EcoWorldly

An innovative campaign from HelpSweden.org aims to turn our notions of wealth and poverty on their heads.

HelpSweden.org has drafted a petition to Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt. It urges greater action on the Millennium Development Goals when Sweden holds the European Union presidency in the second half of 2009. The message also holds a reminder of the first world’s forgotten debt to the rest of the world for resources and labor.

Think Africa’s poor?

Not in terms of natural resources. Most diamonds and gold in the world come from Africa. With all the conflict that’s erupted over mining the abundant precious materials in the Congo, there’s a saying, “We’d be so much better off if we weren’t so rich.”

Much of the African continent is also blessed a climate far more lush than, say, Sweden. Yet with a fraction of the natural resources and more snow than you could shake a kräftskivor at, Sweden’s economy is among the top twenty largest in the world, dwarfing any African nation.

So what gives?

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Sweden’s Umeå University in April announced the discovery of ‘the world’s oldest living tree’, a 9,550 year old spruce in the mountains of Dalarna province of the Nordic country.

Scientists discovered the 13 foot tall (4 meter tall) spruce growing at an altitude of 2,985 feet (910 meters) on Fulu Mountain but it is thought its roots actually sprouted just after the end of the last ice age, nearly 10,000 years ago, and the lone survivor has been cloning itself ever since.

The discovery effectively turned the tables on Methuselah, a bristlecone pine located in California’s White Mountains, which at 4,768 years old, was believed to be the oldest living tree around. Its species are known to live long - there are 4,000-year-old pine trees in North America.

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A fleet of scientists, business leaders, and policy makers have convened at the 2008 World Water Week in Stockholm, Sweden for the past week to exchange views on the world water crisis and promote initiatives to build a clean and healthy world.

Organized by the Stockholm International Water Institute, the conference this year focuses on sanitation and hygiene issues related to water, which compliments the United Nations’ 2008 International Year of Sanitation theme.

“Sanitation is one of the biggest scandals of all times,” Prince Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands, who heads the UN Advisory Board on Water and Sanitation, was quoted in an article by news agency Agence France-Presse. “It’s something that we have to put on our radar screen. Some 7,500 people die every day due to this lack of sanitation,” he added.

According to the UN, 2.6 billion people around the world lack access to adequate sanitation, while half the world’s population lacks access to clean water. Consequently, citizens in underdeveloped countries experience premature deaths, illness, a degradation of living quarters and damage to the environment and local economies at alarming rates. Combined with the effects of global warming and the world water crisis, this creates cause for alarm.

A goal of World Water Week is to encourage the 2,500 international conference attendees to strategize ways to advance best practices, scientific understanding, and policy making processes related to water, health, poverty, and the environment.

Using preventive medicine, building sustainable cities, changing human behaviors, and comprehending sanitation’s link to global warming are other items highlighted during the week.

Another honorable mention for WWW is its commitment to arranging an environmentally responsible conference; using less bottled water, promoting carbon off-setting, recycling, providing organic and fair trade food, and supporting eco-hotels are all part of the conference’s plan to bring the issues home.

More information on conference topics:
WWW press releases

Photo: Stockholm International Water Institute

SAS flies slower to save fuel and lower carbon emissions.

Well, when I read this headline, conflicting views sprang to mind.

Firstly of course, being an Englishman with no sense of irony, I immediately leapt to my feet and saluted my queen and her armed forces.

Then I faltered slightly, and thought, if a crack team of SAS marines were being air dropped into some war-torn despotic state, surely, speed is of the essence, to ensure that the paras can be in and out again with time for a cup of tea a mere hours later.

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I grew up by the sea – always had an affinity with the waves, the tides, that sense of looking out to the great beyond, wondering what lay there.

But as one grows older, the great beyond takes on connotations other than distant lands lying beyond a Devonian horizon.

We can’t help but begin contemplating what will happen once we’ve died.

But I know what’ll happen to me – all thanks to this Swedish company.

I’m being thrown to sea in something that looks remarkably like a UFO.

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It was only last year that I began to fully appreciate the concept of incidental heat gains within buildings - heat gained indirectly via a window facing the sun, the heat generated from electrical appliances and rather surprisingly, the heat generated from our own bodies.

I thought the latter would be insignificant. Not a bit of it.

In fact, whilst sitting down, we provide the same amount of heat as a 60 watt light bulb. This can increase to 250 watts depending on the type of exercise we are doing.

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In an article that ran earlier this month, I learned the Swedish government has announced that Sweden is beating emissions targets as laid out by the Kyoto Protocol.

“Sweden was allowed to increase its emissions by more than four percent.

[But] emissions have decreased by nearly nine percent so [overall] that means Sweden has reduced its emissions by 12.7 percent, more than agreed under the Kyoto Protocol,” said the political advisor Hannes Borg. Read the rest of this entry »