‘Climate change Green Paper under the spotlight’

Engineering News, 11 February 2011

The 38-page National Climate Change Green Paper was released just before most of South Africa’s negotiating team went to Cancun.

A raft of consultative workshops on the Green Paper are to be held around the country in the next month or so. The interest in the Green Paper is overwhelming. The proposals that will be put forward will have implications for everybody.

There was something of a delay in the release of the paper following the issuing of the National Climate Change Response Paper in early 2010. The original intention was to have the White Paper finalised and the legislation taking effect by the end of 2011. This is now unlikely. There is some urgency with respect to having something solid by the seventeeth Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Convention on Climate Change (COP17).

The most we can expect is a White Paper by the time the COP17 is held in Durban at the end of this year.

The Green Paper says a lot and then says nothing. This is not being harsh, but a Green Paper should at least be more than a discussion paper. It should define the policy options for action, the feasibility of these and the timeline for the implementation of the various options. These would be for both mitigation and adaptation.

 

‘The State of Food Security in the World 2010: Addressing Food Insecurity in Protracted Crises’

Summary: This edition of The State of Food Insecurity in the World focuses on people living in a group of countries in which the incidence of hunger is particularly high and persistent, and which face particular challenges in meeting the MDG targets – namely countries in protracted crisis. These countries are characterized by long-lasting or recurring crises, both natural and human-induced, and limited capacity to respond. In the 22 countries identified by this report as being in protracted crisis (or containing areas in protracted crisis), the most recent data show that more than 166 million people are undernourished, representing nearly 40 percent of the population of these countries and nearly 20 percent of all undernourished people in the world.

‘The Importance of Assets in Current Development Debates: Millennium Development Goals and, Social Protection and Climate Change’

 Summary: This paper seeks to explore the extent to which the incorporation of an asset accumulation framework into the three new development issues can assist in overcoming some of the challenges presented by poverty and inequality. It identifies best practice examples of bottom-up poverty reduction initiatives which already incorporate an asset accumulation framework, before identifying a range of potential entry points for incorporating asset accumulation into MDG-related policies, social protection schemes and CC initiatives. By way of a background, the paper starts by summarising the asset accumulation framework and its associated policy components, including the aims and programmes of different asset generation policies. The following three sections then discuss the incorporation of an asset framework into the three new development agendas identified above. In each case the paper first mentions the contextual background, before elaborating in a more comprehensive description on the manner and extent to which an asset-based approach is incorporated. Each section ends with the identification of further opportunities for incorporating assets. The final section of the paper summarises the main findings.

Moser, C. and Stein, A. (2011). Importance of Assets in Current Development Debates: Millennium Development Goals and, Social Protection and Climate Change, Global Urban Research Centre Working Paper Series No. 7: 1-48.