BP rising

The oil spill from a rig off the Mexican Gulf coast has been hogging the headlines for quite some time now. It is now being termed the biggest industrial disaster in the history of the United States, leaving the Exxon valdez incident looking like a minor fortuity. Let’s just look at the numbers to get a sense of the magnitude of the accident – Exxon Valdez spilled 40.9 million gallons of oil, and as per the estimation on 15th June, 2010 the BP oil spill has spewed 543 million litres of oil and the figures are rising by the day. What adds to the acuteness of the problem here is the nature of the accident itself. Exxon Valdez oil spill was confined to the surface of water whereas Deepwater Horizon is releasing oil 5,000 feet below the ocean’s surface.

It is all about business

While I worried and fretted about the environmental consequences of this spill on the marine biodiversity, a banker friend added his own 2 cents to the discussion. His primary concern was the impact of the spill on the crude oil markets in future and how the loss of so many gallons of oil will ever be compensated. Already the exercise of finger pointing has commenced with Anadarko Petroleum Corp. (a partner of BP and owner of a quarter of the Deepwater Horizon rig) dragging its feet from any liabilities and putting the blame squarely on the doorsteps of BP.
Some ingenious solutions have also been put forth. A scientist of Indian origin, Seshadri Ramkumar has created a special form of cotton fabric that can clean up crude oil up to 40 times its weight and Texas University suggests that this would be the best bet to clean up the mess. Kevin Costner the Hollywood star on the other hand proposes to put his 32 machines to work, which can separate crude oil from water at the rate of 200 gallons per minute. But this number pales in comparison to the amount of water that is to be cleansed of oil - 6.43 quadrillion gallons of water!!! Thus it would take approximately 60 million years if we solely depended on Costner’s machines.

British Petroleum or Beyond Petroleum?

What is in the name you may ask? Everything I say. The continued anti-British rhetoric by the U.S administration led by the supreme commander Obama himself has ruffled the feathers of the Britons. The whole situation is getting political overtones – with Obama giving his battle plans for the spill, attacking Britain tacitly owing to its British roots. But the oil giant is anything but British, it is a true blue MNC and has even changed its name to Beyond Petroleum long back. But I feel the reaction of the US is the typical “Uncle Sam behavior”. There is a sense of déjà vu as we see US plans to handle the situation and a parallel can be drawn to the issue of world terrorism. As long as the problem happens in the third world no one bothers and the moment the trouble crops up in your own backyard you shake the world. This irony is particularly stark as the oil spill comes at the backdrop of the delivery of sentence in the Bhopal gas disaster in which a callous US company is the main perpetrator of the tragedy.

I can’t stop myself from drawing vicarious pleasure to see the US fumbling to set its own house in order in the aftermath of a tragic chemical disaster that is bound to affect the biodiversity and livelihoods in the region for the decades to come.

Ecosystem based Adaptation – a new approach of adapting to climate change?

1. Environmental flow assessment (EFA) to evaluate the ecological, social and economic impacts of alternate flow regimes to build an evidence-base for water allocation decision options in Tanzania.
2. A systematic conservation plan on marine protected areas and mechanisms to support the development of communities based on explicitly modelled analysis of climate change at a local level in Papua New Guinea.
   
   These are instances of Ecosystem-based adaptation (EbA). International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) defines EbA as the use of biodiversity and ecosystem services as part of an overall adaptation strategy to help people adapt to the adverse effects of climate change. Ecosystem-based adaptation uses the sustainable management, conservation, and restoration of ecosystems to provide services that enable people to adapt to both current climate variability and long-term change.
   
   On the ground it translates among other things into diversification into sustainable livelihoods for communities which are currently solely dependent on climate sensitive resources. This would in turn discourage the unsustainable exploitation of natural resources and concomitantly increase the environmental resilience and thereby the ability of the environmental system to adapt to climate change.
   
   For the developed countries and even developing countries to a great extent, adapting to climate change has so far meant retrofitting of built environment, climate proofing of coastal infrastructure etc., but the EbA approach strives towards increasing the climate resilience of communities by decreasing their vulnerability to climate variability and climate change by strengthening the ecosystems. A functionally robust ecosystem with its allied ecosystem services can itself prove to be a bulwark between potential future climate disasters and the humanity. According to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment study the ecosystems provide us with a multitude of services classified as provisioning, regulating, cultural and supporting services.
   
   Already we have many projects being piloted in different parts of the country by many non-profits and research institutes which can be classified as EbA. Ecosystem restoration taken up by Green Coast through the plantation of 3,45,000 saplings of tropical dry evergreen forest species, economically important species and mangroves in 125 hactares, and the conservation of 15 hactares of sand dunes in Manakudi estuary, sustainable agriculture through System of Rice intensification (SRI) and concept of coastal bio-villages promoted by M.S.Swaminthan Research Foundation (MSSRF) to name a few. International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) with its partners has developed tools like CRiSTAL and SLED to help Community based Organizations (CBOs) and communities to plan, strategize and implement EbA. What is required at the moment is a more planned approach and institutionalization of the concept. EbA should be a process rather than a fragmented project based activity occuring in different temporal and spatial scales. It has to be a concerted effort between the multiple stakeholders viz. the state, the private sector, the civil society and above all the communities to realize the true potential of EbA.
   
   The draft on Green India Mission (a part of India’s National Action Plan on Climate Change) released recently by the Indian government extensively talks about eco restoration and the importance of holistic improvement of ecosystems rather than greening per se. This Mission could be a great precursor on our path to a new systems thinking called the “ecosystems approach”.