Tag: oil

The Sarstoon-Temash National Park, Belize: Whose land, whose development?

Posted on by janet.crompton

 

View of the Temash River, Toledo, Belize

This October I spent time with the Sarstoon-Temash Institute for Indigenous Management (SATIIM), an NGO which integrates forest conservation with indigenous community development, the only one of its kind in Belize.

The organisation is located in Belize’s southernmost district of Toledo, reachable by a bumpy six hour bus ride from the country’s northern hub, Belize City. Government roadside adverts dot the route advising youngsters to ‘Stay Out of Crime’, and Belizeans to ‘Protect the Cayes and the Mangroves: your social security benefits’. Belize City is beset by gang violence, but high-end eco-tourism is booming in the north around the country’s cayes, beaches, and pristine conservation areas. Over 26% of Belize’s land and territorial waters have been designated as protected areas which play a crucial part in tourism, a major contributor to the economy as its second largest industry, and fuelling growth in many other sectors. The ads tail off by the time we reach Toledo, a safer but poorer district. From here to the River Sarstoon, the border with Guatemala, lie dense wetlands, forest and mangroves, and some of the country’s poorest communities, including many Q’eqchi Maya and Garifuna indigenous peoples.

Over four weeks I spent time here in SATIIM’s office, in the villages they work with, and in the forest, learning about their work and recording the voices of community members. On a visit to the sleepy Q’eqchi Mayan village of Crique Sarco Andres Bo, an active member of SATIIM, explained how the organisation began. Belize has been praised for its pioneering approach to conservation, using a series of legislative acts for protecting areas since gaining independence in 1981. But when it ringfenced a wetlands and forest area in order to create the Sarstoon-Temash National Park in 1994, the government ignored the collective land tenure of many Maya and Garifuna communities in the area, neglecting to consult or even inform them. Villages are largely forest dependent, employing milpa farming, a form of slash and burn subsistence agriculture – but using forest resources such as materials for house building, farming, hunting and fishing on part of their ancestral lands was now outlawed. “We can’t do hunting, we can’t do fishing, we can’t take out logs in there, we can’t have plantations there. But that is land we used, part of Crique Sarco….the vines and sticks which we used to build houses and posts are in those areas,” Andres explained.


Community conservation

In order to try to maintain influence in the area, and recognising that conserving the forest would have a beneficial impact on the surrounding areas’ ecosystems and resources, six villages came together to form SATIIM. The organisation then formed a successful partnership with the Belize Government to monitor the park under a co-management agreement using community led patrols. The community led element is key: SATIIM’s aims are to integrate environmental protection, human rights and development, and their work challenges any notion of conservation which promote reforestation at the expense of or exclusive from the forest communities whose livelihoods depend on it. “If you want to have effective development and effective conservation, the communities must be involved in the development of any plan that affects their livelihood,” explains SATIIM’s Director Froyla Tzalam.

Froyla and the SATIIM office team

Oil and development?

However in radical opposition to the NGO’s approach and in contradiction to the park’s protected status, the government decided to relax its ban on extractive activities and grant oil exploration permits to Texas-based corporation US Capital Energy, who began to cut paths and build exploratory oil drills, wreaking havoc on the forest’s ecosystems. They constructed a major drill site in a low-lying and extremely wet area, where any spills would quickly impact surrounding wildlife and waterways. I learnt more about the site on joining a community forest patrol in the following weeks, which is described in the second-part of this blog series.

The incident brought to the fore tensions between national development, local community interests, and land tenure rights. While environmental protection strategies have been used to bolster the success of the tourism industry and economic development in other areas of Belize, the government had clearly decided to pursue a different strategy in the impoverished and underinvested Toledo District, with Prime Minister Dean Barrow stating that US Capital be allowed to “Drill at Will” in the STNP.

“Are you telling us that we may spend decades protecting an area which over night can be turned into an extractive zone?” Froyla Tzalam

Concerned about the environmental impacts and effect on the villages’ livelihoods, SATIIM decided to fight back. In 2006 they filed a case against the government at the Supreme Court on the basis of its own environmental policy, as no environmental impact assessment has been conducted prior to the explorations. The court ruled against the government, triggering a string of cases in which the communities built the case for their land rights. Rulings from the Supreme Court and the Caribbean Court of Justice have subsequently stated that the government and US Capital Energy acted without the ‘Free, Prior, Informed Consent’ (FPI) of the Mayan and Garifuna communities, a principle defined by the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues and recognised in international law. FPI recognises indigenous people and forest communities’ rights to consent to projects in lands that they customarily own, occupy or use. Court cases up to 2016 have reaffirmed tenure rights of the Maya and Garifuna communities in southern Belize, that their traditional land rights constitute property equal in legitimacy to any other form of property under Belizean law. In addition the Supreme Court has ordered the government to conduct work on the communities’ land boundaries and  is ‘supervising’ its implementation.


Choosing development

The arrival of the oil company brought villages into conflict. Some labelled SATIIM as ‘anti-development’ for challenging US Capital. But Juan Choc, Village Leader of Crique Sarco tells me that since promises of job offers with US Capital haven’t materialised, more and more villagers are coming to realise that oil extraction may not be the type of development they need. The few short term jobs that appeared during oil exploration offered poor working conditions and were poorly paid. Better paid roles were reserved for staff with special skills brought in from Mexico. Orange and green paint, US Capital colours, coats the village schools around the exploration site. However the schools remain government funded, and the paint jobs seem little more than a branding exercise. Tangible benefits from the oil company have been few and far between.

Crique Sarco Village School

Community land tenure

SATIIM will now be working on georeferencing their ancestral land boundaries in order to get more solid legal recognition, and focusing on land rights awareness and environmental education. For the moment the low global oil price has meant that the impetus from US Capital has been lost and the drill site sits empty. But as the government has extended their permits to Feb 2017 in spite of court rulings, further drilling remains a possibility. Even once their land is demarcated communities will still have to decide whether they are for oil extraction or against it. SATIIM has been working on a program of environmental education so that communities are able to make more informed decisions about the benefits and risks involved. For Froyla the communities are now more informed, empowered and more ready to fight for what happens in their land: “It is clear when I attend the community meetings now that the villagers have a different vision of development for themselves. So that’s what gives me hope”.

Rachel Simon is a former part-time Environmental Policy MSc student, graduating in 2016. During her time at university Rachel was part of the Fossil Free Bristol University group. Following the completion of her MSc Rachel spent time with an indigenous conservation organisation in Belize, recording voices of land rights activists for the Latin American Bureau’s [http://lab.org.uk/] forthcoming book, Voices of Latin America.

The second blog in this series is available here.

Divestment at the University of Bristol?

Posted on by janet.crompton

Earlier this year I was approached by students who were involved in the campaign to petition the University of Bristol to divest from fossil fuel investments to see if I would be prepared to support their campaign and to encourage other members of the University’s staff to do so also.  I give lectures to students from the Faculty of Engineering on the subject of sustainable development, and through those lectures the students were aware that I have a good understanding of some of the challenges that face us.

I am a mechanical engineer by training, a specialist in engineering design, and I have worked in and with the transportation industries throughout my working life.  These industries– automobile, railway, aerospace, marine – are among the prime users of the fossil fuels with which the students are concerned, and although I am passionate about all things mechanical I have become convinced in recent years that we must be more radical in addressing issues of climate change than we have so far been prepared to be.  I was thus pleased to be able to give the students my support.  I felt at the very least the subject should figure strongly in debate and discussion within the University. I wrote emails to a number of members of the University staff inviting them to sign up to the campaign, using the letter reproduced below.

Dear Vice Chancellor,
We are writing to you to express our support for the open letter [1] that urges the University of Bristol to divest itself of investments in companies in the fossil fuel industry.  We acknowledge that exploitation of fossil fuels has enabled the remarkable developments of the industrial world, but we are now convinced that its continuation poses enormous threats to our planet and its population through climate change and through the pursuit of ever-more risky approaches to resource extraction.  We appreciate that reducing our use of fossil fuels is a tremendous challenge: we are ‘locked in’ to our current ways of doing things by the choices we have made at a time of fossil fuel abundance. Any change we make will be painful and might seem less than rational in terms of immediate short term financial impact (although not if fossil fuel assets become ‘stranded’ as the Bank of England has recently warned). But the longer we wait before we take decisive action the worse the negative impacts are likely to be, and for this reason we respectfully request that you give very serious consideration to the case for divestment.
[1] https://campaigns.gofossilfree.org/petitions/university-of-bristol-divest-from-the-fossil-fuel-industry

Those replies that I received were very largely supportive: over 50 members of staff have agreed to add their names to the petition. But I also received a number of thoughtful comments, and I thought I should share those through a Cabot Institute blog as a contribution to a debate on the topic.

Of those who declined to offer support, the most frequent reason offered was that the subject was too political – I received emails from colleagues saying that they were supportive in principle, but that it was “above their pay grade” or that they did not want to tie the hands of the University’s management.  For others, the University had important relationships with industry, especially with the petro-chemical industry – as sponsors of research and employers of our graduates – that might be threatened by divestment (and indeed an engineering student from the petro-chemical industry asked me why were we not also targeting the aerospace and automobile industries, among others, whose activities were leading to the demand for fossil fuels).

There were dissenters on technical grounds also.  A number of colleagues felt that to lump all fossil fuels together was much too indiscriminate, that natural gas and shale gas at least should play an important role in the transition to a low carbon future, and that technologies such as carbon capture and storage should be a part of future energy strategy.  For another respondent the difficulties in transitioning to alternative fuels were underestimated. Another felt that we should not divest until we have a viable alternative.  He believed that this could be nuclear, but that we needed to address the issues of the long-term storage of waste first (and he believed it was addressable).  Other colleagues admonished me for the way I wrote the statement of support.  I had suggested that divestment would be painful, but that I believed that the pain would be worth enduring because the consequences of runaway climate change were so unthinkable.  I was reproached by one writer for being too pessimistic – he said that the track record of market-based measures for reducing fossil fuel use is excellent: putting a price on pollution is very effective and it’s not even that costly.  For another colleague the letter was insufficiently assertive.  We should request that the University divest itself from investments in fossil fuel industries, not just consider it!

The responses that I received have caused me to re-examine my views, but I have not substantially changed them.  I still believe that we must very actively transition away from fossil fuels, even if it means significant changes in our lifestyles (and I remain convinced that it will).  As one colleague said we have reached a point where all scenarios are painful and that the logical thing to do is to act as quickly as possible to minimise the long term impact.  But the responses also demonstrated to me that there is an appetite in the University for an informed debate on the topic, and I hope that this blog entry and any responses that it attracts will be a helpful contribution to that debate.

 

Addendum

Kevin Anderson’s commentary in Nature Geoscience this month and reproduced in his blog at http://kevinanderson.info/blog/duality-in-climate-science/ is very relevant to the divestment debate.  His conclusion that ” . . even a slim chance of ‘keeping below’ a 2°C rise . .  now demands a revolution in how we both consume and produce energy. Such a rapid and deep transition will have profound implications for the framing of contemporary society” is in line very much with the sentiments behind the divestment campaign, and supports the need for urgent action.

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This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Prof Chris McMahon from the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Bristol.

What the frack! – A guide to fracking and its legal implications

Posted on by janet.crompton

The recent UKELA South West region seminar hosted by the Cabot Institute provided an ideal opportunity for a rational discussion of both the technical aspects of fracking (courtesy of Professor Mike Kendall) and its legal implications in the UK (courtesy of James Taylor of Simmons and Simmons).

With CO2 emissions from gas combustion around 50% lower than that of coal the move to gas as a transition fuel evidently holds appeal. US shale gas production has been praised for its contribution to the fall in US CO2 levels which have reduced back to those seen in 1990. However as was highlighted during the talk, the current availability and low cost of coal presents a problem in incentivising this move. More importantly however, it presents a potentially significant problem for global emission levels. If the UK replaces its coal supply with gas and displaces this coal onto the global market, total emissions will increase with the existing coal and a new gas supply both being burnt.

The appeal of shale gas is not solely confined to its potential in reducing UK emissions however. Energy security is proving to be a driving factor with the Bowland shale basin alone (in Northern England) thought to contain at least 40-60 years worth of the UK’s gas supply. Although unlikely to lower gas prices in the UK, this could significantly reduce our dependency on foreign gas suppliers.

Gas well.  Image credit: Jerry Dincher

When considering the technique of fracking itself Prof. Kendall emphasised the importance of well design and integrity in ensuring water contamination risks are reduced. With wells connecting the shale gas layer, found at depths of around 2500km, to the surface this casing and its integrity are crucial. In addition monitoring of fractures to date has shown that they remain at levels far below those of aquifers and as such are unlikely to prove a problem in relation to water contamination, particularly as the technology exists to monitor the height and direction of these fractures. The treatment and disposal of wastewater was however highlighted as an area which will need to see innovation and clearer regulation as to how such fluids can be disposed of or re-used if a shale gas industry is to develop here in the UK.

James Taylor confirmed that whilst regulations governing conventional oil and gas extraction (that do not use hydraulic fracturing) are applicable to shale gas and fracking there are a number of problems at present. The absence of a single point of control was emphasised, with Department of Energy and Climate Change, Environment Agency, Health and Safety Executive and Local Councils all playing a regulatory role. Other issues with the current system were highlighted through the absence of a compulsory Environmental Impact Assessment for shale gas operations (sites usually falling short of the 1 hectare threshold) and through the absence of a compulsory groundwater or flaring permit (both being assessed on a site by site basis.)

In addition the heavy influence of economic factors in both the planning guidance applicable to onshore oil and gas as well as within the National Planning Policy Framework were highlighted. The increased impact of such considerations should s58 of the Draft Deregulation Bill come into effect with its duty to promote economic growth when exercising regulatory functions was also raised. With local councils’ set to retain 100% of business rates from shale gas sites in their area the impact of economics on decisions was further brought into question.

Image credit: Libdemvoice

With shale gas promising a potentially valuable transition fuel it was clear from the talks that there is a need to ensure that the technique of fracking is carefully conducted in order to reduce the risk of damage and that this needs to be done under a robust and clear regulatory system. The need for transparent and upfront regulators who consider the arguments and concerns relating to both sides of the shale gas debate was also emphasised. This is of particular importance in light of the current shale gas promotion in the UK. Regulatory reforms such as the proposed removal of subsurface trespass (bypassing issues of obtaining landowner consent) in the next Infrastructure Bill evidences the presumption that at present shale gas is good for the UK and should be facilitated.

One of the key themes that emerged from both talks was that although the debate on fracking is often defined in technical terms the key factors proving influential at present are those of geopolitics and public perceptions. Emphasis was placed on the need for early public engagement and the need to tackle the continued  polarization of what is an already controversial issue. It is clear that fracking and onshore oil and gas extraction is a complex topic, technically, politically and socially. Although complex, it is crucial that the issues associated with fracking are discussed. Talks such as this UKELA event are central to doing so and for allowing rational and informed debate on an important topic.

This blog post is by Joanne Hawkins.
A PhD Researcher looking at the challenge of hydraulic fracturing: energy resilience, the environment and effective regulation at the University of Bristol Law School.

 
Joanne Hawkins,
University of Bristol
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