussing alternative ways to quantify and measure economic activity, environmental health and human well-being, in contrast to the widely used, but myopic and outdated, Gross National Product (GNP).

Talking with Edahiro and Noriko Sakamoto, the JFS communications director, offers a refreshing glimpse of Japanese civil society. Too often in the past, Japanese NGOs have tended toward exclusiveness and self-absorption, hesitant to cooperate with others and more concerned about ideology than impact.

Edahiro and Sakamoto couldn’t be more different. Well aware of the daunting challenges facing Japan and the planet, they dedicate long hours to their work; but they are also upbeat and outward looking, laugh easily, and are driven by an empowering combination of idealism and pragmatism.

I last spoke with Edahiro in 2003, so I asked her how things have changed since then.

“In recent years, especially last year, there have been many changes, and what is going on in Japan is similar to what is going on in the world as a whole. Since the most recent U.N.-IPCC report on Climate Change was released, and following Al Gore’s movie (”An Inconvenient Truth”), awareness among the general public and politicians is increasing,” she said.

“The Government of Japan does not usually take the lead, but they are very good at following suit. Many Japanese companies, too, are finding that the rules defining competitiveness are changing, so government and corporations are gradually changing,” she added.

Edahiro noted that corporate environmental activity used to be limited to philanthropy, but environmental action is now becoming a core part of corporate culture. “The bottom line has changed, especially for companies that are involved in overseas operations,” she said.

Change comes more slowly to domestic firms, but she was pleased to see a variety of interesting initiatives surfacing in local markets, particularly in the banking and finance sectors.

“Small banks are very eager to help local companies reduce their carbon-dioxide emissions. For example, some banks are offering special reduced-rate loans to help businesses invest in emissions reductions. Others, such as Shiga Bank and Biwako Bank, are offering savings accounts with interest rates that rise as reductions are made in community CO2 emissions. Similarly, other banks are tying higher interest rates to reductions in the amount of garbage generated by the community,” she said.

At the local-government level, Edahiro noted the use of incentives in Nagoya City to get city employees to ride bicycles rather than drive. While car drivers are paid a flat rate monthly for travel expenses, bicycle riders are paid a variable rate that begins higher than cars and rises with the number of kilometers traveled. As of 2003, car use was down 25 percent, bicycle riding up 50 percent.

(For more information on these and other initiatives across Japan, visit the JFS Web site  www.japanfs.org), scroll down to the index in the right-hand margin, then search more than a dozen topic choices, from energy and transportation to manufacturing industry and NGO/citizen activities.)

Hundreds of volunteers scattered across Japan are the eyes and ears of JFS, providing information on these and other local initiatives from Hokkaido to Okinawa.

This enviable grassroots network, providing Edahiro with a unique perspective on Japan’s environmental landscape, has not been entirely lost on the central government.

Last February, former Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda appointed 12 individuals from various fields to serve on an advisory committee, the so-called Panel on a Low-Carbon Society, in an effort to address the problems of global warming and climate change. Edahiro was selected to represent Japanese civil society and now sits on the panel with representatives from Toyota, Japan Steel, TEPCO and academia.

Edahiro believes that the appointment is proof that the government is finally opening its doors, however little, to direct cooperation with civil society. “To put someone like me on a panel at this level would have been unthinkable just three or four years ago. It reflects change at the highest level,” Edahiro noted.

As one government official confided to her, working with NGO people in the past has been difficult because they tended to be quite confrontational. Edahiro hopes that by listening and discussing problems and solutions in a more cooperative spirit, she and representatives of government and industry can find shared goals and means to achieve those goals.

Recently she was even invited to speak at an annual training seminar offered to executives of the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transportation and Tourism — the ministry that sits at the heart of Japan’s concrete and construction culture. This is the first time an environmentalist has been asked to address the executives, according to Edahiro, and represents a symbolic step forward in awareness.

However, the real problem in Japan is not awareness. Surveys consistently show the Japanese are well aware of environmental problems — as much as 96 percent of the population is concerned about global warming and climate change. Edahiro attributes this high level of shared concern to Japan’s homogeneity.

The challenge now, for Edahiro and JFS, is to convert awareness into sustained action.

JFS is a nonprofit organization established in 2002 to share Japan’s societal and environmental progress with the wider world. Its Web site is bilingual, it distributes weekly digests and monthly newsletters to more than 7,000 subscribers in 179 countries and it invites foreign researchers to speak in Japan.

Edahiro shares oversight of JFS with a brains trust of colleagues that includes co-CEO Hiroyuki Tada, 47, General Manager Riichiro Oda, 41, and Manager Kazunori Kobayashi, 32. However, the day-to-day operations are in the hands of just two full-time office employees: Sakamoto and Nobuko Saigusa, the JFS general administrator and accountant.

Other staff include a Web-site administrator, an information administrator and project staff in charge of the Daiwa-JFS Sustainability College research and educational programs.

At JFS, however, size belies impact.

Asked about the future, Edahiro has her sights set on taking JFS to the regional level. “I’m hoping that in the future we can shift from JFS to AFS — Asia for Sustainability — then to WFS, or World for Sustainability. First, though, we would like to create a platform so that other Asian countries, such as Korea and China, can send out their information to the world in English,” she said.

Last month, she took part in a conference in China titled “Learning from Japan,” which was sponsored by the Chinese Government and supported by Hitachi Corporation. Other Japanese speakers were from government, academia and Hitachi, with Edahiro representing the NGO sector.

Her talk on the development of civil society in Japan was well received by Chinese officials, and she feels they appreciate that cooperation among government, industry and citizens is key for progress on environmental issues.

She also spoke informally with officials about the importance of information dissemination and was very impressed by the ambitious goals China is setting for energy efficiency and for the introduction of renewable energies, “a goal much higher than Japan’s,” she said.

Another initiative that impressed Edahiro was a change in the government’s policy for civil servant promotions. Traditionally, central government officials would be promoted after being sent to work in local areas. In the past, the sole criteria for evaluation, and promotion, was economic growth in the local region.

That is changing. Now environmental criteria are being included, such as better energy efficiency and water quality. If a civil servant does not show progress on these criteria, despite good economic performance, the chance for a promotion to a prestigious central government position is lost, says Edahiro.

Even more exciting for Edahiro, Chinese officials agreed to let JFS publish the contents of their discussions with her.

With Asia for Sustainability on the horizon, Edahiro is even more focused on the biggest challenge of all: translating widespread awareness into widespread action. Being a translator, it’s a challenge to which Edahiro is perfectly suited.

Stephen Hesse can be contacted at  stevehesse at hotmail.com

—————–

Japan for Sustainability (JFS), established in 2002, is a non-profit organization providing information on developments and activities in Japan that lead toward sustainability.

Junko Edahiro
Environmental Journalist
Co-Founder and Co-Chief Executive, Japan for Sustainability (JFS)
Founder and President, e’s Inc.
Co-Founder and Chairperson, Change Agent, Inc.
Visiting researcher, Research into Artifacts, the Center for Engineering (RACE) at the University of Tokyo
Member of International Sustainability Innovation Council of Switzerland(ISIS).
Translator

Junko Edahiro was born in 1962 in Kyoto, Japan. She received a Bachelor’s degree in Education and a Master’s degree in Educational Psychology from the University of Tokyo.

At the age of 29 years old she set her goal to become a simultaneous interpreter, and started learning English from scratch. Within a few years, she transformed herself into a simultaneous interpreter and a translator from otherwise deemed as an “ordinary housewife.” Later, she published a book titled Anything Is Possible If You Wake Up at 2 A.M. and wrote her own stories about this transformation. It became a national best seller and is very popular among those ordinary people with hidden aspirations.

In 1993 she was inspired to work in the environmental arena after her encounter with Lester R. Brown, then-President of the World Watch Institute and a renowned thinker and writer on environmental and global issues. As an interpreter and translator, she has interpreted at many international meetings, lectures, and seminars on the environmental subjects and has translated several books on the environment and sustainability, including Revolution for Eco Economy by Lester Brown, Limits to Growth: The 30 Year Update by Donnela Meadows, et al., and Believing in Casandra by Alan Atkisson.

As she has built the more experiences in the environmental field, she became an environmental journalist and has started writing and speaking with her own ideas and words. In 1998 she started a list serve which passes on information on the state of the global environment and initiatives of sustainability development worldwide, which attracts over 7,500 subscribers from government, industrial and civil sectors. She has written several books, including How to Fix the Earth published in 2005 and intended for business people and policy makers. She also has delivered hundreds of lectures and speeches on the environment, sustainability, corporate social responsibility and corporate communication. She is regularly on TV and Radio shows on topics of the environment.

She also invites prominent opinion leaders from the U.S. and Europe, and presides several networking events, which attracts hundreds of business people, policy makers, researchers, and concerned citizens. With these activities, she is deemed as an icon figure of networking across different sectors.

In 2002, along with other collaborators, she founded Japan for Sustainability (JFS), a non-profit environmental communication platform, which provides information on Japan’s activities promoting sustainability on the website  www.japanfs.org) and publishes weekly digests and monthly newsletters to over 7,000 subscribers in 179 countries.
She is also an initiator of the Candle Night campaign  www.candle-night.org), in which over five millions of people join to turn lights off in the night of the summer and winter solstices to think about the environment and peace.

From 2003 to 2005, she founded three companies, all related to sustainability in one way or the other. e’s Inc. sells eco-products and supports those who would like to transform themselves. Eco Networks, Inc. provides translation and consulting services and help Japanese corporations to conduct effective communication on sustainability and CSR. The other company is named Change Agent, Inc. (www.change-agent.jp), and it provides consulting and education services, with tools such as visioning, systems thinking, communication and management systems.

She has been chosen as a most successful career woman by Nikkei Career Women magazine in 2003. She has been selected as one of the “100 Planet Earth Lovers” at the World Expo 2005 held in Aichi, Japan.
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The Fourth International Conference on Gross National Happiness will be held 24-26 November 2008 in Thimphu, Bhutan.

The official announcement can be downloaded from www.bhutanstudies.org.bt