Potential contribution of the forestry sector in Bangladesh to carbon sequestration

The Kyoto Protocol provides for the involvement of developing countries in an atmospheric greenhouse gas reduction regime under its Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). Carbon credits are gained from reforestation and afforestation activities in developing countries. Bangladesh, a densely populated tropical country in South Asia, has a huge degraded forestland which can be reforested by CDM projects. To realize the potential of the forestry sector in developing countries for full-scale emission mitigation, the carbon sequestration potential of different species in different types of plantations should be integrated with the carbon trading system under the CDM of the Kyoto Protocol. This paper discusses the prospects and problems of carbon trading in Bangladesh, in relation to the CDM, in the context of global warming and the potential associated consequences. The paper analyzes the effects of reforestation projects on carbon sequestration in Bangladesh, in general, and in the hilly Chittagong region, in particular, and concludes by demonstrating the carbon trading opportunities. Results showed that tree tissue in the forests of Bangladesh stored 92tons of carbon per hectare (tC/ha), on average. The results also revealed a gross stock of 190tC/ha in the plantations of 13 tree species, ranging in age from 6 to 23 years. The paper confirms the huge atmospheric CO(2) offset by the forests if the degraded forestlands are reforested by CDM projects, indicating the potential of Bangladesh to participate in carbon trading for both its economic and environmental benefit. Within the forestry sector itself, some constraints are identified; nevertheless, the results of the study can expedite policy decisions regarding Bangladesh's participation in carbon trading through the CDM.     

EIA Training for Urban Local Authorities in Africa

This paper reports on the participation of the International Council for Local Initiatives (ICLEI) in EIA training in sub-Saharan Africa. It draws from the experiences of an EIA training project in which 365 participants from 17 African cities in six sub-Saharan African countries participated. A total of 27 resource persons from six African countries were hired and gained experience as EIA trainers for local authorities. A number of participating local authorities are already implementing and competently evaluating EIAs as a result of the training workshops. The successful implementation of EIA at the local level greatly depends on the awareness and understanding, by all the stakeholders, of the relevant legislative framework in which the EIA programme is applied. The participants were asked to identify impacts of specific projects, determine mitigation measures and recommend a suitable monitoring programme. The field exercises proved extremely valuable in that they provided a practical opportunity for workshop participants to build essential EIA skills while at the same time providing input into the actual development process in some cases. After the training workshop, participants opined that they were able to understand the value of EIA and the need for its incorporation into the decision-making process.     

Joint implementation: Biodiversity and greenhouse gas offsets

One of the most pressing environmental issues today is the possibility that projected increases in global emissions of greenhouse gases from increased deforestation, development, and fossil-fuel combustion could significantly alter global climate patterns. Under the terms of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, signed in Rio de Janeiro during the June 1992 Earth Summit, the United States and other industrialized countries committed to balancing greenhouse gas emissions at 1990 levels in the year 2000. Included in the treaty is a provision titled Joint Implementation, whereby industrialized countries assist developing countries in jointly modifying long-term emission trends, either through emission reductions or by protecting and enhancing greenhouse gas sinks (carbon sequestration). The US Climate Action Plan, signed by President Clinton in 1993, calls for voluntary climate change mitigation measures by various sectors, and the action plan included a new program, the US Initiative on Joint Implementation. Wisconsin Electric decided to invest in a Jl project because its concept encourages creative, cost-effective solutions to environmental problems through partnering, international cooperation, and innovation. The project chosen, a forest preservation and management effort in Belize, will sequester more than five million tons of carbon dioxide over a 40-year period, will become economically selfsustaining after ten years, and will have substantial biodiversity benefits.     

EIA Training for Urban Local Authorities in Africa

This paper reports on the participation of the International Council for Local Initiatives (ICLEI) in EIA training in sub-Saharan Africa. It draws from the experiences of an EIA training project in which 365 participants from 17 African cities in six sub-Saharan African countries participated. A total of 27 resource persons from six African countries were hired and gained experience as EIA trainers for local authorities. A number of participating local authorities are already implementing and competently evaluating EIAs as a result of the training workshops. The successful implementation of EIA at the local level greatly depends on the awareness and understanding, by all the stakeholders, of the relevant legislative framework in which the EIA programme is applied. The participants were asked to identify impacts of specific projects, determine mitigation measures and recommend a suitable monitoring programme. The field exercises proved extremely valuable in that they provided a practical opportunity for workshop participants to build essential EIA skills while at the same time providing input into the actual development process in some cases. After the training workshop, participants opined that they were able to understand the value of EIA and the need for its incorporation into the decision-making process.     

Linking carbon sequestration science with local sustainability: an integrated assessment approach

This paper introduces an integrated assessment (IA) approach for a Canada-China joint research project that linked forest carbon sequestration, forest resource management, and local sustainability enhancement. The purpose of the IA was to improve the measurement of carbon in different land uses and vegetation covers, as well as to direct decision makers to those land uses or options as an CO₂ emission reduction strategy while supporting rural sustainable development. In this connection, three questions are addressed in this paper:

1)

How will forestry carbon sequestration land use policies affect regional sustainability prospects in rural China?     

Chinese construction companies in Angola: A local linkages perspective

China tends to spearhead its economic overtures to African countries through high-level bilateral negotiations. These are frequently in the form of China Exim Bank loans for large-scale infrastructure projects, repaid by resource exports to China. While much is made of China's resource-based activities in Africa, less focus is placed on the converse of this relationship—the infrastructure provision that African resources buy from China. This article takes the positions that local linkages development is one of the clearest ways that African countries can benefit from Chinese construction companies' market engagement. The prevailing view is that Chinese companies contracted to undertake the construction projects financed in this way do not use local labour, materials or any other inputs in the undertaking of their contracts. Focusing on the strategic orientation of large Chinese companies state-owned enterprises (SOEs) operating in Angola's construction sector, this article seeks to uncover the determinants of their sourcing behaviour, and the manner in which this is reflected in their use of local inputs.     

Exporting dams: China's hydropower industry goes global

In line with China's "going out" strategy, China's dam industry has in recent years significantly expanded its involvement in overseas markets. The Chinese Export-Import Bank and other Chinese financial institutions, state-owned enterprises, and private firms are now involved in at least 93 major dam projects overseas. The Chinese government sees the new global role played by China's dam industry as a "win-win" situation for China and host countries involved. But evidence from project sites such as the Merowe Dam in Sudan demonstrates that these dams have unrecognized social and environmental costs for host communities. Chinese dam builders have yet to adopt internationally accepted social and environmental standards for large infrastructure development that can assure these costs are adequately taken into account. But the Chinese government is becoming increasingly aware of the challenge and the necessity of promoting environmentally and socially sound investments overseas.     

Glocalization of COVID-19 responses and management of the pandemic in Africa

ABSTRACT

The study explores how glocalization of COVID-19 responses affects the management of the pandemic in Africa. Using data from 20 selected African countries, the study found that the reliance on local medicines alongside other salient global initiatives for containment of COVID-19 is effective in managing the pandemic in Africa. It concluded that despite the high vulnerabilities of African countries to COVID-19, the glocal approach has yielded positive outcomes by increasing the number of patients that recover from COVID-19 and scaling down the fatalities compared with the other regions.     

IMPROVING URBAN WATERWAYS IN EMERGING COUNTRIES: AN ACTION PLAN FOR MADRAS1

ABSTRACT: Typically, infrastructure agencies build massive water projects to serve expanding populations in emerging country cities, but collect and treat only a fraction of the resulting wastewater. This effluent often overwhelms existing sewerage systems and fouls waterways. Cleaning urban waterways requires large investments over long terms and the political will to make and sustain them. This challenge - difficult in advanced countries - becomes daunting with the scarce resources and weak institutions typical of emerging countries. This paper presents a framework to structure such a strategy, and applies it to Madras, India. It consists of three parts: (1) setting a vision through a participatory process; (2) macro investments mainly in wastewater treatment that use least-cost methods; and (3) micro investments in small projects that involve local people and galvanize public support. The macro investment, $350 million for Madras, appears very large, but averages out to $66 per capita, far below the $1,000-$2,000 typical of advanced country cities. Micro projects to be undertaken by Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) included an independent wastewater monitoring program, sanitary upgrading of slums along waterways banks, a cattle waste demonstration project, and an industrial pollution survey. Together, a macro/micro strategy promises the funding and political will to achieve a balanced vision of waterways quality.     

Greenhouse gas mitigation options in the Forest sector of Russia: National and project level assessments

Greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation options in the Russian forest sector include: afforestation and reforestation of unforested/degraded land area; enhanced forest productivity; incorporation of nondestructive methods of wood harvesting in the forest industry; establishment of land protective forest stands; increase in stand age of final harvest in the European part of Russia; increased fire control; increased disease and pest control; and preservation of old growth forests in the Russian Far-East, which are presently threatened. Considering the implementation of all of the options presented, the GHG mitigation potential within the forest and agroforestry sectors of Russia is approximately 0.6–0.7 Pg C/yr or one half of the industrial carbon emissions of the United States. The difference between the GHG mitigation potential and the actual level of GHGs mitigated in the Russian forest sector will depend to a great degree on external financing that may be available. One possibility for external financing is through joint implementation (JI). However, under the JI process, each project will be evaluated by considering a number of criteria including also the difference between the carbon emissions or sequestration for the baseline (or reference) and the project case, the permanence of the project, and leakage. Consequently, a project level assessment must appreciate the near-term constraints that will face practitioners who attempt to realize the GHG mitigation potential in the forest and agroforestry sectors of their countries.     

A Brief Overview of Carbon Sequestration Economics and Policy

This article provides an overview of the issues and challenges involved in analyzing the costs and program design for carbon sequestration. The first section examines some of the pitfalls of comparing the results of carbon sequestration cost studies and suggests some simple ways in which analysts could make their results more useful. The pitfalls in comparing studies include different definitions for the summary statistic dollars per ton, differences in the type of costs that are estimated, and differences in underlying assumptions regarding program design and implementation. Future cost studies will benefit from improved treatment of leakage, general equilibrium interactions, and public finance interactions. The second section reviews issues related to the implementation of a carbon sequestration program, including which policy tools are available and which have received the most attention, some of the challenges for using those policy tools, and one alternative that has received little attention, but may become necessary. The discussion also provides an overview and analysis of the bills introduced in the last two congresses and considers the general policy implications of those proposals.     

Basin-scale hydrogeologic impacts of CO2 storage: Capacity and regulatory implications

Industrial-scale injection of CO₂ into saline formations in sedimentary basins will cause large-scale fluid pressurization and migration of native brines, which may affect valuable groundwater resources overlying the deep sequestration aquifers. In this paper, we discuss how such basin-scale hydrogeologic impacts (1) may reduce current storage capacity estimates, and (2) can affect regulation of CO₂ storage projects. Our assessment arises from a hypothetical future carbon sequestration scenario in the Illinois Basin, which involves twenty individual CO₂ storage projects (sites) in a core injection area most suitable for long-term storage. Each project is assumed to inject five million tonnes of CO₂ per year for 50 years. A regional-scale three-dimensional simulation model was developed for the Illinois Basin that captures both the local-scale CO₂–brine flow processes and the large-scale groundwater flow patterns in response to CO₂ storage. The far-field pressure buildup predicted for this selected sequestration scenario support recent studies in that environmental concerns related to near- and far-field pressure buildup may be a limiting factor on CO₂ storage capacity. In other words, estimates of storage capacity, if solely based on the effective pore volume available for safe trapping of CO₂, may have to be revised based on assessments of pressure perturbations and their potential impacts on caprock integrity and groundwater resources. Our results suggest that (1) the area that needs to be characterized in a permitting process may comprise a very large region within the basin if reservoir pressurization is considered, and (2) permits cannot be granted on a single-site basis alone because the near- and far-field hydrogeologic response may be affected by interference between individual storage sites. We also discuss some of the challenges in making reliable predictions of large-scale hydrogeologic impacts related to CO₂ sequestration projects.     

Trade-Based Carbon Sequestration Accounting

This article describes and illustrates an accounting method to assess and compare early carbon sequestration investments and trades on the basis of the number of standardized CO₂ emission offset credits they will provide. The gold standard for such credits is assumed to be a relatively riskless credit based on a CO₂ emission reduction that provides offsets against CO₂ emissions on a one-for-one basis. The number of credits associated with carbon sequestration needs to account for time, risk, durability, permanence, additionality, and other factors that future trade regulators will most certainly use to assign official credits to sequestration projects. The method that is presented here uses established principles of natural resource accounting and conventional rules of asset valuation to score projects. A review of 20 early voluntary United States based CO₂ offset trades that involve carbon sequestration reveals that the assumptions that buyers, sellers, brokers, and traders are using to characterize the economic potential of their investments and trades vary enormously. The article develops a universal carbon sequestration credit scoring equation and uses two of these trades to illustrate the sensitivity of trade outcomes to various assumptions about how future trade auditors are likely to score carbon sequestration projects in terms of their equivalency with CO₂ emission reductions. The article emphasizes the importance of using a standard credit scoring method that accounts for time and risk to assess and compare even unofficial prototype carbon sequestration trades. The scoring method illustrated in this article is a tool that can protect the integrity of carbon sequestration credit trading and can assist buyers and sellers in evaluating the real economic potential of prospective trades. Published online     

The consequences of failure should be considered in siting geologic carbon sequestration projects

Geologic carbon sequestration is the injection of anthropogenic CO₂ into deep geologic formations where the CO₂ is intended to remain indefinitely. If successfully implemented, geologic carbon sequestration will have little or no impact on terrestrial ecosystems aside from the mitigation of climate change. However, failure of a geologic carbon sequestration site, such as large-scale leakage of CO₂ into a potable groundwater aquifer, could cause impacts that would require costly remediation measures. Governments are attempting to develop regulations for permitting geologic carbon sequestration sites to ensure their safety and effectiveness. At present, these regulations focus largely on decreasing the probability of failure. In this paper we propose that regulations for the siting of early geologic carbon sequestration projects should emphasize limiting the consequences of failure because consequences are easier to quantify than failure probability.     

The carbon neutral free for all

Businesses offering to make you or your company carbon neutral are proliferating on the Internet. The term carbon neutral is being defined by common usage. There are no standard ways of measuring your carbon emissions and so no standards for becoming carbon neutral. This paper examines eleven websites offering carbon neutrality. It compares online calculators, their results and the costs of offsetting calculated on the strength of those results. It traces two offset projects: one in Kenya, offering voluntary offsets and run by a not-for-profit organisation; one in India striving for UN Clean Development Mechanism status. The projects are traced from the online carbon offset retailer to the actual project on the ground in order to compare the online rhetoric with the time consuming and difficult work of developing community based projects in Third World countries. The paper offers a definition of carbon neutral based on the ways in which the term is being used. It also uncovers a range of issues for further discussion.     

CO2 capture and storage from a bioethanol plant: Carbon and energy footprint and economic assessment

Biomass energy and carbon capture and storage (BECCS) can lead to a net removal of atmospheric CO₂. This paper investigates environmental and economic performances of CCS retrofit applied to two mid-sized refineries producing ethanol from sugar beets. Located in the Region Centre France, each refinery has two major CO₂ sources: fermentation and cogeneration units. “carbon and energy footprint” (CEF) and “discounted cash flow” (DCF) analyses show that such a project could be a good opportunity for CCS early deployment. CCS retrofit on fermentation only with natural gas fired cogeneration improves CEF of ethanol production and consumption by 60% without increasing much the non renewable energy consumption. CCS retrofit on fermentation and natural gas fired cogeneration is even more appealing by decreasing of 115% CO₂ emissions, while increasing non renewable energy consumption by 40%. DCF shows that significant project rates of return can be achieved for such small sources if both a stringent carbon policy and direct subsidies corresponding to 25% of necessary investment are assumed. We also underlined that transport and storage cost dilution can be realistically achieved by clustering emissions from various plants located in the same area. On a single plant basis, increasing ethanol production can also produce strong economies of scale.     

Fostering sustainable small-scale investments: lessons from experience and ideas for intervention and innovation

This article presents lessons from experience pertinent to implementing small-scale natural resource and related investment projects in developing countries. It outlines ideas for intervention and innovation to foster such investments. Particular emphasis is placed on private-sector participation in these investments. Following a brief presentation of the economic development and other arguments that support intervention and innovation in support of such small-scale natural resource investments, the article discusses many of the lessons learned from experience. These lessons reinforce those touched upon in the investment-specific discussions in the previous articles. The experience and associated lessons that are examined include experiences in both developing and developed countries and encompass not just lessons from natural resource investments, but also small-scale investments in other sectors. Financing and other innovations which facilitate meeting the challenges are drawn from relevant experience where barriers to investment have been surmounted. Options for programme and project interventions to increase market penetration of small-scale investments and achieve the associated development linkages and synergies are suggested. These suggestions are aimed especially at governments and bilateral and multilateral development finance and development assistance entities. It is those players who might support such interventions in collaboration with local financial institutions and other market players.     

The injustice of climate change: voices from Africa

Farmers and pastoralists in Africa are remarkably consistent across countries in how they report climate is changing. These changes are still relatively small but, combined with the effects of chronic poverty, disease and environmental degradation, are already having severe human consequences. The changes are consistent with what is expected to occur due to man-made global warming and will increase. Women are especially impacted. Africa is least responsible for greenhouse gas emissions, but will suffer some of the most damaging consequences. Adaptation is essential. This will require finance from international sources. However, there is much African governments can and should do to start. Boosting adaptation to current climatic variability and shocks and tackling poverty will bring benefits today and for the future.     

Approaches for analyzing local carbon mitigation strategies: Tompkins County,New York,USA

A carbon budget was calculated for Tompkins County, NY, a semi-rural upstate county with a population density of 78 pp/km². The costs and potential for several carbon mitigation options were analyzed in four categories: terrestrial C sequestration, local power generation, transportation, and energy end-use efficiency. This study outlines a methodology for conducting this type of local-scale analysis, including sources and calculations adaptable to different localities. Effective carbon mitigation strategies for this county based on costs/Mg C and maximum potential include reforestation of abandoned agricultural lands, biomass production for residential heating and co-firing in coal power plants, changes in personal behavior related to transportation (e.g., public transportation), installation of residential energy efficient products such as programmable thermostats or compact fluorescent light bulbs, and development of local wind power. The total county emissions are about 340 Gg C/year, with biomass sequestration rates of 121 Gg C/year. The potential for mitigation, assuming full market penetration, amounts to about 234 Gg C/year (69%), with 100 Gg C/year (29%) at no net cost to the consumer. The development of local-scale C mitigation plans based on this sort of model of analysis is feasible and would be useful for guiding investments in climate change prevention.     

Pro-Poor local economic development in South Africa: The role of pro-poor tourism

This paper describes features of the emerging nexus in South Africa between tourism, poverty alleviation and local economic development (LED) interventions. The South African experience of evolving a strong pro-poor focus in LED planning is distinctive in the international context of writings on LED. Pro-poor LED is increasingly the outcome of the application of measures and programmes that are linked to the approach of pro-poor tourism in both rural and urban areas of South Africa. Two studies are presented of Alexandra township, Johannesburg and the Madikwe Game Reserve in North West Province as examples of pro-poor tourism as a form of pro-poor LED. It is argued that the growth of pro-poor tourism initiatives in South Africa suggests that the country is currently a laboratory for the testing and evolution of new approaches towards the planning of LED that potentially will have relevance for other countries in the developing world.