WORLD BANK CALLS FOR FOCUS ON AGRICULTURE

WORLD BANK CALLS FOR FOCUS ON AGRICULTURE
http://globalinfo.org/eng/reader.asp?ArticleId=53665
By Abid Aslam MORE BY THIS AUTHOR
WASHINGTON, Oct. 19, 2007 (IPS/GIN) -- The World Bank urged greater investment in the developing world's farms Friday, warning that failure to boost agriculture could doom the international community's ambition to halve extreme poverty in the next eight years.
Three-fourths of the world's poor live in rural areas, yet they receive only 4 percent of the $100 billion given each year in foreign aid, the bank said in its annual World Development Report, which was released Friday.
In Africa, south of the Sahara and in South Asia, "the number of rural poor people is still rising and will continue to exceed the number of urban poor for at least another 30 years," said Francois Bourguignon, the bank's chief economist.
Governments in Sub-Saharan Africa, a region particularly reliant on agriculture for overall growth, tax farms relatively heavily but spend a scant 4 percent of their budgets to support the sector, the bank found.
The opportunity thus squandered is immense: Economic growth generated by agriculture is about four times more effective in lifting people out of poverty than growth stemming from industry or services, it said.
"A dynamic 'agriculture for development' agenda can benefit the estimated 900 million rural people in the developing world who live on less than $1 a day, most of whom are engaged in agriculture," said Robert Zoellick, the bank's president.
"We need to give agriculture more prominence across the board," he added.
The bank's support for rural initiatives fell during the 1980s and 1990s but has begun to rise again in the past four years. This year, the multilateral lender has committed $3.1 billion to the sector. Officials said the bank plans further increases, as well.
The report urged more than just increased financing. Productivity must be boosted in the raising of staple foods, it said. At the same time, small holders must be able to take advantage of the rapidly expanding global market for high-value goods such as flowers, poultry, farmed fish and dairy products.
The bank urged rich countries to reform policies that harm the poor.
"It is vital that the United States reduce cotton subsidies, which depress prices for African smallholders," it said.
Turning to biofuels, it denounced "restrictive tariffs and heavy subsidies in rich countries, which drive up food prices and limit export opportunities for efficient developing country producers."
It further asserted that industrialized countries, the major contributors to global warming, "urgently need to do more to help poor farmers adapt their production systems to climate change."
The U.N.'s International Fund for Agricultural Development, which helped produce the bank's flagship report, urged government support and a greater say in trade policies for small-scale farmers.
"Smallholder farmers, traditionally, have been the most efficient producers," said Lennart Bage, the International Fund for Agricultural Development’s president, in a statement. "They are the future of agriculture in most developing countries."
"However, smallholders face both old and new challenges that require intervention by the state," Bage said.
Turning to trade, he said rich countries must go beyond reducing subsidies and tariffs. Rather, "space needs to be made for the full engagement of poor rural people and their organizations in policy-making on trade."
The report warned that global food supplies are under pressure from rising demand for food, animal feed and biofuels; the rising price of energy; increasing land and water scarcity; and climate change. In turn, the outlook for food prices remains uncertain.
Agriculture itself contributes to environmental stress. The sector soaks up 85 percent of the world's utilized water and is a cause of deforestation, land degradation and pollution. The report urged more sustainable production systems and incentives to protect the environment.
Agriculture remains important in all regions, not just predominantly rural ones.
To be sure, it employs 65 percent of the labor force and generates 32 percent of gross domestic product growth in sub-Saharan Africa.
In "transforming countries" such as China, India, and Morocco, farming contributes an average of 7 percent to gross domestic product growth, but lagging rural incomes are a major source of political tension.
In urbanized countries, mainly in Latin America and the Caribbean and Eastern Europe and Central Asia, agriculture contributes just 5 percent of gross domestic product growth, the bank said. But even here, the countryside is home to 45 percent of the poor.
The report follows a recent internal evaluation that said the bank itself had long neglected African agriculture.
The bank evaluation found that the bank pushed African governments in the 1980s and 1990s to pull back from agriculture. In the agency's defense, the study noted that the bank had assumed that private concerns would step in to fill the void left by fiscally stressed and badly managed government programs.
In most cases, this did not happen and farmers were left on their own to cope with rocketing fertilizer costs and shortages of seeds and credit. Consequently, cereal yields fell to less than half of South Asia's and one-third of Latin America's, the evaluation said.
Zoellick, who took office in July, has said that reviving African agriculture will be a top priority under his leadership.

Building Green

What Is Green Building?
· No green hammer hanging from your tool belt yet? Here's a rundown on the basics of green building.
By Joe Bousquin
The National Association of Home Builders says more builders are hopping on the green-building bandwagon every month: A recent NAHB survey found that by the end of next year, half of its members will employ some form of green construction in their homes.
"We're starting to see 2007 as a tipping point," says Emily English, green building program manager at NAHB. "Consumers are hearing more and more about green building, so builders are looking to incorporate more of those features into their homes."
The Basics Despite more awareness about green building, there is still a lot of confusion about exactly what green building is. For most experts, there are five main characteristics that define it:
Having an environmentally friendly site selection or "footprint." Some of the factors involved are orientation of the house to maximize natural sunlight for heat and light, as well as shade for cooling. As a result, the home's furnace and air conditioning don't have to work as hard to maintain a comfortable house. Another goal is making a minimal impact on the area in which the house is built. Forget clear-cutting the entire lot; take down only the trees and bushes that would interfere with construction. The remaining trees can help cool the house in the summer and act as a windbreak in the winter. And locating the home near shopping and other services will keep the amount of driving down — a win for the entire environment.
Using energy efficient designs and materials while building a "tighter" home to prevent HVAC loss. The use of sunlight and shade for heating and cooling is as old as mankind, but there are designs and materials specifically designed to keep the house nearly air-tight. With less outside air infiltrating the home, the indoor climate is much easier to control. LED lights use a fraction of regular incandescent bulbs, while Energy Star appliances are certified to meet strict guidelines about how much electricity they require to operate.
Because higher insulation standards and Energy-Star-compliant appliances have evolved over the last few decades, energy efficiency is often the first place builders start when going green. "Energy efficiency is certainly some of the low hanging fruit," says Brian Gitt, executive director of Build It Green, a non-profit, third-party green building education and certification group in Berkeley, Calif.
Reducing a home's water consumption through low-flow fixtures. It's true that the earliest low-flow plumbing fixtures caused problems for some homeowners, but today's versions are as good — if not better — than the old water hogs. One technology is the incorporation of air into the process; the result is a low-flow shower that feels just as strong as the one using much more water.
Promoting a healthy indoor air environment. Yes, air-tight houses are critical to energy efficiency, but an unwelcome result is indoor air quality that is five times more polluted than the air outdoors. Green builders often use some kind of fresh-air ventilation to exhaust the stale indoor air to the outside, bring in fresh air and conserve energy.
Emphasizing material conservation and waste reduction while using sustainable products in design and construction. Engineers in the building-materials business have designed all kinds of products to save lumber by using optimal value engineered (OVE) joists and beams that require minimal trimming and boring for mechanical runs. Green builders can go as far as recycling job-site waste and using it for mulch in the newly planted yard.

Another form of waste reduction is building houses that will endure for years before requiring any serious maintenance. Metal or cement-tile roofing, for example, will hold up much longer than standard shingles; many have life expectancies of half a century.
No national standards To help builders get a better handle on green building, the National Association of Home Builders has created its Model Green Home Building Guidelines. "It's a resource guide for builders who want to figure out what green building is and learn about green building techniques," English says. The Guidelines can be downloaded from the website; it's also available in hard copy and on a CD-ROM through NAHB.
While NAHB's Guidelines provides a starting point, there's still no nationally recognized standard for green homes. Instead, there are about 70 regional groups across the country promoting green building in their own regions. They include Build It Green in Berkeley, Calif., and the Southface Energy Institute in Atlanta, which works with the Greater Atlanta Home Builders Association to educate builders. "We don't design and build green homes, but we train and provide technical assistance to those who do," says Dennis Creech, executive director at Southface, whose EarthCraft House program serves as a green benchmark for builders in the Southeast.
A national standard may be on its way, though. The U.S. Green Building Council, a non-profit group based in Washington, D.C., is currently testing its LEED for Homes pilot program in 12 different regions across the country. Jay Hall, acting manager of the program, hopes to "piggyback" with existing local groups such as Southface and have a national standard in place by late 2007. "We're trying to create a national standard for green homes, and send a clear message about what constitutes green as you go from one region of the country to the other," Hall says.
The USGBC also maintains a list of regional and local programs.

Green building now Plenty of builders are using green techniques today — and they're taking it very seriously. For example, Christopherson Homes, which puts up approximately 300 homes per year in northern California, has earned Build It Green's "GreenPoint Rated" certification. Amy Christopherson Bolten, director of community relations, says Christopherson's homes employ a variety of green techniques:
Dual-flush toilets
Low-VOC paints
Formaldehyde-free insulation
Forest Stewardship Council-certified lumber, which comes from forests managed with sustainable methods
2x6 wall studs, which allow the studs to be spaced farther apart to save lumber wood and make the walls thicker to allow for more insulation
Ventilation systems wrapped and sealed to prevent heat and air conditioning from leaking out
"Now we can show our customers how much they'll save in energy costs based on our specifications," Christopherson Bolten says.
Hurdles still present Being green isn't always easy, though. For example, FSC-certified lumber can be problematic. "It's hard to get, and it's expensive, about 20 to 30 percent more than regular lumber," says Christopherson Bolton, who estimates that building green adds a few thousand dollars in costs to each house.
Training subs to build to green specs can be a challenge, too. Then there's the fact that many homebuyers still don't know what green building is. "The public still seems to be on a learning curve with it," Christopherson Bolten says.
That learning curve appears to be on the upswing, though. With consumers hyper-sensitive to energy costs while becoming more environmentally conscious in general, most observers agree that green is the color of the future for builders and buyers, alike. "The builders in our program aren't just a couple of custom-home guys in a fringe market. They're mainstream builders," says Southface's Creech. "Eventually, I think the home-buying public is going to demand that their homes be built this way."
Joe Bousquin writes for both consumer and trade publications in the home, construction and real estate industries. A former senior writer at TheStreet.com and staff writer for The Wall Street Journal, he has also contributed to the New York Observer, Kiplinger's Personal Finance and Men's Journal.
Busted! Eight Green-Building Myths
· Green building has come a very long way in the past few years, yet some myths still persist.
By Rob Fanjoy

Green building is no longer viewed as a passing fad or some strange notion adopted by militant environmentalists on the fringe of society. In fact, the editors of Harvard Business Review dedicated a large amount of space in their June 2006 issue to explain how green building is now an established mainstream building practice.
Geared mostly toward commercial construction, the article pointed out that even six short years ago, green buildings were generally regarded as interesting experiments but unfeasible in the real world. Since then, hundreds of studies have proven the financial advantages of green buildings (residential and commercial), from reduced construction costs to lower operating costs. There have also been studies that show employers with green buildings experience significant workforce benefits, including better employee attraction and retention, lower absenteeism and improved productivity.
Even so, there are still some persistent myths that keep some in the residential construction industry from accepting that green building is proven effective and here to stay.
Myth #1: Green building is too expensive. This is a very common misconception. Although it has been debunked many times in the past, it still lingers. "A lot of the high-profile green projects that get builders' attention are very high-end, and that's one reason this myth is still around," says Alex Wilson, president of BuildingGreen Inc. in Brattleboro, Vt. and executive editor of Environmental Building News. "But the simple fact is that there are plenty of strategies for inexpensive green building, from right-sizing the structure to optimal value engineering to reducing waste, among many others."
Myth #2: Green building is all about material selection. Wilson says that in the past, people equated green building with using "green materials" such as those with high recycled content, low embodied energy, no VOCs, etc. And while he says that is an important part of constructing a green building, it is still a small part of the big picture. "Other factors such as site selection and energy performance are very important as well," says Wilson. "People are beginning to gain a greater understanding that green building is a systems approach to the entire construction process."
Myth #3: Green building products don't work as well. Wilson points to low-flow toilets and fiberglass insulation as typical products that continue to get a bad rap. People still think that 1.6 gallon-per-flush toilets don't work, even though the fixtures were mandated for all new construction more than a decade ago, and that inhaling fiberglass fibers can lead to cancer. "By and large, new green products work as well if not better than traditional products," he says.
Myth #4: Green Products are hard to find. Okay, there is some truth to this one; some green products are not manufactured nationwide and can be hard to purchase in some parts of the country. But the number of green products and systems that are available has grown exponentially over the past few years to the point where there are literally hundreds—if not thousands—of mainstream green products. BuildingGreen Inc. publishes two comprehensive directories (GreenSpec and Green Building Products) with performance data and contact information on just about every green product imaginable.

Myth #5: Green homes are "weird" or "ugly." No, you don't have to build a yurt or geodesic dome and mount huge rows of solar panels to be green. The fact is that many of today's green homes are virtually indistinguishable from "typical" homes. And if you do want to go with solar power, "There are many ways to integrate PV [photovoltaic] panels that both attractive and effective," says Wilson.
Myth #6: Building a green home is too complicated. Ron Jones is the owner of Sierra Custom Builders in Placitas, N.M., and a founder and executive editor of Green Builder magazine. In his many talks around the world on green building, he still has to address this myth. "This is a business that is about common sense, and a lot of green building is very fundamental," he says. "It all begins with a tight building envelope; the rest of it is not very exotic or akin to rocket science."
Myth #7: To get into green building, you have to sign up for some sort of program or third-party certification. While programs such as the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED and the American Lung Association's Healthy House are terrific at garnering exposure and furthering the green movement, builders don't have to get involved with them to build green. "Those programs are great at supplying templates and roadmaps," says Jones. "But green building is really about one project at a time and a builder's and owner's will to make a better choice."
Myth #8: It's an all-or-nothing proposition. Jones says there is often a tendency to separate construction professionals into two groups: good guys (those who build only green) and bad guys (those who don't build green at all). "That's not true," Jones says. "I bet there are plenty of people employing green technologies and techniques who may not even know it. I'd bet just about any builder or manufacturer in this country is doing something for green building."
Rob Fanjoy is the former editor of Smart HomeOwner magazine and former senior editor of Professional Builder. He lives in Ypsilanti, Mich., where he is using green techniques and materials to remodel his home.
Green Building Information Resources
· Use these resources for more information and education about green building.
By Marjie O'Connor
One of the concerns some builders have about green building is that if they decided to start building green, they have to take it all the way. That's not the case, according to Ron Jones, owner of Sierra Custom Builders in Placitas, N.M. (See 'Busted! Eight Green Building Myths'.) All general contractors building to code are already using green-building products, such as low-flow plumbing fixtures and the new high-efficiency HVAC systems. All builders and remodelers can decide just how green they want to be. To put it in literal terms, the level of intensity can range from a pale green (think mint ice cream) all the way to deepest forest green (think ... well, think deep forest.)
There is plenty of help available to anyone interested in green building—contractors and consumers alike. The list on this page represents only a few of those with a national scope; there are many others that focus on local and regional green-building issues. These organizations provide both home builders and homeowners with excellent basic information, such as tips on water conservation, as well as more sophisticated approaches to green building, including building a zero-energy house that generates all of its own energy needs.
The websites of these organizations also have more links to other green-building programs and publications. Be sure to take advantage of as many—or as few—as you like.
Building America U.S. Department of Energy
Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Clearinghouse U.S. Department of Energy Phone 877-EERE-INF (1-877-337-3463) E-mail eereic@ee.doe.gov
Energy and Environmental Building Association 10740 Lyndale Avenue South, Suite 10W Bloomington, MN 55420-5615 Phone 952-881-1098 Fax 952-881-3048 E-mail information@eeba.org
Environmental Protection Agency Green Buildings Cate Berard US EPA (7409M) 1200 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20460 Phone: 202-564-8847 Fax 202-564-8899 E-mail berard.cate@epa.gov
Forest Stewardship Council 1155 30th Street NW, Suite 300 Washington, DC 20007 Phone 202-342-0413 Fax 202-342-6589 E-mail info@fscus.org
Green Building Initiative 222 SW Columbia St., Ste. 1800 Portland, OR 97201 Phone 877-GBI.GBI1 Fax 503-961-8991 Email: info@thegbi.org
Green Building Institute 7761 Waterloo Road, Jessup, MD 20794 Phone 443-733-1234 Fax 443-733-1219
National Association of Home Builders 1201 15th Street, NW Washington, DC 20005 Phone 800-368-5242; 202-266-8200 x0 Fax 202-266-8400
NAHB Green Building Conference Office of the Registrar The NAHB University of Housing 1201 15th Street, NW Washington, DC 20005 Phone 800-368-5242 x8338 Fax 202-266-8501 E-mail registrar@nahb.com
NAHB Research Center 400 Prince George's Boulevard Upper Marlboro, MD 20774 Phone 800-638-8556 or 301-249-4000 Fax 301-430-6180
Partnership for Advancing Technology in Housing A partnership between the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and leaders of private businesses in the homebuilding, product manufacturing, insurance and financial industries.
U.S. Green Building Council U.S. Green Building Council 1015 18th Street, NW, Suite 508 Washington, DC 20036 Phone (202) 82-USGBC or 828-7422 Fax (202) 828-5110 Email info@usgbc.org
How To Get Started Building Green
· Green building is more attractive than ever to builders and home buyers.
By Richard Wall

There may never be a better time to get into green building than right now, particularly as a way to hedge your business against the slowing housing market.
"There is no slow down for my company," says Matt Belcher of Belcher Homes in St. Louis. "Last year we did 15 green homes, and this next year we'll do 25. I don't build anything but green homes."
Belcher says that a confluence of green products, how-to-build-green information, and customers easily sold on the concept have greatly reduced the obstacles builders used to face in getting started. By using the resources now readily available from national and local home builders associations and other organizations (see table), any builder can establish an individual plan to go green and execute it.
Emily English, director of the National Association of Home Builders' Green Building Program, says the NAHB's free Green Building Guidelines publication lays it all out in phased steps.
Step-By-Step Break Down "There is a learning curve to switching to green practices," says Emily. "So we have different thresholds of building green, starting with bronze, then silver and gold. The first part of the Guidelines is a checklist for what level of green you are building to. The second part of the Guidelines is how to do it, and a source of resources."
The process of going green is broken into seven guiding principles (Resource Efficiency, Lot Design, Preparation, and Development, etc.) with each specific element in a principle section given a numerical value. By adopting elements from each of the seven sections into your building program, you move into green building step by step.
"It's easier to go green this year than it was last year," says Belcher, who will chair the NAHB Green Building Conference March 25-27, 2007, in St. Louis. "There's so much more information out there. Our local HBA of Greater St. Louis and Eastern Missouri just adopted the NAHB's Guidelines. We tweak them for our area, but there isn't much tweaking needed.
"On the product side, all the manufacturers of building components saw the writing on the wall, Belcher adds. "Green products are about all they're pushing."

Sell the Green Bling Belcher said the other two largest potential stumbling blocks to going green have been selling the green concept to dubious customers and turning concept into practice on the job site. Although these are the most crucial aspects a builder needs to get right when switching over to green practices, Belcher doesn't view them as obstacles any longer.
"I sell the customers with what I call the 'green bling.' I tell them about things like photovoltaics, structural insulated panels, and the fact that lenders are raising the value of green homes by as much as 18%," says Belcher. "And when I tell them we are going to build a 3,500 square-foot home and their electric bill won't be more than $125 a month, it gets them going pretty quick."
English and Belcher offer a couple of tips for builders to keep in mind as they go green:
Getting the trades on board was more of an issue in the past than it is today, as the green trend generates information, products, workshops and buzz. Still, English says, builders switching to green should plan on spending extra time training the trades and supervising crews on site.
Belcher advises builders to tell their trade contractors from the very start exactly what they are doing—and why. "These guys pride themselves on being craftsmen, and they appreciate being involved in these advanced building techniques."
"I can say that using the Green Building Guidelines has improved my bottom line dramatically. I am not wasting a thing," says Belcher. "After my first few green houses, I was thinking, 'Why haven't I been doing this all along?'"
Richard Wall is a freelance writer based in St. Augustine, Fla.
Online Resources for Green Building NAHB Green Building Building Science Corporation Department of Energy's Building America Program Advanced Energy The Energy and Environmental Building Association The American Lung Association Green Building Initiative


PATH Announces First Top 10 Remodeling Technologies
· Innovations improve energy and resource efficiency in existing housing.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's Partnership for Advancing Technology in Housing (PATH) has unveiled its first Top 10 Technologies list exclusively for remodeling.
In PATH's Top 10 Remodeling Technologies for 2007, there's something to improve almost every area of the home: the building envelope, lighting, HVAC, plumbing, controls and floors. Although some technologies are relatively new, most have been around for a while, but for various reasons haven't been widely adopted. The Top 10 is designed to help push them along with much-needed exposure.
"Remodelers comprise a unique part of the housing industry and face the distinctive challenges that come with existing housing," said Assistant Secretary Darlene F. Williams of HUD's Office of Policy Development and Research. "PATH has scanned the industry for underutilized technologies that can dramatically improve the resource efficiency and energy efficiency of our existing housing. This Top 10 list offers remodelers a low-risk way to make today's housing perform better tomorrow."
The technologies include:
Air sealing with spray foam insulation
Smart ventilation/ventilation control systems
HVAC sizing
High efficiency toilets
Compact fluorescent lighting
High-performance windows/storm windows
Wireless lighting, thermostats and other controls
Solar hot water
Recycled/renewable flooring options
Tubular skylights
With its Top 10 series, PATH spotlights for the housing industry and consumers innovations that are within easy grasp. However, in past Top 10s, remodelers and homeowners had to decipher which ones applied best to existing construction. The third PATH Top 10 list, the Remodeling Top 10 follows a list unveiled in January for the entire housing industry. That list included mold-resistant gypsum, solar water heating, horizontal axis washer/dryers, induction cooktops, permeable pavers and more. The first PATH Top 10 was released in 2004.


http://www.hgtvpro.com/hpro/green_building?nl=v139c

The Next Ocean

The Next Ocean
Humanity's extra CO2 could brew a new kind of sea
Susan Milius
Terrie Klinger is starting to wonder about the future of kelp sex. It's a delicate business in the best of times, and the 21st century is putting marine life to the acid test.
The pink polyps (species in the South China Sea viewed close-up) of corals are likely to have an increasingly hard time constructing a reef as rising carbon emissions change ocean chemistry.iStockphoto
Klinger, of the University of Washington in Seattle, studies the winged and bull kelps that stretch rubbery garlands up from the seafloor off the nearby Pacific coast. These kelp fronds do no luring, touching, fusing of cells or other sexy stuff. Fronds just break out in chocolate-colored patches.
The patches release spores that swim off to settle on a surface and start the next generation. The new little kelps don't look as if they belong to the same species, or even the same family, as their parents. The little ones just grow into strings of cells, but these are about sex.
"Those of us who have spent far too long looking at this can tell the males from the females," says Klinger. The subtly female-shaped filaments form eggs and release kelp pheromones to call in the male filaments' sperm.
Sex filaments have kept kelp species going for millennia, but Klinger says she wants to know what's happening now that carbon emissions are changing seawater chemistry. The intricate reproductive cycle of kelp is an example of a delicate system that can experience big effects from seemingly small changes in ocean chemistry.
This chemistry is already shifting, powered by the increased concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from human activity. Not all the carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels stays in the air. The oceans have absorbed about half of the CO2 released from burning fossil fuels since the beginning of the industrial age, says Richard Feely of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Seattle. The ocean takes in about 22 million tons of CO2 a day, he says.
The influx causes what scientists call ocean acidification. It's a term of convenience. The ocean isn't acid now, nor do Feely and other ocean chemists expect that seawater will become acid in the foreseeable future. However, the extra CO2 is driving the oceans closer to the acidic side of the pH scale. By the end of this century, Feely says, the upper 100 meters or so of ocean water will be more acidic than at any time during the past 20 million years.
Klinger is just one of the biologists trying to figure out what a shift in seawater chemistry will do to seaweed, corals, fish, and other marine life. The filaments of both bull and winged kelps grow noticeably slower in acidic seawater, she reported last week at the 2008 Ocean Sciences Meeting in Orlando, Fla.
Biologists are discussing what the chemistry change will do to marine creatures: It looks like bad news for calcium users and a new dawn for slimy rocks. It could begin an age of simplification for ocean ecosystems. Either way, there's a rising consensus that, by changing the oceans' chemistry and biology, burning fossil fuels is essentially making new oceans.
Sea change
Researchers say the oceans of today already register a chemical change, though it may sound deceptively small at first.
MATTERS OF SCALE. A phytoplankton bloom (lighter turquoise waters) in the Bering Sea offshore of the Aleutian Islands is visible in this July 1998 satellite image. Relatively small changes in ocean chemistry may have big effects on such small creatures.Sea-Viewing Wide Field-of-View Sensor (SeaWiFS)/NASA/GSFC, GeoEye
Feely now rates the upper layer of seawater on average at 8.10 on the pH scale. That scale goes from 14 to 0 and describes the increasing concentration of hydrogen ions. Plain water, defined as neutral, ranks as 7, and lower numbers indicate increasingly strong acids and larger numbers of hydrogen ions. Since the beginning of the industrial age, Feely says, the seawater pH has slipped about 0.11 of a pH unit.
That's a considerable change, says a 2005 report on ocean acidification from the United Kingdom's Royal Society. The pH scale works logarithmically, so 7 means 10 times more ions than 8. The industrial age has increased the concentration of hydrogen ions by roughly a third.
The pH change from this century could be even bigger. The business-as-usual scenario for carbon emissions will drive the pH of the ocean surface waters down another 0.3 to 0.4 units by the end of the century, says Feely.
That's still not acidic, though. To push the ocean pH below 7, models predict that people would have to burn all of the fossil-fuel carbon on the planet plus a good deal of methane hydrates, he says.
Still, describing the process as ocean acidification isn't wrong. Seawater is acidifying in the sense of creeping toward the acid zone on the scale. Even if the ocean isn't turning into lemon juice, biologists predict that smaller dips in pH could do big things to marine life. It's a peril humans easily fail to appreciate. We can bathe in milk (pH 6.7) or chug orange juice (pH 3 or 4) and call ourselves refreshed. Thanks to fancy protective coatings, such as skin, and robust physiological mechanisms, a milk-soaked juice drinker's blood still hovers around pH 7.35 to 7.45. But our bodies don't have to build coral reefs.
Marine species from corals to snails to floating dots of life called coccolithophores create structures of calcium carbonate. A CO2 boost makes this job harder.
A key ingredient in making calcium carbonate is the carbonate ion, CO3–2. When it reacts with water, CO2 forms carbonic acid, H2CO3. "It's the same as adding CO2 to pop to make it fizzy," says Feely. The carbonic acid dissociates, releasing hydrogen ions that react with the carbonate ions in the water—thus making them unavailable to calcifiers such as corals building reefs. Feely says the carbonate concentration in the warmer waters where corals live today has already decreased 16 percent since the preindustrial era.
Not-ok coral
The future of corals depends on just how much CO2 ends up in the atmosphere, says Ove Hoegh-Guldberg of the University of Queensland in St. Lucia, Australia. During a conversation in Boston last month at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he refers to his most recent paper. In the Dec. 14 Science, he and 16 other scientists summarize their predictions of three possible futures for corals.
Hoegh-Guldberg flips to a triptych of photographs of coral reefs. In the first, multicolored fish swim over a mosaic of nubby tan and brown corals crowding against each other, the classic postcard of a diverse reef. The scene represents a world where humanity freezes carbon emissions now. The CO2 in the air stabilizes at its current concentration of 380 parts per million (ppm). Some changes for ocean ecosystems are already inevitable, but for most of the world's current reefs, corals will remain the dominant species.
The second image represents the world with atmospheric CO2 concentrations bumped up to between 450 and 500 ppm. Swaths of ocean once hospitable to reefs become so starved of carbonate that more and more corals in the upper 100 meters or so of water can no longer add to their skeletons. The colorful fish have dwindled as the crumbling reef no longer offers them habitats. Big, shaggy species of macroalgae muscle in over the diminished corals, making it ever more difficult for coral larvae to find a home.
The last image, for the 500-plus ppm world, shows a murky slope of eroding rubble. It doesn't actually have an old tire in it, but that's the mood. As Hoegh-Guldberg puts it, "You've got slimy rocks."
This ocean could be real by the end of the century. Even one of the more optimistic scenarios from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change puts the atmospheric concentration of CO2 at 550 ppm in the year 2100.
Adding heat
Increased CO2 also means the corals will have to contend with temperature increases. Depending on the coral species and the place, 3 to 4 weeks of temperatures a degree or two Celsius above current summer peaks can turn a reef into a spooky white sculpture of itself. This bleaching comes from the breakdown of the partnership between warm-water, soft-bodied corals and their colorful live-in algae, or zooxanthellae. They photosynthesize, and the host corals take a share of the lunch. Sometimes the partners get together again after a bleaching break-up, but prolonged absence of zooxanthellae kills a shallow-water coral.
CRUNCH. About the size of a peppercorn, a Limacina helicina pteropod is a favorite snack of larger creatures. Declining seawater pH could hamper formation of pteropod shells.Hofmann
Studies of zooxanthellae during the past decade have revealed unsuspected variety in the alga's capacity to endure heat. Corals primarily colonized with a variant called the D strain withstand heat better than others, according to Ray Berkelmans of the Australian Institute of Marine Science in Townsville. Researchers including Andrew Baker of the University of Miami in Florida are working to develop reef-saving therapies that swap out fragile zooxanthellae strains for heat-savvy ones.
The strategy doesn't brighten Hoegh-Guldberg's view of coral futures if carbon emissions keep soaring. Heat waves have bleached corals widely in recent years, but Hoegh-Guldberg hasn't seen the zooxanthellae adapting naturally. "Everyone's had enough time to show magical adaptation of corals," he says.
Another hope for adaptation swirls through conversations about coral reefs, but it doesn't cheer Hoegh-Guldberg either. Atmospheric carbon dioxide has spiked and ocean pH has plunged before in Earth's history. So the question arises of whether corals could just do whatever it was they did to survive last time.
"That's crap," says Hoegh-Guldberg. Ancient corals would have had more time than today's to get up to speed on hot, lower-pH life, he says. Again he flips open the Science paper and jabs a finger at some data. He and his colleagues used published measurements from air bubbles trapped in ancient ice to calculate rates of change for CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. The concentrations have risen more than 1,000 times faster per century during the industrial revolution than during the previous 420,000 years, the team concludes.
Also, Hoegh-Guldberg says he's not convinced that calcifying organisms did manage to laugh off earlier planetary burps of greenhouse gases. During the early Triassic, for example, CO2 concentrations reached levels five times as high as today's. He notes a gap in the fossil record during this time of evidence for both the reef-building corals and the algae that sculpt carbonate.
Some lineages of today's corals are ancient enough to have survived hot spells with funky ocean chemistry. Yet those lineages that survived may have done so without calcified skeletons. "They essentially became anemones," he says.
That's survival for lineages that can do it, but it's still not a happy ending to Hoegh-Guldberg. Even if all today's corals successfully turned into naked, soft-bodied bits—more magic adaptation perhaps—other reef species would still end up homeless. The intricate crags and crevices of reefs shelter much of the biodiversity of oceans, perhaps a million species. Without complex reef habitats built by corals, it will be a simpler ocean, he says.
Floating hubcaps
Beings smaller than corals, some of the mere specks of life that drift in the seas as plankton also need calcium carbonate to build.
Microscopic coccolithophores, up until now not exactly famous, have become iconic in the study of ocean pH change, thanks to Ulf Riebesell of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Kiel, Germany. The celebrity plankton look like a craft project of hubcaps welded around a giant beach ball. The ornate hubcaps, platelets made of calcium carbonate, enclose a photosynthetic cell.
LOSERS AND WINNERS. More acidic waters could be tough on the tiny coccolithophore Emiliania huxleyi (left), which builds a shell of calcium-carbonate platelets; but comfy for nitrogen-fixing cyanobacteria such as Trichodesmium (right).Björn Rost; David Caron/Univ. of Southern California
Springtime blooms of coccolithophores such as Emiliania huxleyi can spread over an area the size of Ireland. Light glinting off all the platelets makes milky blue streaks in the sea visible from space.
E. huxleyi doesn't follow the corals' recipe for calcifying structures. Yet the coccolithophores also fail to grow normally in low-pH seawater, says Riebesell. In experiments simulating such water, he's seen runt cells with flimsy or even deformed platelets.
Growth anomalies are showing up in other marine builder species, such as oysters. And in one of the few studies focusing on larvae, Gretchen Hofmann of the University of California, Santa Barbara, reports difficulties for very young sea urchins. Normal larvae look like alphabet soup "A's." In seawater dosed with extra CO2, though, the larvae grow "shorter and stubbier," she says.
Outside the shell
Much of the first wave of research on the next ocean has focused on the future of calcification. Not that that's silly. Creatures accounting for 46 percent of the annual U.S. seafood catch form some kind of calcified structure, such as clam shells, says Scott Doney of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. Adding in species that eat the calcifiers, such as pink salmon fattening up at sea on swimming snails called pteropods, would boost the percentage.
Still, water chemistry could affect uncalcified aspects of life for marine species, and research is now branching out into these matters. For example, moving around seems to get more difficult for squid in lower-pH water, according to ongoing research by Brad Seibel of the University of Rhode Island in Kingston, and others. The dip in seawater pH disturbs the oxygen transport in squid blood, and squids get sluggish.
That odd future ocean means good news for some species, particularly among the noncalcifiers, says David Hutchins of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Nitrogen-fixing cyanobacteria grow better in experiments that mimic ocean acidification. "They really love the CO2," he says.
The cyanobacteria's cells, such as those in a Trichodesmium species, don't transport CO2 efficiently from the outside world to their internal energy trapping machinery. A richer mix of the gas outside makes the cells more productive.
Who flourishes and who fades among the plankton in the new ocean matters to bigger creatures. The marine grazers that feed on plankton prefer some kinds and shun others. If the plankton equivalent of broccoli gives way to a brussels sprouts equivalent, grazer populations change too. Preferences work their way up to top predators, including those on dry land about to pick up a fork.
Considering lab and field experiments simulating future oceans, Hutchins speculates that plankton shifts will mean more microbial predators and less fish in the future oceans. "It's not necessarily going to be a world we particularly like," he says.
Whether kelps will like it remains to be seen. Kelp biologist Klinger emphasizes that she's just getting started in answering this question. She puts in a plug for the importance of understanding what will happen to kelp. Much like reefs, clusters of fronds offer complex habitats, with hidey-holes for fish and highways for snails. Also one could argue that a future ocean would be a little less interesting without kelp sex.

The Future Is Drying Up

The Future Is Drying Up
from an article by JON GERTNER, The New York Times

Scientists sometimes refer to the effect a hotter world will have on this country’s fresh water as the other water problem, because global warming more commonly evokes the specter of rising oceans submerging our great coastal cities. By comparison, the steady decrease in mountain snowpack — the loss of the deep accumulation of high-altitude winter snow that melts each spring to provide the American West with most of its water — seems to be a more modest worry. But not all researchers agree with this ranking of dangers. Last May, for instance, Steven Chu, a Nobel laureate and the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, one of the United States government’s pre-eminent research facilities, remarked that diminished supplies of fresh water might prove a far more serious problem than slowly rising seas. When I met with Chu last summer in Berkeley, the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada, which provides most of the water for Northern California, was at its lowest level in 20 years. Chu noted that even the most optimistic climate models for the second half of this century suggest that 30 to 70 percent of the snowpack will disappear. “There’s a two-thirds chance there will be a disaster,” Chu said, “and that’s in the best scenario.”

In the Southwest this past summer, the outlook was equally sobering. A catastrophic reduction in the flow of the Colorado River — which mostly consists of snowmelt from the Rocky Mountains — has always served as a kind of thought experiment for water engineers, a risk situation from the outer edge of their practical imaginations. Some 30 million people depend on that water. A greatly reduced river would wreak chaos in seven states: Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and California. An almost unfathomable legal morass might well result, with farmers suing the federal government; cities suing cities; states suing states; Indian nations suing state officials; and foreign nations (by treaty, Mexico has a small claim on the river) bringing international law to bear on the United States government. In addition, a lesser Colorado River would almost certainly lead to a considerable amount of economic havoc, as the future water supplies for the West’s industries, agriculture and growing municipalities are threatened. As one prominent Western water official described the possible future to me, if some of the Southwest’s largest reservoirs empty out, the region would experience an apocalypse, “an Armageddon.”

One day last June, an environmental engineer named Bradley Udall appeared before a Senate subcommittee that was seeking to understand how severe the country’s fresh-water problems might become in an era of global warming. As far as Washington hearings go, the testimony was an obscure affair, which was perhaps fitting: Udall is the head of an obscure organization, the Western Water Assessment. The bureau is located in the Boulder, Colo., offices of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, the government agency that collects obscure data about the sky and seas. Still, Udall has a name that commands some attention, at least within the Beltway. His father was Morris Udall, the congressman and onetime presidential candidate, and his uncle was Stewart Udall, the secretary of the interior under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Bradley Udall’s great-great-grandfather, John D. Lee, moreover, was the founder of Lee’s Ferry, a flyspeck spot in northern Arizona that means nothing to most Americans but holds near-mythic status to those who work with water for a living. Near Lee’s Ferry is where the annual flow of the Colorado River is measured in order to divvy up its water among the seven states that depend on it. To many politicians, economists and climatologists, there are few things more important than what has happened at Lee’s Ferry in the past, just as there are few things more important than what will happen at Lee’s Ferry in the future.

The importance of the water there was essentially what Udall came to talk about. A report by the National Academies on the Colorado River basin had recently concluded that the combination of limited Colorado River water supplies, increasing demands, warmer temperatures and the prospect of recurrent droughts “point to a future in which the potential for conflict” among those who use the river will be ever-present. Over the past few decades, the driest states in the United States have become some of our fastest-growing; meanwhile, an ongoing drought has brought the flow of the Colorado to its lowest levels since measurements at Lee’s Ferry began 85 years ago. At the Senate hearing, Udall stated that the Colorado River basin is already two degrees warmer than it was in 1976 and that it is foolhardy to imagine that the next 50 years will resemble the last 50. Lake Mead, the enormous reservoir in Arizona and Nevada that supplies nearly all the water for Las Vegas, is half-empty, and statistical models indicate that it will never be full again. “As we move forward,” Udall told his audience, “all water-management actions based on ‘normal’ as defined by the 20th century will increasingly turn out to be bad bets.”

A few weeks after his testimony, I flew to Boulder to meet with Udall, and we spent a day driving switchback roads high in the Rockies in his old Subaru. It had been a wet season on the east slope of the Rockies, but the farther west we went, the drier it became. Udall wanted to show me some of the local reservoirs and water systems that were built over the past century, so I could get a sense of their complexity as well as their vulnerability. As he put it, he wants to connect the disparate members of the water economy in a way that has never really been done before, so that utility executives, scientists, environmentalists, business leaders, farmers and politicians can begin discussing how to cope with the inevitable shortages of fresh water. In the American West, whose huge economy and political power derive from the ability of 20th-century engineers to conquer rivers like the Colorado and establish a reliable water supply, the prospect that there will be less water in the future, rather than the same amount, is unnerving. “We have a very short period of time here to get people educated on what this means,” Udall told me as we drove through the mountains. “Then once that occurs, perhaps we can start talking about how do we deal with it.”

Udall suggested that I meet a water manager named Peter Binney, who works for Aurora, Colo., a city — the 60th-largest in the United States — that sprawls over an enormous swath of flat, postagricultural land south of the Denver airport. It may be difficult for residents of the East Coast to understand the political celebrity of some Western water managers, but in a place like Aurora, where water, not available land, limits economic growth, Binney has enormous responsibilities. In effect, the city’s viability depends on his wherewithal to conjure new sources of water or increase the output of old ones. As Binney told me when we first spoke, “We have to find a new way of meeting the needs of all this population that’s turning up and still satisfy all of our recreational and environmental demands.” Aurora has a population of 310,000 now, Binney said, but that figure is projected to surpass 500,000 by 2035.

I asked if he had enough water for that many people. “Oh, no,” he replied. He seemed surprised that someone could even presume that he might. In fact, he explained, his job is to figure out how to find more water in a region where every drop is already spoken for and at a moment when there is little possibility that any more will ever be discovered.

Binney and I got together outside Dillon, a village in the Colorado Rockies 75 miles from Aurora and just a few miles west of the Continental Divide. We met in a small parking lot beside Dillon Reservoir, which sits at the bottom of a bowl of snow-capped mountains. Binney, a thickset 54-year-old with dark red hair and a fair complexion, had driven up in a large S.U.V. He still carries a strong accent from his native New Zealand, and in conversation he comes across as less a utility manager than a polymath with the combined savvy of an engineer, an economist and a politician. As we moved to a picnic table, Binney told me that we were looking at Denver’s water, not Aurora’s, and that it would eventually travel 70 miles through tunnels under the mountains to Denver’s taps. He admitted that he would love to have this water, which is pure snowmelt. To people in his job, snowmelt is the best source of water because it requires little chemical treatment to bring it up to federal drinking standards. But this water wasn’t available. Denver got here before him. And in Colorado, like most Western states, the rights to water follow a bloodline back to whoever got to it first.

One way to view the history of the American West is as a series of important moments in exploration or migration; another is to consider it, as Binney does, in terms of its water. In the 20th century, for example, all of our great dams and reservoirs were built — “heroic man-over-nature” achievements, in Binney’s words, that control floods, store water for droughts, generate vast amounts of hydroelectric power and enable agriculture to flourish in a region where the low annual rainfall otherwise makes it difficult. And in constructing projects like the Glen Canyon Dam — which backs up water to create Lake Powell, the vast reservoir in Arizona and Utah that feeds Lake Mead — the builders went beyond the needs of the moment. “They gave us about 40 to 50 years of excess capacity,” Binney says. “Now we’ve gotten to the end of that era.” At this point, every available gallon of the Colorado River has been appropriated by farmers, industries and municipalities. And yet, he pointed out, the region’s population is expected to keep booming. California’s Department of Finance recently predicted that there will be 60 million Californians by midcentury, up from 36 million today. “In Colorado, we’re sitting at a little under five million people now, on our way to eight million people,” Binney said. Western settlers, who apportioned the region’s water long ago, never could have foreseen the thirst of its cities. Nor, he said, could they have anticipated our environmental mandates to keep water “in stream” for the benefit of fish and wildlife, as well as for rafters and kayakers.

The West’s predicament, though, isn’t just a matter of limited capacity, bigger populations and environmental regulations. It’s also a distributional one. Seventy-five years ago, cities like Denver made claims on — and from the state of Colorado received rights to — water in the mountains; those cities in turn built reservoirs for their water. As a result, older cities have access to more surface water (that is, water that comes from rivers and streams) than newer cities like Aurora, which have been forced to purchase existing water rights from farmers and mining companies. Towns that rely on groundwater (water pumped from deep underground) face an even bigger disadvantage. Water tables all over the United States have been dropping, sometimes drastically, from overuse. In the Denver area, some cities that use only groundwater will almost certainly exhaust their accessible supplies by 2050.

The biggest issue is that agriculture consumes most of the water, as much as 90 percent of it, in a state like Colorado. “The West has gone from a fur-trapping, to a mining, to an agricultural, to a manufacturing, to an urban-centric economy,” Binney explained. As the region evolved, however, its water ownership for the most part did not. “There’s no magical locked box of water that we can turn to,” Binney says of cities like Aurora, “so it’s going to have to come from an existing use.” Because the supply of water in the West can’t really change, water managers spend their time looking for ways to adjust its allocation in their favor.

Binney knew all this back in 2002, when he took the job in Aurora after a long career at an engineering firm. Over the course of a century, the city had established a reasonable water supply. About a quarter of its water is piped in from the Colorado River basin about 70 miles away; another quarter is taken from reservoirs in the Arkansas River basin far to the south. The rest comes from the South Platte, a lazy, meandering river that runs north through Aurora on its way toward Nebraska. Binney says he believes that a city like his needs at least five years of water in storage in case of drought; his first year there turned out to be one of the worst years for water managers in recorded history, and the town’s reservoirs dropped to 26 percent of capacity, meaning Aurora had at most nine months of reserves and could not endure another dry spring. During the summer and fall, Binney focused on both supply and demand. He negotiated with neighboring towns to buy water and accelerated a program to pay local farmers to fallow their fields so the city could lease their water rights. Meanwhile, the town asked residents to limit their showers and had water cops enforce new rules against lawn sprinklers. (“It’s interesting how many people were watering lawns in the middle of the night,” Binney said.)
Water use in the United States varies widely by region, influenced by climate, neighborhood density and landscaping, among other things. In the West, Los Angelenos use about 125 gallons per person per day in their homes, compared with 114 for Tucson residents. Binney’s customers generally use about 160 gallons per person per day. “In the depths of the drought,” he said, “we got down to about 123 gallons.”

Part of the cruelty of a Western drought is that a water manager never knows if it will last 1 year or 10. In 2002, Binney was at the earliest stages of what has since become a nearly continuous dry spell. Though he couldn’t see that at the time, he realized Aurora faced a permanent state of emergency if it didn’t boost its water supplies. But how? One option was to try to buy water rights in the mountains (most likely from farmers who were looking to quit agriculture), then build a new reservoir and a long supply line to Aurora. Obvious hurdles included environmental and political resistance, as well as an engineering difficulty: water is heavy, far heavier than oil, and incompressible; a system to move it long distances (especially if it involves tunneling through mountains or pumping water over them) can cost billions. Binney figured that without the help of the federal government, which has largely gotten out of the Western dam-and-reservoir-building business, Aurora would be unwise to pursue such a project. Even if the money could be raised, building a system would take decades. Aurora needed a solution within five years.

Another practice, sometimes used in Europe, is to drill wells alongside a river and pull river water up though them, using the gravel of the riverbank as a natural filter — sort of like digging a hole in the sand near the ocean’s edge as it fills from below. Half of Aurora’s water rights were on the South Platte already; the city also pours its treated wastewater back into the river, as do other cities in the Denver metro area. This gives the South Platte a steady, dependable flow. Binney and the township reasoned that they could conceivably, and legally, go some 20 or 30 miles downstream on the South Platte, buy agricultural land near the river, install wells there and retrieve their wastewater. Thus they could create a system whereby Aurora would use South Platte water; send it to a treatment plant that would discharge it back into the river; go downstream to recapture water from the same river; then pump it back to the city for purification and further use. The process would repeat, ad infinitum. Aurora would use its share of South Platte water “to extinction,” in the argot of water managers. A drop of the South Platte used by an Aurora resident would find its way back to the city’s taps as a half-drop in 45 to 60 days, a quarter-drop 45 to 60 days after that and so on. For every drop the town used from the South Platte, over time it would almost — as all the fractional drops added up — get another.
Many towns have a supply that includes previously treated water. The water from the Mississippi River, for instance, is reused many times by municipalities as it flows southward. But as far as Binney knew, no municipality in the United States had built the kind of closed loop that Aurora envisioned. Water from wells in the South Platte would taste different, because of its mineral and organic content, so Binney’s engineers would have to make it mimic mountain snowmelt. More delicate challenges involved selling local taxpayers on authorizing a project, marketed to them as “Prairie Waters,” that would capitalize on their own wastewater. The system, which meant building a 34-mile-long pipeline from the downstream South Platte riverbanks to a treatment facility in Aurora, would cost three-quarters of a billion dollars, making it one of the most expensive municipal infrastructure projects in the country.
When Binney and I chatted at the reservoir outside Dillon, he had already finished discussions with Moody’s and Fitch, the bond-rating agencies whose evaluations would help the town finance the project. Groundbreaking, which would be the next occasion we would see each other, was still a month away. “What we’re doing now is trading high levels of treatment and purification for building tunnels and chasing whatever remaining snowmelt there is in the hills, which I think isn’t a wise investment for the city,” he told me. “I would expect that what we’re going to do is the blueprint for a lot of cities in California, Arizona, Nevada — even the Carolinas and the Gulf states. They’re all going to be doing this in the future.”

Water managers in the West tend to think in terms of “acre-feet.” One acre-foot, equal to about 326,000 gallons, is enough to serve two typical Colorado families for one year. When measurements of the Colorado River began near Lee’s Ferry in the early 1920s, the region happened to be in the midst of an extremely wet series of years, and the river was famously misjudged to have an average flow of 17 million acre-feet per year — when in fact its average flow would often prove to be significantly less. Part of the legacy of that misjudgment is that the seven states that divided the water in the 1920s entered into a legal partnership that created unrealistic expectations about the river’s capacity. But there is another, lesser-known legacy too. As the 20th century progressed, many water managers came to believe that the 1950s, which included the most severe drought years since measurement of the river began, were the marker for a worst-case situation.

But recent studies of tree rings, in which academics drill core samples from the oldest Ponderosa pines or Douglas firs they can find in order to determine moisture levels hundreds of years ago, indicate that the dry times of the 1950s were mild and brief compared with other historical droughts. The latest research effort, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters in late May, identified the existence of an epochal Southwestern megadrought that, if it recurred, would prove calamitous.

When Binney and I met at Dillon Reservoir, he brought graphs of Colorado River flows that go back nearly a thousand years. “There was this one in the 1150s,” he said, tracing a jagged line downward with his finger. “They think that’s when the Anasazi Indians were forced out. We see drought cycles here that can go up to 60 years of below-average precipitation.” What that would mean today, he said, is that states would have to make a sudden choice between agriculture and people, which would lead to bruising political debates and an unavoidable blow to the former. Binney says that as much as he believes that some farmers’ water is ultimately destined for the cities anyway, a big jolt like this would be tragic. “You hope you never get to that point,” he told me, “where you force those kinds of discussions, because they will change for hundreds of years the way that people live in the Western U.S. If you have to switch off agriculture, it’s not like you can get back into it readily. It took decades for the agricultural industry to establish itself. It may never come back.”

An even darker possibility is that a Western drought caused by climatic variation and a drought caused by global warming could arrive at the same time. Or perhaps they already have. This coming spring, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will issue a report identifying areas of the world most at risk of droughts and floods as the earth warms. Fresh-water shortages are already a global concern, especially in China, India and Africa. But the I.P.C.C., which along with Al Gore received the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize earlier this month for its work on global-warming issues, will note that many problem zones are located within the United States, including California (where the Sierra Nevada snowpack is threatened) and the Colorado River basin. These assessments follow on the heels of a number of recent studies that analyze mountain snowpack and future Colorado River flows. Almost without exception, recent climate models envision reductions that range from the modest to the catastrophic by the second half of this century. One study in particular, by Martin Hoerling and Jon Eischeid, suggests the region is already “past peak water,” a milestone that means the river’s water supply will now forever trend downward.

Climatologists seem to agree that global warming means the earth will, on average, get wetter. According to Richard Seager, a scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory who published a study on the Southwest last spring, more rain and snow will fall in those regions closer to the poles and more precipitation is likely to fall during sporadic, intense storms rather than from smaller, more frequent storms. But many subtropical regions closer to the equator will dry out. The models analyzed by Seager, which focus on regional climate rather than Colorado River flows, show that the Southwest will ultimately be subject to significant atmospheric and weather alterations. More alarming, perhaps, is that the models do not only concern the coming decades; they also address the present. “You know, it’s like, O.K., there’s trouble in the future, but how near in the future does it set in?” he told me. “In this case, it appears that it’s happening right now.” When I asked if the drought in his models would be permanent, he pondered the question for a moment, then replied: “You can’t call it a drought anymore, because it’s going over to a drier climate. No one says the Sahara is in drought.”
Climate models tend to be more accurate at predicting temperature than precipitation. Still, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that “something is happening,” as Peter Binney gently puts it. Everyone I spoke with in the West has noticed — less snow, earlier spring melts, warmer nights. Los Angeles this year went 150 days without a measurable rainfall. One afternoon in Boulder, I spent some time with Roger Pulwarty, a highly regarded climatologist at the National Oceanographic Atmospheric Administration. Pulwarty, who has spent the past few years assessing adaptive solutions to a long drought, has a light sense of humor and an air of optimism about him, but he acknowledged that the big picture is worrisome. Even if the precipitation in the West does not decrease, higher temperatures by themselves create huge complications. Snowmelt runoff decreases. The immense reservoirs lose far more water to evaporation. Meanwhile, demand increases because crops are thirstier. Yet importing water from other river basins becomes more difficult, because those basins may face shortages, too.

“You don’t need to know all the numbers of the future exactly,” Pulwarty told me over lunch in a local Vietnamese restaurant. “You just need to know that we’re drying. And so the argument over whether it’s 15 percent drier or 20 percent drier? It’s irrelevant. Because in the long run, that decrease, accumulated over time, is going to dry out the system.” Pulwarty asked if I knew the projections for what it would take to refill Lake Powell, which is at about 50 percent of capacity. Twenty years of average flow on the Colorado River, he told me. “Good luck,” he said. “Even in normal conditions we don’t get 20 years of average flow. People are calling for more storage on the system, but if you can’t fill the reservoirs you have, I don’t know how more storage, or more dams, is going to help you. One has to ask if the normal strategies that we have are actually viable anymore.”

Pulwarty is convinced that the economic impacts could be profound. The worst outcome, he suggested, would be mass migrations out of the region, along with bitter interstate court battles over the dwindling water supplies. But well before that, if too much water is siphoned from agriculture, farm towns and ranch towns will wither. Meanwhile, Colorado’s largest industry, tourism, might collapse if river flows became a trickle during summertime. Already, warmer temperatures have brought on an outbreak of pine beetles that are destroying pine forests; Pulwarty wonders how many tourists will want to visit a state full of dead trees. “A crisis is an interesting thing,” he said. In his view, a crisis is a point in a story, a moment in a narrative, that presents an opportunity for characters to think their way through a problem. A catastrophe, on the other hand, is something different: it is one of several possible outcomes that follow from a crisis. “We’re at the point of crisis on the Colorado,” Pulwarty concluded. “And it’s at this point that we decide, O.K., which way are we going to go?”

It is all but imposible to look into the future of the Western states without calling on Pat Mulroy, the head of the Southern Nevada Water Authority. Mulroy has no real counterpart on the East Coast; her nearest analog might be Robert Moses, the notorious New York City planner who built massive infrastructure projects and who almost always found a way around institutional obstructions and financing constraints. She is arguably the most influential and outspoken water manager in the country — a “woman without fear,” as Pulwarty describes her. Pulwarty and Peter Binney respect her willingness to challenge historical water-sharing agreements that, in Mulroy’s view, no longer suit the modern West (meaning they don’t suit Las Vegas). According to Binney, however, Nevada’s scant resources give Mulroy little choice. She has to keep her city from drying out. That makes hers the most difficult job in the water business, he told me.
Las Vegas is almost certainly more vulnerable to water shortages than any metro area in the country. Partly that’s a result of the city’s explosive growth. But the state of Nevada has the historical misfortune of receiving a smaller share of Colorado River water (300,000 acre-feet annually) than the other six states with which it signed a water-sharing compact in the 1920s. That modest share, stored in Lake Mead along with water destined for Southern California, Arizona and northern Mexico, now means everything to Las Vegas. I traveled to Lake Mead on a 99-degree day last June. The narrow, 110-mile-long lake, which at full capacity holds 28 million acre-feet of water (making it the largest reservoir in the United States), was at 49 percent of capacity. When riding into the valley and glimpsing it from afar — an astonishing slash of blue in the desert — my guide for the day, Bronson Mack of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, remarked that he had never seen it so low. The white bathtub ring on the sides of the canyon that marks the level of full capacity was visible about 100 feet above the water. “I have a photograph of my mother on her honeymoon, standing in front of the lake,” Mack, a Las Vegas native, said. That was in 1970. “It was almost that low, but not quite.”

Over the past year, it has become conceivable that the lake could eventually drop below the level of the water authority’s intake pipes, the straws that suck the water out for the Las Vegas Valley. The authority recently hired an engineering firm to drill through several miles of rock and create a deeper intake pipe near the bottom of the lake. To say the project is being fast-tracked is an understatement. The day after visiting Lake Mead, I met with Mulroy in her Las Vegas office. “We have everything in line to get it running by 2012,” she said of the new intake. But she added that she is looking to cut as much time off construction as possible. Building the new intake is a race against the clock, or rather a race against a lake that keeps going down, down, down.

Mulroy is not gambling the entire future of Las Vegas on this project. One catchphrase of the water trade is that water flows uphill toward money, which is another way of saying that a city with ample funds can, at least theoretically, augment its supplies indefinitely. In a tight water market like that of the West, this isn’t an absolute truth, but in many instances money can move rivers. The trade-off is that new water tends to be of lower quality (requiring more expensive purification) or far away (requiring more expensive transport). Thanks to Las Vegas’s growth — the metro area is now at 1.8 million people — cost is currently no object. The city’s cash reserves have made it possible for Mulroy to pay Arizona $330 million for water she can use in emergencies and to plan a controversial multibillion-dollar pipeline to east-central Nevada, where the water authority has identified groundwater it wants to extract and transport. Wealth allows for the additional possibility of a sophisticated trading scheme whereby Las Vegas might pay for a desalination plant on the Pacific Coast that would transform seawater into potable water for use in California and Mexico. In exchange, Nevada could get a portion of their Colorado River water in Lake Mead.

So money does make a kind of sustainability possible for Las Vegas. On the other hand, buying water is quite unlike buying anything else. At the moment, water doesn’t really function like a private good; its value, which Peter Binney calls “infinite,” is often only vaguely related to its price, which can vary from 50 cents an acre-foot (what Mulroy pays to take water from Lake Mead) to $12,000 an acre-foot (the most Binney has paid farmers in Colorado for their rights). Moreover, water is so necessary to human life, and hence so heavily subsidized and regulated, that it can’t really be bought and sold freely across state lines. (Enron tried to start a water market called Azurix in the late 1990s, only to see it fail spectacularly.) The more successful water markets have instead been local, like one in the late 1980s in California, where farmers agreed to reduce their water use and sell the savings to a state water bank. Mulroy and Binney each told me they think a true free-market water exchange would create too many winners and losers. “What you would have is affluent communities being able to buy the lifeblood right out from under those that are less well heeled,” Mulroy said. More practical, in her mind, would be a regional market that gives states, cities and farmers greater freedom to strike mutually beneficial agreements, but with protections so that municipalities aren’t pitted against one another.

More-efficient water markets might ease shortages, but they can’t replace a big city’s principal source. What if, I asked Mulroy, Lake Mead drained nearly to the bottom? Even if drought conditions ease over the next year or two, several people I spoke with think the odds are greater that Lake Powell, the 27-million-acre-foot reservoir that supplies Lake Mead, will drop to unusable levels before it ever fills again. Mulroy didn’t immediately dismiss the possibility; she is certain that the reduced circumstances of the two big Western reservoirs are tied to global warming and that Las Vegas is this country’s first victim of climate change. An empty Lake Mead, she began, would mean there is nothing in Lake Powell.

“It’s well outside probabilities,” she said — but it could happen. “In that case, it’s not just a Las Vegas problem. You have three entire states wiped out: Arizona, California and Nevada. Because you can’t replace those volumes with desalted ocean water.” What seems more likely, she said, is that the legal framework governing the Colorado River would preclude such a dire turn of events. Recently, the states that use the Colorado reached a tentative agreement that guarantees Lake Mead will remain partly full under current conditions, even if upstream users have to cut back their withdrawals as a result. The deal supplements a more fundamental understanding that dates to the 1920s. If the river is failing to carry a certain, guaranteed volume of water to Lee’s Ferry, which is just below Lake Powell, the river’s lower-basin states (Nevada, Arizona and California) can legally force the upper-basin states (Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico and Utah) to reduce or stop their water withdrawals. This contingency, known as a “compact call,” sets the lower-basin states against the upper, but it has never occurred; it is deeply feared by many water managers, because it would ravage the fragile relationship among states and almost certainly lead to a scrum of lawsuits. Yet, last year water managers in Colorado began meeting for the first time to discuss the possibility. In our conversations, Mulroy denied that there would be a compact call, but she pointed out that Las Vegas’s groundwater and desalination plans were going ahead anyway for precautionary reasons.

I asked if limiting the growth of the Las Vegas metro area wouldn’t help. Mulroy bristled. “This country is going to have 100 million additional people in it in the next 25 to 30 years,” she replied. “Tell me where they’re supposed to go. Seriously. Every community says, ‘Not here,’ ‘No growth here,’ ‘There’s too many people here already.’ For a large urban area that is the core economic hub of any particular area, to even attempt to throw up walls? I’m not sure it can be done.” Besides, she added, the problem isn’t growth alone: “We have an exploding human population, and we have a shrinking clean-water supply. Those are on colliding paths. This is not just a Las Vegas issue. This is a microcosm of a much larger issue.” Americans, she went on to say, are the most voracious users of natural resources in the world. Maybe we need to talk about that as well. “The people who move to the West today need to realize they’re moving into a desert,” Mulroy said. “If they want to live in a desert, they have to adapt to a desert lifestyle.” That means a shift from the mindset of the 1930s, when the federal government encouraged people to settle in the West, plant water-intensive crops and make it look like the East Coast. It means landscapes of parched dirt. It means mesquite bushes and palo verde trees for vegetation. It means recycled water. It means gravel lawns. It is the West’s new deal, she seemed to be saying, and I got the feeling that for Mulroy it means that every blade of grass in her state would soon be gone.

The first impulse when confronted with the West’s water problems may be to wonder how, as scarcity becomes more acute, the region will engineer its way back to health. What can be built, what can technology accomplish, to ease any shortages? Yet this is almost certainly the wrong way to think about the situation. To be sure, construction projects like a pipeline from east-central Nevada could help Las Vegas. But the larger difficulty facing Pat Mulroy and Peter Binney, as they describe it, is re-engineering the culture and conventions of the West before it becomes too late. Whether or not there is enough water in the region for, say, the next 30 or 50 years isn’t necessarily a question with a yes-or-no answer. The water managers I spoke with believe the total volume of available water could be great enough to sustain the cities, many farms and perhaps the natural flow of the area’s rivers. But it’s not unreasonable to assume that if things continue as they have — with so much water going to agriculture; with conservation only beginning to take hold among residents, industry and farmers; with supplies diminishing slowly but steadily as the Earth warms; with the population growing faster than anywhere else in the United States; and with some of our most economically vital states constricted by antique water agreements — the region will become a topography of crisis and perhaps catastrophe. This is an old prophecy, dating back more than a century to one of the original American explorers of the West, John Wesley Powell, who doubted the territory could support large populations and intense development. (Powell presciently argued that river basins, not arbitrary mapmakers, should determine the boundaries of the Western states, in order to avoid inevitable conflicts over water.) An earlier explorer, J. C. Ives, visited the present location of Hoover Dam, between Arizona and Nevada, in 1857. The desiccated landscape was “valueless,” Ives reported. “There is nothing there to do but leave.”

Roger Pulwarty, for his part, rejects the notion of environmental determinism. Nature, in other words, isn’t inexorably pushing the region into a grim, suffering century. Things can be done. Redoubling efforts to prevent further climate change, Pulwarty says, is one place to start; another is getting the states that share the Colorado River to reach cooperative arrangements, as they have begun to discuss, for coping with long-term droughts. Other parts of the solution are less obvious. To Peter Gleick, head of the Pacific Institute, a nonprofit based in Oakland, Calif., that focuses on global water issues, whether we can adapt to a drier future depends on whether we can rethink the functions, and value, of fresh water. Can we can do the same things using less of it? How we use our water, Gleick believes, is considerably more complex than it appears. First of all, there are consumptive and nonconsumptive uses of water. Consumptive use, roughly speaking, refers to water taken from a reservoir that cannot be recovered. “It’s embedded in a product like a liter of Coca-Cola, or it’s contaminated so badly we can’t reuse it,” Gleick says. In agriculture, the vast majority of water use is also consumptive, because it evaporates or transpires from crops into the atmosphere. Evaporated water may fall as rain 1,000 miles away — that’s how Earth’s water cycle works — but it is gone locally. A similar consumptive process characterizes the water we put on our lawns or gardens: it mostly disappears. Meanwhile, most of the water used by metropolitan areas is nonconsumptive. It goes down the drain and empties into nearby rivers, like Colorado’s South Platte, as treated wastewater.

Gleick calls the Colorado River “the most complicated water system in the world,” and he isn’t convinced it will be easy, or practical, to change the laws that govern its usage. “But I think it’s less hard to change how we use water,” he says. He accepts that climate change is confronting the West with serious problems. (He was also one of the country’s first scientists, in the mid-1980s, to point out that reductions in mountain snowpack could present huge challenges.) He makes a persuasive case, however, that there are immense opportunities — even in cities like Las Vegas, which has made strides in conservation — to reduce both consumptive and nonconsumptive demand for water. These include installing more low-flow home appliances and adopting more efficient irrigation methods. And they include economic tools too: for example, many municipalities have reduced consumption by making water more expensive (the more you use, the higher your per-gallon rate). The United States uses less water than it did 25 years ago, Gleick points out: “We haven’t even paid too much attention to it, and we’ve accomplished this.” To go further, he says he believes we could alter not only demand but also supply. “Treated wastewater isn’t a liability, it’s an asset,” he says. We don’t need potable water to flush our toilets or water our lawns. “One might say that’s a ridiculous use of potable water. In fact, I might say that. But that’s the way we’ve set it up. And that’s going to change, that’s got to change, in this century.”

Among Colorado’s water managers, Peter Binney’s Prairie Waters project is considered both innovative and important not on account of its technology but because it seems to mark a new era of finding water sources in the drying West. It also proves that the next generation’s water will not come cheap, or come easy. In late July, I went to Aurora to meet up again with Binney. It was the groundbreaking day for Prairie Waters, which had been on the local television news: Binney and several other officials grinned for the cameras and signed a section of six-foot steel pipe, the same kind that would transport water from the South Platte wells to the Aurora treatment facility. That evening, Binney and I had dinner together at a steakhouse in an Aurora shopping mall. When he remarked that we may have exceeded what he calls the “carrying capacity” of the West, I asked him whether our desert civilizations could last. Binney seemed dubious. “Not the way we’ve got it set up,” he said. “We’ve decoupled land use from water use. Water is the limiting resource in the West. I think we need to match them back together again.” There was a decent amount of water out there, he went on to explain, but it was a false presumption that it could sustain all the farms, all the cities, all the rivers. Something will have to give. It was also wrong to assume, he said, that cities could continue to grow without experiencing something akin to a religious awakening about the scarcity of water. Soon, he predicted, we would talk about our “water footprint” just as we now talk about our carbon footprint.

Indeed, any conversations about the one will in short order expand to include the other, Binney went on to say. Many water managers have known this for a while. The two problems — water and energy — are so intimately linked as to make it exceedingly difficult to tackle one without the other. It isn’t just the matter of growing corn for ethanol, which is already straining water supplies. The less water in our rivers, for instance, the less hydropower our dams produce. The further the water tables sink, the more power it takes to pump water up. The more we depend on coal and nuclear power plants, which require huge amounts of water for cooling, the larger the burden we place on supplies.

Meanwhile, it is a perverse side effect of global warming that we may have to emit large volumes of carbon dioxide to obtain the clean water that is becoming scarcer because of the carbon dioxide we’ve already put into the atmosphere. A dry region that turns to desalination, for example, would need vast amounts of energy (and money) to purify its water. While wind-powered desalination could perhaps meet this challenge — such a plant was recently built outside Perth, Australia — it isn’t clear that coastal residents in, say, California would welcome such projects. Unclear, too, is how dumping the brine that is a by-product of the process back into the ocean would affect ecosystems.

Similar energy challenges face other plans. In past years, various schemes have arisen to move water from Canada or the Great Lakes to arid parts of the United States. Beyond the environmental implications and construction costs (probably hundreds of billions of dollars), such continental-scale plumbing would require stupendous amounts of electricity. And yet, fears that such plans will resurface in a drier, more populous world are partly behind current efforts by the Great Lakes states to certify a pact that protects their fresh water from outside exploitation.
Just pumping water from the Prairie Waters site to Aurora will cost a small fortune. Binney told me this the day after the groundbreaking, as we drove north from Aurora to the site. Along the 45-minute journey, Binney narrated where his pipeline would go — along the edge of the highway here, over in that field there and so on. Eventually we turned off the highway and onto a small country road, and Binney slowed down so I could take in the surroundings. “Here’s where you see it all coming together and all of it coming into conflict,” he told me. To him, it was a perfect tableau of the West in the 21st century. There was a housing development on one side of the road and fields of irrigated crops on the other. Farther ahead was a gravel pit, a remnant of the old Colorado mineral-extraction economy.

He drove on, and soon we turned onto a dirt road that bisected some open fields. We rumbled along for a quarter mile or so, spewing dust and passing over the South Platte in the process. Binney parked by a wire fence near a sign marking it as Aurora property. We got out of the truck, hopped over a locked gate and walked into a farm field.

For miles along the highway, we passed barren acreage that formerly grew winter wheat but was now slated for new houses. The land we stood on once grew corn, but tangles of weeds covered it now. As we walked, Binney explained that the collection wells on the South Platte would soon be dug a few hundred yards away; that water would be pumped into collection basins on this field, where sand and gravel would purify it further. Then it would be pumped back to the chemical treatment plants in Aurora before being piped to residents. “We’re standing 34 miles from there,” Binney said.It was a location as ordinary as I could have imagined, an empty place, far from anything, and yet Binney saw it as something else. Earlier, when we crossed over the gravel banks of the South Platte, I found the river disappointing: broad and shallow, dun-colored and slow-moving, its unimpressive flow somehow incorporating water Aurora had already used upstream. James Michener, in writing about this region years ago, was dead-on in calling it “a sad, bewildered nothing of a river.” Still, the South Platte was dependable. It was also Aurora’s lifeline, buying the city 20 or 30 years of time. “What I really like about it,” Binney said, smiling as we walked from the field back to his truck, “is that it's wet"

The 3C initiative

The 3C initiative makes an urgent request to the global community and all its representatives
http://www.combatclimatechange.org/www/ccc_org/ccc_org/224546home/720282thex3/index .p

There are clear indications of an ongoing global climate change. The root cause seems to be the emission of greenhouse gases due to human activity. A change in the climate could potentially alter the conditions that govern human life and lead to major costs. Therefore, we believe that the global community should aim at reducing the emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to acceptable levels as rapidly as possible, as well as providing secure and affordable energy for a stable, global development.

The goal is to underline the need for urgent action by the global community and to influence the post-Kyoto process by demanding a global framework supporting a market based solution to the climate change issue. This can be achieved by getting as many companies as possible aboard and by getting our common platform well known and well understood.

Coordination and ownership
Swedish power company Vattenfall is responsible for coordinating the 3C initiative. Other companies are invited to take part. The initiative stems from Vattenfall’s proposal for a low carbon emitting society “Curbing Climate Change”. www.vattenfall.com

Relations to other initiatives and organizations
Many of the participants in the 3C initiative also take part in other activities on climate change such as the World Economic Forum's G8 Climate Change Roundtable, US Climate Action Partnership and various Trade Association initiatives.

Our commitment - Drawing a roadmap to a low-emitting society: The 3C Initiative is committed to 9 overall principles
1. A switch-over to a low emitting economy is a necessity
The provision of secure, reliable and affordable energy supplies for customers and society is and will remain a key priority for each of our companies. However, we are well aware that all forms of energy provision have environmental consequences and that the long-term impact has to be compatible with a sustainable society, consequently a long-term switch-over to substantially lower emissions of greenhouse gases is a necessity.
2. A global solution is needed
Curbing climate change is first and foremost a question of minimizing the influence of man-made carbon dioxide in the natural environment. However, other greenhouse gases cannot be neglected. The greenhouse effect is global, a global solution is needed – in the end all human activity in all countries has to be addressed. We urgently need to develop a worldwide policy framework to replace the Kyoto Protocol from 2013 and onwards. While respecting different contexts, harmonization among national rules is needed in order to avoid market distortions and protectionism.
3. A common, global goal limiting climate changes is needed
The emission scenarios of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show that the global average surface temperature will increase by 1.4 to 5.8 degrees centigrade between 1990 and 2100. The priority should be to focus on a common, global goal of limiting global warming. Limiting emissions over time can and has to be done following an appropriate path towards 2100. According to present knowledge, the goal should be to stabilize the carbon dioxide equivalent concentration at a level below 550 parts per million (volume) in order to stabilize the temperature increase at an acceptable level. There are signals indicating that the acceptable concentration level may have to be even lower in the future. The long-term goal must be based on sound scientific and economic analyses. An assessment process should be designed to monitor the progress.
4. Greenhouse gas emissions must have a global price
In order to minimize the cost of staying below the cap it is necessary to establish a global price for the emission of greenhouse gases. To limit negative effects on global wealth, a global system facilitating emissions trading should be established. We recognize that gaining control of the carbon cycle will demand resources and will certainly influence transport and energy prices. Consequently, it is important to ensure that impacts on competitiveness and comparative advantages and disadvantages are minimized. Emission reductions should be achieved at the lowest possible cost. The predictability and stability of price trends are important factors.
5. A well laid-out combination of short- and long-term actions is needed
Any solution to the problem must work in both the short and long-term. This means that the world shall neither in the short nor long-term, in fact never, experience any unacceptable consequences from the global warming problem. Many of the actions required are by nature long term. For example, an investment in a new power plant has a time horizon of 40 – 50 years. To commercialize new technology, 20 – 30 years or more is usually required. The simple conclusion is that a focus only on short-term objectives and programs is totally inadequate. On the other hand, we cannot neglect the short-term, it should always be possible to apply the best available technologies. We have to act today and apply a 100-year perspective, that is, take responsibility for our actions from now until 2100.
6. No options should be excluded
The efficient use of resources and strong incentives for research and development are crucial. Diversification is essential to guarantee security of supply. Choice cannot be limited to the alternatives available today. Governments, producers and customers must be open to new solutions and technological developments.
7. A global emissions market is needed
A stable framework must be established for the investments that will be essential to reach the long-term goal. The regime shall be robust, but at the same time adaptive. As new knowledge is accumulated, parameters may change, but not the basic principles. Curbing greenhouse gas emissions is particularly well suited to emissions trading. From an environmental point of view, the location of the emissions is unimportant. There are strong reasons for believing that the costs for reducing greenhouse gas emissions vary widely among sources and countries and the cost savings will thus be larger the wider the trading scheme.
8. The developed countries must lead the way and the developing countries should follow as soon as they are able
Global trade requires a clear division of roles between the political sphere and the market, as well as mutual understanding. The developed economies must lead the way. In the long run it must be more attractive to be part of the system than to remain outside. Putting a price tag on emissions and creating the correct incentives will create resources that can be used to tackle the problem. Price setting must reflect supply and demand. The expansion of a global trading scheme must be built on mutual trust and avoidance of improper use.
9. Fair and sustainable global burden-sharing must be reached
All countries should commit to participate from the start. No poor country shall be denied its right to economic development. Richer countries shall pull a larger weight, but no country shall be forced to disruptive change. Fair effects on competitiveness shall be achieved.

To help reach a low-emitting, sustainable economy quickly and cost-effectively, 3C now follows its call to action with recommendations on policy priorities for the world’s politicians. These recommendations are based on a thorough analysis of how to reduce emissions cost-effectively throughout the global economy.

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Scientists in the IPCC and other bodies suggest that to avoid severe environmental and human impacts (see figure 1), the rise in mean surface temperature by the end of this century should be kept to less than 2°C (3.6°F) above pre-industrial levels. This will require a switch to a low-emitting global economy and is a challenging, though achievable, goal. To reach it the world must define global emission reduction targets (see figure 2) – and associated national commitments – for 2030 and 2050 and gradually reduce emissions to meet those targets.



The opportunities for cutting emissions are widespread (see figure 3), and many are available at very low, or even negative, cost (see figure 4). With global commitment, we firmly believe the world can reduce emissions to a level that will keep warming below 2°C without halting development. Given enabling policy frameworks, the most effective, efficient, and dynamic solutions to climate change will be driven by business.



The policy solution need not be a mystery.
The potential to reduce emissions can be broken down by industry, sector and region (see figure 3), and tools for unlocking that potential can be divided on the basis of potential reduction and cost (see figure 4). Such an analysis reveals that 4 kinds of policy will have the biggest impact:

Market based solutions based on a global price for CO2e
Business will adopt technologies and practices that reduce emissions if it sees economic value in them. That value becomes clearest when carbon has a credible price based on a mechanism that is stable over the long term (see figure 5). To minimize competitive distortion, the price should ultimately be global. Trading with emission rights is well suited to give such a price signal, because it creates minimal distortion in the market, facilitates inclusion of multiple countries and is easy to link to a target emission cap. The sooner governments and businesses establish a global emissions trading system the better, but, realistically, any international system will have to be introduced stepwise.

Minimum requirements for energy and resource efficiency
A carbon price will not achieve all abatements, because market imperfections may distort the price signal. Many efficiency measures remain untaken as a result of market imperfections (see figure 4), such as misaligned incentives or information gaps among end-users (see figure 6). This is most apparent in the building and transport sectors, but applies to some extent in power and industry too. To overcome this, governments should complement the carbon price by establishing minimum requirements for energy and CO2e efficiency for areas not well served by the market. Requirements should be designed to stimulate growing efficiency over time.


Effective mechanisms to reduce emissions from forestry and agriculture
Forestry and agriculture account for large shares of the global abatement potential (see figure 3) but pose special challenges (see figure 7). In forestry, tropical deforestation is exacerbated by weak landowner rights, and sustainable forestry is complicated by the difficulty of measurement and monitoring. In agriculture, implementing CO2e-efficient cultivation techniques is a challenge. National and international policymakers must devise special mechanisms, primarily based on market principles, to make forest management and sustainable agriculture economically attractive and to overcome obstacles and capture the full abatement potential of these sectors.



Technology push
Existing technology can provide significant abatement in the short term, but new technology will play an important role in reducing costs and facilitating economic growth in the future. Long-term credible emission markets are the main requirement for businesses to invest in developing technology, but additional support can accelerate investment. Such support could be either financial or non-financial and will be of different kinds in different development phases (see figure 8); but it will always aim at making the way from development to commercialization as quick and cost efficient as possible. 3C has identified a number of technologies with high abatement potential that need public support to cross the threshold to the market. Those include, but are not limited to, carbon capture and storage, offshore wind, solar photovoltaic and second-generation biofuels.




The international climate effort aims to limit climate change, but some change is inevitable. The impact of this will be most severe in the least developed countries (see figure 9 and 10), those least able to tackle the challenge. This will be a global problem and all nations must be committed to provide their share of the resources required for adaptation.





The participation of the biggest economies in the world is decisive. As the G8+5 countries account for more than half of the world’s emissions and population, and 71 percent of GDP (see figure 11), their commitments to emission reduction will have substantial impact. The G8+5 countries also have an important role to play as role models and pioneers laying out the infrastructure to reduce risks for other countries. We therefore urge them to show strong, coordinated leadership in the ongoing process on how to limit climate change.



A transparent policy framework is a prerequisite for businesses to work efficiently to reduce emissions. There are several ways the 3C companies can contribute to establishing such a framework and can start taking action to reduce emissions.
First of all, we will share our deep understanding of the industries we work in. We can point to the measures with most impact and to what is needed to gain their full effect. The multinational reach of our companies will also help ensure global impact.
Within our respective sectors, we will work to influence our business colleagues and to push the development of efficient technology.
We will work hard to reduce emissions in our own businesses and to act as role models for other organizations.
We will also contribute our share to minimizing market failures by being transparent and by helping our customers make informed choices






ABB
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AIG
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Alcan
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Alstom
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Areva
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Bayer
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BP
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British Sky
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Centrica
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CEZ Group
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China National Offshore Oil Corp.
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Citigroup
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Deutsche Bahn AG
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Deutsche Post World Net
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DONG Energy
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Dow Chemical
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Duke Energy
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Endesa
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EnBW
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Enel
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E.ON
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Eskom
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Fortum
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GE
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Hitachi
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Iberdrola
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Lufthansa
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MAN
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Munich Re Group
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MVM Zrt.
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Norske Skog
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NRG Energy
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Nuon
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Otto Group
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PG&E Corporation
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PNM Resources
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RAO UES of Russia
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Reuters
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SAP AG
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SAS Group
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Siemens
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Suez
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The Tata Power Company Ltd
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Veolia
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Wallenius Lines
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Vattenfall
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Supporting organizations
World Business Council for Sustainable Development

] 3C Participants
As of today the following companies participate in the 3C Initiative:
ABB, AIG, Alcan, Alstom, Areva, Bayer, BP, British Sky Broadcasting, Centrica, CEZ Group, China National Offshore Oil Corp, Citigroup, Deutsche Bahn, Deutsche Post, DONG Energy, Dow Chemical, Duke Energy, EnBW, Endesa, Enel, E.ON, Eskom, Fortum, General Electric, Hitachi, Iberdrola, Lufthansa, MAN, Munich Re Group, MVM, Norske Skog, NRG Energy, Nuon, Otto Group, PG & E, PNM Resources, RAO UES Russia, Reuters, SAP, SAS, Siemens, SUEZ, The Tata Power Company, Vattenfall, Veolia, Wallenius Lines

3C Quick facts •46 companies (2/3 Fortune 500)•4.5 million employees•EUR 1250 billion turnover (10 times EU)•Active in 220 countries and territories•HQ in 11 of the G8+5 nations•15% of global electricity generation•Across industry sectors (including industrial, energy, financial, insurance, power, transportation and media)

The 3C Initiative is a global opinion group consisting of business leaders demanding integration of climate issues in markets and trade.
Today we comprise business leaders from 46 large companies from 11 of the G8+5 countries and from a broad range of industries. We want to support political leaders in taking action on climate change, to give input to the policy debate so that the transition to a low-emitting economy is as fast and cost-effective as possible, and to take our responsibility by acting to cut emissions.
The 3C Initiative was launched on January 11, 2007 by a statement appealing to the global community and all its representatives to join forces with business leaders around a common vision of a low-emitting, sustainable society and to cooperate to create a roadmap that leads to its realization.
The recommendations presented in the 3C Roadmap have been developed out of 3C’s founding statement, through a six-month process of open consultation with many of the initiative’s participating companies.

Corporate Leaders Publish Roadmap for Action on Climate Change
Sun Nov 25, 2007 6:11 pm (PST)
Corporate Leaders Publish Roadmap for Action on Climate ChangeGreenBiz.com, 13 November 2007 - Combat Climate Change (3C), a new coalition of 46 international companies, is pushing global governments to join together for immediate action to address climate change. The group released its roadmap and call for action at a seminar in Washington, D.C., aimed at the leaders of the G8+5 countries -- Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the U.K. and the U.S., as well as Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa -- along with a statement saying that a low-carbon economy is well within reach, and the time to act is now. The companies involved work in sectors ranging from finance, insurance and media to energy, transportation, energy and chemicals. The roadmap was timed to lead off the discussions in advance of next month's summit on climate change in Bali, Indonesia. "Industry can and should be an ally, not an obstacle, to addressing the very real climate problem," Lars Josefsson, the initiative's founder and president and CEO of Swedish energy group Vattenfall, said in announcing the partnership. "But the initiative must be taken not by one industry, but by all of us working together: the global challenge of combating climate change requires a global solution." Among the goals of the 3C roadmap are the creation of a global goal to dictate the maximum amount world leaders will allow global temperatures to increase and setting emissions targets to meet this goal. The group also aims to create a global emissions-trading market and set requirements for energy efficiency and resource-use, especially in the transportation and building sectors, create similar solutions for forestry and agriculture, and spurring the development of alternative energy technologies. While saying that governments themselves must shoulder some of the burden of addressing climate change, the 3C members also committed to working together across sectors as well as within their own operations to maximize efficiency and reduce emissions from within, while also working toward a comprehensive joint solution. Combat Climate Change's six-step roadmap, as well as a list of all 46 member companies, is available on the group's website, CombatClimateChange .org.This article is reproduced with kind permission of GreenBiz.com.

Alternative fuels may boost pollution: reportAFP, 13 November 2007 - Some alternative vehicle fuels such as liquid coal can cause more harmful greenhouse gas emissions than polluters such as petrol or diesel, scientists warned in a US study released Tuesday."Liquid coal, for example, can produce 80 percent more global warming pollution than gasoline," said the Union of Concerned Scientists, a non-profit environmental group, in a statement introducing its study.Liquid coal is viewed as a potential replacement to the oil on which countries rely heavily to fuel vehicles."Corn ethanol, conversely, could be either more polluting or less than gasoline depending on how the corn is grown and the ethanol is produced," the report said.The analysis was based on replacing a fifth of all gasoline consumed in the United States with alternative fuels by 2030.If most of these alternatives consist of liquid coal, the change could pump pollution into the atmosphere equivalent to 34 million more cars on the road. Favoring cleaner "advanced biofuels," on the other hand, could cut harmful gases by a similar amount.The cleanest alternative, the report said, is cellulosic ethanol, made from grass or wood chips -- it could cut emissions by more than 85 percent."We need to wean ourselves off oil, but we should replace it with the cleanest alternatives possible," said the author of the study, Patricia Monahan, in the report. "Let's not trade one bad habit for another."This article is reproduced with kind permission of Agence France-Presse (AFP)