Energy and Environment

This week thousands of government officials, journalists, academics, and private sector and civil society representatives convene in Washington for the spring meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. But the most important event for global economic governance occurs later this year. And it won’t be in the United States. In September, China will host the eleventh summit of the Group of Twenty (G20) in the eastern city of Hangzhou, one of the country’s ancient capitals. The choice of location is appropriate. Hangzhou is a potent symbol of China’s meteoric rise—and of its grand ambitions. Eight centuries ago, it was the terminus of the Silk Road, described by Marco Polo as “the most beautiful and prosperous city in the world.” Today Hangzhou, which has seen its population swell from 2.4 to 8.9 million since 2000, is the headquarters of the internet giant Alibaba. President Xi Jinping is using the summit—and this year’s G20 chairmanship—to showcase China’s emergence as the world’s most dynamic economy and, alongside the United States, its most important leader. As at past G20 summits, the main focus at Hangzhou will be how to promote sustained global growth, which has proven elusive since the sluggish recovery from the global economic crisis that began in 2007-2008. Stimulating aggregate demand is increasingly important in the face of a slowdown in Chinese growth (to a still-enviable 6.9 percent), anemic performance in the EU and Japan, and contractions in other major economies including Brazil and Russia. At the G20 summit in Brisbane in 2014, leaders committed to add another two percent to the collective G20 GDP by 2018. In Hangzhou, they will assess progress toward this goal. But the G20 summit also offers China an opportunity to advance international cooperation on three urgent priorities. These include closing a yawning gap between the global demand for and supply of infrastructure financing; ensuring that G20 members not only implement but also ratchet up the climate change commitments they made in Paris in December; and advancing the world’s ambitious sustainable development agenda. Meeting global infrastructure needs. Satisfying the voracious global demand for airports, railroads, seaports, power plants, electricity grids, housing, waste management, and the like will require investments on an unprecedented scale. It will also necessitate massive technical assistance to help developing countries formulate “bankable” projects and to help ensure that infrastructure investments not only deliver growth but also contribute to positive political, social, and ecological outcomes. China’s main contribution to date has been promotion of its One Belt, One Road (OBOR) initiative—a modern-day “Silk Road” that promises vast investments in Asian infrastructure to connect national economies to global markets. The OBOR is to be underwritten by bilateral assistance and anticipated funding from the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) whose creation Beijing spearheaded last year. However, meeting global infrastructure needs—estimated at $100 trillion over the next two decades—will require far more than the public funding available from wealthy donors and multilateral development banks (including not only the AIIB, but also the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, and others). Moving “from billions to trillions” will entail leveraging private finance, including from traditionally cautious institutional investors, who must be convinced that massive projects with up-front risks and uncertain, long-term payoffs are feasible and sustainable and that they will enjoy a measure of protection if things head south. China can begin to square this circle by working with its G20 partners on a financing model that meets infrastructure funding needs over the short, medium, and long term, including through co-investment by bodies like the International Finance Corporation and the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency, as well as the development of infrastructure finance as a distinct asset class. Such a pragmatic, multilateral approach would also help the United States and China put last year’s AIIB kerfuffle behind them. Fulfilling—and exceeding—the Paris pledges. Hangzhou will be the first G20 meeting since the breakthrough twenty-first conference of parties (COP-21) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), at which countries abandoned the fruitless quest for a legally binding successor to the Kyoto Protocol for a less formal “pledge and review” process. But these “intended nationally-determined contributions” (INDCs) offer little grounds for euphoria, and averting a global ecological calamity will require parties to the UNFCCC to ratchet up their commitments significantly before 2030. The G20, collectively responsible for three quarters of global greenhouse gas emissions, must use the Hangzhou summit to reaffirm their commitment to full implementation of the Paris accord—and to signal their determination to take additional, dramatic steps. In a promising sign, China has signaled that it is prepared to do precisely that. Meeting with President Obama on the margins of the Nuclear Security Summit on March 31, President Xi pledged to make climate change a major focus of the Hangzhou summit. He also promised, along with President Obama, to ratify the Paris Accord on Earth Day, April 22. Since its creation, the G20 has focused overwhelmingly on traditional financial and economic issues, restricting its involvement in climate to the elimination of fossil fuel subsidies. What Xi, Obama, and other leaders now recognize is that future growth must be “green growth,” and that the G20 will be critical in building the global political will to transition to a low-carbon economy. Underpinning this reorientation is the awareness that the shift toward climate-friendly policies and technologies can simultaneously advance innovation, competitiveness, and the health of both citizens and the planet. In the run-up to Hangzhou, the Xi government should mobilize G20 action on climate financing, which will require many multiples of the $100 billion that wealthy donor governments have committed to provide the Green Climate Fund by 2020. This will ultimately include new financial instruments, including green climate bonds, capable of attracting institutional investors, to support projects from reforestation to clean power plants. Sustaining global development. Since the economic reforms launched by Deng Xiaoping in 1978, the Chinese government has managed to bring some 680 million people out of extreme poverty. China’s dramatic transformation has reinforced the Xi government’s intent to place global development at the heart of the Hangzhou agenda. The timing, certainly, could not be better. Last autumn, the UN General Assembly unanimously endorsed a set of seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), intended to drive development policy and investments through 2030. Achieving these ambitious objectives, however, will require high-level political attention of the sort only the G20 can provide. The G20 has already dipped its toe in development waters, of course, beginning with the Seoul summit in 2010. Indeed it has helped shift the development conversation away from official assistance—the traditional preoccupation of the Western Group of Seven (G7) donors. At Hangzhou, China and its G20 partners should endorse the core message of last July’s UN Financing for Development summit in Addis Ababa, which emphasized domestic resource mobilization—that is, funds from public and private sectors in developing countries themselves—to achieve the SDGs. Finally, China can use the Hangzhou summit to share its own experiences with urbanization. At the heart of China’s development has been massive migration from villages to cities. This pell-mell urbanization is increasingly the global norm. By 2030, the number of cities of more than a million will rise to 650. On balance, these trends are positive: cities tend to be hubs of innovation and generators of wealth. But the mega-cities of tomorrow may exacerbate inequality and spawn teeming slums, posing extraordinary challenges to governance and security. To help the G20 tackle this urban agenda, China should invite to Hangzhou the C40, a transnational network of major cities that former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg helped create, to share lessons of how to manage the transition to an urban planet. Such a leadership role can also build political momentum going into HABITAT 3—the third UN Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development—scheduled to take place in Quito, Ecuador, in October. To be sure, the G20’s priority on promoting global growth is well-placed. But as G20 summits have evolved in scope (and expectations have evolved in step), host countries can no longer afford to focus on a singular issue. Nor can global growth be addressed in isolation from other global challenges. The Hangzhou summit offers an opportunity to make progress on a host of issues that can facilitate sustained and sustainable growth over the long run.

Voices from the Field features contributions from scholars and practitioners highlighting new research, thinking, and approaches to development challenges. This article is authored by Ellen Starbird, director of the Office of Population and Reproductive Health at the U.S. Agency for International Development. The sustainable development goals (SDGs) articulate seventeen goals for the world to collectively meet by 2030. The SDG document organizes the goals into five themes—people, planet, prosperity, peace, and partnership—but it’s still a lot to grasp, so finding lynchpins that connect the themes and goals will be important to their success. Voluntary family planning is one of those lynchpins, with clear connections across all five themes. First, family planning affects people in myriad ways. It advances human rights, and saves lives. The 1968 International Conference on Human Rights proclaimed that “parents have a basic human right to decide freely and responsibly the number and spacing of their children.” However, in 2014, estimates indicated that 225 million women in low- and middle-income countries had unmet needs for modern contraceptive methods, meaning they want to stop or delay childbearing but are not using modern contraceptive methods. The ability to access and use family planning can influence outcomes ranging from health and education to women’s empowerment. Family planning helps women time and space their pregnancies, so they can bear children at the healthiest times of their lives. This lowers the number of unintended and high-risk pregnancies, and reduces women’s exposure to pregnancy-related health risks. Helping women time and space their pregnancies also contributes to reduced child malnutrition, healthy birth weight for newborns, and increased breastfeeding. Analyses indicate that by 2020, family planning could help prevent approximately seven million under-five deaths and 450,000 maternal deaths in USAID’s priority countries. Correct use of male or female condoms has dual benefits—preventing both transmission of the HIV virus and unintended pregnancy in HIV-positive women, thus preventing HIV transmission to the newborn. Family planning also advances gender equality and strongly supports the empowerment of women and girls by helping them stay in school, become literate, learn a trade, or start a business. Women cannot take advantage of opportunities and resources equally with men if they cannot plan their families. A wealth of country-level studies document the impact of family planning programs, and provide guidance on how to reach all women, as well as marginalized and underserved populations. Second, family planning use affects the planet. Population dynamics, including human population size, growth, density, and migration, are important drivers of environmental and natural resource degradation, including land, forests, biodiversity, water, and climate change. Population growth affects water scarcity, erodes renewable energy gains, and influences the development of sustainable urban infrastructure. In many countries, populations are growing so quickly that they are overwhelming governments’ abilities to provide education, health services, housing, drinking water, electricity, and waste disposal, contributing to the spread of urban slums. Slower population growth enables building a resilient infrastructure for health and economic development, where fewer government health and education services, including water, are required, and more land, electricity, and energy are available per person. A 2015 report concluded that improving access to family planning can “slow global climate change by providing 16 to 29 percent of the needed emissions reductions.” And a 2015 review of integrated population, health, and environment (PHE) projects concluded “it is clear that PHE projects are having an impact…improving the health, well-being and environment of households and communities across diverse settings and landscapes.” Third, family planning can facilitate economic prosperity. Rapid fertility decline, a result of increased family planning use, lowers the ratio of young people (dependents) to wage earners. With supportive socio-economic policies and attention to equity, countries can experience a “demographic dividend” of rapid economic growth. Family planning also contributes to economic growth by increasing the economic participation of women, and research has shown that having fewer children per family leads to increased household savings and increased investments in each child. Korea and Thailand, both demographic dividend success stories, represent strong examples of countries aligning population policy and family planning services with human capital development policies to accelerate economic growth. Fourth, family planning can contribute to peace—to the development of stable, democratic societies. Studies have shown that a large “youth bulge” (defined as a high proportion of 15 to 29 year-olds relative to the older adult population) is associated with a high risk of civil conflict. The political impact of fertility decline can be significant: studies show that, as a country and its population age, the probability of attaining and maintaining a liberal democracy is increased. Fifth, family planning progress requires new and continued partnerships. Despite recent increased donor and country-level attention to family planning and the potential contribution of family planning to the SDGs, family planning services continue to fall short of need in all developing regions. As we map out the global plan for tackling the SDGs, family planning partnerships at the global level, such as Family Planning 2020, the UN Commission on Life Saving Commodities, the Ouagadougou Partnership, and at the country level, with the public and private commercial sectors, foundations, civil society organizations, and non-health sector groups, will continue to be critical. Empowering women to choose the number, timing, and spacing of their pregnancies is not only a matter of health and human rights, but can hasten progress across the five themes of the new sustainable development goals. Quite simply, family planning is a best buy, and can help make the world a better place for all of us.

I’ve been traveling in Japan, meeting with government officials, power sector executives, and energy policy scholars. I thank CFR life member Bill Martin, Washington Policy and Analysis, and the Japanese Federation of Electric Power Companies for generously hosting me. TOKYO—Last month, Japan commemorated the five-year anniversary of the great earthquake and tsunami that caused the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. The disaster—three nuclear reactor meltdowns and the release of some radioactive material—forced 164,000 residents to evacuate and deeply traumatized the country.[1] So when Japan shut down its entire fleet of nuclear reactors, it was unclear whether they would ever restart. Five years later, the outlook for nuclear power in Japan is better, as are prospects for a cheaper, cleaner, and more secure energy mix. In 2015, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s administration completed a four-year-long process to set targets for Japan’s energy mix in 2030. Those targets include restarting Japan’s nuclear fleet as quickly as possible, though only after reactors pass stringent safety assessments. The administration has also committed to ramp up renewable energy, aiming to combine it with nuclear power to generate nearly half of Japan’s electricity—or a quarter of its primary energy—from “self-sufficient sources” by 2030. And Japan is finally moving ahead with long-overdue electricity system reform to introduce more competition and keep costs down. The targets represent an admirably rational response to the Fukushima disaster. As I’ve written before, Japan should treat renewable energy and nuclear power as complements, not substitutes, which the Abe administration recognizes.  Yet even though administration officials talk about their 2030 vision as a major accomplishment—requiring years of careful analysis and negotiation—setting targets was the easy part. Now Japan needs to execute toward those targets, and an obstacle course of regulatory, legal, and political hurdles stands in the way. If things don’t go according to plan, the government needs to be prepared to adapt its targets, remembering that they are merely instruments to achieve Japan’s overarching energy goals. Japan Will Struggle to Meet Its 2030 Target for Nuclear Energy Restarting Japan’s nuclear reactors could reverse alarming trends that followed Fukushima. After Japan shut down its nuclear reactors, the price of retail electricity rose by two thirds, and the share of imported fossil fuels in the power mix rose from roughly 60 percent to nearly 90 percent (Figure 1). At the moment, low prices for oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG) have reduced Japan’s import bill. But the resource-poor island nation is still at the mercy of commodity market volatility and would suffer if prices increased again. For this reason, Japanese officials care deeply about energy self-sufficiency. If Japan can achieve its nuclear target for 2030, then nuclear will reemerge as its largest source of self-sufficient power. But the nuclear target is easier set than accomplished. Recently, a district court ordered that Takahama Units 3 and 4 stay closed, siding with some residents unhappy about plans to restart the reactors. Whether or not the court’s decision was right (it is puzzling how a local court could overrule the safety assessment of Japan’s nuclear regulator), it certainly appears that the road to restarting Japan’s 42 reactors—of which only two are currently running—will be bumpy. And that’s not all. After Fukushima, the previous government passed legislation making it harder to extend a nuclear reactor’s lifetime beyond 40 years—consistent with its plan to completely phase out nuclear energy. By 2030, one third of existing reactors will hit the 40-year age threshold for decommissioning. Even if utilities manage to finish construction on three new reactors, nuclear energy will still only account for 15 percent of Japan’s electricity. This implies that achieving the government’s 20–22 percent target by 2030 is improbable at best. Uncertainty over nuclear reactor restarts also complicates Japan’s plans to reprocess spent nuclear fuel. When the Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant (RRP) starts up in the near future, it will begin to separate plutonium from the spent fuel that has been accumulating at the facility and at reactor sites around Japan. If enough reactors don’t start up that can burn the reprocessed fuel (in a form called “MOX” fuel) from RRP, then Japan will begin to accumulate reserves of MOX fuel that some experts consider a proliferation risk. After touring RRP, I was left with little concern over the risk that Japan could divert nuclear material to a weapons program or leave it vulnerable to theft or sabotage (Japan’s safeguards at RRP are state-of-the-art, including 140 neutron detectors throughout the facility, multiple cameras recording each step, and automated reporting to the International Atomic Energy Agency). Nevertheless, the government knows that accumulating reprocessed fuel brings risks, including inflamed tensions with China, which has repeatedly voiced concerns over the issue.[2] All of this means that Japan needs to seriously plan for the contingency in which the target nuclear capacity does not materialize. It will need to carefully synchronize operations at RRP with reactor restarts, and it will also need to explore other ways of achieving zero-carbon, self-sufficient energy. Higher Targets for Renewables Could Compensate for a Nuclear Shortfall Although Japan is likely to miss its nuclear target, it has other zero-carbon options to meet its larger goal of 25 percent self-sufficiency in its primary energy mix. Renewable energy, comprising hydro, solar, wind, and geothermal energy, could compensate for a nuclear shortfall. Already, Japan has made substantial progress in ramping up renewables. Following Fukushima, Japan unveiled a generous feed-in tariff incentive scheme to support renewable energy. The market responded enthusiastically, especially in solar power. By 2014, Japan was second in the world to China in annual solar installations, having installed 9.7 GW of capacity. Recognizing that it could not continue funding solar power at such generous levels forever, the government lowered the rate of incentive payments by 16 percent in 2015 and a further 11 percent last month. Nevertheless, its target of 22–24 percent renewable energy by 2030, driven largely by projected growth in solar power, is still well within range. The government set this target by calculating the level of renewable energy that would not cost Japan more in incentive payments than it would save from displaced fossil fuel imports. But in its calculations, the government assumes that solar will cost about six cents per kWh in 2030, a very conservative projection; for reference, unsubsidized solar power in the United States should meet that cost target a full decade earlier, by 2020. Given that solar is likely to be much cheaper than the Japanese government has anticipated, it should not be difficult to support the target share of renewable energy in 2030 without breaking the bank. In fact, Japan should look to support even higher levels of renewable energy. Over the past year, the government has made regulatory changes in this direction. First, it limited the number of days that utilities could "curtail,” or switch off, renewable energy supply to the grid without compensation for the foregone power. Second, Japan has streamlined regulations to drive down the costs of installing rooftop solar—as a result, the price of residential solar in Japan (which composes the large majority of Japanese installed capacity) is lower than that in the United States and closer to leaders Germany and Australia (Figure 2). Finally, Japan is now rolling out a reverse auction system to buy power from utility-scale solar installations. Since large-scale solar is cheaper than rooftop solar and reverse auctions tend to secure lower prices than a feed-in tariff, the shift from decentralized to centralized solar in Japan should further drive down costs and fuel capacity expansion. But intermittent renewable sources, such as solar and wind, have limited potential so long as Japan’s electricity grid remains fragmented. Each of Japan’s ten regional utilities exercises a monopoly in its service territory, and electricity trade among regions is comparatively low. Moreover, the entire power grid is split into two halves operating at different frequencies, limiting power flows between east and west. With better transmission links between regions, the Japanese grid could accommodate more renewable energy, making it easier for resources in one region to compensate for unpredictable renewable energy in another region. Therefore, to make it possible to raise its renewable energy target—important for reducing emissions and increasing energy security—Japan should invest substantially in a more interconnected national grid. Though Overdue, Power Sector Reform Should Not Pit Nuclear Against Renewables On April 1, Japan took an important step toward breaking up its vertically integrated utilities, when it fully deregulated the electricity retail market. Many jurisdictions in the developed world have had deregulated markets—which in several cases has lowered electricity rates by introducing competition into the sector—for decades, but Japan’s path to deregulation has been sluggish. Still, the government has justified its caution by pointing to missteps elsewhere in the world and tailoring its own policies to avoid them. For example, though it now allows customers to choose their retail electricity provider, customers will still be able to stay on a regulated rate from the local utility, and the government will carefully monitor how the market evolves. In doing so, the government hopes to avoid market abuses that plagued deregulation in the United Kingdom and California. But the one aspect of deregulation about which I did not hear a satisfactory answer from Japanese officials was how to avoid the conflict between renewable and nuclear energy that is playing out in other deregulated markets. For example, in many parts of Europe, nuclear power is increasingly unprofitable as a result of the rise of renewable energy. The way deregulated power markets are set up, renewable energy reduces power prices, making it difficult for existing nuclear plants to cover operating costs and virtually impossible for new nuclear plants to raise enough revenue to amortize capital costs. Today, there is a lower risk of this happening in Japan, because only about 2 percent of power is traded on a wholesale power market. But the Japanese government plans to increase that proportion, which could expose nuclear reactors to wholesale price deflation from renewable energy. Japan is considering implementing a “capacity mechanism” that ensures that reliable power from sources like nuclear reactors—which generate consistently around the clock—are compensated enough to keep them open. But capacity markets around the world have had their own problems, and in general they have not solved this problem of renewable energy crowding out nuclear energy. Some have proposed alternative market designs that have not yet been tested but are theoretically promising. For example, splitting the retail market for electricity into two markets—one for reliable, 24/7 power and another for power whose availability fluctuates—could insulate nuclear power from unhealthy competition with renewable energy. Japan should explore this and other proposals. At the end of the day, it is crucial that zero-carbon, secure sources of energy coexist in the Japanese power landscape. As Japan continues to deregulate its power sector, it should ensure that the right economic incentives are in place for nuclear and renewable energy to both flourish. [1] There is increasing evidence that the release of radioactive material from Fukushima has not posed substantial short or long-term risks to human health. [2] For readers wondering why Japan doesn’t just abandon reprocessing, James Acton of the Carnegie Endowment explains, “Japan is entrapped in reprocessing. Commitments made by the national government to local communities to facilitate the development of Japan’s nuclear industry and, in particular, its industrial-scale reprocessing facility make RRP’s operation effectively inevitable.” The full report is essential reading to understand Japan’s convoluted nuclear fuel cycle policies.

Emerging Voices highlights new research, thinking, and approaches to development challenges from contributing scholars and practitioners. This post is from Dr. D. Michael Shafer, president and founder of Warm Heart Worldwide and professor emeritus of political science at Rutgers University. Warm Heart is a community-based development organization dedicated to building socially- and economically-sustainable communities in rural areas of northern Thailand. Though a monumental step forward on climate change, the Paris Agreement fails to recognize one of the biggest climate change issues for developing countries: agriculture. Poor farmers’ dependence on unsustainable planting, cultivating, and harvesting techniques make them unwitting contributors to global warming by emitting black carbon and greenhouse gases (GHGs). This problem extends beyond China and India (the Paris deal’s focus) to places as diverse as Indonesia, Cameroon, and Iran. By burning field wastes, poor farmers release up to twenty-five percent of the world’s total of “black carbon”—clouds of smoke that count as the second-largest warming source after CO2—emitting 330,000 metric tons every year. And rice growers in impoverished and densely-populated areas produce high levels of methane, a hydrocarbon gas twenty-five times as warming as CO2. Traditional flooded paddy techniques account for up to fifteen percent of total GHG emissions from agriculture. These agricultural practices are bad for the environment; they are also bad for people. Degraded soil yields barely enough to feed a family. To double the global food supply by 2050—necessary to avoid shortages and malnourishment, especially in developing countries—traditional farmers will need to improve land use and water management, and adopt new seed, harvesting, and storage technologies. The good news is that solutions to reduce poor farmers’ global warming footprint and improve productivity already exist. First, they can learn to convert their agricultural waste into biochar and then into biochar fertilizer. Agricultural biochar is a “super charcoal” made by pyrolyzing (charring) rice straw, corn cobs, or maize stalks at high heat without any oxygen, a clean process that is also carbon negative—meaning it removes CO2 from the atmosphere and cools the earth instead of warms it. Making biochar is low-cost and low-tech, and its positive effects go beyond climate change mitigation to food security and health more generally. Poor farmers can use biochar as an additive to improve soil’s water penetration and retention—essential as drought conditions spread—to reduce acid levels, and to boost soil fertility. Biochar also aids in decontaminating soil near landfills, toxic waste dumps, and mines—areas where poor farmers are often relegated. For families lacking clean water access, biochar works as a natural water filter. Second, rice growers can switch from standard flooded paddy techniques to a method known as “system for rice intensification,” or SRI. Rather than flooding the paddy for an entire growing season, SRI involves regularly draining and drying out the paddy, refilling it only when the rice begins to wilt. And instead of transplanting seed bundles from the nursery to flooded paddy mud, rice growers plant individual seedlings in orderly rows. Though SRI requires more labor than traditional rice cultivation, it pays more dividends. Because SRI paddies are mostly dry, they reduce the methane released into the environment. SRI can also increase a farmer’s yields by as much as fifty percent, and reduce water needs by forty percent. Yet many poor, rural farmers are not aware that these solutions exist, for several reasons. They may be skipped over by development programs that test innovative projects in select locations—often those most likely to yield results. Others are distrustful of “development” advice from outsiders, so that even when biochar or SRI programs make it to their villages, they fail to take off. So what can work? Agricultural development in poor, rural farming communities that is spread by example. Farmers are more likely to try something when they see another’s success. Grassroots programs such as Digital Green do this by producing short, instructional videos that film poor farmers using simple, easily-replicated, and low-cost techniques. With little more than a tiny, battery-powered projector, Digital Green then shares the videos with women’s co-ops and other community members—ninety percent of whom adopt the innovation, compared to a ten percent adoption rate for expert-led trainings. From a climate change perspective, the benefits of cleaner, more productive, and more sustainable agriculture in poor, rural areas will be striking and immediate. Switching from burning field waste to making biochar would significantly reduce the amount of black carbon and CO2 equivalent released into the atmosphere each year, as well as their warming effects. And switching from flooded paddy to SRI could cut total methane emissions from rice production by between twenty-two and sixty-two percent. Converting just a quarter of Asian rice growers, who produce roughly ninety percent of the world’s rice, could reduce GHG emissions by 3.8 percent annually—nearly Japan’s annual contribution to global GHG emissions. From a human development perspective, the changes will also be immense, helping to feed the estimated 2.5 to 3 billion people the world will add by 2050. Most importantly, limiting poor farmers’ global warming contribution and improving the health and wellbeing of millions will not require expensive overheads, long-term aid interventions, or complicated, high-tech innovations. But it will require considering agriculture as vital to any climate change solution.    

This is a guest post by Gabriella Meltzer, Research Associate in Global Health for the Council on Foreign Relations Studies program. El Niño was first discovered in the 1600s when fishermen noticed that in some years, water temperatures in the Pacific became warmer than usual. Hence, according to the National Ocean Service, El Niño today refers to “large-scale ocean-atmosphere climate interaction linked to a periodic warming in sea surface temperatures across the central and east-central Equatorial Pacific.” These anomalous weather patterns vary across regions, ranging from heavy rainfall and flooding to severe drought. The El Niño of 2015-2016 has thus far proven itself to be the worst on record because of its interaction with global climate change, where higher atmospheric temperatures due to greenhouse gas emissions lead to a higher frequency and greater intensity of the extreme weather events characteristic of an El Niño year. Perhaps no country has felt this more than Ethiopia, which is experiencing its worst drought in roughly half a century. The country has faced three consecutive failed rains, the most intense and recent being in June 2015 with the arrival of El Niño to its doorstep. The primary rainy season from June through September is critical to Ethiopia’s agricultural sector, which contributes 42.3 percent of the country’s GDP and employs roughly 73 percent of its labor force. Ethiopia has suffered from chronic food insecurity for over thirty years as a result of intense population growth whose overcultivation of small landholdings has put immense pressure on the soil in an already fragile environment. Yet, the drought occurring now has brought a level of devastation that, according to the United Nations, could rival the major famine in 1984 that killed upwards of 900,000 people. As of February 2016, 75 percent of harvests have been lost, one million livestock have died, and ten to fifteen million people require emergency humanitarian food assistance, with 430,000 children experiencing severe malnutrition. Between 2004 and 2012, Ethiopia’s economy grew at roughly 11 percent annually, outperforming the 7 percent annual growth required to achieve the first Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of halving poverty by 2015. Ethiopia is frequently touted as a sub-Saharan Africa success story in development circles due to government investments in healthcare, agriculture, education, and infrastructure. Yet as of February 1, the Ethiopian government and its aid partners have announced that they need a total of $1.4 billion in 2016 to address the current drought-induced crisis, and have only received roughly one-third of this amount thus far. The World Food Programme has said that $500 million of this request is urgently needed by the end of this month to extend aid efforts through April. With the political urgency surrounding the current crisis in Syria, organizations like Save the Children have found it challenging to garner public attention and fiscal support for this equally severe humanitarian situation. Despite its efforts to present itself to the world as leading sub-Saharan Africa’s economic renaissance, Ethiopia remains desperately poor, with a human development index of merely .442 (on a scale of 1.0), ranked 174th in the world. The country only reduced poverty by one-third by the close of the MDGs, and nearly 90 percent of the entire population of 96.5 million is living in multidimensional poverty. Despite all of this, the Ethiopian government has still funded 46 percent of its humanitarian requirements. Through its flooding, record snowfalls, and droughts, El Niño has proven to be a far greater threat than any nation could have anticipated. This is particularly the case for a resource-poor country such as Ethiopia, whose communities rely on subsistence farming for survival. Ethiopia is justified in its pleas for help, and donor countries should act quickly to aid the many potential victims of famine. However, the adverse effects of climate change will continue to exact an outsized toll on countries like Ethiopia, and in addition to the rapid mobilization of resources in a time of crisis, there needs to be a forward-looking plan to help vulnerable nations build resilience.

This week, a World Trade Organization (WTO) panel decided in favor of the United States and against India in a dispute over Indian domestic content requirements for sourcing solar power. Reading the headlines, one might worry that “The WTO Just Ruled Against India’s Booming Solar Program” or, worse, that the “WTO swats down India’s massive solar initiative.” The histrionics from progressive media outlets are overblown. In fact, whereas judges of international law have reaffirmed that national procurement of renewable energy favoring domestic manufacturers is illegal, the jury is still out on whether this helps or hurts efforts to deploy clean energy worldwide. Because domestic content requirements can reduce supply and increase prices, I am inclined to call this ruling a small victory that makes it cheaper to combat climate change. But I do still worry that in the future, liberalized trade and prudent climate policies might come into conflict. WTO Panel TRIMs India’s Solar Program The WTO panel ruling did not overturn India’s solar program, the centerpiece of India’s plan to curb emissions growth. India is targeting 100 GW of solar—around half of the world’s current solar capacity—by 2022. And at the 2015 Paris Climate Change Conference, Prime Minister Modi unveiled the International Solar Alliance, a confederation of 120 solar-friendly countries, to be headquartered near Delhi. None of this is materially affected by the WTO ruling, which narrowly focused on solar installations accounting for about 0.5 percent of India’s 100 GW target. The panel found that in a portion of its solar procurement from 2010 to 2014, India violated international trade law by barring foreign-made solar panels and, in some cases, the constituent solar cells in a panel. This was accomplished through “domestic content requirements,” which applied to roughly 500 MW of solar capacity installed by private developers, from whom government agencies promised to purchase the solar energy for 25 years. The panel concluded that these domestic content requirements breached India’s obligation under the WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Investment Measures (TRIMs) not to “require the purchase or use by an enterprise of products of domestic origin or from any domestic source…” The panel also found that India had not followed its legal responsibility under the 1994 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT): “The products of the territory of any Member imported into the territory of any other Member shall be accorded treatment no less favourable than that accorded to like products of national origin…” The direct consequences of this case are minimal. The panel concluded that India should “bring its measures into conformity with its obligations under the TRIMs Agreement and the GATT 1994.” But since the beginning of this case, India has proactively reduced its domestic content requirements, from 50 percent in 2013 to 33 percent in 2014 to just 12.5 percent in its ongoing procurement. Moreover, a very similar case decided in 2014 by the WTO Appellate Body, Canada—Renewable Energy, failed to find that these domestic content requirements constituted actionable subsidies that could legitimize retaliation. So India may have to curtail its already minimal domestic content requirements moving forward, but nothing else really happens.[1] In My Humble Opinio Juris… Even though the direct consequences of this ruling are minimal, the issues raised in the case have broader significance in the long run. This explains why twelve countries and the European Union followed the case as third-party observers, with some countries providing extensive comments cited in the final ruling.[2] Most observers sided with the United States; for example, Japan bluntly called India’s policies “protectionist.” But even though this particular case was relatively easy to decide, onlookers were deeply invested in the precedents this case could set. The clearest outcome from the case was a reaffirmation of the 2014 ruling in Canada—Renewable Energy that domestic content requirements for renewable energy are illegal. Some environmental groups object that outlawing such policies can reduce the incentive to deploy clean energy. Under free trade, they contend, countries will end up importing cheap solar panels from China and never build up a domestic industry that would create local economic benefits. This may well be true, but restricting trade also raises the price of clean energy. And the biggest obstacle to clean energy deployment that I’ve consistently heard from policymakers in the developing world is not that imports fail to create jobs but that the cost is too high. So my conclusion is that this ruling is a felicitous example of the trade agenda aligning well with the climate agenda; reducing barriers to trade can also speed the deployment of clean energy. But India raised another, more interesting, objection on energy security grounds to the U.S. allegation that its domestic content requirements were illegal. Under Article XX of the GATT, countries can derogate from their international trade obligations, i.e., enact contrary policies, so long as certain conditions are met. One such condition is met if a contrary policy is “essential to the acquisition or distribution of products in general or local short supply.” India argued that since it had “abysmally low” domestic production capacity, and since it plans to sharply ramp up its deployment of solar power, it could face a shortage of solar panels if foreign supply were to disappear. The panel was unmoved by this objection. Because India could not prove an “imminent” risk of shortage, the panel held that India could not shirk its legal responsibilities. Surprisingly, the third party observers concurred, and Japan was unsympathetic to India’s argument. As one of the most energy-insecure countries, following the Fukushima nuclear disaster, one might expect Japan to favor retaining the right to prioritize national energy security over international trade liberalization. In this particular case, though, Japan’s opposition to trade barriers in the solar industry has to do with the make-up of Japan’s own solar industry, which largely relies on importing and relabeling Chinese panels. Setting Japan aside, other countries will increasingly want to switch to renewable energy to reduce reliance on fossil fuel imports. But if renewable energy industries become heavily concentrated—as the solar industry has become in China—then countries may not want to shift from one source of concentrated energy imports to another. So the summary WTO panel ruling against India’s energy security objection could set a precedent that discourages renewable energy adoption in the future. The second interesting objection raised by India was that the auctions for solar energy were conducted by the government, and therefore the domestic content requirements counted as government procurement that is exempt under GATT Article III:8(a). Again, the panel disagreed, upholding the prior decision in Canada—Renewable Energy that the government was procuring electricity, not solar panels, so it did not have the right to preferentially procure domestic solar panels. In this case, this prohibition on using preferential government procurement probably does not impede clean energy deployment, again because free trade lowers prices. But I can think of examples in the future where preferential government procurement might be a good idea, especially for advancing new clean energy technology. For example, I advocate targeted U.S. government procurement of emerging technology as a stepping-stone toward free market competition. And it might be logical only to procure technologies that had previously received government research, development, and demonstration (RD&D) support, to ensure that government support follows technologies through every phase of technology readiness. But this sort of program may well give preference to domestic firms eligible to receive public RD&D funds. Following the precedent set by the WTO panel ruling against India, preferential government procurement of domestic clean energy may not be a legally acceptable instrument of technology policy. And since this might hinder efforts to bring new clean technologies to market, this is another potential example in the future where the trade and climate agenda might conflict. Outside of the issues raised in this case, another potential clash between the trade and climate agendas could be the future interaction between carbon pricing and trade barriers. I was (and still am) prepared to call the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) a step forward for climate policy, but TPP does not explicitly authorize trade barriers based on a product’s carbon content. In a related proposal, William Nordhaus calls for “climate clubs," which would erect trade barriers against countries unwilling to enact harmonized climate policies. If such proposals gain momentum, the climate agenda could run afoul of the trade liberalization agenda. As countries around the world implement climate policies and seek to expand clean energy, many more trade disputes will arise. Trying to forecast future rulings at this point is pure speculation. But even if the outcome of this case is far less exciting than the headlines suggest, it hints at what to look out for in the next one. [1] In fact, it is not entirely clear why the United States continued to pursue this case. India’s initial domestic content requirements from 2010–2012 actually helped the United States, by screening out silicon solar panels and cells that China specializes in while enabling U.S. companies like First Solar to export their thin-film products to India. Recognizing that their domestic content requirements had shifted, rather than deterred, solar imports, India revised domestic content requirements from 2012–2014 to plug the loophole, banning all foreign panels. But now that India has generally scaled back all domestic content requirements, the United States has little to gain in the Indian market from a ruling in its favor. One explanation for pursuing the case is that the United States may instead have been seeking a broader precedent to prevent other countries from passing similar domestic content requirements. [2] There was some intrigue about this third-party participation. On behalf of all the third parties, Canada requested “enhanced third-party rights” to make oral statements during hearings and provide several written submissions. It contended that “issues relating to ‘green energy measures’ are of systemic importance to WTO Members.” Both the United and India effectively told Canada to mind its own business, and the panel rejected the request. Undeterred, Canada, Japan, and the European Union submitted extensive comments to the WTO panel. Oddly, China, which had by far the most at stake in this case, remained totally silent, perhaps content to let the other countries make arguments in China’s favor.

With warfare continuing between the Islamist radical movement Boko Haram and the Nigerian security forces, the resulting humanitarian crisis in northern Nigeria is deepening. The United Nations (UN) estimates that there are between two and three million internally displaced persons (IDP). How many there really are is impossible to know. A small percentage are in formal camps. The majority appear to have been taken in by kin. The security services have liberated some women and girls kidnapped by Boko Haram. Again, exactly how many is not known, in part because of the lack of transparency and incomplete official statistics. However, International Alert, a peace-building group, and the United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), both of which are highly credible, report that there is widespread community rejection of the freed women and girls. In some cases rejection is based on fear that those liberated have been radicalized and will recruit others. Others are rejected as “Boko Haram wives,” and rape carries a strong cultural stigma. Finally, there is anecdotal evidence that is highly credible that food prices in parts of the northeast have reached famine levels. There is a United Nations estimate that there are 223,000 severely malnourished children that could die absent immediate help, according to the New York Times. Periodically, the security services announce that because they have cleared Boko Haram from certain territories, IDP’s go home. But many flee again because of renewed Boko Haram depredations. The pervasive lack of security in the northeast makes the delivery of humanitarian assistance and services by the Nigerian government and the international community highly problematic.

Gabriel Walker is a research associate in Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. In the wake of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, Chairman of the World Association of Nuclear Operators Laurent Stricker suggested that “overconfidence” could undermine the safety of nuclear power plants. While the Chinese nuclear industry may not necessarily be overconfident, its ambition is undeniable: the country has brought nearly twenty reactors online in the past decade and has around two-hundred proposed or planned in an all-out push to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels. And after twenty-five years of developing nuclear power domestically, Chinese companies are now seeking to export their technology abroad. Whether they can do it safely and sensibly remains an open question. Compared to established nuclear players like France’s Areva, Russia’s Rosatom, and the United States’ Westinghouse (now owned by Toshiba), Chinese companies are relative newcomers to the international market and eager to compete. In 2015, Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) signed important, multibillion-dollar nuclear deals for projects in the United Kingdom, Argentina, Pakistan, and Iran. At the end of last year, China’s two main nuclear industry SOEs formed the joint venture Hualong International to promote more effectively the Hualong One, a new Chinese-made “third-generation” reactor design, to international buyers as the industry’s “flagship brand.”  In early January 2016, an official from the China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC), one of the two SOEs behind Hualong International, stated that the company was negotiating exports for the design with twenty countries. In the next five years Chinese companies could invest in or begin building twenty-one reactors overseas, including eight domestically designed models. Importantly, the total cost of the Hualong One is roughly two-thirds that of American, Japanese, or European models, suggesting that the joint venture is aiming to undercut competitors and attract new customers with a more affordable price tag. Although Hualong International is not the only company to market a brand-new third-generation reactor—Westinghouse signed a deal to build its first AP1000 model in China without having previously completed any—it is the first to do so without a significant global track record. Even Westinghouse, which has been building commercial reactors for nearly sixty years, has encountered multiple delays in its recent AP1000 projects. One Chinese nuclear-industry scholar suggested that Westinghouse “oversold the system” and “promised more than [it] could deliver.” A relatively inexperienced company like Hualong International may face similar, and possibly more significant, stumbling blocks when it operates on the global stage. There are a number of additional safety, security, and financial implications for China and other countries involved as well: First, although China has “shown unprecedented eagerness” to achieve the world’s best nuclear safety standards, both domestic and foreign experts have pointed out that China is still catching up on safety matters and should gain more operating experience before building more plants. Some point to last August’s explosion in Tianjin and a landslide of construction waste in Shenzhen as examples of China’s lack of safety culture. Furthermore, even if China’s domestic safety practices are well established, that may not translate to equal competence in foreign markets. One CNNC official also stated that the company’s primary focus is “to tap the demand in emerging countries,” which some worry lack the necessary transparency and regulatory oversight for operating safe nuclear plants. Many experts believe that countries with little or no past experience in nuclear power, including over forty-five actively considering embarking on nuclear programs, constitute the fastest-growing risk in the industry. The combination of implementing new technology in unproven markets may lead to unpredictable consequences. Second, the Chinese government has disregarded security concerns by providing Pakistan with civilian nuclear technology. Chinese companies have made successive agreements to build at least six reactors there since 2004, even though Pakistan is not a member of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). China announced its first two deals only after it joined the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), which prohibits its members from exporting nuclear technology to Pakistan and other nonmembers of the NPT. Under controversial circumstances, it later agreed to more deals that directly conflicted with the NSG mandate. Even if Pakistan’s case is unique, and even if the Chinese reactors do help to ameliorate Pakistan’s dire energy crisis without major security consequences, China’s willingness to circumvent international regulations calls into question its commitment to secure nuclear operations in other places around the world. Third, the scope of Chinese nuclear ambitions could entangle both its companies and customers in floundering economic partnerships. The worldwide nuclear industry is rife with disappointing outcomes caused by intractable design and cost issues, and even improved third-generation plants have encountered a wide range of production impediments. Although Chinese companies have had considerable success building plants domestically, there have been continuing struggles with standardizing production that may make it difficult for them to build elsewhere. Adding the fact that Chinese companies are often willing to make risky investments in order to promote their international ventures—including selling the first Hualong One to Argentina, which does not have access to international credit markets because of bond defaults—could be a recipe for messy financial fallout many years down the line. On a scale as large as the one Chinese nuclear companies aspire to reach, initial infrastructure roadblocks or sour deals could stymie longer-term ambitions. Safe, reliable, and cheap nuclear technology has always been the holy grail of those hoping for a “nuclear renaissance.” Some believe one is already taking place within China. And Chinese companies are exceptionally eager to apply their domestic experience overseas, potentially bringing low-carbon electricity to untapped and needy international buyers. But with such complicated and frequently problematic technology, Chinese companies should wade carefully—not dive head-first—into the untested waters of building nuclear plants abroad.