Agora - content

The open forum for foreign policy

Energy & Climate

Where does energy from waste fit into the UK post-Brexit?

Britain’s circular economy strategy is part of a wider plan to mitigate climate change and will change how society operates; the materials we use, how we generate electricity, and how we consume and manage our waste.

The circular economy

The circular economy model is a key framework to realise a more sustainable future. It focuses on keeping materials and resources within the system for as long as possible or, if possible, indefinitely. As opposed to a linear model, where a resource is extracted, refined, consumed, and disposed, the circular model ensures the material is repurposed and reused either through recycling into another product, extraction of key metals and other materials, or potentially even conversion into energy. This approach is one of many potential catalysts for a sustainable future, where fewer virgin resources are extracted from rapidly depleting sources.

The role of waste

To fully embrace and refine this model, a major part of the circular economy is managing waste. The UK is currently following the EU strategy, with the aims to achieve a 60% recycling target for municipal waste by 2030. Landfill capacity is expected to expire by 2023 and, while newer sites will become available, they are not being opened fast enough to meet demand. The UK does not yet have its own strategy on dealing with waste management as part of the circular economy and, with the looming shadow of Brexit, it is unclear if these targets will be maintained or others developed.

Currently, UK policy is having a positive impact on waste. While 48% of total waste in 2016 was recycled and around 25% went to landfill – which includes municipal waste from construction and industry – the weightage amount is still too high to be sustainable. Municipal solid waste is defined as waste coming from homes, schools, shops and small businesses. Since 2010, there has been a 40% reduction in municipal waste sent to the landfill.

Energy from waste

One of the ways that we can reduce waste sent to landfill and support a more sustainable economy is by extracting energy from the waste for heating and electricity generation, a process known as energy from waste (EfW). The process outputs heat, which can be used for district heating, while the energy can be used to create steam, which is in turn used to generate electricity. Materials such as glass and metals, which do not combust in the process, are left at the bottom, known as bottom ash and can be used as aggregates in construction, with the remaining metals being sent for recycling.

There are many advantages of this approach. For instance, when we compare carbon emissions of EfW against sending waste to landfill, EfW has much lower emissions. Research on EfW has also shown that the health risks – cancerous and non-cancerous – from waste incineration are five times lower in comparison to landfill. Given that we are running out of landfill space, EfW can take as much as 60Mt out of landfill in the coming decade and be used to provide electricity to 1.8m homes. Currently, around 3.5m tonnes of waste are being sent abroad to be utilised to generate electricity, which the UK is then buying back.

There are still problems with EfW, the EU has recently removed EfW from its directives to be incorporated into the circular economy on the grounds that, compared to traditional fossil fuels, EfW produces twice as much carbon per unit of electricity generated, passing the limit set by the EU. Research into the technology involved in ensuring the emissions are purified is improving, however, and treatment of air pollution control (APC) residues may rectify some of these problems in the coming years.

What does this mean for the UK?

Weighing up the pros and cons, EfW should be a key part of the UK’s post-Brexit policies. Given we are unable to meet space demand for landfills, EfW will enable us to free up space and reduce the amount of CO2 emissions that would normally be generated. Exporting waste – to be turned into electricity and to be bought back – makes no sense when there is an option to reduce costs, provide investment opportunities, and create domestic capacity for baseline power generation.

EfW does not necessarily need to be a long term strategy for the UK. With society undergoing a transformation in the energy sector and climate being at the top of the agenda, using EfW in a short-to-medium term could provide a stepping stone to a cleaner world. While there are concerns about EfW emissions, a comprehensive national strategy needs to be developed to effectively place EfW in the future of the UK’s circular economy.

Usman Farooq is a data scientist at an international engineering consultancy.

The UK can use COP26 to prove its climate credentials

The next COP summit on climate change will be hosted in Glasgow. In the face of the climate crisis and the past few years of political uncertainty, the UK should use the meeting to successfully deliver on their large climate change promises.

Following the Conservative Party’s win in the December general election, the new government is expected by various public sectors and stakeholders to deliver in multiple fields of policy, from dealing with problems facing the NHS, to relationships with the United States, to combatting homelessness, to the rise in rental prices in the UK.

Among these is the most important of all: climate change. Following it’s postponement, the UK is due to host the 26th Session of the Conference of the Parties (COP26) in 2021, the first such international forum to be hosted in Britain. With climate change becoming increasingly important across the world, the demand and pressure to deliver a substantial agreement is greater than ever.

The UK has long heralded itself as a ‘world leader’ in the fight against climate change, the reality of which is a matter for debate. Despite landmark victories in declaring a ‘climate emergency’, palpable progress on environmental policy in the UK is slow, with the only significant recent victory being the U-turn on policy approaches to new onshore wind farms.

Many parts of the Government and other MPs are currently discussing new approaches through Parliamentary groups and Whitehall Departments. The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) recently focused on achieving net-zero emissions by 2050. Then Chair of the BEIS Committee Rachel Reeves stated in March: “Putting the 2050 net zero target into law was a big sign of the UK’s climate change ambitions. However, the target is only the first step, it’s crucial the Government now comes forward with a roadmap to achieve it”.

The UK has remained a reliable signatory to agreements and participant in further negotiations that arise from COP summits. The country has an additional opportunity to develop a vital, though potentially only cosmetic, association with climate policy. Throughout COP, there are multiple instances where essential agreements become enshrined in the body of climate dialogues. We all recall the Kyoto Protocol to the Paris Agreement and, with the summit in Glasgow, the UK can stamp its name into the environmental history books.

The road ahead is still rife with bumps and potholes. The Government has already had to change the President of the proceedings, from the former Minister for Energy and Clean Growth, Claire Perry O’Neill, to the current Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, Alok Sharma. In addition, the EU may be seeking to exert its influence both ahead of and during COP26 in Glasgow, with the bloc already having separate discussions on increasing European emissions’ targets for 2030. Additionally, as a result of the coronavirus crisis, the summit has now been postponed, throwing yet another wrench into the works in the lead up to COP26.

With an additional year ahead of the conference, it would be foolish to rule out further trials and tribulations. Undoubtedly, 2020 marks an important year for both British and international climate policy, and we must keep a critical eye on what unfolds in the lead up to and during the proceedings at COP26 next year.

Micheil Page is Head of Agora’s Energy & Climate Programme.

Climate change could transform the way we think about democracy

Though it is mainly seen as an environmental catastrophe today, climate change will fundamentally alter our political and economic institutions, including popular rule. For democracy to survive, we need to expand it in definition and practice as part of the response to climate change.

When historians review the 21st century, they may well conclude that climate change ran through all the historical, political, and economic shifts of the era. As environmental collapses destabilise economic systems through resource scarcity, alter societies through mass migration, and jeopardise national security through environmental hazards, global political institutions will fundamentally shift.

One of these institutions we hold dear more than most is democracy, defined by US President Abraham Lincoln as “government of the people, by the people, for the people”. Although we focus on the populist election victories in the West since 2016 as the key challenge to democracy today, there may be a greater one hidden around the corner: what will the impact of climate change be?

A quick prognosis will not yield positive results. The short-term orientation of democratic term limits do not lend themselves to the long-term solutions climate change requires, and the unpalatability of the necessary reforms mean it is safer for democratic politicians to appeal to the rhetoric of climate change, rather than make real progress.

This was seen in Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s proposition that Canada should declare a climate emergency, shortly before he approved the construction of a trans-mountain oil pipeline. For re-election, the bad publicity was preferable to rising fuel costs.

Additionally, solutions must be on a global scale to have a realistic chance of success at fighting climate change. Treaties such as the 2015 Paris Agreement and the European Green Deal, proposed in May 2019 by the incoming European Commission, are an effective way to make sure every country takes action against climate change. In a world were these solutions have to be increasingly globalised, is there any room for the voice of small communities?

These arguments obscure the fact that climate change opposition can empower democratic institutions. For one thing, the notion that elected representatives try to avoid long-term climate policies is only really the case in majoritarian democracies such the UK; adherence to climate change policies is higher in more proportional democracies. This includes the many continental European nations with popular green parties, such as the Dutch GroenLinks who found popularity in elections in 2017.

Moreover, climate change activism is galvanizing young people to more participation in, not disenchantment with, democratic politics. This has led to increased support for presidential candidates in the US with strong climate change policies, and the global school strikes for the climate (we might also expect politicians to respond faster to climate change if the franchise were extended to 16-year-olds).

Additionally, viewing international agreements as globalisation out of the control of the masses is misleading when it comes to climate agreements. They are not imposed on citizens unfairly through unrepresentative organisations, rather people are encouraging states to abide by commitments though the international arena. This is through both traditional political participation and through activism taken to an enormous scale, such as the six to seven million people protesting in late September in a global climate strike. The decision for dozens of US cities to continue adhering to the Paris Climate Agreement, after the American refusal to abide by it in 2017, also reflects the support of communities beyond the state for these arrangements.

From here, we can see democratic principles beginning to shift. States currently employing majoritarian systems of democracy may have to make them more representative if they want to avoid climate disaster, and popular protests play an ever-increasing role in influencing policy makers. Yet while protests are traditionally national affairs in support of state aims, these new climate protests challenge the state system by organising worldwide for common goals and demanding that states adhere to international agreements. These emerging patterns point the way to a future where popular rule does not conform to traditional two-party power structures, nor even to state borders.

Lincoln gave his famous definition during the American Civil War, claiming that Union soldiers died so that democracy “shall not perish from the earth”. Soon we will find ourselves in a similar position, but the people shall no longer be of one nation, but of one, dying, earth. Maintaining democracy in the face of global challenges is far from inevitable, in fact it is unlikely. But maintaining democracy has always been a challenge, and in continuing its maintenance we must widen and deepen the idea of what it could mean to a broader, more global, and fundamentally fairer process.

Ross Twinn is a history student at the London School of Economics.

Reconsidering security under climate change

Following a Parliamentary resolution in May, MPs have declared a “climate emergency”. Climate change is still primarily framed as an environmental problem, however. By reframing it as a security threat, policy makers will be better equipped to implement the drastic policies required.

Media outlets and politicians continue to focus on the environmental impacts of climate change: deforestation, rising sea levels, loss of habitat, increasing ocean acidity, drought. But the violent social consequences of these events have been overlooked.

It is increasingly accepted that climate change will diminish resource availability, destabilising political environments and sparking armed conflicts. While experts and commentators have been warning about this for years, mainstream coverage of climate change has yet to acknowledge the security ramifications of these natural disasters, partly due to the difficulty in analysing hypothetical scenarios.

However, we don’t need to turn to hypothetical scenarios to examine the link between climate change and violence. The first climate change war has already occurred in Darfur.

The first ‘climate change war’

The civil war in Darfur, Sudan, was arguably the first modern climate change war. In the 1980s, severe droughts in the region turned previously arable land into dust, leading to crop shortages and the death of livestock. Predominantly Arab Muslim herders were forced to migrate south in search of new pastures. This migration led to conflicts with the Christian farmers in the region over the limited resources. These conflicts over farmland exacerbated ethnic tensions, resulting in the Darfur wars of 1987-90 and 1994-98. By 2003, the intra-state violence had become a civil war, encompassing state, non-state and other ethnic groups.

In 2004, a peace agreement was signed. Drought raged on, however, intensifying the now decades long tensions over access to agricultural resources between the Christian farmers and Muslim herders. The conflict escalated into genocide, with government backing, perpetrated by Arab Muslims against Christian farmers.

Starvation and illness, caused by the extreme food shortages and the conflict itself, resulted in the deaths and displacement of hundreds of thousands of people in the region. Then UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon said of the crisis: “Amid the diverse social and political causes, the Darfur conflict began as an ecological crisis, arising at least in part from climate change”.

Implications for the Region

Darfur illustrates the causal relationship between environmental stress and conflict. This relationship is not deterministic and does not alleviate the responsibility of the perpetrators, but the factors that led to Darfur are not isolated to Sudan. Climate change will continue to limit resources and exacerbate existing social stresses, including poverty, ethnic tensions, and political instability.

Most African nations rely on rain-fed agriculture for their economy and food supply, and 80% of the population of the Horn of Africa relies upon subsistence farming. Added to this, the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre reported that last year alone 5.5m were displaced in the region due to conflict and 2.6m people due to natural disasters, accounting for more than a quarter of all displacements worldwide.

The pattern that emerged in Sudan is repeating in the region. In 2018 armed conflict erupted in Nigeria between herder and farmer groups, aggravated by drought. In a highly populated region like Sub-Saharan Africa, conflicts have high casualty rates and the human cost of climate change can be greatly felt.

What next?

The international community is slowly beginning to realise the security ramifications of climate change. In the UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has accepted the science and the Government has pledged £193m for development aid concerning climate change. There is still a long way to go, however. Johnson’s voting record reveals a more ambivalent position, particularly concerning preventative measures against climate change. With the threat of a ‘no deal’ Brexit looming, structured cooperation between nation states looks set to fracture, risking the much needed international cooperation to combat climate change.

Climate change will not affect all states equally, and a state’s ability to mitigate and adapt to the adverse changes in the environment will depend on its wealth. The countries which will be most impacted by climate change are those with the least political clout in the international system.

To address this, the international community must stop framing climate change as primarily an environmental issue, and emphasise the relationship between climate and security. This altered emphasis could allow the UK to repurpose some of the £36.9bn defence budget to tackle the greatest threat to human security in the 21st Century, namely climate change.

Shona Warren holds a Masters of International Relations from the University of Melbourne and works in international development.

The UK’s environmental policy must adapt to a post-EU world

While the environment is often treated as a national issue, international co-operation remains pivotal to producing the results that will adequately tackle climate change. As such the UK needs to re-imagine its environmental relationship with the EU27.

The environment should transcend national policy and contribute to foreign policy, considering the grave threat climate change poses towards the whole world and not just a few states. Such is the interconnectivity of countries and economies today that it should be expected that the UK’s environmental policies will come under strain from external shocks that could stem from a number of different geopolitical factors. Yet the most pressing of these might derive from the EU’s future relationship with the UK.

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has predicted that global temperatures will rise by 3°C by 2100 and 2°C within the next 12 years, despite some international co-operation on the issue, testament to the gravity of the problem.

One could argue that drawbacks lie with the official charters only including advisory and voluntary aims to reduce global warming, with the Paris climate change agreement proving especially flimsy in its achievements. America’s exit and its own inability to reach targets is also a cases in point. Clearly, there is a lack of tangible incentives for countries to work together in fear of being hurt economically by the increased red tape, and in this way becoming uncompetitive in terms of output compared to those who continue to produce vast volumes of emissions and pollution such as China.

The EU has proven itself to be different. It has developed a clear goal in pushing member states to contribute to a “resource-efficient, green, and competitive low-carbon economy”. Since the region has integrated further, European states have worked well to tackle the environmental issue through collective effort despite significantly less pressure 30 years ago then as there is now due to growing awareness, green parties, and activist movements. In 2017 the EU emitted 4,466m tonnes of greenhouse gases compared with 5,720 in 1990, an impressive decrease in trend when considering the fact that more nation states have joined the union in the time period and the destabilising nature of the 2008 global financial crisis that could have stalled progress. While its own targets have not been met recently, progress still continues.

Such success heightens the importance of the environment in the UK’s future relationship with the EU. With most media outlets focusing on trade and security, it is easy to overlook the benefits enjoyed by the UK in being a member of a group that is constantly pushing for innovation to improve the environmental state of Europe. Environmental charity Friends of the Earth looked into the relationship further, with a paper titled ‘UK Environmental Policy Post-Brexit: A Risk Analysis’. They found that the Government’s strategy not only proved vague regarding the issue, but also held targets that were less ambitious than the EU’s. The notion that interstate cooperation within the EU helps harmonise environmental goals is ultimately reinforced by the study’s conclusion that better environmental outcomes for the UK would be enjoyed with a closer relationship to Europe.

Of course, the type of Brexit deal will affect relations between the UK and EU. A ‘no deal’ Brexit would prove the most disruptive in terms of policy links with the EU, while a ‘hard Bresit’ could see only the most important environmental regulations retained in the UK. On the other side, if Brexit were completely stopped then Britain would return to the European Parliament reputation damaged but still a leading member state on the environment, perhaps being able to compel others to declare a climate emergency as the UK and Republic of Ireland have.

Global warming alone should be an issue important enough to transcend Brexit and bring negotiators on both sides, if not any others, to consensus on the issue. Shaking off European environment laws to reduce regulations would be done to the detriment of the UK’s clear progress on the environmental issue as part of the European project, and the politicians will do well to acknowledge that nuance.

Thomas Bradbury, studies politics at the University of Exeter.

The recycling problem: who will take our waste?

In the everlasting discussion of policy, trade deals, and environmental crises, one giant shadow looms on the horizon: Who will take our waste?

It is the recurring parable about consumer culture, from which the lesson has still not been learned. We shop, we consume, we discard; the linear economy of consumption and disposal is still running its course as the dominant pattern of use. But changes in China may impact our current habits in waste and recycling of these materials.
The average consumer is largely detached from the size and complexity of the ‘supply chain’ of waste and recycling. This is to the detriment of informed debate about the current broken model, which sees the UK trapped in an unsustainable cycle of shipping waste abroad, rather than looking to reassess how it can re-use and repurpose of discarded materials.

In fact, the glass bottle you put in your recycling bin every week can potentially end up as far away as China for it to be fully recycled. That likelihood is changing, however. Last year China – one of the largest importers of waste from other countries – announced a monumental ban on foreign waste imports following the realisation that the import of so-called ‘recycling’ was leading to a significant pollution crisis. Much of the recycling waste was being sent to landfill, incinerators, or for the informal work economy due to lack of sufficient infrastructure to process the scale of waste entering the country.

This follows another strategic ban by the Chinese government in 2017, as well as planned additional measures to be implemented in late 2019, designed to further refine and control the types of waste being imported into the country and reduce the issue of foreign waste and pollution that has remained uncontrolled for years.

The scale of the waste export crisis has implications for both the waste producers and waste importers in the flow of these items. In the western world, it presents a dilemma for local governments and companies. Now that waste management is outsourced to companies like Veolia, the exports and sales of these materials now faces wider scrutiny from their destinations and, in the worst case, are likely to be returned. The waste market has potentially been disrupted, because the costs of recycling and waste disposal rising has been met with a decrease in the potential return through export. So what solutions have been posed?

The primary solution so far has been to target other developing economies that already import waste. Countries such as Malaysia and Thailand, who previously accepted waste from the West, began accepting extra foreign waste following the first stages of the Chinese import ban. However it is unlikely to be a permanent solution, as China has proven to the world, they do not necessarily need to be the receptacles of the waste of Western livelihoods forever. In fact, India has recently announced plans to potentially ban all imports of plastic waste from other countries.

The remaining solutions leave a lot to be desired. The UK itself already runs a semi-intensive EfW (Energy from Waste) programme designed to reclaim energy from municipal waste through incineration. Currently, the waste that is not exported or sent to EfW, is sent to landfill, which comes with its own consequences of land-use and additional pollutants. This offers a glimpse into the extent of our waste and shows how our own systems are not reaching their fullest and most sustainable potential in the UK.

There is a clear and pressing need for a radical change in the way we consume and dispose of waste, and one of the strongest arguments being presented is that of a ‘circular economy’. Unlike a linear economic model, the circular economy aims for the repurposing and minimising of waste and achieving the most potential from resources. If looking at the case of a simple glass bottle, instead of it being sent to landfill or traded off to other countries, the glass is repurposed or reused for the same product after being sanitised. The resource thus continuously re-enters the supply chain instead of being discarded after one use.

With costs of waste disposal steadily rising, and the environmental implications of human livelihoods potentially reaching breaking point, there is more the need to consider and change these aspects of waste than ever before. The UK could pave the way in not just shipping its waste abroad but looking for sustainable methods of re-addressing our whole waste system to adopt a circular method of resource consumption even for the most harmful of materials, like plastic, and could be a vital part of the Government’s new strategy released last year. After all, if it is our waste, we should be the ones to deal with it.

Micheil Page is Head of Agora’s Energy and Climate Programme.