1. Looking to relocate? A new island pops up in the Red Sea. (Huffington Post Green)
2. Wyoming gets bragging rights: plans begin for North America’s largest wind farm. (TreeHugger)
3. Say goodbye to packaged foods. (Grist)
4. Meet the world’s smallest invertebrate — you may need your glasses! (Discovery News)
5. The FAA makes an exception: aircraft leads whooping cranes on their migration. (Washington Post)

1. Al Gore isn’t making any friends in the ethanol industry– he says his earlier support for corn-based ethanol subsidies was “a mistake.”  (Green)
2. The electric Nissan LEAF gets some pretty serious “gas” (charge) mileage.  (EcoGeek)
3. Did the Copenhagen climate talks accomplish anything?  A new report says yes, maybe a little bit.  (Christian Science Monitor)
4. The Tea Party’s latest target:  sustainable development.  (Mother Jones, via Grist)
5. Reusing vs. hoarding:  why it’s sometimes good to actually get rid of stuff.  (Treehugger)

*Programming note:  We’re taking a break from CGM on Thursday and Friday to celebrate the holiday, and you should, too.  See you on Monday!

Early Saturday morning in Nagoya, Japan, nature got a much needed ‘win.’

Almost a year after the bruising struggle of the Climate Change convention’s COP15, the Convention on Biological Diversity reached all three of its stated goals at its 10th Conference of Parties – an achievement that was uncertain right up to the end.

This negotiation was a quite different in tone from Copenhagen. Nagoya was not marked by any of the high drama and theatrics of Copenhagen, nor did it have heads of state flying in from all around the world. Rather, it was a much more business-like affair of diplomats and environment ministers rolling up their sleeves and working out compromises.

The three major outputs from the COP are:

1. The Nagoya Protocol
   After six years of negotiation, the Convention adopted the Nagoya Protocol on “access and benefit sharing” (ABS) of genetic resources. To make a complicated set of issues as simple as possible, this protocol is intended to define the rules of the game to cover the use of genetic resources taken from one place and transformed and commercialized somewhere else (so, imagine a Swiss pharmaceutical company taking a native plant root from a national park in Brazil and synthesizing a cure for cancer in a laboratory in Basel and then making a trillion dollars). The Protocol sets out the framework by which countries grant access to their genetic resources, regulate and license “bio-prospecting” and export of genetic materials, and revenue-sharing from potential commercialization of products derived from those genetic resources that someone is bothering to conserve. The idea is that clarifying the rules of the game will create additional incentives for countries to conserve nature’s treasure trove of potential cures for whatever ails us.
2. The Strategic Plan
   The conference also adopted a new “Strategic Plan” with a global goal of halting the loss of biodiversity by 2020 to ensure that ecosystems are resilient and able to continue to provide essential benefits and services for people. This represents a significant reframing of the biodiversity agenda around both climate change – noting the role of nature in both climate mitigation and adaptation – and the role of nature in poverty reduction. The 20 headline targets of the plan include:
   • Reduce the rate of all natural habitat loss by half by 2020.
   • All commercial fish stocks, forests and agricultural lands should be sustainably managed by 2020.
   • Prevent the extinction of known species by 2020.
   • By 2020, 17% of all terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems (we are currently at 12%) and 10% of all marine and coastal ecosystems (we are currently at only 1%) should be effectively managed in legally designated protected areas.
3. The Resource Mobilization Strategy
   Another reason for guarded optimism this time around is that the Biodiversity Convention also adopted a “resource mobilization strategy,” recognizing that we can’t achieve the goal and supporting targets without a substantial increase in funding for conservation. The Convention was also clever enough to look at financing from “all sources” recognizing the need for both public and private resources for conservation, as well as both domestic and foreign aid funding in developing countries. Earlier this year, the donor countries replenished the Global Environment Facility, the multilateral trust fund established to finance the climate and biodiversity conventions, to the tune of $4.25 Billion for the period 2010-2014, a 37% increase over the previous four-year period. And at the Conference, France announced an additional 4 Billion euros for conservation over the next decade.  We’ll come back in two years and have another round of talks on more specific funding targets once countries have assessed how much it will cost to achieve the targets (and hopefully when the world economy is a little healthier.)

Emergent Themes

Aside from the official negotiations, a couple of key themes emerged that will likely shape the discourse on conservation over the next few years. First, there was an undercurrent of recognition of the increasingly interrelated nature of biodiversity conservation, climate change and development. Second, there was a lot more focus on the economics of biodiversity. The headline for this was the launch of the TEEB (The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity), which basically summarized the state of the art on the valuation of ecosystem services, and scolded mainstream economics for ignoring the economic benefits of nature as well as ignoring the costs of ecosystem degradation and pollution.

Nature Conservancy Initiatives

Finally, let me highlight a bit of the Conservancy business that got done on the margins of the Conference.  Obviously, these conferences are important for the formal negotiations, but they are also the biggest trade fair of the year on biodiversity, attracting donors and partners and researchers and the media – which is where the real excitement is.

• Forever Costa Rica – We and our partners announced again the completion of the Forever Costa Rica project, whereby we collectively raised some $57 million to help Costa Rica complete its protected areas commitments under the Biodiversity Convention. The project was highlighted at a high level dinner celebrating the LifeWeb Initiative, which mobilized over $120 Million for conservation - Forever Costa Rica accounted for almost half of that.
• Tri-National Initiative – The Conservancy has been promoting a three-country protected areas initiative in Latin America, involving the governments of Colombia, Peru and Ecuador. Our savvy policy team there managed to get ministers from all three countries on the stage at an event to profile the developing project, with the right donor partners in the audience to witness the political commitment coming from the countries.
• Caribbean Challenge – We also had the occasion to highlight our Caribbean Challenge project as an innovative conservation finance scheme. The project aims to establish a $40 million trust fund to provide permanent funding for conservation in eight Caribbean countries, as well as matching contributions from each of the eight countries.
• West Indian Ocean Partnership – We also secured the commitment from the government of the Seychelles to work with a half dozen or more countries of the Indian Ocean and East African coast to develop a series of conservation commitments over the next year or so, modeled on the Micronesia and Carribean Challenges.
• We also launched two important reports on the status of the world’s Marine Protected Areas and on the state of financing of the protected areas networks of Latin America. The recommendations of the former directly influenced the marine outcomes of the negotiations, while the latter directly contributed to the finance outcome, providing a model for the national cost analyses that countries should undertake over the next two years.

Finally, I am more optimistic today than I was when the international community adopted a vague target in 2002 to halt the loss of biodiversity by 2010. This time around, we have a much clearer description of what success looks like, and what the path and guideposts are to get there. That’s significant, even if we are not 100% successful by 2020.

Lastly, let me just conclude by saying that we had a stellar (if now exhausted) and highly diverse Conservancy delegation in Nagoya, working the corridors, presiding at side events, and supporting the country delegations. Over the course of the two weeks, we had something like 12 nationalities represented, speaking over 10 languages, with a team that was never much bigger than 15 people. The Nature Conservancy truly looks and acts like an international organization on the world stage.

(Image: Cheetah in the Serengeti, Tanzania, Africa. Image credit: © Kenneth K. Coe)

1. Billions of California red worms are now helping convert one coffee producer’s waste pulp into fertilizer. (CleanTechnica)
2. Decreasing sea ice is causing reduced polar bear size and the numbers of cubs that make adulthood. (Conservation Maven)
3. While we talk about green energy, demand for coal just keeps increasing worldwide (sigh, cough). (Dot Earth)
4. The CO2 reduction pledges made at Copenhagen in December? New study says they’ll lead to a global temperature jump of at least 3°C by 2100. (Yale Environment 360)
5. Australians are so murderously rageful at invasive cane toads, they might be killing native frogs, too. (Journal Watch Online)

I posted late last month about the Copenhagen Accord and how its simple appendices could be the very small beginnings to a new era of international climate change action. There are plenty of shortcomings of this accord: It lacks detail, it doesn’t set a global emissions reduction target, it has unclear legal status and no compliance mechanism, it doesn’t specify how funding pledges will be delivered, etc.

But the accord does include some important compromises. And it provides the potential to encompass more emissions than we have seen before…if countries support it as an important first step.

January 31 was a key milestone for the accord — an initial deadline for countries to offer voluntary commitments to lower their carbon emissions. So…what happened?

Well, just look at this list of developing countries who have registered their actions, a list provided by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). This has been the most-watched web page in the international climate community in the past week, as people around the world have waited to see which countries are “signing up” for the accord (not technically the right phrase to characterize these actions, but you get the idea). There is another web page with developed-county actions here, whose most important registrant is way down at the bottom.

But the world has been asking for developed countries to act on climate change for years (with mixed results at best). What is so powerful is looking at the list of developing countries that are willing – with significantly fewer economic resources in most cases — to take their own actions to reduce climate change.

Look at it. China, Brazil, Mexico, India, Indonesia, South Africa…. All there. Some of the largest developing countries, accounting for a pretty big chunk of global emissions.

But there are many smaller countries as well, including some of the world’s least-developed countries like Ethiopia, Madagascar and Sierra Leone, and others such as Costa Rica, Mongolia, the Maldives and Papua New Guinea. Some of their submissions call for support from developed countries, and probably include those efforts that are already a part of their individual sustainable-development planning. But that is a key recognition of the accord as well — that “a low-emission development strategy is indispensible to sustainable development.”

In my opinion, in light of or in spite of the critical health and human welfare issues they face, it is a strong statement that these small developing countries are willing to list actions they will take to reduce emissions, regardless of how large or small those actions are.

(Image: Detail of Papua New Guinea’s letter to the United Nations pledging reductions of its greenhouse gas emissions. Graphic created by Christopher Johnson and Robert Lalasz/TNC.)

Last month, the blog Solve Climate published a report detailing Bell Labs’ new initiative to make the systems that power the Internet more energy efficient by convening a “Green Touch” consortium composed of industry, universities, science labs and non-profits. The consortium is committed to find open-source solutions to energy efficiency, with the goal of making communications networks “1,000 times more energy efficient” within the next five years.

But what interested me most about this report was a nugget buried in the middle of the text:

Recently, the industry lost its battle to have the information and communication technology sector (ICT) included in the ‘Copenhagen Accord’ that came out of the two-week talks in December. Advocates believe that getting mention of ICT into the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) text would unleash dollars and innovation.

Making no mention of failed global climate policy, Bell Labs insisted Green Touch would deliver a radical re-engineering of global networks by 2015.

Essentially, because governments decided not to include cutting emissions from the ICT sector, an industry leader has taken it upon itself take on that challenge. As world governments continue to struggle with attempts to solve the climate change crisis and limit greenhouse gas emissions, businesses — especially in the tech sector — are stepping up to the plate to fill the void.

Why? Because they know it will eventually help their bottom line. If Bell Labs and others can create a scheme that allows networks to achieve 1,000 times greater efficiency, it will make economic sense to rebuild the network, which in turn will create massive business opportunities across the sector.

Another example of this leading-edge thinking is Google, one of the biggest believers in fighting climate change as a business model.

The company is developing software to monitor home-energy use, working to develop “utility scale renewable energy cheaper than coal,” and accelerating the commercialization of plug-in vehicles. (Solve Climate has a great rundown of all of Google’s forays into the clean energy sector.)

All three initiatives are under the google.org umbrella, but I’m willing to bet a month’s salary that Google plans on turning all of these initiatives into for-profit ventures.

This can be read in the tea leaves of Google’s recent request before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to become an electricity marketer. The company made no public statement when it filed the request, but told reporters that the move is designed to help it better manage energy supplies for its own operations and give the company better access to renewable energy.

But there’s more. According to The Wall Street Journal, Google’s application reserves the right to “’act as a power marketer, purchasing electricity and reselling it to wholesale customers,’ and trading ‘in the bulk power markets, such as arranging…transmission and fuel supplies.’”

In short, Google reserves the right to be your power company.

It’s not hard to see how this plays out. Google becomes a renewable power company, signs up homeowners who install the Google power meter, and buy the Google plug-in vehicle, which they power with Google Energy.

So why are these smart companies stepping up now — and potentially investing millions — when the world’s governments continue to drag their feet in providing the all-important “regulatory certainty” that clean energy technologies will be needed? After all, we could continue to dig and drill for our energy without limits and all of Google’s clean energy investments would be for naught.

Certainly, Google and Bell Labs are betting governments will eventually provide that regulatory certainty. But they’re also well aware of two certainties — inevitabilities, really — that will define all businesses in the long-term:

1. Climate change is real — and, as we continue to see its effects, people will demand action (and Google, Bell Labs and others will be there with solutions).
2. Even without climate change, you can’t dig and drill for energy forever. (When the wells run dry and all the mountains are blasted, Google, Bell Labs and others will be there with solutions.)

Smart companies inherently get these two certainties (and the near certainty of eventual government regulation) and are making plans to adapt their businesses to them so they can stay profitable at a minimum and — in the best case — boost their profits during the change.

Dumb companies bury their heads in the sand and wait for that next mountain top to be blasted, or the next well to be drilled.

1. Trees in Eastern forests are adapting to climate change by growing faster. (NY Times)
2. The deadline for the Copenhagen Accord came… and went. See who submitted their plans. (The Vine)
3. Orcas are making a comeback in the Northwest, with the help of 6 new babies. (Christian Science Monitor)
4. That idea to paint roofs white in order to reduce energy use? Not gonna work, says a new study. (Conservation Journal Watch)
5. The blobfish – perhaps the world’s ugliest creature – faces extinction from bottom trawling. (Extinction Countdown)

1. Want your martini shaken, stirred and green? There’s a new book guide to organic cocktails. (The Chic Ecologist)
2. The UN drops its January 31 deadline for countries to submit their CO2-emission-reduction proposals. (CleanTechnica)
3. What are the real gaps in climate science (no, we’re not talking climategate)? (NatureNews)
4. The leading GOP pollster tells us all how to pass a climate bill. (The Vine)
5. Conservation biologists are really slow at submitting journal articles (Journal Watch Online).

What we know happened was that the Copenhagen accord was “taken note” of within the official negotiations. The Accord was a political agreement brokered by some countries and acknowledged by almost all of the countries. The four-page document outlines some areas of agreement, including keeping global warming to 2 degrees Celsius, recognizing the importance of stopping deforestation and mobilizing billions in funding to tackle climate change. But it falls well short of securing a new legally-binding global agreement.

There are few, if any, who think the accord is a great deal for the climate or for the most vulnerable people who are affected most by climate change. But it has the potential to be an important step forward by — for the first time — registering developing country actions to reduce emissions in a measurable and transparent way.

Why is this important? The Kyoto Protocol — the world’s current best effort to reduce emissions — only covers about 30% of current global emissions because both the United States and China and other major developing emitters are not part of it. Tackling 30% of global emissions leaves 70% left to grow unfettered, which means there is no chance of curbing global emissions and climate change under the current climate regime.

To get China and the United States on board (who jointly make up close to half of global emissions), they both need to jump. Neither is willing to move without the other taking action. And that is where the two simple tables in the Copenhagen accord have the potential to be a game-changing step in global efforts to slow climate change.

Now, the next opportunity to jump is approaching. The Copenhagen accord set January 31st as the date for developed and developing countries to submit their voluntary targets and actions in two simple appendices. One is for developed countries. One for developing countries. Each appendix has two columns: name of country, emissions reductions or “action” to be taken. Well, developed countries also have to list the base year that they will measure against (e.g., 20% reductions over 2005 levels).

In the United States, getting actions on paper in a formal document is hoped to allay fears that U.S. efforts to reduce emissions won’t put us at a disadvantage to our economic competitors (read, China). This is huge in a country where economic progress is the very fabric of our society.

Countries that sign on to the Copenhagen accord with their targets and actions will show their readiness to continue moving forward to address this complex global threat. At least the simplicity of these two tables shouldn’t create any new barriers to further action on climate change.

(Image credit: Chrissy Schwinn.)

Opinions expressed here and in any corresponding comments are the personal opinions of the original authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Nature Conservancy. For more information about our editorial policy and legal terms of use, see our About This Blog page.

The other day I was walking to work at The Nature Conservancy’s headquarters in Arlington, Va., when I noticed that a small tree was sticking up from part of the roof just behind the big Conservancy logo sign that’s over our building’s front door.

The little tree is also visible from the windows of our U.S. government relations office. Through them, I could see that a seed blown on the wind had found a place between some gravel and a rain gutter and managed to take root. While eventually I am sure the tree will have to go, it seems to me a symbol both of the tenacity of nature and of the stubborn determination required by the Conservancy to save the natural world.

Despite nature’s grace and strength, that determination is no match — at least in the short run — for the pressures that will be placed on Earth by the 9 billion people expected here by mid-century. But the tree tells us where the Conservancy and conservation should be going…and how we will get there.

Not long ago, of course, humans thought nature to be all-powerful, and subduing forests and prairies for our purposes was seen as an admirable endeavor. Today, people have been so successful at converting natural habitats to other uses that we have impacted virtually every natural place on Earth. As a result, the extinction rate for native species continues to increase.

But some scientists now argue that nature is more resilient than we had thought — that, given assistance, natural systems can adapt and be more resilient to change. A four-foot tree growing out of roofing gravel may be evidence of this. We better hope so, because climate change, population growth and infrastructure development will further stress Earth’s ecosystems in the years to come.

One of the most exciting things happening at the Conservancy as we enter 2010 is the idea that we can pioneer ways to help nature be more resilient. Aiding resilience takes us beyond our historical model of preserving natural areas as they are, with all their species and interactions intact. It means that we might have to let go of some of the details to save the natural processes, connectivity and the dynamic quality of large ecosystems which may in time become different, but no less remarkable. This task can and should be done by continuing to work at real places — but at larger scales, and with new and sometimes risky ideas about the future.

An apparent success of the Copenhagen climate conference was the commitment of substantial amounts of money to climate change adaptation. No organization is better suited to invest some of that money well than the Conservancy is — provided that we are tough enough for the challenge.

This new sort of conservation will be less about setting aside preserves apart from people (which is still a good, straightforward task) and more about figuring out how nature and people can work together at large scales to create a more sustainable world. And that figuring-out process gets messy. The bargaining is not always easy. People get angry. If we want to make a difference, we cannot always stand aside from controversy.

Left to its own devices, human society moves toward what is not sustainable; our species is not respectful of the finite capacity of natural systems to support human endeavors. Conservation — even conservation that respects the human benefits of land and water — runs in a counter direction.

Getting society in the United States and around the world to change its course, to respect natural systems and functions at the scale necessary to make a difference, is an arduous but exciting task. For all this, we at the Conservancy (and all of us concerned about the natural world) must be strong and resilient — like a tree growing unexpectedly in the middle of the city.

(Image credit: Robert Lalasz/TNC.)