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10 Top Environmental Headlines of the Week

Gavin Hudson — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 20:20:43 +0000

The top 10 headlines in international environmental news for the week of March 24 - 30.

1. World — Earth Hour 2008

As the clock struck eight in the evening, people across each time zone turned off their lights on March 29. It’s activism en mass and it’s called Earth Hour. The purpose: to inspire people to take action on climate change and to demonstrate that massive and immediate action is possible.

Earth Hour began as a city-wide voluntary blackout in Sydney, Australia, in 2007. This year, they’ve moved the date ahead two days and invited the world to join in. Even Google’s joined in. People from roughly 35 countries participated in this global event, which has become a yearly call to action. Read more: EcoWorldy, CNN.

2. Asia — Japanese Man Crosses Pacific with Wave-Powered Boat

A Japanese man named Kenichi Horie is attempting to be environmentally friendly by boating across the Pacific without sails and without fossil fuels.

How does he do it? With a wave-powered boat. Wave power has been discussed quite a bit recently, with a lot of applications including traditional grid energy generation. However, Kenichi is taking things to the next level by powering his ocean going vehicle with the very thing it bobs atop. Read more: Gas 2.0.

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It Ain’t just Africa that Suffers from Desertification

Joshua S Hill — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 22:56:24 +0000

2007 is quickly coming to a close, and for the environmental community that means two big meetings are about to occur. The first begins tomorrow (Monday the 12th) in the Mediterranean port city of Valencia, Spain. It is the meeting of the Nobel winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and they are coming together to make a concise report on global warming.

From their official site, a snappy little video plays explaining just what has come together to make this report. The fourth volume will be a condensed and concise version of three massive volumes released this year that contains our current knowledge on global warming. It contains more than 2500 scientific expert reviews, authored by more than 800 experts.

The fourth and final report will be the end result of six years work for more than 450 lead authors from over a hundred and thirty countries.

And the tag line that every news agency is running with: “When the world’s paramount experts on global warming gather in Spain next week, they will not have to travel far to witness the impact of rising temperatures.”

“Many people think desertification affects only Africa, Asia or Latin America,” Juan Sanchez, a department head at the Centre for Research on Desertification (CIDE) near Valencia. “But we are also at risk.”

Over the past decade we’ve seen Europe suffer massive and tragic heat waves. But the problem is more than random increases in temperature. Most of Spain suffers from dry spells, but recently aridity is becoming more and more of a problem thanks to human development and changing rainfall patterns.

According to CIDE, approximately a seventh of Spain is at risk of desertification. For those of us who get a little lost on what desertification actually is, we once again turn to Wikipedia:

Desertification is the degradation of land in arid, semi arid and dry sub-humid areas resulting from various climatic variations, but primarily from human activities.

The areas most at risk are the Canary Islands, where 57% of the territory is threatened, and two eastern provinces on the Spanish mainland, Valencia (29%) and Murcia (37%). And sadly, unlike some countries at risk, there are areas of Spain that the UN believes are already irreversibly damaged. In fact, the figure sits at six percent of the territory of Spain.

Sadly the European Environment Agency (EEA) believes that Spain will not be the only one to suffer. They predict that by the end of this century, temperatures in Europe will rise by between 2.0 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) and 6.2 C (11.16 F).

The EEA also singled out Spain, southern Italy, Greece and Turkey as areas where lessened rain will soon be the norm, and subsequently reduce water for farms, cities and hydropower plants.

“The Mediterranean is especially vulnerable and faces the threat of large-scale migration and the disruption of local economies,” Italian expert Antonio Navarra of Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics and Vulcanology, told AFP in a recent interview. “We are looking at major impacts that could be put tremendous stress on agriculture, water management, energy production and tourism.”

“In 25 to 50 years,” said Sanchez, “if we do not stop the process of climate change, temperatures will rise, torrential rains will be more intense and erosion will increase.”

(Torrential rainfall – following devastating forest fires – washes away already damaged soil, creating the erosion that Sanchez mentions.)

In the lead up to the December global climate change conference in Bali, this report holds special significance. If not for the jokes it will provide John Stewart concerning “cheat sheets” for politicians, then for the combined political power the document will represent.

AFP via PhysOrg - Climate change: Europe’s most arid country battles desertification

The Fight Against Desertification: An International Meeting

Heidi Strebel — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 15:28:07 +0000

Currently over 250 million people experience the direct consequences of desertification. Many of them are the world’s most destitute and vulnerable citizens.

2000 participants are expected in Madrid for the eighth international conference of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), which runs from September 3 - 14. Ecologists, representatives from 800 NGOs, and envoys from the 191 countries that ratified the Convention will meet to report on recent developments in the battle against one of the most critical environmental problems of our day.

The UNCCD defines "desertification" as the "degradation of land in arid, semi-arid and dry sub-humid areas resulting from various factors including climatic variations and human activities." In other words, the term does not refer to the expansion of existing deserts, but to the reduction or loss of productivity of previously fertile lands. The topsoil on those lands gradually loses its nutrients and the crop yield diminishes, sometimes to the point of being completely barren and unproductive. Deforestation, overgrazing, overcultivation and faulty irrigation are some of the major causes of land degradation, while growing populations put further pressure on land and water resources.

The consequences of desertification are devastating and far-reaching. The drop in biological productivity leads to a decline in economic productivity, forcing farmers, and often entire communities, into poverty and compelling many to migrate. According to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), land degradation causes "an estimated loss of $42 billion a year in agricultural production." It is believed that almost one-third of "the world’s cropland has been abandoned over the past 40 years because erosion has made it unproductive." Eroded lands become more susceptible to flooding which can in turn affect water quality, while during periods of drought people suffer from health problems caused by wind-blown dust.

For several decades the United Nations has been battling to reverse what is one of gravest environmental problems of our day. Starting in the mid-1970s, there were a number of international efforts, but by the early 1990s, various studies showed that, apart from a few localised improvements, overall land degradation had increased. There was a call for a change in tactics. The Convention to Combat Desertification was one of three major conventions elaborated during the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. It is designed to promote action through locally-run National Action Programmes (NAP) funded by local, national and international organisations. The UNCCD website provides a summary of this new approach:

"Drawing on past lessons, the Convention states that these programmes must adopt a democratic, bottom-up approach. They should emphasize popular participation and the creation of an ‘enabling environment’ designed to enable local people to reverse land degradation through self-help. Of course, governments remain responsible for creating this enabling environment. They must make politically sensitive changes, such as decentralizing authority, improving land tenure and systems, and empowering women, farmers and pastoralists."

Although it is easier to prevent desertification than to reverse it, the UNCCD encourages members to develop offensive stategems as well as defensive manoeuvres. The programmes implemented under the aegis of the Convention include reforestation projects, managed grazing methods, sustainable farming techniques, such as crop rotation, and efficient irrigation schemes. And the fight goes on.

UNCCD

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This Desert Flower: Israel’s Negev Desert

Eldad Granot — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 19:24:21 +0000

This desert flower / No sweet perfume ever tortured me more than this

–Sting

“The desert is in full bloom! You just have to go see it!” I’ve been hearing too much of this for a few weeks now, from my chronically infected wanderlust stricken neighbors, who are simply unable to spend even a single weekend here in our quaint, green suburban Ra’anana. “Sure”, I thought, “You mean you think that I too should drive for hours and hours to the middle of a barren no-place just to see a couple of small bushes with three tiny wilted greenish white petals stuck to them. Yeah, right.”

But my wife, naive and easily convinced as she is, packed up our day pack, delicately but forcibly packed me into the driver’s seat and made me drive about an hour and a half southwards, on one of Israel’s most boring stretches of asphalt wastelands, to see for ourselves what all the fuss is about. When we neared the borderhills of the Northern Negev desert, I realized we were in for a vast surprise. Instead of the dry, dusty gray middle-eastern desert that I had expected, what came into view was more like Province, France, in the height of spring! Wherever you looked, wild poppies had painted hills brilliant red and abundant uncultivated yellow Daisies had decorated the rolling wadi-sides with expansive blotches of bright yellow. I’ve seen a few deserts in my life, but this was more like a sub-tropical paradise than a desert!

The Negev desert, in southern Israel, is an arid region at the northeastern edge of the large Saharo-Arabian desert belt, which extends from the African Atlantic seaboard on the west, across the Arabian Desert eastwards, all the way to the Sind in India. The fairly small Negev is in fact one of the least dry deserts in the world, as it gets plenty of moist air, thanks to its proximity to the Mediterranean Sea. This allows for a wealth of human activity in the desert. In modern days, eco-tourism is a biggie, but so is desert agriculture. Just beyond the blossoming reserve that we were exploring were vast expanses of cultivated plots ripe with potatoes, open fields of winter wheat, just beginning to turn from green to golden and greenhouses sheltering juicy organic winter tomatoes nearly bursting on their vines, being picked for sale in Europe and other for international markets – all growing on reclaimed desert lands.

Not all world deserts have it this well off. In fact, desertification is one of the biggest environmental problems the world has, and it’s getting worse all the time. The UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) defines desertification as: "land degradation in arid, semiarid and subhumid tropics caused by a combination of climatic factors and human activities." Drylands are fragile ecosystems, and desert environments depend on a delicate balance of soil, wind and humidity. Human over-exploitation can and does lead to encroachment and expansion of these deserts. Desertification is not only a land issue: Soil erosion from damaged lands causes siltation, which destroys river and sea habitats. For example, coral reefs of Caribbean Islands and elsewhere have been identified as being ruined by shifting sand.

Don’t think that if you live far away from the nearest desert that desertification does not influence you directly. Global politics and economics play a role too: farm subsidies in the developed world push crop prices down in developing agricultural dryland areas which in turn forces poor farmers and countries to spend less and less on managing and maintaining the delicate balance of land usage. Also, as demand for (cheap) goods rise in the industrialized world, developing nations strive to increase outputs by bringing marginal land areas into production, again increasing desertification. The problem is so pronounced, that UNEP estimates around 10-20% of the world’s dryland – about 8-10Mllion sq kilometers, an area the size of Canada, China or Brazil – already degraded. In China alone the arable land and the homelands of nearly 400 million people are threatened by desertification. UNEP selected the problem of desertification for last year’s “World Environment Day” theme. You can learn more about the scope of desertification and related facts here.

In conjunction with international experts and the UNCCD, Israel’s Blaustein Institute for Desert Studies recently held the “Deserts and Desertification - Challenges and Opportunities” conference at Sde Boker, located in the Negev desert. The Institute routinely hosts students from around the world who come to get graduate degrees in Desert Studies, researching desert related topics from climate-sensitive agriculture to desertification remediation and drylands management.

One lesson learned from recent Israeli history is that desertification is not irreversible destiny. When soil conservation, irrigation and sustainable desert agriculture and forestry become national priority, trends can be changed. The Negev desert, accounts for over half of this tiny country’s area. The Negev, especially the northern part, had been a highly productive region during various periods of ancient history. Over time, it had turned into a wasteland, due to overgrazing, deforestation and poor soil stewardship. Indeed, when the modern State of Israel was founded, in 1948, the Negev desert extended as far north as Gedera, today a southern suburb of Tel Aviv. The equilibrium that allowed for a flourishing desert life in the past had been lost for many centuries. In recent years, Israelis have relearned how to live in harmony with their arid environment. National projects were set into motion to revive the desert heritage. During the 1950s, water infrastructure projects were built to deliver water from the rainy north to the desiccated south. Newly established desert settlements invented and then implemented drip irrigation technologies (now used around the world), allowing local agricultural economies to grow while conserving precious water resources. Trees were planted trees on dry and salty lands, where common forestry knowledge thought it to be impossible. Policy makers introduced organized grazing, and enforcers maintained seasonal allocations to ensure that the land's capacity was not exceeded.

So, next time your wife offers to take a trip to see your local desert in full bloom, accept her offer gratefully. With a third of the world’s land being degraded drylands, one can easily appreciate a shade-blessed desert Acacia tree, a seasonally flooded riverbed and a flowering green desert hill.

Giant Heart of Trees to Fight Global Warming

Maria Surma Manka — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 13:37:14 +0000

Photo credit: Tree-Nation Tree-Nation is an organization aiming to plant 8 million trees in Niger, Africa in the shape of a huge heart to combat deforestation and global warming. Folks who want to get involved can visit Tree-Nation's website and buy trees for themselves or gift them to others for milestones such as weddings, new babies, or even to advertise a business.

Purchasers of a tree are asked to plant it on a virtual map, and then a real tree will be planted in the same spot at the park in Niger. There are different types of trees to choose from, all local ones that have the attributes (like robust root systems) to survive in the desert, like the Acacia, Baobab, and various palm trees.

Once a tree is purchased, it gets its own “Tree-Blog” and profile. Visitors to the site and tree purchasers can socialize with each other by sharing photos, messages, links, etc. Andy Pothecary and Maxime Renaudin are the co-founders of Tree-Nation and are based in Barcleona, Spain. They work with a small team of community members in Niger, and hope that they community there will become a center for projects working towards a sustainable, healthy future. Pothecary told Green Options:

“Our members will share a common interest by planting a tree, an action in the real world, bridging cultural and geographical boundaries.”

Since the project launched late last year, nearly 700 trees have been planted, so Tree-Nation has quite a ways to go. But even if you don't want to buy a tree, the site is worth checking out just for the fantastic mapping technology.

Tree-Nation is affiliated with the United Nations Environment Programme's Billion Tree campaign, whose mission is to plant a billion trees worldwide by the end of 2007 to fight deforestation and raise awareness of global warming.

Tree-Nation