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Sources:
Eldis | Climate change
ClimateChangeCorp | News
Desertification | Web log
The Economist | Environment
Reason magazine | Global warming
SciDev | Climate change | News
The Independent | Climate change | News
The Politics of Global Warming | News
An argan forest in Algeria (Abdelm. Mouzaoui / Willem Van Cotthem)
Desertification | Web log 13 03 2010
Malawi: Community gardens and chicken farm (Terr@dialoog)
Desertification | Web log 13 03 2010
Schoolgardens: one of the best practices to combat malnutrition (Terr@dialoog / Willem Van Cotthem)
Desertification | Web log 13 03 2010
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Eldis / Climate change
Informing the development of a future research programme on energy planning in developing countries
16 09 2009 This report presents the findings of a research scoping study undertaken for DFID, with the overall objective of informing the development of a future ...
Framework for an agreement on adaptation to climate change
16 09 2009 In view of the climate change challenges, this paper aims to outline a possible framework for an agreement on adaptation. It highlights several issues ...
Future prospects for Joint Implementation
16 09 2009 This paper looks at the likely future of Joint Implementation (JI) in the fight against climate change. It also compares JI to the Clean Development Mechanism ...
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ClimateChangeCorp / News
L'Oreal to halve emissions by 2015
03 09 2009 Company announces goals to cut GHG emissions, water use, waste production
Shoppers consider product sustainability
03 09 2009 Environmental sustainability is tiebreaking factor when products are equal
AEP doubles renewable energy goals
03 09 2009 Environmental advances offer benefits for companies and climate
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Desertification / Web log
Desertification and poverty, agriculture and horticulture in the drylands
Schoolgardens: one of the best practices to combat malnutrition (Terr@dialoog / Willem Van Cotthem)
13 03 2010 It cannot be denied that schoolgardens play a vital role in alleviating hunger and malnutrition of children.  Recognition of the role of small-scale gardening and production of vitamin-rich fruits in family gardens (kitchen gardens), school gardens and hospital gardens, is contributing to the multiplication of these best practices by many organizations, foundations and NGOs.The Belgian [...]
Malawi: Community gardens and chicken farm (Terr@dialoog)
13 03 2010 One of the nice development projects of the Belgian non-profit organization Terr@dialoog can be found in Malawi.  Lieve HOET, Chair of the Department ‘Schools for Schools’ within Terr@dialoog, has sent some pictures illustrating the success of their initiatives in Malawi.  More details will follow.
An argan forest in Algeria (Abdelm. Mouzaoui / Willem Van Cotthem)
13 03 2010 Thanks to my good friends the Foresters of Tindouf (Sahara desert, S.W. Algeria) I was lucky to visit a splendid argan forest in the desert valley Oued Elmaa.  Mr. Abdelmoumène MOUZAOUI, forester, offered me some photographs and I had opportunities of taking some too.I publish them here because so many people are interested in this [...]
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The Economist / Environment
New fiction: Ian McEwan: Mr Sunshine
11 03 2010 How not to write “state-of-the-nation” fiction Solar. By Ian McEwan. Nan A. Talese; 304 pages; $26.95. Jonathan Cape; GBP18.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk ...
The IMF in Africa: Going green
11 03 2010 The IMF says it wants to help Africa handle climate change THE global recession was slow to hit Africa. Its banks and stock exchanges were isolated enough from the wider capital markets to suffer few shocks. Foreign investment remained steady. Oil-rich countries such as Angola continued to boom. But dampened demand for African exports last year, together with the shrinking of many venture-capital funds, has now hit the continent hard after a long period of unusually perky growth. Countries south of the Sahara together grew by less than 2% in 2009. In many places income has fallen and unemployment started to rise. So the bullishness of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the IMF’s head, who has been touring Africa, struck some as strange. He went out of his way to praise Africa’s central banks. He even said Africa’s economies were more dynamic than most of Asia’s. The main point, he said, was that Africa was recovering from the global crisis faster than expected. ...
Weather forecasting: Flaky science
04 03 2010 How to predict the consistency of snow “THE wrong type of snow” became famous as a lame excuse in Britain in February 1991 when, caught out by a cold snap, British Rail blamed severe disruption to its services on problems clearing unusually soft and powdery snow from its tracks. But British Rail had a point. There are, indeed, different types of snow—and people who live in mountainous areas, or visit to ski, like to know which ones to expect. Forecasting what sort of snow will fall is not easy. But a pair of researchers at the University of Utah think they have cracked the problem. Jim Steenburgh and Trevor Alcott carried out their research in the Alta ski area, which is about 3,000 metres (10,000 feet) up in the Wasatch range. Good record-keeping at the resort, including precipitation measurements that are taken automatically every hour, allowed them to analyse 457 snowfalls that took place between 1999 and 2007. ...
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Reason magazine / Global warming
Al Gore Breaks Silence on Global Warming Fiascos (Fiasci?)
13 03 2010 Al Gore makes the whole planet sick. If you've been wondering where former vicepresident and Nobel laureate Al Gore has been hiding out during therecent ClimateCrackup (or as I prefer, Klimate Krackup!!!), wonderno more. Gore broke his silence yesterday in an op-edof 1,896 words' duration in Los Tiempos de Nueva York. And it turns out that even if you don't have global warming tokick around anymore, you'll still have to worry about shady oilsheikhs:
It would be an enormous relief if the recent attacks on thescience of global warming actually indicated that we do not face anunimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures toprotect human civilization as we know it. Of course, we would still need to deal with the nationalsecurity risks of our growing dependence on a global oil marketdominated by dwindling reserves in the most unstable region of theworld, and the economic risks of sending hundreds of billions ofdollars a year overseas in return for that oil. And we would stilltrail China in the race to develop smart grids, fast trains, solarpower, wind, geothermal and other renewable sources of energy — themost important sources of new jobs in the 21st century.  But what a burden would be lifted! We would no longer have toworry that our grandchildren would one day look back on us as acriminal generation that had selfishly and blithely ignored clearwarnings that their fate was in our hands. We could insteadcelebrate the naysayers who had doggedly persisted in proving thatevery major National Academy of Sciences report on climate changehad simply made a huge mistake. I, for one, genuinely wish that the climate crisis were anillusion. But unfortunately, the reality of the danger we arecourting has not been changed by the discovery of at least twomistakes in the thousands of pages of careful scientific work overthe last 22 years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.In fact, the crisis is still growing because we are continuing todump 90 million tons of global-warming pollution every 24 hoursinto the atmosphere — as if it were an open sewer.
To my untrained and never-interested eye, Gore seems to make agame effort to handle in turn each of the recent debacles in theglobal warming consensus. I find Al Gore so essentially repellentthat I can't fairly judge his success or failure here, so hash itout among yourselves. The truth, like climate change itself, mustbe felt in the moist or shriveled nipples of each of us.
Paul Ehrlich Goes Up Against "Well-Funded, Merciless Enemies" to Save the Earth from Certain Destruction. Again.
13 03 2010 well-funded, mercilessBy now, talking smack about environmentaldoomsayer and neo-MalthusianPaul Ehrlich should fall solidly under the heading "dead horse, thebeating of." But Ehrlich is some sort of zombie pony: no matter howmany times he is proven wrong, he rises again as a commentator,consulted and quoted by otherwise discriminating people. He waswrong about global starvation, wrong about pesticide-induced riots,wrong about race war, and wrong about nuclear annihilation. Now,naturally, he has taken up the cause of global warming. Here are Reason, we have done our fair share ofEhrlich-bashing(and its converse, Norman Borlaug promoting). But the folks at Hot Air are taking another run at the old boy, driven to it by emails fromEhrich—recently dug up and made public by The Washington Times—arguing for a major publicrelations campaign against global warming skeptics, funded andorganized by folks at the National Academy of Sciences. Here'sEhrlich:
“Most of our colleagues don’t seem to grasp that we’re not in agentlepersons’ debate, we’re in a street fight against well-funded,merciless enemies who play by entirely different rules,” Paul R.Ehrlich, a Stanford University researcher, said in one of thee-mails.
The way the folks at Hot Air see it, anyone worried about globalwarming should take heart: Every catastrophe predicted by Ehrlichhas failed to come to pass, so we're probably good to go.
Cap and Trade is Dead
13 03 2010 The great newspaperman H.L. Mencken allegedly once said, “Forevery complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple—andwrong.” But in the halls of Congress, complex carbon rationingschemes are multiplying, and they are good counterexamples toMencken’s observation. When it comes to Congress, you can generallybet that its complex solution to a complex problem is worse thanthe simple solution. To date, the leading proposal for reducing carbon emissions inthe United States has been the Waxman-Markey cap and trade scheme,which passed the House of Representatives last June. The heart ofWaxman-Markey is the creation of an economy-wide cap on carbondioxide emissions requiring that emitters must have a permit foreach ton of carbon dioxide they release into the atmosphere. Theartificial scarcity of emissions permits would put a price oncarbon dioxide produced by burning fossil fuels like coal, naturalgas, and oil. This congressionally-mandated carbon market wouldboost energy prices, forcing consumers and businesses to cut backon their energy use and subsidizing innovators to develop low andno-carbon energy sources like solar, wind, and nuclear. But inorder to secure the acquiescence of major industries, the 1,200page Waxman-Markey bill is filled with special interest deals thatdramatically distort the proposed carbon market making energy evenmore expensive than it would be under a simple cap-and-tradearrangement. Last fall, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) introduced a similarlyconvoluted cap and trade bill in the Senate, and after beingreported out of Senate committee the bill has stalled. In fact,The Washington Post last week reported that Sen. LindseyGraham (R-S.C.) has declared, "Cap-and-trade is dead.” So to address senatorialintransigence, Graham has joined with Sen. Kerry and Sen. JoeLieberman (I-Conn.) to devise a new scheme to meet the goal ofcutting U.S. carbon dioxide emissions by 17 percent by 2020.Instead of setting an overall national reduction target, the newscheme would apply different forms of carbon rationing to threemajor industrial sectors: electric utilities, transportation, andmanufacturers. Details of the new scheme are sketchy, but under theKerry-Graham-Lieberman approach cap and trade is only partiallydead. Cap and trade would still apply to electric utilities while acarbon tax would be imposed on gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel. Somesort of carbon rationing would later be phased in formanufacturers. This divide and conquer strategy may be good politics, but it isbad economics. The virtue of creating an artificial market applyingto all greenhouse gas emissions is that market participants canfigure out the most efficient way to cut emissions amongthemselves. Isolating favored segments means that marketparticipants will not be able to find the least expensive ways tocut carbon emissions, raising the overall price of energy more thanit would otherwise be. So the Kerry-Graham-Lieberman bill does notinitially appear to be much of an improvement on the Waxman-Markeyhorror. December's Copenhagen conference collapsedlargely because the U.S. and China could not agree on a global planfor reducing greenhouse gas emissions. At the conference, U.S.special envoy for climate change Todd Stern declared, “From ourpoint of view, you can’t even begin to have an environmentallysound agreement without the adequate, significant participation ofChina.” China refused to offer any binding commitment, even carbonintensity goals, and further refused to allow for independentauditing of its voluntary pledges. Yet less than three months later, in January, the ObamaAdministration sent a letter of intention to the United NationsFramework Agreement on Climate Change pledging to reduce U.S.greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent from their 2005 levels by2020. As Reuters reported, when asked if the U.S. would pull out ofthe Copenhagen Accord if China and India didn’t sign on, Sternresponded, "No...I don't think it's a question of the U.S. saying'never mind.'" If that’s the case, then the drama in Copenhagen wasgratuitous since the U.S. has now given in to China anyway. Assuming that carbon emissions pose a significant danger to theglobal climate, there is a much better proposal (cheaper)circulating on Capitol Hill: the Carbon Limits and Energy for America’s Renewal (CLEAR) Act. TheCLEAR act is a short, sweet bill introduced by Sen. Maria Cantwell(D-Wash.) and Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine). The CLEAR Act sets agradually declining cap on carbon dioxide emissions (20 percentbelow 2005 by 2020). It limits carbon dioxide emissions byrequiring producers and importers of coal, natural gas, and oil tobuy permits at a monthly auction for each ton of carbon in thefuels they sell in the U.S. The requirement would apply to 2,000 to3,000 fossil fuel producers and importers. Unlike Waxman-Markey or the new Kerry-Graham-Lieberman proposal,the CLEAR Act would largely avoid picking winners and losers amongtechnologies, special interest groups, or industries. Seventy-fivepercent of the proceeds from the auction would be rebated on a percapita basis in equal monthly lump sum payments. Cantwell andCollins estimate that 80 percent of consumers would incur no netcosts while the top 20 percent in income would see less than a 0.3percent decrease in their incomes. The remaining 25 percent of theauction revenues would be used to fund energy research anddevelopment, adaptation to climate change, and help workers wholose their jobs because of higher energy prices. Of course, failing to rebate these auction revenues somewhatundercuts the claim by Cantwell and Collins that they are notpicking winners and losers. In addition, it would be moreeconomically efficient (and cheaper) to rebate the entire amountrather than let Congress allocate money to favored projects. Thesemissteps from Cantwell and Collins remind us that Mencken was rightto be cynical about the workings of government. But if we must dosomething—and it seems that Congress and the president believe thatwe must—the CLEAR Act, clocking in at 39 pages, has more appealthan Waxman-Markey's 1,200. Sometimes simpler is better. Ronald Bailey isReason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the BiotechRevolution is available from PrometheusBooks.
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SciDev / Climate change / News
Temperature rise spreads malaria, scientists insist
11 03 2010 The hotly contested idea that climate change is increasing the spread of malaria has been supported by a review of recent studies.
Are new biofuels the ethical answer?
10 03 2010 New biofuels offer a sustainable source of energy but we must consider the ethical and social implications, say Joyce Tait and Banji Oyelaran-Oyeyinka.
The marriage of science and rainmakers
05 03 2010 Kenyan meteorologists are joining forces with traditional rainmakers to deliver communities weather forecasts as climate change takes hold.
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The Independent / Climate change / News
'Green' plastics may be worse for environment
13 03 2010 A type of degradable plastic bag that was supposed to be better for the environment may not be completely biodegradable, a Government-commissioned study has found. The bag is made with metal salts that are supposed to accelerate degradation, but scientists found the material was not fully biodegradable and might contaminate the way plastics are recycled.


Mind the water hazard...floating golf course to be built in Maldives
12 03 2010 The island nation of the Maldives, confronted by rising oceans and a landscape that is just a few feet above sea level, is poised to build a floating golf course and convention centre in what could be the first of a series of futuristic off-shore developments designed to confront the threat of global warming.


Humans must be to blame for climate change, say scientists
05 03 2010 Climate scientists have delivered a powerful riposte to their sceptical critics with a study that strengthens the case for saying global warming is largely the result of man-made emissions of greenhouse gases.


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The Politics of Global Warming / News
Living Stories by The New York Times with Google
C.I.A. Is Sharing Data With Climate Scientists
19 01 2010 A satellite image of the East Siberian Sea from 1999-2008. This image has been degraded to hide the satellite’s true capabilities. USGS The nation’s top scientists and spies are collaborating on an effort to use the federal government’s intelligence assets — including spy satellites and other classified sensors — to assess the hidden complexities of environmental change. They seek insights from natural phenomena like clouds and glaciers, deserts and tropical forests. The collaboration restarts an effort the Bush administration shut down and has the strong backing of the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. In the last year, as part of the effort, the collaborators have scrutinized images of Arctic sea ice from reconnaissance satellites in an effort to distinguish things like summer melts from climate trends, and they have had images of the ice pack declassified to speed the scientific analysis.
Fault Lines Remain After Climate Talks - Column
18 01 2010 The recently concluded climate talks in Copenhagen suggested to many commentators and participants that the global community, as represented by the United Nations, was incapable of broad agreement on just about anything. Others argued that such judgments were too swift and praised the outcome — a five-page document — as an historic first-step toward meaningful global action on the climate. Opinions have been as varied and discordant in the aftermath of the meeting as they were at the sessions in the Bella Center in Copenhagen, where thousands of delegates argued and postured — to uncertain ends — in the twilight of 2009...
The Copenhagen That Matters - Op-Ed
01 01 2010 As I listened to Denmark’s minister of economic and business affairs describe how her country used higher energy taxes to stimulate innovation in green power and then recycled the tax revenues back to Danish industry and consumers to make it easier for them to make and buy the new clean technologies, it all sounded so, well, intelligent. It sounded as if the Danes looked at themselves after the 1973 Arab oil embargo, found that they were totally dependent on Middle East oil and put in place a long-term strategy to make Denmark energy-secure and start a new industry at the same time...
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