Save Wood and Paper
* Return unwanted mail and ask for your name to be removed from the mailing list.
* Always use both sides of a sheet of paper.
* Use e-mail to stay in touch, including cards, rather than faxing or writing.
* Re-use envelopes.
* Always recycle paper after use.
* Share magazines with friends and pass them on to the doctor, dentist or local hospital for their waiting rooms.
* Use recyclable paper to make invitation cards, envelops, letter pads etc.
In your Home
* Turn off equipment like televisions and stereos when you're not using them.
Choose energy-efficient appliances and light bulbs.
* Save water: some simple steps can go a long way in saving water like for e.g: you should always turn off the tap when you are brushing your teeth. And try to collect the water used to wash vegetables and salad to water your houseplants.
* Let clothes dry naturally.
* Keep lids on pans when cooking to prevent your cooker having to work extra hard. Prefer to use gas ovens, Geysers etc in place of the electric ones.
* Recycle your paper, glass, plastics and other waste.
* Use rechargeable batteries.
* Send e-greetings instead of paper cards.
In your Garden
* Water the garden early in the morning or late in the evening. This reduces water loss due to evaporation. Don’t overwater the garden. Water only till the soil becomes moist, not soggy.
* Explore water efficient irrigation systems. Sprinkler irrigation and drip irrigation can be adapted to garden situations .
* Make your garden lively - plant trees and shrubs which will attract birds. You can also put p nest boxes and put food.
* Try growing sturdy grass in bare patches of land , and convince people in your neighbourhood to do so too.
* Put waste to work in your garden- sweep the fallen leaves and flowers into flower beds or under shrubs . This will increase soil fertility and also reduce the need for frequent watering.
* If you have little space in your garden , you could make a compost pit to turn organic waste from the kitchen and garden to soil enriching manure .
* Don't use chemicals in the garden - as they will eventually end up in the sea and can upset the delicate balance of lifecycles.
* Organic and environmentally friendly fertilisers and pesticides are available - organic gardening reduces pollution and is better for wildlife.
Reuse and Recycle
* Use washable nappies instead of disposables if you can.
* Recycle as much as you can.
* Give unwanted clothes, toys and books to charity shops or jumble sales.
* Use mains electricity rather than batteries if possible. If not, use rechargeable batteries.
* Use a solar-powered calculator instead of one with a battery.
* Instead of a plastic ballpoint, use a fountain pen with bottled ink, not plastic cartridges.
* Store food and other products in ceramic containers rather than foil and plastic wrap
While Shopping
* Buy fruit and vegetables that are in season to help reduce enormous transport costs resulting from importing produce and, where possible, choose locally produced food.
* When buying fish look out for a variety of non-endangered species and buy local fish if possible.
* Prefer vegetarian options for your meals.
On-line Shopping
* Purchase solar powered products.
* Send e-cards, if you can, rather than buy paper cards.
* Shop online, not only will this reduce fuel consumption and emissions by not driving to the shops, but each time you buy something on-line WWF receive a donation. You may even buy products from the nature shop.
At your workplace
* Use printers that can print on both sides of the paper ; try to look into this option when replacing old printers.
* Use the back of a draft or unwanted printout instead of notebooks. Even with a double-sided printer there is likely to be plenty of spare paper to use!
* Always buy recycled paper - for your business stationery and to use in your printers.
* Switch off computer monitors, printers and other equipment at the end of each day. Though in standby mode they're still using power - and that adds to global warming.
* Always turn off your office light and computer monitor when you go out for lunch or to a meeting.
During Holidays
* Go on holiday during the off-peak period to prevent over straining resources - you'll also avoid the crowds.
* Find out about your destination before you go on holiday - it may be an environmentally sensitive area. Doing this will also ensure you are informed of what to see and any local customs.
* Find out about places before you visit. You may be visiting a environmentally sensitive area, in which case you must take extra care to stay on footpaths and follow signs.
* Don't travel by air if you can avoid it because air travel uses up large amounts of fossil fuels and creates greenhouse gases.
* Avoid taking things on holiday that you will throw away.
* Dispose of any rubbish responsibly - it can be hazardous to wildlife.
* Ask your travel agent or tour operator what they are doing to be environmentally responsible.
* Use public transport, cycle or walk instead of using a car.
* Use facilities and trips run by local people whenever possible.
* Don't be tempted to touch wildlife and disturb habitats whether on land, at the coast or under water.
* Be careful what you choose to bring home as a holiday souvenir. Many species from coral and conch shells to elephants and alligators are endangered because they are killed for curios or souvenirs.
* Don’t leave any rubbish at the beach - turtles are often killed by plastic bags they've mistaken for jellyfish and many items take years to degrade as well as being dangerous.
* Boats and jet-skis create noise and chemical pollution which is disturbing to wildlife - don't keep the engine running unnecessarily.
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Will carbon trading work?
Carbon trading -- with its mix of free-market principles and government regulation -- holds global appeal as a way for businesses to reduce emissions. But lack of a global market for carbon trade and questions over surveillance and accounting for pollution offsets raises questions about its viability.
The factors complicating accurate carbon-trading reportage begins with the "product" -- in this case the absence of an invisible gas. Adding to the intangibility is the crediting of businesses for projected reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.
"They are a tricky beast -- an environmental commodity is not a natural private good, like a tube of toothpaste or a haircut," said Michael Gillenwater, dean of the Greenhouse Gas Management Institute, in an interview earlier this year.
"You can just look in the mirror to tell if a haircut is a good product... in carbon trading, it's just a piece of paper, a record in a database and the trust that it really does represent a truthful accounting of emissions," he said.
Carbon trading uses a stick-and-carrot approach to reduce the gases that cause global warming. The stick: Governments cap total emissions and require pricey permits and hefty fines for emissions. The carrot: Industry finds ways to reduce emissions to decrease costs and with leftover polluting allocations sell to the highest bidder on the open market.
Video: What is carbon trading?
Carbon trading allows companies to pollute up to a point -- but, in theory, the total amount of pollution should be less than current levels. More than 30 countries worldwide have or are planning a carbon trading market.
For carbon trading to really work, however, the market needs to be worldwide, said Louis Redshaw of Barclays Capital.
"The U.S. is close, not close enough, but getting closer to implementing cap and trades. Japan is doing the same thing.," Redshaw said. "South Korea, even, are going to follow what Japan does."
Carbon trading legislation -- facing party opposition and energy industry pressure --recently failed to pass the Australian Senate earlier this month, causing a political fracas for Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and the ruling Labor government. The government plans to reintroduce the legislation in February.
The European Union is home to the biggest emissions trading system, but that has been subject to complaints that too many pollution permits have been issued.
"Carbon trading on its own can't save the planet," said Robert Rabinowitz of the European Climate Exchange. "Carbon trading can help make the process cheaper, but only if the politicians set sufficiently ambitious targets."
This is a worry since the carbon trading market as pollution joins the ranks of other tradable commodities such as coal and natural gas.
The global market for carbon trading was "vulnerable to Enron type accounting scandals" because of the lack of global standards on emissions accounting and qualified professionals to account for those changes, according to the "2009 Greenhouse Gas/Climate Change Workforce Needs Assessment Survey" released earlier this year.
"Any crediting involving projections are inherently uncertain and vulnerable to manipulation by the unscrupulous," said the report, a global survey of industry professionals and policy makers by Greenhouse Gas Management Institute and Sequence Staffing.
The factors complicating accurate carbon-trading reportage begins with the "product" -- in this case the absence of an invisible gas. Adding to the intangibility is the crediting of businesses for projected reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.
"They are a tricky beast -- an environmental commodity is not a natural private good, like a tube of toothpaste or a haircut," said Michael Gillenwater, dean of the Greenhouse Gas Management Institute, in an interview earlier this year.
"You can just look in the mirror to tell if a haircut is a good product... in carbon trading, it's just a piece of paper, a record in a database and the trust that it really does represent a truthful accounting of emissions," he said.
Carbon trading uses a stick-and-carrot approach to reduce the gases that cause global warming. The stick: Governments cap total emissions and require pricey permits and hefty fines for emissions. The carrot: Industry finds ways to reduce emissions to decrease costs and with leftover polluting allocations sell to the highest bidder on the open market.
Video: What is carbon trading?
Carbon trading allows companies to pollute up to a point -- but, in theory, the total amount of pollution should be less than current levels. More than 30 countries worldwide have or are planning a carbon trading market.
For carbon trading to really work, however, the market needs to be worldwide, said Louis Redshaw of Barclays Capital.
"The U.S. is close, not close enough, but getting closer to implementing cap and trades. Japan is doing the same thing.," Redshaw said. "South Korea, even, are going to follow what Japan does."
Carbon trading legislation -- facing party opposition and energy industry pressure --recently failed to pass the Australian Senate earlier this month, causing a political fracas for Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and the ruling Labor government. The government plans to reintroduce the legislation in February.
The European Union is home to the biggest emissions trading system, but that has been subject to complaints that too many pollution permits have been issued.
"Carbon trading on its own can't save the planet," said Robert Rabinowitz of the European Climate Exchange. "Carbon trading can help make the process cheaper, but only if the politicians set sufficiently ambitious targets."
This is a worry since the carbon trading market as pollution joins the ranks of other tradable commodities such as coal and natural gas.
The global market for carbon trading was "vulnerable to Enron type accounting scandals" because of the lack of global standards on emissions accounting and qualified professionals to account for those changes, according to the "2009 Greenhouse Gas/Climate Change Workforce Needs Assessment Survey" released earlier this year.
"Any crediting involving projections are inherently uncertain and vulnerable to manipulation by the unscrupulous," said the report, a global survey of industry professionals and policy makers by Greenhouse Gas Management Institute and Sequence Staffing.
Friday, December 11, 2009
From red to green: China's drive to be a low carbon leader
Could China be the world's green champion? It seems unlikely. The vast nation is typically portrayed as a dire threat to the planet, with a booming population and a commitment to that dirtiest of fuels -- coal.
But all that might be about to change.
In a column in the New York Times in September headlined "The New Sputnik" Marshall Scholar and multi-Pulitzer Prize winning author Thomas Friedman argued that not only was China going green, but that the decision would spark change around the world -- particularly in the U.S. - much as the USSR's decision to launch Sputnik turbo-charged the space race in 1957.
"China's leaders have decided to go green," he wrote. "...too many of their people can't breathe, can't swim, can't fish, can't farm and can't drink thanks to pollution from its coal- and oil-based manufacturing growth engine. And, therefore, unless China powers its development with cleaner energy systems, and more knowledge-intensive businesses without smokestacks, China will die of its own development."
Video: China's green plans
Video: China's green tower
Video: Taxing the way to green
RELATED TOPICS
* Global Climate Change
* Science and Technology
* Nature and the Environment
The column sparked a fury of debate. In the UK, the Guardian's Jonathan Watts accused him of spending "too long sipping tea with Dalian's technocrats and not enough time breathing the air in Shanxi, Henan and Beijing."
After all, despite impressive investments in green energy, China still depends on coal for 70 percent of its power, rapid industrialization and booming car ownership has cast a pall of smog over many cities and according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the country's carbon emissions are now greater than the United States, and are set to keep rising.
But now a major new report has stirred the mix further.
Produced by an international task force and presented to the Chinese government last month, "China's Pathway Towards a Low Carbon Economy" (CPTLCE) presents a clear plan showing how the country can make the switch from red to green.
It can do this, the report suggests, by evolving its economic development model, adjusting its economic structure, enhancing its technological innovation capacity and strengthening the sustainability of its economy.
The problems may be substantial but, CPTLCE argues, the way ahead is clear.
But can China be the leader the world needs?
"If we are talking about green technologies, then I think the answer is definitely 'yes'," the report's co-chair Bjorn Stigson, President of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, told CNN.
Like Friedman, he believes a green transformation in the country is inevitable.
"In my meetings with Chinese political leaders, including PM Wen Jiabao, I heard very clear signals that this is a priority issue. The Chinese leadership is committed to refocusing attention on environmental protection, water preservation and developing world-leading technologies," he says.
"Given population growth, urbanization and a focus on poverty alleviation among emerging economies, we can foresee that the future world will be resource- and carbon-constrained. China will suffer negative impacts from climate change as well as from resource constraints, unless the world -- and that includes China -- gets onto a low carbon development path.
"In the past China has given priority to economic growth over environmental protection. This has led to air, water and soil pollution. However, recently the leadership has realized this and is taking serious action to address this imbalance."
From factory of the world to innovator
In particular, Stigson believes that China's position as the world's factory puts it in a strong position as a technological innovator.
"[China] can be a leader on the technologies that will be required to deliver green energy: solar, wind, bio-fuels and clean coal," he says.
"Furthermore, as China is going through rapid industrialization, they have a chance to install some of the best available technologies in their industries."
It seems those in the West keen to cast China as an environmental villain could be guilty of a fair degree of hypocrisy -- and may need to look a little closer to home.
"Currently American emissions of greenhouse gas are over 20 tonnes per person, while in China personal carbon footprints are one fifth of that, and 238 million people live below the poverty line," Friends of the Earth's international climate coordinator, Joe Zacune, told CNN.
"Meanwhile, personal carbon footprints in the UK are twice that of China, yet China has a higher proportion of renewable energy for electricity than the UK.
"China does have the potential to be a world leader on environmental issues. Domestically, China has been investing in renewable energy and should continue such steps by expanding investment in appropriate, community-led renewable energy rather than coal and other dirty fossil fuels.
"China seems to be showing much more political will than the U.S. as well as other Annex-1 [rich, industrialized] countries, both domestically and internationally... The primary obstacle for China being a green leader is the lack of a strong example by those countries which are historically responsible causing climate change.
"China's moves to promote clean energy could indeed highlight the lack of action by the U.S. China should most certainly not attempt to follow the U.S.' disastrous 'cap and trade'."
Zacune also believes that China's position outside the Annex 1 group of rich countries identified by the Kyoto Treaty is politically interesting -- giving it a chance to act as a champion for other developing nations at the climate talks currently on in Copenhagen and hold the U.S. and Europe to account.
But, in the end, it may be the fear of being left behind that drives change in the West -- and East.
"The move towards a low carbon economy, not least in China, is triggering a positive race between countries," says Stigson. "The USA has realized that both China and the EU are putting in place serious policies to take the lead on this issue.
"The 'green race' is on, and may the best man win."
But all that might be about to change.
In a column in the New York Times in September headlined "The New Sputnik" Marshall Scholar and multi-Pulitzer Prize winning author Thomas Friedman argued that not only was China going green, but that the decision would spark change around the world -- particularly in the U.S. - much as the USSR's decision to launch Sputnik turbo-charged the space race in 1957.
"China's leaders have decided to go green," he wrote. "...too many of their people can't breathe, can't swim, can't fish, can't farm and can't drink thanks to pollution from its coal- and oil-based manufacturing growth engine. And, therefore, unless China powers its development with cleaner energy systems, and more knowledge-intensive businesses without smokestacks, China will die of its own development."
Video: China's green plans
Video: China's green tower
Video: Taxing the way to green
RELATED TOPICS
* Global Climate Change
* Science and Technology
* Nature and the Environment
The column sparked a fury of debate. In the UK, the Guardian's Jonathan Watts accused him of spending "too long sipping tea with Dalian's technocrats and not enough time breathing the air in Shanxi, Henan and Beijing."
After all, despite impressive investments in green energy, China still depends on coal for 70 percent of its power, rapid industrialization and booming car ownership has cast a pall of smog over many cities and according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the country's carbon emissions are now greater than the United States, and are set to keep rising.
But now a major new report has stirred the mix further.
Produced by an international task force and presented to the Chinese government last month, "China's Pathway Towards a Low Carbon Economy" (CPTLCE) presents a clear plan showing how the country can make the switch from red to green.
It can do this, the report suggests, by evolving its economic development model, adjusting its economic structure, enhancing its technological innovation capacity and strengthening the sustainability of its economy.
The problems may be substantial but, CPTLCE argues, the way ahead is clear.
But can China be the leader the world needs?
"If we are talking about green technologies, then I think the answer is definitely 'yes'," the report's co-chair Bjorn Stigson, President of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, told CNN.
Like Friedman, he believes a green transformation in the country is inevitable.
"In my meetings with Chinese political leaders, including PM Wen Jiabao, I heard very clear signals that this is a priority issue. The Chinese leadership is committed to refocusing attention on environmental protection, water preservation and developing world-leading technologies," he says.
"Given population growth, urbanization and a focus on poverty alleviation among emerging economies, we can foresee that the future world will be resource- and carbon-constrained. China will suffer negative impacts from climate change as well as from resource constraints, unless the world -- and that includes China -- gets onto a low carbon development path.
"In the past China has given priority to economic growth over environmental protection. This has led to air, water and soil pollution. However, recently the leadership has realized this and is taking serious action to address this imbalance."
From factory of the world to innovator
In particular, Stigson believes that China's position as the world's factory puts it in a strong position as a technological innovator.
"[China] can be a leader on the technologies that will be required to deliver green energy: solar, wind, bio-fuels and clean coal," he says.
"Furthermore, as China is going through rapid industrialization, they have a chance to install some of the best available technologies in their industries."
It seems those in the West keen to cast China as an environmental villain could be guilty of a fair degree of hypocrisy -- and may need to look a little closer to home.
"Currently American emissions of greenhouse gas are over 20 tonnes per person, while in China personal carbon footprints are one fifth of that, and 238 million people live below the poverty line," Friends of the Earth's international climate coordinator, Joe Zacune, told CNN.
"Meanwhile, personal carbon footprints in the UK are twice that of China, yet China has a higher proportion of renewable energy for electricity than the UK.
"China does have the potential to be a world leader on environmental issues. Domestically, China has been investing in renewable energy and should continue such steps by expanding investment in appropriate, community-led renewable energy rather than coal and other dirty fossil fuels.
"China seems to be showing much more political will than the U.S. as well as other Annex-1 [rich, industrialized] countries, both domestically and internationally... The primary obstacle for China being a green leader is the lack of a strong example by those countries which are historically responsible causing climate change.
"China's moves to promote clean energy could indeed highlight the lack of action by the U.S. China should most certainly not attempt to follow the U.S.' disastrous 'cap and trade'."
Zacune also believes that China's position outside the Annex 1 group of rich countries identified by the Kyoto Treaty is politically interesting -- giving it a chance to act as a champion for other developing nations at the climate talks currently on in Copenhagen and hold the U.S. and Europe to account.
But, in the end, it may be the fear of being left behind that drives change in the West -- and East.
"The move towards a low carbon economy, not least in China, is triggering a positive race between countries," says Stigson. "The USA has realized that both China and the EU are putting in place serious policies to take the lead on this issue.
"The 'green race' is on, and may the best man win."
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Leave No Child Inside
“I like to play indoors better ’cause that’s where all the electrical outlets are.”
As a boy, I pulled out dozens — perhaps hundreds — of survey stakes in a vain effort to slow the bulldozers that were taking out my woods to make way for a new subdivision. Had I known then what I’ve since learned from a developer, that I should have simply moved the stakes around to be more effective, I would surely have done that too. So you might imagine my dubiousness when, a few weeks after the publication of my 2005 book, Last Child in the Woods, I received an e-mail from Derek Thomas, who introduced himself as vice chairman and chief investment officer of Newland Communities, one of the nation’s largest privately owned residential development companies. “I have been reading your new book,” he wrote, “and am profoundly disturbed by some of the information you present.”
Thomas said he wanted to do something positive. He invited me to an envisioning session in Phoenix to “explore how Newland can improve or redefine our approach to open space preservation and the interaction between our homebuyers and nature.” A few weeks later, in a conference room filled with about eighty developers, builders, and real estate marketers, I offered my sermonette. The folks in the crowd were partially responsible for the problem, I suggested, because they destroy natural habitat, design communities in ways that discourage any real contact with nature, and include covenants that virtually criminalize outdoor play — outlawing tree-climbing, fort-building, even chalk-drawing on sidewalks.
I was ready to make a fast exit when Thomas, a bearded man with an avuncular demeanor, stood up and said, “I want you all to go into small groups and solve the problem: how are we going to build communities in the future that actually connect kids with nature?” The room filled with noise and excitement. By the time the groups reassembled to report the ideas they had generated, I had glimpsed the primal power of connecting children and nature: it can inspire unexpected advocates and lure unlikely allies to enter an entirely new place. Call it the doorway effect. Once through the door, they can revisualize seemingly intractable problems and produce solutions they might otherwise never have imagined.
A half hour after Thomas’s challenge, the groups reported their ideas. Among them: leave some land and native habitat in place (that’s a good start); employ green design principles; incorporate nature trails and natural waterways; throw out the conventional covenants and restrictions that discourage or prohibit natural play and rewrite the rules to encourage it; allow kids to build forts and tree houses or plant gardens; and create small, on-site nature centers.
“Kids could become guides, using cell phones, along nature trails that lead to schools at the edge of the development,” someone suggested. Were the men and women in this room just blowing smoke? Maybe. Developers exploiting our hunger for nature, I thought, just as they market their subdivisions by naming their streets after the trees and streams that they destroy. But the fact that developers, builders, and real estate marketers would approach Derek Thomas’s question with such apparently heartfelt enthusiasm was revealing. The quality of their ideas mattered less than the fact that they had them. While they may not get there themselves, the people in this room were visualizing a very different future. They were undergoing a process of discovery that has proliferated around the country in the past two years, and not only among developers.
For decades, environmental educators, conservationists, and others have worked, often heroically, to bring more children to nature — usually with inadequate support from policymakers. A number of trends, including the recent unexpected national media attention to Last Child and “nature-deficit disorder,” have now brought the concerns of these veteran advocates before a broader audience. While some may argue that the word “movement” is hyperbole, we do seem to have reached a tipping point. State and regional campaigns, sometimes called Leave No Child Inside, have begun to form in Cincinnati, Cleveland, Chicago, the San Francisco Bay Area, St. Louis, Connecticut, Florida, Colorado, Texas, and elsewhere. A host of related initiatives — among them the simple-living, walkable-cities, nature-education, and land-trust movements — have begun to find common cause, and collective strength, through this issue. The activity has attracted a diverse assortment of people who might otherwise never work together.
In September 2006, the National Conservation Training Center and the Conservation Fund hosted the National Dialogue on Children and Nature in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. The conference drew some 350 people from around the country, representing educators, health-care experts, recreation companies, residential developers, urban planners, conservation agencies, academics, and other groups. Even the Walt Disney Company was represented. Support has also come from religious leaders, liberal and conservative, who understand that all spiritual life begins with a sense of wonder, and that one of the first windows to wonder is the natural world. “Christians should take the lead in reconnecting with nature and disconnecting from machines,” writes R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, the flagship school of the Southern Baptist Convention.
It may have something to do with what Harvard professor E. O. Wilson calls the biophilia hypothesis, which is that human beings are innately attracted to nature.
To some extent, the movement is fueled by organizational or economic self-interest. But something deeper is going on here. With its nearly universal appeal, this issue seems to hint at a more atavistic motivation. It may have something to do with what Harvard professor E. O. Wilson calls the biophilia hypothesis, which is that human beings are innately attracted to nature: biologically, we are all still hunters and gatherers, and there is something in us, which we do not fully understand, that needs an occasional immersion in nature. We do know that when people talk about the disconnect between children and nature — if they are old enough to remember a time when outdoor play was the norm — they almost always tell stories about their own childhoods: this tree house or fort, that special woods or ditch or creek or meadow. They recall those “places of initiation,” in the words of naturalist Bob Pyle, where they may have first sensed with awe and wonder the largeness of the world seen and unseen. When people share these stories, their cultural, political, and religious walls come tumbling down.
And when that happens, ideas can pour forth — and lead to ever more insightful approaches. It’s a short conceptual leap, for example, from the notions generated by Derek Thomas’s working group to the creation of a truly sustainable development like the pioneering Village Homes, in Davis, California, where suburban homes are pointed inward toward open green space, vegetable gardens are encouraged, and orchards, not gates or walls, surround the community. And from there, rather than excusing more sprawl with a green patina, developers might even encourage the green redevelopment of portions of strip-mall America into Dutch-style eco-communities, where nature would be an essential strand in the fabric of the urban neighborhood.
In similar ways, the leave-no-child-inside movement could become one of the best ways to challenge other entrenched conceptions — for example, the current, test-centric definition of education reform. Bring unlike-minded people through the doorway to talk about the effect of society’s nature-deficit on child development, and pretty soon they’ll be asking hard questions: Just why have school districts canceled field trips and recess and environmental education? And why doesn’t our school have windows that open and natural light? At a deeper level, when we challenge schools to incorporate place-based learning in the natural world, we will help students realize that school isn’t supposed to be a polite form of incarceration, but a portal to the wider world.
All this may be wishful thinking, of course, at least in the short run. But as Martin Luther King Jr. often said, the success of any social movement depends on its ability to show a world where people will want to go. The point is that thinking about children’s need for nature helps us begin to paint a picture of that world — which is something that has to be done, because the price of not painting that picture is too high.
Within the space of a few decades, the way children understand and experience their neighborhoods and the natural world has changed radically. Even as children and teenagers become more aware of global threats to the environment, their physical contact, their intimacy with nature, is fading. As one suburban fifth grader put it to me, in what has become the signature epigram of the children-and-nature movement: “I like to play indoors better ’cause that’s where all the electrical outlets are.”
In San Diego, according to a survey by the nonprofit Aquatic Adventures, 90 percent of inner-city kids do not know how to swim; 34 percent have never been to the beach.
His desire is not at all uncommon. In a typical week, only 6 percent of children ages nine to thirteen play outside on their own. Studies by the National Sporting Goods Association and by American Sports Data, a research firm, show a dramatic decline in the past decade in such outdoor activities as swimming and fishing. Even bike riding is down 31 percent since 1995. In San Diego, according to a survey by the nonprofit Aquatic Adventures, 90 percent of inner-city kids do not know how to swim; 34 percent have never been to the beach. In suburban Fort Collins, Colorado, teachers shake their heads in dismay when they describe the many students who have never been to the mountains visible year-round on the western horizon.
Urban, suburban, and even rural parents cite a number of everyday reasons why their children spend less time in nature than they themselves did, including disappearing access to natural areas, competition from television and computers, dangerous traffic, more homework, and other pressures. Most of all, parents cite fear of stranger-danger. Conditioned by round-the-clock news coverage, they believe in an epidemic of abductions by strangers, despite evidence that the number of child-snatchings (about a hundred a year) has remained roughly the same for two decades, and that the rates of violent crimes against young people have fallen to well below 1975 levels.
Most of all, parents cite fear of stranger-danger.
Yes, there are risks outside our homes. But there are also risks in raising children under virtual protective house arrest: threats to their independent judgment and value of place, to their ability to feel awe and wonder, to their sense of stewardship for the Earth — and, most immediately, threats to their psychological and physical health. The rapid increase in childhood obesity leads many health-care leaders to worry that the current generation of children may be the first since World War II to die at an earlier age than their parents. Getting kids outdoors more, riding bikes, running, swimming — and, especially, experiencing nature directly — could serve as an antidote to much of what ails the young.
The physical benefits are obvious, but other benefits are more subtle and no less important. Take the development of cognitive functioning. Factoring out other variables, studies of students in California and nationwide show that schools that use outdoor classrooms and other forms of experiential education produce significant student gains in social studies, science, language arts, and math. One 2005 study by the California Department of Education found that students in outdoor science programs improved their science testing scores by 27 percent.
And the benefits go beyond test scores. According to a range of studies, children in outdoor-education settings show increases in self-esteem, problem solving, and motivation to learn. “Natural spaces and materials stimulate children’s limitless imaginations,” says Robin Moore, an international authority on the design of environments for children’s play, learning, and education, “and serve as the medium of inventiveness and creativity.” Studies of children in schoolyards with both green areas and manufactured play areas have found that children engaged in more creative forms of play in the green areas, and they also played more cooperatively. Recent research also shows a positive correlation between the length of children’s attention spans and direct experience in nature. Studies at the University of Illinois show that time in natural settings significantly reduces symptoms of attention-deficit (hyperactivity) disorder in children as young as age five. The research also shows the experience helps reduce negative stress and protects psychological well being, especially in children undergoing the most stressful life events.
Studies of children in schoolyards with both green areas and manufactured play areas have found that children engaged in more creative forms of play in the green areas, and they also played more cooperatively.
Even without corroborating evidence or institutional help, many parents notice significant changes in their children’s stress levels and hyperactivity when they spend time outside. “My son is still on Ritalin, but he’s so much calmer in the outdoors that we’re seriously considering moving to the mountains,” one mother tells me. Could it simply be that he needs more physical activity? “No, he gets that, in sports,” she says. Similarly, the back page of an October issue of San Francisco magazine displays a vivid photograph of a small boy, eyes wide with excitement and joy, leaping and running on a great expanse of California beach, storm clouds and towering waves behind him. A short article explains that the boy was hyperactive, he had been kicked out of his school, and his parents had not known what to do with him — but they had observed how nature engaged and soothed him. So for years they took their son to beaches, forests, dunes, and rivers to let nature do its work.
The photograph was taken in 1907. The boy was Ansel Adams.
Last spring, I found myself wandering down a path toward the Milwaukee River, where it runs through the urban Riverside Park. At first glance, there was nothing unusual about the young people I encountered. A group of modern inner-city high school students, they dressed in standard hip-hop fashion. I would have expected to see in their eyes the cynicism so fashionable now, the jaded look of what D. H. Lawrence long ago called the “know-it-all state of mind.” But not today. Casting their fishing lines from the muddy bank of the Milwaukee River, they were laughing with pleasure. They were totally immersed in the fishing, delighted by the lazy brown river and the landscape of the surrounding park, designed in the late nineteenth century by Frederick Law Olmsted, the founder of American landscape architecture. Ducking a few backcasts, I walked through the woods to the two-story Urban Ecology Center, made of lumber recycled from abandoned buildings.
When this Milwaukee park was established it was a tree-lined valley, with a waterfall, a hill for sledding, and places for skating and swimming, fishing and boating. But when adjacent Riverside High School was expanded in the 1970s, some of the topography was flattened to create sports fields. Industrial and other pollution made the river unfit for human contact, park maintenance declined, and crime became a problem. Then, in the early 1990s, something remarkable happened. A retired biophysicist started a small outdoor-education program in the abandoned park. A dam on the river was removed in 1997, and natural water flow flushed out contaminants. Following a well-established pattern, crime decreased as more people used the park. Over the years, the outdoor-education program evolved into the nonprofit Urban Ecology Center, which annually hosts more than eighteen thousand student visits from twenty-three schools in the surrounding neighborhoods.
The center’s director, Ken Leinbach, a former science teacher, was giving me a tour. “Many teachers would like to use outdoor classrooms, but they don’t feel they’re trained adequately. When the schools partner with us, they don’t have to worry about training,” he said. An added benefit: the center welcomes kids from the surrounding neighborhood, so they no longer associate the woods only with danger, but with joy and exploration as well. Later, we climbed to the top of a wooden tower, high above the park. Leinbach explained that the tower creates the impression that someone is watching over the kids — literally.
“From up here, I once tracked and gave phone reports to the police about a driver who was trying to hit people on the bike path,” he said, looking across the treetops. “Except for that incident, no serious violent crime has occurred in the park in the past five years. We see environmental education as a great tool for urban revitalization.” Even as it shows how nature can be better woven into cities, the Urban Ecology Center also helps paint a portrait of an educational future that many of us would like to see: every school connected to an outdoor classroom, as school districts partner with nature centers, nature preserves, ranches, and farms, to create the new schoolyards.
We see environmental education as a great tool for urban revitalization
Such a future is embodied in the nature-themed schools that have begun sprouting up nationwide, like the Schlitz Audubon Nature Center Preschool, where, as the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported in April 2006, “a 3-year-old can identify a cedar tree and a maple — even if she can’t tell you what color pants she’s wearing. And a 4-year-old can tell the difference between squirrel and rabbit tracks — even if he can’t yet read any of the writing on a map. Young children learn through the sounds, scents, and seasons of the outdoors.” Taking cues from the preschool’s success in engaging children, an increasing number of nature centers are looking to add preschool programs not only to meet the demand for early childhood education but also to “create outdoor enthusiasts at a young age,” the Journal Sentinel reported. And their success points to a doorway into the larger challenge — to better care for the health of the Earth.
Studies show that almost to a person conservationists or environmentalists — whatever we want to call them — had some transcendent experience in nature when they were children. For some, the epiphanies took place in a national park; for others, in the clump of trees at the end of the cul-de-sac. But if experiences in nature are radically reduced for future generations, where will stewards of the Earth come from? A few months ago, I visited Ukiah, California, a mountain town nestled in the pines and fog. Ukiah is Spotted Owl Central, a town associated with the swirling controversy regarding logging, old growth, and endangered species. This is one of the most bucolic landscapes in our country, but local educators and parents report that Ukiah kids aren’t going outside much anymore. So who will care about the spotted owl in ten or fifteen years?
Federal and state conservation agencies are asking such questions with particular urgency. The reason: though the roads at some U.S. national parks remain clogged, overall visits by Americans have dropped by 25 percent since 1987, few people get far from their cars, and camping is on the decline. And such trends may further reduce political support for parks. In October 2006, the superintendent of Yellowstone National Park joined the cadre of activists around the country calling for a no-child-left-inside campaign to make children more comfortable with the outdoors. In a similar move, the U.S. Forest Service is launching More Kids in the Woods, which would fund local efforts to get children outdoors.
Nonprofit environmental organizations are also showing a growing interest in how children engage with nature. In early 2006, the Sierra Club intensified its commitment to connecting children to nature through its Inner City Outings program for at-risk youths, and it has ramped up its legislative efforts in support of environmental education. The National Wildlife Federation is rolling out the Green Hour, a national campaign to persuade parents to encourage their children to spend one hour a day in nature. John Flicker, president of the National Audubon Society, is campaigning for the creation of a family-focused nature center in every congressional district in the nation. “Once these centers are embedded, they’re almost impossible to kill,” says Flicker. “They help create a political constituency right now, but also build a future political base for conservation.”
Proponents of a new San Diego Regional Canyonlands Park, which would protect the city’s unique web of urban canyons, have adjusted their efforts to address these younger constituents. “In addition to the other arguments to do this, such as protecting wildlife,” says Eric Bowlby, Sierra Club Canyons Campaign coordinator, “we’ve been talking about the health and educational benefits of these canyons to kids. People who may not care about endangered species do care about their kids’ health.” For conservationists, it could be a small step from initiatives like these to the idea of dedicating a portion of any proposed open space to children and families in the surrounding area. The acreage could include nature centers, which ideally would provide outdoor-oriented preschools and other offerings. Of course, such programs must teach children how to step lightly on natural habitats, especially ones with endangered species. But the outdoor experiences of children are essential for the survival of conservation. And so the truth is that the human child in nature may be the most important indicator species of future sustainability.
The future of children in nature has profound implications not only for the conservation of land but also for the direction of the environmental movement.
The future of children in nature has profound implications not only for the conservation of land but also for the direction of the environmental movement. If society embraces something as simple as the health benefits of nature experiences for children, it may begin to re-evaluate the worth of “the environment.” While public-health experts have traditionally associated environmental health with the absence of toxic pollution, the definition fails to account for an equally valid consideration: how the environment can improve human health. Seen through that doorway, nature isn’t a problem, it’s the solution: environmentalism is essential to our own well-being. Howard Frumkin, director of the National Center for Environmental Health, points out that future research about the positive health effects of nature should be conducted in collaboration with architects, urban planners, park designers, and landscape architects. “Perhaps we will advise patients to take a few days in the country, to spend time gardening,” he wrote in a 2001 American Journal of Preventive Medicine article, “or [we will] build hospitals in scenic locations, or plant gardens in rehabilitation centers. Perhaps the . . . organizations that pay for health care will come to fund such interventions, especially if they prove to rival pharmaceuticals in cost and efficacy.”
Here’s one suggestion for how to accelerate that change, starting with children: nationally and internationally, pediatricians and other health professionals could use office posters, pamphlets, and personal persuasion to promote the physical and mental health benefits of nature play. Such publicity would give added muscle to efforts to reduce child obesity. Ideally, health providers would add nature therapy to the traditional approaches to attention-deficit disorders and childhood depression. This effort might be modeled on the national physical-fitness campaign launched by President John F. Kennedy. We could call the campaign “Grow Outside!”
In every arena, from conservation and health to urban design and education, a growing children-and-nature movement will have no shortage of tools to bring about a world in which we leave no child inside — and no shortage of potential far-reaching benefits. Under the right conditions, cultural and political change can occur rapidly. The recycling and antismoking campaigns are our best examples of how social and political pressure can work hand-in-hand to create a societal transformation in just one generation. The children-and-nature movement has perhaps even greater potential — because it touches something even deeper within us, biologically and spiritually.
In January 2005, I attended a meeting of the Quivira Coalition, a New Mexico organization that brings together ranchers and environmentalists to find common ground. The coalition is now working on a plan to promote ranches as the new schoolyards. When my turn came to speak, I told the audience how, when I was a boy, I pulled out all those survey stakes in an attempt to keep the earthmovers at bay. Afterward, a rancher stood up. He was wearing scuffed boots. His aged jeans had never seen acid wash, only dirt and rock. His face was sunburned and creased. His drooping moustache was white, and he wore thick eyeglasses with heavy plastic frames, stained with sweat. “You know that story you told about pulling up stakes?” he said. “I did that when I was a boy, too.”
The crowd laughed. I laughed.
And then the man began to cry. Despite his embarrassment, he continued to speak, describing the source of his sudden grief: that he might belong to one of the last generations of Americans to feel that sense of ownership of land and nature. The power of this movement lies in that sense, that special place in our hearts, those woods where the bulldozers cannot reach. Developers and environmentalists, corporate CEOs and college professors, rock stars and ranchers may agree on little else, but they agree on this: no one among us wants to be a member of the last generation to pass on to its children the joy of playing outside in nature.
Richard Louv is a veteran columnist with the San Diego Union-Tribune and the author of seven books, including, most recently, Last Child in the Woods. He is chairman of the Children & Nature Network.
As a boy, I pulled out dozens — perhaps hundreds — of survey stakes in a vain effort to slow the bulldozers that were taking out my woods to make way for a new subdivision. Had I known then what I’ve since learned from a developer, that I should have simply moved the stakes around to be more effective, I would surely have done that too. So you might imagine my dubiousness when, a few weeks after the publication of my 2005 book, Last Child in the Woods, I received an e-mail from Derek Thomas, who introduced himself as vice chairman and chief investment officer of Newland Communities, one of the nation’s largest privately owned residential development companies. “I have been reading your new book,” he wrote, “and am profoundly disturbed by some of the information you present.”
Thomas said he wanted to do something positive. He invited me to an envisioning session in Phoenix to “explore how Newland can improve or redefine our approach to open space preservation and the interaction between our homebuyers and nature.” A few weeks later, in a conference room filled with about eighty developers, builders, and real estate marketers, I offered my sermonette. The folks in the crowd were partially responsible for the problem, I suggested, because they destroy natural habitat, design communities in ways that discourage any real contact with nature, and include covenants that virtually criminalize outdoor play — outlawing tree-climbing, fort-building, even chalk-drawing on sidewalks.
I was ready to make a fast exit when Thomas, a bearded man with an avuncular demeanor, stood up and said, “I want you all to go into small groups and solve the problem: how are we going to build communities in the future that actually connect kids with nature?” The room filled with noise and excitement. By the time the groups reassembled to report the ideas they had generated, I had glimpsed the primal power of connecting children and nature: it can inspire unexpected advocates and lure unlikely allies to enter an entirely new place. Call it the doorway effect. Once through the door, they can revisualize seemingly intractable problems and produce solutions they might otherwise never have imagined.
A half hour after Thomas’s challenge, the groups reported their ideas. Among them: leave some land and native habitat in place (that’s a good start); employ green design principles; incorporate nature trails and natural waterways; throw out the conventional covenants and restrictions that discourage or prohibit natural play and rewrite the rules to encourage it; allow kids to build forts and tree houses or plant gardens; and create small, on-site nature centers.
“Kids could become guides, using cell phones, along nature trails that lead to schools at the edge of the development,” someone suggested. Were the men and women in this room just blowing smoke? Maybe. Developers exploiting our hunger for nature, I thought, just as they market their subdivisions by naming their streets after the trees and streams that they destroy. But the fact that developers, builders, and real estate marketers would approach Derek Thomas’s question with such apparently heartfelt enthusiasm was revealing. The quality of their ideas mattered less than the fact that they had them. While they may not get there themselves, the people in this room were visualizing a very different future. They were undergoing a process of discovery that has proliferated around the country in the past two years, and not only among developers.
For decades, environmental educators, conservationists, and others have worked, often heroically, to bring more children to nature — usually with inadequate support from policymakers. A number of trends, including the recent unexpected national media attention to Last Child and “nature-deficit disorder,” have now brought the concerns of these veteran advocates before a broader audience. While some may argue that the word “movement” is hyperbole, we do seem to have reached a tipping point. State and regional campaigns, sometimes called Leave No Child Inside, have begun to form in Cincinnati, Cleveland, Chicago, the San Francisco Bay Area, St. Louis, Connecticut, Florida, Colorado, Texas, and elsewhere. A host of related initiatives — among them the simple-living, walkable-cities, nature-education, and land-trust movements — have begun to find common cause, and collective strength, through this issue. The activity has attracted a diverse assortment of people who might otherwise never work together.
In September 2006, the National Conservation Training Center and the Conservation Fund hosted the National Dialogue on Children and Nature in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. The conference drew some 350 people from around the country, representing educators, health-care experts, recreation companies, residential developers, urban planners, conservation agencies, academics, and other groups. Even the Walt Disney Company was represented. Support has also come from religious leaders, liberal and conservative, who understand that all spiritual life begins with a sense of wonder, and that one of the first windows to wonder is the natural world. “Christians should take the lead in reconnecting with nature and disconnecting from machines,” writes R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, the flagship school of the Southern Baptist Convention.
It may have something to do with what Harvard professor E. O. Wilson calls the biophilia hypothesis, which is that human beings are innately attracted to nature.
To some extent, the movement is fueled by organizational or economic self-interest. But something deeper is going on here. With its nearly universal appeal, this issue seems to hint at a more atavistic motivation. It may have something to do with what Harvard professor E. O. Wilson calls the biophilia hypothesis, which is that human beings are innately attracted to nature: biologically, we are all still hunters and gatherers, and there is something in us, which we do not fully understand, that needs an occasional immersion in nature. We do know that when people talk about the disconnect between children and nature — if they are old enough to remember a time when outdoor play was the norm — they almost always tell stories about their own childhoods: this tree house or fort, that special woods or ditch or creek or meadow. They recall those “places of initiation,” in the words of naturalist Bob Pyle, where they may have first sensed with awe and wonder the largeness of the world seen and unseen. When people share these stories, their cultural, political, and religious walls come tumbling down.
And when that happens, ideas can pour forth — and lead to ever more insightful approaches. It’s a short conceptual leap, for example, from the notions generated by Derek Thomas’s working group to the creation of a truly sustainable development like the pioneering Village Homes, in Davis, California, where suburban homes are pointed inward toward open green space, vegetable gardens are encouraged, and orchards, not gates or walls, surround the community. And from there, rather than excusing more sprawl with a green patina, developers might even encourage the green redevelopment of portions of strip-mall America into Dutch-style eco-communities, where nature would be an essential strand in the fabric of the urban neighborhood.
In similar ways, the leave-no-child-inside movement could become one of the best ways to challenge other entrenched conceptions — for example, the current, test-centric definition of education reform. Bring unlike-minded people through the doorway to talk about the effect of society’s nature-deficit on child development, and pretty soon they’ll be asking hard questions: Just why have school districts canceled field trips and recess and environmental education? And why doesn’t our school have windows that open and natural light? At a deeper level, when we challenge schools to incorporate place-based learning in the natural world, we will help students realize that school isn’t supposed to be a polite form of incarceration, but a portal to the wider world.
All this may be wishful thinking, of course, at least in the short run. But as Martin Luther King Jr. often said, the success of any social movement depends on its ability to show a world where people will want to go. The point is that thinking about children’s need for nature helps us begin to paint a picture of that world — which is something that has to be done, because the price of not painting that picture is too high.
Within the space of a few decades, the way children understand and experience their neighborhoods and the natural world has changed radically. Even as children and teenagers become more aware of global threats to the environment, their physical contact, their intimacy with nature, is fading. As one suburban fifth grader put it to me, in what has become the signature epigram of the children-and-nature movement: “I like to play indoors better ’cause that’s where all the electrical outlets are.”
In San Diego, according to a survey by the nonprofit Aquatic Adventures, 90 percent of inner-city kids do not know how to swim; 34 percent have never been to the beach.
His desire is not at all uncommon. In a typical week, only 6 percent of children ages nine to thirteen play outside on their own. Studies by the National Sporting Goods Association and by American Sports Data, a research firm, show a dramatic decline in the past decade in such outdoor activities as swimming and fishing. Even bike riding is down 31 percent since 1995. In San Diego, according to a survey by the nonprofit Aquatic Adventures, 90 percent of inner-city kids do not know how to swim; 34 percent have never been to the beach. In suburban Fort Collins, Colorado, teachers shake their heads in dismay when they describe the many students who have never been to the mountains visible year-round on the western horizon.
Urban, suburban, and even rural parents cite a number of everyday reasons why their children spend less time in nature than they themselves did, including disappearing access to natural areas, competition from television and computers, dangerous traffic, more homework, and other pressures. Most of all, parents cite fear of stranger-danger. Conditioned by round-the-clock news coverage, they believe in an epidemic of abductions by strangers, despite evidence that the number of child-snatchings (about a hundred a year) has remained roughly the same for two decades, and that the rates of violent crimes against young people have fallen to well below 1975 levels.
Most of all, parents cite fear of stranger-danger.
Yes, there are risks outside our homes. But there are also risks in raising children under virtual protective house arrest: threats to their independent judgment and value of place, to their ability to feel awe and wonder, to their sense of stewardship for the Earth — and, most immediately, threats to their psychological and physical health. The rapid increase in childhood obesity leads many health-care leaders to worry that the current generation of children may be the first since World War II to die at an earlier age than their parents. Getting kids outdoors more, riding bikes, running, swimming — and, especially, experiencing nature directly — could serve as an antidote to much of what ails the young.
The physical benefits are obvious, but other benefits are more subtle and no less important. Take the development of cognitive functioning. Factoring out other variables, studies of students in California and nationwide show that schools that use outdoor classrooms and other forms of experiential education produce significant student gains in social studies, science, language arts, and math. One 2005 study by the California Department of Education found that students in outdoor science programs improved their science testing scores by 27 percent.
And the benefits go beyond test scores. According to a range of studies, children in outdoor-education settings show increases in self-esteem, problem solving, and motivation to learn. “Natural spaces and materials stimulate children’s limitless imaginations,” says Robin Moore, an international authority on the design of environments for children’s play, learning, and education, “and serve as the medium of inventiveness and creativity.” Studies of children in schoolyards with both green areas and manufactured play areas have found that children engaged in more creative forms of play in the green areas, and they also played more cooperatively. Recent research also shows a positive correlation between the length of children’s attention spans and direct experience in nature. Studies at the University of Illinois show that time in natural settings significantly reduces symptoms of attention-deficit (hyperactivity) disorder in children as young as age five. The research also shows the experience helps reduce negative stress and protects psychological well being, especially in children undergoing the most stressful life events.
Studies of children in schoolyards with both green areas and manufactured play areas have found that children engaged in more creative forms of play in the green areas, and they also played more cooperatively.
Even without corroborating evidence or institutional help, many parents notice significant changes in their children’s stress levels and hyperactivity when they spend time outside. “My son is still on Ritalin, but he’s so much calmer in the outdoors that we’re seriously considering moving to the mountains,” one mother tells me. Could it simply be that he needs more physical activity? “No, he gets that, in sports,” she says. Similarly, the back page of an October issue of San Francisco magazine displays a vivid photograph of a small boy, eyes wide with excitement and joy, leaping and running on a great expanse of California beach, storm clouds and towering waves behind him. A short article explains that the boy was hyperactive, he had been kicked out of his school, and his parents had not known what to do with him — but they had observed how nature engaged and soothed him. So for years they took their son to beaches, forests, dunes, and rivers to let nature do its work.
The photograph was taken in 1907. The boy was Ansel Adams.
Last spring, I found myself wandering down a path toward the Milwaukee River, where it runs through the urban Riverside Park. At first glance, there was nothing unusual about the young people I encountered. A group of modern inner-city high school students, they dressed in standard hip-hop fashion. I would have expected to see in their eyes the cynicism so fashionable now, the jaded look of what D. H. Lawrence long ago called the “know-it-all state of mind.” But not today. Casting their fishing lines from the muddy bank of the Milwaukee River, they were laughing with pleasure. They were totally immersed in the fishing, delighted by the lazy brown river and the landscape of the surrounding park, designed in the late nineteenth century by Frederick Law Olmsted, the founder of American landscape architecture. Ducking a few backcasts, I walked through the woods to the two-story Urban Ecology Center, made of lumber recycled from abandoned buildings.
When this Milwaukee park was established it was a tree-lined valley, with a waterfall, a hill for sledding, and places for skating and swimming, fishing and boating. But when adjacent Riverside High School was expanded in the 1970s, some of the topography was flattened to create sports fields. Industrial and other pollution made the river unfit for human contact, park maintenance declined, and crime became a problem. Then, in the early 1990s, something remarkable happened. A retired biophysicist started a small outdoor-education program in the abandoned park. A dam on the river was removed in 1997, and natural water flow flushed out contaminants. Following a well-established pattern, crime decreased as more people used the park. Over the years, the outdoor-education program evolved into the nonprofit Urban Ecology Center, which annually hosts more than eighteen thousand student visits from twenty-three schools in the surrounding neighborhoods.
The center’s director, Ken Leinbach, a former science teacher, was giving me a tour. “Many teachers would like to use outdoor classrooms, but they don’t feel they’re trained adequately. When the schools partner with us, they don’t have to worry about training,” he said. An added benefit: the center welcomes kids from the surrounding neighborhood, so they no longer associate the woods only with danger, but with joy and exploration as well. Later, we climbed to the top of a wooden tower, high above the park. Leinbach explained that the tower creates the impression that someone is watching over the kids — literally.
“From up here, I once tracked and gave phone reports to the police about a driver who was trying to hit people on the bike path,” he said, looking across the treetops. “Except for that incident, no serious violent crime has occurred in the park in the past five years. We see environmental education as a great tool for urban revitalization.” Even as it shows how nature can be better woven into cities, the Urban Ecology Center also helps paint a portrait of an educational future that many of us would like to see: every school connected to an outdoor classroom, as school districts partner with nature centers, nature preserves, ranches, and farms, to create the new schoolyards.
We see environmental education as a great tool for urban revitalization
Such a future is embodied in the nature-themed schools that have begun sprouting up nationwide, like the Schlitz Audubon Nature Center Preschool, where, as the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported in April 2006, “a 3-year-old can identify a cedar tree and a maple — even if she can’t tell you what color pants she’s wearing. And a 4-year-old can tell the difference between squirrel and rabbit tracks — even if he can’t yet read any of the writing on a map. Young children learn through the sounds, scents, and seasons of the outdoors.” Taking cues from the preschool’s success in engaging children, an increasing number of nature centers are looking to add preschool programs not only to meet the demand for early childhood education but also to “create outdoor enthusiasts at a young age,” the Journal Sentinel reported. And their success points to a doorway into the larger challenge — to better care for the health of the Earth.
Studies show that almost to a person conservationists or environmentalists — whatever we want to call them — had some transcendent experience in nature when they were children. For some, the epiphanies took place in a national park; for others, in the clump of trees at the end of the cul-de-sac. But if experiences in nature are radically reduced for future generations, where will stewards of the Earth come from? A few months ago, I visited Ukiah, California, a mountain town nestled in the pines and fog. Ukiah is Spotted Owl Central, a town associated with the swirling controversy regarding logging, old growth, and endangered species. This is one of the most bucolic landscapes in our country, but local educators and parents report that Ukiah kids aren’t going outside much anymore. So who will care about the spotted owl in ten or fifteen years?
Federal and state conservation agencies are asking such questions with particular urgency. The reason: though the roads at some U.S. national parks remain clogged, overall visits by Americans have dropped by 25 percent since 1987, few people get far from their cars, and camping is on the decline. And such trends may further reduce political support for parks. In October 2006, the superintendent of Yellowstone National Park joined the cadre of activists around the country calling for a no-child-left-inside campaign to make children more comfortable with the outdoors. In a similar move, the U.S. Forest Service is launching More Kids in the Woods, which would fund local efforts to get children outdoors.
Nonprofit environmental organizations are also showing a growing interest in how children engage with nature. In early 2006, the Sierra Club intensified its commitment to connecting children to nature through its Inner City Outings program for at-risk youths, and it has ramped up its legislative efforts in support of environmental education. The National Wildlife Federation is rolling out the Green Hour, a national campaign to persuade parents to encourage their children to spend one hour a day in nature. John Flicker, president of the National Audubon Society, is campaigning for the creation of a family-focused nature center in every congressional district in the nation. “Once these centers are embedded, they’re almost impossible to kill,” says Flicker. “They help create a political constituency right now, but also build a future political base for conservation.”
Proponents of a new San Diego Regional Canyonlands Park, which would protect the city’s unique web of urban canyons, have adjusted their efforts to address these younger constituents. “In addition to the other arguments to do this, such as protecting wildlife,” says Eric Bowlby, Sierra Club Canyons Campaign coordinator, “we’ve been talking about the health and educational benefits of these canyons to kids. People who may not care about endangered species do care about their kids’ health.” For conservationists, it could be a small step from initiatives like these to the idea of dedicating a portion of any proposed open space to children and families in the surrounding area. The acreage could include nature centers, which ideally would provide outdoor-oriented preschools and other offerings. Of course, such programs must teach children how to step lightly on natural habitats, especially ones with endangered species. But the outdoor experiences of children are essential for the survival of conservation. And so the truth is that the human child in nature may be the most important indicator species of future sustainability.
The future of children in nature has profound implications not only for the conservation of land but also for the direction of the environmental movement.
The future of children in nature has profound implications not only for the conservation of land but also for the direction of the environmental movement. If society embraces something as simple as the health benefits of nature experiences for children, it may begin to re-evaluate the worth of “the environment.” While public-health experts have traditionally associated environmental health with the absence of toxic pollution, the definition fails to account for an equally valid consideration: how the environment can improve human health. Seen through that doorway, nature isn’t a problem, it’s the solution: environmentalism is essential to our own well-being. Howard Frumkin, director of the National Center for Environmental Health, points out that future research about the positive health effects of nature should be conducted in collaboration with architects, urban planners, park designers, and landscape architects. “Perhaps we will advise patients to take a few days in the country, to spend time gardening,” he wrote in a 2001 American Journal of Preventive Medicine article, “or [we will] build hospitals in scenic locations, or plant gardens in rehabilitation centers. Perhaps the . . . organizations that pay for health care will come to fund such interventions, especially if they prove to rival pharmaceuticals in cost and efficacy.”
Here’s one suggestion for how to accelerate that change, starting with children: nationally and internationally, pediatricians and other health professionals could use office posters, pamphlets, and personal persuasion to promote the physical and mental health benefits of nature play. Such publicity would give added muscle to efforts to reduce child obesity. Ideally, health providers would add nature therapy to the traditional approaches to attention-deficit disorders and childhood depression. This effort might be modeled on the national physical-fitness campaign launched by President John F. Kennedy. We could call the campaign “Grow Outside!”
In every arena, from conservation and health to urban design and education, a growing children-and-nature movement will have no shortage of tools to bring about a world in which we leave no child inside — and no shortage of potential far-reaching benefits. Under the right conditions, cultural and political change can occur rapidly. The recycling and antismoking campaigns are our best examples of how social and political pressure can work hand-in-hand to create a societal transformation in just one generation. The children-and-nature movement has perhaps even greater potential — because it touches something even deeper within us, biologically and spiritually.
In January 2005, I attended a meeting of the Quivira Coalition, a New Mexico organization that brings together ranchers and environmentalists to find common ground. The coalition is now working on a plan to promote ranches as the new schoolyards. When my turn came to speak, I told the audience how, when I was a boy, I pulled out all those survey stakes in an attempt to keep the earthmovers at bay. Afterward, a rancher stood up. He was wearing scuffed boots. His aged jeans had never seen acid wash, only dirt and rock. His face was sunburned and creased. His drooping moustache was white, and he wore thick eyeglasses with heavy plastic frames, stained with sweat. “You know that story you told about pulling up stakes?” he said. “I did that when I was a boy, too.”
The crowd laughed. I laughed.
And then the man began to cry. Despite his embarrassment, he continued to speak, describing the source of his sudden grief: that he might belong to one of the last generations of Americans to feel that sense of ownership of land and nature. The power of this movement lies in that sense, that special place in our hearts, those woods where the bulldozers cannot reach. Developers and environmentalists, corporate CEOs and college professors, rock stars and ranchers may agree on little else, but they agree on this: no one among us wants to be a member of the last generation to pass on to its children the joy of playing outside in nature.
Richard Louv is a veteran columnist with the San Diego Union-Tribune and the author of seven books, including, most recently, Last Child in the Woods. He is chairman of the Children & Nature Network.
Monday, December 7, 2009
Plastic bags consumtion pattern!!!
Did you know?
It is estimated that somewhere between 500 billion and one trillion plastic bags are consumed throughout the world each year. In 1977, supermarkets began to offer plastic grocery bags as an alternative to paper bags. By 1996, four out of every five grocery bags used were plastic. Now almost 100% of the bags are plastic bags.
It is estimated that somewhere between 500 billion and one trillion plastic bags are consumed throughout the world each year. In 1977, supermarkets began to offer plastic grocery bags as an alternative to paper bags. By 1996, four out of every five grocery bags used were plastic. Now almost 100% of the bags are plastic bags.
Saturday, December 5, 2009
How to get your child excited about nature
Children are born with an innate curiosity about the natural world around them. How can we help them satisfy it?
Parents need to teach children in a simple but deliberate way how to understand and interact with the natural environment. If this curiosity is not stimulated, it gradually dulls as the many distractions of modern life fill the child’s interest.
When a child becomes excited by nature, he/she gains access to its inherent rewards – inspiration, entertainment, comfort and perspective. As our modern life becomes more complex and over-stimulating, an appreciation of our natural world offers the child a gift that will last a lifetime.
Start when they’re young
First impressions are lasting impressions. Even babes in arms, birth – 6 months old, will respond with interest to the wonders of their natural environment. The first year or two of a child’s life is a special time when the child looks to the parent for guidance in all areas of learning. Seize the moment to instill in your child an interest and a reverence for nature.
As an example, when my children were babies I would take them to a quiet spot near the house before dinnertime to listen to the evening bird songs. As each bird gave its distinct call, I would simply say the name of the bird – varied thrush, grouse, towhee, robin, woodpecker…. Invariably, my child would be fixated in silence, concentrating on the attention we gave to the sounds of nature. Beyond the learning experience, these were precious moments, rewarding for both child and parent.
Go with them
Your participation is essential, as it underscores the importance of learning about our natural environment. As guide and mentor, your example sets the benchmark for your child’s level of interest in nature.
Begin by taking your child out in nature with just yourself. Avoid bringing your child’s friends along for the first few outings; children listen to their peers more than their parents and all it takes is one snicker from a friend saying ‘this is dumb’ to throw a wet blanket on your efforts.
Also, sending your child off to camp or school field trips is no guarantee that he/she will have a successful experience in wild nature. With children, social interactions can distract from their experience of nature.
Help them observe
Equip your child with the means to better explore and observe the natural world, from the miniature world of the insects to the local flora and fauna, and the swirling night sky constellations.
Binoculars/monocular
Give your child his/her own child-sized binocular for use during outings in nature. A monocular may be even preferable to binoculars for young children because a monocular is smaller, lightweight and easy to pack in a pocket or pack.
Journal
A sturdy, hard-bound journal with blank pages enables your child to keep a record of personal observations. Coloured pencils are also useful for nature drawings or bird sketches. As journal pages gradually fill with drawings and observations, the child gains a sense of pride and accomplishment which deepens the growing bond with nature.
Local wildlife books
Find a book which details the birds, mammals and wild flora specific to your locale. Reading a guide will greatly enhance your child’s outings. The children’s book section of the library will have lots to offer.
Topographical maps
Your town’s bookstore will likely have topographic maps of your area. Pin a large (poster-size) copy on a wall at home as a reference. The child can highlight areas explored or pin small numbers that correspond with pages in their journals. Over time, the child develops an intimate knowledge of the surrounding area and its wild attractions. It’s also useful to have a laminated copy of the topo map to bring along as a pocket guide during outings.
“How can we expect to preserve and protect biodiversity if we don’t even know the names of the plants and animals that share our neighbourhood?”
- Robert Bateman, wildlife artist
Let them lead
Although you may have a preset route to follow, give preference to the child’s interests. Follow their interests, and let your child set the pace. Keep the outing easy and fun. And, you may be surprised by what your child’s keen eye can teach you.
Encourage your child to be a ‘trophy’ hunter (by camera, of course!)
Keep a checklist of local wildlife and flora and try to “discover” them in the wild. Give your child a small camera to document their find, and mark it off on the checklist. By documenting their discovery, the child sees progress and can take pride in their accomplishment. Use copies of the child’s photos for Christmas cards to the relatives. This adds value to the child’s efforts.
Bring your child to a wildlife rehabilitation center
Many communities have wildlife shelters and recovery centers which provide the public with an opportunity to see local wildlife species close-up. This is also a chance for your child to see local people engaged in stewardship activities. These people are modeling to young people their dedication to wildlife.
Give your child an area to steward
Whether it’s a small wild corner of your yard, a child-sized section of a garden bed, or a nearby special spot in nature, give the child responsibility for its stewardship. For young children, this can be as simple as monitoring the changes in this area over the seasons, setting out seeds to help the birds in winter, or freshening the water in the birdbath. These seemingly small acts of stewardship instill the notion of individual responsibility for the care of our environment.
Older children can take on a task such as creating a backyard wildlife habitat, maintaining birdfeeders, or growing their own vegetable patch. It may be necessary to help the child get started, but know when to stand back and let the child take ownership.
With the threats facing our environment nearing a precipitous threshold, we must increase our efforts to teach our children the wonders of nature. This is our best assurance that they will make wise choices throughout their lives which benefit the environment and promote the values of sustainability for the benefit of all.
Parents need to teach children in a simple but deliberate way how to understand and interact with the natural environment. If this curiosity is not stimulated, it gradually dulls as the many distractions of modern life fill the child’s interest.
When a child becomes excited by nature, he/she gains access to its inherent rewards – inspiration, entertainment, comfort and perspective. As our modern life becomes more complex and over-stimulating, an appreciation of our natural world offers the child a gift that will last a lifetime.
Start when they’re young
First impressions are lasting impressions. Even babes in arms, birth – 6 months old, will respond with interest to the wonders of their natural environment. The first year or two of a child’s life is a special time when the child looks to the parent for guidance in all areas of learning. Seize the moment to instill in your child an interest and a reverence for nature.
As an example, when my children were babies I would take them to a quiet spot near the house before dinnertime to listen to the evening bird songs. As each bird gave its distinct call, I would simply say the name of the bird – varied thrush, grouse, towhee, robin, woodpecker…. Invariably, my child would be fixated in silence, concentrating on the attention we gave to the sounds of nature. Beyond the learning experience, these were precious moments, rewarding for both child and parent.
Go with them
Your participation is essential, as it underscores the importance of learning about our natural environment. As guide and mentor, your example sets the benchmark for your child’s level of interest in nature.
Begin by taking your child out in nature with just yourself. Avoid bringing your child’s friends along for the first few outings; children listen to their peers more than their parents and all it takes is one snicker from a friend saying ‘this is dumb’ to throw a wet blanket on your efforts.
Also, sending your child off to camp or school field trips is no guarantee that he/she will have a successful experience in wild nature. With children, social interactions can distract from their experience of nature.
Help them observe
Equip your child with the means to better explore and observe the natural world, from the miniature world of the insects to the local flora and fauna, and the swirling night sky constellations.
Binoculars/monocular
Give your child his/her own child-sized binocular for use during outings in nature. A monocular may be even preferable to binoculars for young children because a monocular is smaller, lightweight and easy to pack in a pocket or pack.
Journal
A sturdy, hard-bound journal with blank pages enables your child to keep a record of personal observations. Coloured pencils are also useful for nature drawings or bird sketches. As journal pages gradually fill with drawings and observations, the child gains a sense of pride and accomplishment which deepens the growing bond with nature.
Local wildlife books
Find a book which details the birds, mammals and wild flora specific to your locale. Reading a guide will greatly enhance your child’s outings. The children’s book section of the library will have lots to offer.
Topographical maps
Your town’s bookstore will likely have topographic maps of your area. Pin a large (poster-size) copy on a wall at home as a reference. The child can highlight areas explored or pin small numbers that correspond with pages in their journals. Over time, the child develops an intimate knowledge of the surrounding area and its wild attractions. It’s also useful to have a laminated copy of the topo map to bring along as a pocket guide during outings.
“How can we expect to preserve and protect biodiversity if we don’t even know the names of the plants and animals that share our neighbourhood?”
- Robert Bateman, wildlife artist
Let them lead
Although you may have a preset route to follow, give preference to the child’s interests. Follow their interests, and let your child set the pace. Keep the outing easy and fun. And, you may be surprised by what your child’s keen eye can teach you.
Encourage your child to be a ‘trophy’ hunter (by camera, of course!)
Keep a checklist of local wildlife and flora and try to “discover” them in the wild. Give your child a small camera to document their find, and mark it off on the checklist. By documenting their discovery, the child sees progress and can take pride in their accomplishment. Use copies of the child’s photos for Christmas cards to the relatives. This adds value to the child’s efforts.
Bring your child to a wildlife rehabilitation center
Many communities have wildlife shelters and recovery centers which provide the public with an opportunity to see local wildlife species close-up. This is also a chance for your child to see local people engaged in stewardship activities. These people are modeling to young people their dedication to wildlife.
Give your child an area to steward
Whether it’s a small wild corner of your yard, a child-sized section of a garden bed, or a nearby special spot in nature, give the child responsibility for its stewardship. For young children, this can be as simple as monitoring the changes in this area over the seasons, setting out seeds to help the birds in winter, or freshening the water in the birdbath. These seemingly small acts of stewardship instill the notion of individual responsibility for the care of our environment.
Older children can take on a task such as creating a backyard wildlife habitat, maintaining birdfeeders, or growing their own vegetable patch. It may be necessary to help the child get started, but know when to stand back and let the child take ownership.
With the threats facing our environment nearing a precipitous threshold, we must increase our efforts to teach our children the wonders of nature. This is our best assurance that they will make wise choices throughout their lives which benefit the environment and promote the values of sustainability for the benefit of all.
Thursday, December 3, 2009
Shipping Green- Logistics go Green
In a city where one can hardly see the horizon because of an almost constant cloud of filth and pollution, many Hong Kong residents have long given up on the idea of a clean, green life.
But one Australian company is trying to counter that, with the introduction in the city's harbor, the second busiest in the world, of eco-friendly ferries that run on solar and wind power.
Solar Sailor has created a new type of sail -- rigid wings covered in solar panels that can bend and fold depending on the direction of the sun and wind. Four of these solar ferries will be roaming the waters of Hong Kong in January and Solar Sailor is in talks to introduce them in Shanghai and San Francisco.
"When we started in 1999, oil was at $10 a barrel, no one had heard of a hybrid car and people weren't educated about global warming," Solar Sailor CEO Robert Dane told CNN. With oil now around $73 a barrel, Dane says green technologies make more financial sense than ever.
Video: Solar Sailor
Despite these developments, ferries only contribute to a small amount of the world's overall shipping pollution, which is said to cause over 60,000 premature deaths every year, according to James Corbett, an expert in marine policy. The big polluters are oil tankers and freighters, which carry over 80 percent of the world's trade.
That is why Solar Sailor is now turning its attention to these giant ships, infamous for using some of the dirtiest fuel on the planet that release high levels of contaminants, such as sulfur dioxide. At the current rate, by 2020 more sulfur dioxide is expected to be generated by vessels at sea than all the vessels on land.
Now China's biggest shipping company, Cosco, is in advanced talks with Solar Sailor for the fitting of solar wings on some of its large tankers. Another shipping company, NYK Line, launched Auriga Leader in December 2008, the world's first solar-assisted freighter.
But for Nikolaos Kirtatos, Director of the Laboratory of Marine Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens, a solar-powered supertanker is wishful thinking. "A big ship needs so much power and the technology is not there yet," he told CNN. "With solar panels you also need a very large surface and a lot of storage space for batteries."
Kirtatos predicted, "Fossil fuels will continue to be the main source of energy for the foreseeable future, at least the next two decades."
Traditionally, the shipping industry has been slower than others, such as the car and aviation industries, to implement sustainable technologies.
That is because countries largely overlooked shipping as it operates outside national territories, meaning the shipping emissions do not appear in countries' pollution balance.
According to James Corbett, Professor of Marine Policy at the University of Delaware, "That is changing with new expectations for environmental performance, higher fuel prices and stricter regulators such as the International Maritime Organization."
But if the shipping industry does not take measures to further reduce its emissions, Corbett predicts the number of related deaths could rise to 87,000 by 2012.
"The industry still has a lot more it can do, including more efficient vessel design that could lead to smaller consumption of fuel," he told CNN.
At the United Nations Climate Change Conference taking place this week in Copenhagen, regulators are expected to announce a tax on oil consumption by ships.
One of the world's largest shipping companies, Maersk, told CNN it would welcome stricter regulations.
Maersk has been on the forefront of changes in ship design and operation in order to "reduce fuel use and avoid maritime disasters caused by the accidental spilling of thousands of tons of petrol into the world's oceans," Soren Stig Nielsen, Director of Sustainability at Maersk, told CNN.
Stig Nielsen sees significant opportunities for shipping to become more effective and environmentally friendly in moving large quantities of goods.
He told CNN that Maersk has already introduced "double-hull vessels" which make spilling of oil more difficult. "But," said Stig Nielsen, "It's not just how you build the ships, but how you operate them -- allowing the ships to sail slower and reducing speed to half the maximum would save a lot of fuel and reduce operating costs."
Maersk has pledged to reduce CO2 emissions by 20 percent for 2012, on top of the 15 percent reduction it says it has achieved since 2002.
Regarding the use of green energies such as solar and wind power, Nielsen said Maersk is looking into it. "Right now we owe it to ourselves to look at all the options and think solar power could some day be used as supplement energy," he told CNN.
"The shipping industry has improved, but it still has a long way to go," he said.
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
What is Copenhagen?
United Nations Climate Change Conference 2009
The United Nations Climate Change Conference is taking place at the Bella Center in Copenhagen, Denmark, between 7 December and 18 December 2009. The conference includes the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP 15) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the 5th Meeting of the Parties (COP/MOP 5) to the Kyoto Protocol. According to the Bali Road Map, a framework for climate change mitigation beyond 2012 is to be agreed there.
The conference was preceded by the Climate Change: Global Risks, Challenges and Decisions scientific conference, which took place in March 2009 and was also held at the Bella Center.
Negotiating position of the European Union
On 28 January 2009, the European Commission released a position paper, "Towards a comprehensive climate agreement in Copenhagen." The position paper "addresses three key challenges: targets and actions; financing of "low-carbon development and adaptation"; and building an effective global carbon market".
In order to demonstrate good example, the European Union had committed to implementing binding legislation, even without a satisfactory deal in Copenhagen. Last December, the European Union revised its carbon allowances system called the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) designed for the post-Kyoto period (after 2013). This new stage of the system aims at further reducing greenhouse gases emitted in Europe in a binding way and at showing the commitments the EU had already done before the Copenhagen meeting. To avoid carbon leakage—relocation of companies in other regions not complying with similar legislation—the EU Commission will foresee that sectors exposed to international competition, should be granted some free allocations of CO2 emissions provided that they are at least at the same level of a benchmark. Other sectors should buy such credits on an international market. Energy intensive industries in Europe have advocated for this benchmark system in order to keep funds in investment capacities for low carbon products rather than for speculations.The European chemical industry claims here the need to be closer to the needs of citizens in a sustainable way. To comply with such commitments for a low-carbon economy, this requires competitiveness and innovations.
The French Minister for Ecology Jean-Louis Borloo pushes the creation of the Global Environment Organisation as France's main institutional contribution, to offer a powerful alternative to the UNEP.
Official pre-Copenhagen negotiation meetings
Bonn – second negotiating meeting
Delegates from 183 countries met in Bonn from 1 to 12 June 2009. The purpose was to discuss key negotiating texts. These will serve as the basis for the international climate change agreement at Copenhagen. At the conclusion the Ad Hoc Working Group under the Kyoto Protocol (AWG-KP) negotiating group was still far away from the emission reduction range that has been set out by science to avoid the worst ravages of climate change: a minus 25% to minus 40% reduction below 1990 levels by 2020. The AWG-KP still needs to decide on the aggregate emission reduction target for industrialised countries, along with individual targets for each country. Progress was made in gaining clarification of the issues of concern to parties and including these concerns in the updated draft of the negotiating text.
Seventh Session
Bangkok
The first part of the seventh session of the AWG-LCA was held in Bangkok, Thailand, from Monday, 28 September at the United Nations Conference Centre (UNCC) of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP), Bangkok, Thailand.
Barcelona
The resumed session was held in Barcelona, Spain, from 2 to 6 November 2009. Thereafter, the AWG-LCA will meet to conclude its work at its eighth session, concurrently with the fifteenth session of the Conference of the Parties which opened in Copenhagen on 7 December 2009.
Listing of proposed actions (by country/political union)
Australia
To cut carbon emissions by 25% below 2000 levels by 2020 if the world agrees to an ambitious global deal to stabilise levels of CO2e to 450 ppm or lower. This equates to a 16% cut below 1990 levels by 2020.
To cut carbon emissions by 15% below 2000 levels by 2020 if there is an agreement where major developing economies commit to substantially restrain emissions and advanced economies take on commitments comparable to Australia. This equates to a 5% cut below 1990 levels by 2020.
To cut carbon emissions by 5% below 2000 levels to 2020 unconditionally.
It is clearly stated in proceedings from the Australian Senate and policy statements from the government that the Australian emission reductions include Land use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF) with the form of inclusion remaining undecided and whilst acknowledging that they are subject to the forming of accounting guidelines from this Copenhagen conference. Using Kyoto accounting guidelines, these are equivalent to an emissions cut of 24%, 14%, and 4% below 1990 levels by 2020 respectively. Raw use of UNFCCC CO2-e data including LULUCF for the years 2000 and 1990 leads to apparent emissions cuts of 33%, 25% and 15% respectively.
Brazil
To cut emissions by 38–42% below projected 2020 levels by that same year.
This is equivalent to an emissions cut of between 5% above and 1.8% below 1990 levels by 2020.
Canada
To cut carbon emissions by 20% below 2006 levels by 2020. This is equivalent to 3% below 1990 levels by 2020.
The three most populous provinces disagree with the federal government goal and announced more ambitious targets on their jurisdictions. Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia announced respectively 15%, 20% and 14% reduction target below their 1990 levels while Alberta is expecting a 58% increase in emissions.
China
To cut CO2 emissions per unit of GDP (emissions intensity) by 40–45% below 2005 levels by 2020.
European Union
To cut greenhouse gas emissions by 30% below 1990 levels by 2020 if an international agreement is reached committing other developed countries and the more advanced developing nations to comparable emission reductions.
To cut greenhouse gas emissions by 20% below 1990 levels by 2020 unconditionally.
India
To cut emissions intensity by 20–25% below 2005 levels by 2020.
Japan
To cut greenhouse gas emissions by 25% below 1990 levels by 2020.
New Zealand
To reduce emissions between 10% to 20% below 1990 levels by 2020 if a global agreement is secured that limits carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2-e) to 450ppm and temperature increases to 2°C, effective rules on forestry, and New Zealand having access to international carbon markets.
Russia
To reduce emissions between 20% to 25% below 1990 levels by 2020 if a global agreement is reached committing other countries to comparable emission reductions.
South Africa
To cut emissions by 34% below current levels by 2020.
This is equivalent to an absolute emissions cut of 18% below 1990 levels by 2020.
United States of America
To cut greenhouse gas emissions by 17% below 2005 levels by 2020, 42% by 2030 and 83% by 2050.
This is equivalent to 1.3% below 1990 levels by 2020, 31% by 2030 and 80% by 2050.
Technology measures
UNEP
At the fifth Magdeburg Environmental Forum held from 3 to 4 July 2008, in Magdeburg, Germany, United Nations Environment Programme called for the establishment of infrastructure for electric vehicles. At this international conference, 250 high-ranking representatives from industry, science, politics and non-government organizations discussed solutions for future road transportation under the motto of "Sustainable Mobility– United Nations Climate Change Conference 2009|the Post-2012 CO2 Agenda".
Technology Action Programs
Technology Action Programs (TAPs) have been proposed as a means for organizing future technology efforts under the UNFCCC. By creating programs for a set of adaptation and mitigation technologies, the UNFCCC would send clear signals to the private and finance sector, governments, research institutions as well as citizens of the world looking for solutions to the climate problem. Potential focus areas for TAPs include early warning systems, expansion of salinity-tolerant crops, electric vehicles, wind and solar energy, efficient energy grid systems, and other technologies.
Technology roadmaps will address barriers to technology transfer, cooperative actions on technologies and key economic sectors, and support implementation of Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions (NAMAs) and National Adaptation Programmes of Action (NAPAs).
Related public actions
The Danish government and key industrial organizations have entered a public-private partnership to promote Danish cleantech solutions. The partnership, Climate Consortium Denmark, is an integrated part of the official portfolio of activities before, during and after the COP15.
There is also a European Conference for the Promotion of Local Actions to Combat Climate Change. The entire morning session on 25 September was devoted to the Covenant of Mayors.
The Local Government Climate Lounge will be an advocacy and meeting space located directly in the COP 15 building, at the heart of the negotiations.
Activism
Some small protests occurred during the first week of the conference. A much larger mostly peaceful march was held in Copenhagen on December 12 calling for a global agreement on climate. Between 40,000 and 100,000 people attended. 968 protesters were arrested at the event, including 19 who were arrested for carrying pocket knives and wearing masks during the demonstration. Of these all but 13 were realeased without charge. One police officer was injured by a rock and a protester was injured by fireworks during the rioting. Some protestors where kettled by police and detained for several hours without access to food, water or toilets. Protestors were said to be angry at the use of what they considered "heavy-handed" police tactics.
There is a movement called "Reclaim Power!", which is a confrontational mass action of non-violent civil disobedience, scheduled for December 16th. The various movements for global justice plan to join together and take over the Bella Center in order to transform the conference into a Peoples Assembly.
The Yes Men made a false statement purporting to be from the Canadian environment minister Jim Prentice, which pledged to cut carbon emissions by 40% below 1990 levels by 2020. The statement was followed by a statement from the Ugandan delegation, praising the statement that was also faked and The Yes Men also released a spoof press conference on a fake form of the official website. The statement was written about by the Wall Street Journal before being revealed as a hoax. Jim Prentice described the hoax as "undesirable".
The Danish Text
A leaked document known as "The Danish Text" has started an argument between developed and developing nations. The document was subtitled as "The Copenhagen Agreement" and proposes measures to keep average global temperature rises to two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Developing countries have reacted to the document by saying that the developed countries had worked behind closed doors and made an agreement according to their wish without the consent of the developing nations. Lumumba Stanislaus Di-Aping, chairman of the G77, has said, "It's an incredibly imbalanced text intended to subvert, absolutely and completely, two years of negotiations. It does not recognize the proposals and the voice of developing countries". A confidential analysis of the text by developing countries shows deep unease over details of the text.
Monday, November 30, 2009
Post-Kyoto Protocol negotiations on greenhouse gas emissions
Post-Kyoto negotiations refers to high level talks attempting to address global warming by limiting greenhouse gas emissions. Generally part of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), these talks concern the period after the first "commitment period" of the Kyoto Protocol, which is due to expire at the end of 2012. Negotiations have been mandated by the adoption of the Bali Roadmap and Decision 1/CP.13 ("The Bali Action Plan").
UNFCCC negotiations are conducted within two subsidiary bodies, the Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action under the Convention (AWG-LCA) and the Ad Hoc Working Group on Further Commitments for Annex I Parties under the Kyoto Protocol (AWG-KP) and are expected to culminate in the United Nations Climate Change Conference taking place in December 2009 in Copenhagen (COP-15); negotiations are supported by a number of external processes, including the G8 process, a number of regional meetings and the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate that was launched by US President Barack Obama in March 2009. High level talks were held at the meeting of the G8+5 Climate Change Dialogue in February 2007 and at a number of subsequent G8 meetings, most recently leading to the adoption of the G8 leaders declaration "Responsible Leadership for a Sustainable Future" during the G8 summit in L´Aquila, Italy, in July 2009.
February 2007 Washington Declaration
In the non-binding "Washington Declaration" on February 16, 2007, the G8+5 group of leaders agreed in principle to a global cap-and-trade system that would apply to both industrialized nations and developing countries, which they hoped would be in place by 2009.
Official G8+5 Climate Change Dialogue Web site
33rd G8 summit
Leaders of the 33rd G8 summit
On June 7, 2007, leaders at the 33rd G8 summit issued a non-binding communiqué announcing that the G8 nations would "aim to at least halve global CO2 emissions by 2050". The details enabling this to be achieved would be negotiated by environment ministers within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in a process that would also include the major emerging economies. Groups of countries would also be able to reach additional agreements on achieving the goal outside and in parallel with the United Nations process. The G8 also announced their desire to use the proceeds from the auction of emission rights and other financial tools to support climate protection projects in developing countries.
The agreement was welcomed by British Prime Minister Tony Blair as "a major, major step forward".French president Nicolas Sarkozy would have preferred a binding figure for emissions reduction to have been set. This was apparently blocked by U.S. President George W. Bush until the other major greenhouse gas emitting countries, like India and China, make similar commitments.
2007 UN General Assembly plenary debate
As part of the schedule leading up to the September UN High-Level-Event, on July 31 the United Nations General Assembly opened its first-ever plenary session devoted exclusively to climate change, which also included prominent scientists and business leaders. The debate, at which nearly 100 nations spoke, was scheduled to last two days but was extended for a further day to allow a greater number of "worried nations" to describe their climate-related problems.
In his opening speech, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged Member States to work together, stating that the time had come for "decisive action on a global scale", and called for a "comprehensive agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change process that tackles climate change on all fronts, including adaptation, mitigation, clean technologies, deforestation and resource mobilization". In closing the conference General Assembly President Haya Rashed Al-Khalifa called for an "equitable, fair and ambitious global deal to match the scale of the challenges ahead".She had earlier stressed the urgency of the situation, stating that "the longer we wait, the more expensive this will be".
The day after the session ended, the UN launched its new climate change web site detailing its activities relating to global warming.
2007 Vienna Climate Change Talks and Agreement
A round of climate change talks under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) concluded in Austria in 31 August 2007 with agreement on key elements for an effective international response to climate change.
A key feature of the talks was a United Nations report that showed how energy efficiency could yield significant cuts in emissions at low cost.
The talks set the stage for the 2007 United Nations Climate Change Conference held in Bali in December 2007.
September 2007 United Nations High-Level-Event
As well as the meeting of the United Nations General Assembly, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was to hold informal high-level discussions on the post-Kyoto treaty on September 24. It was expected that these would pave the way for the United Nations Climate Change Conference, held in Bali in December 2007. Three Special Envoys on Climate Change, appointed on May 1, 2007, held discussions with various governments to define and plan the event.
In advance of the "High-Level-Event", the Secretary-General hoped that world leaders would "send a powerful political signal to the negotiations in Bali that “business as usual” will not do and that they are ready to work jointly with others towards a comprehensive multilateral framework for action".
September 2007 Washington conference
It emerged on August 3, 2007, that representatives of the United Nations, major industrialized and developing countries are being invited by George Bush to a conference in Washington on September 27 and 28. Countries invited are believed to include the members of the G8+5 (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, United Kingdom, United States, Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa), together with South Korea, Australia, Indonesia and South Africa. The meeting is to be hosted by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and is envisaged as the first of several extending into 2008. Initial reaction to the news of the conference invitation was mixed.
2007 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bali
Main article: 2007 United Nations Climate Change Conference
Negotiations on a successor to the Kyoto Protocol dominated the 2007 United Nations Climate Change Conference conference. A meeting of environment ministers and experts held in June called on the conference to agree a road-map, timetable and "concrete steps for the negotiations" with a view to reaching an agreement by 2009.
2008 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Poznań
Following preliminary talks in Bangkok, Bonn, and Accra,[21] the 2008 negotiations culminated in December with the 2008 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Poznań, Poland.
35th G8 Summit
September 2009 United Nations Secretary General´s Summit on Climate Change
United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon will convene a high-level event on Climate Change on 22 September 2009 to which Heads of State and Government have been invited. This event is intended to build further political momentum for an ambitious Copenhagen agreed outcome to be adopted at COP-15.
2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen (COP-15)
Copenhagen will be the center of climate change negotiations in 2009.
Following preparatory talks in Bonn, Bangkok and Barcelona, the 2009 conference will be held in December 2009 in Copenhagen, Denmark, and the treaty succeeding the Kyoto Protocol is expected to be adopted there.
Potential topics to be discussed include carbon capture and storage, biofuels, adaptation financing, technology transfer, sustainable agriculture, emissions targets, tropical forests and rural and transport electrification (plug-in hybrids)
Development of technologies will be important to reduce carbon emissions. Even if all carbon emissions stopped tomorrow, global warming would continue for the next 30 years. James E. Rogers, CEO of Duke Energy and member of Copenhagen Climate Council said “It is a myth that we have the technologies to do the job. We don’t. New technologies are crucial as is further development of existing technology.”
Some media sources claim that the meeting will lead to empty promises without measurable goals. In a recent meeting of the Group of Eight G8, the world top leaders agreed to halve carbon emissions by 2050; however, they did not set specific targets because they did not agree on a base year.
However members of the climate council acknowledge that action needs to happen fast. “My personal view is that the future of humanity is at stake,” said Tim Flannery, Professor at Macquaire University and chairman of the Copenhagen Climate Council, in an interview with chinadialogue.net.
UNFCCC negotiations are conducted within two subsidiary bodies, the Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action under the Convention (AWG-LCA) and the Ad Hoc Working Group on Further Commitments for Annex I Parties under the Kyoto Protocol (AWG-KP) and are expected to culminate in the United Nations Climate Change Conference taking place in December 2009 in Copenhagen (COP-15); negotiations are supported by a number of external processes, including the G8 process, a number of regional meetings and the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate that was launched by US President Barack Obama in March 2009. High level talks were held at the meeting of the G8+5 Climate Change Dialogue in February 2007 and at a number of subsequent G8 meetings, most recently leading to the adoption of the G8 leaders declaration "Responsible Leadership for a Sustainable Future" during the G8 summit in L´Aquila, Italy, in July 2009.
February 2007 Washington Declaration
In the non-binding "Washington Declaration" on February 16, 2007, the G8+5 group of leaders agreed in principle to a global cap-and-trade system that would apply to both industrialized nations and developing countries, which they hoped would be in place by 2009.
Official G8+5 Climate Change Dialogue Web site
33rd G8 summit
Leaders of the 33rd G8 summit
On June 7, 2007, leaders at the 33rd G8 summit issued a non-binding communiqué announcing that the G8 nations would "aim to at least halve global CO2 emissions by 2050". The details enabling this to be achieved would be negotiated by environment ministers within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in a process that would also include the major emerging economies. Groups of countries would also be able to reach additional agreements on achieving the goal outside and in parallel with the United Nations process. The G8 also announced their desire to use the proceeds from the auction of emission rights and other financial tools to support climate protection projects in developing countries.
The agreement was welcomed by British Prime Minister Tony Blair as "a major, major step forward".French president Nicolas Sarkozy would have preferred a binding figure for emissions reduction to have been set. This was apparently blocked by U.S. President George W. Bush until the other major greenhouse gas emitting countries, like India and China, make similar commitments.
2007 UN General Assembly plenary debate
As part of the schedule leading up to the September UN High-Level-Event, on July 31 the United Nations General Assembly opened its first-ever plenary session devoted exclusively to climate change, which also included prominent scientists and business leaders. The debate, at which nearly 100 nations spoke, was scheduled to last two days but was extended for a further day to allow a greater number of "worried nations" to describe their climate-related problems.
In his opening speech, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged Member States to work together, stating that the time had come for "decisive action on a global scale", and called for a "comprehensive agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change process that tackles climate change on all fronts, including adaptation, mitigation, clean technologies, deforestation and resource mobilization". In closing the conference General Assembly President Haya Rashed Al-Khalifa called for an "equitable, fair and ambitious global deal to match the scale of the challenges ahead".She had earlier stressed the urgency of the situation, stating that "the longer we wait, the more expensive this will be".
The day after the session ended, the UN launched its new climate change web site detailing its activities relating to global warming.
2007 Vienna Climate Change Talks and Agreement
A round of climate change talks under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) concluded in Austria in 31 August 2007 with agreement on key elements for an effective international response to climate change.
A key feature of the talks was a United Nations report that showed how energy efficiency could yield significant cuts in emissions at low cost.
The talks set the stage for the 2007 United Nations Climate Change Conference held in Bali in December 2007.
September 2007 United Nations High-Level-Event
As well as the meeting of the United Nations General Assembly, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was to hold informal high-level discussions on the post-Kyoto treaty on September 24. It was expected that these would pave the way for the United Nations Climate Change Conference, held in Bali in December 2007. Three Special Envoys on Climate Change, appointed on May 1, 2007, held discussions with various governments to define and plan the event.
In advance of the "High-Level-Event", the Secretary-General hoped that world leaders would "send a powerful political signal to the negotiations in Bali that “business as usual” will not do and that they are ready to work jointly with others towards a comprehensive multilateral framework for action".
September 2007 Washington conference
It emerged on August 3, 2007, that representatives of the United Nations, major industrialized and developing countries are being invited by George Bush to a conference in Washington on September 27 and 28. Countries invited are believed to include the members of the G8+5 (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, United Kingdom, United States, Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa), together with South Korea, Australia, Indonesia and South Africa. The meeting is to be hosted by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and is envisaged as the first of several extending into 2008. Initial reaction to the news of the conference invitation was mixed.
2007 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bali
Main article: 2007 United Nations Climate Change Conference
Negotiations on a successor to the Kyoto Protocol dominated the 2007 United Nations Climate Change Conference conference. A meeting of environment ministers and experts held in June called on the conference to agree a road-map, timetable and "concrete steps for the negotiations" with a view to reaching an agreement by 2009.
2008 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Poznań
Following preliminary talks in Bangkok, Bonn, and Accra,[21] the 2008 negotiations culminated in December with the 2008 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Poznań, Poland.
35th G8 Summit
September 2009 United Nations Secretary General´s Summit on Climate Change
United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon will convene a high-level event on Climate Change on 22 September 2009 to which Heads of State and Government have been invited. This event is intended to build further political momentum for an ambitious Copenhagen agreed outcome to be adopted at COP-15.
2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen (COP-15)
Copenhagen will be the center of climate change negotiations in 2009.
Following preparatory talks in Bonn, Bangkok and Barcelona, the 2009 conference will be held in December 2009 in Copenhagen, Denmark, and the treaty succeeding the Kyoto Protocol is expected to be adopted there.
Potential topics to be discussed include carbon capture and storage, biofuels, adaptation financing, technology transfer, sustainable agriculture, emissions targets, tropical forests and rural and transport electrification (plug-in hybrids)
Development of technologies will be important to reduce carbon emissions. Even if all carbon emissions stopped tomorrow, global warming would continue for the next 30 years. James E. Rogers, CEO of Duke Energy and member of Copenhagen Climate Council said “It is a myth that we have the technologies to do the job. We don’t. New technologies are crucial as is further development of existing technology.”
Some media sources claim that the meeting will lead to empty promises without measurable goals. In a recent meeting of the Group of Eight G8, the world top leaders agreed to halve carbon emissions by 2050; however, they did not set specific targets because they did not agree on a base year.
However members of the climate council acknowledge that action needs to happen fast. “My personal view is that the future of humanity is at stake,” said Tim Flannery, Professor at Macquaire University and chairman of the Copenhagen Climate Council, in an interview with chinadialogue.net.
Friday, November 20, 2009
360: Bottle Caps
Bottle caps are often so small that it’s easy to overlook the impact they have on the environment. If you drop one on the ground at the park or the beach, you may think it’s not a big deal.
But the Beach Environmental Awareness Campaign Hawaii (B.E.A.C.H.) found that “plastic bottle caps are one of the top 10 items found during marine debris beach clean-ups and are the second most littered item after cigarette butts.”
Recycling seems like a good option, but did you know that many cities don’t accept caps for recycling? Let’s get down to the bottom of the bottle cap mystery and find out how they’re recycled, where they’re accepted and what to do if your city doesn’t take them.
Discarding bottle caps doesn’t have to be a lose-lose situation. If you can’t recycle with your city, there are options with other organizations for turning them into valuable products. Photo: Amanda Wills, Earth911.com
All Plastics are Not Created Equal
Just by physical touch, you can tell the texture and durability of most plastic bottles is different from their caps. This is because bottles and caps are made from different types of plastics.
Polyethylene terepthalate (PET), or plastic #1, often comprises plastic bottle,s while polypropylene (PP), or plastic #5, often makes up the caps. So, what’s the big deal if the bottle is a #1 and the cap is a #5? They’re both plastic right?
It all comes down to the melting point, which has a difference of nearly 160 degrees Fahrenheit between the two. If a cap gets mixed in with bottles, the entire batch may be ruined because there is un-melted plastic in the mix.
Plastic Pays
All plastics go through the same recycling process. They’re sorted, baled, screened to remove contaminants, washed, ground into flakes, separated from contaminants, dried, melted, filtered and formed into pellets. This is an expensive and time-consuming process, and recyclers want to make sure it’s worth it financially.
Markets for different types of plastic vary around the country, but based on the recycling rates posted from the 2007 U.S. National Postconsumer Plastics Bottle Recyling Report, it’s easy to infer that there’s a larger market for PET, which has a recycling rate of nearly 25 percent, than PP, which has a rate of less than 9 percent. So, if your city does not accept bottle caps, it could be because the benefit is not large enough to support the cost.
What Major Cities are Doing
Let’s take a look at some cities that are taking steps to create bottle cap programs and others that do not accept caps for recycling.
* San Francisco accepts caps even if they’re left on the bottles.
* Washington, D.C. accepts emptied #1-7 plastics and lids.
* Houston also accepts lids, but unlike the two cities above, it asks that the lids be removed from the bottle. Also, be sure to rinse before tossing them into the bin.
* While New York City does not accept plastic caps, metal caps can be removed from bottles and placed in the bin for recycling.
* The City of Phoenix does not collect caps because #5 plastics “can damage the sorting equipment, be harmful to workers in the sorting facility or are too small to be sorted or make the sorting process inefficient.”
* San Diego also asks its residents not to recycle caps due to the differences in types of plastic. It does, however, accept metal caps.
To check if your city accepts caps for recycling call or visit the Public Works or Department of Sanitation section of its Web site. You can also search Earth911.com for plastic #5 or plastic bottle cap recycling locations.
How Private Companies are Stepping In
If you’re in an area where plastic cap recycling is not available, seek out retailers that accept them. A few of companies are taking the lead when it comes to tackling the issue of recycling #5 plastics.
Aveda, a company known for its commitment to improving its impact on the environment through its naturally-derived products, eco-friendly packaging and production processes, is now accepting #5 plastic bottle caps for recycling at its stores and salons. Any Aveda network salon or store will accept the caps to be made into new Aveda caps. Aveda recycles the caps into new packaging for some of its product lines.
Types of Caps Accepted
* Twist caps on threaded neck bottles (shampoo, soda, milk, water, etc.)
* Flip caps on tubes and food product bottles (condiments, etc.)
* Jar lids (peanut butter, pickles, etc.)
* Laundry detergent lids
Caps Not Accepted
* Pharmaceutical lids
* Metal lids
* Plastic pumps or sprayers
* Bendable or breakable lids
Preserve, in partnership with Stonyfield Farms and Organic Valley, is another company that accepts #5 plastics for recycling. You can mail in your caps to Preserve or drop them off at your local Whole Foods location.
What’s Accepted?
* Any plastics clean and stamped with the number 5
* Filters from Brita water pitchers
* Used Preserve products
What Do They Make From RecycledCaps?
* Preserve products
* Personal care items, such as razors and toothbrushes
* Tableware, such as plates and cutlery
* Kitchenware, such as measuring cups and cutting boards
But the Beach Environmental Awareness Campaign Hawaii (B.E.A.C.H.) found that “plastic bottle caps are one of the top 10 items found during marine debris beach clean-ups and are the second most littered item after cigarette butts.”
Recycling seems like a good option, but did you know that many cities don’t accept caps for recycling? Let’s get down to the bottom of the bottle cap mystery and find out how they’re recycled, where they’re accepted and what to do if your city doesn’t take them.
Discarding bottle caps doesn’t have to be a lose-lose situation. If you can’t recycle with your city, there are options with other organizations for turning them into valuable products. Photo: Amanda Wills, Earth911.com
All Plastics are Not Created Equal
Just by physical touch, you can tell the texture and durability of most plastic bottles is different from their caps. This is because bottles and caps are made from different types of plastics.
Polyethylene terepthalate (PET), or plastic #1, often comprises plastic bottle,s while polypropylene (PP), or plastic #5, often makes up the caps. So, what’s the big deal if the bottle is a #1 and the cap is a #5? They’re both plastic right?
It all comes down to the melting point, which has a difference of nearly 160 degrees Fahrenheit between the two. If a cap gets mixed in with bottles, the entire batch may be ruined because there is un-melted plastic in the mix.
Plastic Pays
All plastics go through the same recycling process. They’re sorted, baled, screened to remove contaminants, washed, ground into flakes, separated from contaminants, dried, melted, filtered and formed into pellets. This is an expensive and time-consuming process, and recyclers want to make sure it’s worth it financially.
Markets for different types of plastic vary around the country, but based on the recycling rates posted from the 2007 U.S. National Postconsumer Plastics Bottle Recyling Report, it’s easy to infer that there’s a larger market for PET, which has a recycling rate of nearly 25 percent, than PP, which has a rate of less than 9 percent. So, if your city does not accept bottle caps, it could be because the benefit is not large enough to support the cost.
What Major Cities are Doing
Let’s take a look at some cities that are taking steps to create bottle cap programs and others that do not accept caps for recycling.
* San Francisco accepts caps even if they’re left on the bottles.
* Washington, D.C. accepts emptied #1-7 plastics and lids.
* Houston also accepts lids, but unlike the two cities above, it asks that the lids be removed from the bottle. Also, be sure to rinse before tossing them into the bin.
* While New York City does not accept plastic caps, metal caps can be removed from bottles and placed in the bin for recycling.
* The City of Phoenix does not collect caps because #5 plastics “can damage the sorting equipment, be harmful to workers in the sorting facility or are too small to be sorted or make the sorting process inefficient.”
* San Diego also asks its residents not to recycle caps due to the differences in types of plastic. It does, however, accept metal caps.
To check if your city accepts caps for recycling call or visit the Public Works or Department of Sanitation section of its Web site. You can also search Earth911.com for plastic #5 or plastic bottle cap recycling locations.
How Private Companies are Stepping In
If you’re in an area where plastic cap recycling is not available, seek out retailers that accept them. A few of companies are taking the lead when it comes to tackling the issue of recycling #5 plastics.
Aveda, a company known for its commitment to improving its impact on the environment through its naturally-derived products, eco-friendly packaging and production processes, is now accepting #5 plastic bottle caps for recycling at its stores and salons. Any Aveda network salon or store will accept the caps to be made into new Aveda caps. Aveda recycles the caps into new packaging for some of its product lines.
Types of Caps Accepted
* Twist caps on threaded neck bottles (shampoo, soda, milk, water, etc.)
* Flip caps on tubes and food product bottles (condiments, etc.)
* Jar lids (peanut butter, pickles, etc.)
* Laundry detergent lids
Caps Not Accepted
* Pharmaceutical lids
* Metal lids
* Plastic pumps or sprayers
* Bendable or breakable lids
Preserve, in partnership with Stonyfield Farms and Organic Valley, is another company that accepts #5 plastics for recycling. You can mail in your caps to Preserve or drop them off at your local Whole Foods location.
What’s Accepted?
* Any plastics clean and stamped with the number 5
* Filters from Brita water pitchers
* Used Preserve products
What Do They Make From RecycledCaps?
* Preserve products
* Personal care items, such as razors and toothbrushes
* Tableware, such as plates and cutlery
* Kitchenware, such as measuring cups and cutting boards
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Chevron
The global demand for energy will increase in the coming decades, and this rising demand presents significant opportunities for our industry. As demand increases, however, the complexities of global climate change also pose serious questions for the energy industry and the broader society. At Chevron, we are working to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and expand our energy supply portfolio to meet the demands of customers for affordable, reliable and lowerimpact supplies of energy.
Our multifaceted response to climate change involves seeking ways to reduce GHGs from the use of fossil fuels, expanding the use of alternative fuels and renewables, and improving energy efficiency.
Climate Change and Chevron's Response
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states in its Fourth Assessment Report that most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to manmade GHGs. Chevron is working to be part of the solution to the energy and climate challenge facing the world. Near-term mitigation actions, development of advanced energy technologies for the long term, and adaptation to the potential impacts of climate change are needed to meet the challenge.
Our Action Plan on Climate Change
Now in its seventh year of implementation, Chevron's Action Plan on Climate Change continues to guide our activities, including emissions reduction, efficiency improvements, research investments, business opportunities and advocacy positions. While we continued to grow our business, our total GHG emissions remained relatively flat due to the efforts that follow.
In 2008, our total emissions were 59.6 million metric tons, which is better than our goal of 62.5 million metric tons.1 Our preliminary goal for 2009 is 60.5 million metric tons, slightly higher than 2008's actual emissions. This goal accounts for emissions growth from new major capital projects and emissions reductions from anticipated declining production from maturing fields, continued energy efficiency in our operations, and continued reduction in flaring and venting. We estimate that combustion of our products resulted in emissions of approximately 382 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 20082 — about 5 percent less than the 404 million metric tons in 2007. When compared with the International Energy Agency's Key World Energy Statistics (2008 edition), these emissions represent approximately 1.4 percent of global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels. Our GHG emissions intensity in 2008 was approximately 37 metric tons of CO2 equivalent per 1,000 barrels of net oil-equivalent production from our upstream operations and 36 metric tons of CO2 equivalent per 1,000 barrels of crude oil that was input into our refineries.
Reducing Emissions
Flaring
Routine flaring and venting of the natural gas associated with crude oil extraction are a significant source of our total corporate GHG emissions. We remain committed in our efforts to reduce routine flaring and venting in our operations. Since 2003, we have reduced emissions from flaring and venting by about 15 percent on an equity basis, and we continue to work aggressively to reduce routine flaring and venting in our operations wherever technically and commercially feasible.
Chevron's flaring reduction standard is aligned with the World Bank–led Global Gas Flaring Reduction voluntary initiative, a public-private partnership that is active in several developing countries where we operate. While we have made significant progress in reducing routine flaring and venting from our operations, we face many challenges, including local security, approval delays, partner funding, competing government investment priorities, materials availability and the lack of infrastructure. In these limited circumstances, flaring is currently the safest and most feasible way to manage the associated gas in the near term.
We are actively pursuing projects to further address this challenging problem in Angola, Kazakhstan and Nigeria. These long-term projects include major processing capacity to convert gas into liquid fuel that can be more readily used in the marketplace, and the commissioning of a new pipeline that will carry natural gas from the Niger Delta to Ghana and other markets. Construction is completed on the pipeline and testing is under way before the line is put into service.
Reinjection is one option to reduce flaring when there are suitable reservoir conditions and when the comparatively large financial investment is justified by the technical feasibility and expected life of the project or the expected duration of the need for injection. An example of a feasible and successful reinjection project is at the Agbami deepwater field in Nigeria. Other projects, for example, those that have a strong likelihood of near-term development of gas markets, are not generally candidates for reinjection.
Carbon Sequestration
Chevron holds large natural gas reserves in Australia and is making major investments to reduce GHG emissions. Our Gorgon project, located more than 81 miles (130 km) off the northwest coast, will produce liquefied natural gas, a lower-carbon fossil fuel. The project will include large-scale reinjection and storage of carbon dioxide. Gorgon represents the world's first commercial-scale GHG storage project to undergo an environmental impact assessment including public review and comment. In addition, Chevron and its joint-venture partners — ExxonMobil and Shell — committed to public disclosure of monitoring data from the injection project to assist in the further development of sequestration technology.
Improving Efficiency
Improving our energy efficiency lowers the life-cycle emissions of our products. In 2008, we updated our energy efficiency evaluation process to design new capital projects to optimize energy use. This allows cost-effective conservation measures to be part of the initial design. We incorporate the cost of carbon emissions in our decision-making process for capital projects. In 2008, we initiated a major effort to upgrade our GHG evaluation tools and methodology, which will improve our ability to assess the potential impact of the GHG emissions from our proposed activities and to identify the most cost-effective ways to address those emissions.
As of 2008, Chevron reduced the total energy consumption required to complete all of its business functions by 28 percent compared with the energy the company would have consumed in 1992 to complete the same business functions. In 2008, the cost of energy to the company was approximately $7.6 billion. For our company's operated assets, the total energy consumption in 2008 was approximately 914 trillion Btu. Because fuel combustion is the largest source of GHG emissions from our operations, improving our overall energy efficiency represents a corresponding reduction in our carbon emissions. We are increasingly attentive to opportunities to save on energy costs — as seen in the projects that follow.
As part of the upgrades planned for our refineries in El Segundo and Richmond, California, we proposed adding to the existing cogeneration facilities at both locations. Onsite cogeneration is a highly efficient technology that replaces the need for generating steam in a boiler and for purchasing electricity offsite.
The Richmond Refinery is the most energy efficient of all Chevron's operated refineries, and the workforce is always looking for ways to make the refinery more efficient. Approximately one-fourth of the refinery's annual operating costs represent fuel costs associated with producing steam throughout the facility. With strong support from senior management at the site, a coordinated team of operations, maintenance staff and facility engineers are working together to look for ways to optimize overall steam use and minimize venting waste steam. Compared with 2007, Richmond reduced its annual use of fired steam by about 17 percent, representing significant cost savings and the avoidance of an estimated 90,000 metric tons of GHG emissions.
Chevron Energy Solutions Co. assisted our Richmond, California, refinery in installing 55 kilowatts of solar power generation to help meet the facility's electricity needs with clean, renewable energy.
We continued to improve fuel efficiency in our shipping fleet by instituting a propeller painting and polishing initiative on our oil tankers. By reducing resistance across the propeller blades, we are able to decrease the amount of oil required to power each tanker by approximately 24 barrels per operating day.
We joined with the other members of the European Petroleum Industry Association to develop and launch an industrywide driver awareness campaign to promote more fuel-efficient driving habits among Europe's motorists.
Through a variety of employee-based programs, such as supporting vanpooling and public transit subsidies in some locations, we encourage our workforce to reduce miles traveled. And our recently launched "I Will" campaign, visible to the public, deals with energy conservation and efficiency, sharing facts about our corporate efforts and highlighting energy saving measures of individuals, such as vanpooling and unplugging appliances not in use.
Pursuing Business Opportunities and Investing in Research, Development and Technology
Chevron invests in research partnerships to develop alternative fuels whose life-cycle production results in less CO2 than do conventional liquid fuels per unit of energy.
Chevron Technology Ventures is working on a number of research projects and partnerships to develop low-carbon fuel from biomass.
Through our partnerships with universities, such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California at Davis, we are supporting innovative research in the environmental and economic impacts of climate change as well as in energy efficiency and other strategies to help reduce overall GHG emissions.
Chevron participates in joint-industry projects to enable the development and safe, widespread deployment of significantly lower-cost carbon capture and storage technologies. These projects draw on the best talent offered by the participating companies, universities, government and private research organizations to investigate a broad range of potential technologies in order to commercialize those that offer the most benefit to the participants. Chevron actively participates in the Cooperative Research Center for Greenhouse Gas Technologies (http://www.co2crc.com.au) and the CO2 Capture Project (http://www.co2captureproject.org). In addition to financial support, Chevron provides industry guidance, technical expertise, and program management. Results from these research efforts are being integrated into Chevron's Gorgon liquefied natural gas project in Australia and may be considered for potential future projects involving CO2 capture and storage.
Supporting Flexible and Economically Sound Policies
Our Seven Principles for Addressing Climate Change summarize the fundamental aspects of achieving a sustainable and economically viable carbon management program. We are actively engaged with governments and nongovernmental organizations in several jurisdictions currently considering climate policies — including in Australia, Canada and the United States (in California and other jurisdictions) — advocating for sound climate policy in line with our Seven Principles.
1. Chevron's net decrease of approximately 0.8 million metric tons of CO2- equivalent emissions from 2007 to 2008 can be attributed primarily to reduced flaring accounting for 1 million metric tons at the Cabinda (Angola) and Nigeria operations. Flare reductions in Nigeria are attributed to the Escravos Gas Plant facility and shutdowns caused by sabotage to pipelines. Continuing energy efficiency improvements also helped to minimize growth in emissions. Additional significant reduction of GHG emissions is attributed to decreased production in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico and California. Chevron Shipping Co. also lowered its emissions. Decreases were offset by emissions from a new deepwater operation in Nigeria; increased GHG emissions from Chevron’s share of the Yeosu Refinery in South Korea, which saw a new heavy oil unit come onstream; increased throughput at Chevron’s Richmond Refinery; and increased production from Chevron’s U.S. midcontinent upstream operations.
Chevron's 2007 emissions have been restated to 60.4 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent from 60.7 million metric tons due to a correction in data primarily from two business units.
Chevron's 2008 GHG emissions data are reported on an equity basis for all businesses in which Chevron has an interest except where noted as follows. The following entities are not currently included in the Chevron corporate GHG inventory: Chevron Phillips Chemical Co., the Caspian Pipeline Consortium, the Azerbaijan International Operating Co., the Chad/Cameroon pipeline joint venture, Caltex Australia Ltd.'s Lytton and Kurnell refineries, and other refineries in which Chevron has an equity interest of 16 percent or less. These are entities over which Chevron does not have full operational control or which do not generally follow Chevron’s corporate GHG inventory protocol or a compatible protocol.
Due to rounding, individual numbers may not sum to the total numbers.
2. Product emissions are calculated based on total 2008 upstream liquids, gas and coal production figures from Chevron's 2008 Annual Report. The emissions factors used are from the American Petroleum Institute's Compendium of Greenhouse Gas Emissions Estimations Methodologies for the Oil and Gas Industry, published in 2004.
Updated: May 2009
Our multifaceted response to climate change involves seeking ways to reduce GHGs from the use of fossil fuels, expanding the use of alternative fuels and renewables, and improving energy efficiency.
Climate Change and Chevron's Response
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states in its Fourth Assessment Report that most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to manmade GHGs. Chevron is working to be part of the solution to the energy and climate challenge facing the world. Near-term mitigation actions, development of advanced energy technologies for the long term, and adaptation to the potential impacts of climate change are needed to meet the challenge.
Our Action Plan on Climate Change
Now in its seventh year of implementation, Chevron's Action Plan on Climate Change continues to guide our activities, including emissions reduction, efficiency improvements, research investments, business opportunities and advocacy positions. While we continued to grow our business, our total GHG emissions remained relatively flat due to the efforts that follow.
In 2008, our total emissions were 59.6 million metric tons, which is better than our goal of 62.5 million metric tons.1 Our preliminary goal for 2009 is 60.5 million metric tons, slightly higher than 2008's actual emissions. This goal accounts for emissions growth from new major capital projects and emissions reductions from anticipated declining production from maturing fields, continued energy efficiency in our operations, and continued reduction in flaring and venting. We estimate that combustion of our products resulted in emissions of approximately 382 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 20082 — about 5 percent less than the 404 million metric tons in 2007. When compared with the International Energy Agency's Key World Energy Statistics (2008 edition), these emissions represent approximately 1.4 percent of global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels. Our GHG emissions intensity in 2008 was approximately 37 metric tons of CO2 equivalent per 1,000 barrels of net oil-equivalent production from our upstream operations and 36 metric tons of CO2 equivalent per 1,000 barrels of crude oil that was input into our refineries.
Reducing Emissions
Flaring
Routine flaring and venting of the natural gas associated with crude oil extraction are a significant source of our total corporate GHG emissions. We remain committed in our efforts to reduce routine flaring and venting in our operations. Since 2003, we have reduced emissions from flaring and venting by about 15 percent on an equity basis, and we continue to work aggressively to reduce routine flaring and venting in our operations wherever technically and commercially feasible.
Chevron's flaring reduction standard is aligned with the World Bank–led Global Gas Flaring Reduction voluntary initiative, a public-private partnership that is active in several developing countries where we operate. While we have made significant progress in reducing routine flaring and venting from our operations, we face many challenges, including local security, approval delays, partner funding, competing government investment priorities, materials availability and the lack of infrastructure. In these limited circumstances, flaring is currently the safest and most feasible way to manage the associated gas in the near term.
We are actively pursuing projects to further address this challenging problem in Angola, Kazakhstan and Nigeria. These long-term projects include major processing capacity to convert gas into liquid fuel that can be more readily used in the marketplace, and the commissioning of a new pipeline that will carry natural gas from the Niger Delta to Ghana and other markets. Construction is completed on the pipeline and testing is under way before the line is put into service.
Reinjection is one option to reduce flaring when there are suitable reservoir conditions and when the comparatively large financial investment is justified by the technical feasibility and expected life of the project or the expected duration of the need for injection. An example of a feasible and successful reinjection project is at the Agbami deepwater field in Nigeria. Other projects, for example, those that have a strong likelihood of near-term development of gas markets, are not generally candidates for reinjection.
Carbon Sequestration
Chevron holds large natural gas reserves in Australia and is making major investments to reduce GHG emissions. Our Gorgon project, located more than 81 miles (130 km) off the northwest coast, will produce liquefied natural gas, a lower-carbon fossil fuel. The project will include large-scale reinjection and storage of carbon dioxide. Gorgon represents the world's first commercial-scale GHG storage project to undergo an environmental impact assessment including public review and comment. In addition, Chevron and its joint-venture partners — ExxonMobil and Shell — committed to public disclosure of monitoring data from the injection project to assist in the further development of sequestration technology.
Improving Efficiency
Improving our energy efficiency lowers the life-cycle emissions of our products. In 2008, we updated our energy efficiency evaluation process to design new capital projects to optimize energy use. This allows cost-effective conservation measures to be part of the initial design. We incorporate the cost of carbon emissions in our decision-making process for capital projects. In 2008, we initiated a major effort to upgrade our GHG evaluation tools and methodology, which will improve our ability to assess the potential impact of the GHG emissions from our proposed activities and to identify the most cost-effective ways to address those emissions.
As of 2008, Chevron reduced the total energy consumption required to complete all of its business functions by 28 percent compared with the energy the company would have consumed in 1992 to complete the same business functions. In 2008, the cost of energy to the company was approximately $7.6 billion. For our company's operated assets, the total energy consumption in 2008 was approximately 914 trillion Btu. Because fuel combustion is the largest source of GHG emissions from our operations, improving our overall energy efficiency represents a corresponding reduction in our carbon emissions. We are increasingly attentive to opportunities to save on energy costs — as seen in the projects that follow.
As part of the upgrades planned for our refineries in El Segundo and Richmond, California, we proposed adding to the existing cogeneration facilities at both locations. Onsite cogeneration is a highly efficient technology that replaces the need for generating steam in a boiler and for purchasing electricity offsite.
The Richmond Refinery is the most energy efficient of all Chevron's operated refineries, and the workforce is always looking for ways to make the refinery more efficient. Approximately one-fourth of the refinery's annual operating costs represent fuel costs associated with producing steam throughout the facility. With strong support from senior management at the site, a coordinated team of operations, maintenance staff and facility engineers are working together to look for ways to optimize overall steam use and minimize venting waste steam. Compared with 2007, Richmond reduced its annual use of fired steam by about 17 percent, representing significant cost savings and the avoidance of an estimated 90,000 metric tons of GHG emissions.
Chevron Energy Solutions Co. assisted our Richmond, California, refinery in installing 55 kilowatts of solar power generation to help meet the facility's electricity needs with clean, renewable energy.
We continued to improve fuel efficiency in our shipping fleet by instituting a propeller painting and polishing initiative on our oil tankers. By reducing resistance across the propeller blades, we are able to decrease the amount of oil required to power each tanker by approximately 24 barrels per operating day.
We joined with the other members of the European Petroleum Industry Association to develop and launch an industrywide driver awareness campaign to promote more fuel-efficient driving habits among Europe's motorists.
Through a variety of employee-based programs, such as supporting vanpooling and public transit subsidies in some locations, we encourage our workforce to reduce miles traveled. And our recently launched "I Will" campaign, visible to the public, deals with energy conservation and efficiency, sharing facts about our corporate efforts and highlighting energy saving measures of individuals, such as vanpooling and unplugging appliances not in use.
Pursuing Business Opportunities and Investing in Research, Development and Technology
Chevron invests in research partnerships to develop alternative fuels whose life-cycle production results in less CO2 than do conventional liquid fuels per unit of energy.
Chevron Technology Ventures is working on a number of research projects and partnerships to develop low-carbon fuel from biomass.
Through our partnerships with universities, such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California at Davis, we are supporting innovative research in the environmental and economic impacts of climate change as well as in energy efficiency and other strategies to help reduce overall GHG emissions.
Chevron participates in joint-industry projects to enable the development and safe, widespread deployment of significantly lower-cost carbon capture and storage technologies. These projects draw on the best talent offered by the participating companies, universities, government and private research organizations to investigate a broad range of potential technologies in order to commercialize those that offer the most benefit to the participants. Chevron actively participates in the Cooperative Research Center for Greenhouse Gas Technologies (http://www.co2crc.com.au) and the CO2 Capture Project (http://www.co2captureproject.org). In addition to financial support, Chevron provides industry guidance, technical expertise, and program management. Results from these research efforts are being integrated into Chevron's Gorgon liquefied natural gas project in Australia and may be considered for potential future projects involving CO2 capture and storage.
Supporting Flexible and Economically Sound Policies
Our Seven Principles for Addressing Climate Change summarize the fundamental aspects of achieving a sustainable and economically viable carbon management program. We are actively engaged with governments and nongovernmental organizations in several jurisdictions currently considering climate policies — including in Australia, Canada and the United States (in California and other jurisdictions) — advocating for sound climate policy in line with our Seven Principles.
1. Chevron's net decrease of approximately 0.8 million metric tons of CO2- equivalent emissions from 2007 to 2008 can be attributed primarily to reduced flaring accounting for 1 million metric tons at the Cabinda (Angola) and Nigeria operations. Flare reductions in Nigeria are attributed to the Escravos Gas Plant facility and shutdowns caused by sabotage to pipelines. Continuing energy efficiency improvements also helped to minimize growth in emissions. Additional significant reduction of GHG emissions is attributed to decreased production in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico and California. Chevron Shipping Co. also lowered its emissions. Decreases were offset by emissions from a new deepwater operation in Nigeria; increased GHG emissions from Chevron’s share of the Yeosu Refinery in South Korea, which saw a new heavy oil unit come onstream; increased throughput at Chevron’s Richmond Refinery; and increased production from Chevron’s U.S. midcontinent upstream operations.
Chevron's 2007 emissions have been restated to 60.4 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent from 60.7 million metric tons due to a correction in data primarily from two business units.
Chevron's 2008 GHG emissions data are reported on an equity basis for all businesses in which Chevron has an interest except where noted as follows. The following entities are not currently included in the Chevron corporate GHG inventory: Chevron Phillips Chemical Co., the Caspian Pipeline Consortium, the Azerbaijan International Operating Co., the Chad/Cameroon pipeline joint venture, Caltex Australia Ltd.'s Lytton and Kurnell refineries, and other refineries in which Chevron has an equity interest of 16 percent or less. These are entities over which Chevron does not have full operational control or which do not generally follow Chevron’s corporate GHG inventory protocol or a compatible protocol.
Due to rounding, individual numbers may not sum to the total numbers.
2. Product emissions are calculated based on total 2008 upstream liquids, gas and coal production figures from Chevron's 2008 Annual Report. The emissions factors used are from the American Petroleum Institute's Compendium of Greenhouse Gas Emissions Estimations Methodologies for the Oil and Gas Industry, published in 2004.
Updated: May 2009
Greenland Ice Cap Melting Faster Than Ever
Nov 2009
Satellite observations and a state-of-the art regional atmospheric model have independently confirmed that the Greenland ice sheet is losing mass at an accelerating rate, reports a new study in Science.
This mass loss is equally distributed between increased iceberg production, driven by acceleration of Greenland's fast-flowing outlet glaciers, and increased meltwater production at the ice sheet surface. Recent warm summers further accelerated the mass loss to 273 Gt per year (1 Gt is the mass of 1 cubic kilometre of water), in the period 2006-2008, which represents 0.75 mm of global sea level rise per year.
Professor Jonathan Bamber from the University of Bristol and an author on the paper said: "It is clear from these results that mass loss from Greenland has been accelerating since the late 1990s and the underlying causes suggest this trend is likely to continue in the near future. We have produced agreement between two totally independent estimates, giving us a lot of confidence in the numbers and our inferences about the processes".
The Greenland ice sheet contains enough water to cause a global sea level rise of seven metres. Since 2000, the ice sheet has lost about 1500 Gt in total, representing on average a global sea level rise of about half a millimetre per year, or 5 mm since 2000.
At the same time that surface melting started to increase around 1996, snowfall on the ice sheet also increased at approximately the same rate, masking surface mass losses for nearly a decade. Moreover, a significant part of the additional meltwater refroze in the cold snowpack that covers the ice sheet. Without these moderating effects, post-1996 Greenland mass loss would have been double the amount of mass loss observed now.
This work was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council.
Story Source:
Adapted from materials provided by University of Bristol.
Journal Reference:
1. Michiel van den Broeke, Jonathan Bamber, Janneke Ettema, Eric Rignot, Ernst Schrama, Willem Jan van de Berg, Erik van Meijgaard, Isabella Velicogna, Bert Wouters. Partitioning Recent Greenland Mass Loss. Science, 2009; 326 (5955): 984 DOI: 10.1126/science.1178176
Satellite observations and a state-of-the art regional atmospheric model have independently confirmed that the Greenland ice sheet is losing mass at an accelerating rate, reports a new study in Science.
This mass loss is equally distributed between increased iceberg production, driven by acceleration of Greenland's fast-flowing outlet glaciers, and increased meltwater production at the ice sheet surface. Recent warm summers further accelerated the mass loss to 273 Gt per year (1 Gt is the mass of 1 cubic kilometre of water), in the period 2006-2008, which represents 0.75 mm of global sea level rise per year.
Professor Jonathan Bamber from the University of Bristol and an author on the paper said: "It is clear from these results that mass loss from Greenland has been accelerating since the late 1990s and the underlying causes suggest this trend is likely to continue in the near future. We have produced agreement between two totally independent estimates, giving us a lot of confidence in the numbers and our inferences about the processes".
The Greenland ice sheet contains enough water to cause a global sea level rise of seven metres. Since 2000, the ice sheet has lost about 1500 Gt in total, representing on average a global sea level rise of about half a millimetre per year, or 5 mm since 2000.
At the same time that surface melting started to increase around 1996, snowfall on the ice sheet also increased at approximately the same rate, masking surface mass losses for nearly a decade. Moreover, a significant part of the additional meltwater refroze in the cold snowpack that covers the ice sheet. Without these moderating effects, post-1996 Greenland mass loss would have been double the amount of mass loss observed now.
This work was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council.
Story Source:
Adapted from materials provided by University of Bristol.
Journal Reference:
1. Michiel van den Broeke, Jonathan Bamber, Janneke Ettema, Eric Rignot, Ernst Schrama, Willem Jan van de Berg, Erik van Meijgaard, Isabella Velicogna, Bert Wouters. Partitioning Recent Greenland Mass Loss. Science, 2009; 326 (5955): 984 DOI: 10.1126/science.1178176
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