Joan Smith in the Independent on Sunday writes:

The roots of this scandal lie in a globalised economy where western shopping habits – for food and clothes alike – are disconnected from the manner of production. The fashion-conscious young have been persuaded by clever marketing to think that clothes should be cheap and disposable, just as poor families came to believe that eight nutritious burgers could be made for £1. It remains to be seen whether the horsemeat scare will change consumer behaviour in the long term, but there’s no comparable outcry about the plight of Asian garment workers.

With four million workers in the garment industry in Bangladesh, (http://www.bgmea.com.bd ) the implications of the horrendous incident at Rana Plaza where hundreds were killed and injured highlights the need for consumer awareness,  fairtrade and corporate responsibility.

“The deaths as a result of the collapsed building in Bangladesh were a tragedy but not an accident,” says Murray Worthy from the charity War on Want. He argues that the level of neglect and lack of regulation in the industry led to the disaster at the factory.

It happened just five months after a fire at the Bangladeshi firm Tazreen Fashions in which more than 100 people were killed.

Campaigners say that the rapid expansion of the industry over the past few years played a large role in this incident.

It is a common occurrence for buildings to see illegal floors added, according to Sam Mahers from Labour Behind the Label. In this case, one minister alleged that the whole building was illegally constructed.

“Many of these buildings are a death trap, often with no proper escape routes. So while this incident is shocking it is not surprising,” Ms Mahers says.

Labour Behind the Label is part of a campaign pushing for retailers to sign up to the Bangladesh Fire and Building Safety Agreement.

It argues for action that includes independent building inspections, training in workers’ rights and “a long-overdue review of safety standards”. So far, Germany’s Tchibo and America’s PVH Corp (owner of Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger) have signed it.

Employees in Bangladeshi factories are mainly women and conditions can be harsh, unions say. Although they are contracted to work eight hours a day, if an important order comes in workers are often forced to work up to 18 hours in a day, or on their day off, to finish the job. ” (BBC coverage, article -  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22296645 )

The Clean Clothes Campaign (CCC)  has continuously pressured for improved conditions since 1989; in a recent statement they urged brands to sign Safety Agreement following the Rana Plaza disaster:

“The total compensation figure is likely to be over US$30 million in addition to the cost of emergency treatment. The death toll, already over 300, seems likely to increase dramatically as media reports indicate that 1000 people are still unaccounted for. Our local partners have expressed concern that mismanagement and incorrect accounting by the authorities means that some deaths are not being recorded on the list of deceased.

The CCC is contacting all brands whose names are linked to one of the five factories that were producing in the building  to verify details of their production.

Five brands have confirmed current or recent production: Bon Marche (UK), El Corte Ingles (Spain), Primark (UK/Ireland), Mango (Spain) and Joe Fresh (clothing line at Loblaw’s, Canada’s largest supermarket chain).

A number of other brands are linked to the factory through import data, labels  and other documentation found at the site by local activists of other brands producing in one of the factories, including Benetton (Italy), Cato Fashions (USA), Children’s Place (USA), Carrefour (France).  So far all deny production or failed to respond.

The CCC calls on all buyers to step forward immediately and to make sure that every effort is taken to minimise the pain and suffering of the people involved and prevent further deaths.

Ineke Zeldenrust from Clean Clothes Campaign says: “Brands can no longer justify any further delay in signing the Bangladesh Fire and Building Safety Agreement.  Since Tazreen, where 112 people died, brands have come up with insufficient proposals such as safety videos (H&M) or a safety academy (WalMart). How much safety does a video provide, when floors collapse or emergency exits do not exist? Workers need a structural solution, not a quick-fix. The lack of action demonstrated by brands amounts to criminal negligence.”

Letter to the Observer 28 April 2013

The factory collapse in Bangladesh will have pricked the conscience of many a business that relies on cheap labour in developing countries to keep down the costs of production. We hope the tragedy brings about a sharper focus on occupational health and safety, in which organisations recognise their moral duty to protect workers from harm no matter where they are in the supply chain.
Jane White
Institution of Occupational Safety & Health

Moving forward and changing the industry - it’s up to you:

Labour behind the label (http://www.labourbehindthelabel.org) fifth annual ‘Let’s Clean Up Fashion’ report produced in 2011 emphasizes some key principles for improvement in the industry:

1 Taking a collaborative approach

A large number of brands and retailers in the UK are members of the Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI), a collaborative body of companies, trade unions and civil society organisations (referred to here as NGOs). Membership of a multi-stakeholder initiative (MSI) such as the ETI, however, is not necessarily a clear indicator of good collaboration or effective projects. Burberry, Gap, Tesco, Sainsbury and Fat Face are all members of the ETI, but made disappointing submissions. Another ETI brand, Debenhams, refused to provide any information for this report. It is notable, though, that those brands with the most in-depth projects were all ETI members (Monsoon, Next, M&S).

2 Worker organising and freedom of association

3 Examining commercial factors: paying the cost

It is widely acknowledged that there is a huge gap between prevailing wages for garment workers and even the lowest estimates of a living wage. Therefore, any attempt to ensure all workers receive a living wage will impact on production costs and could mean suppliers have to charge more for their goods. Any serious living wage programme needs to identify how these cost increases will be covered and by whom.

4 Rolling it out: developing a route-map for sustaining a living wage.

Any route map for change must include benchmarks that identify what constitutes success. It is vital for brands and retailers to provide clear targets for what they believe a living wage level should be in each country they buy from. Such benchmarks are controversial and continue to be a source of debate. However, unless brands tell consumers and workers what wage levels they are aiming to implement, their work will not deliver a living wage for all workers. To date only M&S claims to have identified living wage benchmarks for its primary production countries: Sri Lanka, India and Bangladesh. Yet a year after making a commitment to pay a ‘fair living wage’ to workers in these countries by 2015, the company has not published these figures 

Download the full Labour behind the label report with summaries of UK retailers level of commitment . 

Are shoppers willing to pay?

The BBC interviewed shoppers following the disaster (video)

Sign the petition - Demand safety for Bangladeshi workers

http://www.cleanclothes.org/action/current-actions/rana-plaza

“It’s unbelievable that brands still refuse to sign a binding agreement with unions and labour groups to stop these unsafe working conditions from existing. Tragedy after tragedy shows that corporate-controlled monitoring is completely inadequate,”  says Tessel Pauli from Clean Clothes Campaign.

She adds: “Right now the families of the victims are grieving and the community is in shock. But  they, and the hundreds injured in the collapse, are without income and without support. Immediate relief and longterm compensation must be provided by the brands who were sourcing from these factories, and responsibility taken for their lack of action to prevent this happening.” 

To stop these collapses from happening, the Clean Clothes Campaign calls upon brands sourcing from Bangladesh to sign on to the Bangladesh Fire and Building Safety Agreement immediately. The CCC, together with local and global unions and labour rights organisations has developed a sector-wide program for action that includes independent building inspections, worker rights training, public disclosure and a long-overdue review of safety standards. It is transparent as well as practical, and unique in being supported by all key labour stakeholders in Bangladesh and internationally.

The agreement was already signed last year by the US company PVH Corp (owner of Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger) and the German retailer Tchibo. The labour signatories are now calling on all major brands sourcing in the industry to sign on to the initiative in order to ensure its rapid implementation. The programme has the potential to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of workers currently at risk in unsafe and illegally built factories.

CCC has been campaigning on safety issues in Bangladesh since the collapse of the Spectrum factory in 2005, which left 64 people dead and involved high street brand Zara.

Call on Retailers to compensate

A petition drawn up by the National Garment Workers’ Federation, which called on Primark, Matalan and Mango to pay compensation to victims’ families and to sign up to the Bangladesh fire and building safety agreement to prevent future deaths of garment workers.

The UK high street retailer Primark and Canadian counterpart Loblaws have announced they will compensate the victims of last week’s collapse of a Bangladeshi factory complex where suppliers of some of their clothing lines were located.

Avaaz have a petition 

To the CEOs of H&M, GAP, and other fashion brands:

As citizens and consumers, we urge you to immediately sign an enforceable Bangladesh fire and building safety agreement, or risk fatal damage to your brand image. The agreement must commit you to pay for routine, independent inspections and safety upgrades for your supplier factories. Your companies and other multinationals profit from cheap labour, and can do much more to reduce the dangers of the places where your products are made.

At a reception in London recently I met an extremely rich woman, who lives, as most people with similar levels of wealth do, in an almost comically unsustainable fashion: jetting between various homes and resorts in one long turbo-charged holiday. When I told her what I did, she responded: “Oh I agree, the environment is so important. I’m crazy about recycling.” But the real problem, she explained, was “people breeding too much”.

I agreed that population is an element of the problem, but argued that consumption is rising much faster and – unlike the growth in the number of people – is showing no signs of levelling off. She found this notion deeply offensive: I mean the notion that human population growth is slowing. When I told her that birth rates are dropping almost everywhere, and that the world is undergoing a slow demographic transition, she disagreed violently: she has seen, on her endless travels, how many children “all those people have”.

As so many in her position do, she was using population as a means of disavowing her own impacts. The issue allowed her to transfer responsibility to others: people at the opposite end of the economic spectrum. It allowed her to pretend that her shopping and flying and endless refurbishments of multiple homes are not a problem. Recycling and population: these are the amulets people clasp in order not to see the clash between protecting the environment and rising consumption.

In a similar way, we have managed, with the help of a misleading global accounting system, to overlook one of the gravest impacts of our consumption. This too has allowed us to blame foreigners – particularly poorer foreigners – for the problem.

OVER the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar. The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO₂ put there by humanity since 1750. And yet, as James Hansen, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, observes, “the five-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade.”

Temperatures fluctuate over short periods, but this lack of new warming is a surprise. Ed Hawkins, of the University of Reading, in Britain, points out that surface temperatures since 2005 are already at the low end of the range of projections derived from 20 climate models (see chart 1). If they remain flat, they will fall outside the models’ range within a few years.

The mismatch between rising greenhouse-gas emissions and not-rising temperatures is among the biggest puzzles in climate science just now. It does not mean global warming is a delusion. Flat though they are, temperatures in the first decade of the 21st century remain almost 1°C above their level in the first decade of the 20th. But the puzzle does need explaining.

Economist March 2013

Full article here: http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21574461-climate-may-be-heating-up-less-response-greenhouse-gas-emissions

Climate change key data: http://climate.nasa.gov/key_indicators/

Climate scientists have linked the massive snowstorms and bitter spring weather now being experienced across Britain and large parts of Europe and North America to the dramatic loss of Arctic sea ice.

Both the extent and the volume of the sea ice that forms and melts each year in the Arctic Ocean fell to an historic low last autumn, and satellite records published on Monday by the National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado, show the ice extent is close to the minimum recorded for this time of year.

“The sea ice is going rapidly. It’s 80% less than it was just 30 years ago. There has been a dramatic loss. This is a symptom of global warming and it contributes to enhanced warming of the Arctic,” said Jennifer Francis, research professor with the Rutgers Institute of Coastal and Marine Science.

Full article at the Ecologist

The heavy snowfall and freezing temperatures which have marked March 2013 across the northern hemisphere are in stark contrast to March 2012 when many countries experienced their warmest ever springs. The hypothesis that wind patterns are being changed because melting Arctic sea ice has exposed huge swaths of normally frozen ocean to the atmosphere would explain both the extremes of heat and cold, say the scientists.

Full article at the Guardian

Further reading:

Arctic sea ice reports and daily news 

Letter to John Griffiths AM, Minister for Environment and Sustainable Development, from Margaret Minhinnick, Sustainable Wales.

22.02.2013

Dear John Griffiths

 It was good to speak to you on Feb. 6 at ‘Environment Wales’ (EW) Strategy meeting in Cardiff. Might I state again how important ‘Sustainable Wales’ believes it is for the Welsh government to respect and support local activism and knowledge at every opportunity.

 I write with particular reference to ‘Gwynedd Gynaladwy / Sustainable Gwynedd’, started in 1995, which is undergoing severe restrictions. In fact, its office in Penrhyndeudraeth is to close and its officer become a full-time volunteer. I am also concerned about the future of ‘Ymlaen Ceredigion’, based in Aberystwyth.

 ‘Sustainable Wales’ (SW), also established 1995 of which I am the volunteer Director, has been under the same financial restrictions for 2 years. We have recently opened new offices above the SUSSED fair trade / ethical shop in Porthcawl, funded by the shop sales, but SW’s future is precarious.

 Might I reiterate how important it is for groups such as ‘Gwynedd Gynaladwy’, ‘Ymlaen Ceredigion’ and ‘Sustainable Wales’, with their vital local knowledge and grassroots support, to continue promoting matters of the environment and sustainability. They operate as educationalists, facilitators, motivators, providing mentoring/hand-holding support. These groups initially were backed with support from EW, and are real success stories.

 Their grass-roots experience and history of community activity mean that they can engage at street level, whilst communicating with civil servants or politicians. Their activities include community participation, awareness raising, training, lobbying, co-ordinating partnerships for action and developing various practical projects. They all deliver real action on the ground, which should be counted towards the Welsh Government’s Sustainable Development Duty.

 It was disappointing to learn from you at the EW Strategy meeting that your division’s most recent idea is for ‘Place Coordinators’. This appears to be parachuting officers into a few communities. Such officers will have far less experience than those of us already on the ground.

 I have been involved with EW since its inception. In fact, I was the Co-ordinator of Friends of the Earth Cymru when the UK2000 initiative was launched in 1987. This was the precursor to EW and had a tremendously positive effect, both on environmental groups in Wales and how they came to view and tackle the main environmental issues.

 The creation of UK2000 and subsequently Environment Wales was a radical development. It took place during the premiership of Margaret Thatcher. I go so far as to state that no subsequent intervention in the environmental and voluntary movements has had such a long-lasting and creative grassroots impact.

 FoE Cymru was one of the original partners in UK2000, and the grant assistance from that source allowed us to appoint our first salaried officer (dealing with Recycling). This was a seminal moment in the history of FoE Cymru – and every other UK2000 partner benefited in important ways.

 I recall also how the original UK 2000 idea, of having development officers in a number of environmental bodies, was to help them build ‘capacity’ within their own orgaisations as well as nurture local group project development. I suggest that this would really help the hard-pressed SD organisations mentioned above in much the same way.

 Considering the urgency of climate change - see the essay by Gareth Wyn Jones, in the current ‘Agenda’ (IWA) attached, – the welfare of these bodies, rich in experience, local knowledge and support, is in all our interests.

 Thus the idea ‘dropping people in’ to new positions to lead or promote environmental / sustainable initiatives is surely flawed.  We need to nurture and secure those at the grassroots! The best people to help communites engage with these complex local and global problems are their peers. 

 I would be delighted to talk to you about our work at any occasion.

Yours sincerely,

Margaret Minhinnick

Cc Leanne Wood AM, Kirsty Williams AM, Clair Sian-Le-Berry EW, Jan Walsh EW Chairperson, Cynthia  Hughes Gwynedd Gynaladwy, Bob Jaques Ymlean Ceredigion

Just a few days ahead of this week’s Sustainable Wales Friday Green Room Debate on the topic ‘Is catastrophic climate change inevitable’ the European Environment Agency have released their 2012 report on ‘Climate change, impacts and vulnerability in Europe’. It makes for sobering reading. Climate change, as evidenced by increases in temperature, changes in precipitation, and decreases in ice and snow, is now clearly happening, globally and across Europe – to the extent that many new records for weather extremes have been set in recent years. With exceptional melting of the Arctic ice sheet observed in 2012, snow cover decreasing, glaciers retreating and permafrost soils warming, northern Europe is changing rapidly. Meanwhile, southern and eastern Europe are experiencing extreme heat and decreased river flows, coupled across the continent with increased frequency and intensity of droughts and floods. Freshwater systems are stressed, with warming bringing earlier and increased phytoplankton blooms. Most of Europe’s coasts are seeing increases in sea level and ocean acidification; Europe’s forests are having their growth checked by pests, diseases and forest fires. Farming is being badly disrupted, as is biodiversity and even human health, with deaths increasing due to heat-waves, tropospheric ozone, floods and the northern migration of tick- and other vector-borne diseases.

But it’s not all entirely bad news. Warming is bringing a northward expansion of the area in which some food crops can be grown; Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey could become the bread-baskets of Europe if irrigation problems can be solved. Many species of plants, animals and insects are migrating, some making use of wildlife corridors created by Europe’s conservation agencies - although whether they can outpace the rapidity of habitat change is an open question. And while it is clear that the human impacts of climate change in social and economic terms will vary widely across Europe – with the poorer south expected to fare the worst – the very fact that we know so much about what is happening raises the possibility of a wide range of adaptation and mitigation measures being put in place before all is lost. As one of the richest, freest and most scientifically-informed communities on Earth, the European nations – UK included - are already leading the world in this respect. Forewarned may be forearmed, if Europe’s policy-makers and citizens can collectively take the many tough decisions that lie ahead. What should be saved, what abandoned? Already massive works are under way in Venice, threatened by sea-level rise; in much of Mediterranean Europe current agriculture may have to cease altogether, replaced by solar farms producing the clean energy we so urgently need.

So, there is little doubt that climate change is inevitable – it’s already happening all around us, and there’s enough greenhouse gases locked into the atmosphere and oceans of the Earth system to ensure global warming continues for decades and centuries, possibly a millennia – and this year again saw a global high for carbon emissions. But will its impact be catastrophic? That’s another question altogether. 10-12,000 years ago humanity developed agriculture and large-scale cattle herding, clearing the forests and as a consequence kicking off anthropogenic global warming. The coming of the fossil-fuelled Industrial Revolution in the late 19^th Century kicked the process up a massive gear; with the post WW2 ‘great acceleration’ the human imprint on the Earth reached new, record levels. Yet, just as our impact grew, so did our knowledge, and with that knowledge, our awareness and concern. We are no longer - if indeed we ever truly were - ignorant of our reckless overgrowth and habitat depletion; armed with the best scientific information available, we can wield the same awesome technological and social creativity we have displayed throughout our short but spectacular history to adapt to, and eventually solve, the staggering problems caused by our own successes and excesses. Of course, we may fail; but, given the challenges humanity has overcome so far, it’s certainly not inevitable.

Posted by Steven Robert Harris, 5th December 2012

The Sustainable Wales Green Room Debate ‘Is Catastrophic Climate Change Inevitable?’ with guest speaker Nick Jepson takes place on Friday, December 7th, at 8pm at the Green Room, James St., Porthcawl (above SUSSED). Can’t attend? The debate will also be streamed live, on http://www.ustream.tv/channel/the-green-room-events-channel.

The great scientific news of 2012 has been the confirmation by the Atlas and CMS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland of the sighting of a ‘Higgs-like boson’ at around the energy levels predicted by the standard model of particle physics. This discovery helps to further unravel the mystery of how matter acquires mass, leading us deeper into our increasingly profound and detailed understanding of the fundamental forces and building blocks of nature. Being able to predict, and then find such significant patterns among the billions of high-energy particle collisions measured at the LHC is a triumph for both theory and practice, for both science and engineering, and also for a truly international process of political and economic cooperation that demonstrates just what is possible when people work together with good will. It also further strengthens our faith in the scientific method - the only means so far that we have collectively discovered of steadily and reliably, through reason, calculation and experiment, revealing the truths of nature in ways that allow us not just to understand physical reality, but manipulate it.

In and of itself, a breakthrough such as the Higgs is truly something to make one hopeful for the future of humanity, if only for the sheer wonder that together we can probe so far into the impossibly small and fleeting. Yet this is much, much more than just another ‘gee-whiz’ moment. The discovery of the Higgs further confirms that we are very much on the right track in our fundamental understanding of matter, and this brings us another significant step closer to developing what our imperilled civilisation currently most desperately needs – a truly clean and limitless source of energy. At the beginning of the Twentieth Century Einstein’s demonstration that E=MC² revealed that huge amounts of energy were locked up in each tiny atomic nucleus; by the middle of the century we had developed the technology to release that energy in a controlled fashion, and the nuclear age began. But, simultaneously, our combustion of the fossil fuels of coal, oil and gas hugely accelerated, pushing to an unprecedented rate – along with deforestation and other land-use associated with intensifying agriculture - the emission of greenhouse gases to the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans. Now, at the beginning of the Twenty-first Century the true scale and dangers of the global warming our use of fossil-fuel energy has unleashed is becoming increasingly evident, yet somehow, for complex political, economic and social reasons nuclear energy has not displaced coal, oil and gas to any really significant extent. And, although there is a huge increase in the awareness of our need for clean energy sources, research and development into solar and the other as yet very inefficient renewable technologies remains pitifully under-funded and resourced compared to the sums spent on pursuing new ways of extracting the old, dirty fuels. Sometimes, when we learn yet again global emissions have risen by an unprecedented amount, the situation seems hopeless: are we to simply keep on burning our hoard of fossilised sunlight until the whole planet is cooked?

Well, perhaps we shouldn’t despair quite yet. When the early atomic scientists and quantum physics of the Twentieth Century began to probe the mysteries of the atom who could have predicted how rapidly and radically our knowledge and capabilities would expand? Who could have predicted the emergence of an entirely new nuclear technology in so short a space of time? And, since the pace began to gather in particle physics post WW2, who could have predicted the huge advances in our understanding of the fundamental forces and particles and their relationship to each other that we now see? Although it may not be immediately evident, somewhere in the blizzard of data emerging from the LHC and its fellow high-energy physic installation around the world is the information that we need to create the energy sources that currently live only in our imagination: clean, abundant, and infinitely more powerful than our current fossil-fuel technologies. For it is only when an energy source is better, easier, cheaper than those technologies that they will be replaced. The discovery of the Higgs brings that day a little closer; and that’s a real cause for hope.

Posted by Steven Robert Harris, 22nd November 2012

In the spirit of Donald Rumsfeld we might distinguish between natural inevitabilities and unnatural inevitabilities. Someday, for example, the precarious flank of the massive Cumbre Vieja volcano on La Palma in the Canary Islands will collapse and send a mega-tsunami across the Atlantic. The damage from Boston to New York City will dwarf last year’s disaster in Japan. It’s inevitable, but volcanologists don’t know whether the destabilising eruption will occur tomorrow or in five thousand years. So for now, it’s merely a titillating topic for NOVA or the National Geographic Channel.

Another, much more frequent example of natural inevitability is the pre-global-warming hurricane cycle. Two or three times each century a perfect storm has crashed into the US Atlantic seaboard and wreaked havoc as far as the Great Lakes. But a $20 billion disaster every few decades is why we have an insurance industry. And even the loss, now and then, of an entire city to nature (San Francisco in 1906 or New Orleans in 2005) is an affordable tragedy.

How long will it take for this realisation to percolate through the tumoured brain of American politics? Until 2006, American public opinion was broadly in step with European concerns about global warming. Following Climategate, however, the energy-industry-subsidised right went on the offensive and polls recorded a dramatic decline in public perception of climate change as a scientific fact.

Even more surprisingly, opinion surveys tracking public reactions to extreme climate events, like the recent epic drought in the Great Plains, have failed to detect significant change in opinion. The presidential race, meanwhile, has largely been a contest about which candidate stoops lowest to administer oral sex to fossil fuel producers.

Read the full blog at LRB, thanks to Rob Hope for the link.