And now a special report on my favorite topic: burps and poo. In a country with more cattle than people (there are 50 to 55 million cows in the Argentina, versus about 40 million Argentines) one of the country’s main environmental issues is methane (CH4) emissions from the livestock industry. Although the energy industry is the largest single source of emissions of CO2 into the earth’s atmosphere (globally, 38%), Argentina’s main contribution to global warming is caused by livestock indigestion.

Latin America, namely via the livestock industries of Brazil and Argentina, generates 12% of the world’s human-produced CH4, which makes it regionally second only to Asia as a CH4 polluter. This chemical is 25 times worse as a greenhouse gas than carbon. In Argentina, livestock contribute to 67% of all of national CH4 gas emissions. Namely, this is through ‘enteric fermentation’ or in layman’s terms, burps. 85% of these burps come from cows, who release the gas that builds up when they breakdown plant cellulose. The same beef and pork that renders Argentines full of national pride belches 44 billion litres of CH4 per day. Argentina ranks 14th in the world (1 worst, 186 best) as a CH4 polluter and per capita, pollutes more than China, India, Brazil, or any of the top ten polluters.

Does this mean that Argentines should lay off the beef and consume food whose production emits less greenhouse gases? I do not think that would be a culturally sensitive or a reasonable solution to Argentina’s methane problem. No Argentine I know is about to give up their daily milanesa sandwich or weekend asado in the name of environmentalism, although it is worth mentioning that vegetarianism is indeed on the rise, with more trendy health food restaurants popping up around the city every month. If we presume that meat consumption is not going to change considerably in the near future, it seems imperative to think about how Argentina could best cultivate that meat in an environmentally responsible manner.

Luckily, there are remedies to cow indigestion. Most simply and preventatively, serving cow livestock alfalfa grasses, which are easy for them to digest, reduces their belching in the first place.

Methane to Markets, an international non-governmental organisation that advocates for cost-effective, near-term methane recovery and use as a clean energy source, has partnered with the National Institute of Agricultural Technology (INTA) to install a methane recovery system on a dairy farm in Santa Fe Province.  The Rafaela dairy operation has a livestock population of approximately 250 dairy cows. The current waste management method involves water hosing and solids separation into poo lagoons.  The proposed methane recovery system is a plug flow digester that would capture the manure, heat it, and turn burn the resulting methane to create electricity. The system will reduce emissions by 42 metric tonnes of CO2 equivalent per year.

Such a system comes at a steep price-about US$36,000 for the plug flow digester on the Rafaela farm- but in order for Argentine leadership to take its environmental responsibility seriously it should consider supporting more such projects. If Argentines are not going to consider consuming considerably less meat (and I don’t necessarily think they should as my general culinary philosophy is continue doing what you do best and Argentines do indeed do meat best), I think they should begin investing in more widespread methane reduction and capture techniques and technologies.

I recently attended a local university’s Urban Competition and Clusters student presentations. A seminar of about twenty engineering students was asked to present their informed opinions on what would make Buenos Aires a more competitive world city.

Firstly, I was pleased to hear that their assignment involved some dreaming because via my current professional experience working for an international engineering consultancy I’ve learned that engineers rightly tend to focus on the immediately feasible. This interests me because in many ways, infrastructure engineers are some of the most forward-thinking of the professional lot; to oversimplify it, they necessarily calculate for future demands and issues of all kinds. Thus, I give immense credit to their professor, who seemed to identify the acute type of shortsightedness that can accompany large public works/urban planning endeavors, which is to say creativity.

Some students took on the challenge to dream and others didn’t as much. But for this exact reason the evening was extraordinarily telling of what future infrastructure planners in Buenos Aires consider the city’s major problems and opportunities.  A selection of their thoughts and my thoughts on their thoughts follows.

The one common theme was roads. All five small groups addressed street and highway infrastructure and most of them proposed highway upgrading and widening projects. Clearly, transportation infrastructure needs help in Buenos Aires, but I didn’t see any of the students considering the root causes for congestion, which I believe are as crucial when addressing road capacity. Nor did anyone mention alternative methods for reducing traffic such as congestion pricing or car-pooling initiatives (excluding major public transportation improvements, which were discussed, though briefly).

To me, one group stood out from the rest. Their plan had two major tenets: improving public parks and recreational spaces as well as investing much further in public education on all levels. They argued that both of these initiatives would help build an ‘economy of innovation’ that is currently dragging in Buenos Aires. Without knowing, they hit on one of my favorite urbanists’ (Richard Florida) arguments: the rise of the creative class as a form of economic development.  Right on!

There were myriad proposals, ranging from the development of a new cruise ship terminal to green roofs. Though the event had the familiar feeling of a college presentation (intermittently bored and stressed pupils, differently prepared, eager to get their portion out of the way), little did they know I was riveted.

So what would make Buenos Aires a more competitive city according to the local to-be urban planners? Throughout the presentation I saw one common thread: decongestion. I understood that they valued agile built and social environment. Through different lenses, the students talked about the problem the city faces with lack of movement, whether referring to transportation or creative processes. They thought that a more free, open and spacious Buenos Aires would be a better Buenos Aires.

Cheers to the engineering professor who challenged his students! Cheers to the students who accepted the challenge! Let’s hope they graduate and get to work soon.

As a North American citizen living in Buenos Aires, there’s a certain amount of fitting in that I feel compelled to do. I’ve started gesticulating more. I paint my nails. I arrive just the right amount of late to engagements of all kinds. But I’ve learned that no matter how much mate I drink there’s a certain dreamy ‘yankee’ spirit in me that will never be fully subdued-nor would I want it to. I expound my perspective here not in the spirit of criticizing Argentines, but rather with aspirations to share what I hope is a valuable space in between things.

I was talking with an Argentine friend at work the other day who observed, “you know what the difference between Argentina and the States is? In the States you look forwards and in Argentina, we look backwards.”

I have steered away from language like ‘backwards’ or ‘upside-down’ when formulating my thoughts on development in Argentina. I suppose I’ve never felt that my own homeland was ‘upwards’ or ‘right-side-up.’ On the contrary.

But there is a particular truth to my friend’s statement about Argentine inertia.

Every place has its history, which is to say the present answers to the past, regardless of hemisphere. But I have never been somewhere where I felt such a recollection of the future, where buildings and people alike were so framed by their shadows. To borrow the Mexican historian, Enrique Krauze’s words, in Argentina, “the weight of the past has sometimes been more present than the present itself.”

So far as I can tell, the ghosts of Argentina’s past – not as a developing country but as a nation that briefly grasped and then lost hold of development – do an effective job of haunting the country’s citizens and leaders.

What form does that haunting take? Mostly, I believe, it rears its head in resignation: resignation to garbage-strewn streets, inefficient and smoggy public transportation, political corruption, and the likes. The very avenues, in their fading glory, seem to whisper, ‘look what you could have been and look at what you are now.’

According to me, Buenos Aires is beautiful: a fast-paced, vibrant, and relevant world city. And Argentines, in my experience, are well educated, hard working, and more open-minded than they are given credit for.

I wonder what the distance in between the nostalgia of Argentines and the dreams of North Americans is. In a capital city that has more psychoanalysists per capita than anywhere in the world, perhaps Argentines could therapise themselves into quantifying that leap and then taking it. Having lived both in the world of forward-lookers and the world of backward-lookers, I believe the gap between the two is a manageable one indeed.

As for environmental sustainability, our global challenge to ensure a healthy habitat for our future generation rests on our collective ability to think ahead and act accordingly. I believe that the currency of the times will be measured by our capacity not to retrospect, but to aspire.

Today, 50% of the world’s population lives in urban areas. These cities account for 75% of global energy consumption and 80% of greenhouse gas emissions. In just 20 years, two-thirds of the world’s population is projected to live in cities.

In response to the challenge of global warming and climate change, representatives of 18 of the world’s leading metropolises met in 2005 to strategize on how they could take responsibility for their municipality’s contribution to these pressing issues. In 2006, the leading world cities formed an alliance with the Clinton Climate Initiative, called themselves the C40 climate leadership group, and vowed to both reduce carbon emissions and increase energy efficiency in their cities throughout the world.  

Seven of the 40 cities are in Latin America (Bogotá, Buenos Aires, Caracas, Lima, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo), but according to the C40 website only two of those have published Climate Change Action Plans (Bogotá and Mexico City).

The delegates of all the C40 cities (as well as 17 affiliate cities) met for the third time about a month ago in Seoul, Korea at the C40 Large Cities Climate Summit. The theme of this year’s four-day event was “Cities’ Achievements and Challenges in the Fight against Climate Change.” City mayors, policy makers, and experts and scholars in the climate, energy, and transportation related fields addressed the wider use of green energy, energy efficiency measures, sustainable transport, and sustainable city development (including sustainable adaptation measures).

These themes encompass some of the more major aspects of urbanism, politics, and economics and it is no small task to break the issues into manageable, actionable pieces.

Some cities are further along acting on their promises than others.

Toronto, for example, has built a partnership with Zerofootprint, a nonprofit organization dedicated to assisting companies, governments and individuals reduce their carbon footprint. Zerofootprint Toronto is part environmental footprint calculator and part online social network and it is “designed to graphically illustrates to users the impact every aspect of their daily lives has on the environment while allowing them to network with like-minded friends, neighbors and co-workers to create a virtual eco-community.”

In Buenos Aires, a number of initiatives are underway, namely, to increase energy efficiency in some public buildings, perform a city-wide air quality study, and begin to work towards cleaner and more efficient public transit. But the city could be doing much more to make good on its pledge.

The disparity between the actions of different C40 cities draws attention to the different challenges that cities in less developed countries face. The declaration as a result of the Seoul Summit explains, “cities in developed countries need to assist the efforts of cities in developing countries in taking actions as they are more vulnerable to climate change and have lower capacity to cope with environmental hazards.” 

Indeed. It is hard to blame Buenos Aires for lagging behind in its promise to combat greenhouse gas emissions – this city has other very pressing needs. Certainly learning about initiatives in other leading cities and access to global experts in the related fields will expose Buenos Aires’ delegates to the opportunities for positive, sustainable, urban development. Whether these opportunities are transformed into more action and faster action remains to be seen.

Personally, I have always been skeptical of these global pacts. It is easy enough for Buenos Aires to sign on to being a member of the C40 climate leadership group. It’s another thing for the city to take significant action towards its pledge to reduce carbon emissions.

This is the problem with intergovernmental institutions carrying the sustainable development torch. There is no accountability involved. The United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals are a stark example. Goal number one? Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger by halving the global population of those living on less than one dollar per day by 2015. Sounds good.

But is this achievable in the next six years? The percent of Africa’s population living in poverty is about 50% and hasn’t changed in 30 years. Has not the main driver behind the UN’s Millennium Development Goals’ progress on goal one been the booming industrial capitalism of East Asia, where poverty has fallen 60% in the same 30 year period?

I am skeptical that climate change will be solved by a global compact such as C40. I do, however, believe that C40 has an important role to play in strategizing solutions towards the pressing need for sustainable development. Eduardo Galeano, the Uruguayan re-writer of history and one of my favourite authors says it best: “What then is the purpose of utopia? It is to cause us to advance.”

I regularly come across the criticism that the sustainability paradigm is plagued by absent statistics. Most commonly, I hear that sustainable development, as a field, is ‘todo en el aire’ – that it lacks grounding and concrete, potent solutions. Indeed, precisely because sustainable development admits the interrelatedness of ecological, economic, and social systems, its encompassing scope can make it seem like a moving target.  Even the most expert of experts in the field disagree about how best to approach the global set of issues that sustainable development demands we address. 

To me (and probably to those disposed towards the aforementioned scepticism), it makes sense to start with numbers because to find out where we should go, we first need to know exactly we are. Many organisations have already acknowledged this practical starting point and have responded by researching sustainability indicators for every corner of the globe.

I’ll start big. The 2009 United Nations Economic and Social Council Report tells us that the planet’s population has doubled in the past forty years and is expected to grow by nearly 50% in the next forty years, reaching nine billion by 2050.  According to the World Bank’s 2008 development indicators, about 20% of the world’s current population consumes 75% of the planet’s resources while the world’s poorest 20% consume 1.5%.

Zooming in a bit, according to the World Wildlife Fund’s 2006 Living Planet Report, Latin America and the Caribbean house 26% of global bio-capacity, yet are responsible for 8% of human activity’s ecological footprint. 

Details of the region’s footprint are reported on the World Resources Institute Earth Trends website and some of the key indicators follow. 

From 1990 to 2000 Argentina lost 8% of its forested areas. Chile lost 1%. On a whole, Latin America lost 4%, and the World, 2%. Argentina is responsible for 0.6% of global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Residential energy consumption per capita in the country is 250.6kg of oil equivalent (kgoe) per person. Per capita for Latin America on a whole the figure is 140.6 and for the world it is 300.4.  

According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s Buenos Aires air quality study (the only comprehensive one on the city to date), transportation accounts for 30% of the city’s greenhouse gas emissions (and 15% of the country’s on a whole).  

The world’s leading international initiative on methane research and recovery, Methane to Markets, tell us that globally, approximately 30% of the human-induced greenhouse effect can be attributed to the non-CO2 greenhouse gases. One such gas is methane (about 25 times worse as a greenhouse gas than carbon), and Argentina is the 15th largest producer of it in the world. The top five in order of greatest to smallest methane polluters are: The US, India, China, Germany, and France. If analysed per capita, Argentines (well, their livestock) produce more methane per person than any of the top ten polluters.

Finally, though the figure is disputed, according to the United States Central Intelligence Agency, roughly 23% of Argentina’s population lives below the poverty line, giving it a rank of 94 out of 146 countries, about equivalent to India. By comparison, according to the same source, 12-13% of the populations of Mexico and the US respectively live below the poverty line. Argentina’s own national census reports that 11.3% of the population live on less than US$2 per day.

Those are the facts. Their implications are succinctly summarised by the president of the World Wildlife Fund below: 

“As countries improve the well- being of their people, they are bypassing the goal of sustainability and … using far more resources than the planet can sustain. It is inevitable that this path will limit the abilities of poor countries to develop and of rich countries to maintain prosperity.” 

And this writer’s opinion? To me, the statistics demonstrate that Argentina is far from being one of the main global culprits of over-consumption or pollution. But as William McDonough, author of ‘Cradle to Cradle’, points out, “in planetary terms, we’re all downstream.”  We now live in a world where greenhouse gas emissions contaminate our collective atmosphere and where human habitat destruction like desertification and ever more frequent extreme weather threaten our collective political stability.

I believe that our global challenges demand local solutions. Argentina’s effort is under way. More on that coming soon.

—

To investigate the numbers further, I suggest you go to:

The World Bank Statistics Division (www.worldbank.org)

The United Nations Development Programme (http://hdr.undp.org/en/statistics/data/) 

The World Resources Institute Earth Trends (www.earthtrends.wri.org)

The World Wildlife Fund Living Planet Report (http://www.panda.org/about_our_earth/all_publications/living_planet_report/)

Methane to Markets (www.methanetomarkets.org) 

It should come as no surprise that Argentina is far from the forefront of socially and environmentally responsible development. If you have ever had soot blown in your face by a passing colectivo, looked out your train window as it leaves Retiro station, or tried to refuse a bag at a grocery store, you know that Buenos Aires has a long way to go before it can boast institutional environmental respect.

As the paradigm of sustainable development – that which “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” – becomes globally accepted as the best, if not only way forward, the environment, economy, and social well being of a nation’s citizens are becoming universally accepted as interrelated. The capital, unfortunately, is just the tip of the iceberg. From un-enforced logging regulations in the South to lacking social, health, and housing infrastructure in the North to widespread industrial soy production on most of the country’s fertile land, Argentina, as a nation has serious environmental problems to address.

Environmentalism has penetrated national, provincial, and municipal level politics, as well as culture. This blog will explore the country’s progress, when achieved, and challenges, when identified, towards sustainable development. I hope to give credit where credit is due to the agencies, corporations, small business owners, non-profits, and individuals who are propelling the environmental movement. I hope to expose those entities that could and should be doing more.

To start with, it is important for me to note that there are important historical reasons why Argentina is not currently a global leader of sustainable development. The country has a complicated and tumultuous past, including the relatively recent economic crisis of the early 2000s. I know, though cannot pretend to personally understand, that many Argentines have faced extremely difficult realities in their lifetime: loss of savings, of a home, of a job. I realize that environmental responsibility has not been high on the public, private, or personal agenda as it was replaced by other, perhaps more pressing needs. But to treat the environment as separate from financial, health care, or other public systems is a mistake. Environmental issues are not beside the point; corporate social responsibility is not ‘an extra.’   I blame no Argentine for the distance their country has to go towards integrating environmental management into mainstream politics, regulation, education, business, and culture.

But people must be held accountable for their nations. Why? Because Argentina belongs to Argentines. Its football legends, asado, tango, vibrant porteño culture – that is Argentina. Its shotty trash collection, serious contributions to greenhouse gas emissions, poor air quality, and nearly quarter of the population living below the poverty line…that is Argentina too.

Finding solutions to these problems is not that simple. Funds directed towards one program are diverted from another. If resource-extensive industries like mining, logging, and agriculture were severely limited, so too would be employment and the tax base that pays for public services.  It is my opinion that all too often environmentalists fail to recognize the economic and social implications of their recommendations. Even if a long term solution can be identified, its implementation may have seriously negative impacts in the short term. For instance, restricting industrial soy production would potentially save virgin forest from being razed to support cultivation, but it might also destroy the livelihood of those who depend on the crop for income. In other words, if respect for the environment was in everyone’s best interest all the time, we would not find ourselves facing the ecological challenges we are.

I hope my reporting inspires Argentines to both own their environmental successes and demand further action where it can be taken. I hope it humbles foreigners as to the challenges, competing forces, and complexities intrinsic in the development driving developing nations.