A paper published today by the International Institute for Environment and Development warns that African governments are signing away water rights for decades with insufficient regard for how this will affect millions of local users, including fishing, farming and pastoralist communities.

The water rights often feature in the growing number of large land deals that governments are signing with investors (see First detailed study of large land acquisitions in Africa warns of impacts on poor rural people) as many of these areas require irrigation to be viable.

Such deals have already raised concerns for being rushed, secretive and one-sided. Many fail to deliver real benefits and can even create new social and environmental problems (see Report shows how secret land deals can fail to benefit African nations – and how to make them better).

Now, researchers at IIED warn that governments risk signing away water rights in ways that harm the future prospects of their citizens, especially fishermen and pastoralists, who rely on the same water as the investors. Some investors in Mali and Sudan have been given unrestricted access to as much water as they need.

“Companies that acquire land for irrigated farming will want secure water rights, but long-term contractual commitments can jeopardise water access for local farmers,” says co-author Lorenzo Cotula. “This affects not only the people who have customarily used the land that is being leased, but also distant downstream users who can be hundreds of kilometres away and even across an international border.”

The Gibe III dam in Ethiopia will enable irrigation on 150,000 of land the Ethiopian government has allocated to investors, but studies suggest this project would lower the level of Kenya’s Lake Turkana – on which half a million Kenyans depend — by eight metres by 2024.

The ‘global water crisis’ is a crisis of water management, not of water quantity,” says the paper’s lead author Jamie Skinner, a principal researcher at the International Institute for Environment and Development. “Good water management in the face of climate change is only possible if it is clear who the water belongs to, who holds rights to its use and when allocations to all users  are made in a transparent way.”

For interviews, contact:

Lorenzo.Cotula@iied.org

Jamie.Skinner@iied.org

ENDS

Mike Shanahan

Press officer

International Institute for Environment and Development [please note new address / phone]

80-86 Gray’s Inn Road, London WC1X 8NH, UK. Tel: +44 (0)20 3463 7399; Fax: +44 (0)20 3514 9055

www.iied.org

Twitter http://twitter.com/IIED

Biodiversity Media Alliance http://biodiversitymedia.ning.com

Climate Change Media Partnership roster http://climatechangemedia.ning.com

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A book published today by the International Institute for Environment and Development paints a vivid picture of an alternative future in which food, energy and water supplies are sustainable and in the control of local communities.

The book show how the linear systems that shape our world are flawed as they assume a limitless supply of resources and a limitless capacity for the environment to absorb waste and pollution.

The global food system’s dependence on fossil fuels that contribute to local pollution and global warming is just one example of an unsustainable system.

The authors call instead for circular systems that mimic natural cycles to produce food, energy, materials and clean water.

“Circular economy models that reintegrate food and energy production with water and waste management can also generate jobs and income in rural and urban areas,” says co-author Dr Michel Pimbert, a principal researcher at IIED. “This ensures that wealth created stays within the local and regional economy.”

One example is a system that recycles food waste and chicken manure to feed a worm farm. The worms in turn feed the chickens and farmed fish whose bones are used as fertiliser in a market garden. Human waste via a compost toilet also enriches the garden, whose crops — together with the farmed fish and meat and eggs from the chickens — feed the people.

The system is a closed circle with loops within it. All the nutrients stay in the system and just move about through the circle, rather than being pumped as sewage into the sea and leaving the soil forever poorer.

“A transformation towards re-localised food systems will significantly help to address climate change and other challenges,” says Pimbert. “Circular systems also provide the basis for economic and political sovereignty – the ability of citizens to democratically manage their own affairs and engage with other communities on their own terms.”

Dr Caroline Lucas, a member of parliament from the Green Party of England & Wales, has written the book’s foreword.

“I warmly welcome this book’s contribution to the debate on how food systems can be redesigned and re-localised to sustain diverse local ecologies, economies and human well being,” she writes.

“The authors rightly emphasise the need for a systemic and fundamental transformation of industrial food and farming in the face of peak oil, climate change, biodiversity loss, the water crisis, food poisonings, and the impoverishment of farmers and rural communities.”

“The challenge is to design resilient food systems with, by and for citizens – to reduce ecological footprints and foster local democratic control over the means of life. But rather than look at food and agriculture in isolation, we need to consider ways of re-integrating food and energy production with water and waste management in a diversity of local contexts in rural and urban areas, – and at different scales. “

 To mark the launch of the book – Virtuous Circles: Values, systems and sustainability — IIED invites bloggers to join a virtual circle to share their blog posts about the book (by emailing Suzanne.Fisher@iied.org). IIED will then profile the best posts on its own blog and via Twitter with the hashtag #vcircles.

Please note that this press release and the book are embargoed until Tuesday 22 November at 00.01 GMT

To request a PDF of the book, email mike.shanahan@iied.org

 For interviews in English or in French, contact:

Dr Michel Pimbert

Mobile no: 07525 069061

E-Mail: michel.pimbert@iied.org

 NOTES TO EDITORS

The International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) is an independent, non-profit research institute. Set up in 1971 and based in London, IIED provides expertise and leadership in researching and achieving sustainable development (see: www.iied.org).

Sadly, this book was just about completed when its lead author, Andy Jones, met with a sudden death on 17th November 2010. Between 2008 and 2010 Andy was a much respected researcher associated with IIED’s Agroecology and Food Sovereignty Team.

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Governments are ignoring a vast store of knowledge — generated over thousands of years — that could protect food supplies and make agriculture more resilient to climate change, says a briefing published today by the International Institute for Environment and Development.

It urges negotiators at the UN climate change conference in Durban later this month to give stronger support to traditional knowledge and address the threats posed by commercial agriculture and intellectual property rights.

The paper includes case studies from Bolivia, China and Kenya that show traditional knowledge and local farming systems have proved vital in adapting to the climatic changes that farmers there face.

This includes using local plants to control pests, choosing traditional crop varieties that tolerate extreme conditions such as droughts and floods, planting a diversity of crops to hedge bets against uncertain futures, breeding new varieties based on quality traits, and having systems in place to protect biological diversity and share seeds within and between communities.

But the paper warns that government policies tend to overlook such knowledge and fail to protect farmers’ rights to grow traditional crops, benefit from their use and access markets.

“Policies, subsidies, research and intellectual property rights promote a few modern commercial varieties and intensive agriculture at the expense of traditional crops and practices,” says the paper’s lead author Krystyna Swiderska, a senior researcher at the International Institute for Environment and Development.

“This is perverse as it forces countries and communities to depend on an ever decreasing variety of crops and threatens with extinction the knowledge and biological diversity that form the foundations of resilience.”

The paper says that while modern agriculture and varieties may increase productivity, environmental stress and climatic variability mean the survival of poor farmers depends on more resilient and readily available traditional varieties.

“It is because of famers’ intimate knowledge of nature that traditional farming practices have persisted for thousands of years and overcome climatic threats,” adds Swiderska.

“To sweep away all of that knowledge and the biological diversity it relates to in favour of a limited set of modern seed varieties means putting the private interests of commercial seed corporations ahead of the public interest of sustaining food and agriculture.”

The paper says traditional seed varieties that have been developed locally are better suited to the prevailing local conditions – such as soils and pests — even with climatic changes like drought. They are also cheaper.

“In Guangxi, Southwest China, most farmer-improved varieties survived the big spring drought in 2010, while most of the modern hybrids were lost”, says Dr. Yiching Song from the Centre for Chinese Agricultural Policy, Chinese Academy of Science.

Similarly, in coastal Kenya farmers have gone back to using traditional varieties to cope with changes in climate. “Traditional knowledge, crops and resource management practices are an essential element of local adaptive capacity, ”says Doris Mutta, senior researcher at the Kenya Forestry Research Institute.

More important, with traditional varieties farmers can select and save seed themselves for the next crop season, and this is a more self-reliant and sustainable farming system for adaptation.

Modern varieties on the other hand have to be bought each season, depend on market availability, and are often protected by intellectual property rights which can restrict their use. They also require costly inputs such as fertilisers and pesticides, which many indigenous farmers cannot afford.

“In the last few decades, there has been a rapid spread of hybrids at the expense of local landraces for most staple food crops in China,” says Dr Yiching Song, of the Centre for Chinese Agricultural Policy. “In fact, modern agriculture, like hybrid seeds, has made poor farmers in remote areas more vulnerable by increasing their reliance on external resources.”

The paper adds: “The capacity of the world’s poorest and most affected communities to adapt to climate change ultimately depends not only on traditional knowledge or on individual ecosystems, but on both — on the interlinked bio-cultural systems from which new innovations can develop and spread, and on the landscapes, cultural and spiritual values and customary laws that sustain them.”

IIED

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A growing focus on national and international security challenges posed by climate change could detract attention from the root causes of the problem, the needs of the most vulnerable people and the search for appropriate solutions.

Corinne Schoch, a researcher at the International Institute for Environment and Development explains why in an opinion paper published today (6 October), as ongoing UN climate-change negotiations in Panama reach their mid-point.

Schoch says a growing focus on security could lead to top-down responses to climate change that marginalise the most vulnerable people and sideline the existing institutions that are best suited to meeting these people’s needs.

Security institutions – from the UN Security Council to national militaries – are increasingly looking at the potential for climate change to spark conflict. Schoch’s paper examines why this is happening and what the implications of this trend could be.

“The focus on climate change and conflict implies an overly simple chain of cause and effect,” says Schoch. “The potential link between climate change and conflict may be real but the truth is that we have insufficient evidence to draw strong conclusions and there is a danger in extrapolating from the local to the global.”

“This could create top-down responses that focus on security in a very limited sense of the word and ignore both the causes of climate change and the best ways to limit its impacts on vulnerable communities.”

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1. CONSERVATION ENTERPRISE: WHAT WORKS, WHERE AND FOR WHOM?

Summary: Community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) recognises that local communities are often best placed to conserve natural resources, as long as they stand to gain more than they lose from doing so. Conservation enterprises—commercial activities generating economic and social benefits in ways that help meet conservation objectives—seek to reinforce these incentives. The African Wildlife Foundation (AWF) has adopted conservation enterprise as a core part of its conservation strategy since the 1990s. It predominantly supports partnerships between local communities and the private sector, with the community retaining ownership and the private sector providing the management expertise and paying a combination of fixed and variable fees to the community for access to its resources. This study draws on the experience of the AWF and other organisations to assess what effect conservation enterprises can have on the livelihoods of local communities and how effective such initiatives are at poverty reduction. It finds that most of these enterprises cannot by themselves take people out of poverty, but can provide less tangible benefits, such as increased investment in health and education, strengthened community organisations and greater resilience in difficult times. A successful conservation enterprise needs to strike a balance between harnessing local skills and entrepreneurship and ensuring that the benefits are felt by the entire local community, particularly those who make the decisions about resource use. Some programmes can be specifically targeted at particular groups, but enterprises providing employment tend not to favour the poorest community members and the benefits may be captured by local elites. The evidence also shows that well-designed conservation enterprises can improve the conservation of some types of land areas and key, high value species—such as mountain gorillas—but are less effective at conserving biodiversity with a lower market value. Download the paper from http://pubs.iied.org/14613IIED.html

2. POVERTY, BIODIVERSITY AND LOCAL ORGANISATIONS: LESSONS FROM BIRDLIFE INTERNATIONAL

Summary: Global targets to reduce the rate of biodiversity loss significantly by 2010 have not been met, and the rate of biodiversity loss does not appear to be slowing. At the same time, targets to reduce human poverty worldwide are also off track. This dual challenge has led to a search for effective mechanisms and entry points through which conservation and development objectives can be addressed together. Both conservation and development sectors, within their own sphere of interest, have advocated the importance of local participation and also of partnership between conservation agencies and local people. This paper discusses why working with local organisations can be an important entry point for conservation and poverty reduction, describes the global experience of BirdLife International in this context, and concludes with a discussion, based on BirdLife’s experience, of some of the issues and constraints which need to be taken into account when addressing conservation and poverty reduction through working with local organisations. Three examples, one from South America (Bolivia) one from Africa (Uganda) and one from Asia (Nepal), help to illustrate how BirdLife’s partners have worked with local organisations as an entry point to achieving conservation and poverty reduction. These examples, and BirdLife International’s very rich experience in this approach worldwide, reveal that working in partnership with local organisations ensures that environment and poverty are addressed in a more holistic way, as experienced and understood by local people. It also has benefits in terms of sustainability, efficiency, legitimacy and respect for rights. However, it needs to
be part of a broader strategy, particularly one which addresses drivers and root causes of poverty and biodiversity loss at larger scales. Linking local organisations to national and international networks can help to ensure that local voices are heard in such forums.

Download the paper from http://pubs.iied.org/14614IIED.html  Contact David.Thomas@birdlife.org

3. BIODIVERSITY AND POVERTY: TEN FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS – TEN POLICY IMPLICATIONS

Summary: This paper is intended to stimulate discussion about the linkages between biodiversity, conservation and poverty reduction. What do we know, what do we not know, and what do we need to know? These ten questions provide a quick—hence simplistic—insight into a complicated and convoluted issue. We would therefore be very interested in your feedback. Are these the right questions? And the right answers? What else should we be asking—and trying to answer—to better understand (and enhance) the biodiversity-poverty relationship? Please send your ideas to pclg@iied.org.    Download the paper from http://pubs.iied.org/14612IIED.html 

For more information about IIED’s work on the links between biodiversity, conservation and poverty, please contact Dilys Roe (dilys.roe@iied.org)

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