Green news from Turkey. The Turkish newspaper Today’s Zaman reported on a new new book exchange campaign launched by the Ministry of Education that will be aimed at “saving millions of trees, protecting the environment and contributing to the country’s economy.”

Every year 155 million books are distributed by the Ministry to students in Turkey. Most of these books, according to the article, are thrown into the trash at the end of the year. The cost of these books to the Turkish public is more than USD 800 million annually.

The Turkish Ministry of Education understood like many others that going green is a win-win deal - benefiting the environment and saving in costs. So it changed the concept from a distribution plan to an exchange project, where books will be given to students temporarily and they will be returned at the end of the educational term. The Ministry expects to save more than 1.27 million trees every year with this project. It also estimates that it will save USD 110 million annually (50% of the paper used to publish textbooks is imported, costing $750 million annually).

This is a great move and I congratulate the Turkish Ministry of Education for it. I was also very happy to read in the article that according to the Turkish Ministry, Germany, Austria, the US, Canada, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, England, France, Hungary, Italy, Spain, Japan, Korea and China were applying the same or a similar method at their schools. It makes so much sense (and similar in many ways to the renting concept of our friends and partners at Chegg), not to mention the educational added-value for the young students!

Prime Minister of India Dr. Manmohan Singh at the National Action Plan on Climate Change Release Function

Barely a week after the release of the National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC), citizen groups and civil society members from across India have been putting forward their viewpoints on the Action Plan. Shortly after the release, the Climate Challenge India (CCI) coalition, a grouping of environmental experts, financiers, businesspeople, analysts and activists committed to developing a positive leadership agenda on climate change for India, issued an independent Interim Assessment of the Government of India’s ‘National Action Plan on Climate Change’. The assessment gives the Government a B+ for effort and a D for vision. NAPCC was released on the 30th of June 2008 by the Prime Minister of India, in a high profile function in New Delhi.

While welcoming the fact that a national action plan has been tabled for discussion, the group concluded that an opportunity to demonstrate leadership on a critical issue for the country has been missed. Although the Plan talks of promoting a more coherent approach to sustainable development across government departments, it does not demonstrate the adoption of a new, more forward-looking agenda based on ensuring climate security for the nation, or a well-thought through strategy chalking out a discernible low-carbon pathway for India. There is also an absence of any sense of palpable urgency about climate change, or the establishment of clear targets and timetables for action that would have reflected a more serious level of commitment by the government.

Indeed, many vestiges of the Governments old approach to climate policy and mindset are exhibited in the Action Plan. For example, in the very first paragraph of the report, the Government takes a dig at developed countries for having caused the climate change problems in the first place. More welcome is the recognition that climate change is a serious inter-generational challenge and that particular attention needs to be paid in adaptation strategies to gender and vulnerable groups such as women, children and the elderly. But the absence of any attention to the need for climate-resilient planning for India’s metropolises or Tier II cities in the Action Plan, shows an utter lack of understanding about the challenge to human habitats posed by climate change.

This is not to suggest that the report is entirely without merit. There are a number of welcome measures in the report. The focus on the further enhancement of eight mission areas many of them already the subject of national plans is appreciable. Realizing that if key aspects of the report are to be implemented and improved upon, they will require the engagement of India’s many diverse and enterprising communities, CCI has requested the Government to establish mechanisms to promote such engagement, and has also committed itself to a democratization of debate on climate policy and its effective implementation in India.

Click here to read the 7 page Interim Assessment of NAPCC

Posts Related to Climate Change and India:

• National Action Plan on Climate Change Launched: Solar Energy to Change the Face of India
• Indian Youth Climate Network (IYCN) Calls For DYSoC - 2008
• 3TIER Moves to India, Advocates Leapfrog to Renewable Energy

A new experiment comes from Michele Grassi, researcher at the department of math at the University of Pisa, in the centre of Italy, who built a prototype of a wave-trapping machine.

Submerged, it goes 100mt deep down the water to catch waves’ energy. The problem is that it’s not easy to harness this energy and convert it into electricity in large amounts but the young Italian has conceived different sizes of this revolutionary machine: big and expensive (millions of Euros) able to produce a megawatt of energy and small and cheap (100.000 Euros) with 100 kilowatt able to provide energy to around 30 apartments.
 
“The machine is different from all the other projects that aim to derive energy out of waves. It can be used in a calm sea as the Mediterranean, even if its efficiency in the ocean could be five times bigger” Grassi said.

While marine energy generators do not emit smoky pollutants or leave behind radioactive waste, these machines are not small or unobtrusive. To draw energy from the ocean, they often need to be rooted on seafloors relatively close to shore, in places that traditionally have not been used for energy generation.

In September the final model of Michele Grassi will be experimented but the waves’ machine has started already to arouse international interests. Despite his green-friendly intention, it’s quite predictable that his biggest opponents will be environmental groups..

Sources: Berr Offshore -  Rinnovabili - Pure Energy System Wiki - BBC

Image courtesy of Victor Geere at Flickr under Creative Commons

Apart from parading their own theoretic short and long term goals and how best to approach this growing problem while clouding their own best national interests, making concessions for climate change may prove harder than committing to curb global carbon pollution.

As the main players at the Hokkaido summit, were the G8 Club, and China, Brazil and India, to pose and think about climate change issues as possible recipe for wars, the plight of the millions of victims of the conflict in Darfur, Sudan would connect with their jostling for the best breathing space.

It has emerged that the Darfur genocide has a lot more to do with climate change and its ripple effects on the local ecology than has been thought before and aid workers there are warning that a similar environmental situation elsewhere is a recipe for war.

(This subject has been covered in this forum before, with a caution that the Darfur conflict inflicts even more damage on Sudan’s environmental degradation with nearly two million internally displaced people putting pressure on the fragile environment as they clear land and source ground water to survive. See: The Animals are Innocent, Blame the Local Ecology)

Amy Chilla, a spokesperson for Tents of Hope, a public awareness campaign that rallies communities to respond to the crisis in Darfur, Sudan by creating tents as focal points for learning about the Darfur genocide said: “There is a greater picture to what is happening to the environment and how it affects different regions and taking Darfur as a cautionary tale is important.”

Aid workers have chronicled how climate change led to the genocide - the spawn of numerous enmities created by fights over more than two decades between herder and farmer communities for access to land and the continuing scarcity of resources.

The progressing of desertification as these fights begun to take toll on the environment and increased competition for limited land resources meant that farmers, generally considered Africans, began fencing remaining arable land while camel herders, considered Arabs, lost access to grazing grounds.

Between 1987 and 1989, thousands were killed in land battles that cemented ethnic lines and hatreds. United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki Moon, says: “Two decades ago, the rains in southern Sudan began to fail. According to U.N. statistics, average precipitation has declined some 40 percent since the early 1980s… the drying of sub-Saharan Africa derives, to some degree, from man-made global warming. It is no accident that the violence in Darfur erupted during the drought”.

Local ecology indeed plays an important role in conflicts as a source of wealth and as a precursor of death for innocent millions of people. In Africa, these are mostly camouflaged as political, religious or ethnic.

A critical lack of fuel for cooking drives women to leave the safety of the refugee camps and walk farther and farther every day in search of firewood, subjecting them to attacks and rape by the Janjaweed raiders.

The vastness of Darfur, about the size of France, makes it difficult for any effective peace keeping efforts. The land near the camps has been so stripped of firewood and trees that a one-way journey of three hours is now the norm for most women gathering firewood in South Darfur.

In North Darfur, the wood is well outside the reach of a walking journey from many camps, and refugees are selling their food rations to townspeople or middlemen to earn cash to purchase wood fuel, again from middlemen, to cook what little remains.

Ki Moon on Monday repeated his fears again before the gathered G8 leaders thus: “We tend to think of climate change as something in the future. It is not. We see now, most of all in Africa, that drought and changing weather patterns are compounding the challenges we face in attaining the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).”

It is worth noting that in the larger Sudan, the boundary between semi-desert and desert has shifted south an estimated 50-200 km since 1930, according to the UN Post-Conflict Environmental Assessment conducted by UN Environment Programme (UNEP).

Disorganized and poorly managed mechanized rain-fed agriculture, which covers an estimated area of 6.5 million hectares, has been particularly destructive, leading to large-scale forest clearance, loss of wildlife and severe land degradation, UNEP says.

This, coupled with unsustainable explosion in livestock, from 28.6 million in 1961 to 134.6 million in 2004 and deforestation in which between 1990 to 2005, Sudan lost 8.8 million hectares or about 11.6% of its forest cover, is a cause for worry.

It may seem far away but the era of climate change wars is here with us. With the race for total food security and energy independence dawning, it may only be a matter of time before it gets to the very heart of the United States, perhaps sooner that we ever thought.

No wonder Manmohan Singh, the prime minister of India, says: “Climate change, energy security and food security are interlinked, and require an integrated approach.”

Image credit: HDPT-CAR at Flickr under a Creative Commons license

As a measure against nocturnal rice thefts, Thai authorities introduced a six o’clock p.m. curfew on combine harvesters, vehicles used to harvest the crop.

In Thailand, as in many parts of Asia, the price of rice has gone up dramatically in recent months tempting greedy and corrupt dealers to use any means available to get a hold of the pricey grain for either sell or hoarding. In fact, the hoarding of rice has been blamed for the price spirals forcing governments to impose buying rations.

According to the Asia Development Bank (ADB), approximately 1 billion Asians need assistance to cope with soaring food prices and shortages.

The purchasing power of many of Asia’s poor has been seriously eroded reversing previous gains made in fighting poverty.

The International Herald Tribune describes rice, a staple food for half of the global population, as one of the “world’s most politically fragile crop.”

Like the price of rice, general food prices are on the rise in many parts of the world, forcing poor people to protest - sometimes violently - against governments.

Food riots have erupted in countries such as Haiti, Cameroon, Egypt, Indonesia, Senegal and Somalia, among others, threatening national stability or exacerbating conflict. Poor people, particularly children and those living with diseases, face the risk of malnutrition or death due to inadequate diets.

“It’s the worst crisis of its kind in more than 30 years,” Jeffrey Sachs, an economist and UN special adviser recently told The New York Times. “It’s a big deal and it’s obviously threatening a lot of governments. There are a number of governments on the ropes, and I think there’s more political fallout to come.”

Experts say that food reserves are at their lowest in 35 years, and there is a systemic imbalance between the forces of supply and demand that cannot be fixed in the short term. UN statistics show that global food prices have risen by 65 percent since 2002 to levels increasingly beyond the reach of the poor.

The current food quagmire has been festering over the years with little to no media attention.

“In the seven of the last eight years consumption has exceeded production, which can happen only if we draw down our stocks. The carryover, the grain in the bin when a new harvest begins, is the seminal indicator of food security, and it’s now down to 54 days consumption, not much than is needed to fill the supply line,” says Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute.

Nearly 1.7 billion people in Asia - three times the population of Europe - live on less than US$2 a day, and to them the spiraling food prices are like a shockwave.

“The world’s food import bill will rise in 2007 to $745 billion, up 21% from last year, the FAO estimated in its biannual Food Outlook. In developing countries, costs will go up by a quarter to nearly $233 billion,” reports Time Magazine.

Asia’s poor are particularly vulnerable to rising food prices for staples such as rice because 60 percent of their spending goes toward food and the figure rises to 75 percent if transport costs are included, according to the ADB.

Many countries in the region have resorted to banning food exports and imposing price controls; however, the ADB warns that this could worsen the crisis, as farmers will stop growing crops that bring a negative return on investment.

An assortment of causes have been cited for the ongoing food crisis from climate change, population growth, increased consumption of meat in Asia, particularly India and China, a ballooning oil price, focus on bio-fuels to greed and corruption.

According to experts, the transportation of specific commodities over long distances chews up a lot of oil, which in a context of a skyrocketing oil price is responsible for the food price hikes.

Also, the fact that many people in Asia and other parts of the world now eat like North Americans is also an underlying factor for the upward spiral of food prices. The more people eat meat, the less food will be available to satiate empty bellies of the poor because grains meant for human beings go to fattening chickens and animals for meat.

Continued growth in meat output is dependent on feeding grain to animals, creating competition for grain between affluent meat-eaters and the world’s poor, says the World Watch Institute.

In addition, the increased commercialization of agriculture has negatively impacted the productivity of small farmers. Consequently, small farmers opt to abandon the land, and trek to urban areas in search of proverbial greener pastures.

According to a United Nations Population Fund (UNPFA) report between 2000 and 2030, Asia’s urban population is expected to increase from 1.36 billion to 2.64 billion, putting pressure on urban areas which are already incapable of meeting everyone’s food needs.

As the Asian food story reveals, to avert a global food crisis requires a multi-disciplinary and multi-dimensional approach that employs short term and long-term measures.

In the short term, bilateral and multi-lateral agencies can lend monetary support and food aid to help seriously affected countries cope with the food crisis. While government subsidies can help the poor to withstand the food crisis, it is not a sustainable strategy in the long-term.

National governments will need to invest in agricultural systems in a manner that keeps small farmers engaged in the production of food with a guarantee of support, fair compensation and improved access to market information.

The ADB recommends that farmers need to have access to reliable and affordable seed, fertilizers, pesticides and credit.

In the long-term, agricultural research, improvement of irrigation systems and the development of new technologies, including improved seed and crop varieties suited to specific climatic conditions, are essential to improving yields.

The use of low cost technologies such as drip kits and treadle pumps can also help farmers to make optimum use of land and water in the face of global warming. Labor-saving technologies that will adapt agriculture to new conditions generated by rural-to-urban migration can help to compensate for the depletion of labor.

As UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon succinctly put it, the longer-term challenge is to boost agricultural development, particularly in Africa and other regions most affected.

With increased political will, fair trade and investments into agricultural systems, hopefully rice farmers in Thailand will, once again, have nights filled with sleep unafraid of waking up to a bare rice field harvested by some unscrupulous characters bent on making a quick dollar.

Credit: Orhan at Flickr under a Creative Commons License

The report forecasted heat waves, less rain and a subsequent increased drought. It predicted that exceptionally hot years, which had originally only occurred every 20 to 25 years, were now more likely to hit every one or two years. And the report noted that all of this could start as soon as 2010.

In addition, the report noted that rainfall, which has already seen to be falling since the 1950’s, is also likely to decline further. The report concluded that southern Australia, and Tasmania (the island off the south of us), will be the worst affected.

The Australian Agriculture Minister Tony Burke said that the report indicted a risk of drought all but doubled, as did the area in which drought would affect. “Parts of these high level projections read more like a disaster novel than a scientific report,” he told reporters. “What’s clear is that the cycle of drought is going to be more regular and deeper than ever.”

This comes at a time when, only last year, we were hearing that the drought could be waning in Australia. However the report concluded that “the analysis shows that the extent and frequency of exceptionally hot years have been increasing rapidly over recent decades and this trend is expected to continue.”

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who took office towards the end of 2007 from John Howard, noted that the reports finding that the area of Australia that would experience an exceptionally hot year could increase from 5% to 95%, was “very disturbing.”

Source

credit: suburbanbloke at Flickr under a Creative Commons license

The Indian capital city of New Delhi will be hosting the upcoming Commonwealth Games 2010. This will be the first time India will host the Commonwealth Games and the second time that the Games will be hosted in Asia. Preparations have been on for quite some time now, to not just renovate and construct sporting facilities all over the city but to also beautify the city and gear it to ensure that visitors during the Games have a comfortable stay. Cashing upon the tourism potential is another motive of all the gearing up. The preparation of the Games has not been untouched by the green wave and Delhi’s Department of Environment, Forest and Wildlife has already asked all concerned authorities to, “ensure that Delhi’s latest showpieces are environmentally sound and reflect the city’s commitment to preserving nature”. However, the ground realities are far from that and the ecological impact of the Games may be much more than the economic gains.

The rapid and deadline driven renovation and laying down of wider transport system, especially connecting the different venues with each other is coming at a huge green cost. A large number of ‘heritage’ trees have either been axed or transplanted. Transplantation has rarely worked and though the Government maintains the green cover of the city has gone up, the green heritage has been lost and the green space missing, from where it is needed the most. This is not just because of the Commonwealth Games, but also to accommodate the ever increasing number of private vehicles, particularly cars, on the Delhi roads. The Delhi metropolitan has more cars than the total number of cars in the other three metros of India, viz., Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai (formerly Bombay, Calcutta and Madras). Concerned citizens and civil society groups have taken to the roads, time and again, to protest against the felling of trees and have also called for a policy to reduce the purchase of such large number of cars in Delhi.

The largest environmental impact of the preparations, which may cause a permanent and irreversible damage to the Delhi ecosystem is the construction of the Games Village complex on the floodplains of river Yamuna, that passes through the city. The river has its own story to tell. The 22 km stretch of the river in the city has already been turned into a drain. A large volume of the water from the river is withdrawn and diverted to be supplied to the city the moment it enters Delhi. What flows in it is essentially the untreated waste water that enters into it during its journey from one to the other end of the city. The river also has power plants, industrial units and what not been put up on its banks. As if all of that wasn’t enough, one of India’s largest and finest temples - Akshardham Temple has also been constructed on the floodplains of the river, right in the heart of the city.

A sticker from a protest site near the Commonwealth Games Village site

Now, the authorities have decided to construct the Commonwealth Games Village bang opposite to the Temple complex and literally on the riverbed. Constructions are on full swing even as protesters from all across the country have called in for a Yamuna Satyagrah(the fight for truth) - a method of protest first popularised by Mahatma Gandhi. The river has usually shown a calm period of 4-5 years after which, it comes down with a flood of water. With the threats of climate change looming large, one cannot really predict with absolute certainty, but the next time the river comes down with its flood of water, there will be no floodplain available to control it, and the city would then said to be ‘flooded”.

The Environment Department has further asked the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) and the various civic agencies to adhere to the concept of “green building technology, sustainable site planning, design and construction of buildings” in order to “ achieve maximum harmony with nature. According to the State Environment, Forest and Wildlife Secretary J. K. Dadoo, “The State Government has declared the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi as Green Games. It is important that buildings that are constructed under the scheme combine features of being water and energy-efficient and are made of eco-friendly material.” What seems to have been overlooked is that such buildings should also hold their ground and not be constructed at places where they are themselves in danger and also pose a threat to the very human ecosystem they are supposed to provide services to.

Image Taken: From the Walls of CSE

£100bn investment (200bn USD) in renewable energy has been proposed meaning that thousands of wind turbines will be built.

The prime minister has described these plans as his “green revolution” and suggested it is to be the country’s largest energy initiative since nuclear power.

The North Sea – formally a huge source of energy for the UK with its oil and gas supplies – has now peaked and Brown wants this to be turned into a stretch of water oozing with wind power.

Middelgrunden in Copenhagen’s harbour (see photo above) has long been a wind farm I have yearned should become a blueprint on a global scale. It serves as a good example of what the view off the UK’s east coast may one day resemble. Quite beautiful.

Should these proposals come to fruition, then they should ensure we meet the EU’s agenda that states that countries must produce 15% of their energy from renewable sources by 2020.

As reported in the Guardian, the good news doesn’t stop here:

“Householders will be encouraged to reduce their bills through energy-saving incentives due to be announced later this summer. Within a decade … every householder able to do so [should] fit loft or cavity wall insulation, install low-energy light bulbs, and use low-energy consumer goods.”

Perhaps the political green tide is turning here in the UK. A man who has caused many green campaigners absolute anguish has listened and begun that revolution.

Sources:

Greenpeace

The Guardian

Image Source:

andjohan at Flickr under a creative commons license.

Instead of acting upon it or even printing copies to president George Bush and his handlers, they tossed it in a cyber trash bin called Spam folder as if that was the only green thing to do.

Many months after Scott McClellan quit spinning for Dubya, climate watchers are crying foul that he never ever touched the seemingly hot subject in his recently released book, What Happened. But in his famous spins, he had blamed human activity - you and me - as responsible for global warming on more than one occasion.

Spin can be clever tomfoolery sometimes but the White House stance on global warming is well known and George W. Bush has never disappointed with his public statements that smack verily of official ignorance or pretense on the subject as an inconvenient truth.

What if the White House decided to take the global lead in addressing greenhouse gas emissions and played a more prominent role in combating global warming with same the zeal it suppressed the EPA recommendations document that suggested long term savings of up to US$2 trillion through 2040 if the federal government was to enact tougher greenhouse gas regulations for new automobiles?

But as Bush joins the G8 Summit in Hokkaido, Japan next week, the environmental group, WWF, issued an alarm report that the summit will be just another talk shop because the leaders (whose nations are responsible for 62% of the CO2 in atmosphere) have largely failed to follow through on past commitments on climate change.

Niklas Hoehne, the report’s author, lamented: “None of the eight leading industrial nations have taken sufficient measures needed to be considered in line with the target to limit a worldwide increase in temperatures to 2 degrees centigrade.”

China supported that stance by pouring cold water on George Bush’s grandiose but unconvincing statement at a White House press briefing that: “The first thing is to make sure we get a understanding that all of us need to agree on a long-term goal.”

Su Wei, director-general of the Office of China’s National Leading Group on Climate Change, dismissed Bush thus: “We should focus on real, practical shorter-term and medium-term actions, empty talk of long-term goals does not produce any specific results to address climate change.”

A high level meeting in South East Asia blamed industrialized nations for global warming and adopted a three-year action plan Thursday for regional cooperation to combat climate change effects. The plan will include the sharing of information and best practices on nationally appropriate actions to mitigate carbon emissions.

My prayer, however, is that George Bush’s renewed long term commitment on global warming should not be the next big hoax. Otherwise official skeptics of global warming and mega spinners stationed at the White House will continue to have a field day.

Image credit: Azrainman at Flickr under a Creative Commons license

Look for your swimsuit!

Sunday 6th of July Italy will participate for the third time to the “Big Jump“, a campaign by European Rivers Network (ERN) to inspire a reconciliation of people with their rivers.

The Italian NGO “Legambiente” has organized many events to celebrate this national meeting on the Po River, the country’s longest river (405 miles long). The Po’s waters flow through the Val Padana, the plain that stretches across northern Italy from the French border on the west to the Adriatic Sea on the east. Many Italians live in this fertile expanse, some of the most heavily cultivated land in Europe: here is located the city of Turin, headquarters of Fiat, the automotive conglomerate, and some of the country’s most beautiful and historic towns.

Once upon a time the citizens of Turin were used to bath in the Po River. It was only 50 years ago but many things have changed. Nearly 25% of the land along its banks has been denuded of natural vegetation to make way for sterile plantations of poplars harvested for cellulose; the river is dammed for hydroelectric power and tainted by agricultural and industrial chemicals.

Fortunately, huge efforts have been made since the 90ies for the cleaning and the restoration of Italian rivers. Responsible citizens have understood: to respect, to restore, to give back its original space to the river and improve the water’s quality everywhere. This growing awareness is expressed through the revival of the activities on and along the rivers: cycle tracks, discovery canoe tours, sporty fishing…

“Big Jump” aims a people’s return to the rivers in order to support the European restoration effort for rivers and wetlands, a huge project expressed in the European Water Framework Directive.

July the 6th Italian citizens will swim or jump in the Po River to remind that:

-Rivers, once used only for navigation, serve today as rubbish dumps and are polluted
-The numerous beaches and swimming spots disappeared
-People turned their back to the rivers and forgot their responsibility

“Big Jump” wants to induce people to respect their rivers and lakes. Everybody will swim in the rivers the same day, at the same hour, in all the European rivers: an inspiring project to get citizens involved in the territory they live.

Other Sources: National Geographic

Image courtesy of Zeta at Flickr under Creative Commons