By Nnimo Bassey
Environmental Costs and Benefits of Development
Environmental costs are those costs that arise from damage done to the environment. They are not covered or find space on our national accounting books. When they appear at all on corporate balance sheets they are shown as corporate social responsibility (CSR) outlays.
With CSR, those that cause environmental harm present a façade of care for impacted communities. Environmental costs are tolerated because the environmental benefits are reaped by powerful entities – be they state actors or corporations while those costs are externalised unto voiceless communities.
Market solutions to pollution emerged in the early 1960s by way of monetary compensations for environmental harm. The problems of externalities were solvable “through voluntary negotiations between the polluter and those adversely affected, leading to agreements about fair compensations from the polluter.
This kind of transaction supposedly makes all parties better off. Polluters get their profits while those affected by the pollution get compensation that exceeds the value of the damage inflicted on them.” The problem is that you cannot really find the right monetary compensation for ecological damage as some of these are persistent and are irreversible.
This brings to mind the recent agreement by Shell, the oil company, to pay the sum of 55 million Pounds Sterling as compensation for huge oil spills from their pipelines in 1998 and 1999 at Bodo, Ogoniland in Nigeria. It was agreed that a chunk of the cash would go for social infrastructure in the community while the balance would be shared equally among the 15,600 fisherfolk that were directly impacted.
The fact that each of those persons whose livelihood had been irreparably damaged would receive about N600, 000 (six hundred thousand Naira) or about US$3, 200 (three thousand two hundred US Dollars) raised some conversations on social media. One person sent a chat to me over twitter urging that fund managers should be approached to help the community folks handle the money – fearing that they may otherwise squander their sudden wealth. That sort of thinking indicates a shallow understanding of the value of local livelihoods.
The compensation amount does not by any stretch of the imagination compare to what fisherfolk spend in buying fishing boats and equipment. And the pollution at Bodo, like in many other parts of Ogoniland, is so bad that up to 30 years of work will be needed to effect adequate remediation.
A troubling phenomenon is the trade in toxic wastes. Global trade is indeed so one sided that it would permit the dumping of toxic waste in poorer nations ostensibly to provide them avenue for foreign exchange earning. One particular leaked email by a World Bank claimed that Africa is under-polluted and that it would make economic sense to dump wastes in Africa since the death of men from postrate cancer was a long shot for Africans that would not live to the age of 65 (to worry about the disease) in the first instance.
Nature, Exploitation and Ecocide
The rise of market environmentalism sees nature as commodity and looks for ways to ameliorate environmental and social costs in terms of monetary compensation. Efforts are put into placing a price tag on life and if anything is considered worthless then it is fair game to destroy it. And things only have worth if humans know of what use to put them. The fact that Mother Earth is seen as a slave of man is a clear manifestation of ignorance and unreasonable haughtiness.
It is essential for us all to recognise that everything in Nature has intrinsic or existence value. They all have non-use value. This non-use value does not require that utility be derived from direct use of the resource because the value comes from the resource simply existing.
Moreover, life is a web of relationships and everything or life forms are interconnected in this web of life. Trying to determine value simply on the premise of ‘service’ to humanity is absolutely unreasonable. The insistence that Nature most be seen in terms of monetary or exploitation value has been characterised as the reality of colonization in the 21st century: not just the enslavement of people but of the planet.
A concept developed by HOMEF that can help us deepen this aspect of our conversation is that of Re-Source democracy. According to HOMEF, “Re-source democracy hinges on the recognition that a natural ‘resource’ fundamentally belongs to Nature and secondly to communities of species and peoples who live in the territory or have traditionally held the territory where the ‘resource’ such as forests, rivers or grazing lands exists.
Re-source democracy is about stewardship that recognises the right of citizens to establish rules and to act in line with traditional as well as best available knowledge to safeguard the soil, trees, crops, water and wildlife first as gifts of Nature and secondly to enjoy the gifts as necessary provisions that support their lives and livelihoods as well as those of future generations.
Re-source democracy calls on us to re-source, to re-connect with Earth – our source of life – and to respect her as a living being with inherent rights, and not just a ‘resource’ to be exploited.”
Climate Crisis and the rise of False Solutions
Africa is arguably the most vulnerable continent to climate change. The visible impacts include floods from unusually heavy rainfalls, droughts and increased desertification. Climate change will usher in new dimensions of water stress on the continent and more citizens will be forced into becoming climate refugees. It portends more conflicts.
Sea level rise is also a threat. Weak infrastructure and cities located on low-lying coastal areas are all vulnerable. It is very important to note that for every global temperature rise, Africa experiences 50 per cent rise higher than the global average. It is also known that to put the planet on a course that would keep global average temperature rise at not more than 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels up to 80 per cent of known fossil fuel reserves must be left in the ground.
By the way, when we speak of a global average of 2 degrees Celsius for Africa that means 3 degrees. Food production capacity may reduce by 50 per cent in some cases by 2020 and will be severely compromised in all cases if high temperature rise happens.
Current United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference (UNFCCC) of parties negotiations have failed to give any hope that temperature increase above pre-industrial levels will remain within acceptable levels. To compound matters, climate negotiations focus on market mechanisms that allow for carbon offsets rather than having measurable, legally binding emissions cuts at source as required by science.
What we have had is the promotion of voluntary emissions reduction since the Climate COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009. As we speak, the world is on course to have catastrophic temperature increases if nothing substantial happens at the forthcoming Climate COP21 in Paris in December 2015. One of the requirements to curb temperature rise is to leave at least 80% of known fossil fuels reserves underground.
Is this something that countries that have fossil fuel resources would agree to? How about those that are going into extreme extraction such as fracking rather than leaving known conventional reserves untapped?
Whatever is the case, it is clear that there must be an urgent transition from dirty energy as represented mostly by fossil fuel sources. This transition does not necessarily mean job losses but may actually lead to the creation of more jobs that are also cleaner and safer.
The enthronement of false solutions to climate change poses direct sources of environmental challenges in Africa by way of problem shifting from the Global North to the Global South. One example is the investment in production of raw materials for biofuel production that has meant the grabbing of lands on the continent for cultivation of crops including jathropha.
Another example is the introduction of the concept of Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD) and other market solutions that allow polluters to keep polluting once they can pay for a carbon stock in a designated and colonised forest somewhere in Africa or elsewhere. REDD forests often mean violence, human rights abuses, displacement and impoverishment of forest communities, despite all the safeguards introduced. One example is what the Sengwer peoples are suffering in Kenya as we speak.
Energy and Power Grids
As is evident in the Programme for Infrastructure Development in Africa (PIDA) agreed by the African Union in 2012, there is no reference to renewable energy development on the continent. The emphasis is on fossil fuel driven energy supply and national or mega grid lines. It is not surprising that this should be so, because the drivers of the PIDA process are multinational extractive companies, oil companies and international and private financial institutions.
Rather than invest on green energy and autonomous supply systems that do not rely on problematic national grids emphasis is made for the construction of coal fired plants, gas plants and probably nuclear plants. Big dams rather than micro ones will probably be on the cards.
We must not ignore the fact that Africa has abundant solar, thermal and other resources needed for providing green and renewable energy on the continent. Investment on renewables is certain to generate more jobs than the enclave extractive sector jobs would ever do.
Continent Grab
One response to the food crisis has been a rise in speculations and a massive land grabbing in Africa. According to the World Bank by 2010 fully half of the cropland acquisition projects by foreign interests in the world were on lands in Africa.
Beyond the number of acquisitions the quantum of land grabbed was also larger because the unit areas for projects in Africa tended to be higher than those elsewhere. They amounted to about two thirds of all land acquired then.
In 2009 DRC promised some 7 million acres of land to ZTE, a Chinese firm, and also gave 1.2 million acres to Atama Plantation, a Malaysian firm, for oil palm plantations. Considering that African lands have been acquired at what has been termed “basement prices” what is happening here amounts to nothing short of a continent grab.
…to be continued next week
