By Tamar Shapiro and Thomas Legge

WASHINGTON — On May 15, Richard M. Daley stepped down as mayor of Chicago. With his retirement, his city lost its chief executive of 22 years, but America also lost one of its most environment-friendly local leaders.  With the failure of the U.S. Congress to pass comprehensive climate and energy legislation, it is local and state governments in the United States, such as Daley’s city hall, that can play a pivotal role in fighting global warming. Europeans need to look to such local officials if transatlantic cooperation on climate change is to make progress in the years ahead.

Daley transformed Chicago from its industrial roots to a green city with more than 7 million square feet of rooftop gardens and green roofs, more than 1300 new acres of open space, more than half a million new trees planted since 1998, and 88 buildings that are LEED certified as meeting high standards for energy savings, water efficiency, and CO₂ emissions reduction. In recognition of these achievements, Daley was awarded the 2010 Climate Protection Award from the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

Much of the local climate agenda in the United States has been driven by committed state or city leaders, such as Daley, who have made fighting global warming a goal for their administrations. Many of these local leaders have taken steps to strengthen and leverage their own efforts through bilateral and multilateral partnerships. Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York chairs C40, a group of 18 large cities working together to combat climate change. Former Mayor Greg Nickels of Seattle was instrumental in launching the Climate Protection Agreement, pursuant to which more than 1000 mayors have pledged to meet the standards of the Kyoto Protocol despite lack of action at the federal level. In large part due to the personal engagement of then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, California has led state-level action with its 2006 Global Warming Solutions Act, which commits the state to return its greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 and to reduce them to 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050, Currently, more than half of the U.S. states have adopted climate action plans, although none with California’s level of ambition so far, and they are joined by a large number of local governments.

Europe’s climate champions are also to be found at the local level. Mayors like Mayor Bertrand Delanoë of Paris and former Mayor Ken Livingstone of London made green urban development a main plank of their political platforms. Some smaller cities have gone further, adopting targets that far exceed national ambition. Växjö, Sweden, decided in 1996 to become free of fossil fuels and is on track to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 55 percent below 1993 levels by 2015.

Even though such efforts depend on political entrepreneurs, they are supported and sustained by a national or EU-wide infrastructure. The EU has legally binding targets for greenhouse gas emissions, renewable energy, and energy efficiency by 2020, which often translate into legislative action at the city level. The EU has also set up a highly successful “Covenant of Mayors,” under which 1,900 local authorities have committed to exceed the EU-wide target of reducing CO₂ emissions by more than 20 percent by 2020. The Covenant provides targets, baselines, methodologies, and a structure of peer support to drive implementation. Campaigns like the annual European Green Capital award (won by Hamburg in 2011 for its energy savings and smart development of its industrial docklands) can build public awareness and a race to the top among municipalities.

Many European policymakers are encouraging equivalent actions at the city and state levels in the United States in lieu of federal action. Unfortunately, city and state leaders move on eventually, and even the best climate action plan and the most well-intentioned pledge, if not implemented by investment or regulation, can easily be ignored after a political transition. In the absence of a federal framework that drives local investments and regulatory changes, the U.S. climate strategy will inevitably consist of a patchwork of state and local actions — all important, but some with a longer-lasting impact than others. Large-scale investments in transit or in open space and greening — as were made by Daley’s administration — will have an impact that long outlasts the leader who championed them. Similarly, regulatory changes that promote more compact and energy-efficient development, while not irrevocable, are more difficult to undo than a plan.

With the U.S. federal government’s current retreat from the climate policy arena, European policymakers are facing a new challenge: working with many eager but diverse partners instead of one recalcitrant one. European policymakers, especially at the local level, can exchange best practices with their American counterparts. While the United States will still be left with a patchwork of climate change actions for the foreseeable future, such cooperation can help to overcome the unpredictability of political change by encouraging the implementation of measures whose success has been proven elsewhere and which will outlast their champions.

Tamar Shapiro is director of the Urban & Regional Policy Program at the German Marshall Fund in Washington. Thomas Legge is a program officer in the Climate & Energy Program at the German Marshall Fund in Washington

WASHINGTON — Last week, while attention was focused on New York and the U.N. conference to review the global development goals, a less prominent UN gathering took place in Rome. It was an emergency meeting, an emergency about food. Concerns are growing that a surge in wheat prices could trigger a global food crisis. Therefore, the meeting of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) was more immediately relevant for the world’s poor than the poverty summit that the world media followed so closely.

Rising food prices, to the tune of a five-percent increase between July and August, and food riots that left 13 dead and hundreds injured in Mozambique have fueled fears that the world may be facing yet another food crisis, the second in three years. If the world wants to prevent another short-term crisis, let alone achieve the development goal of halving the proportion of hungry people in the world by 2015 leaders need to act now.

Neither the previous crisis nor a looming rerun are solitary events. A permanent food crisis has been unfolding for decades. According to the FAO, 925 million people continue to suffer from chronic hunger worldwide. Another food price spike, even one that doesn’t reach the magnitude of 2007-08, would add to this immense number, likely pushing millions more into poverty and hunger. Like the previous crisis, the current uncertainty is caused by both immediate and underlying factors. Short-term supply shocks to basic food commodities, like the one caused by Russian wildfires and the subsequent wheat export ban, have a ripple effect throughout fragile world food markets. At the same time, long-term factors continue to put pressure on global food prices. Rapid economic growth and changing diets in emerging economies, increasing demand for biofuels in developed countries, climate change, population growth, ineffective trading systems, and, above all, a severe decade-long underinvestment in agricultural research and development are all exacerbating an already dire situation.

Some of these factors are beyond the reach of immediate policy remedies. But others are not. The international community reacted to the 2008 food crisis with a proliferation of initiatives. The G8 L’Aquila Joint Statement on Global Food Security in July 2009 elicited pledges of $22 billion over three years to agriculture development. In response, a trust fund has been set up at the World Bank — the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program — to implement the pledges. In addition to contributing to the trust fund, the United States launched its own Global Hunger and Food Security Initiative, called “Feed the Future.” Other initiatives are underway at the UN, within the European Union, and at other multilateral organizations.

These efforts are a welcome start. However, the sheer multitude of initiatives runs the risk of creating policy and implementation incoherence if coordination is not improved. Even more importantly, donors are talking the talk while not always walking the walk. Some pledges have yet to turn into real money. So far, only the United States, Canada, South Korea, Spain, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have committed to the World Bank trust fund. This ambiguity has led some African officials to question the Fund’s sustainability.

In the short term, solutions will require a renewed and serious commitment to the pledges already made. Developed countries need to pay up as promised, and soon. In the long run, solutions will mean tackling tough issues. This involves a serious attempt to reform agriculture subsidy and biofuels policies at home, as well as a renewed push to conclude stalled trade negotiations.  The transatlantic partners, with their vast agricultural markets and advanced technical knowledge, should lead these efforts. The focus needs to be on both preventing further immediate shocks and beginning to establish a sustainable global food system.  This means that European countries should commit to the trust fund now housed at the World Bank.

While some progress has been made, the world is not yet close to achieving the Millennium Development Goal to halve the proportion of hungry people by 2015.  Getting there is not a charitable pursuit. As U.S. President Barack Obama explained last week at the New York summit, progress is very much in the security interest of the donor countries themselves. Without their commitment to food security, the alternatives for the hungry, pointedly outlined by Josette Sheeran, the head of the World Food Programme, are  to “revolt, migrate, or die.”

Mark Allegrini and Peter Sparding are Program Associates in the Economic Policy Program at the German Marshall Fund.

The world’s farmers have to produce 70% to 100% more food by 2050, and yet do so while reducing the roughly 30% of greenhouse gas emissions that agriculture causes.   That was the challenge under discussion at Agriculture Day in Copenhagen on Saturday, a day-long set of meetings sponsored primarily by the CGIAR network, the group of crop research institutions around the world that brought us the Green Revolution.    The short answer given by the experts was money.

Most of the discussion was about the challenge of producing the food.   U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack gave statistics from new analyses suggesting that rising temperatures will have serious impacts on world yields of rice, wheat and other crops.     That creates a challenge for the world’s farmers because it suggests the need for more land.  But that leads to deforestation.   Yield gains are therefore important.  Most of the speakers and members of the audience spoke more, and with greater animation, about this challenge of producing this food.

But that won’t be easy.   Governments have allowed funding to decline for basic crop research and “extension services” that send experts to work with farmers around the world.   IFPRI, one of the world’s lead agricultural research institutions, has calculated that $7 billion per year for decades is necessary just to address these yield challenges and keep the number of hungry children from increasing.   Meanwhile governments have spoken about contributing $3 billion per year, which is a major improvement, but probably still not enough.

As hard as it will be to produce more food, that may be the easy part.   Somehow the world has to produce more food on the same land while also reducing the nitrous oxide and methane €“ powerful greenhouse gases €“ that otherwise multiply as we use more fertilizer and make more livestock.     In truth, the group had fewer specifics to offer about solving that problem.

A key question that emerged for me was whether the funds for more food would also be used to encourage those forms of agriculture that reduce emissions.     Those officials involved in distributing funds to boost food production said that right now there are no criteria or mechanisms in place for prioritizing funds at those forms of agriculture that reduce emissions as well.    Increasing agricultural productivity is critical to protecting forests, but it would be a grave mistake to spend money just to boost food production without simultaneously encouraging production techniques that reduce greenhouse gas emissions.   That will include different ways of applying fertilizer, and even just producing some kinds of livestock rather than others.

The need for innovation was in the background but received less explicit attention.    No one would argue that we know today exactly how to produce all the energy the world will need while reducing greenhouse gas emissions.   The same is true for producing the world’s food.   But the need for innovation in farming receives much less attention.

The other challenge that only occasionally emerged was that of possibly using much of the world’s productive land to produce energy.   I spoke about a recent paper I co-authored in the jounral Science with twelve of the world’s leading scientists about an error in how carbon dioxide emissions from bioenergy are counted in international treaties and domestic cap and trade laws.   (See Fixing a Critical Climate Accounting Error at   http://www.princeton.edu/~tsearchi/writings/Fixing%20a%20Critical%20Climate%20Accounting%20ErrorEDITED-tim.pdf ).     In effect, the rules treat all bioenergy as 100% reductions in carbon dioxide compared to the use of fossil fuels.   But if the world produces this bioenergy by clearing forests, that may even increase greenhouse gas emissions.   The rules have to distinguish those forms of bioenergy that reduce greenhouse gases from those that do not.   If not fixed, this false accounting will encourage the clearing of much of the world’s forests, and create enormous competition for the world’s farmland with food production.   As the financial crisis has shown, it’s really important to get accounting rules right, and the principle applies as strongly to counting carbon as to counting money.

INPE, Brazil’s space research institute, also presented an interesting paper, which found that cattle ranching creates roughly half of Brazil’s greenhouse gas emissions through deforestation and methane.   The speakers emphasized the potential Brazil has to produce lots more beef on land that was already deforested.    Expansion of cattle grazing causes even more deforestation that expansion of soy fields and palm oil plantations.   That gives us reason for optimism because the technical potential is there to stop this expansion and whether we do so is a question of will and money.

This weekend, GMF is hosting with its partners the third annual Brussels Forum, a gathering of political, academic, and business leaders to debate the countless items on the transatlantic agenda. Public sessions will be streamed live in  video and audio from Brussels, and transcripts and video for download will be available shortly after each session. Take a look at the agenda and you can see the range of issues and the high-level speakers like Robert Zoellick, Javier Solana, Michael Chertoff, several heads of government and ministers, a large Congressional delegation, and countless other thought leaders.

WASHINGTON — The news from Afghanistan on the counter-narcotics front is bad.   Opium production from Afghanistan’s 408,000 acres of poppy rose almost 50% in 2006, contributing to global heroin production that set a new record high of 606 metric tons in 2006.   The effort to stop the growing and production of illicit drugs, led by the United Kingdom and supported by a $600 million U.S. effort, is falling farther behind.

In Latin America, a region also plagued by poppy cultivation, there is ample evidence that illegal drug production carries with it a significant environmental cost. Trees in rain forests are cut down to make space for illegal drug laboratories.   Gallons of chemicals such as acidic anhydride, sodium carbonate, and ether, which are used to convert morphine into opium, are discarded into rivers and other waterways.   Fires are started to cover up illicit laboratories.

We also need to find alternatives to carbon-based fuels.   The Energy Information Administration projects world carbon emissions rising from 26.9 billion metric tons in 2004 to 33.9 billion metric tons in 2015.

Policymakers have so far addressed these problems with isolated or loosely coordinated efforts.   This approach ignores the possible nexus between these challenges and potential solutions.   Consider these two observations:

First, the seedpod of the opium poppy contains both gum and seeds that can be processed for drugs.   Poppy, which flourishes almost anywhere, is an understandable crop for Afghanistan’s poor farmers to grow and sell for conversion to lucrative €“ though illicit €“ products since poppy prices are 10 times higher than for wheat, and farmers do not fear the government’s eradication efforts.   The challenge for the counter-narcotics effort in Afghanistan is to find an alternative crop that will induce farmers to give up poppy cultivation or to find a reason to grow poppy legally.

Second, the effort to limit carbon’s impact on the global environment has led to increased interest in biofuels.   Biofuels are derived from organic materials known as biomass.   Americans are most familiar with ethanol, which is made from corn and added to gasoline.   Biodiesel, more familiar to Europeans, is made using soybean or other plant oils and can be used as a fuel in its pure form with some engine modifications, although it is usually blended with traditional diesel.   In a small Australian pilot program in 2005, Tasmanian farmers used biodiesel produced from poppy seed, which is about 50% oil, to run their tractors.   The poppy plant itself, like the jatropha plant that is being grown in India for biomass, has the potential to be a useful source for biodiesel.

There is a potential opportunity to connect the fight against poppy cultivation and the need for new sources of energy.   To test this hypothesis, the United States should fund a crash program of international research to determine whether the opium poppy can be turned into biomass for the large scale production of biodiesel and design the necessary technology to do so.   Assuming the scientific questions can be addressed, there will remain economic and social issues.   Can the Kabul government ensure, perhaps by buying whole crops with international assistance (which would be cheaper and more effective than an eradication program), that the price for poppy will equal or exceed the price that narco-traffickers are willing to pay?   Assuming that some illegal market will continue to exist in parallel with the legal one, what kinds of government controls, including a continuing eradication program to deter cheating, will be necessary to insure that the vast majority of the crop is sold for production of biomass fuel?

If opium poppy can be used to make biodiesel, and farmers shift production to a legal crop more profitable than today’s alternatives, it would deal a blow to narcotics traffickers.     Because truck drivers in Afghanistan and the whole South Asian region use diesel, Kabul could set up biodiesel plants in Afghanistan to process the poppy, providing thousands of jobs.     Getting more biodiesel into trucks in the area would have a positive impact on global warming and, since biodiesel contains no sulfur, would also reduce acid rain.   Other countries with drug production problems, like Pakistan or Colombia, might also adopt the process, reduce drug production, create jobs, and promote a more sustainable environment.

The 21st century will require that leaders think in new ways about how diverse challenges and solutions are related.   Fighting narcotrafficking and global climate change could be two dots waiting to be connected.

Marc Grossman is a Vice Chairman of The Cohen Group.   He is a GMF Board Member.

At an international biofuels conference hosted in Brussels last week, the EU Commission announced that imports will be an important policy tool in order to reach the EU’s ambitious goal of a 10% biofuels share by 2020. This came at a point when serious doubts were raised, even within the Commission, about the feasibility of the 10% goal.  

The presence of five EU Commissioners in addition to Brazilian President Lula and EU President Barroso at the conference indicated the enormous importance biofuels have gained as a tool to fight climate change and to achieve energy diversification and income opportunities for rural areas. Interestingly, though, the European Commissioner for Agriculture and Rural Development, Mariann Fischer Boel, was not among the speakers.  

EU Trade Commissioner Mandelson strongly argued for increased international trade in biofuels and emphasized that biofuels produced in countries like Brazil have a stronger carbon performance and are cheaper and  cleaner than their European counterparts. The Swedish Trade Minister Sten Tolgfors would even like to abolish import tariffs on biofuels altogether. He criticized that Brazilian ethanol was still met with tariffs of up to 55% while the tariff on petrol was as low as 5%. Sweden and the Netherlands recently commissioned a comprehensive OECD study on a trading system for biofuels that will be released in spring 2008. In contrast to the European approach, the US biofuels strategy is much more focused on local production. Experts predict that this year US import figures for biofuels will be even lower than they were in 2006.  

The other key aspect that was repeatedly raised last week in Brussels was the need for a sustainable production of biofuels. The EU plans to establish sustainability criteria or a certification system that would apply to imports as well as domestic production. Sustainability criteria will include environmental as well as social aspects of global biofuels production. The EU just finished a public consultation process and plans to publish a Renewable Energies Directive by the end of 2007. The sustainability discussion was initially pushed by countries like the Netherlands, United Kingdom and Germany after experts argued that certain biofuels had a negative greenhouse gas impact on the environment.  

One way to significantly raise the environmental and energy-balance of biofuels would be to switch to greener, so-called second- or third-generation biofuels. These, however, won’t become economically viable until 2012 to 2017.