Courses on climate change: Free online!

Yesterday I registered for two Coursera courses:

- Introduction to sustainability; and
- Climate literacy: Navigating climate conversations

You can register too. Just sayin' :)

Natural gas and climate change

Natural gas is cleaner than many alternatives, notably coal. It could help to reduce US carbon dioxide emissions from around 18 tonnes per person today to around 14 by 2040.

Unfortunately, that is nowhere near enough. I went to an interesting presentation last week on the 'Economic Implications of Moving Toward Global Convergence in Carbon Emissions'. I learned that taking into consideration population growth, the sustainable level per person per year is around 2 tonnes. That is around the India's level today.

A carbon tax imposed only in the developed world can help. But even a tax of around $250 per tonne would not be sufficient to achieve convergence at sustainable levels. A tax around this level would increase the price of petrol by around $4 per gallon. That sounds like a lot but it really isn't. Americans are still drastically under-paying for petrol compared with Europe and even compared with plenty of developing countries, which can least afford it. Unfortunately, carbon is currently trading at around $10 per tonne in the EU. Still some way to go.

Tradable green energy certificates in Romania

This story from Agerpres appeared in my in-box today but I can't find the internet link:

"As many as 36,9000 green certificates namely 15,200 in the first session and 21,700 in the second session, were traded on the Centralized Green Certificates Market (PCCV), in July 2012, read data OPCOM energy market operator made public.

Five purchase and 32 sale bids were launched and the closure price amounted to 241.05 lei per certificate in the first July session. Eight purchase and 26 sale bids were launched in the second session, when the closure price was 240.98 lei per certificate.

As many as 388,003 green certificates have been traded on PCCV, since early this year. The green certificate is a document attesting 1MWh electricity generated from renewable energy sources. The renewable energy sources eligible to participate in the Green Certificate negotiation system are the water energy made use of in the power plants having an installed power of utmost 10MW, the wind energy, the sun energy and the geothermal energy and the associated fuel gases, biomass, biogas, waste and mud fermentation gas from the wastewater treatment plants.

The mandatory annual quota for 2012 amounts to 8.3 percent of the electricity supplied by each supplier to the end users.

The national targets for the electricity consumption amount to 35 percent and to 38 percent in the perspective of the year 2015 and 2020 respectively."

Sentences of note

"Murle raids for cattle and a far more valuable commodity, children, have prompted Dinka and Nuer warriors to retaliate in kind."


Well, that certainly jumped out at me anyway. From THIS article in this week's economist.

Development and military expenditure

A quote from this week's Economist: "Military analysts at IHS Jane’s say that South-East Asian countries together increased defence spending by 13.5% last year, to $24.5 billion. The figure is projected to rise to $40 billion by 2016. According to SIPRI, arms deliveries to Malaysia jumped eightfold in 2005-09, compared with the previous five years. Indonesia’s spending grew by 84% in that period."


The full article is HERE.


What. if anything, should this imply for development expenditure? I must confess, I am actually not at all sure. Does it matter in any way at all? Thoughts?

Does climate change fuel terrorism?

Here are a few paragraphs from an article on the more general topic strife in the Sahal in this week's Economist.

Low precipitation may seem normal near the Sahara. In fact, much of the Sahel normally gets enough rain to allow modest farming. But a rise in water temperatures in the nearby Gulf of Guinea has shifted the flow of rain clouds southwards, meteorologists say. Livestock have died in droves. Long-term overgrazing and fast population growth have made the problem worse.

Oxfam, an aid agency, warns of a humanitarian disaster, with more than 1m children facing severe malnutrition. Villagers in Chad already dig up ant hills to gather grain the ants have stored. But the worst-affected place is now Niger, a landlocked country of 15m people which, even in normal times, accounts for a sixth of global child deaths from malnutrition. Save the Children, another aid agency, says that the situation in Niger has worsened since September, when a lack of rain led to crop failures of up to 80%.

Misery has made the Sahel’s thousands of unemployed an easy target for recruiters from extremist groups. Their main base lies across Niger’s badly patrolled border with Algeria, where the Sahel becomes outright desert. A two-decade-old Islamist insurgency there has adopted the mantle of global jihad and renamed itself al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. Having failed to dislodge the military regime along Algeria’s densely populated Mediterranean coast, these extremists are increasingly focused on the sandy hinterland.

Read the full article.

Weather insurance

Climate change is causing more weather extremes and more micro climates. Those who rely on agriculture in developing countries are hit extremely harshly. Mongolia, a country which relies on livestock, saw 25% of its stock die in 2010 resulting, largely from arctic oscillations. The World Bank (amongst plenty of others) is working on a number of weather insurance schemes and I attended an interesting seminar about some of these a few weeks ago.

The aim is to insure households against effects of climate change and some of my own research suggests that this is a good idea. Households are often able to cope when they suffer from idiosyncratic shocks and people bind together in villages to help. But few households are able to defend against the kind of weather shocks that can decimate entire villages or areas. 

There are great challenges however when implementing such schemes. The first challenge is to decide when to pay out. The schemes presented in the seminar require publicly available indexes. For example, a publicly available index of rainfall. When it falls below a certain level, if your farm is within a certain radius of the weather station you receive a payout. This was the case in an example in Hondurus presented. In Mongolia, an index of livestock death was used. In both cases, the aim is that an individual farmer cannot influence the likelihood of payout. They also ensure that a farmer who suffers less because he has made investment to protect himself from climate change is not penalised because he has been hit less hard. This encourages such investments. Finally, the index is public, clear and verifiable helping to win trust and gain buy-in.

There are problems though. The first is often weather stations. They often don't exist in sufficient numbers and relevant places in developing countries, so a network may have to be set up. A second issue comes in managing the scheme. Some experiences show that the scheme stops becoming viable when just a key employee or two, with the relevant expertise, leave an insurance company. In nomadic places like Mongolia, sales agents have to chase herds around the country to sell insurance! This makes the costs very high. An Indian example extended to groundwater levels which is a function of the previous monsoon. Therefore insurance has to be purchased prior to the monsoon.

Overall, the practical implementation of these schemes seems challenging but the benefits in the face of climate change, extremely high, when the schemes work.

One of my favourite things about the World Bank is the openness. You can read all about these different projects online. Here are links to the different documents:  Mongolia ; India ; Central America.