Supporter: Jim Jarvie

In Timor-Leste (East Timor), this year’s weather has caused more serious problems than ever encountered in living memory and beyond. The dry season was meant to start last March. That should have signaled the start of a planting and harvest season through to now in November, when the wet season would augur the next crop season. Except the dry season never arrived. It’s rained.

Photo: Paul Jeffery/Mercy Corps

We went to speak to farmers in dire straits in the remote area of Same, in the south of the world’s newest nation, one of the poorest countries in the world with half the population living on less that US$ 1 a day.

The charity and kindness that those in real need show to guests never ceases to amaze in this work, and our hosts in the fields, among their grass-thatched houses without power, clean water or incomes was no exception. A leading local farmer, Donatus, described the issues.

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Energy poverty and community-based energy solutions have been back in the news lately, and have been a focus of Mercy Corps’ programming for the last couple of years.

Energy poverty limits economic growth where it is needed most. It impacts crosscutting issues including ill health and environmental degradation, as well as contributing to poor education and gender inequities. Smoke from poor-quality stoves or open fires impacts half the world’s population.

For the 25 percent of humanity off the power grid — and, in addition, those hooked up to unreliable and potentially dangerous power supplies — night time hours are unavailable for activities including small business, other income generation and school homework.

In many areas, the impact of wood-fuel dependence is also causing escalating environmental problems, leading to significant decreases in forest and mangrove cover; fires increasing in frequency and severity; and degraded land being overtaken by invasive species that are unsuitable even for livestock grazing.

Despite current energy-use patterns, there is a huge potential for small-scale renewable energy solutions applied across vast geographies. To date, most projects have had limited impact because of insufficient community mobilization around broader energy-use patterns, a failure to train community members responsible for maintaining the systems, and a failure to link communities with the service providers and financial support that would make the model replicable on a meaningful scale.

Mercy Corps’ approach to alleviating energy poverty is firmly embedded in economic development and market access — opening localized, appropriate and affordable market opportunities in energy products. It applies principles of understanding market systems around energy poverty, placing the poor within the energy market, defining sustainable outcomes and facilitating change. Our approach stays out of the direct market and instead works to build functioning markets that support access to energy products.

Mercy Corps has energy poverty initiatives operating in Africa and Asia with a basis in energy poverty surveys and market analyses intended to expand access for the poor in clean cooking and lighting technologies. These are based on a pair of complementary approaches to addressing energy poverty:

• An energy poverty assessment methodology, identifying the root causes and impacts of energy poverty within complex environments, and
• Market access and marketing strategies, contributing best practices for accessing ‘bottom of the pyramid’ markets across a diversity of cultures and geographies

Energy poverty assessments are made relevant at local levels, using metrics that can be applied at broad scale. They investigate energy needs, opportunities and challenges in meeting them through surveys of representative communities. They cover experiences from past and present projects trying to address energy poverty, and supporting government policy.

Outcomes of the assessment process include baseline analyses and studies, identifying poverty energy gaps, appropriate energy markets and conducting a market analysis/ mapping exercise of target products and services. This forms the basis of robust programme design, based on socially-acceptable models to address constraints to alleviating energy poverty.

Part of programme design may incorporate identification of financing issues identifying and overcoming financial barriers to product uptake for the retailer and consumer, including accessing carbon finance. This design and approach can include: pilot programme implementation; deploying national and international advisors; testing market approaches; addressing government and private sector capacity development; assessing product compatibility with cultural norms; and, finally, commencement of educational and outreach campaigns.

The final goal? Scale up and reach the maximum number of people over the largest area we can.

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Week 9 post-earthquake: Mercy Corps, like our partners and peers, has been focused on emergency response. We’ve been busy with distributions, Comfort for Kids, water and sanitation provision, and more.

But what should we do now that contributes to long-term recovery? The context is challenging at best. Consider these statistics:

• Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere
• It is ranked 146th out of 177 countries in terms of human development
• 80 percent of Haiti's people live in abject poverty
• Unemployment here is somewhere between 70 and 80 percent
• Literacy is only 62 percent
• About 96 percent of the land is deforested and its soils and slopes eroding — which makes it more vulnerable to hurricanes and other storms

Then, of course, there's the impact of the earthquake. There’s a lot to do. And so the Mercy Corps Haiti team took a pause last Sunday to prioritize focus and direction, to consolidate thinking and strategy. Programme managers who'd helped direct emergency responses in places like Darfur, Indonesia's Aceh Province and Sri Lanka shared their experience in moving from disaster to long-term recovery.

The strategy that arose — which reflects what we've been planning since shortly after the earthquake — is that we’re going to roll out a recovery strategy based on job creation through urban regeneration and resilience, rural infrastructure development, and business development focused through small and medium enterprises. All of these things are interlinked and will integrate issues surrounding youth, education and vocational training, environmental responsibility and disaster risk reduction (DRR).

It's a complex but complementary strategy to address a wide range of challenges, many of which existed well before the earthquake struck.

In the short-term, we’ll still need to focus on emergency recovery, but we want to start targeting activities in ways that will blossom into long-term revitalisation. In rural areas — where we're focusing on places hosting displaced people from earthquake-shattered cities — this will likely include working on improving feeder roads to help deliver produce to markets; improving irrigation; and recovering degraded land for tree planting for cash crops and fuel wood.

In urban areas, we’re looking at DRR measures in anticipation of coming rains and the hurricane season; waste management measures — particularly those focusing on income generation such as organic waste composting; and critical upgrades to water and sanitation service delivery.

For the long-term — through approaches including small business development, community associations, microfinance and related services — we intend to build on current activities to create sustainable jobs in agricultural markets and urban recovery.

In a post-disaster environment clear goals are needed, but plans need to flexible to make sure we achieve them on a road that’s bound to be full of surprises. We have those goals now, and hope to be on the road to achieving them.

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The Climate One Stop homepage.

On December 14 at 9 A.M. here at the Climate Change Conference here in Copenhagen, Mercy Corps was part of a presentation hosted by USAID, as part of the U.S. delegation tent. Our presentation was part of the launch of Climate One Stop, a website acting as a one-stop shop for climate facts and figures.

The website brings together heavy duty data providers like NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), data consolidators like the United Nations Development Programme and World Resources Institute, and data users like Mercy Corps and our sister agencies. You can read the NASA press release here 
and visit our startup site at http://climateonestop.net. Its basic task is to help us filter out and select quality, applicable data and information from the blossoming number of climate-related news feeds, then use that information to help the communities where we work.

Why has Mercy Corps been placing an emphasis on this? The starting point is our mission: helping people build secure, productive and just communities. A dilemma is that doing this successfully means taking a long-term view, which increasingly requires taking climate change adaption into account. But, in transitional countries where short-term needs are paramount, making the case for thinking ahead is tricky. It needs compelling data and argument, and this is where Climate One Stop comes into play.

Let me give some examples from where we have boots on the ground.

Take Afghanistan where we naturally think of the ongoing conflict, violence and need for stabilization. Obviously these challenges require the focused attention and resources currently being applied. But what happens when short-term objectives are met? A recent report to DFID, the United Kingdom's development agency, recently said "At present, climate change is not a consideration into the national or sectoral plans of the Government of Afghanistan, despite it presenting a significant threat to cross sectoral development."

But Afghanistan is literally running dry. That impacts agriculture and will therefore reduce food security. Unless we take that into account during short-term stabilization measures, how long will the benefits of any short-term gain last? We need reliable data to share with communities and governments to help them address long-term environmental and climate threats needing urgent consideration to bolster successes in security. We need reliable data to show stakeholders and partners like the Government of Afghanistan what is happening, and what needs to be done.

Mercy Corps and colleague organisations need solid, reliable data to share with communities and governments to help them address long-term environmental and climate threats.

In Indonesia, Mercy Corps has been active in helping urban poverty reduction. More than 50 percent of the world's population are in cities that concentrate squalor and suffering. Yet, as we help people move forward in megacities like Jakarta, the communities we work with are increasingly hit by floods from increasing numbers of storms with strengthening intensity, and now face rising sea levels. We need reliable data to best predict how strongly climate change will worsen current hazards and set about planning responses with communities and government. As in Afghanistan, we need to merge short-term response with informed, long-term programming and protection of the legacy of our projects.

Finally, consider the disasters we respond to like the tsunami in Indonesia's Aceh Province and Sri Lanka, and the more recent earthquake that hit the western part of Indonesia's Sumatra Island. These areas suffered the unimaginable consequences of natural, rapid-onset catastrophe. Yet, as they are coastally located, they are certain to also suffer the impact of human-based, slow-onset disasters from climate impact, including rising sea levels and storms.

When we respond to immediate disaster, we hope to put in place disaster risk reduction strategies to protect people from future, similar events. Now we realize we need to incorporate the threat from the gathering tide of climate risks.

Areas as diverse as conflict states, peaceful urban centers and disaster sites all need to start thinking about climate adaptation to secure long-term stability. Yet to do that, solid data from multiple sources needs to be considered and applied. The work at Climate One Stop gives us a head start. This is why Mercy Corps supports it. We hope that you will too.

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Photo: Haja Nirina (flickr)

The UN Climate Change Conference has started in Copenhagen, and it is overwhelming. Bella Centre, an efficient and vast venue, is chockablock with the 15,000 people it can hold — amid rumours that more than 40,000 people have registered. Security is smooth and polite. Among the cavernous halls and corridors, myriad Internet spots and meeting rooms, the hosting is friendly, unflustered and chirpy; most first timers to Denmark are thinking of returning one day for a holiday to really see the place properly.

The flow of humanity, from almost every nation on Earth — women and men from seemingly every ethnicity, religion, age group on the planet — flow past each other from event to meeting to rest stop at a frenetic pace. It brings home the message that, whatever the outcome of whatever form of agreement emerges from this conference, climate change as a threat unites us as no other in history.

This is a historic event.

Two parallel universes seem to exist here. The negotiators, between the forums and country booths to which they retire to regroup and head out again, exist in the same space but barely the same context as the plethora of side events that run across the Bella Centre and other nearby venue spots in Copenhagen. The world outside of the conference centre has a better overview of the deals and promises, raised hopes and disappointments than those in the side events.

The side events arise from non-governmental organisations (NGOs), campaigners, practitioners and others from civil society involved in the climate debate, as well as the actions already being taken to counter its impacts across the world.

Mercy Corps was directly involved in one of these today. Pramita Harjati, an urban planner from our Indonesia programme, presented her work with ACCCRN (the Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network). ACCCRN — funded by the Rockefeller Foundation — joins us with sister programmes in India, Thailand and Vietnam. Together, they share experiences in analyzing how the challenges that the urban poor already face will be exacerbated by climate change. They discuss how they work with government and the private sector to find solutions.

Pramita talked about how increased storm frequency and intensity have immediate impacts on human life and — in the longer term — their livelihoods as houses are damaged and shrimp and fish farms are destroyed. Other members of the network and the wider audience then heard complementary reports from India about how in Surat, the diamond and textile industries can close for extended periods because workers lose their homes and belongings to flooding. And then we heard similar tales from Vietnam.

It was a microcosm of what these side events are about. Numerous small conferences sharing reports of climate impacts and possible solutions across sectors including government, the private sector and agencies like Mercy Corps.

Together, these events represent the collective knowledge of millions of people, and give voice for advocacy for the negotiators to come to a deal that sets the world on a direction to take on the climate challenge we have created for ourselves. These parallel universes may merge yet.

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