ACCRA, Ghana (PAMACC News) - The African Development Bank Group’s Annual Meetings in May will focus on the impact of climate change on Africa and the need for a just energy transition on the continent, the Bank Group’s Secretary General has said.
Professor Vincent Nmehielle spoke during a virtual press conference convened to brief journalists about the agenda of the five-day meetings, to be held from 23 to 27 May in Accra, Ghana.
For the first time since 2019, many delegates at this year’s meetings: the 57th Annual Meetings of the African Development Bank and the 48th Annual Meeting of the African Development Fund, will meet in person.
Nmehielle said the theme, Achieving Climate Resilience, and a Just Energy Transition for Africa, was chosen to provide a framework for the governors of the Banks to share their experiences and engage in addressing climate change and energy transition challenges, as well as their policies and measures to deal with them.
“Governments will be able to show what their countries have done in this regard,” the Secretary General said. A key highlight during the Bank Group’s Annual Meetings will be a commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the African Development Fund, the Bank Group’s concessional lending arm.
The Annual Meetings will also serve as a precursor to the UN Climate Change Conference, or COP 27, which is being called the “African COP”, to be held in November in Egypt. Governments will once again lobby for the continent’s positions on climate change.
The Secretary General was joined by African Development Bank Acting Chief Economist and Vice President Professor Kevin Urama; Vice-President for Power, Energy, Climate and Green Growth Dr Kevin Kariuki; and the Director of the Agriculture and Agro-Industry department Dr Martin Fregene, who represented the Vice President of the complex. They answered questions from the over 80 journalists who attended the event.
Professor Urama emphasized the Bank’s role as a thought leader in Africa, saying the meetings would include three main knowledge events that would touch on topics such as building a digital economy, green jobs for youth and a special session on climate change that would include the launch of the African Development Bank’s African Economic Outlook for 2022 report.
The Bank officials fielded questions on a range of topics, including the Bank’s role in infrastructure development, Africa’s energy transition, and a $1.5 billion plan to avert a food crisis sparked by the war in Ukraine.
According to Urama, resilience was all encompassing. “The Bank will be focusing a lot more on infrastructure investments to build the resilience of countries, social resilience, economic resilience and also environmental resilience in general, including climate resilience,” he said.
Kariuki noted that the African Development Bank was no longer investing in new coal projects. “However, when it comes to gas, we do understand that Africa needs to address its energy poverty and in order to look at energy poverty, we need to look at all non-coal sources of energy…Therefore, from where we stand, as long as a gas project has been included in a country as part of Nationally Determined Contributions…then the bank will invest in those gas power plants,” he said.
Fregene said the $1.5 billion food plan would address immediate needs triggered by the ongoing conflict in Europe. The plan will support farmers with seeds and fertilizers in the next wet season which starts around October in the southern hemisphere. The Bank also has a medium- to longer-term plan to help countries build resilience, known as Mission 1 for 200, which will help farmers boost production to 100 million tonnes of food to reach 200 million people.
At the end of the session, Nmehielle urged journalists, as “partners and advocates for development,” to spread the word about the impact of the Bank’s work and to press their governments for the change they want to see.
“The Bank is a catalyst...The Bank exists to help regional member countries to achieve their socio-economic development,” Nmehielle said. “The Annual Meetings will be exciting. We look forward to seeing you in Accra,” he added.
PAMACC News: Mining, one of the main causes of the degradation of rivers and forests in the Amazon, can now be monitored remotely by journalists, scientists, and other concerned citizens. Today, the Pulitzer Center in partnership with Earthrise Media launches the Amazon Mining Watch, a platform powered by an algorithm that analyzes satellite imagery to detect gold mines and other open-pit mining activities in the world's largest rainforest.
In its beta version, the platform performs 326 million analyses of high-resolution images every 4 months, covering the entire Amazon region, which encompasses nine countries or 6.7 million square kilometers. The algorithm has identified an area with characteristics of mining activity the size of 6.8 thousand square kilometers. To get an idea of the size of the environmental impact, this area is equivalent to about four times the entire city of New York.
The Amazon Mining Watch platform is a partnership between the Pulitzer Center's Rainforest Investigations Network (RIN) and Earthrise Media. The two nonprofit organizations had already collaborated to investigate the alarming criminal expansion of gold mining operations in Brazil and Venezuela and, from this experience, they decided to expand their methodology to the entire Amazon region.
The AI model recognizes mining zones using topographical features, and therefore it is not possible to determine when using the platform which mining sites are legal and which are illegal. It is also important to point out that because it is an automatic detection method using satellite images, there are false positives. The main goal of Amazon Mining Watch is to encourage journalists, researchers, and activists to use the data as a springboard to further investigate the results, thus contributing to contextualizing the AI findings
How the algorithm was developed
Earthrise Media, an organization dedicated to supporting communicators and organizations in the use of geospatial analysis, enlisted high school students in the United States for "identification marathons" of looking at mines through satellite images of the Amazon. This human effort eventually "trained" the AI model to recognize the characteristics of an open-pit mine, making it possible for computers to distinguish between mining areas and other land uses, such as agriculture.
This statistical and computational model, known as an artificial neural network, was trained to look at patches the size of 44 by 44 pixels, an equivalent of 440m by 440m on the ground. It did this by looking at thousands of Sentinel 2 satellite images from the last four months.
In this way, every four months, Amazon Mining Watch will be able to update its analysis of the status of mining on Amazon.
The code behind the platform as well as the data generated is open to the public and can be downloaded for other uses.
Reporting from the analysis
The Rainforest Investigations Network (RIN) was created in 2020 by the Pulitzer Center to support investigative journalists in the three main rainforest regions: the Amazon, the Congo Basin, and Southeast Asia. In its two years of operation, the network has awarded 25 fellowships to reporters investigating environmental crimes, corruption, and the supply chains that drive forest destruction.
The Amazon Mining Watch platform originated from a series of collaborations with journalists seeking to expose illegal mining activity and document its impacts on the environment and Indigenous communities in Brazil and Venezuela.
One of these collaborations is the investigation “Illegal Mining Set Air Bases in the Jungle” (Las pistas illegales que bullen en la selva Venezolana)” published together by El País and ArmandoInfo in early 2022: The first story of the series Corredor Furtivo (The Stealthy Corridor) by RIN Fellows Joseph Poliszuk and María de Los Ángeles Ramirez.
PAMACC News: Mining, one of the main causes of the degradation of rivers and forests in the Amazon, can now be monitored remotely by journalists, scientists, and other concerned citizens. Today, the Pulitzer Center in partnership with Earthrise Media launches the Amazon Mining Watch, a platform powered by an algorithm that analyzes satellite imagery to detect gold mines and other open-pit mining activities in the world's largest rainforest.
In its beta version, the platform performs 326 million analyses of high-resolution images every 4 months, covering the entire Amazon region, which encompasses nine countries or 6.7 million square kilometers. The algorithm has identified an area with characteristics of mining activity the size of 6.8 thousand square kilometers. To get an idea of the size of the environmental impact, this area is equivalent to about four times the entire city of New York.
The Amazon Mining Watch platform is a partnership between the Pulitzer Center's Rainforest Investigations Network (RIN) and Earthrise Media. The two nonprofit organizations had already collaborated to investigate the alarming criminal expansion of gold mining operations in Brazil and Venezuela and, from this experience, they decided to expand their methodology to the entire Amazon region.
The AI model recognizes mining zones using topographical features, and therefore it is not possible to determine when using the platform which mining sites are legal and which are illegal. It is also important to point out that because it is an automatic detection method using satellite images, there are false positives. The main goal of Amazon Mining Watch is to encourage journalists, researchers, and activists to use the data as a springboard to further investigate the results, thus contributing to contextualizing the AI findings
How the algorithm was developed
Earthrise Media, an organization dedicated to supporting communicators and organizations in the use of geospatial analysis, enlisted high school students in the United States for "identification marathons" of looking at mines through satellite images of the Amazon. This human effort eventually "trained" the AI model to recognize the characteristics of an open-pit mine, making it possible for computers to distinguish between mining areas and other land uses, such as agriculture.
This statistical and computational model, known as an artificial neural network, was trained to look at patches the size of 44 by 44 pixels, an equivalent of 440m by 440m on the ground. It did this by looking at thousands of Sentinel 2 satellite images from the last four months.
In this way, every four months, Amazon Mining Watch will be able to update its analysis of the status of mining on Amazon.
The code behind the platform as well as the data generated is open to the public and can be downloaded for other uses.
Reporting from the analysis
The Rainforest Investigations Network (RIN) was created in 2020 by the Pulitzer Center to support investigative journalists in the three main rainforest regions: the Amazon, the Congo Basin, and Southeast Asia. In its two years of operation, the network has awarded 25 fellowships to reporters investigating environmental crimes, corruption, and the supply chains that drive forest destruction.
The Amazon Mining Watch platform originated from a series of collaborations with journalists seeking to expose illegal mining activity and document its impacts on the environment and Indigenous communities in Brazil and Venezuela.
One of these collaborations is the investigation “Illegal Mining Set Air Bases in the Jungle” (Las pistas illegales que bullen en la selva Venezolana)” published together by El País and ArmandoInfo in early 2022: The first story of the series Corredor Furtivo (The Stealthy Corridor) by RIN Fellows Joseph Poliszuk and María de Los Ángeles Ramirez.
PAMACC News: The world’s largest meat company, JBS, has increased its greenhouse gas emissions by a staggering 51% over the last five years and is now responsible for greater emissions than Italy’s annual climate footprint, new research finds. It is approximately equivalent to fossil fuel giant Total’s 2020 emissions.
A coalition of campaign groups – including the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP), Feedback and Mighty Earth – have expressed outrage at JBS’s supersized climate emissions, which place it at odds with its own corporate emissions reduction strategy just one year on from its ‘Net Zero by 2040’ pledge. Ahead of the company’s annual general meeting (AGM) in São Paulo on 22 April, the coalition is urging JBS’s investors and customers to drop the Brazil-based company.
“JBS is one of the world’s worst climate offenders and that’s why we’re urging its key customers like giant supermarkets Carrefour, Costco and Tesco to drop JBS urgently,” said Alex Wijeratna, Campaign Director at Mighty Earth. “No company that buys meat from JBS can claim to be serious about climate change. JBS could easily implement systems that would end its links to deforestation and radically reduce its methane pollution. The fact that a single meat company can cause more pollution than an entire G7 member country should be a wake up call that we need a massive scale up of plant-based and cultivated protein, and we need it now.”
JBS’s top investors include Brazilian development bank BNDES, asset manager BlackRock, and Barclays and Santander banks. Its major customers in the retail sector include supermarket giants Carrefour, Costco, Tesco, Walmart and Ahold Delhaize. In the fast food sector, its customers include McDonald’s, Burger King and KFC.
Using a UN-approved methodology, new research contained in a media brief by IATP, Feedback and investigative website DeSmog, found that JBS – which processed 26.8 million cattle, 46.7 million pigs and 4.9 billion chickens last year – increased its annual GHG emissions by 51% in five years from 280 million metric tonnes (mmts) in 2016 to around 421.6 mmts in 2021. This is more than the annual climate footprint of Italy or Spain and close to that of France (at 443 mmt) and the UK (at 453 mmt).
The latest UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment report has singled out livestock-related methane emissions, recommending they be slashed by a third by 2030 in order to hold global temperature rise to 1.5ºC. Instead, JBS’s emissions are set to jump even higher as it pursues aggressive expansion plans and seeks access to increased financing through a possible listing on an American stock exchange.
“It’s mind blowing that JBS can continue to make climate claims to investors, even as the company massively increases its emissions,” said Shefali Sharma, Europe director of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, which estimated in 2018 that JBS’s emissions were roughly half that of oil majors such as BP, Shell or ExxonMobil. “Our updated emissions estimates show clearly the harm being done by empty net-zero announcements. Investors gathering at today's AGM shouldn't be fooled by this greenwash. We need public, independent and accountable systems for monitoring these companies’ emissions. Governments need to step up and regulate these companies and support a transition out of this destructive model of industrial livestock production.”
With operations in 20 countries ranging from Brazil to the US and record annual revenues of $76 billion, JBS last year promised to achieve net zero emissions by 2040. However, its net-zero plans provide little detail and have been panned by campaigners for omitting so-called ‘Scope 3’ emissions – which represent up to 97% of JBS’s contribution to climate change. Scope 3 emissions encompass pollution from its entire supply chain: potent greenhouse gases such as methane emitted from livestock, as well as emissions from deforestation, forest fires, and land conversion, plus the production of animal feed, enteric fermentation, and the use of agrochemicals.
Carina Millstone, Executive Director of campaign group Feedback, said: “It's high time that banks and investors, many of whom have adopted their own 'net-zero’ targets and committed to end deforestation, ceased to bankroll climate chaos and the destruction of nature, by pulling the plug on their financial backing to toxic JBS and its subsidiaries.”
Hazel Healy, UK Editor of climate investigative news outlet DeSmog, said: “JBS is using the same greenwashing tactics we’ve seen employed by oil and gas majors for decades. It presents itself as a company with genuine climate ambition but fails to disclose its full emissions so they can be compared with the company’s public communications. And as this research shows, JBS’s emissions are increasing substantially, not decreasing.”
Launched alongside IATP’s JBS emissions revelations, a new report about the company by Mighty Earth – called The Boys From Brazil – highlights how JBS used corruption and massive government subsidies to finance the enormous international growth that put it into the climate super-polluter category in which it finds itself today.
The report highlights that JBS was responsible for an estimated 1.5 million hectares of deforestation in its indirect supply chains in Brazil since 2008 and warns that scandal-hit JBS has repeatedly broken its promises to stamp out deforestation in the Amazon or conserve other key ecosystems such as the Cerrado and the Pantanal. It also chronicles a long history of links to elite bribery, price-fixing, invasion of Indigenous lands, worker exploitation, modern-day slavery, and environmental pollution.
