Friends of the Earth

In Australia, several environmental groups have banded together to encourage a new approach to climate action. They’re steering away from incremental approaches, which have largely failed, and instead are promoting a holistic Transition Decade.

Spearheaded by Friends of the Earth, Beyond Zero Emissions, Climate Emergency Network and the Sustainable Living Foundation, the Transition Decade (T10) presents a shared framework for individuals and community groups to develop, then implement initiatives to put Australia on the path of sustainability by 2020.

Reporting from Copenhagen

Copenhagen's mall-sized Bella Center, the command center for the largest climate change gathering ever convened, has exceeded its capacity, and thousands of registered civil society groups are now being asked to leave.

The move is raising the ire of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), who say they are being cut out of the process for global warming action that they, in part, built.

Their absence in the crucial final days of the conference will be a blow to poor nations who rely on NGO assistance to get their voices heard, the NGOs say, and it will keep out non-governmental experts who could quickly analyze any proposed deals, leaving the world hearing only the claims of politicians.

Most reports on how the fossil fuels industry is weakening the climate bill involve big numbers, complex election laws and even more complex ways of working around them.

Friends of the Earth decided to simplify things.

“Dating back to our founding, FOE has spoken to the needs of the planet and its people, not to the needs of politicians for compromise. I am absolutely committed to that mission.” —Erich Pica

What comes to mind when you hear the word economist?

Conservative? Business booster? Probably not "hard-core environmentalist", but one economics and fuel subsidies expert is just that — and, at 34, he's the new president of the outspoken environmental leader Friends of the Earth.

Fifteen years ago, as Erich Pica was studying economics at Western Michigan University, he looked at how the United States measures its economic growth, how environmental destruction – mountaintop mining and the Exxon Valdez cleanup, for example – counted toward GDP, and he saw that it wasn’t sustainable.

“We have economic incentives established throughout our system that reward environmental bad behavior,” Pica says. “Our entire system is built on this once-through, virgin material to landfill that degrades the environment and uses it as an economic bedrock without replenishing it.”

The nation and its policies need to recognize that “the U.S. economy is not above and beyond the natural ecosystem.“

Friends of the Earth has been pounding that message home for 40 years. Pica now has the hammer in hand, and he intends to use it.

The World Bank has experienced what it calls a long and complex relationship with hydropower.

In the 1990s, concerns about the environment, water equity, population displacement and social justice led to protests and lawsuits around hydropower projects and a steep decline in Bank funding for hydro development that bottomed out in 1999, when the Bank put no money at all into hydropower.

Then in 2003, the Bank began funding hydropower projects again, including Bujagali in Uganda, Bumbuna in Sierra Leone, Felou in Senegal, Nam Theun 2 in Laos (above), and Rampur in India.

A recent report from a World Bank Group (WBG) team led by Senior Water Resources Specialist Daryl Fields verifies the shift: Directions in Hydropower: Scaling Up for Development describes the World Bank taking a renewed role in hydropower development and examines the challenges and opportunities hydropower presents today.

This realignment of hydropower is being driven by a number of factors, starting with estimates that the developing world has 1,333 GW of potential and unexploited hydro capacity.

Some NGOs, however, say that number, also promoted by the hydropower industry, would be much lower if negative social and economic impacts were taken into consideration. Some also don’t believe large scale hydropower is the answer for rural electrification.