Policymakers in developed countries are increasingly looking to leverage private sector funds to finance climate action in developing nations, filling the gap left by tight government budgets and a lack of political focus on climate change in the United States and other major emitting countries.

The numbers are striking. In the analysis we conducted with the World Resources Institute (WRI) and the Overseas Development Institute, we found that the United States’ climate finance is increasingly coming from America’s two business-oriented foreign investment agencies: the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) and the Export-Import Bank of the United States (Ex-Im). In 2010, only 20% of U.S. climate finance came from these agencies (which don’t rely on taxpayer dollars), but by 2012 they were spending almost half. Almost all the loans, loan guarantees, and insurance policies issued by OPIC and Ex-Im fund clean energy projects in developing countries.

Globally, the picture is similar. In 2011, companies based in developed countries spent close to $13 billion in support of climate projects in developing nations, surpassing climate-related official development assistance by about half a billion dollars. And there is no doubt that private capital will figure heavily in the coming years as developed countries scramble to demonstrate that they have met their pledge to provide $100 billion in financial assistance to developing nations to address climate change.

Given the current budgetary issues and a lack of focus on climate change in many developed country governments, it’s going to be challenging to get to the $100 billion with or without private sector finance. But what’s even more daunting is that $100 billion is nowhere near the size needed to meet the challenge. Experts estimate that truly comprehensive action on climate will require $700 billion per year of additional climate-related investment in developing countries, and greening another $5 trillion of infrastructure investment per year to 2020. Even if we maintain the current 50-50 split of public-private investment as we reach $100 billion in 2020, and even if every dime of $50 billion in public money leveraged private sector investment (unlikely), a 14:1 leverage ratio would be needed to meet the challenge — substantially higher than the possibly inflated ratios typical of development finance instruments.

So how can the world meet this urgent financing challenge when huge investments are needed and governments can’t come close either through public investment or by leveraging private sector investment through typical development finance? What will generate sufficient private sector investment?

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By Michael Wolosin & Abigail Jones, via Climate Advisers

Percentage of grasslands converted into corn or soybean fields between 2006 and 2011

The ramp up in biofuel production has thus far been a major misfire in the fight against climate change. By driving up the price of corn and other biofuel sources, standards passed in the United States and Europe requiring a certain level of biofuel use have encouraged producers to dedicate more corn to ethanol production and less to food supplies.

Meanwhile, production of biofuel crops is displacing production of food crops on available land, and encouraging deforestation in the developing world. All of which in turn intensifies the problem of global food insecurity.

Thanks to a new study from South Dakota State University, we can add another negative from biofuel policy: Accelerated destruction of grasslands in America’s Western Corn Belt (WCB) region — North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Minnesota, and Iowa.

According to Christopher Wright and Michael Wimberly, the study’s authors, conversion of grassland to corn and soy production between 2006 and 2011 has proceeded at a pace comparable to deforestation rates in Brazil, Malaysia, and Indonesia. In Iowa alone, the losses are approaching 12 million hectares (almost 30 million acres) of tallgrass prairie.

In sum, we found a net decline in grass-dominated land cover in the WCB totaling nearly 530,000 hectares (approx. 1.3 million acres). This change was concentrated in two states, South Dakota and Iowa, with the majority of grassland conversion occurring in the WCB’s three western states relative to the core corn/soy growing areas in Iowa and Minnesota.

Grassland loss from 2006 to 2011

As Brad Plumer at the Washington Post notes, a number of converging factors are driving this change: Subsidized crop insurance, as well as insufficient rewards for preserving grassland from conservation programs, are contributing along with the price boost in biofuels. But the latter is especially ironic, given that grasslands are themselves able to store carbon from the atmosphere better than cropland. So expanding biofuel crop production into grasslands specifically further dilutes biofuels’ already dubious benefits.

The destruction of grasslands is also part of the poor overall land management and climate change that’s contributing to the threat of “dust-bowlification” in the western and plains regions of the United States. As warming drives higher temperatures, heat waves, and more extremes between deluge and drought, that area of the country is increasingly left drier for longer. The loss of grasslands leave soil more vulnerable to erosion, and less able to hold and buffer water flows. That creates the possibility of a repeat of the Dust Bowls of the 1930s is growing, with all the attendant threats to food security.

In fact, Wright and Wimberly include the ominous note rates of grassland conversion this high “have not been seen in the Corn Belt since the 1920s and 1930s.”

by Nick Sundt, via WWF

Scientists report in the journal Nature Climate Change that the drought-stress currently being experienced by forests in the Southwestern U.S. “is more severe than any event since the late 1500s megadrought” that “probably led to deaths of a large proportion of trees living at the time.”

They warn that climate projections indicate that “the mean forest drought-stress by the 2050s will exceed that of the most severe droughts in the past 1,000 years.”

In Temperature as a Potent Driver of Regional Forest Drought Stress and Tree Mortality (by A. Park Williams et al., Nature Climate Change, 30 September 2012), the authors say that the current severe drought event in the Southwest — which extends from 2000 to the present – is the fifth strongest since 1000 AD. They define the Southwest as including Arizona, New Mexico and the southern portions of Utah and Colorado. They attribute the current event both to natural variability and to rising atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases from human activity; and they associate it with “regional-scale declines in canopy greenness and tree survival, due in part to large bark-beetle outbreaks and increasingly large wildfires.”

A combination of declining precipitation during the cool season and rising temperatures during the warm season is likely by mid-century to be accompanied by increased forest decline. “If forest drought stress exceeds late 1500 levels, we expect that a lot of trees are going to be dying,” says the article’s lead research, A. Park Williams (Los Alamos National Laboratory), in a press release on Monday from the U.S. Geological Survey.

“Consistent with many other recent studies, these findings provide compelling additional evidence of emerging global risks of amplified drought-induced tree mortality and extensive forest die-off as the planet warms,” said co-author Craig D. Allen, a research ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey.

Nick Sundt is a climate change expert at the World Wildlife Fund. This piece was originally published at WWF and was reprinted with permission.

Photo Credit: Aaron Fishman

by Glenn Hurowitz

The Obama administration is poised to make one of the biggest climate policy decisions of its entire administration – and it’s not about coal, oil, or gas, but rainforests.  EPA is deciding whether or not palm oil should be included in the Renewable Fuel Standard, which mandates that American motorists use 36 billion gallons of biofuel in their cars and trucks by 2022. In order to qualify for inclusion, palm oil would have to cut greenhouse gas pollution by at least 20 percent compared to gasoline.

Which means that it should be an easy call: Of all the biofuels, palm oil causes by far the most pollution because much of it is grown by clearing and burning dense rainforests, many of them on carbon-rich peatland, to make room for plantations. That widespread deforestation has made Indonesia the world’s third biggest global warming polluter, just behind China and the United States.

EPA recognized some of the problems with palm oil in its draft finding that palm oil does not qualify for inclusion in the RFS … but just barely. However, a close look at EPA’s draft finds that it used old and deeply flawed data to systematically underestimate the emissions from palm oil. For instance, the analysis draws on data on plantation expansion that ends in 2003 – not taking into account how much worse the palm oil industry has gotten since then.

Newer studies from the National Academies of Science and the International Council on Clean Transportation find that the palm oil industry’s carbon footprint just keeps getting bigger:

The new study used satellite imagery to map the encroachment of oil palm plantations onto peatlands from 1990 to 2000, from 2000 to 2007, and finally 2007 to 2010. Despite increasing awareness of climate change in that period, the rate of peat destruction was higher in this last 3 year period than ever before. “Everywhere we looked, the drainage of peat to plant palm oil is increasing, “ said Dr. Chris Malins of the International Council on Clean Transportation, one of the organizations that carried out the study. “In the Sarawak province in Malaysian Borneo, for instance, based on the last 3 years we would expect over 80% of future palm expansion to be at the expense of peat.” The findings are echoed in a new study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Kim Carlson et al., which found that from 2008-2011 69% of palm oil conversion in the Indonesian province of West Kalimantan occurred at the expense of peat, even despite the introduction of a ‘moratorium’ in 2011.

All in all, this deforestation means that running a car on palm oil produces a lot more greenhouse gases than running it on Canadian tar sands. Indeed, a study in Science found that it would take palm oil biofuels grown on peatland a whopping 423 years to pay back the carbon debt created through land clearance. In other words, a palm plantation cleared in the year 1600 that produced biofuels for the last several centuries would still not have displaced enough oil to make up for the amount of carbon released when the land was cleared. Palm oil can make even dirty oil look green.

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AP Photo

Industry: Light bulb war a dim idea

Big Business usually loves it when the GOP goes to war over federal rules.

But not when it comes to light bulbs.

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A group of world leaders is calling for negotiators in Durban to move forward on a deal that they say would prevent massive deforestation and help substantially reduce carbon emissions.

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon joined famed British anthropologist Jane Goodall at the COP 17 climate conference today to support a mechanism called REDD+ (also known as Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation).

They called it a “win-win” for reducing carbon emissions and preserving biodiversity.

The REDD+ mechanism, which is still being hashed out by negotiators this week, allows emitters to offset a portion of their emissions through forest preservation projects in developing countries. It’s one of the main agenda items in Durban actually getting traction.

Also joining the event to support REDD+ were Bill and Hillary Clinton, who spoke to a diverse crowd of diplomats, journalists and NGOs via separate recorded video messages.

“Clearing and burning of tropical rainforests is responsible for approximately 15% of global carbon emissions, but conserving forests is one of the most affordable ways to reduce pollution,” said Clinton in a brief address to a large crowd. “Help us fight one of the greatest threats in history.”

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by Mike Roddy and Dr. Reynaud Serrette. Roddy is a former builder/developer who works for a commercial solar business.  Serrette is an Associate Professor of Civil Engineering at Santa Clara University.

The climate-conscious home builder may ask him or herself: “What’s the most C02-friendly method of building a home?” We wanted to find that out as well, so we compared three different materials — steel, timber and concrete.

Surprisingly, it’s not timber. The answer is steel, which has a CO2 Index of 1 compared to 1.52 for concrete and a 4.44 for a timber-framed home.

Here’s how we found the answer by using a single-story, ranch-style house in Texas with three bedrooms, two baths and a garage for a model. The living space was approximately 116 square meters, plus an attached 47 square meter garage and storage area.

The structural systems for all three construction materials were designed by professional engineers.  Contractors then developed cut lists and block totals from engineered drawings.

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Henry David Thoreau, one of the country’s first environmentalists, was born 194 years ago — July 12, 1817.

His writings remain crucial reading today. Even now his words cast an important light on our relationship with the planet. In this week’s space we celebrate Thoreau’s birthday by reflecting on his work and explaining how organizations are carrying on his legacy.

Thoreau was born in in Concord, Massachusetts, and he was one of America’s first and most important environmentalists. He is remembered best today for his book Walden, which describes his most famous exploit—leaving civilization to live in solitude on the banks of nearby Walden Pond. Thoreau was a gifted writer as well as a naturalist, abolitionist, philosopher, conservationist, and visionary environmentalist who could see the consequences of unrestrained and irresponsible consumption of resources.

Wastefulness was anathema to Thoreau. “Thank God men cannot fly,” he wrote, “and waste the sky as well as the earth.” Environmental stewardship was a cornerstone of his philosophy. He was constantly aware of what he used, what was a waste, and what was a necessity. Most of all, he opposed excess: “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.”

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Surprise, surprise:  It turns out small farmers aren’t as destructive to the world’s forests as multi-national corporations.

A new report by the Union of Concerned Scientists places most of the blame for deforestation on industry, not local farmers. Smallholder and subsistence farmers have historically been blamed as leading culprits in ripping down tropical forests, but new data shows that commercial agriculture (beef, soy, and palm oil in particular) and timber production are now the leading culprits.

Small-scale farming has become less important to deforestation in recent decades, as rural populations have leveled off or declined and large businesses producing commodities for urban and export markets have expanded into tropical forest regions.

Deforestation has changed from a “state-initiated” process to an “enterprise-driven” one. The major agents of deforestation are corporations that analyze it as an economic alternative, and choose it instead of other options because it is advantageous in terms of dollars and cents.

Deforestation contributes somewhere between 15% – 20% of anthropogenic carbon emissions.

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The Wonk Room is reporting on the scene from Copenhagen during the United Nations Climate Change Conference.

Fighting Deforestation

President Barack Obama “made his first public intervention in the Copenhagen climate summit” by supporting the Norway-Brazil plan to allow rich countries to fund the protection of rainforests. “”I am very impressed,” Obama said after accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, “with the model that has been built between Norway and Brazil that allows for effective monitoring and ensures that we are making progress in avoiding deforestation of the Amazon.”

International approval for the Norway-Brazil proposal for a Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) mechanism still has a ways to go, especially as targets for reductions of deforestation have not yet been determined. In a possible breakthrough for the integrity of such programs, Google presented tools for the accurate monitoring of the rates of deforestation via climate satellite data.

Tuvalu Contretemps

Tuvalu’s proposal to amend the Kyoto Protocol to mandate strict limits on greenhouse gas emissions from all nations continued to embroil official negotiations, causing the shutdown of today’s plenary. China led objections to Tuvalu’s request for formal discussions, concerned that the negotiations could end up breaking the Kyoto Protocol’s delicate balance. Formal negotiations have been suspended until Saturday, when it is possible the delegates may take a formal vote on the amendments — an unprecedented event.

European Disunion

Three European countries received awards from the International Climate Action Network — two for setting the talks back and one for helping progress. Poland was deemed a Fossil Fool for preventing the European Union from strengthening its 2020 emissions targets in Copenhagen, while Germany earned opprobrium for its proposal that funding for climate assistance should be taken away from other international aid programs. In contrast, France was praised for challenging other EU members to close the “loophole in the accounting of emissions for forest management” — namely, getting unfair credit for existing forests — in Europe.

United States

The United States continued to have a strong presence behind the scenes and in side events, with Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack joining a panel on the future of international agriculture, rich and poor. While discussing his agency’s plans to expand renewable energy in the United States, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar noted that President Bush “simply slept” through global warming. Salazar brushed off questions from activists about his agency’s continued support for the expansion of offshore drilling and coal mining.