When it comes to adopting an eco-friendly lifestyle, there is no single place that you have more control than in your home, where you can decide what comes in and what goes out (not to mention where it comes from and where it goes to).

It is your choice whether or not to recycle, to purchase organic food and textiles, to conserve energy and water, to re-purpose old furnishing or donate them to charitable organizations (rather than throwing them away), and to shop for home goods from vendors that embrace eco-friendly practices and materials. So when it’s time to renovate your home, it is you who decides just how green you want to become.

And there are plenty of options for the homeowner looking to make the process a little less harmful to the environment. Depending on the scope of your renovations, your best option may be to hire a company or contractor that specializes in green building projects. These people are well acquainted with the latest advances in green building practices and materials (local, renewable, sustainable, and so on) and they can help you to find the options that work for your home and your budget.

On the other hand, hiring a contractor can be a fairly pricey proposition in and of itself. Although large or complex jobs may require the skills and experience that a contractor (and crew) bring to the job, there are also several things you can do on your own to spend less as you make your house more valuable and appealing in an eco-friendly way.
For example, you may need to bring in the pros to tackle major plumbing issues, but you can probably install low-flow toilets and aerated taps on your own with nothing more than a comprehensive home repair guide and a few tools. And if you ask demo crews to stay their hand when removing cabinetry, you won’t have to pay them for cleanup; you can haul intact cabinets to a vendor that specializes in refurbishing usable items for resale. You can even assemble your own solar panels (for about a fifth of what it costs to have them professionally installed), although you’ll have to do some research to learn how.

You can also use reclaimed hardwoods throughout your space for flooring, cabinets, furnishings, and so on, and even create an eco-friendly exterior by landscaping with drought-resistant native plants as well as growing trees that will provide shade in the summer, a wind-break in the winter, and extra oxygen all year-round.

Evan Fischer is a contributing writer for Morrison Hershfield, the leader in innovative, eco-friendly and cost effective engineering projects.

In the last few decades, sustainability has become a major buzzword. While the term sustainability itself has several different meanings, since the early 1980s the term has been used to describe human sustainability on Earth. The United Nations defines sustainable development as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” In this way, sustainable development represents some of the most pressing and important matters concerning environmental, economical, and sociopolitical health. With new public interest in sustainability, sustainable development degree programs at institutions for higher learning have become an ever more prominent choice among young students.

Colleges and Universities around the world foster forward thinking minds interested in building a better future for our world and our race. Sustainability as a college study cultivates individuals who are educated on important environmental issues that drastically affect our social and economic lives. Students in these programs are well versed in the issues of global warming, renewable energy, environmental policy, sustainable agriculture, and more. Because of the nature of sustainability as a concept, a thorough understanding of sustainable issues cannot be gained through the study of one single discipline. For this reason, sustainable development degrees combine curriculum from many different fields within both the social sciences and the natural sciences. Students in these programs will complete coursework in economics, political science, engineering, and much more.

A sustainable development program seeks to educate students in all of the necessary fields to create a well-rounded individual versed on multitude of issues in sustainable development and prepared for active service in the industry. Students address the fundamental issue of how to move toward a trajectory of sustainability that will enable future generations to gain further progress in human well-being as well as ecological well-being. In addition to addressing the fundamental concept of sustainable development, students within these programs gain the skills they need to become innovators within the field.

Sustainable development degrees are available at all levels of higher education, existing at a bachelor’s level, master’s level, and as a separate PhD program at some institutions. Columbia University offers an undergraduate major in Sustainable Development that involves coursework in Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Earth Science, Engineering, Economics, Politics, Anthropology, and Statistics. This particular program prepares students for careers with professional organizations across public, private, and non-profit sectors as well as graduate programs if desired. Columbia University also offers a PhD program in Sustainable Development through the School of International and Public Affairs. This program provides rigorous studies in sustainable development followed with in-depth research in the area. Students completing this doctoral program are prepared to educate the future generation with the necessary skills and insight to face the most challenging problems of future human welfare.

With sustainability being such a vital topic for our society today and for the generations to come, official sustainability degree programs in our schools for higher learning are a huge step forward. The first step towards creating a better future for ourselves and our planet is generating public discourse on the topic and educating the current generation about the important issues at hand. With vigorous programs dedicated to sustainable development and sustainable development education, great strides can be made to ensure a more promising future.

By-line:
Mariana Ashley is a freelance writer who particularly enjoys writing about online colleges. She loves receiving reader feedback, which can be directed to mariana.ashley031 @gmail.com.

There is obvious utility to this reductionist rationality, a formulaic approach that enables calculation and the predominance of economic though. But what a dull and lifeless summation of the human condition. Albeit useful for marketers, advertisers and anyone wanting to sell more and more crap to us, or as a tool in some behavioural structure of biopower, this is a narrow and deluded concept of the individual, which provides an unnatural focus that is used to determine so many hugely important choices that shape all our lives.

Humans have struggled for thousands of years to capture the human condition through art and we are still going. An neoliberal economist, it would seem, is happy to continue with a robust formula and continued economic growth. If only it were so simple.

Within this overly-rational perspective, society is nothing more than an abundance of individuals all guided by their own self-interest within the governing framework of the market. This is the dream of Ayn Rand, Tea Party members and the conservative right. It reflects the generalization of market principles to all of human life resulting from neoliberalism’s near worship of what Karl Polanyi called the “self-regulating market”, which he also deemed a myth.

For proponents of neoliberalism, the market is seen not only as the governing mechanism for allocating all goods and services but also as a way of understanding the organisation and evaluation of institutional performance, necessitating the commodification of everything. Hence the continuing press for more, through phase after phase of neoliberalisation until the state is a distant memory and your vote is made not through ballots but banknotes and if you don’t have enough of them that’s your fault, not the system’s.

Nature vs neoliberalism

But there is a flaw in this scheme and it begins to get noticed at the macro level, only after decades of its development.

It is flawed because it overlooks externalities, the dumping of the economy’s waste and other negative effects onto nature as well as the commodification of nature itself. Nature was not designed as a commodity and therefore will not behave like one. Despite the best efforts of the economy, nature will raise its voice regardless of whether anyone is listening or not. This is because neoliberalism’s flaw is encompassed within the deluded and misguided notion that the environment is a subsystem of the economy rather than the other way round. This concept is key to the shift in thought necessary to transition to a low-carbon economy and sustainable development. A truth long denied or ignored by those of a neoliberal agenda, but a truth nonetheless.

We are therefore faced with a clash between economic and ecological rationalities as a result of our consumptive habits and tolerance of political powers. However, this clash is indicative of a great irony at the heart of neoliberalism. This is due to the fact that although it may make good commercial sense for firms to externalise production costs, such a practice is ecologically irrational and highly destructive. The externalities created by production, pass the environmental costs onto society and the biophysical world, creating an ecological contradiction that sees neoliberal capitalism gnawing away at the resource base that supports it.This is the ecological paradox of neoliberal capitalism: it will destroy that which makes itself possible – nature.

In terms of CO2 as an externality, its proliferation brings climatic changes that could bring about water shortages, resource wars, disease and ultimately loss of life, bringing neoliberal economies crashing down. Hence, it is argued, that without sufficient self-regulation by firms or states, capitalist societies will continue to create ecological crises. It is therefore politically, economically, socially and ecologically of interest to tackle. This is the task at the true heart of sustainable development, not the quest for ‘sustainable growth’ (i.e. business as usual with more efficient lightbulbs) but questioning how we continue to prosper whilst addressing the implications of our current actions.

The key element to acknowledge is that there are too many perforations within our current system that precipitate destructive consequences, which erode our social and ecological foundations and need addressing now, not in some distant, ever-promised future.This can only come about by manipulating another element of the neoliberal agenda, localisation.

With this in mind, I’ll be looking at how people can beat neoliberalism at its own game in Part 3.

(UPDATE: as I am in the middle of doing my dissertation, part 3 is going to have to wait a while. In the meantime go and frolic outside or if it is night-time watch Adam Curtis’ new documentary ‘All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace’.)

Despite their different qualities, forms and direct causes, there is an ideological concept that links the recent cuts in public spending, anthropogenic climate change and the banking crisis.

It is of pressing importance to get to grips with, to understand and to tackle in order to reclaim our shared future.

Its name is neoliberalism.

In my next few posts, I will take a closer look at neoliberalism in order to get a better idea of how it operates, in relation to people and nature and what this means for the future. Along the way I’ll show how there are social and ecological limits to neoliberalism, give examples of how its been previously challenged and describe the attributes that make it what it is.

The rise of neoliberalism

During the 1980s in the US and UK, neoliberalism took hold under the wistful gaze of a former actor, President Reagan, and the society denying gawp of Margaret Thatcher. Both of whom were influenced by economists such as Friedman, Hayek and Epstein, and championed a vision that stood as a counter to what it viewed as the failures of the Keynesian, state-coordinated model of capitalism.

A couple of academics, Peck and Tickell, termed this period in the 1980s as ‘rollback neoliberalism’, determinable by patterns of deregulation and dismantlement; the 1990s then went on to see an emergent phase of active state-building and regulatory reform, which they called ‘roll-out neoliberalism’. This can be seen in the new institutions created by Blair and Clinton in the 1990s following the dismantlement of Keynesian structures, and were designed to embed the neoliberal project more deeply in civil society.

I would like to suggest that we can now add a third phase. ‘Roll-over neoliberalism’ sees the influence of corporate power fully infiltrating every aspect of government in a deceptive, misleading and misguided ideological manuoevre that simply expects the public and the environment to roll over and take the abuse. Fast food chains are asked to come up with food policy, tax-dodgers give their input on tax and bankers smarm their way out of any punishment by holding the government’s balls firmly in their money-grabbing grips. Keynesian influenced ideas such as a Green New Deal in which a coordinated approach to stimulating the economy is taken with a focus on developing a low carbon infrastructure and green jobs, is simply ignored in favour of business as usual.

In the face of such ludicrous proceedings by our democratic representatives it is now of great importance that people seeking to improve this situation come together because although the powers that be may soak up our demonstrations in the short term, ignore our dissent and carry on as before, there are limits in the long-term that business as usual will break, bringing neo-liberalism and the global economy to its knees.

These limits are not just those of public tolerance, but are ecological. The people and the planet both have lines you shouldn’t cross, and neoliberalism is pushing both much too far, whilst simultaneously championing itself as the saviour to each in the eloquent hypocrisy that has become the mainstay of the west’s delusional political discourse. Tackling this situation means tackling social justice, poverty, equality and climate change all at once, for all are intricately interwoven and deserve a concerted effort in order to confront business as usual practices that have destructive effects to society and nature. Rather than ignoring global divisions of labour in national policies on poverty or framing climate change in moral terms, doom and gloom rhetoric or even scare tactics, they must be recognised in their true context. Issues such as social justice, poverty, climate change and equality, are situated in a discourse of power, wherein our shared environment is a critical context for shaping the debate the world over.

This is because the power of neoliberalism is in almost everything we see in the West and is itself made possible by the natural mechanisms of the environment and its ecosystems. Capitalism, of which neoliberalism is a shell, may have provided us in the West with considerable material wealth but it is critically flawed. For everyone on the planet to achieve the same standards of living as those in the US we would need another two planets.

There are two main responses to this problem and one is particularly more nasty than the other. One is to have an economic rethink and push for a more just and equal global society and form of human development where resources are utilised sustainably with an eye to the long-term rather than merely short-term political and financial gain. The other is to carry on as we are, securing and using resources for our own Western purposes, exploiting their increasing demand as supplies dwindle, emitting more and more CO2. Throughout history such competition for resources is played out over a backdrop of wars, droughts and famines and in our current trajectory we are potentially set on a course that sees a peaking in oil supplies, growing water scarcity and a potential food crisis that Lester Brown warns could cause widespread societal collapse.

From a cynical perspective, it would appear that this latter choice is a winner when you think about the timescales involved – decades perhaps – that might allow you to have an almighty blowout and then just pop your clogs before having to tidy up any of the mess. But as the baby-boomers start to retire and fade away, the younger generations might have a few things to say about all of this, as they are the ones who currently seem to be on course to get fewer and fewer benefits of business as usual practices as time moves on. The oldies might be about to shuffle of this mortal coil but the young have a vested interest in tidying this place up.

As well having our future threatened from the old school business as usual practices, our present is equally pushed and shoved. It’s not just the increasing cost of an education that has us buggered but also our relations with each other that are bound within shallow frames of consumption and identity, as well as our relations with nature. These relations have in many ways changed as a result of the ideological power of neoliberal capitalism which drives the politics, economics and culture of the world system, providing the context and direction for how humans affect and interact with non-human nature and with one another. Although we may perceive that we are disconnected from what made us, seeing nature merely as something to be bought, sold, used or overcome, we are in truth completely interconnected with it.

The ideology that has caused this disconnection or alienation has pervaded throughout modern Western living. Its power is evident, paradoxically, in its seeming elusiveness as neoliberal capitalist projects have become the norm, the way we see the world and often each other – they have shaped themselves as a set of objective, natural, and technocratic truisms, so that we can no longer see the wood for the trees.

In Part 2 I’ll be looking at the rationality behind neoliberalism and the effects this has on people and nature.

While no one would dispute the progress that electrical and electronic technology has brought to Western culture, the problem of how to handle the end life of more than 50 million tonnes of e-waste created each year around the planet is staggering.

The UK alone contributes an estimated 1–2 million of those tonnes, shared between private households and commercial businesses. In fact, the average Briton will discard at least four electrical units yearly, 40%–50% of which are still in working condition. E-waste volume is increasing at the rate of 5% each year and becoming the most serious waste disposal problem in the world.

Electronic waste consists of appliances, large and small; mobile phones and other portable devices; TVs, stereo equipment, monitoring equipment, tools, electric gadgets, sports equipment, toys and video games; medical, electrical and lighting machinery and so much more. Unfortunately, these modern marvels are filled with toxic and hazardous substances such as arsenic, lead, mercury and cadmium, to name a few. Disposing of them in the local landfill is no longer a recognised option.

In response, the UK initiated Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) recycling in 2005 with additional directives added in 2007 and an Environmental Agency supervisory task force in 2008. The results? Not much. In fact, it has come to light through campaign groups such as the Environmental Investigation Agency that as much as 77% of the e-waste in the UK is being shipped to developing countries in western Africa, especially Nigeria and Ghana. While records would indicate otherwise, the black market is alive and flourishing and players are involved at all levels of the game.

Legally, no electronic equipment is to leave the UK unless it has been tested and proven workable. Failure to comply with this policy can result in high fines and two years imprisonment. However, the reality is that containers filled with broken TVs, computers and other electronics are arriving in third world countries on a daily basis. To date, only limited fines have ever been issued, and no one has been sentenced to jail for this crime. It would appear that the government is not as determined to halt this practice as it postures.

Meanwhile, in Ghana and Nigeria, primary UK dumping spots, young men and children work at stripping copper and other precious metals and parts from ever-increasing mountains of broken equipment. Piles of plastic parts burn in the open air and release harmful toxic fumes into nearby densely populated areas. Once stripped, the useless equipment parts are then cast aside next to rice fields, rivers and other water sources. Poisons leach into the soil and water supplies. The long term results will be devastating:

• Impaired brain development in the children
• Kidney damage
• Weakened blood, nervous and immune systems
• Reproductive problems

This does not need to happen. Intentionally causing harm to another society is morally reprehensible. With legislation already in place clearly prohibiting the shipping of e-waste outside the UK, the government needs to put teeth into its policies. This means increasing rather than decreasing the task force assigned to monitor WEEE recycling agencies and practices and enforcing severe penalties on those who choose to flout the law.

Since the 2007 Directive has taken a “polluter must pay” attitude, manufacturers must be encouraged, forcefully, if necessary, to take responsibility for the products they create, including their reuse, recycling and safe disposal. Since a carrot has some advantage over a stick, financial incentives for those companies creating more eco-friendly products could be used as an extra stimulus. Removing toxic substances from design is a must. Extending product life and making upgrades easily adaptable could also encourage less frequent discarding by a population that would rather buy new than spend extra expense on costly repairs.

While the manufacturers may be held primarily responsible for excessive e-waste production, educating the consumers of the UK is also an important factor in lowering the massive volume of discarded electronic equipment. Encouraging them to donate to individuals, organisations or even countries that lack such technology will keep more e-waste out of container ships and landfills alike. Awareness of the devastating toxic damage to children, families, animals and environments in faraway places such as Africa, India, China and Pakistan must be brought to the forefront. Taking care of each other and this planet is everyone’s business.

Thomas O’Rourke is a guest blogger who regularly writes on behalf of Sims Recycling – discussing environmental issues such as WEEE recycling.

By Rob Plastow

Charlie Brooker said that you don’t really watch Mad Men, you just sit there and let it seep into you. I’m not the biggest TV fan, I put the TV on mute during the ad breaks and don’t watch many shows. Yet somehow I’m addicted to letting Mad Men seep into me and fascinated by the world in which the show plays out – advertising.

Recent reviews of the current series explain its popularity is due to its similarity to today – just how far have we really come? The anachronistic voyeurism we are allowed lets us maintain any distance we may need to not see it as a direct mirror of our own consumption habits and materialistic society.

The show is often filled with glitz and glamour, luxury products and decadent services but still populated by discontented, substance abusing middle classes who appear to want for nothing yet are modern men and women constantly in search of a soul.

In the current series, the agency has lost the contract with Lucky Strike and the creative director, Don Draper, openly dismisses tobacco companies in a full page ad in the New York Times. But back before he had even a single strand of moral fibre he was the man that had come up with the “It’s toasted” tag-line just as Lucky Strike were beginning to feel the scorn of medical researchers scrutinising the impacts of smoking.

Draper skimmed passed the health issues that were emerging in his 1960s America and went straight for the sensory cue, threw away the psychological research about death-wishes and clung on to the simple, shallow, highly effective call to indulgence. For Draper there was no point in entering the debate, just enjoy the taste of that smooth carcinogenic tobacco.

The same can be said of sustainability and climate change. We know the score and yet we keep on smoking. How do we make green living just plain living? How can behaviour change be beneficial to the individual and appeal to our self-interest?

These questions, in light of Mad Men, make me ask another: is news of anthropogenic climate change received today in the same way that news of smoking’s harmful affects were in the 1960s?

Back when that came out, some people quit. Many others didn’t. Today some people are trying to live greener and this want for sustainability has changed the political landscape, but many others remain resolutely unchanged.

Green living sometimes rubs people up the wrong way due its perceived want of altruistic behaviour which fuels a sense of self-importance that non-greens find sickening. Like a non-smoker with a smug grin telling a smoker cigarettes will kill them.

But what advocates of green lifestyles try to assert is that living green can improve your own feelings of self-importance through a qualitative change rather than a quantitative one and that altruistic outcomes can be a product of the process to living green – not always, but often.

Climate sceptics hold even firmer to their beliefs in the face of this and reason for their autonomy and independence from any ‘fads’ or unwanted changes.

This possible divide over morality, consumption and sense of self causes a lot of friction – both sides feeling wholly justified by their own beliefs, which more often than not are embedded or at least vitally attached to their own creation of self and what they perceive to be fair, right and important.

With such large implications for behaviour, stances on climate change and sustainability no doubt both inform and are created by identity of the self – how we see ourselves, each other and what we want to become.

Mad Men symbolises these aspirations for an entire ideology and culture based on modernity, consumption and progress; that are full of hope on the outside and despair within.

For all his elegant cool, Don Draper is also a philandering drunk who has no idea who he even is half the time. The story fluctuates between his efforts to change and his ignorance of his wrongs.

Making behavioural changes is different for everybody. Don Draper goes swimming and writes a journal, Transition groups try to live with less dependency on fossil fuels, and most people who want to do something about climate change make adjustments to their lives by shopping locally and reducing, re-using and recycling.

Consumption along with the desire it creates, frame our outlook (at least in the West) without us realising half the time. It is the lens through which we see the world most of the time; observing the world in terms of its potential to benefit ourselves, often through purchasing things.

It then becomes easy to understand how that desire is at the centre of consumer economies. All the credit crunch, recession, and climate change clatterings in the news media around the world all stem from a silent, invisible psychological origin that grows within us all.

Followers of Ayn Rand would even lift it up onto a pedestal and call it ‘enlightened self-interest’. But for many (especially outside of the Western world) there’s nothing enlightening about being deluded and at the whim of a silent, invisible ego that is goaded by people like Don Draper into consuming more and more in the faint hope of sating manipulated desire, or for a moment’s perceived happiness from having bought something.

And yet that is what our whole way of life, our economy and our socialisation rests upon. That psychological trick as it were, whereby PR companies, ad men and marketers have latched onto the mind and even the outskirts of the soul in order to get our money and make us work for more.

Spend, spend, spend to keep the machine working. Governments say they want to tackle climate change and social justice but at the same time they urge us to carry on consuming – the very thing that has caused our societies to be socially and environmentally unsustainable.

We are trapped, as Tim Jackson says, on a hedonic treadmill. Mad Men shows us getting on it to begin the run, and so far we are still on it.

We are encouraged by economies of consumption to take our problems and concerns and to ‘toast’ them with that good old ad man trick which has kept us smoking for so long.

There’s a lot of waste, a lot of fossil fuels and nowhere near enough renewables. The following year, 2010, saw record temperatures recorded by NOAA, NASA and the MET Office. Other than the inertia of business as usual and the power of the oil and gas lobby, there is no reason why the richest country in the world has such a poor energy policy.

Let’s hope that one day in the not so distant future, we can use this image as a baseline with which to see some much needed progress and a good helping of political backbone.

Click it to see a bigger pic on grist.com

Stay tuned by following me on Twitter @RobPlastow

The British Government has announced that 9 electric and ultra-low emission cars will be eligible for grants of up to £5,000. The government says that the grants “will be available to motorists across the UK from 1 January 2011, [and] will reduce the cost of eligible cars up to a quarter.”*

In addition to this, a number of incentives are also being introduced to encourage motorists to make their next car, a green car.

First of all £43m will be put aside to allow customers to receive a £5,000 grant towards the cost of a green car. A further £20m will be used to create 4,000 new electric charging points around the country. Even London Mayor Boris Johnson is chipping in with £1m to encourage London taxi drivers to convert their ‘Black Cabs’ in to ‘Green Cabs’.

Although a green car may increase the cost of your car insurance due to the technology involved there are plenty of other savings to be made. For drivers in and around London, £2000 can be saved by not having to pay the congestion charge. Green cars are exempt from road tax and it can cost as little as 2.0-2.5p per mile, saving as much as £800 a year on petrol costs.

So here are the nine cars that will start the ‘Green’ revolution in Britain.
** (including Government grant)

The Mitsubishi i-MiEV

• 63bhp
• Top speed: 80mph
• Eco-mode allowing travel up to 100 miles
• 0 – 60mph in less than nine seconds
• 4-occupant capacity
• Available from £23,990**

The Smart ForTwo electric drive

• 40bhp
• Top speed: 62mph
• Travel up to 84 miles
• 2-occupant capacity
• Price: N/A
• Available in 2012

The Peugeot iON

• 64bhp
• Top Speed: 81mph
• 0 – 60mph in 16 seconds
• Travel up to 93 miles on one charge
• Price: N/A

The Citroën CZero

• 64bhp
• Top Speed: 80mph
• 0 – 60mph in 15 seconds
• Travel Distance: 81 miles
• Price: Around £20000** (est)

The Nissan Leaf

• 120bhp
• Top Speed: 93mph
• 0 – 60mph in 7 seconds
• Price: £23,000*
• Voted Car of the Year 2011
• Cruising travel distance of up to 138 miles

The Tata Vista EV

• 0 – 60mph in under 10 seconds
• Top Speed: 71mph
• Travel distance up to 110 miles
• 4-occupant capacity

The Toyota Prius Plug-in

• Top Speed: 112mph
• 0 – 60mph in 13.7 seconds
• Full charge takes on 100 minutes
• Economy: 108.6mpg
• Price N/A

The Vauxhall Ampera

• Top Speed: 100mph
• 151bhp
• 1.4L petrol engine used to drive generator
• Price: £28,995**
• Available early 2012

The Chevrolet Volt

• Hybrid Car
• Battery range of only 35 miles
• Combustion engine runs on premium gas
• Total travel distance 379 miles
• Price: £20,000** (est)

*http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Nl1/Newsroom/DG_193151

COP 16

The Oxford University Centre for the Environment recently concluded that costs resulting from sea level rise on the Caricom islands “could amount to between $4bn and $6bn a year and with infrastructure costs running to tens of billions in many countries”.

Their report states that a 1 metre rise in sea-levels would see land being encroached by 100 metres, forcing more than 100,000 people to move and cause dramatic coastal erosion, which in turn would contaminate fresh water supplies and decimate the tourism industry.

The plea comes from islands who fear they will drown if world agreements limit global temperature rise to 2C rather than 1.5C.

Developed countries such as the USA, UK and EU member states are arguing in Cancun for a 2C limit to temperature rises and suggest that island states accept this and use adaptation funding to build sea defences.

It comes as no surprise then that the small islanders accuse the West of seeing them as ‘collateral damage’.

Rising tide

Current estimates have a broad range for predicted sea level rise this century, anywhere between 30cm and 1 metre by 2100.

But what this indicates is a commitment of the developed countries to a business-as-usual path of policy, with remuneration for adaptation being paid to the poorer countries set to be hit hardest first. The small countries are fighting hard to change this stance in Cancun but this power struggle and policy approach is at the heart of the problems of trying to reach agreements.

Inevitably, vulnerable states will not turn down money for adaptation and the rich countries know this. In time they will have no other choice.

It is this stance that is currently being held vehemently by the US and is shaping up to be a very much ‘all or nothing’ approach, much to the chagrin of developing countries the world over. As a result, there is currently much speculation over a potential walkout.

It’s only just begun so we’ll have to wait and see but again the dimensions of power will decide how things work out, instead of reasoned thought and sense.