„Trash Course - Military bunkers inspire a school architecture founded on waste“
Saurabh Phadke, a young architect started a fascinating project – She built a school in Pune (India) out of trash. Because money was less but waste was available in tons. They found a way of building walls with plastic bottles which were filled with mud and several other organic waste. The walls were plastered with a mixture of paper mache, buttermilk, cottage cheese, human hair and egg white. The cottage cheese and egg, explained Phadke, acted as adhesives. “By creating a school out of waste, we wanted to teach children that nothing is waste,” said the principal. And it works, they are teaching 35 students since May this year.
-----------------------------------------
“Once Saurabh Phadke was ready with the blueprint for Aman Setu school’s building, the next task was to gather loads of Pune’s garbage at the site and place orders with junk dealers.”
“Using waste halved the cost of construction. The school at Wagholi, 13 km from the Pune railway station, was ready in May this year.”
“Just like one places layers of brick-cement-brick-cement, we placed mud bags-barbed wire-mud bags-barbed wire. Like a Velcro fastener, wires hold the bags together. The walls were plastered with a mixture of papier mache, buttermilk, cottage cheese, human hair and egg white. The cottage cheese a nd egg, explained Phadke, acted as adhesives. Advertisement hoardings came handy to waterproof the roof.“ “Aman Setu’s approach of blending the natural with conventional is reflected in its teaching style as well. The school has a farm and each child is allotted a section of it to grow vegetables organically. On Thursdays—called the “busy bawarchi” day in the school calendar—children learn to cook the food they grew.”
“Every three weeks the students, teachers and the principal meet to discuss what was taught and learnt. “Ours is a living curriculum,” explained Kapoor.“
“The school has 35 students in I to IV standards. They are called caterpillars. Another 20 “eggs” study in junior and senior kindergarten.“
“Maths and science are taught through simple games and activities. The idea is, explained Shilpa Desai, head of the primary and pre-primary school at Aman Setu, children experience first and learn from it later.“
"Number of People Overweight or With Obesity Rivals World’s Hungry"
According to the article, 1.1 billion people are underfed. What are the causes of hunger in the face of abundant food production? The population of overweight people has expanded rapidly and has surged to 1.1 billion people. Furthermore, the food wastage in developed countries is enormous. I guess every one of us throws food away every now and then - unfortunately. The article points out the food wastage and obesity affects poor as well as rich.
--------------------------------------
The World Health Organization provides a number of facts on obesity, including that globally in 2005: • Approximately 1.6 billion adults (age 15+) were overweight • At least 400 million adults were obese • At least 20 million children under the age of 5 years are overweight globally in 2005. The WHO also projected that by 2015, approximately 2.3 billion adults will be overweight and more than 700 million will be obese. Recent years have seen a large increase in those overweight or obese. Obesity also affects the poor as well, due to things like marketing of unhealthy foods as the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) highlights. “Restrictions in access to food determine two simultaneous phenomena that are two sides of the same coin: poor people are malnourished because they do not have enough to feed themselves, and they are obese because they eat poorly, with an important energy imbalance… The food they can afford is often cheap, industrialized, mass produced, and inexpensive.” […] In Britain for example, a Centre for Food Policy and Thames Valley University report, titled Why health is the key for the future of farming and food (January 2002) says that far more people are affected by diet-related diseases such as cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes and nutritional deficiencies than diarrhoeal diseases (salmonella, campylobacter, etc) — some 35% compared to 0.2%. As the report says bluntly, “food safety may scandalise the country and attract political attention, but it is the routine premature death by degenerative disease that extracts the greater ill-health toll” (p.15). This phenomena is seen in many rich nations, though Britain comes out worse than most on many such indicators (p.16). The report further highlights that the costs of coronary heart disease alone are around £10 billion a year (approximately 14 billion in U.S. dollars). These costs are made up of • £1.6 billion in direct costs (primarily to the tax payer through the costs of treatment by the British National Health Service) and • £8.4 billion in indirect costs (to industry and to society as a whole, though loss of productivity due to death and disability). (p. 38) In addition, this does not include costs from other diseases, or effects of wider industrial agricultural policies that have given rise to BSE, Foot and Mouth disease, or the cost to the environment, etc. Other issues and problems they point out include: • Encouraging/advertising unhealthy diets and foods (especially to children); • Generally putting low priority on health; • Industry-dominated food policy at the expense of local grocery stores; • Deteriorating health of children in poverty; • and so on. • Experts believe that obesity is responsible for more ill health even than smoking, the BBC has noted, which ties in with the World Watch quotation above about health costs for obesity in the U.S. exceeding those associated with smoking.
"Developing Countries Need Financial Aid To Fight Global Warming"
This article provides some interesting figures about some of the challenges that face developing countries in dealing with global warming. It's true that even though the so-called 'developed' countries have caused more global warming effects so far (because they have become more industrialized, in a lesser amount of time), the effects are more blatant in developing countries, since they don't have the means to deal with climate change and environmental catastrophes. I think it's entirely fair that more wealthy countries give funds to the lesser economically-endowed ones in order to help them deal with the consequences of their actions. ---------------------- "Developing countries need financial help to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and mitigate the effects of climate change. The recently elected Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama offered Indonesia a $400 million loan to mitigate climate change, according to the Japan Times Online. (...)
UK Chancellor Alistair Darling last week asked EU countries to commit to 10 billion euros a year in funding to developing countries as part of a 100 billion euro global package. Darling said the UK will commit to provide one billion, but no agreement was reached. The deal will be finalized next week by EU heads of state.
(...) A 2006 report by Nicholas Stern calculated that a two degree Celsius rise in global temperatures would cost about one percent of world GDP, but the recently released World Bank’s World Development Report said it will cost Africa about four percent of GDP and India five percent.
“Bangladesh, Mexico and Zambia showed the greatest percentage of the population entering poverty in the wake of extreme drought, with an additional 1.4 percent, 1.8 percent and 4.6 percent of their populations being impoverished by future climate extremes, respectively,” Purdue professor and co-head of the study, Thomas Hertel said.
Hertel added, "This translates to an additional 1.8 million people impoverished per country for Bangladesh and Mexico and an additional half million people in Zambia.”
The article talks about "geoengineering" as a plan B, in case that our current methods of controlling CO2 may not work. By the word "Geoenginerring", it meant the artificial way to cool the earth down. It is not solely a matter of technology or price of doing it, but more of social, biological and political matter, because some side effects may occur such as acidity of ocean, expansion of ozone holes, and cloudy skies. However, scientists are not excluding the possibility because when the current means of cooling down Earth don't work, they have to find an alternative way, and geoengineering seems to be the next possible answer for the problem. On the other hand, scientists are also afraid that our society may fall into a moral hazard- just because there is a possible alternative, it does not mean we should stop putting efforts on cooling down the earth. I think if we keep researching on it and develop more "cost-effective" way to cool down the earth, this may become our solution to current global warming.
""Geoengineering will not substitute for either aggressive mitigation or proactive adaptation," it said in a adopting a policy statement this year, "but it could contribute to a comprehensive risk management strategy to slow climate change and alleviate some of its negative impacts."
But the society is also among those emphasizing that geoengineering should not become an excuse for policymakers to back off action that reduces emissions.
"The possibility of quick and seemingly inexpensive geoengineering fixes could distract the public and policymakers from critically needed efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions," it warned."
Scientist found archeological proof of pamtrees on the Northpole. 53 million years ago the average temperature didn’t go below 8°C, according to a study by the University of Utrecht. The Arctic “would have looked very similar to the vegetation we now see in Florida,” Appy Sluijs of Utrecht University in the Netherlands said. Evidence of palms has never been found so far north before. The scientists, sampling sediments on a ridge on the seabed that was about 500km from the North Pole 53.5 million years ago, found pollens of ancient palms as well as of conifers, oaks, pecans and other trees.
Maybe we can book our summervacations (again?) to the North Pole in a few decennia?
----------------------------------------
Vroeger groeiden er palmen opde Noordpool
Het is een poos geleden, maar 53 miljoen jaar geleden verliepen de poolwinters zonder vorst. Oud stuifmeel toont aan dat er toen op de Noordpool zelfs palmbomen groeiden. Dat blijkt uit onderzoek van de Universiteit Utrecht, het Nederlands Instituut voor Zeeonderzoek, TNO en de Universiteit van Bremen.
De gemiddelde wintertemperatuur op de Noordpool zakte in die tijd, toen er net als vandaag een broeikaseffect op aarde heerste, niet onder de acht graden Celsius.
De wetenschappers leiden dat af aan de vondst van stuifmeelkorrels van palmen in boorkernen uit de Noordelijke IJszee. Die palmen groeiden op het land rond de Arctische Oceaan, en hebben een gemiddelde temperatuur van acht graden of meer nodig, schrijven de onderzoekers in het geologische vakblad Nature Geoscience. ---------------------------------------------
The roof of the world, Himalaya is also in danger as well as Arctic and Antarctic oceans. Himalaya is the source of the largest rivers in Asia like Yangtze, Ganges, Indus, Yamuna, and Brahmaputra, on which people depend for agriculture, transportation, fisheries and so on. Countries that are depending on Himalaya for living, including India, Nepal, China, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bhutan, will be in serious trouble if more ice melts. I guess we still have time to protect Himalaya from melting down, but the same thing is happening to South and North poles and we are not so helping. Himalaya is really a “Third Pole” of the world. It’s located in the center of the continent of Asia, and it provides so many resources for the region, and people who actually live near it have so many jobs related to Himalaya. There’re also numerous tribes and peoples living there for thousands of years with their uniqueness and a great number of ecospecies. Right now the rivers will look like they have plenty of water because of this ice-melting but in few decades we will see what’s happening.
=========================================
The roof of the world is springing a dangerous leak. Accelerated melting of glaciers and changes in rainfall patterns in the high Himalayan mountain chain are posing a growing risk to people’s lives and livelihoods in the 10 river basins downstream. When climate-change negotiators meet in Barcelona next week ahead of their gathering in Copenhagen, they should not forget the need for greater attention to the plight of the Himalayas.
Climate Change will devastate Africa, top UK scientists warns
According to the article, top UK scientists object some US scientist' opinion that global warming makes the earth more flourish. And they argues that global warming brings about droughts and devastation of Africa. In connection with this claim, I also think that climate change harm the poor's life more directly. For developed countries, desertification means more dust and irritations only. However, for developing countries which mainly focus on agriculture, desertification means cutting out of the cost of living. Thus sadly climate change will exacerbate unfortunate bottom billion's fate and it is more disastrous for Africa.
---------------------------------------------- One of the world's most influential scientists has warned that climate change could devastate Africa, predicting an increase in catastrophic food shortages.
Conway predicts hunger on the continent could increase dramatically in the short term as droughts and desertification increase, and climate change affects water supplies. "Projected reductions in crop yields could be as much as 50% by 2020 and 90% by 2100," the paper says.
Conway held out some hope that east Africa and the Horn of Africa, presently experiencing its worst drought and food shortages in 20 years, will become wetter. But he said that the widely hoped-for 8-15% increase in African crop yields as a direct result of more CO2 in the atmosphere may fail to materialise.
"The latest analyses of more realistic field trials suggest the benefits of carbon dioxide may be significantly less than initially thought," he said.
Instead, population growth combined with climate change would mean countries face extreme problems growing more food: "We are going to need an awful lot more crop production, 70-100% more food will be needed than we have at present. Part of [what is needed] is getting more organic matter into Africa's soils, which are very depleted, but we also have to improve water availability and produce crops that yield more, and use nitrogen and water more efficiently."
JAHILIYA, Yemen — More than half of this country’s scarce water is used to feed an addiction.
Even as drought kills off Yemen’s crops, farmers in villages like this one are turning increasingly to a thirsty plant called qat, the leaves of which are chewed every day by most Yemeni men (and some women) for their mild narcotic effect. The farmers have little choice: qat is the only way to make a profit.
Meanwhile, the water wells are running dry, and deep, ominous cracks have begun opening in the parched earth, some of them hundreds of yards long.
“They tell us it’s because the water table is sinking so fast,” said Muhammad Hamoud Amer, a worn-looking farmer who has lost two-thirds of his peach trees to drought in the past two years. “Every year we have to drill deeper and deeper to get water.”
Across Yemen, the underground water sources that sustain 24 million people are running out, and some areas could be depleted in just a few years. It is a crisis that threatens the very survival of this arid, overpopulated country, and one that could prove deadlier than the better known resurgence of Al Qaeda here.
Water scarcity afflicts much of the Middle East, but Yemen’s poverty and lawlessness make the problem more serious and harder to address, experts say. The government now supplies water once every 45 days in some urban areas, and in much of the country there is no public water supply at all. Meanwhile, the market price of water has quadrupled in the past four years, pushing more and more people to drill illegally into rapidly receding aquifers.
“It is a collapse with social, economic and environmental aspects,” said Abdul Rahman al-Eryani, Yemen’s minister of water and environment. “We are reaching a point where we don’t even know if the interventions we are proposing will save the situation.”
Making matters far worse is the proliferation of qat trees, which have replaced other crops across much of the country, taking up a vast and growing share of water, according to studies by the World Bank. The government has struggled to limit drilling by qat farmers, but to no effect. The state has little authority outside the capital, Sana.
Already, the lack of water is fueling tribal conflicts and insurgencies, Mr. Eryani said. Those conflicts, including a widening armed rebellion in the north and a violent separatist movement in the south, in turn make it more difficult to address the water crisis in an organized way. Many parts of the country are too dangerous for government engineers or hydrologists to venture into.
Climate change is deepening the problem, making seasonal rains less reliable and driving up average temperatures in some areas, said Jochen Renger, a water resources specialist with the German government’s technical assistance arm, who has been advising the water ministry for five years.
Unlike some other arid countries in the region, like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Yemen lacks the money to invest heavily in desalination plants. Even wastewater treatment has proved difficult in Yemen. The plants have been managed poorly, and some clerics have declared the reuse of wastewater to be a violation of Islamic principles.
At the root of the water crisis — as with so many of the ills affecting the Middle East — is rapid population growth, experts say. The number of Yemenis has quadrupled in the last half century, and is expected to triple again in the next 40 years, to about 60 million.
In rural areas, people can often be seen gathering drinking water from cloudy, stagnant cisterns where animals drink. Even in parts of Sana, the poor cluster to gather runoff from privately owned local wells as their wealthier neighbors pay the equivalent of $10 for a 3,000 liter-truckload of water.
A very down to earth* kind of guy. I'm an environmental sociologist interested in establishing material and organizational sustainability worldwide. I'm always looking for interesting materials/technologies, inspiring ideas, or institutional examples of sustainability to inspire others to recognize their choices now. To be fatalistic about an unsustainable world is a sign of a captive mind, given all our options.
*(If "earth" is defined in a planetary sense, concerning comparative historical knowledge and interest in the past 10,000 years or so anywhere...) See both blogs.
Nicole Niedermeier
ReplyDelete„Trash Course - Military bunkers inspire a school architecture founded on waste“
Saurabh Phadke, a young architect started a fascinating project – She built a school in Pune (India) out of trash. Because money was less but waste was available in tons. They found a way of building walls with plastic bottles which were filled with mud and several other organic waste. The walls were plastered with a mixture of paper mache, buttermilk, cottage cheese, human hair and egg white. The cottage cheese and egg, explained Phadke, acted as adhesives. “By creating a school out of waste, we wanted to teach children that nothing is waste,” said the principal. And it works, they are teaching 35 students since May this year.
-----------------------------------------
“Once Saurabh Phadke was ready with the blueprint for Aman Setu school’s building, the next task was to gather loads of Pune’s garbage at the site and place orders with junk dealers.”
“Using waste halved the cost of construction. The school at Wagholi, 13 km from the Pune railway station, was ready in May this year.”
“Just like one places layers of brick-cement-brick-cement, we placed mud bags-barbed wire-mud bags-barbed wire. Like a Velcro fastener, wires hold the bags together. The walls were plastered with a mixture of papier mache, buttermilk, cottage cheese, human hair and egg white. The cottage cheese a nd egg, explained Phadke, acted as adhesives. Advertisement hoardings came handy to waterproof the roof.“
“Aman Setu’s approach of blending the natural with conventional is reflected in its teaching style as well. The school has a farm and each child is allotted a section of it to grow vegetables organically. On Thursdays—called the “busy bawarchi” day in the school calendar—children learn to cook the food they grew.”
“Every three weeks the students, teachers and the principal meet to discuss what was taught and learnt. “Ours is a living curriculum,” explained Kapoor.“
“The school has 35 students in I to IV standards. They are called caterpillars. Another 20 “eggs” study in junior and senior kindergarten.“
“Maths and science are taught through simple games and activities. The idea is, explained Shilpa Desai, head of the primary and pre-primary school at Aman Setu, children experience first and learn from it later.“
--------------
http://www.downtoearth.org.in/full6.asp?foldername=20091031&filename=news&sec_id=50&sid=26
Anna Maislinger
ReplyDelete"Number of People Overweight or With Obesity Rivals World’s Hungry"
According to the article, 1.1 billion people are underfed. What are the causes of hunger in the face of abundant food production? The population of overweight people has expanded rapidly and has surged to 1.1 billion people. Furthermore, the food wastage in developed countries is enormous. I guess every one of us throws food away every now and then - unfortunately. The article points out the food wastage and obesity affects poor as well as rich.
--------------------------------------
The World Health Organization provides a number of facts on obesity, including that globally in 2005:
• Approximately 1.6 billion adults (age 15+) were overweight
• At least 400 million adults were obese
• At least 20 million children under the age of 5 years are overweight globally in 2005.
The WHO also projected that by 2015, approximately 2.3 billion adults will be overweight and more than 700 million will be obese.
Recent years have seen a large increase in those overweight or obese.
Obesity also affects the poor as well, due to things like marketing of unhealthy foods as the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) highlights. “Restrictions in access to food determine two simultaneous phenomena that are two sides of the same coin: poor people are malnourished because they do not have enough to feed themselves, and they are obese because they eat poorly, with an important energy imbalance… The food they can afford is often cheap, industrialized, mass produced, and inexpensive.”
[…]
In Britain for example, a Centre for Food Policy and Thames Valley University report, titled Why health is the key for the future of farming and food (January 2002) says that far more people are affected by diet-related diseases such as cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes and nutritional deficiencies than diarrhoeal diseases (salmonella, campylobacter, etc) — some 35% compared to 0.2%.
As the report says bluntly, “food safety may scandalise the country and attract political attention, but it is the routine premature death by degenerative disease that extracts the greater ill-health toll” (p.15).
This phenomena is seen in many rich nations, though Britain comes out worse than most on many such indicators (p.16).
The report further highlights that the costs of coronary heart disease alone are around £10 billion a year (approximately 14 billion in U.S. dollars). These costs are made up of
• £1.6 billion in direct costs (primarily to the tax payer through the costs of treatment by the British National Health Service) and
• £8.4 billion in indirect costs (to industry and to society as a whole, though loss of productivity due to death and disability). (p. 38)
In addition, this does not include costs from other diseases, or effects of wider industrial agricultural policies that have given rise to BSE, Foot and Mouth disease, or the cost to the environment, etc.
Other issues and problems they point out include:
• Encouraging/advertising unhealthy diets and foods (especially to children);
• Generally putting low priority on health;
• Industry-dominated food policy at the expense of local grocery stores;
• Deteriorating health of children in poverty;
• and so on.
•
Experts believe that obesity is responsible for more ill health even than smoking, the BBC has noted, which ties in with the World Watch quotation above about health costs for obesity in the U.S. exceeding those associated with smoking.
-------
http://www.globalissues.org/article/558/obesity
Alexandra Vorobyova
ReplyDelete"Developing Countries Need Financial Aid To Fight Global Warming"
This article provides some interesting figures about some of the challenges that face developing countries in dealing with global warming. It's true that even though the so-called 'developed' countries have caused more global warming effects so far (because they have become more industrialized, in a lesser amount of time), the effects are more blatant in developing countries, since they don't have the means to deal with climate change and environmental catastrophes. I think it's entirely fair that more wealthy countries give funds to the lesser economically-endowed ones in order to help them deal with the consequences of their actions.
----------------------
"Developing countries need financial help to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and mitigate the effects of climate change. The recently elected Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama offered Indonesia a $400 million loan to mitigate climate change, according to the Japan Times Online.
(...)
UK Chancellor Alistair Darling last week asked EU countries to commit to 10 billion euros a year in funding to developing countries as part of a 100 billion euro global package. Darling said the UK will commit to provide one billion, but no agreement was reached. The deal will be finalized next week by EU heads of state.
(...)
A 2006 report by Nicholas Stern calculated that a two degree Celsius rise in global temperatures would cost about one percent of world GDP, but the recently released World Bank’s World Development Report said it will cost Africa about four percent of GDP and India five percent.
“Bangladesh, Mexico and Zambia showed the greatest percentage of the population entering poverty in the wake of extreme drought, with an additional 1.4 percent, 1.8 percent and 4.6 percent of their populations being impoverished by future climate extremes, respectively,” Purdue professor and co-head of the study, Thomas Hertel said.
Hertel added, "This translates to an additional 1.8 million people impoverished per country for Bangladesh and Mexico and an additional half million people in Zambia.”
-----------------------------------------
http://www.care2.com/causes/global-warming/blog/developing-countries-need-financial-aid-to-fight-global-warming/
Young Han
ReplyDelete"Geoengineering, can it be our "Plan B"?"
The article talks about "geoengineering" as a plan B, in case that our current methods of controlling CO2 may not work. By the word "Geoenginerring", it meant the artificial way to cool the earth down. It is not solely a matter of technology or price of doing it, but more of social, biological and political matter, because some side effects may occur such as acidity of ocean, expansion of ozone holes, and cloudy skies. However, scientists are not excluding the possibility because when the current means of cooling down Earth don't work, they have to find an alternative way, and geoengineering seems to be the next possible answer for the problem. On the other hand, scientists are also afraid that our society may fall into a moral hazard- just because there is a possible alternative, it does not mean we should stop putting efforts on cooling down the earth. I think if we keep researching on it and develop more "cost-effective" way to cool down the earth, this may become our solution to current global warming.
---------------------------------------------------
""Geoengineering will not substitute for either aggressive mitigation or proactive adaptation," it said in a adopting a policy statement this year, "but it could contribute to a comprehensive risk management strategy to slow climate change and alleviate some of its negative impacts."
But the society is also among those emphasizing that geoengineering should not become an excuse for policymakers to back off action that reduces emissions.
"The possibility of quick and seemingly inexpensive geoengineering fixes could distract the public and policymakers from critically needed efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions," it warned."
---------------------------------------------------
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33495560/ns/us_news-environment/
Sam Wijnants
ReplyDeletePalmtrees on the North Pole!
Scientist found archeological proof of pamtrees on the Northpole. 53 million years ago the average temperature didn’t go below 8°C, according to a study by the University of Utrecht. The Arctic “would have looked very similar to the vegetation we now see in Florida,” Appy Sluijs of Utrecht University in the Netherlands said. Evidence of palms has never been found so far north before. The scientists, sampling sediments on a ridge on the seabed that was about 500km from the North Pole 53.5 million years ago, found pollens of ancient palms as well as of conifers, oaks, pecans and other trees.
Maybe we can book our summervacations (again?) to the North Pole in a few decennia?
----------------------------------------
Vroeger groeiden er palmen opde Noordpool
Het is een poos geleden, maar 53 miljoen jaar geleden verliepen de poolwinters zonder vorst. Oud stuifmeel toont aan dat er toen op de Noordpool zelfs palmbomen groeiden. Dat blijkt uit onderzoek van de Universiteit Utrecht, het Nederlands Instituut voor Zeeonderzoek, TNO en de Universiteit van Bremen.
De gemiddelde wintertemperatuur op de Noordpool zakte in die tijd, toen er net als vandaag een broeikaseffect op aarde heerste, niet onder de acht graden Celsius.
De wetenschappers leiden dat af aan de vondst van stuifmeelkorrels van palmen in boorkernen uit de Noordelijke IJszee. Die palmen groeiden op het land rond de Arctische Oceaan, en hebben een gemiddelde temperatuur van acht graden of meer nodig, schrijven de onderzoekers in het geologische vakblad Nature Geoscience.
---------------------------------------------
http://www.standaard.be/artikel/detail.aspx?artikelid=UI2H5HN0&subsection=173
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteSujin Kwon
ReplyDeleteMelting Mountains
The roof of the world, Himalaya is also in danger as well as Arctic and Antarctic oceans. Himalaya is the source of the largest rivers in Asia like Yangtze, Ganges, Indus, Yamuna, and Brahmaputra, on which people depend for agriculture, transportation, fisheries and so on. Countries that are depending on Himalaya for living, including India, Nepal, China, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bhutan, will be in serious trouble if more ice melts. I guess we still have time to protect Himalaya from melting down, but the same thing is happening to South and North poles and we are not so helping. Himalaya is really a “Third Pole” of the world. It’s located in the center of the continent of Asia, and it provides so many resources for the region, and people who actually live near it have so many jobs related to Himalaya. There’re also numerous tribes and peoples living there for thousands of years with their uniqueness and a great number of ecospecies. Right now the rivers will look like they have plenty of water because of this ice-melting but in few decades we will see what’s happening.
=========================================
The roof of the world is springing a dangerous leak. Accelerated melting of glaciers and changes in rainfall patterns in the high Himalayan mountain chain are posing a growing risk to people’s lives and livelihoods in the 10 river basins downstream.
When climate-change negotiators meet in Barcelona next week ahead of their gathering in Copenhagen, they should not forget the need for greater attention to the plight of the Himalayas.
===
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/31/opinion/31iht-edchhibber.html?_r=1
Hyun-deok,Park
ReplyDeleteClimate Change will devastate Africa, top UK scientists warns
According to the article, top UK scientists object some US scientist' opinion that global warming makes the earth more flourish. And they argues that global warming brings about droughts and devastation of Africa.
In connection with this claim, I also think that climate change harm the poor's life more directly. For developed countries, desertification means more dust and irritations only. However, for developing countries which mainly focus on agriculture, desertification means cutting out of the cost of living. Thus sadly climate change will exacerbate unfortunate bottom billion's fate and it is more disastrous for Africa.
----------------------------------------------
One of the world's most influential scientists has warned that climate change could devastate Africa, predicting an increase in catastrophic food shortages.
Conway predicts hunger on the continent could increase dramatically in the short term as droughts and desertification increase, and climate change affects water supplies. "Projected reductions in crop yields could be as much as 50% by 2020 and 90% by 2100," the paper says.
Conway held out some hope that east Africa and the Horn of Africa, presently experiencing its worst drought and food shortages in 20 years, will become wetter. But he said that the widely hoped-for 8-15% increase in African crop yields as a direct result of more CO2 in the atmosphere may fail to materialise.
"The latest analyses of more realistic field trials suggest the benefits of carbon dioxide may be significantly less than initially thought," he said.
Instead, population growth combined with climate change would mean countries face extreme problems growing more food: "We are going to need an awful lot more crop production, 70-100% more food will be needed than we have at present. Part of [what is needed] is getting more organic matter into Africa's soils, which are very depleted, but we also have to improve water availability and produce crops that yield more, and use nitrogen and water more efficiently."
------
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/oct/28/africa-climate-change-sir-gordon-conway
JAHILIYA, Yemen — More than half of this country’s scarce water is used to feed an addiction.
ReplyDeleteEven as drought kills off Yemen’s crops, farmers in villages like this one are turning increasingly to a thirsty plant called qat, the leaves of which are chewed every day by most Yemeni men (and some women) for their mild narcotic effect. The farmers have little choice: qat is the only way to make a profit.
Meanwhile, the water wells are running dry, and deep, ominous cracks have begun opening in the parched earth, some of them hundreds of yards long.
“They tell us it’s because the water table is sinking so fast,” said Muhammad Hamoud Amer, a worn-looking farmer who has lost two-thirds of his peach trees to drought in the past two years. “Every year we have to drill deeper and deeper to get water.”
Across Yemen, the underground water sources that sustain 24 million people are running out, and some areas could be depleted in just a few years. It is a crisis that threatens the very survival of this arid, overpopulated country, and one that could prove deadlier than the better known resurgence of Al Qaeda here.
Water scarcity afflicts much of the Middle East, but Yemen’s poverty and lawlessness make the problem more serious and harder to address, experts say. The government now supplies water once every 45 days in some urban areas, and in much of the country there is no public water supply at all. Meanwhile, the market price of water has quadrupled in the past four years, pushing more and more people to drill illegally into rapidly receding aquifers.
“It is a collapse with social, economic and environmental aspects,” said Abdul Rahman al-Eryani, Yemen’s minister of water and environment. “We are reaching a point where we don’t even know if the interventions we are proposing will save the situation.”
Making matters far worse is the proliferation of qat trees, which have replaced other crops across much of the country, taking up a vast and growing share of water, according to studies by the World Bank. The government has struggled to limit drilling by qat farmers, but to no effect. The state has little authority outside the capital, Sana.
Already, the lack of water is fueling tribal conflicts and insurgencies, Mr. Eryani said. Those conflicts, including a widening armed rebellion in the north and a violent separatist movement in the south, in turn make it more difficult to address the water crisis in an organized way. Many parts of the country are too dangerous for government engineers or hydrologists to venture into.
Climate change is deepening the problem, making seasonal rains less reliable and driving up average temperatures in some areas, said Jochen Renger, a water resources specialist with the German government’s technical assistance arm, who has been advising the water ministry for five years.
Unlike some other arid countries in the region, like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Yemen lacks the money to invest heavily in desalination plants. Even wastewater treatment has proved difficult in Yemen. The plants have been managed poorly, and some clerics have declared the reuse of wastewater to be a violation of Islamic principles.
At the root of the water crisis — as with so many of the ills affecting the Middle East — is rapid population growth, experts say. The number of Yemenis has quadrupled in the last half century, and is expected to triple again in the next 40 years, to about 60 million.
In rural areas, people can often be seen gathering drinking water from cloudy, stagnant cisterns where animals drink. Even in parts of Sana, the poor cluster to gather runoff from privately owned local wells as their wealthier neighbors pay the equivalent of $10 for a 3,000 liter-truckload of water.
----
Whole article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/world/middleeast/01yemen.html?_r=1&hpw