The Government has announced the award of the so-called Management Service Contracts by which transnational business corporations propose to take over Ghana Water Company's operations. Last Tuesday, 22nd November 2005, a contract was signed with a consortium made up of a Dutch company, Vitens, and Rand Water of South Africa.

The African kingdom of Lesotho, a nation afflicted by one of the worlds worst AIDS pandemics, is to become the first country in the world to offer HIV tests to its entire population. Its ministers and public health officials will announce a 12 million (7 million) programme this week to test the 1.9 million people living in the mountainous enclave within South Africa for the human immunodeficiency virus. In a groundbreaking move for African healthcare, King Letsie III of Lesotho is likely to become the first monarch to take the test publicly.

A recent report by Friends of the Earth International argues that an analysis of historical responsibility leads to the conclusion that compensation based on ecological debt should be added to a rights- based approach for determining fair shares of environment space. In its analysis, it observes that issues related to past and present contributions to the climate crisis as well as actions that have undermined development opportunities in poor countries, have yet to be adequately recognized and addressed by the Kyoto protocol. The report presents the relationship between historical responsibility and climate debt as it has evolved from the focus on ecological debt and climate justice to where it stands today. Recommendations for a just and equitable climate framework are made.

Three decades of increasingly patchy rains and drought are taking a heavy toll on the people of the Sahel nations, the semi-arid countries strung along the southern fringes of the Sahara, according to a group of scientists and specialists on climate change. “We’ve noted an increasing number of extreme events across the Sahel, where you can have heavy rain all of a sudden then nothing for several weeks,” Arona Diedhiou, a research fellow at Senegal’s Institute for Research and Development (IRD), said after a weeklong seminar on climate change organised by the Amma-Afrique project.

Deforestation accounts for 25 percent of all man-made emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2), the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) warned here on Friday (December 9). As a result, FAO is offering to provide data and technical advice to countries attending the UN climate change conference in Montreal to find ways to create financial incentives for reducing forest loss in the developing world. "FAO's newest data on the role of forests in mitigating climate change, contained in our recently released Global Forestry Resources Assessment (FRA 2005), provides a clear picture of the contribution that forests make to countering global warming – and of how deforestation exacerbates the problem," said Dieter Schoene, of FAO's Forestry Department.

More than 150 nations agreed Saturday (December 10) to launch formal talks on mandatory post-2012 reductions in greenhouse gases talks that will exclude an unwilling United States. For its part the Bush administration, which rejects the emissions cutbacks of the current Kyoto Protocol, accepted only a watered-down proposal to enter an exploratory global "dialogue" on future steps to combat climate change. That proposal specifically rules out "negotiations leading to new commitments." The parallel tracks represented a mixed result for the pivotal two-week U.N. conference on global warming, doing little to close the climate gap between Washington on one side, and Europe, Japan and other supporters of the Kyoto Protocol on the other.

Source: http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=1392556

Official webpages of the convention:
http://unfccc.int/2860.php
http://unfccc.int/meetings/cop_11/items/3394.php

Blogs written by environmentalists during the convention:
http://climatejustice.blogspot.com/
http://www.itsgettinghotinhere.org

Greenpeace Coverage:
http://climate2005.greenpeace.ca

More and more households are looking to alternative power or renewable energy as a constant source of electricity in a bid to cut down on costly monthly bills or decrease greenhouse emissions in the environment. Coal-driven energy has not only had a noticeable effect on the environment, but has also seen the decline of the world's natural resources, prompting "green" nations and businesses to promote renewable sources of power. One such group is Sustainable Energy Africa, a non-governmental organisation which endorses and researches sustainable energy resources in developing African communities. What they have done is build an energy efficient (or eco) house that runs completely on alternative energy sources, like solar and hydro power.

Tanzania is the one of the poorest countries in the world. 60 per cent of the population live on less than £1.40 a day and Tanzania has a total debt of £4.4 billion. Furthermore, 9.8 million Tanzanians do not have access to safe water (28 per cent). Biwater is a company with an annual turnover of £160 million that provides water services around the world. Early this year the Tanzanian Government spectacularly terminated a water privatisation contract with Biwater just two years into a ten year contract for failing to improve water supplies. Now Biwater wants compensation for the money it would have got if the contract had lasted ten years - this will amount to millions, and will take years to resolve. Click on the web link provided to protest against the Biwater action.

Finding a consensus on land rights and disarmament is essential to advance peace talks between Sudan's government and Darfur rebels, African mediators said, although both sides were far apart on the issues. The latest talks to end the violence in Darfur opened last week in Abuja with the rebels, presenting a unified front, forcing the government to tackle the key theme of power sharing for the first time after six previous negotiating rounds.

Campaigners have condemned UK water company Biwater for suing Tanzania, one of the poorest countries in the world. The company was kicked out earlier this year for allegedly failing to make required investments under a $102 million privatisation contract or to improve water services in Dar es Salaam.

Representatives from governments, green organisations and business are currently meeting in Montreal, Canada to thrash out how to deal with the threat posed by climate change. As the meeting takes place, worldwide protests are underway to call for international governments to develop workable emissions reduction programmes and policies. Patrick Bond and Rehana Dada critically examine South Africa's response to dealing with pollution and call for genuine solutions to a very real problem.

Climate change damage, the subject of a major Montreal 'Conference of Parties 11' which aims to update the Kyoto Protocol from November 28-December 9, is apparent to anyone following the news.

* The ferocity of recent Gulf Coast hurricanes was blamed by a leading British climate scientist upon a 3 degree (centigrade) rise in water temperatures.

* Frequent bleaching of Indian Ocean corals due to sea surface temperature rise is fast reaching lethal levels.

* Siberia's tundra is thawing, releasing unprecedented amounts of methane.

* Polar icecaps are melting, as are mountain glaciers across Africa.

* An estimated 37% of terrestrial species are likely to disappear due to global warming by 2050.

* Droughts and floods are intensifying.

Here in South Africa, society is slowly coming to grips with apartheid's responsibility for the world's worst relative overdose of greenhouse gases. Tragically, the post-apartheid government's neoliberal orientation has made the situation much worse.

The Kyoto Protocol aims to stabilise greenhouse gas emissions from 'developed' countries by 2012, at a level 5,2% lower than 1990 levels. That target won't be met, and most scientists agree that instead, a 60% reduction is needed to undo the severe climate damage now underway.

The 1997 Protocol came into effect in February 2005, but South Africa is not subject to emissions reduction targets at this stage. However, since we will be in future, some state officials, international financiers and local corporations - and even a few NGOs that should know better - are promoting a gimmick: Kyoto's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), which substitutes investments in carbon-reducing projects for genuine emissions reductions.

Critics include dozens of environmental justice networks that signed last year's 'Durban Declaration on Climate Justice' (http://www.carbontradewatch.org) against the CDM and especially trading carbon pollution rights.

Carbon trading justifies letting the US, European Union and Japan continue their emissions, in exchange for a small profit payout to dubious South African firms and municipalities for reductions in local carbon that we should be making in any event.

For example, landfill gas (40-60% methane) that escapes from Africa's largest dump, at Bisasar Road in the Durban residential suburb of Clare Estate should be captured, cleaned and the methane burned safely and cleanly for energy. The neighbourhood's residents are Indian and African; the vast dump's location smack in the middle of a residential area typified racist urban planning under apartheid.

Instead, Durban officials aim to burn the unprocessed landfill gas on site - in the process, raising the level of gas flaring by a factor of fifteen. Moreover, the Durban plan entails keeping the dangerous dump open at least another seven years so as to make the venture profitable, even though the ruling African National Congress had promised Bisasar Road's closure in 1996 due to community opposition.

The Durban bureaucrats' goal is to sell carbon credits via the World Bank to big corporations and Northern governments. But a famous community activist, cancer-stricken Sajida Khan, appears to have frightened the World Bank off for now.

Unfortunately, South Africa's Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism supports this form of carbon colonialism, which we term the 'privatisation of the air'. The government issued its National Climate Change Response Strategy in September 2004, arguing opportunistically that the 'CDM primarily presents a range of commercial opportunities, both big and small. This could be a very important source of foreign direct investment.'

Indeed, South Africa's five-fold increase in CO2 emissions since 1950 and 20% increase during the 1990s, can largely be blamed upon the attempt by state electricity company Eskom, the mining houses (led by Anglo American) and huge metals smelters (especially BHP Billiton) to brag of the world's cheapest electricity. Emitting twenty times the carbon tonnage per unit of economic output per person than even the United States, South African capital's reliance upon fossil fuels is scandalous.

Not only are vast carbon-based profits fleeing to the mining houses' offshore financial headquarters. There are very few jobs in these smelters, including the proposed $2.5 billion Coega aluminium project for which the notorious Canadian firm Alcan has been promised lucrative sweetheart deals from Eskom and other state agencies. Less than 1000 jobs will be created in the smelter, though it will consume more electricity than nearby Port Elizabeth, South Africa's fourth largest city.

Researchers at the University of Cape Town's Energy for Development Research Centre confirm that South Africa is 'the most vulnerable fossil fuel exporting country in the world'; scores extremely poorly 'on the indicators for carbon emissions per capita and energy intensity'; suffers a 'high dependence on coal for primary energy'; offers 'low energy prices' which in part is responsible for 'poor energy efficiency of individual sectors'; and risks developing a 'competitive disadvantage' by virtue of 'continued high energy intensity' which in the event of energy price rises 'can increase the cost of production'.

Aside from carbon trading, the main answer to the climate question provided by South African public enterprises minister Alec Erwin is to fast-track dangerous 'Pebble Bed' nuclear technology rejected by German producers like Siemens some years ago. That reckless strategy will continue to be fought by the superb environmental advocacy NGO Earthlife Africa, which has won two important preliminary court battles against Erwin and former environment minister Valli Moosa in the past year.

Although South Africa may be Africa's worst offender, other countries face similar problems. In Nigeria, powerful advocacy work by Iwerekhan community activists led the Federal High Court of Nigeria to judge gas flaring in Delta State a 'gross violation' of the right to life and dignity as promised in the Nigerian constitution (http://www.climatelaw.org/media/media/gas.flaring.suit.nov2005/ni.shell…). Yet the World Bank may give flaring mitigation official status as an investment in its Prototype Carbon Fund. According to the Climate Justice Programme, the proposed investments would justify flaring that should, in a just society, be outlawed outright, because they 'contain a toxic cocktail, including dioxins and particulates, and contribute to acid rain, respiratory illnesses, cancer and premature death', problems that the Nigerian court now considers a 'gross violation' of Iwerekhan people's human rights.

Whether in Nigeria, South Africa or elsewhere, renewable energy sources like wind, solar, wave, tidal and biomass are the only logical way forward for this century's energy system, but still get only a tiny pittance of government support.

Meantime, because of alleged 'resource constraints', Durban communities like Kennedy Road bordering Bisasar landfill - where impoverished people rely upon dump scavenging for income - are still denied basic services like electricity.

Hence there has arisen a new generation of municipal protests in South Africa, including a march by several thousand residents of shack settlements here in Durban on November 14. The week before, Durban city manager Mike Sutcliffe banned the march, showing that neo-liberalism and state repression are often two sides of the same coin. The community activists marched anyway, and the police attacked them, leading to more than 40 arrests and dozens of injuries from rubber bullets. The police also used live ammunition but fortunately no one was killed (http://southafrica.indymedia.org).

South Africa has witnessed nearly 900 illegal protests over inadequate municipal water, sanitation, electricity and housing services over the past year. President Thabo Mbeki passes the buck to local government, and hasn't yet shown any commitment to redirecting resource flows, which today so illogically favour the biggest corporate consumers of fossil fuels.

While Durban's Kennedy Road activists are promised a few jobs and bursaries by the municipality and World Bank, the plan to burn the landfill's methane gas on-site could release a cocktail of new toxins into the already-poisoned air. The generator's filters would never entirely contain the aromatic hydrocarbons, nitrous oxides, volatile organic compounds, dioxins and furans.

An even more dubious carbon trade is now being marketed in South Africa by another state agency, Sasol, which produces petroleum from coal. Sasol's attempt to earn carbon credits for its new Mozambique gas pipeline is based on claims that the huge investment would not have been viable without carbon finance. That this is a blatant fib was conceded offhandedly to researchers by a leading Sasol official in August, and is the sort of incident which discredits the idea of commodifying the air through unverifiable carbon reductions.

Aside from the World Bank, the cash-rich companies that most need these deals to protect future pollution profits are the oil majors, beneficiaries of windfall profits as the price per barrel soared from $11 in 1998 to more than $70 this year.

The Bank itself even admits in a new study that these and other extractive firms' depletion of Africa's natural resources drain the national wealth by hundreds of dollars per person each year (see Bond's analysis at http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2005-10/04bond.cfm).

In the process, the oil fields are attracting a new generation of US troops to bases being developed in the Gulf of Guinea. According to NATO's Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, General James Jones, 'The carrier battle groups of the future and the expeditionary strike groups of the future may not spend six months in the Mediterranean Sea but I'll bet they'll spend half the time down the West Coast of Africa.'

Once again, Pretoria is amplifying the worst trends, as Human Science Research Council writers John Daniel and Jessica Lutchman recently concluded of sleazy oil deals that encompass the Sudanese and Equatorial Guinean dictatorships: 'In its scramble to acquire a share of this market, the ANC government has abandoned any regard to those ethical and human rights principles which it once proclaimed would form the basis of its foreign policy.'

Those ethical principles should be urgently revisited now, since our future generations' very survival is at stake. In South Africa, the National Climate Change Conference last month failed to engage seriously with these critiques, and will be looked back on by ecological historians as a large part of the problem.

At the world scale, the Montreal conference will probably also be considered a travesty by future generations. Tragically, although Friends of the Earth International has joined the critique of carbon trading, the other giant environmental NGOs - many of which like Greenpeace appear to have been co-opted by their relationships with big oil - believe in market solutions.

In contrast, the signatories to the 'Durban Declaration' of October 2004 (http://www.carbontradewatch.org) continue to oppose a bogus for-profit approach to a problem caused mainly by advanced industrial capitalism. South Africa is a big part of this dual dilemma - i.e., emitting huge amounts of carbon, and serving as a guinea pig for a World Bank band aid scam - and it is up to environmental and social activists here to ratchet up the pressure and insist upon genuine solutions.

* Bond ([email protected]) and Dada ([email protected]) are editors of a new book, 'Trouble in the Air: Global Warming and the Privatised Atmosphere', from the University of KwaZulu-Natal's Centre for Civil Society (http://www.nu.ac.za/ccs/files/CCS_ENERGYSERIES_1005_COMPLETE.pdf). Dada's documentary film on Bisasar Road aired nationally in South Africa last month.

* Please send comments to [email protected]

This is an update about disturbing developments regarding the Merowe Dam Project in Northern Sudan. This dam - the largest hydropower project under construction in Africa - is currently being built by Chinese and Western companies. About 50,000 people are supposed to be displaced to barren places in the Nubian desert for the project. In recent days, tensions around the dam project have escalated. On November 29, violence erupted on Sherri Island, a Nile island that will be submerged by the Merowe reservoir. Massive protests broke out when security forces tried to arrest representatives of the dam-affected communities on this island. In the ensuing scuffles, the office of the dam authority was set afire, and the government officials had to flee the island. According to unconfirmed reports, the government has dispatched three battalions to the area to quash the unrest.

The first-ever World Health Organization (WHO) study on domestic violence reveals that intimate partner violence is the most common form of violence in women's lives - much more so than assault or rape by strangers or acquaintances. The study reports on the enormous toll physical and sexual violence by husbands and partners has on the health and well-being of women around the world and the extent to which partner violence is still largely hidden.

African nations are moving toward creating a single power pool, overcoming geographical hurdles in order to light and develop the world's poorest continent, a senior energy industry official said on Friday, November 25. Joshua Kofi, the president of African energy consortium UPDEA, which coordinates power projects on the continent, said the five existing regional power pools would be integrated into one within five to 10 years.

The growing trend of establishing plantations of oil palm has taken its toll primarily on tropical forests, where this palm finds enough soil, water and solar energy to fill its needs. The typical procedure is to log a certain area of forest and then establish the plantation aimed at the production of oil and kernel oil. But it also happens that plantation companies may "clear" the entire forest by setting it on fire.

South African pulp and paper company Sappi is planning to increase the capacity of its Sappi Saiccor mill by more than 200,000 tons a year. Sappi Saiccor is the largest producer of chemical cellulose (dissolvable pulp) in the world. Its mill at Umkomaas, about 50 kilometres south of Durban Port currently produces about 600,000 tons of chemical cellulose a year. The chemical cellulose is used to produce things like cigarette filters, sweet wrappers, an additive to washing powder that stops dirt
sticking to clothes and the stuff that makes vitamin tablets stick together. Almost all of Saiccor's cellulose is exported.

Among other direct and underlying causes of deforestation, Africa's rainforest ecosystems are threatened by logging, as are virtually all of the world's remaining large, contiguous rainforests. These biodiversity rich rainforests provide critical habitat not only to local indigenous but all of the Earth's peoples and species. In the Democratic Republic of Congo the threat has become a reality.

Policy makers around the world are gradually coming to terms with the real possibility of a bird or avian H5NI influenza pandemic. From Washington, D.C., to London, Paris, and other industrialized countries, preparations to combat a possible pandemic among human beings are almost assuming war-like proportions as the bird flu influenza moves from Asia to parts of Europe. The World Health Organization (WHO) is leading a coordinated global response through a new World Bank funded initiative. However, to date there is no coordinated response from Africa, its regional institutions or national governments, says this article from World Press Review.