erin gill environmental journalist & historian

How do we know that the global climate has and continues to change?

It is essential to address this question of whether the cliamte is really changing, because if it hasn't changed then what are we talking about. It is unquestionably the case that the global climate has changed since the beginning of the Industrial Revoltion. I don't think there's anyone who would dispute that. Global temparature has gone up by 0.6-0.7 degrees Celsius in a hundred years. Precipitation has increased globally. Sea levels have risen. The duration of lake and river ice has decreased. Arctic sea ice has reduced in thickness by about 40% since the 1960s. Mountain glaciers are in widespread retreat. Most years, spring arrives earlier. I could go through a hundred statistics, but the picture would be the same, of a world that has warmed.

 

There's been talk recently about projections suggesting that global temperature will increase this century by two or three degrees. What does this mean in real terms?

The first thing to be clear about is that an increase in global termpature of two to three degrees won't translate into a simple increase in temperature wherever you or I happen to be. It's about what this type of incraese will mean to the functioning of the global climate system, in terms of the intensity of cyclones, storms, floods, the longevity and severity of droughts, that type of thing. It's about a rise in global temperature having an impact on climatic extremes.
To give you an idea of the magnitude of what we're discussing I can say that global termpature today is about six degrees warmer than it was during the last ice age. The projections we're talking about for this century are for a warming of a third to a half of that again. But instead of the increase taking place over thousands of years it is set to take place over a hundred years. That's a rate of change that hasn't been seen for at least 10,000 years, probably a long longer, and it will take the world into a climate regime we've not seen before - at least not since human beings have been around. We don't know what will happen.

 

The Hadley Centre is a famous name within climate science.

It's difficult to measure our position, but I guess we're the best. But I would say that, wouldn't I? [Laughing] The UK government commissions independent reviews of our work and the last one concluded that the Hadley Centre was the number one climate modelling centre in the world. This is a judgement by our global peers. Obviously, other climate centres around the world are better at some aspects of the work. There's never one centre that's the best at everything.

I must also mention the role the academic community, particularly the UK academic community, plays in the Hadley Centre's work. We can only model climatic processes we know about and much of the underpinning science - the fundamental research - is done within the academic community. Researchers at a particular university might look at, say, leaves and how they transpire, or at plankton and how they die and fall to the bottom of the ocean. All of their advances help us build better models of the global climate system. The UK climate science community is incredibley efficient in the way it generates the science we need and pulls it all the way through into climate modelling and, finally, into advice to policymakers.

 

What does the Hadley Centre actually do?

We monitor global and UK national climate and then we try to attribute changes that are taking place to causes. Are the changes being caused by humans, by solar radiation, by volcanic activity? From there, we try to predict the future using climate models.
We don't create UK government policy, but our scientific advice informs it. The Hadley Centure is part of the UK Meteorological Office and our main funder is the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra). Within the centre we're largely mathematicians, physicists and computer scientists. Some of the people here are phenomenally clever, far smarter than I am. Myself, I have a physics background - a PhD in cloud physics.

 

Is it really possible to predict the climate's future?

The only tools we have to predict the future of the global climate are complex mathematical models, which are equations that replicate the Earth system. We take the atmosphere, oceans, land surface, biosphere, ocean biology, sea ice and so on. We use equations to map the way they interact - we map things like exchanges of heat, momentum, and moisture between these variables in the Earth system.
We started off back in the 1970s with just a crude model of the atmosphere. As knowledge and supercomputing have advanced we've been able to make our climate models more complex. At the moment, we're starting to introduce climate chemistry, which has never before been included in climate models. This should lead to a much more complete picture of the Earth system.
We've also been increasing the resolution of our climate models. Basically, we divide up the globe into grid boxes and base our calculations on those boxes, so the smaller the grid boxes the more local the information we can generate. In our new model the grid boxes represent, say, 150km2, whereas in the old one they were 250km2 and the one before that they were 350km2. We also have to account for depth by including layers within the atmosphere and layers within oceans.
Climate modelling is a huge effort, but once you have a model you can ask questions, such as: 'If we put extra greenhouse gases into the atmosphere - which is what we have been and continue to do - what happens to the climate system?'

 

I've heard it takes months to 'run' one of the Hadley Centre's climate models.

Yes, it does. One of the reasons is that in order to predict the climate's future you have to start in the past. We start in 1860, because this is before humans began emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in larger quantities. Once the model is stable in the pre-industrial climate, then we have to put in all the greenhouse gases that have been emitted since 1860 as well as changes in volcanic activity and the sun's output. We have to run the model for 140 years before we get to zero and we have to check to see whether our model can reproduce the changes in temperature that have been documented since 1860. It can.
Next, we run the model forward for 100 or 200 years to see what it tells us about the future. Altogether, we run it for 200-250 years. These days, our supercomputers can calculate something like 1-1.5 years per day, which means that if we want to run the model for 250 years it takes us about 200 days. These are big supercomputers, running at something called teraflops, which means they do a million million calculations per second.

 

What is our climatic future?

Once a climate model has predicted changes in the future of the climate system, then we've got to ask what those changes might mean. How will it change water resources and agriculture? How will it change whether people can live on small islands - or will sea level rise make that impossible? How does changes in the climate affect extreme weather events, such as droughts? We're moving more and more into predicting regional impacts. We might be able to say now what climate change means for the globe, but what does it mean for Europe or the UK, particularly our coasts and the infrastructure sited there? As we go down in scale the answers get harder and harder.
We also use climate models to look at 'surprises' in the climate system. Climate is very complicated and there are some big question marks. Is the Gulf Stream going to switch off? Is the West Antarctic ice sheet going to collapse? Will a lot of methane - which is a very powerful greenhouse gas - be released from wetlands or the permafrost of Siberia as global temperature rises?
Next year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will publish what's called the Fourth Assessment Report (4AR). This will offer the latest and best predictions that the global scientific community can offer about the future of the Earth's climate. The Hadley Centre is involved in every aspect of the 4AR.

 

I've read that results produced by the Hadley Centre's climate model don't match up with recent observations relating to the functioning of the Gulf Stream.

Yes, recent observations of the North Atlantic Drift or the Thermohaline Circulation or the Gulf Stream - these are all slightly different things, scientifically speaking, but the terms are used by the media fairly interchangeably - have been at variance with our climate model. Observations of Gulf Stream functioning have been made at three points over the past forty years. These amount to spot checks, no more. More recently, Harry Bryden from the UK Oceanography Centre at Southampton University made observations that pointed to the possibility of a weakening of the Gulf Stream.
We have run our climate model and it suggests that the Gulf Stream should not have weakened during the period in question, so we're talking to each other and trying to figure out why things aren't matching up. There are various possibilities. The fact that we've only got spot measurements and there is naturally a lot of variability in the strength of the Gulf Stream means Bryden's observations could have inadvertently measured temporary low points in its strength. Or, there could be a process underway that is leading to a weakening of the Gulf Stream - one we're unaware of and that we haven't included in our climate models. We don't know yet, but the good news is that in future there will be monitoring of the Gulf Stream's functioning every year. It is a difficult thing to monitor, but it's going to be done every years from now on.

 

The Gulf Stream is rather important, isn't it?

Yes, the Gulf Stream is a key component of the global climate system. When we think about the possibility of its collapse, it is one of those things we refer to as a 'low probability, high impact' event. At the moment, our climate models suggest the Gulf Stream is likely to weaken over the next 100 years because of global warming, but not shut down.
However, we know from past history that the Gulf Stream can shut down. The last time it did so was about 8,000 years ago, roughly speaking. Essentially, the Gulf Stream has two states. It has an 'on' state, which is stable; the state the Gulf Stream is in now. But it also has an off state, and that's stable, too. So if it flipped into the off state it could be there for a while - even if we reduced greenhouse gases in the atmosphere substantially.
If the Gulf Stream switched off it would have very serious consequences, particularly for northern Euroen but really right around the world. In our part of the world it would lead to significant cooling. We think it's unlikely to happen within the next 100 years, but how unlikely we're not sure.
We don't know where the trigger point is. What the world is doing is taking a risk.

 

Some people wonder why we need to cut greenhouse gas emissons now. Why not wait to see whether climate change becomes a serious problem?

The problem with delaying emission reduction is that once greenhouse gases are in the atmosphere they stay around for a long time, so what we're emitting now will have an impact for decades, even centuries, to come. The main greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, typically has an atmospheric lifespan of one hundred years.
One way I can explain it is this: with our climate models we can play around and do things that aren't possible in the real world. For instance, we can turn off all greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere from today onward and see what happens. What does the model tell us? Well, even without any more greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere global temperature would continue to increase for a couple of hundred years, because it would take that long for gases already in the atmosphere to dissipate. The second thing we notice is that heat that's accumulated in the oceans - oceans are absorbing a lot of the heat that's been generated thus far by global warming - would be released. This would also lead to increases in global temperature for a couple of hundred years.
Sea level rise is also a big issue. As sea water gets warmer it expands. Because the oceans have been and will continue to absorb heat from global warming, the oceans will epand and sea levels will rise. It takes a long time for oceanic thermal expansion to dissipate, something in the order of a thousand years. So even if we shut off all greenhouse gas emissions today, sea levels would keep rising for about a thousand years simply due to thermal expansion. And due to the melting of ice sheets, sea levels would keep rising for several thousand years. In fact, some of the sea level rise we're experiencing today is the result of the end of the last ice age, 8,000 years ago.
What this experiment tells us is that in terms of global temperature we are already committed to increases for a couple of hundred years and in terms of sea level rises we are committed for at least a thousand years. But reducing emissions now is important because doing so would limit further temperature increases and sea level rises.

 

Is it true that climate change is increasing the intensity of tropical storms?

This is an area of very active research. I don't think the scientific community would yet put its hand on its heart and say that 'the intensity of tropical cyclones is increasing and will increase as a result of climate change'. There are some recent scientific results that point in that direction, but our confidence in being able to say that we know this for sure is still quite low. Intuitively, the idea makes sense. Tropical cyclones are very much dependent on the temperature of the sea surface, and sea surface tempeatures are increasing. Higher sea surface temperatures intensify what we call the hydrological cycle - the rising of air, the forming of moisture, moisture falling back down again - and that, in turn, suggests that tropical cyclones should intensify. But when you run that argument through the climate models it's a lot more complicated. I don't want to be over-confident and say climate change is intensifying tropical cyclones, but I don't want to dismiss the idea either.

Do you allow yourself to think about the changes you or your children will witness as a result of climate change?

Yes, I do. My son is 21 and my daughter is 19 and the climate they will experience in decades to come will be very different to the climate I think of as normal. But what is normal? There is no such thing anymore. The rate of climate change is accelerating enormously. By the 2040s, when hopefuly my children will still be very much around, they could be experiencing the kind of very hot summer we had in 2003 every other year. Recently the Royal Society fo the Protection of Birds recommended that people begin planting non-native plant species because birds are finding it difficult to survive. Our native plant species are finding it difficult to survive, so the birds are suffering as well.

How do you feel about the business repsonse to climate change thus far? Has it been adequate?

It's very difficult for me to answer that question because it's not my job to preach. My job is to offer the best scientific advice. What I can say is that technology is advancing faster than we expected. Some businesses are waking up to the fact that they have a corporate responsibility and that there may be commercial opportunities that come out of climate change. I can't tell people what to do, I can just tell them what is going to happen.

 

* ENDS Climate Review 2006/2007, pp. 10-13.

The ENDS Climate Review was published in 2006 as a 52-page, one-off publication aimed at business readers. I was managing editor, developing the editorial plan, commissioning writers, editing copy and writing some as well, including the interview above with the Hadley Centre's Dave Griggs.

UK consumption of organic food has risen ten-fold over the past decade, fuelled by perceived quality and health benefits. Until now, the environment has been a secondary market driver. With supermarkets now investigating the climate change impacts of food, Erin Gill looks at the implications for British agriculture and the complexity of comparing the impacts of different production systems.

 

Earlier this year the UK mainstream press briefly considered organic farming. The headlines were surprisingly negative, given the positive relationship the organic movement has forged in recent years with the media. The Times told its readers "Buying organic food ‘can harm the planet’" while The Daily Mail announced "Why going organic could cost the earth".

 

The inspiration for these headlines was a report on the environmental impacts of food production and consumption produced for the Environment Department (DEFRA) by the Manchester Business School.1 The MBS report does not contain new research but summarises existing evidence - mainly life-cycle assessment (LCA) analyses - about the environmental pros and cons of three aspects of food production and consumption: organic versus non-organic food; locally produced food versus food that has been shipped or trucked in from afar; and fresh versus refrigerated food.

Also examined are packaging and the complexities of determining carbon emissions from food distribution - ‘food miles’.

The report’s conclusions do not immediately appear newsworthy. If there is an overriding message it would seem to be that measuring foods’ environmental impacts is not easy and for all the public disapproval about food miles and excess packaging there is not much useful data to demonstrate their harm.

 

Its only clear-cut conclusions are that it would not be a good idea for policy-makers to stand by and allow the amount of air-freighted food and refrigerated food sold in the UK to continue to increase, and consumers are probably responsible for more carbon emissions travelling to and from local supermarkets than food producers and supermarkets emit while distributing products.

 

This latter message did not attract much media coverage while the report’s comments about the lack of evidence supporting claims that organic farming is a ‘greener’ system of production were seized on.

Although the report defends organic farming by stating "there is no doubt that, for many foods, the environmental impacts of organic agriculture are lower than for the equivalent conventionally grown food" it concludes "there is insufficient evidence available to state that organic agriculture overall would have less of an environmental impact than conventional agriculture".

 

Its final word on the matter is, "there is no clear-cut answer to the question: which ‘trolley’ has a lower environmental impact - the organic one or the conventional one?"

 

The organic movement disagrees and the Soil Association (SA) has accused the report’s authors, Ken Green and Chris Foster, of relying too heavily on a study by Cranfield University’s Silsoe Research Institute. This used an LCA model to compare organic and non-organic farming which, according to the SA, is so flawed it substantially overstates the global warming potential (GWP) of organic farming systems, possibly by 15-20%.

 

Green labelling
All this could be dismissed as an interesting-but-not-very-important dispute between academics and the organic movement if the labelling of food according to its environmental performance or carbon profile did not look set to be the next big thing.

 

In January, Tesco chief executive Terry Leahy raised eyebrows when he committed the UK’s largest food and non-food retailer to providing its customers with labelling for "all of our products so that customers can compare their carbon footprint as easily as they can currently compare their price or their nutritional profile".

Leahy did not set a deadline for the ‘green’ labelling but spoke of beginning "the search for a universally accepted and commonly understood measure of the carbon footprint of every product we sell - looking at its complete life cycle from production, through distribution to consumption".

 

It’s a statement sure to strike fear into the hearts of designers of impact assessment methodologies.

Even if Leahy’s dream of an environmental assessment tool combining simplicity and universal acceptance is not realised, some type of green labelling for supermarket products seems on the way.

Environment Secretary David Miliband is on-side, telling farmers at the annual general meeting of the National Farmers’ Union in February that although it would take some time for food labels to incorporate all environmental impacts, from production to distribution, "in the shorter term, we want to develop environmental standards specifically for food production. This could cover a range of factors including energy inputs, fertiliser use, soil management, waste management and water pollution."

 

Organic growth

What will this increasing scrutiny of farming’s environmental impacts mean for the organic sector, which has succeeded in establishing itself in consumers’ minds as the ‘green’ form of farming?

With just less than 4% of UK agricultural land under organic production, the future seems healthy but uncertain. Will organic farming continue to grow but remain a niche sector? Or will a range of factors soon coalesce - green labelling for food, potential new climate change mitigation measures from government, support for organic farming from the wildlife conservation lobby and continued increases in consumer demand - to speed up farm conversion rates, pushing organic farming into the mainstream?

 

Along with the rise in organic food sales from £100 million a year in 1994 to more than £1.6 billion in 2006, the area of farmland under organic production in Britain has also expanded.

 

The strongest growth took place over the past decade when the area under organic production increased ten-fold from 60,000 hectares in 1997 to more than 686,000ha by the end of 2004.

However, since then the area has reduced to about 620,000ha. A significant factor was a drop in Scottish land under organic production. This is seen as a one-off blip caused by some upland sheep farms leaving the organic fold after having pocketed conversion payments without much intention of committing long term to organic agriculture.

The area under organic production in England and Wales has continued to increase, but the past few years the number of farms entering the three-year conversion period has fallen. And in some parts of England growth has all but dried up.

One reason for this slowdown has been the UK government’s overhaul of the way it calculates farm subsidies - decoupling them from production - and subsequent introduction of the new single farm payment (SFP). Even before DEFRA proved unable to pay farms SFPs on time, farmers seemed to have hunkered down in anticipation of a rocky ride. From a farmer’s perspective, it has not been the time to change production methods.

 

There is also the argument that the organic movement has convinced the most easily won-over farmers to convert and further conversions will be harder-won.

 

What is clear is that arable farmers in England’s eastern grain belt have not converted in the same numbers as livestock and dairy farmers in the west. This striking imbalance appears to be more extreme than in other European countries. Of the 620,000ha under organic production in the UK, less than 60,000ha are classed as arable - a ratio of roughly 10:1 grassland to arable. Meanwhile, in Germany out of just under 810,000 organic hectares almost 230,000ha are arable, a ratio of about 4:1.

 

The reason for arable farmers’ reluctance, particularly those with large farms, is that conversion is more difficult and expensive and involves fundamental changes to farming practices that livestock and dairy farms do not need to make.

Most organic-based arable systems rely on mixed farming, where land is grazed by sheep or cattle when it is not producing cereals and is sown with grass-clover pastures which convert atmospheric nitrogen into nitrates in the soil.

This type of farming is different from businesses run by large-scale, conventional arable farmers who are essentially monocroppers without the skills or infrastructure to care for animals. Instead they have invested heavily in machinery and carry out comprehensive fertiliser application and pesticide spraying programmes.

 

"If a large, purely arable farm wanted to convert to organic cultivation the farmer would need to introduce new enterprises - cattle or sheep, something to eat the grass. It’s a big change for people who’ve got into the habit of a simple arable system," explains Michael Marriage, who has farmed organically in Wiltshire for the past 25 years and is founder-director of the Doves Farm Foods brand.

 

Despite the challenges, Mr Marriage is hopeful that more arable farmers will convert. He cites an area of Gloucestershire that boasts a group of predominantly arable organic farms and he admits to having succeeded in convincing a few of his neighbours to convert.

 

There is a specific culture attached to large-scale arable farming that also acts against organic conversion, according to Helen Browning, SA’s director of food and farming.

 

"In addition to being the most mechanised of British farmers and the most intensive, in some ways, there are also intellectual and emotional barriers that keep them from considering organic farming. They’re ‘barley barons’ and they have big tackle," she said.

 

"Of all the farmers in the UK they’re the ones who’ve seen the organic approach as the biggest challenge to their identity as farmers. This is ‘men’s farming’ and we have to go about things gently when we’re trying to convince them to reconsider organics."

 

To this end, the SA has earmarked money for promoting organic conversion in regions where organic farms are underrepresented. But it is not much money and Browning acknowledges it will not be enough to change existing regional imbalances.

 

Overall, the SA argues organic farming remains on the rise and the current plateau between 600,000ha and 700,000ha, is not its natural resting place. After all, the UK remains home to the tenth-largest total land area devoted to organic production despite being a geographically smaller nation than others lower down the list. And in a ranking of countries based on the percentage of agricultural land under organic farming, the UK clocks in at number 18 with 3.9%, a reasonable achievement (see figure).

 

Supply shortfall

What everyone at the SA repeats regularly is that organic farming needs to grow at a rate that matches but does not exceed consumer demand. Organic farming is about providing what consumers want and combining principles with profit.

The SA does not want organic farming to follow the route of post-war conventional farming and produce goods that do not attract a good price. "We haven’t set ourselves clear targets for the amount of land we want under organic production," explains Ms Browning.

 

"We don’t want to bring producers in who won’t be able to survive after the conversion period. We always tell producers that they have to know where they’ll sell before they convert."

 

The leaders of the UK organic movement may have been wise to guard against flooding the market before there was demand, but they are now faced with demand that outstrips domestic supply.

 

Substantial domestic undersupply is an issue for organic milk, cereals, pork, beef and some fruits and vegetables. Of course, imports can make up the difference, especially with some of Europe’s biggest agricultural exporters, including Italy, Spain and Portugal, recording large increases in land under organic production.

 

But relying on imports may not please British consumers, who have shown interest in arguments in favour of local food and who have responded to organic campaigns by asking supermarkets to buy more British organic food.

And accepting the current production status quo would mean organic farming’s biodiversity and landscape benefits will not be achieved across a larger area. And claims that organic farming could play a role in climate change mitigation and adaptation will not be put to the test.

 

Climate friendly?

No one knows for sure whether organic farming is ‘climate friendly’. This lack of clarity is just another example of how much more difficult it is to identify and measure the greenhouse gas emissions and carbon cycle at play in agriculture than it is for an industrial process.

 

Although it has been known for some time that British agriculture’s contribution to UK emissions grossly outweighs its economic contribution, curbing agricultural emissions has not been a priority for policy-makers.

This may change as the government comes to terms with the results of the national soil inventory published in 2005. This contained the news that UK soils are not carbon sinks, as had been assumed, but release carbon at a rate that dwarfs the reductions achieved by the UK so far. Carbon losses from UK soils over 25 years from 1978 to 2003 were found to be about 0.6% per year, equivalent to 13 million tonnes of carbon annually.

 

Soil carbon levels are not incorporated into the Kyoto Protocol reporting regime, so these losses do not ‘count’ yet. But if new international climate change negotiations were to require emission inventories to include soil carbon losses, any evidence that conventional agriculture exacerbates such losses and that organic farming reduces them or, possibly, delivers increases in soil carbon levels could prove highly relevant.

 

The SA believes organic farming’s effect on soil carbon levels should be investigated, pointing to three studies - two American and one Swiss - that suggest organic farming performs better than conventional farming when it comes to soil carbon.

 

An internal SA policy document speculates that widespread adoption of organic farming could result in the sequestration "of 1.8 million tonnes of carbon annually on arable land... [or] 13% of British agriculture’s officially recorded greenhouse gas emissions".

 

Such an annual reduction in soil carbon losses "would be 14 times the potential soil carbon sequestration that has been calculated that could be achieved by non-organic arable farming in England... through the adoption of conservation field margins, increased returns of crop residues and reduced tillage systems."

 

N2O emissions

Even if government were to conclude that expecting British farmers to adapt their methods to stem soil carbon losses would be too complicated, it is possible it would eventually seek to curb nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions from agriculture.

N2O emissions account for more than half of agriculture’s official climate emissions and the sector is the biggest source of N2O in the UK. Nitrogen fertilisers and manure are the culprits, although it appears certain tilling practices including ‘greener’ methods such as minimum till, may also be a problem. Organic supporters argue that wider adoption of organic arable farming would probably reduce N2O emissions, although the LCA data produced by the Silsoe Research Institute suggested otherwise.

 

Another area of concern for the organic movement is agriculture being let off the hook when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions associated with farm inputs - namely fertilisers, pesticides and animal feed. These emissions are classed as industrial, but if less of these inputs were used because more British farms had converted to organic systems, agriculture’s real climate impact would be cut, say organic campaigners.

 

Finally, organic supporters argue that organic methods could reduce British agriculture’s susceptibility to drought and limit flooding severity. Organic farming’s emphasis on maintaining and improving soil structure, which improves water infiltration, means organic agriculture yields better than conventional farming during drought.

American research has shown organically managed soils have infiltration rates twice those of conventional soils. There is no sign yet that DEFRA or the Environment Agency is testing these climate adaptation arguments with a view to informing UK policy.

 

But this does not mean DEFRA is not interested in learning more about the climate impacts of different farming systems. It had, after all, commissioned the LCA research by Silsoe that precipitated the negative newspaper headlines earlier this year.

 

Biodiversity benefits

The biodiversity benefits of organic farming are much less controversial. On this issue the organic movement has the support of several nature conservation charities, not least the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.

The RSPB has championed organic farming for years. It cites a paper published in 2005, written by members of its staff and others from then English Nature, as providing proof that organic farming is better at providing habitats and food for a larger range of flora and fauna than conventional farming.3

 

The benefits are not simply the result of an absence of chemical pesticides and inorganic fertilisers, the paper argues, but also derive from "sympathetic management of non-cropped habitat and preservation of mixed farming". This refers to the way in which most organic farms incorporate livestock and avoid monocropping. It is the variety of crops and livestock that seems a key strength.

 

It is not yet known whether selective alteration of conventional farming practices, without adoption of full organic production methods, could deliver similar biodiversity protection. This is something the RSPB is trialling on a Cambridgeshire farm it bought in 1999. Results so far have been encouraging insofar as they have shown that Britain’s most damaging arable farms could probably maintain current yields while improving their poor biodiversity performance.

According to Sue Armstrong-Brown, head of countryside conservation at the RSPB, it is not a case of pitting organic against wildlife-friendly conventional farming. "This isn’t a one-horse race from our perspective. It would be great if there were more organic farms, for instance, in the east of England," says Ms Armstrong-Brown. "But we want to work with conventional farmers, too, and our trials at Hope Farm in Cambridgeshire are aimed at understanding what conventional arable agriculture can deliver."

 

Future uncertain

The future of organic farming in the UK is far from clear. On the one hand, organic farmers are seen as more market-oriented than most because they are producing the food that growing numbers of consumers seem to want. They are not among those farmers whose businesses are built around outdated, and recently eliminated, subsidies that promoted overproduction of some commodities.

 

On the other hand, there is no guarantee the organic sector will differ substantially from the wider food market as and when organic sales continue to escalate. Dependence on food imports is not a new development for the UK, it has been the case for more than a hundred years, with the exception of brief periods during and immediately after both world wars. British agricultural and rural policy is predicated on large-scale food imports and there is little sign DEFRA plans to support a different model for organic food production. Currently, imports account for about half of UK organic food sales.

If anything, DEFRA’s capacity to support organic agriculture has recently taken a nosedive. Faced with the financial fiasco involving late allocation of SFPs, DEFRA has cut services in other areas, including suspending its organic conversion information scheme (OCIS).

 

OCIS has been a popular scheme, offering farmers interested in converting to organic agriculture a free half-day site visit from an advisor, followed by a back-of-the-envelope plan about how their farm might go organic. It was suspended at the end of 2006 and although DEFRA has said a new improved version will be reintroduced some time this year, no date has been set.

 

Organic leaders also seem reluctant to commit publicly to a vision of UK organic food sales supplied predominantly by domestic farms. Peter Melchett, the SA’s director of policy, refers to the need to increase imports "for a considerable time" and although there is still some talk within organic organisations of organic farming growing to 30% of agricultural land area, current growth rates suggest this is a chimera.

 

Add to this all the unanswered questions about the climate impacts of organic farming (mainly N2O emissions) versus its potential capacity to support climate mitigation and adaptation (maximising soil carbon levels, flood and drought resistance, better energy efficiency). If DEFRA wants answers to these it will need to commission more research, or substantially expand the terms of the work being carried out at Silsoe.

 

Chris Foster, co-author of the Manchester Business School report, believes it would be naive to expect LCA to provide one single, definitive answer. "Other evaluation tools will have to be employed and, eventually, judgments will have to be made," he says.

 

Silsoe’s work, thus far, underlines this point: it does not address the soil carbon question, flooding and drought resistance or the biodiversity impacts of different agricultural systems. A fully integrated model for assessing agricultural impacts is not just around the corner. Yet this is exactly what David Miliband and Tesco’s Terry Leahy seem to want.

 

Further information
Environmental impacts of food production and consumption, Manchester Business School, December 2006 (http://www.defra.gov.uk/science/project_data/DocumentLibrary/EV02007/EV02007_4601_FRP.pdf)
Determining the environmental burdens and resource use in the production of agricultural and horticultural commodities, Silsoe Research Institute, Cranfield University (http://www2.defra.gov.uk/research/project_data/More.asp?I=IS0205&M=KWS&V=Natural%20Resource%20Use)
Hole, DG, et al 2005, Biological Conservation, Vol 122, pp 113-130

 

*ENDS Report 386, March 2007, pp 34-38

 

Policy failure is an uncomfortable topic. But as Europeans generally accept that you can learn from your mistakes, Erin Gill asks whether there is something to be gained from discussing failed EU policies more openly

No one enjoys failure. It is painful and humiliatig and exhausting. Despite this, one of the most persistent ideas associated with failure is that it is good for you. We are often encouraged to learn from it to avoid repeating mistakes.

Is there then somethin we should be learning from the failures that have taken place in EU enviornmental policymaking over the years? What had gone wrong and why?

 

It is possible, of course, to identify failure almost everywhere. No legislation is perfect and, inevitably, poorly drafted ones have at times been adopted. This has caused headaches for those charged with implementing them and disappointment for those who played a role in devising them.

Former chair of the European parliament's environment committee, MEP Caroline Jackson, admits the existence of 'defective' policies, which she defines as legislation that does not achieve its objective. But Ms Jackson takes consoltion from the fact that legislation can be amended.

 

When Legislation Stalls
Often defective policies are not those that have the wrong effect, but those that have little or no effect. There are the directies and regulations critics describe as 'toothless'.

Picking just one directive to illustrate the point, John Hontelez, director of the European Environmental Bureau (EEB), chooses the 2003 directive that introduced minimum tax rates for energy products and electricity. When it was proposed in 1997, environmental campaigners hoped that it would prompt member states to introduce 'green' taxes on energy and electricity use to encourage efficiency.

 

These days, Hontelez refers to the directive as little more than 'Swiss cheese', so full of holes that few member states have had to do much to comply. In his view, this directive is one of many examples of failure at EU levels to introduce fiscal reform to help protect the environment.

 

Another way in which EU environmental policymaking has been known to fail is when draft directives and regulations are abandoned before reachin the adoption stage.

 

In recent years, steps have been taken to prevent disagreements between member states and the European parliament that in the past have shelved too many legislative proposals. Codecesion procedures now often force a compromised, but some directives, for other reasons, still don't survive the examination and amendment phase.

one example is the soil protection directive. Unless the Slovenian presidency can revive it, the proposed directive seems likely to fail following last December's move by four member states to defeat it. Many observers, including Christian Hey, secretary general of the German Advisory Council on the Environment, believe the main reason behind its demise was resistance from agricultural interests to EU-level influence over land use management.

 

When asked to identify individual 'failed' directives, people involved or close to EU environmental policymaking seem more keen to discuss what they see as systemic failures in policymaking that have emerged gradually.

The notion that substantial failures exist within the EU process of churning out green lawas seems pervasive. Individual representing different political positions agree that serious failures have occurred and that some have implications for the future.

 

Implementation Crisis
Some argue that poor implementation is one of the most worrying failures of EU environmental policymaking. Ludwig Krämer, previously in charge of waste management polcy within the European Commission's environment directorate and now working with Madrid-based NGO Derecho y Medio Ambiente (Law and Environment), believes EU environmental policymakers must recognise that failure to ensure their legislation is implemented properly threatens their credibility.

Krämer cites the Commission's recent communication on environmental enforcement, published last September, as indicative of a planned 'retreat' on enforcement. He believes thi would gradually undermine the EU executive's future capacity to introduce environmental policies.

 

Brussels-based bureaucrats need to acknowledge that the preparation of environmental legislation must be separated from its enforcement, argues Krämer. In the other areas of EU legislation where enforcement and litigation are common, such as competition law, those enforcing the law operate autonomously from those drafting policy, he emphasises.

Caroline Jackson also believes poor implmentation is one of the most significant failures of EU environmental policy. Her preferred solution would be to expand the European Environment Agency's remit to include verifying implementation of environmental legislation across the EU.

 

A Failure or a Challenge?
Do infringement proceedings indicate that a directive is a failure? Many seem to jump to this conclusion and yet others argue such a view is naive. The latter group suggests that infringements are a sign tha a directive's implementation is proving slow or difficult for one or several member states. The 1991 nitrates directive is often mentioned as an example of legislatin that required legal threats before several member states would commit sufficient investment toward improving wastewater treatment infrastructure. Infringements are cetainly a sign of struggle, but not always of failure.

EU environmental legislation has been the subject of more citizen complaints and legal disputes over the years than any other area of EU law. This makes sense, in part, because environmental policies are often intimately related to quality of life and people's deeply-held values. This is the argument offered by one source who spoke to ENDS.

Certain directives and regulations seem to lend themselves to acrimony, not lesat the 1985 environmental impact assessment (EIA) directive, the Natura 2000 directive and the 1979 birds directive. It is wrong to judge these directives as failures simply because they have elicited many complaints, legal warnings and European Court of Justice proceedings, says the source. Many these directives are contentious because they are genuinely challenging pieces of legislaton?

 

What concerns this unnamed source is not so much the EIA directive attracting more complaints from EU citizens than other EU leglisation, but that citizens in some member states appear not to trust their national judicial and administrative systems. "So many environment-related complaints and petitions come from a small number of member states, including Italy, Spain and Poland," says the source.

 

Viewed from this perspective, citizen complaints and infringement proceedings look less like an indication that something is wrong with EU envionmental law and more as though democratic processes at member state level have failed.

Not everyone views poor or uneven implementation of EU environmenal polciy as the biggest failure of the recent past. many argue that the biggest disappointment has been failure to integrate environmental issues into other EU policy areas.

"The Cardiff process didn't work. It was too bureaucratic," says Siv Näslund, former director of the Swedish Environmental Advisory Council, alluding to administrative effort unveiled in 1998 to take 'green' policy out of its silo and integrate it into other sectors, including transport, energy and agriculture. Ludwid Krämer agrees, suggesting EU bureaucrats have given up on the idea. "Integration has died," he says.

Certainly, evidence suggests that entire sectors of EU policy remain largely untouched by an environmental perspective. "The success of EU environmental policymaking has depended on maintaining a sectoralised approach," says Christian Hey. "Whenever environmental policymakers seeks to influence others sectors they encounter great difficulty."

 

Integration Failures
Examples of the EU's failure to achieve integration are everywhere. The EU's inability to rein in the environmental impacts of road transport and intensive agriculture is a case in point. Frans Evers, chair of the European Environment and Sustainable Development Advisory Councils, refers to Eu agricultural policy as "a great disappointment".

Meanwhile, Malcolm Fergusson, senior fellow at the Institute for European Environmental Policy, acknowledges the Eu transport sector has remained immune to all but the most minor, end-of-pipe environmental measures. "Technical measures to reduce pollutant emissions hve been successful, bu thte core of EU transport policy remains focused on growth - building motorways, keeping the roads moving," says Fergusson. "Environmental impacts have not been fully integrated into transport policymaking. Goods transport has been growing at a faster rate than GDP recently, so the goal of decoupling transport's environmental impacts from economic growth has, in fact, become more distant."

One of the most unsettling consequences of failed attempts to integrate environmental concerns into wider EU policymaking has been the manipulation of the term 'sustainable development', to the extent that its association with the need for fundamental change to deliver environmental improvement has been largely lost.

 

"Sustainable development has become an ambiguous term," regrets Näslund. Frans Evers agrees wholeheartedly. "I was the senior Dutch civil servant for environmental policy at the time when the Brundtland report was published, introducing the concept of sustainable development. The Brundtland report gave us high hopes, but positive implementation of sustainable development concepts has just not occurred."

 

Representatives of business and industry do not always share the view that efforts to integrate environmental concerns have had little effect on the wider EU policy agenda.

 

Benny Hasenson of the Finnish Confederation of Industries believes policymakers give too much consideration to environmental concerns. "The industrial and business implications of certain policy proposals are not always sufficiently recognised," argues Hasenson, citing greenhouse gas emission limits for EU industrial installations. He says these are prompting investors to move production out of the EU to regions with less stringent limits. Rather than deliver environmental benefits, it results in higher emissions than would have been generated if these processes, such as metal smelting, had remained in the EU.

 

Who's to Blame?
The causes of envionmental policy failure are many but a few are mentioned repeatedly. While some people, including Caroline Jackson, reject the notion that busines and 'vested interests' hav been a significant factor over the years, many believe business has played a role.

 

One source, who asked not to be named, offered the example of the German automotive industry's resistance to the 2000 end-of-life (ELV) directive. "At one stage, teh German automotive industry succeeded in stalling the progress of the ELV directive under Germany's EU presidency, which is not considered fair play," says the source. "More recently, the German automotive industry has been strident in its resistence to the intorduction of binding targets for the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions for vehicles," the source adds.

 

Not surprisingly, environmental campaigners often view business resistance as the biggest obstacle to new green policies. "In most cases, organised business lobbying is the main reason behind member states' resistance to specific policies," says EEB's John Hontelez.

 

He argues that business resistance to change and environmental innovation is profound. "The industries of the future are not as well organised as the industries of today. That's why we urge the European Commission to listen less to trade associations like Business Europe or Cefic and to talk instead to businesses that are ahead of the pack within their sectors."

 

Beyond the disputed role of business in contributing to EU environmental policy failures, is an allegation that an absence of will or ability at the bureaucratic level is a significant factor.

 

Ludwig Krämer is particularly vociferous on this issue: "Environmental policymakers has been taken over by administrators, who arrange things to suit themselves. Increasingly, member states are being allowed to report on measures they are taking to comply with an environmental directive, not on the results of those measures. This makes things easier for administrators, but it does not ensure environmental improvement."

 

Just as there have been too many failures in EU green policies to name, so too are there countless potential failures looming on the horizon. Identifying them is as subjective as pinpointing past mistakes. But it is clear that the ecological theats posed by the EU's potential failure to regulate the biofuels industry have been on many people's minds (see below).

 

with failures, large and small, identifiable in every aspect of EU environmental polcymaking, it is easy to despair. When progress seems elusive, who better to turn to than the Irish playwrights Samuel Beckett. Acknowledging failure's inevitability he responded: "Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better."

Siv Näslund, Swedish Environment Ministry and former director of the Swedish Environmental Advisory Council
"My great fear is that we may be underestimating global climate change and the risk it will create climatic feedbacks that threaten the biosphere much more seriously than we would like to admit. Ecological resilience may be being taken for granted."

Frans Evers, chiar of European Environmetn and Sustainable Development Advisory Councils
"The next big area of failure could be energy policy, due to a failure to integrate environmental concerns into decision making. Climate change is influencing energy policy, but enviromental protection and environmental outcomes are still not at the forefront of energy policy decisions."

 

Ludwig Krämer, Derecho y Medio ambient and university lecturer in EU environmental law
"One growing failure is that the European Commission is not taking the citizen along with it. There is a lack of proper monitoring and enforcement of environmental policy implementation. We have all these rules but they're just green speak until they're put into operation."

 

Malcolm Fergusson, senior fellow at Institute for European Environmental Policy
"Biofuels may be the next big failure. If we don't put the right standards in place we will be giving EU farmers more subsidies to damage the environment and we'll also be buying biofuel crops that are destroying the rainforest."

Christian Hey, secretary general of the German Advisory Council on the Environment:
"Several failures on the horizon relate to the EU sixth action programme, which I consider to be a failure overall. The idea was to address big issues holistically. It's been nice talk, but little action. For instance, there has been little progress on marine and soil issues and on integrated product policy. That is becase these issues have been tackled in too holistic a manner to be manageable. In future, it will be necessary to refocus environmental policy by prioritising a few areas."

 

Benny Hasenson, Finnish Confederation of Industries
"One failure that might be on the horizon is revision of the Integrated pollution prevention and control directive. There hasn't been a proposal from the European Commission yet, but Business Europe is concerned that when a proposal is published it may include plans for revised permit requirements that go beyond best available technologies (BAT) as they are defined in existing Bref documents. This would be an added disincentive to invest in industrial production within the EU. We're not against permitting, but we don't think requirements should go beyond BAT as currently defined. If we focus on achieving optimum levels of environmental protection all investment interest will be lost."

John Hontelez, secretary general of the European Environmental Bureau

"It is worrying that long-time members of the EU, such as my home nation the Netherlands seem to be retreating from the 'we have to do it togehter' sentiment. It's more important than it was in the past to have clear environmetnal standards at EU level because the EU is no longer a club of rich nations where all recognise the importance of environmental protection."

 

* This article was originally published in the March 2008 edition of ENDS Europe Report.

 

A controversial carbon footprint study produced by consultancy Environmental Resources Management (ERM) for one of the world’s largest paper makers failed to take into account land use changes or emissions from “end of life carbon flow”, ENDS has learnt.

 

ERM completed a study on the footprint of parts of Asia Pulp and Paper’s (APP) operations in Sumatra using data from 2006, which has attracted criticism from several NGOs, most recently the US-based Rainforest Action Network (RAN) and the Japan Tropical Forest Action Network (JATAN).

 

They argue that the carbon footprint calculated – just 30 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent per tonne of paper – was “implausibly low”. They have called on APP to release full details of the analysis’ scope and methodology.

RAN’s Bill Barclay said: “APP has been promoting ERM’s analysis as the carbon footprint for their paper products. They have been using it to say that their paper products are nearly carbon neutral.”

 

Now ERM has told ENDS that its analysis was “limited” and did not consider certain key emission sources: “The work we undertook excluded the effects of land use changes and end of life carbon flow. Any inclusion of these would have affected the outcome,” said ERM managing partner for the UK and Ireland, Keryn James.

 

ERM now appears to have distanced itself from APP. In a statement posted on its website on 3 November, ERM said it had “expressed concern to APP about the need to respond to the issues being raised and is currently engaging with APP in relation to APP’s use of ERM’s work and public statements made by APP”.

Ms James adds that ERM is “fulfilling our current contractual obligations with APP, which comprises a four-year programme of work begun in 2006”.

 

RAN and JATAN have produced their own estimate of APP’s Sumatran paper emissions based on 2006 data. They conclude that the company’s footprint was in the range of 16-21t CO2e per tonne of paper.

APP’s director of sustainability and stakeholder engagement Aida Greenbury said the RAN/JATAN report “grossly exaggerates and misstates APP’s carbon footprint” and that it represents “an attempt to distort the facts and use APP as an example in what is really an indictment of Indonesia’s national spatial plan, forest management policies and right to develop industry in its developing economy”.

 

Ms Greenbury said that APP’s original commission of ERM was part of its efforts to establish a baseline from which to identify carbon saving options. “Science today has advanced to enable us to expand our internal analysis. We are currently undertaking an even more aggressive carbon footprint analysis,” she added.

APP has also said it is “re-allocating more than 15,000 hectares of deep peat carbon sink”, previously earmarked for pulpwood plantation, to create the “world’s first privately funded project turning pulpwood plantation concessions into a carbon reserve”. The Kampar Carbon Reserve is in the Riau province of Sumatra.

 

ENDS Report 430, November 2010, p13