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	Africa: Drying, Drying, Disappearing.. by Paul Virgo Inter Press Service   Dec 2009   Lake Chad was bigger than Israel less than 50 years ago. Today its surface area is les than a tenth of its earlier size, amid forecasts the lake could disappear altogether within 20 years.   Climate change and overuse have put one of Africa"s mightiest lakes in mortal danger, and the livelihoods of the 30 million people who depend on its waters is hanging by a thread as a result.   An unprecedented crisis is looming that would create fresh hunger in a region already suffering grave food insecurity, and pose a massive threat to peace and stability, experts say.   "If Lake Chad dries up, 30 million people will have no means of a livelihood, and that is a big security problem because of growing competition for smaller quantities of water," Dr Abdullahi Umar Ganduje, executive secretary of the Lake Chad Basin Commission (LCBC) tells IPS in Rome. "Poverty and hunger will increase. When there is no food to eat, there is bound to be violence."   The lake, which shrank 90 percent between 1963 and 2001 from 25,000 square kilometres to under 1,500, is bordered by Chad, Niger, Cameroon and Nigeria.   Four more countries, the Central African Republic, Algeria, Sudan and Libya, share the lake"s hydrological basin and are therefore affected by its fortunes.   "Lake Chad has experienced shrinkage," Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi said at November"s World Food Security Summit at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in Rome. "If it dries up, it will be a real disaster. I want to warn the world about this imminent disaster."   That disaster has already started. Villages that used to be thriving lakeside ports are now stranded miles from the water, and have been swallowed by the advancing Sahara desert. Fishers and farmers are struggling to survive.   "The dramatic situation is already taking place," Maher Salman, a technical officer with FAO"s land and water division tells IPS. "It"s clear that the consequences have started. There is outward migration. People are looking for water, so they leave the basin area."   Fishers have seen once massive catches frequently reduced to half-filled buckets. The FAO says the lake"s fish production has fallen 60 percent, and the variety of fish caught has dramatically declined too.   Farmers who rely on lake waters for irrigation are having to move nearer to the water or abandon their activities. Lack of water has caused pasture lands to shrivel up and led to plummeting livestock production.   This is the sort of situation former World Bank vice-president Ismail Serageldin was worried about in 1995 when he said that "the wars of the 20th century were fought over oil, and the wars of the next century will be about water" - a view echoed in reports by several organisations including the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.   Little can be done at the regional level about climate change, which is attacking the lake on two fronts - reducing the rainfall that feeds it, and accelerating evaporation of its waters due to higher temperatures. Visit the related web page
	Humanity has no time left for procrastination. by Christian Schwägerl Spiegel International / Germany   Dec 2009   Who is to blame for the summit failure.   The US? China? The EU? The G-8? In Copenhagen, the outlines of a dangerous world were there for all to see. It was palpable that this is a world in which trust is harder to come by than oil, and where there is more mistrust than CO2 emissions.   And yet Copenhagen has proven that trust is the most important resource for the transformation of the current oil-based system towards a greener civilization. It is more important than all the money that will be required for new technology, more efficient machines, dams and the survival of forests.   It is a question of trust that China does not flood Europe with even more products made using cheap coal-based power, instead of replacing coal with alternative power stations; that Europe is not isolated as an island of environmentalism, while in Africa entire countries are becoming inhospitable. That America, China and India curb their fossil fuel consumption for reasons of climate protection.   In order for 7 billion people to live together on one planet, a circle of trust is required, one that rewards solutions and punishes the wrong economic activities of the past. That does not describe some kind of paradise. Rather it is the prerequisite for preventing a world without hope.   In Copenhagen a vicious circle of mistrust came in to being, one that engulfed all the good intentions and plans.   The climate deal that was presented by the leaders of the United States, China, India, Germany and around 20 other states offers no concrete CO2 targets for 2020 and 2050. There is no clear strategy to distribute financing of the promised $100 billion in aid pledged to developing nations to adopt CO2-curbing green technologies and to help pay for the damage caused to those countries by climate change. And there is no consistent monitoring of reductions and of how they are to be achieved.   To announce a target of limiting global warming to an increase of 2 degrees Celsius is meaningless as long as there is no limit to the CO2 that humanity allows itself to emit by 2050: 750 billion tons, according to the best available science. At the current level that would already have been emitted by the 2020s. Yet there was not enough trust to commit to this kind of CO2 budget.   The deal reveals a crisis of trust between the states. The fact that Barack Obama flew in, gave a speech, made a separate deal and then simply announced this - before the international community had even been made aware of it or had agreed to it - has corroded the UN process. Obama lacked the trust in this process and the courage to diagnose his own people with a case of energy obesity.   One could seek culprits for the debacle: " Chimerica" or the emerging countries, the EU, the G-8 or the G-77. The closest fit is "Chimerica against the rest of the world."   The Europeans could also have done a bit better, by unilaterally upping their reductions target from 20 to 30 percent. That, however, was too much for Italy and Poland. There was plenty of selfishness to go around. Everyone wants to be the first to strike oil, but when it comes to the much more sensible policy of protecting resources, then it"s all about waiting.   The extent of the addiction to fossil fuels was apparent in many actors at Copenhagen, but especially in one. He was decisively responsible for the chaos that marked the negotiations: James Inhofe, a US Republican politician who does whatever he can in Washington to inhibit Obama"s efforts to impose CO2 limits. He is not only ridiculous in describing climate change as made up by "the Hollywood elite," but outright dangerous. For men of his ilk, oil and coal are tantamount to power.   They believe that Americans have a God-given right to release twice the level of emissions as the Europeans and four times as much as the planet"s average inhabitant.   But there are plenty of Chinese, Indians and Australians who think similarly. Working together in Copenhagen, they prevented humanity from starting to work together to solve a number of shared problems - to the detriment of every start-up investment that has the prospect of a hundred years of green profits.   Men like Inhofe, who in Copenhagen warned that nations shouldn"t be "deceived into thinking the US would pass cap-and-trade legislation," have the effect of poison when it comes to the urgently needed global trust-building. As in nuclear disarmament, the expectation is pivotal that the other side will take the same difficult steps. But as long as the danger persists that a party could again come into power in America that would wipe the findings of climate science from the table there won"t be much trust towards the US. And the Chinese may be talking the talk on climate issues, but as long as they are only spending a small part of their cash reserves on green investments, their credibility will be compromised.   The consequences Copenhagen will have on other policy areas should not be underestimated: How can people maintain hope that the megaproblems of our planet can be entrusted to the type of major summit round that just took place in Copenhagen?   The trust that is needed right now to revive the seriously injured political process can no longer be expected to come from the top down. This is the hour for a new global environmental movement, as Nobel Prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom says. A movement that isn"t just reflected in dutiful survey answers, but in the new lifestyle choices it makes and in the persistence with which it raises troubling questions for oil and coal companies and the major political parties.
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