Written by Mark Swilling | 26 December 2009

Below is a response to an email that Stefan Bringezu from the Wupperthal Institute and fellow member of the International Panel for Sustainable Resource Management wrote to all the members of the Panel after the failure of the Copenhagen talks(which hopefully he will agree I can reproduce on this blog).

I agree fully with Stefan and in particular the contrast of how quickly the global response to the economic crisis was engineered versus the cataclysmic mess of Copenhagen. There is, however, an interesting tension in all the talk about new institutional arrangements. On the one hand African countries hang onto the UN system for dear life because it is the only place they have a voice; while on the other Ethiopia and South Africa helped the US spin the final (non-)deal because they were effectively part of that core group that in the final hours hammered out what has disappointed the world. So there is a ‘group of 17’ in practice, but its heading the wrong direction.  (Stefan suggested we need an equivalent of a "G-20" for sustainability - what he called the "G-17".) 

I agree with Stefan that this has got a lot to do with the fact that carbon is delinked from resource scarcity/security which, in turn, is about the global economy. As Ernst von Weiszacher (Chair of the Panel) has so eloquently argued in his recent speeches, oil and food prices preceded the financial crisis (and for me, soil degradation levels are a key driver of declining growth rates of food outputs). We need to make these links in the Resource Panel’s work. But surely this will lead us into the interesting area of macro-economic policy – Stefan hints at this with the nice example of the stone age – changes take place because alternatives are more attractive and not because we ran out of stones. 

The financial crisis was really about the futility of investing in fictitious wealth premised on unsubstantiated assumptions about the value of fixed property. What intrigues me is that the vast number of venture capital funds that burnt their fingers are redirecting their investments into “greentech” – they are effectively betting that the next technology revolution (Kondratief cycle) is going to be a sustainability one. But what many of them are anticipating – and waiting for – is for the US congress to pass the climate change-related legislation. And this is what has bogged down. My reading of the US position in Copenhagen is that they wanted the Chinese to play ball to help break the logjam in the US congress and remove resistance to the climate change legislation. But, and here is the link to the financial crisis, what drives so many congressmen and senators really crazy with rage these days is the stubborn refusal of the Chinese to allow its currency to ‘float’ (ie to stop keeping the yuan artificially low). The Chinese refuse because this is their way of keeping the costs of exported goods low so that they can salvage their export-dependent industries. The US says: pay your workers more so that they can buy more goods. The Chinese are slowly doing this, but prefer putting money into collective consumption like health care and infrastructure. So it is highly unlikely that US legislators will agree to anything that enhances the Chinese advantage in the global economy while the US is struggling to find ways of combating unemployment. Only if the prices of Chinese goods go up (if the yuan floats) will the US start to succeed in this regard – or at least this is what many strong senators and congressmen are arguing. The US then spun this by targeting the Chinese determination to resist external monitoring of their rather suspect notion of “energy intensity” reductions as the cause of the failure. The outcome at Copenhage is not what the Chinese wanted, i.e. they did not want to be seen as the deal breakers, even though it is clear that they played a key role in watering down the deal during the all night negotiations on the last night.

So we have a very complex conundrum here – if we start linking carbon and resource scarcity, it will quite quickly have implications for China’s determination to reduce “energy intensity” by relocating its dirty industries elsewhere in Asia and Africa, thus becoming an importer of manufactured products (and hence an importer of resource footprints - or what some call ecological rucksacks). This is effectively a resource decision, with major negative implications for the US who will never be able to compete.At the same time the EU has issued warnings to member states that resource prices are rising and that everything needs to be done to prevent resource exporting nations from raising prices in global markets because this undermines economic recovery. I think these were the underlying dynamics that fed into the failure of Copenhagen, and I agree they are probably best “resolved” in a kind of new “G17” (or whatever number) that Stefan refers to. But somehow this will have to have links to the UN system if, in particular, Africa is to remain part of the process. How China reconciles its new status as a member of Obama's club of "major economies" and its historical membership of the club of "developing economies" remains to be seen. And how the US secures a deal for climate change legislation in the congress without China cooperating fully also remains to be seen. In this messy interregnum, will South Africa seize the opportunity to chart its way into the new low-carbon world or will it stubbornly refuse to act until someone else pays for it thus giving others the right to determine how we eneter this new low-carbon world.   

Written by Mark Swilling | 04 December 2009

(A summary of this article was published in Eikestadnuus on 4 December 2009)

How bad must things get before the citizens of Stellenbosch stand up together and say ‘enough is enough’? Our town is literally collapsing before our eyes, and yet we go about our business hoping that political leaders from on high will step in, or some expert has the solution.

We all know that things are not right with our Municipality. Accusations of corruption have appeared in the press; four of the top Directors have resigned (plus some key officials lower down in the bureaucracy); the ANC has recalled the Deputy Mayor from  his position (although he is still on the Mayco);  the Mayor has been stripped of his powers; small parties and independents are reconsidering their alliances; and some reports suggest that the Municipal Manager needs extra security to protect him from threats (made by whom? we can only ask, or imagine because no specifics are provided).

While the core group of political leaders and officials who should be running this town rip each other apart, the infrastructure we depend on for our daily lives is collapsing. Worst still, service delivery for the poor is suffering, thus making worse the lives of the homeless. The exciting Stellenbosch land reform project for which National Government committed over R10 million has stalled. But still no protests? Why are we so passive?

It is a proven fact that our landfill site is full. In fact, it has been so badly managed for over a decade now that it is actually illegal. Not long ago the Department of Environmental Affairs threatened to close it down, thus forcing Stellenbosch to pay huge amounts of money to transport the waste to other landfills in the Western Cape (assuming they would accept our waste). Similarly, our sewage treatment plants in Stellenbosch and Franschhoek are full and although there are lots of consultant’s reports on what to do, nothing in practice is happening fast to resolve the problem. Even if something was done, the reports all propose spending money using old fashioned technologies that make it impossible to recycle and re-use the sewage for productive purposes. Our water supplies are threatened with no long-term plan in place to resolve the problem – some time between 2013 and 2017 Stellenbosch will run out of water if nothing changes to use water more efficiently and  recycle our sewage.

Our rivers are so polluted, that if the research results get out fruit and wine exports from this region will cease immediately. A protest movement against pesticide sprays that poison us all was launched last week by The Air That We Breathe Foundation – over 100 people attended the founding meeting representing the complete cross-spectrum, include rich suburbanites and poor farm workers who actually bear the brunt of the poisoning that takes place on the farms. Ironically, property developers market developments in vineyards that are sprayed so heavily with organo phosphates that property owners suffer long-term damage to their health, especially children who are more vulnerable. And all this to produce a crop that will become increasingly difficult to export because of the gradual international resistance to toxic sprays.

Our energy supply has effectively been capped because of the national energy shortage , and this will get worse as the economy picks up. Already permissions are being refused to people who need more supply to extend their business operations or build new settlements. And all this without any significant action by the big users to substantially reduce consumption, and with no programme to replace electric geyers with solar hot water heaters – an action that creates hundreds of jobs.

Quite a number of businesses are making plans to shut down their Stellenbosch operations, especially those in the wine and food business because they fear damage to the reputations being in a polluted badly managed town. Others who thought of locating here have given up on Stellenbosch as a basket case – no-one at the Municipality even bothers to return their phone calls. This means jobs lost.

Two Council meetings have been postponed where a No Confidence vote in the Mayor and Deputy Mayor was going to be tabled by the DA – this meeting will now happen in January. Whether the DA or the ANC rules, the challenges will be the same.

There is one hope: the draft Spatial Development Framework  (SDF) maps out a sustainable future.Compiled by the firm CNDv from Cape Townon behalf of the Municipality, this builds on the Sustainable Human Settlement Strategy that was adopted by the Council earlier this year. Together this documents provide the most ambitious and far-reaching conception of how to build a sustainable South African town that has ever been compiled since the dawn of democracy in 1994. These documents link spatial planning, settlement planning and  infrastructure investments in ways that will make Stellenbosch a globally renowned sustainability destination and innovation hub. Unfortunately, with the Municipality in political and administrative disarray, it is highly unlikely that the SDF will become the guiding document for a united  multi-party vision for the future.

Maybe it is time for civil society, the University and business to take the initiative. Maybe we need a Stakeholder Forum with a single purpose – to Save Stellenbosch, to put Stellenbosch First. Unless civil society, business and the University come together, Stellenbosch will slide ever deeper into trouble, thus betraying its promise to provide a better more sustainable future for all its citizens, in particular the poor.  Its time Stellenbosch stood up for and said “enough is enough, put Stellenbosch First”. Maybe it is time for a broad stakeholder forum to develop its own set of development proposals for how to build Stellenbosch as a sustainable town.

Written by Mark Swilling | 29 November 2009

(Published in the Cape Times, 19 November 2009)

Everyone agrees now that the Climate Change negotiations in Copenhagen will not result in a new global deal about how the world will prevent the planet warming by more than 2 degrees Celsius. But this is, in many ways, now beside the point. Things are moving so fast now that CO2 emissions are no longer the only issue that threatens economic recovery, development and poverty eradication strategies. Mainstream scientific assessments of ice melting, biodiversity loss, soil degradation, depletion of oil reserves, agricultural yields, fish resources, forest clearing, build-up of chemical pollutants, shortage of strategic metals and the impacts of biofuels all arrive at the same conclusions: we have reached, or will soon reach, the limits to the resources we depend on for our survival as a species. ‘Peak everything’, is how Achim Steiner, Director of UNEP, depicted the situation during discussions of the International Panel for Sustainable Resource Management in Beijing on 10 November.

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Written by Mark Swilling | 01 October 2009

Although discussions of sustainability tend to be dominated by 'doom and gloom', there are examples from all contexts that confirm that shifts are taking place that are cause for hope. These cases also deserve much more detailed investigation. The following short stories reveal how diverse these responses are across a wide range of scales:

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Written by Mark Swilling | 30 September 2009

The following short essay was included in an earlier draft of report on decoupling that I co-authored for the International Panel for Sustainable Resource Management. It did not make it into the final report, but is worth considering because it contradicts what virtually every South African 'analyst', in particular Adam Habib, tends to assume, which is that sustainability is a "cost" that others must carry, not an economic opportunity for Africa.

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Written by Mark Swilling | 30 September 2009

In the 28 September 2009 edition of Newsweek Gordon Brown wrote an article about the future that calls on the world reach agreement in Copenhagen in December - for which, he says, “there will be no second chance”. Significantly, he argues that investments in a sustainable future are also the investments that will get the world out of the global recession.

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Written by Mark Swilling | 29 September 2009

There is mounting evidence that numerous coastal cities face the very real threat of sea-level rise. Unsurprisingly, the response is not to consider investments to relocate people, infrastructures and economies, but rather to optimistically assume that sea levels will not rise as much as the experts predict and therefore the easiest solution to contemplate will be to build dykes.

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Written by Mark Swilling | 28 September 2009

One of the characters from the annals of urban history that intrigue me the most is 'Baron' Haussman (1809-1891) - his title is in quotes because he is said to have given it to himself. He must surely be one of the great pioneers of modern urbanism, and the first grand master of the art of debt-financed city building. One can only imagine the urban future that he must have contemplated in 1852 just before implementing Napoleon III’s mandate to transform Paris into a “modern city”.

It was a job that obsessed him for over 20 years and which entailed forcefully ramming his ‘boulevards, gardens, railways, gas pipes and aqueducts’ through the teaming slums of Paris. (This was the man that that has been credited with inventing the story that slums are evil because that is where vampires live and come out at night to suck the blood of middle class children.) The massive debts he ran up to finance it all most certainly catapulted Paris into the post-1850 Victorian Boom,  but the risks he took lost him his job in 1870. The destruction of ‘Old Paris’ was so brutally disruptive that a year later the revolutionaries that lost their lives trying to set up the Paris Commune were in fact trying to re-create a sense of community and re-occupy the spaces that had been so forcefully cleared to build the grand boulevards for the boomtime preening bourgeoisie to show off their new found wealth. There are surely lessons here somewhere that speak to the current historical moment.

Written by Mark Swilling | 28 August 2009

Poor people experience the consequences of unsustainable use of resources more than anyone else because they are more dependent on these ‘free services’ than anyone else. Consider the following...

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Written by Mark Swilling | 31 July 2009

Simon Marvin and his associates are taking the urban studies community by storm with their work on splintering urbanisam, networked infrastructures, flow management and now their notion of 'urban ecological security'. AbdouMaliq Simone, renowned cultural theorist and documenter of African urban diversities, cultures and dynamics, wrote to me asking my view, and in particular his discomfort with the 'security' discourse that comes with this new writing. Herewith my response...

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