This is the great question of the 21st Century, really, and it’s as hard to settle as it is vital.

For the longest time, it was seen as rather axiomatic that getting carbon emissions down to a sustainable level would mean saying “goodbye to growth.” This was phrased in different ways – usually with some vague comment about how we’d all be better off if we didn’t care so much about ‘stuff’ and how a post-growth society could be fairer, more peaceful, more equal, etc. (See for example Affluenza and Prosperity without Growth, or the provocatively-titled website Make Wealth History.) This seems to be intuitively sensible to quite a lot of people, and there’s a veritable cottage industry devoted to helping people ‘live sustainably’ by reducing their economic activity in order to reduce their personal carbon footprint – growing their own food and so on.

In more recent years, though, this reaction has been roundly challenged by a more optimistic view, apparently nicknamed ‘bright green’, which believes that a combination of technological improvements can enable us to reduce emissions to below dangerous levels without sacrificing (much) economic growth – or the key aspects of our cosy Western lifestyles. This view has quickly become the mainstream view amongst policymakers – particularly since the 2007 Stern report, which argued addressing climate change was achievable for the cost of a few % of GDP growth. (It’s also Al Gore’s basic position.)

It’s also a view I’m instinctively drawn to.

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I have a new favourite book.

It’s not a novel. I wouldn’t call exactly call it non-fiction, though, either. If anything it’s an instruction manual. And it’s not written by a famous writer, or journalist, or even a regular joe with a gift for words who had a horrible childhood/exciting divorce.

It’s written by children.

It’s called Work We Can and Cannot Do, and it’s amazing.

It was published a little over ten years ago by The Concerned for Working Children, the organisation I’m volunteering for here in Bangalore. I love it not because it’s inspiring to read, though, in a strange way, it is. I love it because it’s a sudden sharp shock of sense in a very fraught debate. It’s like when you’re in the middle of a heated argument and then someone comes up with a new suggestion and everyone’s left thinking, ‘why didn’t we think of this before’?

The ‘child labour’ debate

You see, coming to work at CWC I have, quite unintentionally, stepped into the middle of one of the most fraught debates in the development sphere in India, and maybe anywhere – that of ‘child labour.’ (I’ll explain the scare quotes in a second.) You might think that this is a fairly straightforward matter, right? Child labour is bad. Children toiling in factories and hotels and fields when they should be in school? That’s bad, right?

If you’re involved in development or you’ve looked into the issue, you might have picked up that it’s a bit more complicated than that. The money that children make from working often provides essential support for their families, to pay medical bills, provide extra food, and so on. Simply taking the children out of work and putting them in school can be disastrous for families’ incomes or, more often, simply doesn’t work – the children skip school and are forced to work in ‘unofficial’ jobs, often with worse pay and conditions. To get them to stop working and stay in school, you have to provide extra financial support to their families to make up for the lost income.

That, at least, is the rough concensus amongst Western NGOs and the like. It’s also (kinda, sorta) the underlying principle of Indian legal and political efforts on the issue.

But it turns out it’s still more complicated than that.

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Low-carbon development isn’t always about expanding renewable energy and public transport. The World Bank recently published a report laying out how Brazil can meet its aims for economic development while reducing greenhouse gas emissions – and its main recommendations are in the areas of agriculture and land use.

With over 190 million people, Brazil is the world’s fifth-largest country and expected to be one of the economic giants of the 21st Century. The Brazilian parliament has adopted a voluntary goal of reducing emissions in 2020 by about 37% against current predictions. The World Bank study designs a ‘low carbon scenario’ for Brazil which sees emissions between 2010-30 reduced 37% against projections, and leaves emissions in 2030 20% below the level of 2008.

Brazil’s economy is already relatively green, with renewables – mostly hydropower – already accounting for much of its electricity generation and biofuels, mostly ethanol, providing a large proportion of transport fuel. Brazil’s greenhouse gas emissions per person each year are less than half the global average. The World Bank’s report recommends a familiar list of steps to further reduce Brazil’s emissions, including further expanding renewable energy, improving urban public transport, and further increasing the proportion of transport fuel provided by biofuels to 80%.

But Brazil has one very big source of greenhouse gas emissions: deforestation. The basin of the Amazon river, which lies mostly within Brazil’s borders, has suffered from extensive logging in recent decades. Deforestation releases carbon trapped in trees, and prevents future trees from extracting carbon from the atmosphere. The Brazilian government has made considerable progress in reducing deforestation in the last few years, but it still accounts for two-fifths of Brazil’s greenhouse gas emissions. Furthermore, the activities which tend to lead to deforestation – livestock farming and the farming of corn for ethanol biofuel – need to expand significantly in the next few decades if Brazil is to meet its targets for development. Agriculture accounts for another quarter of Brazil’s emissions.

How do you expand agriculture while freeing up space to return to forest? You increase the land efficiency of your farming.

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The heading ‘geo-engineering’ covers a vast array of possible interventions. Broadly speaking, they fit into two categories. The total climate change the Earth experiences will depend essentially on two key factors: how much sunlight  is absorbed by the planet, and how much of of that heat – when it radiates out again – is trapped by greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Conventional climate change mitigation efforts try, in one way or another, to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases – and particularly carbon – we put into the atmosphere.

Some geo-engineering projects build on this by trying to take some of the excess greenhouse gases we’ve already put in the atmosphere out again and store them elsewhere. In the common ‘greenhouse effect’ analogy, this is like taking a few panes of glass out of the greenhouse.

Other geo-engineering projects try to reduce the warming effect by reflecting more of the Sun’s rays so they don’t get trapped in the ‘greenhouse’ in the first place – the equivalent of putting some shade over the greenhouse when it gets too hot.

Instinctively, the former – carbon extraction – seems more reasonable, right? If we’ve put too much carbon in the atmosphere, it stands to reason we should take some out again. But carbon-extraction geo-engineering schemes can be highly controversial. For example, research into ‘seeding’ areas of ocean with iron in order to promote the growth of carbon-munching plankton has been the subject of protests by green groups.

Meanwhile, sunlight-reflecting geo-engineering conjures up images of giant space mirrors that will remain, most likely, in the realm of science fiction. But one of the least controversial and simplest methods of geo-engineering works by reflecting more sunlight: painting streets and buildings white.

So any conversation about the topic needs to bear in mind that some geo-engineering projects are far more complex and risky than others. Nevertheless, the IPCC’s research programme seems to include some pretty hi-sci stuff, such as bio-engineering crops on a global scale to be lighter and more reflective. So while we should keep in mind that some geo-engineering ideas are a lot more controversial than others, it’s nonetheless appropriate to consider the case against the kind of projects the IPCC is about to assess.

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A smart city should use technology to help people move around, reduce energy waste and tackle crime by constantly collecting and analysing information about how people use the city. Up-to-the-minute information on traffic and bus and tube services should be available online, on mobiles and via a 24-hour digital radio station.

Read more at the Guardian

I recently enjoyed the Environment Agency report 50 Ways To Save The Planet, given away with the Guardian a few months back. It’s a refreshingly positive approach to climate-change pamphleteering, with the emphasis firmly on answers. It’s also a bafflingly varied smörgåsbord of solutions, ranging from the mundane – put a jumper on before you turn up the heating – to slightly mad hi-tech schemes like using giant space mirrors to reflect the Sun’s rays away from the Earth. Amidst the sci-fi technology, though, one suggestion caught my eye: No 23, for the Government to legally require one-third of all park land to be converted to “public fruit and nut orchards and community held allotments” for the production of food.

While the high-tech schemes for reducing climate change might grab many of the media headlines, ideas like this show the environmental movement at its most radical. As I’ve noted before, there are various ways in which we can hope to intervene to reduce the climate dangers inherent in our current level of economic activity. One way is to reduce the carbon emissions required for energy production, through renewable energy; another is to mitigate the effects of carbon emissions, through carbon sinks, harvesters, or, yes, giant space mirrors. These areas are where the science-fiction stuff generally comes in.

But there’s a whole other area of intervention – reducing the actual amount of economic activity involved in modern life. This is the school of thought from which ideas like the one above – from TV pundit Penney Poyzer – stem. Modern life, the argument goes, is just too modern. We have too much stuff, travel too much, do too much. We need to return to simpler times – growing our own food, sourcing goods locally, re-using instead of replacing.

Why is this apparently backward-gazing viewpoint so radical? Because it disputes the central idea of economic and political thought in the last 200 years – the beneficence of material progress and economic growth. Having ever-more, the argument goes – more choice, more gadgets, more convenience – is costing the earth.

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The most notable success from my development blog, this post received over 1000 hits in a few days and was linked to by several development blogs worldwide.

For those of you who found my chart summarising African history since independence too complicated, my amazing friend John has (amazingly) produced a simpler version. Rather than tracking country by country, it helps you see how the governmental composition of Africa has shifted over time.

The wider a section the more states were in that situation at the time. So we can clearly see how colonialism gave way to dictatorship and war, then in many cases to one or other level of democracy. But war and tyranny remain with us today.

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