Carbon | News & Views

UK water use ‘worsening global crisis’

By Richard Black
Environment correspondent, BBC News

The amount of water used to produce food and goods imported by developed countries is worsening water shortages in the developing world, a report says.

The report, focusing on the UK, says two-thirds of the water used to make UK imports is used outside its borders.

The Engineering the Future alliance of professional engineering bodies says this is unsustainable, given population growth and climate change.

It says countries such as the UK must help poorer nations curb water use.

“We must take account of how our water footprint is impacting on the rest of the world,” said Professor Roger Falconer, director of the Hydro-Environmental Research Centre at Cardiff University and a member of the report’s steering committee.

If the water crisis becomes critical, it will pose a serious threat to the UK’s future development
Professor Peter Guthrie

“If we are to prevent the ‘perfect storm’, urgent action is necessary.”

The term perfect storm was used last year by the UK government’s chief scientist, Professor John Beddington, to describe future shortages of energy, food and water.

Forecasts suggest that when the world’s population soars beyond 8bn in 20 years time, the global demand for food and energy will jump by 50%, with the need for fresh water rising by 30%.

But developing countries are already using significant proportions of their water to grow food and produce goods for consumption in the West, the report says.

“The burgeoning demand from developed countries is putting severe pressure on areas that are already short of water,” said Professor Peter Guthrie, head of the Centre for Sustainable Development at Cambridge University, who chaired the steering group.

“If the water crisis becomes critical, it will pose a serious threat to the UK’s future development because of the impact it would have on our access to vital resources.”

Key to the report is the concept of “embedded water” – the water used to grow food and make things.

Embedded in a pint of beer, for example, is about 130 pints (74 litres) of water – the total amount needed to grow the ingredients and run all the processes that make the pint of beer.

A cup of coffee embeds about 140 litres (246 pints) of water, a cotton T-shirt about 2,000 litres, and a kilogram of steak 15,000 litres.

Using this methodology, UK consumers see only about 3% of the water usage they are responsible for.

The average UK consumer uses about 150 litres per day, the size of a large bath.

Ten times as much is embedded in the British-made goods bought by the average UK consumer; but that represents only about one-third of the total water embedded in all the average consumer’s food and goods, with the remainder coming from imports.

The UK is not unique in this – the same pattern is seen in most developed countries.

The engineering institutions say it means nations such as the UK have a duty to help curb water use in the developing world, where about one billion people already do not have sufficient access to clean drinking water.

UK-funded aid projects should have water conservation as a central tenet, the report recommends, while companies should examine their supply chains and reduce the water used in them.

This could lead to difficult questions being asked, such as whether it is right for the UK to import beans and flowers from water-stressed countries such as Kenya.

While growing crops such as these uses water, selling them brings foreign exchange into poor nations.

In the West, the report suggests, concerns over water could eventually lead to goods carrying a label denoting their embedded water content, in the same way as electrical goods now sport information about their energy consumption.

The Engineering the Future alliance includes the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE), the Royal Academy of Engineering (RAE) and the Chartered Institute of Water and Environmental Management (CIWEM).

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Green policy: We need a seismic shift in thinking

Andy Atkins

The massive disruption to European air travel from the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland is a stark reminder of the massive force of nature – and the powerlessness of our actions when we feel its full might.

It’s a timely reminder of the urgent need to heed warnings from the world’s leading climate scientists about the huge threat we face unless we slash greenhouse gas emissions and tackle global warming.

But despite widespread agreement among the main political parties that climate change is one of the biggest challenges we face, the issue has taken a back seat since Gordon Brown blew the general election whistle earlier this month.

Before the economic crisis took hold, all the main parties seemed to grasp the importance of making climate change a major issue.

David Cameron kicked off his party leadership by making the environment a leading priority, urging people to “vote blue, go green” in the runup to the 2006 council elections.

Nick Clegg told a 2008 climate rally that some were saying: “In a recession we can’t afford the luxury to worry about the planet … they are wrong, you are right.”

And at last year’s Copenhagen climate talks, Gordon Brown warned of the “economic catastrophe equivalent in this century to the impact of two world wars and the great depression in the last.”

Cross-party support in the last parliament led to the passing of the historic Climate Change Act. Championed by Friends of the Earth, this was the first national legislation anywhere in the world to set legally binding targets for cutting emissions.

All three parties have sizeable sections devoted to the environment in their manifestos, and these are certainly stronger and bolder than last time round. But none of them fully grasps the size of the environmental challenge we face.

There is little to choose between Labour and Conservative electoral pledges.

Perhaps most deplorable is the fact that neither includes a commitment to delivering the 42% reduction in greenhouse gases that the government’s key advisors – the committee on climate change – say is required by 2020. Labour hinted at it, but only if various international conditions are met, while the Conservatives don’t even have a 2020 target.

Labour are strong on making our homes more energy efficient, promising to improve 7 million homes through tougher standards for rented housing and a loans scheme for homeowners, with the aim that all lofts and cavity walls will be insulated by 2015. However, these laudable intentions are undermined by promises to widen motorways and build more runways.

A lack of detail permeates Conservative plans. How much money will its Green Investment Bank have? How big an impact will green government procurement plans have on the markets for eco products? And what emission standards will be set for new power stations? The promise to scrap airport expansion plans is welcome.

The Liberal Democrats have been most impressive – second only to the Green Party – in putting green issues at the heart of their policy proposals by including them on most pages and in every section of their manifesto.

The next UK parliament will be critical if the UK is to play its part in reducing emissions and seizing the enormous economic opportunities of developing a low-carbon future, which could deliver hundreds of thousands of new green jobs and business opportunities.

Strong leadership will be required from whichever party wins the election to ensure that the UK plays a fair role in tackling global warming. And this will be so much easier if they are supported by the other parties too. Climate change is too important to be a political football.

The starting point for the next government must be a far stronger target for cutting UK emissions – without buying carbon offsets from abroad.

Local carbon budgets should also be introduced for every local council. They have a crucial role to play in meeting our climate goals. And we need a new law to tackle the significant greenhouse gas emissions and deforestation caused by the UK’s dependence on imported feeds for livestock – which will also support better UK farming and domestic feed production.

And the next UK government must also play a prominent role in pushing for a strong and fair international agreement on cutting emissions where those responsible make the deepest cuts first, and developing countries are supported to grow in a clean, green way.

Aviation emissions have been reduced by the Icelandic volcano , but it’s also brought chaos, misery and frustration to tens of thousands of people. Cutting emissions and tackling climate change is essential – but this must be achieved through bold strategies, not volcanic activity.

It’s a seismic shift in political thinking that we desperately need.

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Green Party sets ambitious carbon reduction targets

The Green Party has said that carbon emissions must be cut at a much faster rate than the government is currently proposing.

In its 2010 election manifesto, it said emissions need to be reduced by 90 percent by 2030, instead of 80 percent by 2050 as the government has advocated.

“This means an annual reduction of about ten percent per year from now until 2030,” the party pointed out.

It said that only by achieving these cuts can the UK hope to prevent “runaway and disastrous climate change”.

To do this, the Greens put forward a number of proposals, such as discouraging the use of fossil fuels by bringing back the fuel duty escalator and introducing carbon quotas for all UK households and businesses.

The party would also introduce a “massive” programme of direct government investment in large-scale wind and other renewable generation, with the aim of obtaining half of the UK’s energy from renewable sources by 2020.

Environmental measures also formed part of the election manifestos of all three of the main political parties.

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Google calls for price on carbon

Google has spoken in support of a price on carbon to tackle global warming, insisting it makes good business sense.

Dan Reicher, the organisation’s director of climate change and energy initiatives, told the Guardian that carbon pricing would provide the incentive companies need to invest in green technology.

This would in turn create a new market for environmental innovations that Google and others could exploit.

“Putting a serious price on carbon will both get us closer to the serious energy reductions we need to make but also accelerate the domestic development and adoption of these technologies,” he explained.

Mr Reicher said there are “various ways to get a carbon price” and insisted that it would not just be businesses that would benefit.

Households could save money by reducing their energy consumption and adopting energy efficiency technology, with carbon pricing encouraging them to do so.

Meanwhile, the Guardian has reported that the Aldersgate Group is putting together a report containing recommendations from a coalition of low carbon firms, which it would like to see implemented by the new UK government.

They include extending the role of carbon pricing in the country.

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Climate change space mission begins

A satellite that will measure the thickness of the ice at the earth’s poles is being sent into orbit today (April 8th).

The Cryosat-2 spacecraft will be launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 14:57 BST.

If it makes it into space, it will send information back to a team of UK-led researchers, allowing them to monitor the melting of sea ice.

They will use the data to determine how global warming is affecting ocean currents, sea levels and the world’s climate.

The first Cryosat craft was launched in 2005 but crashed minutes after take-off, landing in the Arctic Ocean.

Project manager Richard Francis, from the European Space Agency, told the BBC that the launch of the new satellite will be nerve-wracking.

However, he added: “It will be so exhilarating when the spacecraft finally makes it into orbit and we get the first contact with it.”

According to figures from the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre, ice cover in the Arctic increased this winter during an unusually cold spell, reaching levels not seen since 2001.

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80 percent cuts in carbon emissions possible

Cutting Europe’s carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2050 is possible, but the continent must eradicate carbon-emitting power generation.

This is the conclusion of a new report by the European Climate Foundation, which states that an 80 percent cut on 1990 levels would require a move to an almost zero-carbon power supply.

In the short term, the cost of implementing these policies would be higher than conducting business as usual, but over the longer term it would not lead to higher energy prices, the document stated.

Matt Philips, a spokesman for the European Climate Foundation, said: “When the Roadmap 2050 project began it was assumed that high-renewable energy scenarios would be too unstable to provide sufficient reliability.”

It was also thought that they would be uneconomic and that major breakthroughs in technology would be needed to move in this direction.

“Roadmap 2050 has found all of these assertions to be untrue,” he said.

According to data from the European Commission, carbon emissions from companies covered by the EU Emissions Trading Scheme fell by 11.2 percent last year.

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Earth struck by most powerful space storm in three years

By Rachel Courtland – New Scientist

The most powerful geomagnetic storm since December 2006 struck the Earth on Monday, a day earlier than expected.

On 3 April, the SOHO spacecraft spotted a cloud of charged particles called a coronal mass ejection (CME) shooting from the sun at 500 kilometres per second. This velocity suggested the front would reach Earth in roughly three days.

“It hit earlier and harder than forecast,” says Doug Biesecker of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colorado.

Fortunately, the storm was not intense enough to interfere strongly with power grids or satellite navigation, but it did trigger dazzling auroras in places like Iceland (pictured).

Such storms highlight the uncertainty in the arrival times of CMEs, which can easily be 15 hours off predictions, Biesecker says. Better modelling of the solar wind, which can accelerate CMEs en route to Earth, could reduce the uncertainty.

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Arctic winter ice recovers slightly despite record year low, scientists say

By Juliette Jowit – The Guardian

The melting Arctic ice cap recovered slightly over the last winter, but scientists warned that it was still one of the worst years on record.

The twice yearly figures published by the National Snow and Ice Data Centre of the winter high and summer low for the Arctic sea ice is seen as a powerful indicator of global warming.

Last night the US organisation released the data for the winter of 2009-10 showing the maximum extent reached on 31 March was 5.89m square miles (15.25m sq km). This was 250,000 square miles (650,000 sq km) below the 1979 to 2000 average for March when measurements are taken for winter sea ice. The rate of decline for March over the 1978 to 2010 period is 2.6% per decade, according to NSIDC data. Arctic sea ice reflects sunlight, keeping the polar regions cool and moderating global climate.

NSIDC said there had been some recovery in the amount of ice that was two years old or more, from last year’s previous record low.

However, the spread of the ice, though higher than in some recent very bad years, was still low compared to past decades. “I think it’s the sixth or seventh lowest maximum out of the previous 32 years,” said Walt Meier, a research scientist at NSIDC.

Looking ahead to the other key annual figure – the lowest extent of sea ice at the end of the summer melting season – Meier said this year was also expected to be historically low, depending on temperatures and winds which blow the ice around, and sometimes out of the Arctic Sea into the warmer Atlantic and Pacific currents.

“I would say [it's going to be] low, perhaps one of the lowest, but not approaching 2007,” said Meier, referring to the record lows that year when the Arctic lost an area of ice the size of Alaska in one year. “Given the amount of thin ice we know we’re going to be low, it’s just a matter of how low.”

Last month, Japanese scientists reported in the journal Geophysical Research Letters that winds rather than climate change had been responsible for around one-third of the steep downward trend in sea ice extent in the region since 1979. The study did not question global warming is also melting ice in the Arctic, but it could raise doubts about high-profile claims that the region has passed a climate “tipping point” that could see ice loss sharply accelerate in coming years.

Last week the Catlin Arctic Survey leader Ann Daniels wrote for the Guardian about the ice seen by the team of three explorers trekking across the Arctic in “incredibly strong north winds” to measure ocean acidification linked to greenhouse gases. “We’ve also been seeing vast areas of open water and very thin ice — it’s the first time any of us have experienced anything quite like this on such a large scale,” wrote Daniels. “The way the ice is behaving is simply the strangest we have ever seen.”

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Solar-powered plane completes first test flight

A new solar-powered plane took to the skies in Switzerland this week as its manufacturers examined its flight behaviour.

The Solar Impulse has the wingspan of a Boeing 747 yet weighs the same as a small car and features four propellers which help to lift it off the ground.   These are powered using solar cells attached to the plane’s wings.

Swiss adventurer Bertrand Piccard is part of the team responsible for the aircraft and he hopes to fly it around the world in 2012.  He said it was important to determine how the prototype would fly and whether it would be able to keep a straight trajectory.

“To fly without fuel, we have to make it fly in line,” he told the Associated Press.  Witnesses said the flight was successful, with the plane enjoying a smooth take-off and landing.

According to government statistics, air travel accounted for 6.4 percent of the UK’s carbon dioxide emissions in 2006.

Forecasts suggest they could make up around ten percent by 2020 unless action is taken to reduce them.

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Hacked climate email inquiry cleared Jones but serious questions remain

By Fred Pearce, Guardian.

Gaunt, beta-blocked and stood down from duty, Phil Jones is the fall guy for the wider failings that triggered the hacked climate email scandals. But at its hearings into the affair a month ago, the Commons science committee was kind to the director of the Climate Research Unit (CRU), but short-tempered with his grinning sidekick, the University of East Anglia’s vice-chancellor Edward Acton.

And so, in their report, Jones gets the benefit of a few doubts. At their final drafting meeting last week, only the MPs’ in-house cryptosceptic, Graham Stringer, voted against a sentence saying that, on the evidence they had, “the scientific reputation of Professor Jones and CRU remains intact”.

Instead, the university administration gets chastised for presiding over a culture of secrecy and possible illegality within the CRU that led to a public relations meltdown.

The MPs are clear that there are serious issues to address both in climate science and in the operation of freedom of information law in British universities. But in their desire not to single out Jones, they end up bending over backwards to support a man who is the pillar of the establishment they are criticising.

Of course, it must have been “frustrating” for Jones to handle freedom of information requests from people “he knew – or perceived – were motivated by a desire simply to undermine his work”. But, as the MPs say, his “blunt refusals to share data, even unrestricted data” led to “unfortunate email exchanges” and was “inevitably counterproductive”.

The MPs are right to absolve Jones of many of the crimes of which bloggers have accused him. The allegations surrounding his “tricks” and efforts to “hide the decline” are largely malicious inventions.

But, in their rush to judgment before parliament is dissolved for the general election, Phil Willis and his team avoided examining more complex charges, including those raised by the Guardian in its investigations in February.

Even so, they sometimes get confused. The MPs accept Jones’s claim that CRU’s habit of keeping secret much of its data, methodology and computer codes was “standard practice” among climate scientists. Yet they also note that Nasa scientists doing similar work are much more open. Not so standard, then.

And whatever standard practice may be, surely as one of climate science’s senior figures, Jones should take some responsibility for its misdemeanours? Jones has worked for the CRU for more than 20 years and been its director for six. The MPs found there a “culture of withholding information” in which “information may have been deleted to avoid disclosure.” It found this “unacceptable”. Doesn’t its director take responsibility?

The MPs kept their criticism for the university. Its “failure to grasp fully the potential damage [from] non-disclosure of FOIA requests was regrettable”.

Also possibly illegal, it might have added.

UEA is rightly in deep doo-doo. The MPs find that its information officers colluded with CRU to subvert legitimate freedom of information requests, and “found ways to support” the culture of secrecy. In a key statement that not even the proliferation of acronyms can disguise, they say: “We must put on record our concern about the manner in which UEA allowed CRU to handle FOIA requests.”

The wider research community also has questions to answer. “We recommend that all publicly funded research groups consider whether they are being as open as they can be, and ought to be, with the details of their methodologies,” the MPs say. That sounds like a good follow-up for the committee after the general election.

But apart from Acton, the person who will read this report with most gloom, may be Sir Muir Russell, the Scottish grandee appointed by Acton to review the activities of Jones and his colleagues.

The MPs agree with the sceptic Lord Lawson, who gave evidence, that Russell’s inquiry should conduct his interviews and hearings “in public wherever possible”. Unless Russell has spoken to nobody in the past four months, he evidently is not doing that. They say his inquiry should “publish all written evidence on its website as soon as possible”. Yesterday, a month after the deadline for submissions closed, none had been posted.

Worse, the MPs have given him long list of things to investigate or rule on, such as deciding whether emails were deleted in breach of FOI law. Or coming up with rules for CRU on sharing data. And such as deciding whether Jones “subverted the peer-review process”. They also suggest that a test of how truly independent the Russell inquiry is will be whether it gives the UEA an advance copy. This story is far from over yet.

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