Why It Matters : Project Green

Of Sludge and Salad: Wastewater Greens the World's Gardens

Newsweek — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 07:14:52 GMT

You might want to hold your nose for this one.

Photo: IWMI

An intriguing new study is out on the use of wastewater in world agriculture. If you've ever wondered where all that cruddy old water goes when you pull the bathtub plug, brush your teeth, or purge the loo, this is the report you've been waiting for. The short answer: On your salad. The big surprise is, that may not be all bad.

In a survey of 53 cities worldwide, the International Water Management Institute (IMWI), a water research and advocacy group, has found that the vast majority of produce cultivated in urban plots is irrigated with what amounts to tainted water, fetched from polluted streams and lakes or wells. True, only a fraction (say 10 percent) of global agricultural output is harvested in the cities, and only a part of that crop is consumed uncooked. Yet in these cities alone, some 1.1 million farmers produce vegetables and fruit for 4.5 million people. Projecting the numbers worldwide, no fewer than 200 million farmers rely on recycled water to sow 20 million hectares, an area twice the size of Hungary. The findings were released during World Water Week, a summit of sages and policy types gathered in Stockholm through Aug. 23 in an effort to rethink the way the world farms and flushes.

At first whiff, this all seems dire. After all, the water we dump, from sink or commode, back into an ecosystem, carries a galaxy of bugs, bacteria and germs that can cause nasty diseases from diarrhea to hepatitis. Worse, it's a good bet that most families that consume the fruit and vegetables grown with such swill do not properly wash their produce, a sure invitation to illness. Cholera outbreaks in Israel and Chile have been traced to food contaminated with wastewater .

Now it turns out that even the plumbing has a silver lining. Noisome as it seems, dirty water may be the only reason that many people around the world eat at all, especially in the poorest countries. Nearly 200,000 residents in Accra, the capital of Ghana, put produce on the table thanks largely to wastewater. Nearly a quarter of Pakistan's domestic vegetables are nurtured with wastewater. It's no exaggeration to say that "bad" water helps fill the bowls of scores of calorie depleted households around the world.

Add to that the fact that irrigating with waste adds a kind of pro bono fertilizer to the farm and also returns moisture to drying lands. "It's a great way to cope with water stress," says senior IWMI official, Pay Drechsel. The soil is also a great natural filter, "cleansing" dirty water as it seeps into the ground. There may even be a plus for the climate, as sludge-laden water returns carbon to the earth that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere.

More to the point, there may be little alternative. For a time, the World Health Organization, rightly fearing the rampant spread of diseases, cautioned against using tainted water for cropping. But in time, "they realized this would put millions of farmers out of business," says Drechsel. Some 85 percent of the 53 cities studied dump their sewage and wastewater into streams and lakes. In the poorest societies, where clean water is as precious as it is scarce, diverting fresh water to the farm is to rob the drinking glass.

WHO has now adapted its approach, signing off on farming with wastewater in countries where clean water is scarce but with the caveat that authorities move aggressively to treat waste and that families thoroughly wash their produce. "With an ever greater number of emerging economies lacking resources to adequately treat their waste, this situation will continue."

So pull the plug and pass the salad. But wash, first.

The G8: Butting Heads on Climate

Katie Paul — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 17:07:59 GMT

Finding ways of capping carbon emissions is on the agenda for this week’s G8 Summit, which begins today on the pristine Japanese island of Hokkaido. But if anything is getting capped, it’s expectations for a meaningful agreement on climate change.

A competing jumble of climate change negotiations have turned the forum itself into a debate topic as polarizing as the carbon markets and global targets being proposed. Not one, but two extra groups have joined the G8 at Hokkaido, each with the potential to reach its own set of conclusions. The G8 + 5 group brings major developing emitters like China and India into the fold, and the Major Economies Meeting (MEM), George W. Bush’s brainchild, adds three other big carbon emitters—Indonesia, Australia and South Korea—into the mix. Together, the groups account for 80 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. Washington would prefer to settle the major points at the MEM before tackling the unwieldy 200-country United Nations gatherings, which are coming up against their deadline for a post-Kyoto treaty to be approved in Copenhagen in December of 2009. Coming out of Hokkaido empty-handed will make pre-Copenhagen talks this fall just that much messier.

Still, while none of the three groupings at Hokkaido will likely produce a major consensus on emissions caps, they are producing a lively diplomatic chess match. E.U. members, who want the group to commit to steep cuts in carbon emissions by 2050, are butting heads with Bush over his unwillingness to commit to numerical targets. Meanwhile, Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda is trying to broker a compromise. With a more green-friendly Obama or McCain administration only months away, Fukuda apparently believes that a tussle with Bush is counterproductive. Instead, he’s pushing for agreements on less-polarizing issues, such as encouraging carbon capture and storage technology for coal power plants, promoting nuclear energy and lowering tariffs on clean technology.

“There are some folks out there who think the rest of the world can settle on their own agreement and expect the United States to then come and join under a new administration,” said Council on Foreign Relations environmental expert Michael Levi on a recent press conference call. “But the Japanese understand that, regardless of substance, the United States is going to have to be part of creating whatever agreement happens if there’s any chance that the U.S. will end up being part of that agreement.”

The Green Wall of China - and beyond

Mac Margolis — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 12:23:10 GMT

For calloused earth watchers, the latest word on the state of global forests was all too familiar. In the annual Global Monitoring Report 2008, released on April 8, the World Bank concluded that the planet's woodlands are still vanishing at an alarming rate. Between 2000 and 2005, according to the most up-to-date numbers, an average of 73,000 square kilometers of forests fell annually. That is to say, a swath of forest the size of Panama tumbles every year to the loggers' chainsaws, the planters' bulldozer, and the settlers cocktail of kerosene and a match.

More than provoking another round of handwringing, the report is sure to add wood to the already inflamed political row over who is to blame for the worsening assault on the earth's climate. Thanks to the rich world's addiction to fossil fuels like oil, natural gas and coal, developing nations have often been portrayed as innocents in the tale of dangerous climate change. That is no longer the case. The felling of forests accounts for about 20 percent of all the carbon that humans pour into the skies every year, worsening the planetary greenhouse effect and driving unpredictable climate change. Leading the plunder are the developing nations, with top honors going to Brazil and Indonesia, which together (see chart, page 206) destroy nearly 50 million kilometers of woodlands a year. So whether it's burning gasoline or torching rainforests, no society has a monopoly on fouling the earth's atmosphere.

But there are some surprises in the dismal forest tally. First, while the assault against woodlands is a global one, some countries have been quietly getiing greener. In fact, many woodlands are growing back at a pace that has taken the scientific world by surprise, starting with the richest nations. Thanks to a combination of aggressive reforestation, preservation, falling population, and removing marginal farm land from cultivation, countries from Japan to Germany have seen their forests flourish in recent years. In Spain, Ukraine and Finland, tree farming for timber and pulp and paper has clothed once barren plots. Japan has denser forests today than it did before World War II. All told, 22 of the world's most forested nations had become greener between 1990 and 2005, according to a study of international specialists coordinated by the University of Helsinki.

By 2005, according to the World Bank, high income countries boasted close to 1 hectare of forest per person, three times the green space per capita (.29 hectares) in the poorest nation. The gains were particularly startling in Europe, where new forests are helping literally to clear the air, sopping up 126 million tons of atmospheric carbon a year, equal to 10 percent of all EU smokestack and tailpipe emissions.

More remarkably, two of the biggest and fastest developing nations are also reversing the deforestation curse, challenging the notion that development with preservation is an oxymoron. India and China have recorded some of the fastest gains in forest cover on the planet. Indeed, if Brazil is the all too familiar portrait of forests in peril then China has become the unlikely poster child of preservation. China's green thumb arose from environmental disaster. As it happened, predatory wood cutters and farmers had so depleted the stands of trees girdling the lowlands that in 1998 disaster struck; torrential rains swelled the Yangtze river, causing devastating floods that claimed more than 3,000 lives.

Since then Beijing cracked down on bootleg loggers and exhorted the nation to sow the nation with fast growing poplar, eucalyptus and pine. By some count the Chinese plant 5 billion trees a year. Though the new forests are a thin filter for the megatons of greenhouse gases hurled into the skies by China's breakneck development, replanted areas already take up more carbon than the amount released by annual tree felling. (Planted forests in India are drinking up nearly as much carbon as the country's woodcutters and developers can release.)

Environmental purists may argue, with reason, that the soldierly rows of eucalyptus for pulp and paper or exotic pine for construction are poor stand-ins for the majestic old growth forests that once crowned the planet. But in a world choking on the consequences of decades of environmental plunder, the fact that the planet is a little greener is already a breath of fresh of air.

See Naples ... Die

Newsweek — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 12:19:48 GMT

By Barbie Nadeau

I can only begin to tell you how much I love Napoli. It is a city that entices you by defying you, and constantly surprising you. Naples is an acquired taste, to be sure. It is too loud, too fast, too chaotic –not to mention too dirty, especially recently--but at the same time its beauty, historical significance and unique energy make it well worth enduring all the negatives.

I always imagined the only thing that could really defeat this vibrant city would be Vesuvius erupting or some sort of freak tsunami-like wave from the sea. Sadly, this beautiful urban organism actually is dying a much worse death. After months of negative publicity about the ever--and still--present garbage in the streets, the city seems to be giving up. Store window displays make apologies for the trash on the sidewalks. Even the city's "what's on" monthly magazine Qui Napoli asks forgiveness and patience on it's cover: "Sorry, we'll come back prettier than before." Worse yet, major hotels like the Continental are closing. And famous restaurants like the Caruso roof garden atop the Grande Albergo Vesuvio, where international A-listers used to have their own tables, are locking up simply because no one wants to come to Napoli anymore.

That's a justified reaction, perhaps. After all, who wants to walk through miasmic mounds of rodent-ridden garbage? But it's an unfair response to the problems in Naples. Many Mediterranean cities like Naples which are rich in culture rely heavily on tourism. Once it's gone, they are left vulnerable and virtually ruined.

The garbage stinks, sure, but Naples' gems are still there: its archaeological museum continues to highlight world-renowned artifacts from Pompeii and Herculaneum that simply can't be seen anywhere but Naples. The San Carlo theater, as well, is booming after a 50 million euro shot in the arm. Famed Neapolitan director Riccardo Muti is even coming back to conduct a special concert later in the year. And there is still that unmistakable Neapolitan energy that writhes through the city.

Many Neapolitans blame the recent scrutiny in the press for what seems to be the final nail in the city's coffin. But it is actually the lack of focus by local and regional government that is responsible. Even after the firestorm of attention over the last few months and years, garbage continues to line the streets. Some 100,000 tons have been shipped to other parts of the country, including Sardinia and some northern provinces, but Neapolitans continue to produce refuse and it continues to rot in many public spaces.

The historical center, it should be said, appears much cleaner. Where dumpsters overflowed just a month ago, in some cases there simply are no dumpsters at all now. But where they are present, their contents are still spilling out. Giving in to random fits of rage, frustrated locals spontaneously dump garbage on busy streets. In the suburbs the situation is still worse. The piles are higher and much more spread out than at the height of the post-Christmas crisis. The environmental disaster that looms is hard to fathom.

As Italy prepares for elections in April, the garbage crisis has become a central issue in the campaign, with both sides promising to fix the problem for good "this time." In fact, last weekend an Italian judge ordered 28 people to stand trial for their part in the garbage crisis, including the regional president Antonio Bassolino, who is charged with defrauding the state and abuse of office. Also charged is the Impregilo construction company and its affiliates for mismanagement and defrauding the state. (All deny any wrongdoing.)

While accountability won't clean up the mess, it may at least curtail some of the corruption and misuse of resources that led to it. A little late, perhaps, plans are also underway to teach Neapolitans the value of recycling and reusing. All across the city the environmental groups Legambiente and Greenpeace are handing out recycling containers and giving mini-seminars to teach people in the local community what they should do at home. Still, there is a long way to go before the city is clean again, even by Neapolitan standards.

Maybe cities don't die. But loss of dignity is one of the curses of old age, and this venerable beauty deserves better care than she's been getting.

(Photograph of garbage in Naples by Barbie Nadeau)