Russia advances in aiding indigenous peoples but challenges remain - UN expert

Russia’s federal and regional governments have undertaken several impressive steps to tackle the concerns of its small number of indigenous peoples, but significant challenges remain in overcoming poverty, unemployment and other social ills, a United Nations human rights expert said today.

Endorsing Gaza war report, UN Human Rights Council condemns Israel

The Human Rights Council today strongly condemned a host of Israeli measures in the occupied Palestinian territory and called on both sides to implement the recommendations of a United Nations commission that found evidence that Israel and the Palestinians committed serious war crimes in the three-week Gaza war nine months ago.

African governments on the improve, but corruption on the rise - UN report

African nations have made marginal progress in the core areas of governance over the last four years, according to a new United Nations report, which has expressed concern over a rise in corruption in the continent’s authorities in the same period.

UN rights expert credits Brazil with major progress on improving access to food

Brazil has made substantial progress in ensuring all its citizens have access to food, but authorities in the South American nation should do more to help the most vulnerable groups, such as the landless and small farmers, a United Nations human rights expert said today.

Virgin Money’s climate change Isa gets Richard Branson in a pickle

Arms manufacturers, tobacco companies, mining giants and oil companies. These are not the kind of companies where you would expect an ethically minded saving operation to be investing the hard-earned cash of an ethically minded saver. And yet Toby Webb says that is exactly where his money ended up when he entrusted it to the Virgin Money climate change Isa.

Toby is no naive green investor. He is the founder of a company called the Ethical Corporation that runs conferences and a magazine that explores how companies are greening themselves.

But even he admits to being shocked when he read the small print on the progress of his investment from Virgin Money. He wrote in a blog: “I had expected the fund to be investing in clean tech firms. Exciting new technology companies set to capitalise on the next green revolution.”

But Virgin had other plans for his climate-saving cash. It decided that those cutting-edge clean tech companies, which it calls “solution providers”, would get “up to 10%” of the Isa’s money. Note that phrase “up to”. It could be zero.

Likewise the “solution adopters”, would get “up to 15%”. For the rest, “between 75 and 100%”, Virgin simply promises to find companies with a “lighter environmental footprint”. Oh, and they must show “outstanding profit growth”.

What does a “lighter” footprint mean? The term turns out to be alarmingly elastic.

For a start, it does not exclude any industry. Oil and coal companies may be the villains of climate change, but that does not count them out of Virgin’s climate change Isa. This, Virgin tells its customers, is “so you don’t miss out on lucrative sectors like oil, gas, electricity and transportation.” Hmm.

Instead Virgin applies what it calls a “green filter” to select companies with better-than-average green credentials within any industry sector. That’s what it says: better than average. Impressively perhaps, Virgin says that in pursuit of this somewhat-less-than-gold standard, its consultants, Trucost, analyse no less than 700 criteria of green-ness.

Now Toby may not admit it, but he is a whizz at getting to the bottom of corporate ethical and unethical strategies. That’s his business, after all. But he says, he even he had trouble finding out what the 700 filter factors were.

They seem to cover everything from cutting greenhouse emissions to doing something as banal and commonplace as “encouraging recycling in their workplaces”.

To be fair, many of the big corporations on Virgin’s green investment list do a bit more than encourage their staff to put their office waste paper in a separate bin. But in some sectors of industry, being “better than average” may not involve much more. So if you are a slightly better-than-average coal company, you’re in.

And despite the “climate change” name, the huge ragbag of environmental criteria mean that companies do not even have to be better than average in fighting climate change.

Toby found that some of his money had gone to the French oil giant Total, which featured in my Greenwash column a few weeks ago.

Other past subjects of this column’s investigations that made it into Virgin Money’s good-guys list include the banks HSBC and the Royal Bank of Scotland.

And then there is the mining and metals giant, Rio Tinto. It is not everybody’s idea of a climate-friendly company, being one of the world’s largest coal miners. And its aluminium smelters are among the world’s worst climate villains because of the company’s unusually heavy reliance on burning coal for the hugely energy-hungry smelting process.

A couple of years ago, I visited one of Rio Tinto’s largest aluminium smelting operations, at Gladstone in Queensland. It is hooked up to a 30-year-old coal power station. Producing the metal for each beer can there generates enough CO2 to fill 300 cans.

Yet Virgin is blithely putting its climate change Isa money into this company. Lighter footprint? Give me a break.

Also getting the green nod is British Aerospace, now called BAE Systems, one of the world’s great arms manufacturers. In the last little while, BAe has been greening its image. Virgin seems to have been impressed.

Virgin says its investment policies encourage even the biggest and least-green companies to clean up their act. “This is a pressure that traditional green funds cannot exert,” says press officer Scott Mowbray. “It is important that the firms from the most damaging sectors receive investment to improve their environmental credentials.”

But Toby says the big guys don’t need his money. It is the smaller “solution providers” that are struggling to get investment. By putting most of Toby’s money instead into the likes of Total, BAe and Rio Tinto, Virgin is delivering them a damaging snub.

It is an interesting debate. But Toby is probably not the only Virgin investor who will feel let down by how Branson’s best are investing money they thought was going to fight climate change.

Renewable energy sparks new opportunities

THE government’s new system for subsidising renewable energy – to be introduced in April – should provide a major boost for dairy farmers and other landowners who currently face high electricity bills.

That was the view this week of Robin Priestley, of Brodies LLP at its conference on how to harness renewable energy.

The new Feed-In Tariffs (FITs) provide advantages in that they pay for all the electricity generated, as well as surplus power sold to the grid.

The scheme is targeted at small-scale operations up to a limit of five megawatts, and this puts it, according to Priestley, in the range that many farmers could benefit from.

The changing public attitude to renewable energy and climate change is also helping encourage more landowners to look at the opportunity provided by renewable schemes, either through wind power or hydro, according to Alex Buchan, also of Brodie’s

“We are increasingly busy with smaller-scale schemes, which are still quite complex in that they require legal expertise in property, planning, taxation and other matters,” he said.

” Dealing correctly with these aspects can be critical to the success or otherwise of any project. However, it is noticeable that the public acceptability of renewable energy and its benefit to the country is more apparent.”

The increased use of planning conditions, or Section 75 agreements, might also induce communities to support applications, as they can also reap some of the benefit of renewable energy through this condition.

Buchan advised anyone thinking of pursuing the development of a project for either wind or water power to seek advice from people or organisations with a positive track record in this relatively new technology.

The Scottish Government has a renewable energy target of 31 per cent of energy coming from renewable sources by 2011 and while that target now seems achievable, the bar is being raised to 50 per cent by 2020.

One major problem in hitting those targets, however, is that connection to the National Grid is not as straightforward as it could be. There is sufficient capacity in the Central Belt of Scotland, but in the north where there are big plans for expansion of wind farms, the infrastructure is often not up to requirements.

Historically, planning has been a major hurdle for such projects, but the new laws should help reduce the height of that hurdle, says Priestley, but he conceded there would be flashpoints between developers and residents.

By Andrew Arbuckle

Honduras: UN sends team to examine human rights violations after coup

The United Nations human rights chief is sending a team to Honduras on Sunday for a three-week official visit to examine violations of rights in the wake of the coup d’état in the Central American country in June.

Zimbabwe, Southern Sudan to Strengthen Ties

‘Zim, Southern Sudan to strengthen ties’

Herald Reporters

ZIMBABWE will soon open a consulate in Southern Sudan to strengthen bilateral relations between the two countries, Vice President Joice Mujuru said on Wednesday.

VP Mujuru said this at a dinner she hosted for Sudan First Vice President Salva Kiir Mayardit who is also Southern Sudan President.
“I wish to inform you that Zimbabwe will soon open a consulate in Juba (Southern Sudan capital), with a view to broadening and deepening our bilateral cooperation,” she said.

VP Mujuru said relations between Zimbabwe and Southern Sudan date back to the early 1980s when the Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement was launched to rid Africa’s largest country of all forms of injustices.

“The history of co-operation between the Government of the Republic of Zimbabwe and the SPLM is well documented.

“We would want to underline that when the SPLM, under the late charismatic John Garang took up arms to fight, what they were fighting were the relics of injustice.

“Because the fight in Sudan was aimed at eradicating all forms of oppression we found common ground with them as we had also fought to unshackle ourselves from the yokes of colonialism,” said VP Mujuru.

She called on the international community to support the Comprehensive Peace Agreement signed between SPLM and the Government of Sudan to end the civil war in that country in 2005.

“I wish to call upon the international community to resolutely support all efforts leading to the full implementation of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement.

“As you may be aware, Zimbabwe is in the process of implementing its own Global Political Agreement and we understand the value of international support in such initiatives.

“We want to underline, however, that there is a clear distinction between support and interference. We believe support should be based on the concept of sovereign equality of nations,” said VP Mujuru.

She also urged Zimbabwean businessman to take advantage of investment opportunities in Southern Sudan.

“To all business people and prospective investors in our midst, here is a generously endowed country waiting for a Midas touch to assume its rightful place among the economic giants of Africa.

“I am informed that Southern Sudan is home to some of Africa’s perennial rivers. As a farming nation ourselves, we can only conclude that given its size, rainfall patterns and soil fertility, Southern Sudan is naturally an attractive partner for us in agricultural development,” she said.

The Sudanese Vice President thanked Zimbabwe for the assistance it extended during their struggle.

“I came here to thank you and all brothers and sisters in Sadc for all the assistance and the important role you played in our struggle.

Although we are late in thanking you we are mindful of our friends and will never forget you,” said VP Mayardit. He said his government needed support because there was little or no institutions of infrastructure in Sudan.

“Things were not easy for us when we came from the bush because there were no institutions in the first place, we did not have any infrastructure. You are a government that has been there for a long time and we have a lot to learn from you,” said VP Mayardit.

VP Mayardit arrived in the country on Wednesday to consult and update President Mugabe on the peace agreement between the Sudan People’s Liberation Army and the government in Khartoum.

More power to women

Herald Reporters

THE Government will continue empowering women through access to land and requisite inputs and other materials needed for them to increase agricultural productivity and improve their financial well-being, President Mugabe has said.

He said this while officiating at the inaugural Women’s Economic Summit in Harare yesterday.

“It is our sincere wish that women’s food-generating activities can be improved to lead to financial security realised from their sale of their produce. This, ladies and gentlemen, can only occur when and where appropriate policies regarding women’s access to land, and the provision of vital farming inputs and credit are put in place on time.

“In Zimbabwe, we continue to do our best in prioritising allocation of land and farming inputs to our women and thus empowering them, through our much-maligned land redistribution programme.”

President Mugabe said special financing mechanisms that took into account the needs of women were needed.

“Reflecting on our seasons past and present, it is clear that we need a special financial window that will take into account the financial needs of women. For this to happen, appropriate legislation, where presently it may not exist, will need to be crafted to remove the minor status of women with regards to signing contractual obligations, in their own right independent of their spouses.”

President Mugabe said the improvement of women’s status needed joint efforts from both sexes.

“While the subject is one that relates directly to women, it is a subject for all of us. We all must join hands as we develop the status of our women in society. We all must work together, men and women must work together to improve the status of women.”

While women constitute 52 percent of Africa’s population, President Mugabe lamented that it was worrying that their contribution to food security on the continent was limited.

“With 52 percent of Africa’s population made up of women, it is without question appropriate that the continent’s political and social activities reflect this population composition. The good news is that these statistics are now well accepted and documented.

“The challenge thereof is to strengthen efforts that are being made for women to get assistance in producing food, not only for the sustenance of their families, but for the well- being of their communities, countries and their neighbouring countries as well.”

He said experience in Bangladesh had shown that women had the lowest defaulting rate when it comes to repaying loans.

“It is important to note that the experiences of Bangladesh’s Grameen Bank have shown that women have the lowest defaulting rate when it comes to loan funds,” said President Mugabe.

On the current constitution-making process, President Mugabe urged women to actively participate so that their views and aspirations were adequately captured.

“As most of you here present may know, Zimbabwe is in the process of drafting a new people-driven constitution. It is our sincere hope that all women’s groups will take an active interest in this exercise and provide valuable input to come up with a constitution that truly empowers them.”

President Mugabe bemoaned the under representation of women in positions of authority in both political and business fields.

“I note that one of your conference’s goals is to improve women’s leadership capacity, which I am sure, extends to socio-economic-political spheres as well as to the corporate world. Indeed, that there is a paucity of women leadership in these areas in much of Africa is not debatable. In the corporate world, many of the positions in companies’ top management and corporate boards are mainly taken up by men.

“The same extends to the political leadership, where for now, there is only one woman president in Africa and that is President Sirleaf Johnson of Liberia in a continent, we should remember, where women constitute 52 percent of the population.”

The President said for women to attain these leadership positions, they must be equipped with the requisite education, training and skills and urged them to lead in pursuing educational opportunities and career paths they aspired for.

“Barring cultural practices that have tended to militate against the girl child educationally, women should be in the forefront in pursuing educational opportunities and career paths which lead them to the critical positions they aspire to. It is also through education and training that women will realise their aspirations for emancipation and empowerment.”

He, however, said the drive by women for greater involvement in all facets of life would not be easy given deep-rooted traditions held by some men.

“Naturally, there will be resistance from some men who will see such ‘encroachment’ into traditionally male domains as threats to their positions and livelihoods. That is to be expected and women should craft strategies for dealing with such eventualities,” he said.

President Mugabe urged the women to implement decisions and strategies they would agree upon during the conference.

Addressing the same event later in the day, Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai said the imbalances that existed between men and women were a threat to Zimbabwe’s efforts to achieve set development targets.

“Our inheritance is fraught with situations which disadvantage women and fail to acknowledge their invaluable presence as an essential natural resource and equal partners for human development. Our ability to realise our global goals shall suffer permanently unless we take a radical and visible path to rectify the glaring imbalances in our society,” said PM Tsvangirai while delivering the keynote address.

PM Tsvangirai said while a lot had been done in areas of advocacy and legislation, more still needed to be done to change mindsets that inhibited gender relations.

“A lot of movement has taken place in the area of advocacy and legislation, but there seems to be a general failure to tackle primitive mindsets, which continue to place road-blocks to the transformation of our human relations across the gender divide. This is an evolutionary challenge that requires clarity of vision and an unfettered commitment to the sovereign rights of all women,” he said.

PM Tsvangirai said gender discrimination had hindered development and in many cases perpetuated poverty, unnecessary tension and humiliation and failure of societies to advance and grow.
He concurred with President Mugabe that a small number of women occupied leadership positions nearly 30 years after independence.

“Nearly 30 years after independence, there can never be any justification for the limited numbers of women in positions of political leadership in Government, in all our political parties and in business.

“As Government and in particular during this period of inclusion, we must demonstrate our sincerity and go beyond mere political posturing. If democracy is a conversation, as they say, our discourse must never be limited to narrow transitional issues. Our conversations must take advantage of the fast changing scenes and evolving political dynamics to scan our social landscape, removing socially embedded stereotypes and traditional acts of backwardness,” he said.

Speaking at the same event, Deputy Prime Minister Thokozani Khupe said the summit would enable women to share experiences on challenges they were facing.

“As a woman leader, I feel that it is vital that we share experiences and challenges faced by our colleagues in leadership positions and identify possible solutions that will enable us to drive the economy,” she said.

DPM Khupe said women in leadership positions faced many challenges from men and other cultural taboos.

“It is up to us as women to move the goalposts in our favour since we constitute about 52 percent of the population,” said DPM Khupe.

She said the inequalities would affect Africa’s ability to achieve targets under the Millennium Development Goals.

“The UN MDGs of September 2 000 aimed at reducing poverty in Africa by 2015 will only be possible if women are given the opportunity to participate in economic growth and development strategies in agriculture, construction and infrastructural development, mining, tourism and manufacturing,” she said.

Delegates — mainly women drawn from the country’s 10 provinces and others from Swaziland, South Africa and Pakistan — are attending the summit.

Arctic will be ice-free in a decade, according to Pen Hadow

The explorer trekked more than 269 miles towards the North Pole this winter in temperatures below -40 degrees C to measure the depth of the ice.

The average thickness of ice floes was 1.8 metres, suggesting the ice sheet is now largely made up of first year ice rather than “multiyear” ice that will have built up over time.

An analysis by Cambridge University has concluded that the Arctic is now melting at such a rate that it will be largely ice free within ten years, allowing ships to cross the Arctic Ocean.

Further analysis by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) warned that the “irreversible trend” will cause dangerous feedback because water absorbs more heat from the sun than ice, therefore further speeding up the global warming process. The melting of the ice could also trigger extreme weather patterns as the ocean currents change and release even more greenhouse gases stored under the ice.

The results will be presented to a UN meeting this December in Copenhagen as further evidence that the world must reduce carbon emisisons in order to prevent the Arctic melting at an even faster rate.

The Catlin Arctic Survey, led by Mr Hadow, came in for criticism after the team only managed to get half way to the North Pole because of extreme weather conditions and the hi-tech radar equipment for measuring the ice failed in the first few days.

The seasoned Arctic Explorer, who was the first person to trek to the North Pole alone, was forced to continue with just a simple ice drill. During the 73 day trek he took 1,500 readings, often during pitch blackness and with windchill factors down to -70 degree C. The team also took thousands of visual observations to give an impression of how the shape of the ice sheet is changing.

Mr Hadow insisted the effort was worth it. He pointed out that no other readings of this year’s winter sea ice was available to scientists and surface readings can pick up changes in the ice that were not being picked up by computer models.

“Our on-the-ice techniques are helping scientists to understand better what is going on in this fragile ecosystem,” he said.

“To all intents and purposes the Arctic will be ice free in a decade. I do find the implications of this happening in my lifetime quite shocking.”

Professor Peter Wadhams, of the Polar Ocean Physics Group at the University of Cambridge, said scientists rely on readings from submarines or satellite for data sea ice.

However the new data from the survey confirmed the wider evidence that the Arctic will be completely ice free within twenty years, with most of the ice gone within a decade.

“The Catlin Arctic Survey data supports the consensus view that the Arctic will be ice-free in summer within about 20 years and that much of that decrease will be happening within 10 years,” he said.

“It will not be very long before we start to think of the Arctic as an open sea. We have taken the lid off the northern part of the planet and we cannot put it back on again.”

Centrica speeds up wind-park plans to qualify for subsidies

Centrica is accelerating plans to build two giant offshore wind parks in the North Sea to allow it to qualify for extra subsidies that could be worth hundreds of millions of pounds.

The two projects at Race Bank and Docking Shoal, off the Norfolk coast, are expected to cost about £1.5 billion each to build. But if Centrica, owner of British Gas, places an order for the turbines before March 31, it will clinch an extra 33 per cent in government subsidies for up to 25 years — transforming the economics of the projects.

Centrica is engaged in a race against time to secure financing and planning consent for the schemes, which will be located up to 27 kilometres offshore and will have a combined generating capacity of as much as 1.1 gigawatts — enough to power 700,000 homes. “It makes a huge difference,” a spokesman said. “We don’t know whether or not we will get the full consents in time, but it may be do-able.”

In a drive to kick-start faltering investment in offshore wind energy, due partly to the recession, the Government announced in April a temporary boost in the renewable obligation certificates (ROCs) awarded to offshore wind generators from 1.5 to 2 per megawatt hour. The move was designed to help meet the Government’s ambitious target of generating 40 per cent of UK energy from renewable sources, such as wind, by 2020.
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At the time, just three offshore windfarm projects were expected to benefit from the decision. They comprised another, smaller Centrica-backed wind farm called Lincs; London Array, a joint venture involving E.ON; and the Gwynt y Mor project off the Welsh coast led by RWE Energy.

Centrica had not been expected to order turbines for Docking Shoal or the nearby Race Bank until 2011 or later.

Nick Hyslop, director at RBC Capital Markets, said there was a huge financial incentive: “It is hard to put an exact figure on how much this is worth because it all depends on future power prices, but it is a very significant amount of money; we are talking hundreds of millions of pounds.”

A spokesman for the Department of Energy and Climate Change said that a decision on consent for both wind parks would be made in due course, but gave no further detail.

Centrica has also been holding talks with turbine manufacturers in the hope that its order for as many as 300 turbines can be placed swiftly once consent is granted.

Some planning concerns have been raised over the impact of the two projects on birds and on UK air radar.