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	Assets that kill don’t make for good investments by Jan Erik Saugestad Thomson Reuters Foundation Norway   In an age of mistrust there’s good reason the voice of the healthcare community continues to carry weight. Research published this week by The Lancet medical academic journal showing the health impacts of climate change deserve attention.   We should listen when told that climate change is an issue of public health as much as it’s about the health of our planet. They show how our continued reliance on coal is costing lives through air pollution while also driving climate change that will prove damaging to public health in so many ways. This is a poor return from a killer investment.   Analysis included in the research by The Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Climate, the research collaboration behind the research, shows air pollution from coal plants is responsible for over 1.6 million premature deaths across India, China, Indonesia, South Korea and Japan each year. This figure is for just one type of air pollution attributed to coal and the overall total is likely to be even higher. That isn’t what I would call cheap energy.   No more warnings should be needed for the finance sector to exit the coal industry given its role in air pollution and a widescale public health disaster. When my doctor tells me something is bad for my health I tend to listen. It’s due time the finance sector now listens to the warnings about a whole sector.   The industry’s smog, acid rain, toxic mercury, and fine particles enter deep into our lungs and no amount of greenwashing can ever change that. Meanwhile profitable solar and wind industries are harmless, generating the stable and consistent returns investors seek.   But the World Coal Association is aggressively advocating that finance should be directed towards cleaner coal plants. This is economic nonsense when renewables can now support energy needs. While polluting coal plants can be made relatively cleaner they have been, and always will be, factories of death. The industry has contributed to over 800,000 pollution premature deaths annually and planned coal plants would increase such deaths by 130,000 people per year. Coal is causing these deaths across borders in Europe and elsewhere.   Fortunately, some investors and utilities are moving capital and shifting portfolios towards genuinely clean energy like solar and wind power. As the Lancet report highlights, the global solution is a worldwide coal phase out as coal plants cause 44% of global CO2 emissions. We’ve already seen institutional investors rush to drop coal in large part due to its poor financial performance but increasingly also based on pollution and its devastating effects on public health.   Assets that kill don’t make for good investments. Moreover, the Lancet Countdown report adds even greater weight to the body of expert opinion that the coal industry is facing long-term structural decline.   Our funds saw the writing on the wall and began exiting coal in 2013. Two years later the Norwegian Government instructed the trillion dollar Government Pension Fund to pull out of any company with 30% of more of its business coming from coal, which made headlines around the world and was soon followed by Allianz, the world''''s largest insurance company which adopted the same coal screen.   The insurance giant Axa has also exited coal. When the world’s largest insurers start divesting from coal, you know the industry is in serious trouble.   The US$80 billion we have under management is just a small slice of the US$1.24 trillion investor equity to have turned its back on this filthy fuel. This increasingly also includes health sector funds as fossil fuel industries harms their members.   As the Lancet highlights, whilst coal is phased out of the energy system, in particular in electricity production, the rapid scaling up of zero-carbon energy production and use will be crucial. Critical renewable technologies for achieving this will be solar, wind and other safe renewables sources like geothermal.   Solar is booming globally, as the International Energy Agency, showed recently - a new era is upon us. The Lancet recognises that renewable energy continues to grow rapidly, mainly from increasing solar and wind investment, most notably in the USA, China and Europe. A solar revolution is also underway in India.   Another remarkable new example of the shift from dirty coal energy to solar and wind is South Korea. President Moon Jae-in is charting a path which other Asian economies are watching closely as the Government seeks to clear the smoggy skies by shutting down dirty coal plants and other sensible measures.   This gives some hope in boosting the economy with high returns from both domestic and overseas investments in clean energy infrastructure, which are making billions.   There are hopeful signs from Asia to the Americas - transitioning to clean energy saves lives and avoids financial losses from dying industries.   * Jan Erik Saugestad is the CEO Storebrand Asset Management. Storebrand is the largest private pension in Norway with over US$80 billion assets under management. http://tmsnrt.rs/2h655FP   http://news.trust.org/spotlight/combatting-drought/ http://tmsnrt.rs/2ywMTAl http://tmsnrt.rs/2zfhCSl http://bit.ly/2zlARt8 http://bit.ly/2An9XPE http://bit.ly/2lC942k Visit the related web page
	Restricting farmers’ rights to save, exchange, and sell seeds by Oakland Institute, Bread for the World, agencies   Jan. 2017   Ahead of World Bank’s release of the 2017 “Enabling the Business of Agriculture” (EBA) report this month, 157 organizations and academics from around the world denounce the Bank’s scheme to hijack farmers’ right to seeds, attack on food sovereignty and the environment.   In a letter to the World Bank President Jim Yong Kim and EBA’s five Western donors, the group demands the immediate end of the project, originally requested by the G8 to support its industry-co-opted New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition.   “The EBA dictates so-called ‘good practices’ to regulate agriculture and scores countries on how well they implement its prescriptions,” said Frederic Mousseau, Policy Director at the Oakland Institute. “But the EBA has become the latest tool, to push pro-corporate agricultural policies, notably in the seed sector—where it promotes industrial seeds, that benefit a handful of agrochemical companies,” he continued.   Only six multinationals currently control over two-thirds of the industrial seed sales, and pending agro-industry mergers stand to further consolidate this oligopoly. Further market expansion for these corporations depends on the shrinking of farmer-managed seed systems, which currently provide 80 to 90 percent of the seed supply in developing countries through on-farm seed saving and farmer-to-farmer seed exchange.   A new report, Down On the Seed, the World Bank Enables Corporate Takeover of Seeds, exposes that while the World Bank claims to promote “smart and balanced policies,” its EBA index blatantly ignores farmer-managed seed systems. Instead, it reinforces the stranglehold of agrochemical companies and Western nations by pushing for intellectual property rights in agriculture, so that private breeders profiteer from the use of their seeds by farmers.   The EBA also awards the best scores to countries that ease private companies—not the farmers—access to public gene banks. In addition, the Bank recommends that governments reduce the time and cost necessary to register industrial seeds, with the private sector as the predominant force on the national committees that oversee the introduction of new varieties.   “The EBA reforms aim to foster the privatization of seed systems, regardless of the consequences for farmers and the planet,” said Alice Martin-Prevel, author of the report, Down on the Seed. “The reduction of farmers as passive consumers of industrial seeds undermines their contribution to agro-biodiversity, which is crucial to mitigate pests, disease, and the effects of climate change. It also disempowers farmers, while failing to protect them in increasingly concentrated markets.”   In its 2016 EBA report, the World Bank upheld Tanzania as a model country for enacting intellectual property laws in agriculture, and becoming the first least-developed nation bound by the 1991 UPOV Convention. UPOV is a pro-industry treaty that dramatically restricts farmers’ rights to save, exchange, and sell seeds. Under Tanzania’s seed laws, farmers now risk fines and imprisonment for practicing ancestral seed saving and trading, and are being forced to rely on industrial varieties.   “The Bank, behind closed doors, convinces governments to implement reforms based on the EBA scores, thereby bypassing farmers and citizens’ engagement,” said Mousseau. “The signatories to the petition are demanding an end of the EBA as a step to enable the full participation of farmers and rural communities in agricultural policymaking. This participation is essential for development to be inclusive and to tackle the challenge of food insecurity and rural poverty around the world.” http://bit.ly/2jPhbDL   http://www.righttofoodandnutrition.org/echoes-below-peoples-social-struggles-antidote-human-rights-crisis Visit the related web page
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