Barry Streek
A Western Cape development agency, Wesgro, has initiated a novel approach for providing would-be entrepreneurs with information on small enterprises by establishing “business corners” in local libraries.
So far 24 business corners have been established in libraries in the Cape Town metropolitan area, and another seven are planned for other areas in the province. Wesgro aims to increase the number by at least 20 a year.
Each library receives a R10 000 launching grant with which to acquire books, journals, videos and other relevant equipment.
“After more than a bumpy start, the Library Business Corner programme has over the past few months enjoyed an amazingly enthusiastic response from librarians, library authorities, sponsoring bodies and others involved in small business support,” says Wolfgang Thomas, chief economist at Wesgro.
“If all libraries participated in the programme, we could probably be confident that entrepreneurs in most corners of our province will be able to reach a library business corner nearby.”
In 1995 the government White Paper on small business promotion proposed the establishment of a national grid of local business service centres (LSBCs) for every town in the country.
But the costs of this proved high in Cape Town the local centre collapsed because of funding problems and the expansion of LSBCs stalled, leaving entrepreneurs frustrated with the lack of access to relevant information.
“Unfortunately, the cost of such a network of LSBCs at least R300 000 to R600 000 each a year turned out to be far too high for Ntsika [the government enterprise promotion agency] and the Department of Trade and Industry,” says Thomas.
The Library Business Corner programme is the West Cape’s initiative to come up with an affordable way of implementing LSBCs.
“In the search for low-cost, sustainable models for the dissemination of information to entrepreneurs, libraries have come forward as an ideal institution, accessible to the public, equipped to store and disseminate information,” says Thomas.
Gail Jacobs has been appointed the full-time Library Business Corner coordinator with facilities at Business Opportunity Network, a local small-business NGO, where a monthly newsletter, Corner News, is produced.
l The City of Cape Town is hosting an inaugural small business week at the Peninsula Technikon from July 17 to 20. The council sa recent survey had established that there were 60 000 small, medium and micro enterprises in the city, accounting for nearly 95% of Cape Town’s business sector and contributing more than 40% of employment and more than 50% of total economic output in the city.
@Make or break in Bonn
Will the Bush administration manage to abort the Kyoto Protocol at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change?
analysis
Richard Worthington
Next week official negotiations of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Kyoto Protocol will resume in Bonn, after a deadlock between industrialised and developing countries last November.
The issue at hand is the control of greenhouse gas emissions, particularly from industrialised countries, that are reported to have a disruptive effect on world climatic changes.
There is little agreement on what may realistically be expected as an outcome. President George W Bush has turned his back on established United States commitments and years of multi-lateral effort to address possibly the greatest threat to the prosperity of future generations, not to mention the lives of millions of people already living on marginal lands.
Japan is reluctant to move ahead without the US. The G77 (developing countries) and China hold tenuously to some common positions, with South Africa treading cautiously, reluctant to break ranks or to raise the ire of any potential investor.
When 154 nations signed the UNFCCC, which took effect in March 1994, they accepted the obligation to adopt national programmes to stabilise greenhouse gas emissions at a level preventing dangerous human intervention with the climate system. The protocol, the basics of which were agreed in Kyoto in 1997, is the attempt to establish legally binding commitment to quantified limits on emissions, while supporting sustainable development.
There are outstanding issues within both agreements that need to be resolved, such as details that parties have agreed to address at future meetings. But the big question now is whether the protocol will survive. A US delegation will attend the Bonn conference, but only to discuss convention issues. They are expected to propose an alternative to the existing protocol.
Many parties are keen to press ahead without the US, but the conditions for enforcing the protocol require the agreement of countries accounting for 55% of developed country emissions, of which the US accounts for around 35%. This leaves Japan in a pivotal position, though not indispensable if Canada and Australia do the right thing.
The European Union is the only developed country grouping that appears steadfastly committed to the Kyoto Protocol, with support from the environmental NGOs. Their position is based on the understanding that a flawed protocol is better than regressing 10 years. The country that demanded much of the compromise, the US, now pronounces “unfair” the rather pedestrian idea that nations that have made the greatest impact on the global climate should be the first to make legally binding commitment to mitigating that impact.
The most disingenuous aspect of the Bush position is the projected (and rather tired) fiction that the American way of life is under threat from external forces. We have heard repeatedly that taking action to address climate change will have costs for the US economy, with no consideration of the long-term costs of failure to take effective action.
Implementing the protocol is easily affordable, even if the opportunity for the US to buy its way out of significant domestic action via emissions trading and “hot air” is strictly limited by a sensible cap. (Hot air is the difference between the greenhouse gas emissions level limit to which a nation has committed itself and that nation’s actual level of emissions such unused emissions entitlements may, under proposed protocol rules, be bought by countries with excessive emissions, as a means of achieving their commitments.)
Macroeconomic modelling by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change provides an indication of the costs of achieving the US commitment, which is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to an average 7% below the 1990 level within the period 2008 to 2012.
With efficient use of the “flexibility mechanisms” of the protocol, such as emissions trading, the costs in 2010 would be between 0,1 and 1,1% of the gross domestic product (GDP); without recourse to the mechanisms the cost would be 0,2 to 2% of GDP.
This translates to a cost of up to $125 a person a year for an Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) country, where the increase in GDP a person is projected to be $3 000 to $5 000 a year.
In February this year the United Nations Environment Programme announced: “The report [by Munich Reinsurers] indicates that losses due to more frequent tropical cyclones, loss of land as a result of rising sea levels and damage to fishing stocks, agriculture and water supplies, could annually cost around $304,2-billion.”
According to the WorldWatch Institute (2001), the wealthiest countries sustained 57,3 % of the measured economic losses to disasters between 1985 and 1999, which represented only 2,5 % of their GDP. In contrast the poorest countries endured 24,4 % of the economic toll of disasters, which adds up to 13,4% of their GDP.
The Kyoto Protocol, with the dual goal of promoting sustainable development and addressing climate change, is particularly important for developing countries. While articles 4,8 and 4,9 of the UNFCCC express noble intentions regarding, financial assistance, technology transfer, least developed countries and those most vulnerable to climate change, most attention has focused on the potential proceeds of the clean development mechanism.
In fact, so much has been invested in negotiating and preparing to use this instrument of the protocol (whereby countries could achieve greenhouse gas commitments by funding projects in developing countries that avoid or reduce emissions), that if it does not materialise, the very prospect of its existence will have been a barrier to development and action to address climate change.
A number of countries have responded positively to a suggestion by South Africa’s Deputy Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism, Joyce Mabudafhasi, at preparatory meetings at the end of June, that in the interest of measurable progress the resumed Conference of Parties should not try to address all outstanding issues.
This could be read as backing off from Minister Mohammed Valli Moosa’s announcement that the ministry is preparing the country for ratification of the protocol, as it may signal tacit acceptance that convention issues take priority over the protocol.
South Africa has enjoyed some moral and hands-on leadership since entering this process but, as part a negotiating bloc that includes the ever-obstructive Oil and Petroleum Exporting Countries, other African and developing countries are looking for a clear commitment to defending the protocol from rival proposals or gutting from within.
There has been considerable dissatisfaction with documents produced under the direction of the president of the conference and proposed as the basis for these negotiations due the concessions they contain to OECD countries (for example, Japan to gain credit for agricultural “sink” activities) and more importantly for the implication that agreed elements of the protocol may be up for renegotiation. There has also been talk of changing the 1990 baseline, deferring the first commitment period and/or revisiting numerical commitments.
In fact it is in the second commitment period, due to start in 2012, that the full effects of the protocol will start to apply. South Africa, having the 14th-largest national emissions and being in the top six for emissions per capita and per unit of GDP, will hopefully put the interests of the continent before those of our fossil fuel lobby and make every effort to ensure that a substantial foundation is laid. If the protocol is aborted, both the difficulty and the costs of addressing climate change will increase dramatically.
Richard Worthington is a member of Earthlife Africa Johannesburg and the Sustainable Energy and Climate Change Partnership