Tiempo Climate Newswatch

The United Kingdom plans a massive increase in renewable energy use to cut greenhouse gas emissions. It is intended that 30 per cent of the country's electricity generation will be met be renewables by the year 2020 with a further ten per cent from nuclear power and coal-fired plants with carbon capture and storage. These fuel sources are the "trinity of low carbon and the future of energy in Britain," said energy secretary Ed Miliband.

The measures covered by the Low Carbon Transition Plan range from home insulation and renewable power generation to electric cars and high-speed trains, and should create 1.2 million jobs. The overall effect will be to achieve emissions cuts of 34 per cent by 2020 compared with 1990 levels. Every government department will have to meet a carbon budget alongside its financial budget. "Our transition plan is a route map to 2020. It strengthens our energy security, it seeks to be fair in the decisions we make, above all it rises to the moral challenge of climate change," Miliband said.

Climate change presents an imminent threat to Nigeria, according to the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA). Sea-level rise is already leading to coastal and marine erosion and flooding and coral bleaching, the agency reports. "Further increases in drought, flood, windstorms and other extreme climate phenomena will negatively affect water resources through reduced freshwater availability, food security, human health (such as spread of malaria in the arid zones), industrial production and the physical infrastructure base for socio-economic activity, resulting in reduced development," warned NEMA director-general AVM Mohammed Audu-Bida. He advised stakeholders to adopt a proactive approach to managing risk and vulnerability and to jettison old-fashioned reactive strategies.

A US$205 million programme to study and fight coastal erosion in West Africa has been announced by the West African Economic and Monetary Union (UEMOA). The scheme involves UEMOA members Benin, Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast, Senegal and Togo, as well as Gambia, Guinea, Liberia, Mauritania and Sierra Leone. The International Union for Conservation of Nature is working on a study of how to treat coastlines that could act as a template for what happens in west Africa. "This survey will tell us how the sea is advancing over the continent and which areas are most sensitive to coastal erosion. It will also enable us to have a complete photographic map of the coastline of the region," said Malick Diallo, head of the UEMOA water and environment commission. A regional observatory for coastal erosion will be established and urgent action will be taken to protect the western shore of the estuary of Lake Togo, between Togo and Benin.

Expansion of coastal cities is accompanied by a decline in the quality of life of their inhabitants, negating the reasons for urban migration, reports a group of international experts meeting in Oslo, Norway. Coastal protection measures lead to a false sense of security and require increasingly expensive infrastructure, whilst coastal erosion, lack of runoff, nutrient shortage and subsiding deltas result from a failure to implement upstream river management.

Serious implementation of integrated coastal zone management is needed and innovation is essential, the group concludes. There are successful showcases with regard to innovative approaches such as "soft" engineering and managed realignment. Governance must be enabled at all scales from intergovernmental engagement to the individual, personal choices that may counteract the tyranny of "small and short-sighted decisions." The meeting was organized by LOICZ (Land-Ocean Interactions in the Coastal Zone), a core project of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme and the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change.