FACING CLIMATE CHANGES: A GLOBAL CHALLENGE

In the past two centuries, we have been seeing a fairly steady rise in the amount of greenhouse gases in the Earth's atmosphere. The atmospheric concentrations of key anthropogenic greenhouse gases (i.e. Carbon Dioxide, Methane, Nitrous Oxide and troposphere ozone) reached their highest recorded levels in the 1990s. These changes are happening at unpredictable speed. If emissions continue to grow at current rates, it is almost certain that atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide will double, or possibly triple, from pre-industrial levels during the current century. The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate. Much of this carbon dioxide has been produced by the burning of fossil fuels for transportation, manufacturing, heating, cooling, electricity generation and other activities. Land degradation and deforestation are also significant sources of greenhouse gas emissions. The result, known as the "enhanced greenhouse effect," is a warming of the earth's surface and lower atmosphere. Climate models estimate that the average global temperature will rise by 1.4 to 5.8 degrees C by the year 2100. A temperature increase of .6 degrees C occurred last century.

According to the British Government, climate change could have four different kind of impact[1]:

  • It will threaten the homes and livelihoods, and thus the well-being of large numbers of people all across the globe.
  • Climate change could also prejudice social progress. Also social equity could be affected, since poorest countries and poorest segment of population are the most vulnerable too. Moreover, the costs of damage as well as the required adaptation and mitigation efforts will be unevenly distributed both among and within countries. As a consequence inequity could be enhanced thus undermining social cohesion and worsening conflicts over scarce resources.
  • Climate change will slam economics of all sizes across the world. Either in a direct way, as a changing climate affects the production of their goods and services, or changes customers needs and demands; or in indirectly, through increased costs of insurance, higher costs of borrowing or reduced access to finance. All will be faced with uncertainty and additional risk, and again it is most likely to be the developing countries who will suffer most.
  • As greenhouse gas emissions accumulate in the atmosphere, there is an increased risk of major adverse effects, beyond those of the basic predictions of increased ambient temperatures and sea-levels. The stability of a range of critical, interlinked physical, ecological and social systems and subsystems could be threatened (Fig.1).

Fig.1: An integrated framework on climate change

source: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changes

Slowing down the process of climate change requires a substantial reduction in global emissions of the main greenhouse gases.

It has been estimated that 63 per cent of the increased concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have been generated through fossil fuel burning and land use changes undertaken by industrialized countries. For this reason, the global community has urged industrialized and emerging countries like China, India and Brazil (for their economic expansion and large population) to take concrete initiatives in reducing their greenhouse gas emissions.

HOW THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY IS RESPONDING?

It fell to scientists to draw international attention to the threats posed by global warming. Evidence in the 1960s and '70s that concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were increasing first led climatologists and others to press for action. It took years before the international community responded.

In 1988, an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was created by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). This group issued a first assessment report in 1990 which reflected the views of 400 scientists. The report stated that global warming was real and urged that something be done about it. The Panel's findings encouraged governments to create the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change setting an overall framework for intergovernmental efforts to tackle the challenge posed by climate change. By standards for international agreements, negotiation of the Convention was rapid. It was ready for signature at the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development – also known as the "Earth Summit" -- in Rio de Janeiro. The earth summit resulted in important documents, among them Agenda 21 that is a “a comprehensive plan of action to be taken globally, nationally and locally by organizations of the United Nations System, Governments, and Major Groups in every area in which human impacts on the environment.” In other word Agenda 21 level the path to follow for a sustainable development, intended as a process that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generation to meet their own needs” (Bruntland report, 1997). The Agenda 21 called for the creation of a Commission on Sustainable Development, to ensure effective follow-up of UNCED, enhance international cooperation, and examine progress in the implementation of Agenda 21 at the local, national, regional and international levels.

After the entry into force of the 1992 convention, ratifying countries gathered annually during Conference of Parties (COP) to concretise the taken engagements. In December of 1997, the Kyoto Protocol was drafted by the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the UNFCCC at their third annual meeting. Information provided by IPCC set the level of global CO2 emissions reductions that are needed in order to prevent further climate change and the Kyoto Protocol served as an international ‘plan’ for how to achieve a provisional target.

Kyoto Protocol is in fact the instrument that gather specific and substantial obligation that countries have to respect in order to fulfil with the principles of the 1992 convention. The agreed emissions levels, set out in the Protocol, charge industrialized countries with the responsibility of reducing their emissions of greenhouse gases “by at least 5 per cent below 1990 levels in the commitment period 2008 to 2012” (Article 3 of the Kyoto Protocol). The Kyoto Protocol is a complicated agreement that has been slow in coming. The Protocol not only has to be an effective against a complicated worldwide problem, it also has to be politically acceptable. As a result, panels and committees have multiplied to monitor and referee its various programmes, and even after the agreement was approved in 1997, further negotiations were deemed necessary to create instructions on how to "operate" it. While the text of the Kyoto Protocol was adopted unanimously in 1997; it only entered into force on 16 February 2005.

The full implementation of Agenda 21, and the Commitments to the Rio principles, were strongly reaffirmed at the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) held in Johannesburg, South Africa in August-September 2002. Two main documents were adopted: the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation (JPOI) and the Johannesburg Declaration on Sustainable Development.

In that occasion the UN reaffirmed the commitment to achieve the internationally agreed development goals, including those contained in the United Nations Millennium Declaration, known as Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) adopted during the Un Millennium Summit in September 2000. The MDGs, which have become commonly accepted as a framework for measuring progress in development, comprise 8 goals, 18 targets and 48 indicators. The 7th goal in particular remarks the concept of sustainable development, and trace new targets in order to ensure environmental sustainability.

ENERGY, DEVELOPMENT AND ENVIROMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY

Although Agenda 21 and other important document, like the Millennium Declaration, have no specific energy chapter and do not treat energy as a priority itself, energy issues clearly raise as a central point in the path toward the achievement of sustainable development goals.

According to WSSD Johannesburg Declaration energy must be considered a human need on par with other basic human need (food security, clean water, sanitation, health care, etc….).

Almost two billion people have no access to modern energy services, thus affecting all aspects of development social, economic, and environmental including livelihoods, health, agricultural productivity, access to water, education, and gender-related issues.

In order to ensure that sustainable development goals are realized, the main challenge lies in finding ways to balance a risky trade off: the one existing between the necessity and demand for energy with its impacts on the natural resource.

These impacts, including pollution, habitat degradation and climate change can undermine the livelihood of world’s poor, and may represent a big obstacle toward any poverty reduction process. This is because poor communities vitally depend on healthy environmental resources, and moreover they are most vulnerable to environmental degradation. Only contrasting the current tendency toward environment degradation, poverty in its wider meaning can be tackled.

In order to fulfil targets foreseen by MDG Energy Vision[2] (MODI, 2005) there is the need to accelerate the delivery of modern energy service for poor people all around the world. Achieving this targets will have positive environmental impact, both at local and global viewpoint, helping in switching from traditional fuels to modern energy sources, reducing greenhouse emission and boosting development processes in a sustainable way.

“An effective energy sector that can fulfil the demand for energy services is a prerequisite for economic and social development which in turn is a prerequisite for sustainable poverty reduction”

However we have to take in account the previously mentioned trade-off (of the negative environmental impacts of an expanded energy sector), which underestimation could represent a great obstacle in the planned development path. Climate change process can affect very basic needs of population like food, health and shelter thus there’s the need to increase energy efficiency and transition toward sustainable and renewable energy sources world wide.

GENERAL DEFINITIONS

Renewable energy sources (RES) can be defined, in general, as those capturing their energy from ongoing natural processes, like sunshine, wind, flowing water, geothermal heat flows and biological processes; they are considered renewable because their flow of energy is replaced by a constant natural process in a short period of time, which is one of the main differences between RES and fossil energy sources.

RES can be used in different ways, either directly or indirectly, to generate some more convenient form of energy: for instance, to produce electricity through wind turbines or fuels, such as ethanol, from biomass.

Their use is not new in human history, since wood has been the primary energy source since less than 150 years ago; nevertheless, in the last century, the low price of fossil fuels caused a fall in wood use and, even today, it is one of the main obstacles to a widespread development in RES exploitation.

In relatively recent years, during the 1970s, the concept of renewable energy began to be debated; since then, RES have gained increasing attention due to the emergence of various problematic issues related to the use of fossil fuels and of nuclear energy: in particular their exhaustibility, their polluting emissions and wastes, and quite recently their rising prices.

As a matter of fact, RES are seen as more sustainable than nuclear and fossil sources of energy: firstly, because they may be classified as “free energy”, which means (in engineering) an energy source available directly from the environment and which cannot be expected to be depletable by humans; besides, RES are commonly considered cleaner, in terms of their final emissions and environmental impact.

However, several kinds of criticism have arisen, regarding a more extensive use of RES, aiming at satisfying part of the increasing energy demand of the last years.

One of the main critique on RES is referred to their habitat hazards. In fact, even if they are not supposed to lead to any new global risk, like nuclear wastes, some renewable energy capture systems entail particular environmental problems: for instance, someone claims that wind turbines can be dangerous for flying birds, while hydroelectric dams can create barriers for migrating fishes. Besides, some people disapprove the aesthetic consequences of wind turbines or large solar-electric installations in the countryside.

Another problematic issue deals with the effective availability of a RES and with its need of proximity to the energy demand. Since RES usually provide a relatively low-intensity energy and are intermittent in nature, exploiting such resources on a large scale is likely to require considerable investment in the technology adopted, as well as in transmission and distribution networks. The costs (not only financial, but also in terms of energy utilized) in infrastructures and for the transport and storage of this energy will make two questions arise: on one side, that of the economic profitability; on the other, that of the net energy produced.

Finally, there is a debate on the opportunity cost of the land. Large areas should be used to install wind turbines or photovoltaic cells, or to build a dam, or to cultivate energy crops, in order to produce significant level of bio-energy; those areas could be used to other kinds of production, or could even left wild for conservation purposes.

The relevance of this issue is particularly evident in the case of biomass production, and especially of biofuels by energy crops, since the large amount of land required could be used to produce food crops: the achievement of food security by a country and its bio-energy production become to be seen, in this way, as they were in a sort of competition, as we will underline later.

In the case of biomass production for energy purposes, all the above mentioned issues assume a peculiar relevance, not just that of land availability and opportunity costs; however, before analyzing the peculiar meaning of those issues, we think it is worth trying to give a definition of the term “biomass” and underline its main characteristics.

The term biomass has different definitions, often depending on the defining entity and its purposes. Nonetheless, it can be broadly identified as all kinds of non-fossil organic material that is available on a renewable basis; we include agricultural crop and wood wastes and residues, animal wastes, municipal wastes, other organic waste materials and, of course, dedicated energy crops and trees.

Given the high variety of raw materials, several types of technologies are used to transform biomass into bio-energy: among them, we could list direct combustion, co-firing, pyrolysis and anaerobic digestion. On the other side of the coin, final uses of biomass are various and diversified: biomass can be used for household heating, as a liquid fuel, to produce bio-fuels or bio-gas.

Some differences can be identified between biomass and the other kinds of RES. From the point of view of its availability, biomass can be considered, among RES, the most independent one from geography, being available at local level in various forms in almost every period of the year. However, geography becomes relevant again in the phase of transformation of biomass into bio-energy and its transport: collection logistics, available transformation technologies and infrastructures are crucial aspects of the biomass supply chain, as well as the distance existing between the production site and the demand. In this perspective, biomass can be seen as an important resource at territorial level.

In terms of renewability of the source, there is a wide diversity not only between biomass and other RES, but also among different types of biomass: some kinds of biomass are constantly renewed (e.g. municipal or animal wastes), while some others take time and a new productive process to be renovated (e.g. trees and energy crops). It is worth reminding that this second kind of biomass lies in the definition of RES too, because the time it needs to be renewed never goes beyond a human lifespan.

Furthermore, as opposite for the other RES, the final uses of biomass for bio-energy are usually characterized by some sort of polluting emissions, even if at a lower level than fossil energy sources: in fact, these emissions would be compensated by the amount of CO2 absorbed by biomass during its life, resulting in no net CO2 emission.

Biomass shares most of the criticisms claimed against RES in general, as we already mention in the case of land opportunity costs. Nevertheless, in the case of biomass, the critical issue of net energy production assumes a peculiar emphasis and ends up being linked to that of net polluting emissions, due to high incidence of transport in its productive process. It is generally agreed upon that total net polluting emissions of bio-energy from biomass (considering both those of the transport phase and those of the final uses) are lower than those of fossil fuels, especially if biomass is transported and use within a reasonable distance from the production site.

Now, we want to focus our attention on bio-fuels, a specific type of biomass obtained by the oil of dedicated crops, like sunflower, soy, sugar cane, which are called energy crops when used for energy purposes.