e-Parliament Update: October 2009
Dear friend of the e-Parliament,
Long-term supporters of the e-Parliament will know that over the past couple of years we have found ourselves increasingly focusing on the issue of Climate Change. Now we feel the time is ripe to adjust the structure of the e-Parliament to reflect this development with the creation of a Climate Parliament as a direct subsidiary of the larger organisation.
This body will draw together democratic legislators from throughout the world to address global warming, making use of the methods that have been developed by the e-Parliament (the polling, hearings and roundtables) but also with the ambition to gather together legislators once a year in a full plenary session. The website for the new organisation is currently under development at www.climateparliament.net. We will inform you when it becomes 'live'. For the time being, supporters of both the e-Parliament and the Climate Parliament will continue to receive the same update.
Our other activities over the last few months were dominated by a forests hearing in Costa Rica on June 6-7 and an energy hearing in Mozambique on September 18-20. We have also made progress in setting up an office in India, and in funding for our supergrid initiative. This is a brief report on these activities as well as a tribute to some of the legislators who have attended our hearings and who are now making progress in their national parliaments.
For background on any of these stories please see our previous update here or our website here.
June-September 2009
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Legislators, experts and members of the e-Parliament staff experiencing the rain of the rainforest.
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The Costa Rica Hearing
An international parliamentary hearing on Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) took place at the Earth University in Guacimo on June 6-7 and was attended by 18 legislators from countries with substantial forested areas in Latin America and Africa. They visited farms where the rainforest has become protected as a result of the Costa Rican Forestry Law 7676 and its PES scheme; they heard about similar PES schemes from around the world; and, by the end of the hearing, were well aware as to how they could promote rainforest protection in their home parliaments. At the end of the hearing, the legislators agreed that:
- Cross-party groups in parliaments could be effective in promoting financial incentives for rainforest protection and that there needs to be an international network to share best practice between these groups. The e-Parliament would be delighted to fill this coordinating role.
- National parliaments in tropical forest nations should initiate expert reviews of options for strengthening financial incentives for forest conservation in their own countries. The e-Parliament's new India Director Sanjay Kumar, who has worked in forestry for over 25 years, is currently writing an outline of the terms of reference for such a review.
- Legislators in the developing world can and must establish financial incentives and initiate PES schemes in their own countries, but there needs to be a close partnership with legislators in the developed world, who can help to make additional funding available for these schemes once they have been established.
The e-Parliament was represented in Costa Rica by Secretary General Nicholas Dunlop, Communications Director Jasper Bouverie, and Programme Officers Susana Guerreiro and Kitty Garden. For more details on the hearing please see our hearing report and the end-of-hearing press release.
MPs making progress
Many of the MPs who have attended our hearings over the past two years have been making good progress in their national parliaments. In particular we would like to highlight the work of:
 Dr. Ruth Rabinowitz in South Africa, who attended our hearings in Amboseli in Kenya and Mabula in South Africa and spent much of last year campaigning for a Feed-in Tariff (FIT) to promote renewables in South Africa, eventually introducing a private member's bill for this purpose. As a result, a FIT was introduced by the South African regulator NERSA. Ruth, who unfortunately lost her seat in the last election, is now working outside parliament as the head of a group called the Renewable Energy Activists (REACT) to make sure that the FIT is properly administered.
 George Nangale at the East African Legislative Assembly, who attended our hearings at Amboseli, Samburu, Mabula and Tobago and has introduced a bill into the East African Legislative Assembly aimed at securing cooperation between East African countries in the management of trans-boundary ecosystems (like Lake Victoria, Mount Elgon etc). He reports that the United Nations Environment Programme are now considering helping with the drafting of the bill and facilitating its passage through parliament. He hopes that the bill will be presented to parliament before the end of the year.
 Anurag Thakur in the Indian Parliament, who attended our recent hearing in Costa Rica and was inspired to investigate the progress of the Indian government's compensatory afforestation fund (CAMPA). This will provide funds for reforestation after forest has been lost due to development projects. Anurag was calling for the faster implementation of CAMPA. In Costa Rica, he also expressed interest in the idea of funding forest conservation through a levy on hydroelectric generation. On return to India he submitted a question calling for clarification from central government on the request from the Himachal Pradesh state government to levy 10 paise per unit (kWh) on electricity produced by the hydropower projects in the state.
Funding for the Europe-Mediterranean Supergrid Initiative
The e-Parliament is very grateful for a grant of 300,000 euros from the European Climate Foundation for our work promoting a high-voltage direct current (HVDC) "supergrid" for Europe and North Africa. Work on this initiative is well underway under the management of the project's coordinator, James Corre. We now have cross-party groups active in the European and German parliaments and have secured interest from individual MPs in Britain, Denmark, Switzerland, Finland and Greece. The e-Parliament's Secretary General Nicholas Dunlop recently spoke about the Supergrid on BBC Radio 4's Costing the Earth programme and will discuss the issue on the BBC World Service (The Forum) on October 4/5.
Office in India
We are delighted to announce that Sanjay Kumar, who has worked in the Indian Forestry Service for over 25 years, has joined the e-Parliament as our India Director. Based in Delhi, Sanjay will be working with Indian legislators to help them extend renewables to the poor in rural India. For more information on Sanjay, please click here.
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e-Parliament Communications Director Jasper Bouverie and Secretary General Nicholas Dunlop with UNDP administrator Helen Clark.
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Meeting with the Administrator of the UNDP
The e-Parliament's Secretary-General Nicholas Dunlop and Communications Director Jasper Bouverie met with the Administrator of the UNDP, the former Prime Minister of New Zealand Helen Clark. At the meeting Helen Clark expressed great interest in the work of the e-Parliament, and suggested a Memorandum of Understanding between the two organisations to allow us to build on existing cooperation.
New on the website
The video of the Energy hearing in Guyana and a toolkit for legislators on how feed-in tariffs can be applied in the developing world can now both be accessed from our website: www.e-parl.net
Energy hearing in Mozambique
A hearing for Southern African legislators on Energy Access for the Poor - the fifth in our series for African, Caribbean and Pacific Island legislators - took place on September 19th and 20th in Maputo. 19 legislators from Lesotho, Malawi, Mauritius, Namibia, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia and Mozambique heard presentations on different renewable energy technologies and the
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Legislators listening to experts on the field trip to the village of Djabula in Mozambique.
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policies to support them. They also were taken on a field visit to Djabula, an isolated village in Maputo province where stand-alone photovoltaic panels linked to batteries provide electricity to a school, health centre, water pump and 45 houses.
At the hearing there was a particular focus on how energy policies and customs had in the past tended to ignore the needs of women and how the transition to renewables can lead to dramatic improvements. In Djabula, for example, an electric water pump powered by solar panels greatly benefited women because they no longer had to walk 15 kilometres to fetch water. Many of the legislators were interested in the idea of conducting gender audits, as has been done in Botswana, to uncover the unexpected benefits and pitfalls that energy policies might have on the lives of men and women.
The hearing was coordinated by e-Parliament Programme Officers Susana Guerreiro and Kitty Garden, and Executive Director Jesper Grolin. The expert presentations have already been published on our website and will shortly be followed by a hearing report.. To read the post-hearing press release, please click here.
Future energy hearings
The next hearing on Energy Access for the Poor will take place on November 7-8 in Vanuatu, and on March 27-28 2010 a hearing in the same series of ACP hearings will take place in Cameroon.
Copenhagen
The e-Parliament will be well-represented at the Copenhagen Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in December. We hope to be hosting a side-event in cooperation with partner organisations. More details will be available in our next update.
PHOTOS: e-PARLIAMENT AND UNDP
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