Maldives Government Endorses World’s First Strategic National Action Plan Integrating Disaster Risk Reduction, Climate Change Adaptation

24 June 2011, Bangkok – The Government of the Maldives has fully endorsed the world’s first Strategic National Action Plan (SNAP) that integrates Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) and Climate Change Adaptation (CCA).


The Disaster Management Centre Maldives has welcomed what is states is a landmark achievement for the country towards preparedness.

SNAP was officially endorsed on behalf of the Government by the Minister of Environment, Hon. Mohamed Aslam, on behalf of the Government of the Maldives on 8 June 2011 who said, “The Ministry has always been working towards risk reduction and resilience for the Nation and island communities. This SNAP concept is prepared in accordance with the necessary strategic plans and Manifestos of the government.”

The new action plan which places DRR and CCA in the development planning of the Maldives is a collaboration led by of the Government of Maldives with support from the United Nations system in the Maldives and the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR). SNAP is guided by both the Hyogo Framework of Action, a global blueprint for reducing disaster risks which was adopted in Kobe Japan in January 2005, as well as the objectives of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Based on broad consultations with key sectors such as housing, construction, environment, health, education, media, development planning and tourism, SNAP builds upon lessons learned from past disasters. It promotes good governance, empowers local communities, builds resilience, and promotes risk sensitive regional and local development. A unique feature of SNAP Maldives is its focus on aspects of governance, and decentralisation, as key for successful DRR and CCA.

The Disaster Management Centre Maldives has welcomed what is states is a landmark achievement for the country towards preparedness.

SNAP was officially endorsed on behalf of the Government by the Minister of Environment, Hon. Mohamed Aslam, on behalf of the Government of the Maldives on 8 June 2011 who said, “The Ministry has always been working towards risk reduction and resilience for the Nation and island communities. This SNAP concept is prepared in accordance with the necessary strategic plans and Manifestos of the government.”

The new action plan which places DRR and CCA in the development planning of the Maldives is a collaboration led by of the Government of Maldives with support from the United Nations system in the Maldives and the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR). SNAP is guided by both the Hyogo Framework of Action, a global blueprint for reducing disaster risks which was adopted in Kobe Japan in January 2005, as well as the objectives of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Based on broad consultations with key sectors such as housing, construction, environment, health, education, media, development planning and tourism, SNAP builds upon lessons learned from past disasters. It promotes good governance, empowers local communities, builds resilience, and promotes risk sensitive regional and local development. A unique feature of SNAP Maldives is its focus on aspects of governance, and decentralisation, as key for successful DRR and CCA. Full Article >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

The Good News About Coal

During the years when governments and the media were focused on preparations for the 2009 Copenhagen climate negotiations, a powerful climate movement was emerging in the United States: the movement opposing the construction of new coal-fired power plants.


Environmental groups, both national and local, are opposing coal plants because they are the primary driver of climate change. Emissions from coal plants are also responsible for 13,200 U.S. deaths annually—a number that dwarfs the U.S. lives lost in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.

What began as a few local ripples of resistance quickly evolved into a national tidal wave of grassroots opposition from environmental, health, farm, and community organizations. Despite a heavily funded industry campaign to promote “clean coal,” the American public is turning against coal. In a national poll that asked which electricity source people would prefer, only 3 percent chose coal. The Sierra Club, which has kept a tally of proposed coal-fired power plants and their fates since 2000, reports that 152 plants in the United States have been defeated or abandoned.

An early turning point in the coal war came in June 2007, when Florida’s Public Service Commission refused to license a huge $5.7-billion, 1,960-megawatt coal plant because the utility proposing it could not prove that building the plant would be cheaper than investing in conservation, efficiency, or renewable energy. This point, frequently made by lawyers from Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental legal group, combined with widely expressed public opposition to any more coal-fired power plants in Florida, led to the quiet withdrawal of four other coal plant proposals in the state.
Full Article >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

If The Sea Is In Trouble, We Are All In Trouble

The report that the ocean is in trouble is no surprise. What is shocking is that it has taken so long for us to make the connection between the state of the ocean and everything we care about – the economy, health, security – and the existence of life itself.


If the ocean is in trouble – and it is – we are in trouble. Charles Clover pointed this out in The End of the Line, and Callum Roberts provided detailed documentation of the collapse of ocean wildlife – and the consequences – in The Unnatural History of the Sea.

Since the middle of the 20th century, more has been learned about the ocean than during all preceding human history; at the same time, more has been lost. Some 90 per cent of many fish, large and small, have been extracted. Some face extinction owing to the ocean's most voracious predator – us.

We are now appearing to wage war on life in the sea with sonars, spotter aircraft, advanced communications, factory trawlers, thousands of miles of long lines, and global marketing of creatures no one had heard of until recent years. Nothing has prepared sharks, squid, krill and other sea creatures for industrial-scale extraction that destroys entire ecosystems while targeting a few species. More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

Why Localisation Is A Key Part Of The Answer

Last week it emerged that the Department of Energy and Climate Change, whose official position remains that "we do not have any contingency plans specific to a peak in oil production", was actually stating in internal documents released under the Freedom of Information Act that "it is not possible to predict with any accuracy exactly when or why oil production will peak".


Energy bills are going nowhere other than up, with knock-on effects across the economy. The fossil fuels of the future will be dirtier, more expensive and from less accessible places. At the same time, the need to decarbonise is urgent. The world's carbon emissions increased in 2010 by a record amount, in spite of many of the world's economies being in recession, and 19 countries recorded their hottest ever temperatures.

In March, Mervyn King, Governor Bank of England, said: "This is not like an ordinary recession where you lose output and get it back quickly. You may not get it back for many years, if ever, and that is a big, long-run loss of living standards for all people in this country." When something isn't working, it behoves us to question whether a different approach might be more appropriate.

One such approach, spreading around the world with great vigour, is the Transition movement. It suggests that within the challenges of peak oil, climate change, and our economic troubles lies a huge opportunity. In the same way that vast amounts of cheap fossil fuels made globalisation possible, the end of the age of cheap oil will inevitably put globalisation into reverse. More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

International Climate Protection Fellowships

The International Climate Protection Fellowships enable prospective leaders to conduct a research-related project of their own choice during a one-year stay in Germany.


Submit an application if you are a prospective leader from a non-European threshold or developing country (see list of countries) working in the field of climate protection and resource conservation in academia, business or administration in your country. Applicants must provide a clearly visible leadership potential either by experience in a first leadership position or be able to provide appropriate references. They must also have completed their first university degree (Bachelor’s or equivalent academic degree) less than 12 years prior to the start of the fellowship (1 September 2012) with outstanding results.
They must also hold a further academic or professional qualification (Master’s, PhD, LL.M., MBA etc.) or have extensive professional experience in a leadership role (at least 48 months at the time of application). Furthermore, they are expected to have gained initial practical experience through involvement in projects related to climate protection and resource conservation. The fellowship will enable the recipients to conduct a research-related project of their own choice with hosts in Germany whom they are free to choose themselves. More >>>

Groundwater Depletion Rate Accelerating Worldwide

ScienceDaily — In recent decades, the rate at which humans worldwide are pumping dry the vast underground stores of water that billions depend on has more than doubled, say scientists who have conducted an unusual, global assessment of groundwater use.


These fast-shrinking subterranean reservoirs are essential to daily life and agriculture in many regions, while also sustaining streams, wetlands, and ecosystems and resisting land subsidence and salt water intrusion into fresh water supplies. Today, people are drawing so much water from below that they are adding enough of it to the oceans (mainly by evaporation, then precipitation) to account for about 25 percent of the annual sea level rise across the planet, the researchers find.

Soaring global groundwater depletion bodes a potential disaster for an increasingly globalized agricultural system, says Marc Bierkens of Utrecht University in Utrecht, the Netherlands, and leader of the new study.
More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

Growing Goat Herds Signal Global Grassland Decline

After the earth was created, soil formed slowly over geological time from the weathering of rocks. It began to support early plant life, which protected and enriched it until it became the topsoil that sustains the diversity of plants and animals we know today.


Now the world’s ever-growing herds of cattle, sheep, and goats are converting vast stretches of grassland to desert. One indicator that helps us assess grassland health is changes in the goat population relative to those of sheep and cattle. As grasslands deteriorate, grass is typically replaced by desert shrubs. In such a degraded environment, cattle and sheep do not fare well. But goats—being particularly hardy ruminants—forage on the shrubs. Goats are especially hard on the soil because their sharp hoofs pulverize the protective crust of soil that is formed by rainfall and that naturally checks wind erosion. Between 1970 and 2009, the world’s cattle population increased by 28 percent and the number of sheep stayed relatively static. Meanwhile, goat herds more than doubled.

Growth in goat populations is particularly dramatic in some developing countries. While cattle herds in Pakistan doubled between 1961 and 2009 and the number of sheep nearly tripled, the goat population grew more than sixfold and is now roughly equal to that of the cattle and sheep populations combined. These livestock have grazed the countryside bare of its rainfall-retaining vegetation, contributing to the massive flooding that ravaged Pakistan in the summer of 2010. More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

Al Gore Blasts Obama On Climate Change For Failing To Take 'Bold Action'

Former Vice President Al Gore is going where few environmentalists – and fellow Democrats – have gone before: criticizing President Barack Obama's record on global warming.


In a 7,000-word essay for Rolling Stone magazine that will be published Friday, Gore says Obama has failed to stand up for "bold action" on global warming and has made little progress on the problem since the days of Republican President George W. Bush. Bush infuriated environmentalists for resisting mandatory controls on the pollution blamed for climate change, despite overwhelming scientific evidence that the burning of fossil fuels is responsible.

While Gore credits Obama's political appointees with making hundreds of changes that have helped move the country "forward slightly" on the climate issue, and acknowledges Obama has been dealing with many other problems, he says the president "has simply not made the case for action."
More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

UN talks must save Kyoto or 'collapse': AOSIS

BONN — UN talks struggling to forge a response to global warming must salvage the embattled Kyoto Protocol or risk collapse, the head of a 43-nation bloc of island nations said Friday.


"Some countries are willing to commit to a second commitment period," said Grenada's Dessima Williams, chair of the the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS).
"It is not anywhere near the full coverage that will be needed," she told AFP on the sidelines of a negotiating session of the 194-nation UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), ending Friday.

"However, it is either that or the complete collapse of the system."
Kyoto, which covers 37 industrialised countries, is the only international deal with binding targets for curbing greenhouse gases.
A first commitment period expires at the end of 2012, and the fate of the treaty remains in limbo. More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

The Shrinking Pie: Post-Growth Geopolitics

Post-Growth Geopolitics


As nations compete for currency advantages, they are also eyeing the world’s diminishing resources—fossil fuels, minerals, agricultural land, and water. Resource wars have been fought since the dawn of history, but today the competition is entering a new phase.

Nations need increasing amounts of energy and materials to produce economic growth, but—as we have seen—the costs of supplying new increments of energy and materials are increasing. In many cases all that remains are lower-quality resources that have high extraction costs. In some instances, securing access to these resources requires military expenditures as well. Meanwhile the struggle for the control of resources is re-aligning political power balances throughout the world.

The U.S., as the world’s superpower, has the most to lose from a reshuffling of alliances and resource flows. The nation’s leaders continue to play the game of geopolitics by 20th century rules: They are still obsessed with the Carter Doctrine and focused on petroleum as the world’s foremost resource prize (a situation largely necessitated by the country’s continuing overwhelming dependence on oil imports, due in turn to a series of short-sighted political decisions stretching back at least to the 1970s). The ongoing war in Afghanistan exemplifies U.S. inertia: Most experts agree that there is little to be gained from the conflict, but withdrawal of forces is politically unfeasible. More >>>

This article is the part 6 from Chapter 5 of Richard Heinberg's new book 'The End of Growth', which is set for publication by New Society Publishers in August 2011. This chapter 'Shrinking Pie: Competition and Relative Growth in a Finite World' looks in greater depth at the prospects for further development in in an increasingly resource strained environment.

Location: Cayman Islands

A Perfect Storm for Hunger: New Oxfam report tackles broken food system

The global food system is broken,” reads a new report from Oxfam International.


While much of Growing a Better Future: Food Justice in a Resource-Constrained World essentially reviews the major factors that contribute to food insecurity, Oxfam’s call to transform the food system is certainly timely, given this year’s high food prices (blamed in part for inflaming popular revolts in the Middle East) and fears of another global food crisis.

Despite producing enough food for everyone, one in seven people globally face chronic under-nutrition and almost one billion people are food insecure. Hunger is concentrated within rural areas in developing countries, and within families, women are often disproportionally affected, having serious implications for maternal and child health.

“We face three interlinked challenges in an age of growing crisis: feeding nine billion without wrecking the planet; finding equitable solutions to end disempowerment and injustice; and increasing our collective resilience to shocks and volatility,” write the authors of the report. More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

Jamaica’s Coastal Capital at Risk: Report from the Field

A new economic valuation shows what Jamaica’s economy stands to lose if its coral reefs decline further.


Last week, I traveled to Jamaica with my colleagues Lauretta Burke and Benjamin Kushner to launch a new analysis called Coastal Capital: Jamaica – The Economic Contribution of Jamaica’s Coral Reefs. We spent several rainy days in Kingston, where we launched the report at two events, met with many members of Jamaica’s environmental community, and sampled delicious (but spicy) Jamaican cuisine. The sun came out near the end of the week, which allowed us to get out to the beach and see some coral reefs before heading back home.

Our first stop was the Jamaica Institute of Environmental Professionals’ (JIEP) bi-annual conference in Kingston. This year’s conference theme was “Balancing National Development and Environmental Protection,” and WRI officially launched Coastal Capital: Jamaica. We followed this launch event with a three-hour seminar on our results at the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona Campus. More than 80 people attended the two events, including some of the key players in environmental policy and coastal management in the country. Two of Jamaica’s national newspapers also covered the report, headlining the importance of the country’s coral reefs to its tourism and fishing industries. More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

What Will Climate Change and Sea Level Rise Mean for Barrier Islands?

ScienceDaily (June 16, 2011) — A new survey of barrier islands published earlier this spring offers the most thorough assessment to date of the thousands of small islands that hug the coasts of the world's landmasses.


The study, led by Matthew Stutz of Meredith College, Raleigh, N.C., and Orrin Pilkey of Duke University, Durham, N.C., offers new insight into how the islands form and evolve over time -- and how they may fare as the climate changes and sea level rises.

The survey is based on a global collection of satellite images from Landsat 7 as well as information from topographic and navigational charts. The satellite images were captured in 2000, and processed by a private company as part of an effort funded by NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey.

During the 20th century, sea level has risen by an average of 1.7 millimeters (about 1/16 of an inch) per year. Since 1993, NASA satellites have observed an average sea level rise of 3.27 millimeters (about 1/8 of an inch) per year. A better understanding of how climate change and sea level rise are shaping barrier islands will also lead to a more complete grasp of how these dynamic forces are affecting more populated coastal areas.

Stutz, the study's lead author, highlighted a series of key findings from the new survey during an interview with a NASA science writer. More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

Will Small Island Developing States secure funding from UNESCO?

Securing funding for Small Island Developing States (SIDS) fight against Climate Change was one of the critical issues discussed at the 186th Session of the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Executive Board.


According to Senator Franka Alexis-Bernadine who led Grenada’s delegation to the three-week meeting, this critical issue has created a bit of controversy among larger members of the UNESCO Executive Board.
“The larger countries…seemed to have been lobbying the Secretary-General to move away from this ethical issue to focus more on other issues,” she said not revealing the identity of those countries due to existing diplomatic relations.

“You can see your funding slipping away right before your eyes as the bigger countries; one of which is from Latin America…convince the team on the ground that in actual fact this was no longer a priority for Small Island Developing States,” she said as she explained some of the subtleties that occurred at the meeting.

Grenada, Barbados and St Lucia are the only three islands representing the entire Caribbean Community (CARICOM) at UNESCO. Determined to lobby at all cost Senator Bernadine who is also Grenada’s Minister for Education said that they stood their ground and she said eventually the Board, “realized that our stance was not going to change in that regard.” More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

Joint Efforts to Map Water Levels Across Arab Countries

June 9, 2011—Across and within Jordan, Tunisia, Morocco and Lebanon, water levels in reservoirs and rivers, rainfall patterns and soil moisture will be mapped by satellites high overhead.


This new view of water systems will allow leaders to monitor local and regional drought and flood conditions, track evaporation from lakes and reservoirs, and even estimate future water supplies and crop yields.
This new project, financed by the World Bank’s Global Environmental Facility, is the first in a series of investments under the Arab World Initiative approved by the World Bank Board of Directors.

In the past, information on water has come from people and equipment on the ground. But collecting data in the field is often expensive and difficult to gather and verify. Satellite images can provide a unique view, across mountains and borders, and provide it almost instantly.

Not Enough Water-20% Less
Water supplies have a major impact on agriculture and the environment. A steady water supply is also essential for city life. Cities are growing in size and population throughout the region. And, because of climate change, experts predict an increasingly dry future. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that rainfall in many parts of the region will decrease by over 20% during the next century. More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

Editorial: Mr. President - Are you insane or just blind.

With the greatest respect I would like to ask all world leaders "Are you insane or just blind?"


The world is beset by a perfect storm of peak oil, climate change and an out of control population. all of which are potential conflict triggers.

The high cost and apparently constrained supplies of petroleum are causing blackouts, rolling brownouts and falling productivity in over fifty countries around the globe as I write this.

Climate change has the potential, given the expected rise in average global temperatures, to raise sea level by one metre by the end of the century, inundating islands, coastal plains and deltas around the globe.

Changes in rainfall patterns along with the melting of glaciers could disrupt food production in many of the worlds most populous countries causing famine. Droughts are now evident in states around the world. China is building canal over 1700 kilometers long in an attempt to bring water to water stressed northern areas of the country. Agriculture accounts for at least 70% of a countries water usage. South Asia which is home to well over one fifth of the world's population, is dependent on the seasonal monsoon rains for much of their food production as well as glacial melt water which is the source of the major rivers in the region. As temperatures rise the glaciers will melt, and if the rainfall patterns change millions may perish.

We could see refugee flows the likes of which have never been seen in recorded history, caused by any or all of the above scenarios. Climate Change Refugees will flow from areas of famine to areas where there is food. They will do so legally or illegally and they will be forced to do so even if it costs them their life.

No country can mitigate or adapt to the coming changes on its own. The only way that the human race can survive with a reasonably tolerable level of civilization is by working together. We no longer have time for political bickering, posturing or arguing within states or between states.

The time is now. We have to protect the major portions of the global commons, the atmosphere, the oceans, the biosphere. Humans need these to survive, we need the plants, the animals, the insects. We are dependent on all of it, we cannot survive without a healthy planet.

We are today, more than at any time in the history of the human race, our brothers and sisters keepers.

The Editor

Location: The Cayman Islands

The Karma of Electric Vehicles

MALIBU, California, June 9, 2011 (ENS) - Large environmental problems like the ongoing Fukushima nuclear catastrophe and the effects of the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico still occupy center stage, but an even bigger solution to the planet's environmental woes is rapidly approaching.


Vehicle electrification can ease dependence on polluting petroleum that is heating up the planet, yet many people are not fully informed on how electric vehicles will fit into their lives. One information gap is public understanding of the important fit between electric vehicles and the smart grid.

A game-changing research paper that addresses this gap, "Vehicle Electrification: Status and Issues," has just been published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in the special Smart Grid issue of the Proceedings of the IEEE. It shows how to change the energy equation and serves as a reference source to understand electric vehicles from a whole systems perspective. More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

Climate change, nuclear risks and nuclear disarmament: from security threats to sustainable peace.

On 17 May the World Future Council released its latest report entitled Climate Change, Nuclear Risks and Nuclear Disarmament: From Security Threats to Sustainable Peace.


It is the outcome of groundbreaking research by Prof. Dr. Jürgen Scheffran of the University of Hamburg.

The report examines the linkages between nuclear and climate risks, noting that these two clear threats may interfere with each other in a mutually re-enforcing way. It also acknowledges that finding solutions to one problem area could lead to solutions in the other: "Preventing the dangers of climate change and nuclear war requires an integrated set of strategies that address the causes as well as the impacts on the natural and social environment.” Prof. Dr. Scheffran offers an approach to move away from these security threats to building sustainable peace.

The study brings to light the multidimensional interplay between climate change, nuclear risks and nuclear disarmament, and its critical implications for the strategic security environment. In addition, it explores prospects and openings to tackle these key challenges, stressing the role played by institutions to “strengthen common ecological and human security, build and reinforce conflict-resolution mechanisms and low-carbon energy alternatives, and create sustainable lifecycles that respect the capabilities of the living world."

Read the full report here.

Location: Cayman Islands

Climate change: major impacts on water for farming

New FAO survey sums up current scientific understanding of impacts, highlights knowledge gaps and areas for attention


Rome - Climate change will have major impacts on the availability of water for growing food and on crop productivity in the decades to come, warns a new FAO report.

Climate Change, Water, and Food Security is a comprehensive survey of existing scientific knowledge on the anticipated consequences of climate change for water use in agriculture.

These include reductions in river runoff and aquifer recharges in the Mediterranean and the semi-arid areas of the Americas, Australia and southern Africa -- regions that are already water-stressed. In Asia, large areas of irrigated land that rely on snowmelt and mountain glaciers for water will also be affected, while heavily populated river deltas are at risk from a combination of reduced water flows, increased salinity, and rising sea levels.

Additional impacts described in the report:

An acceleration of the world’s hydrological cycle is anticipated as rising temperatures increase the rate of evaporation from land and sea. Rainfall will increase in the tropics and higher latitudes, but decrease in already dry semi-arid to mid-arid latitudes and in the interior of large continents. A greater frequency in droughts and floods will need to be planned for but already, water scarce areas of the world are expected to become drier and hotter.

Even though estimates of groundwater recharge under climate change cannot be made with any certainty, the increasing frequency of drought can be expected to encourage further development of available groundwater to buffer the production risk for farmers.

And the loss of glaciers - which support around 40 percent of the world’s irrigation -- will eventually impact the amount of surface water available for agriculture in key producing basins

Increased temperatures will lengthen the growing season in northern temperate zones but will reduce the length almost everywhere else. Coupled with increased rates of evapotranspiration this will cause the yield potential and water productivity of crops to decline.

"Both the livelihoods of rural communities as well as the food security of city populations are at risk" said FAO Assistant Director General for Natural Resources, Alexander Mueller. "But the rural poor, who are the most vulnerable, are likely to be disproportionately affected". More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

Redefining Marine Territories in a Changing World

From a purely territorial perspective, these are bullish times for the world's oceans.



As anthropogenic climate change picks up pace, seas around the world are rising, due to thermal expansion and the melting of alpine glaciers and arctic ice sheets; according to most scientists, by at least a meter by the year 2100.
As a result, low-lying coastal areas around the world, and in several cases entire island nations, are expected to be reclaimed by the sea. Global sea level rise complicates the resolution of questions that have presented geopolitical difficulties for centuries: who owns the sea, and how much of it do they own? According to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), concluded in 1982, countries have exclusive control over their seabed materials out to the extent of their continental shelf (but with a minimum of 200, and maximum of 350, Nautical miles from their coastline). In addition, they have broader control over marine resources (including, crucially, fishing stocks) in an Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) extending 200 nautical miles from the low-water mark on their coastlines. More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

Aviation Has to Contribute to Fighting Climate Change, EU Says

The inclusion of the aviation sector in the European Union’s emissions trading system is a “practical example” of steps that need to be made to prevent global warming,


EU Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard said.
“‘If we had only done that for European airlines only it wouldn’t be fair,” Hedegaard told a seminar in Brussels today. “Everyone agrees the aviation sector has to contribute.”

The EU decided in 2008 that external and internal flights should be covered by its emissions trading system, known as the ETS, after airline discharges in Europe doubled over two decades. The European legislation offers an option to exclude incoming flights from a non-EU country if the nation implements “equivalent” measures to cut pollution from aviation.
China’s airline association said earlier this week that it “totally opposes” the EU’s plan to expand its cap-and-trade program from 2012 to include airlines, adding the initiative may prompt trade conflict. More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

Sustainable development must be as much blue as it is green

Seychelles' Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Ambassador Ronny Jumeau, has reminded a United Nations debate on the pathway to sustainable development that the world's oceans, coasts, and small island countries must be included in the concept of a green economy.


Speaking at the informal debate in the UN General Assembly on the challenges of the green economy held on June 2, Amb. Jumeau stressed that what the small island developing states (SIDS) described as a "blue economy" must be part and parcel of the concept, definition, and development of a climate- and environment-friendly green economy.

"This is something we in the small islands talk about a lot but do not hear about enough," Ambassador Jumeau said, “We cannot build a new eco-friendly and sustainable world economy without factoring in and caring for the oceans, which would require integrating the SIDS.”

He later explained that the push by the SIDS for the "blue" economy to be incorporated within the concept of the global green economy is essentially to ensure that the oceans and marine resources, and consequently the small islands as large ocean territories, are not forgotten or left behind. More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

When the Nile runs dry

A new scramble for Africa is under way. As global food prices rise and exporters reduce shipments of commodities, countries that rely on imported grain are panicking.


Affluent countries like Saudi Arabia, South Korea, China and India have descended on fertile plains across the African continent, acquiring huge tracts of land to produce wheat, rice and corn for consumption back home.

Some of these land acquisitions are enormous. South Korea, which imports 70 percent of its grain, has acquired 1.7 million acres in Sudan to grow wheat—an area twice the size of Rhode Island. In Ethiopia, a Saudi firm has leased 25,000 acres to grow rice, with the option of expanding this to 750,000 acres. And India has leased several hundred thousand acres there to grow corn, rice and other crops.

These land grabs shrink the food supply in famine-prone African nations and anger local farmers, who see their governments selling their ancestral lands to foreigners. They also pose a grave threat to Africa’s newest democracy: Egypt.

Egypt is a nation of bread eaters. Its citizens consume 18 million tons of wheat annually, more than half of which comes from abroad. (See data.) Egypt is now the world’s leading wheat importer, and subsidized bread—for which the government doles out approximately $2 billion per year—is seen as an entitlement by the 60 percent or so of Egyptian families who depend on it.

As Egypt tries to fashion a functioning democracy after President Hosni Mubarak’s departure, land grabs to the south are threatening its ability to put bread on the table because all of Egypt’s grain is either imported or produced with water from the Nile River, which flows north through Ethiopia and Sudan before reaching Egypt. (Since rainfall in Egypt is negligible to nonexistent, its agriculture is totally dependent on the Nile.)

Unfortunately for Egypt, two of the favorite targets for land acquisitions are Ethiopia and Sudan, which together occupy three-fourths of the Nile River Basin. Today’s demands for water are such that there is little left of the river when it eventually empties into the Mediterranean.

The Nile Waters Agreement, which Egypt and Sudan signed in 1959, gave Egypt 75 percent of the river’s flow, 25 percent to Sudan and none to Ethiopia. This situation is changing abruptly as wealthy foreign governments and international agribusiness firms snatch up large swaths of arable land in the upper Basin. While these deals are typically described as land acquisitions, they are also, in effect, water acquisitions.

Now, when competing for Nile water, Cairo must deal with several governments and commercial interests that were not party to the 1959 agreement. Moreover, Ethiopia — never enamored of the agreement — has announced plans to build a huge hydroelectric dam on its branch of the Nile that would reduce the water flow to Egypt even more.

Because Egypt’s wheat yields are already among the world’s highest, it has little potential to raise its land productivity further. With its population of 81 million projected to reach 101 million by 2025, finding enough food and water is a daunting challenge. More >>>

Location:Cayman Islands

Natural Disasters Displaced 42 Million In 2010; Climate Change Could Be Factor, Experts Say

OSLO, Norway — About 42 million people were forced to flee their homes because of natural disasters around the world in 2010, more than double the number during the previous year, experts said Monday.



One reason for the increase in the figure could be climate change, and the international community should be doing more to contain it, the experts said.

The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre said the increase from 17 million displaced people in 2009 was mainly due to the impact of “mega-disasters” such as the massive floods in China and Pakistan and the earthquakes in Chile and Haiti.

It said more than 90 percent of the disaster displacements were caused by weather-related hazards such as floods and storms that were probably impacted by global warming, but it couldn’t say to what extent.

“The intensity and frequency of extreme weather events is increasing, and this trend is only set to continue. With all probability, the number of those affected and displaced will rise as human-induced climate change comes into full force,” said Elisabeth Rasmusson, the secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council. More >>>

Location:Cayman Islands

Climate to wreak havoc on food supply, predicts report

Some areas in the tropics face famine because of failing food production, an international research group says.






The Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) predicts large parts of South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa will be worst affected.

Its report points out that hundreds of millions of people in these regions are already experiencing a food crisis.

"We are starting to see much more clearly where the effects of climate change on agriculture could intensify hunger and poverty," said Patti Kristjanson, an agricultural economist with the CCAFS initiative that produced the report.

A leading climatologist told BBC News that agriculturalists had been slow to use global climate models to pinpoint regions most affected by rising temperatures.

This report is the first foray into the field by the CCAFS initiative. To assess how climate change will affect the world's ability to feed itself, CCAFS set about finding hotspots of climate change and food insecurity.

Focusing their search on the tropics, the researchers identified regions where populations are chronically malnourished and highly dependent on local food supplies.

Then, basing their analysis on the climate data amassed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the team predicted which of these food-insecure regions are likely to experience the greatest shifts in temperature and precipitation over the next 40 years.
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Location: Cayman Islands

Event: 2nd World Congress on Cities and Adaption to Climate Change

The Resilient Cities 2011 congress is being held in Bonn, Germany 3 - 5 June.


The Resilient Cities 2011 official website is: resilient-cities.org/bonn2011
The Resilient Cities 2011 congress will be documented on their website. Here you can find all resources and information (photos, speeches, press releases) available for download*. More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

Editorial: Global Energy Shortages

I have just looked at my RSS News Feed under the heading of Energy Shortages and noticed that there are fifty-eight articles from around the world this morning.



These range from utilities in China that are financially struggling to rolling blackouts in Venezuela and Pakistan, to South Africa seeking to cut power consumption by thirteen percent.
This is a world-wide problem, Russia has banned the export of gasoline, which prompted Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to ban exports of refined petroleum products late last month, especially as the country gears up for State Duma elections in December and Presidential elections in the spring of 2011. In Karachi, Pakistan a protester was killed demonstrating against load shedding.


It may just be my imagination but I detect a global trend in all these reports which only reinforces the theory of Peak Oil.

In the Cayman Islands households are billed monthly, with a breakdown between electricity consumed and the cost of fuel used to generate the consumed amount of electricity shown on the invoice. I have people telling me on a daily basis that their fuel charge is more than the electrical charge.

If oil is abundant as OPEC claims why are so many stares globally having these overwhelming energy shortages? One could argue that it is the financial aspect of obtaining petroleum products that is to blame. However, one must ask why the price is escalating. Could it possible be a supply and demand situation?
It really does not matter wether it is unaffordable or unattainable it still leads to a shortage of electricity for all of us. It is therefore time to push of governments and legislators to take the necessary steps to enable the introduction of renewable sources of energy such as solar, wind and ocean thermal conversion.

Location: Cayman Islands

Time For Obama To Say No To The Fossil Fuel Wish List

In our globalized world, old-fashioned geography is not supposed to count for much: mountain ranges, deep-water ports, railroad grades -- those seem so nineteenth century. The earth is flat, or so I remember somebody saying.


But those nostalgic for an earlier day, take heart. The Obama administration is making its biggest decisions yet on our energy future and those decisions are intimately tied to this continent’s geography. Remember those old maps from your high-school textbooks that showed each state and province’s prime economic activities? A sheaf of wheat for farm country? A little steel mill for manufacturing? These days in North America what you want to look for are the pickaxes that mean mining, and the derricks that stand for oil.

There’s a pickaxe in the Powder River Basin of Montana and Wyoming, one of the world’s richest deposits of coal. If we’re going to have any hope of slowing climate change, that coal -- and so all that future carbon dioxide -- needs to stay in the ground. In precisely the way we hope Brazil guards the Amazon rainforest, that massive sponge for carbon dioxide absorption, we need to stand sentinel over all that coal.

Doing so, however, would cost someone some money. At current prices the value of that coal may be in the trillions, and that kind of money creates immense pressure. Earlier this year, President Obama signed off on the project, opening a huge chunk of federal land to coal mining. It holds an estimated 750 million tons worth of burnable coal. That’s the equivalent of opening 300 new coal-fired power plants. In other words, we’re talking about staggering amounts of new CO2 heading into the atmosphere to further heat the planet. More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

Cities Lead on Climate Problems, and Actions

New Report Analyzes Urban Areas Across the World..


Cities are emerging as most threatened by climate change, and as the first responders to it, says a new international report. The report, led by researchers at Columbia University and the City University of New York (CUNY), is the most comprehensive study to date detailing the risks cities face, and how they are preparing for impacts such as increased heat waves, drought and rising sea level. Authors from 50 cities looked at urban areas in Asia, Latin America, Africa, Europe and North America, doing in-depth analyses of Athens, Dakar, Delhi, Harare, Kingston, London, Melbourne, New York, São Paulo, Shanghai, Tokyo and Toronto.

Cities are now home to half the world’s population, the authors note. “This is a groundbreaking study that should serve as a wake-up call about the need to make cities a key focus of global climate change research and response efforts,” said Cynthia Rosenzweig, a climate impacts scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the Center for Climate Systems Research, part of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, who is one of the coeditors. Published by Cambridge University Press, the report was convened by the Urban Climate Change Research Network, a global coalition of researchers specializing in climate change from an urban perspective. The initiative was founded at the Earth Institute in 2007.
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Location:Sandalwood Crescent,George Town,Cayman Islands

Prospect of limiting the global increase in temperature to 2ºC is getting bleaker

CO2 emissions reach a record high in 2010; 80% of projected 2020 emissions from the power sector are already locked in.

Energy-related carbon-dioxide (CO2) emissions in 2010 were the highest in history, according to the latest estimates by the International Energy Agency (IEA).



After a dip in 2009 caused by the global financial crisis, emissions are estimated to have climbed to a record 30.6 Gigatonnes (Gt), a 5% jump from the previous record year in 2008, when levels reached 29.3 Gt.

In addition, the IEA has estimated that 80% of projected emissions from the power sector in 2020 are already locked in, as they will come from power plants that are currently in place or under construction today.

“This significant increase in CO2 emissions and the locking in of future emissions due to infrastructure investments represent a serious setback to our hopes of limiting the global rise in temperature to no more than 2ºC,” said Dr Fatih Birol, Chief Economist at the IEA who oversees the annual World Energy Outlook, the Agency’s flagship publication.

Global leaders agreed a target of limiting temperature increase to 2°C at the UN climate change talks in Cancun in 2010. For this goal to be achieved, the long-term concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere must be limited to around 450 parts per million of CO2-equivalent, only a 5% increase compared to an estimated 430 parts per million in 2000. More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

Libya: Water Emerges as a Hidden Weapon

CAIRO, May 27, 2011 (IPS) - Libya’s enormous aquatic reserves could potentially become a new weapon of choice if government forces opt to starve coastal cities that heavily rely on free flowing freshwater.



With only five percent of the country getting at least 100 millimetres of rainfall per year, Libya is one of the driest countries in the world.

Historically, coastal aquifers or desalination plants located in Tripoli were of poor quality due to contamination with salt water, resulting in undrinkable water in many cities including Benghazi.

Oil exploration in the southern Libyan desert in the mid-1950s revealed vast quantities of fresh, clean groundwater - this could meet growing national demand and development goals.

Scientists estimate that nearly 40,000 years ago when the North African climate was temperate, rainwater in Libya seeped underground forming reservoirs of freshwater.

In 1983, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi initiated a huge civil water works project known as the Great Man-Made River (GMMR) - a massive irrigation project that drew upon the underground basin reserves of the Kufra, Sirte, Morzuk, Hamada and the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer - to deliver more than five million cubic metres of water per day to cities along Libya’s coastal belt.

"The Colonel’s GMMR project was discounted when first unveiled as an uneconomic flight of fancy and a wasteful exploitation of un-renewable freshwater reserves," Middle East-based journalist Iason Athanasiadis told IPS. "But subsequently it was hailed as a masterful work of engineering, tapping into underground aquifers so vast that they could keep the 2007 rate of dispersal going for the next 1,000 years." More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

Global food crisis: Climate change imperils Guatemala's food security

The impact of global warming is already compromising food security in many developing countries, according to a report on food security released on Tuesday by Oxfam.



Its research predicts that climate change will have further devastating consequences over the next 20 years as yields of staples in some regions decline dramatically. Wheat yields may fall by more than 20% in Brazil, for example, while maize production in central and west Africa may fall by more than 10%, it says.

In Guatemala, climate change has affected smallholders dramatically in the last two years. The country is particularly vulnerable to climate change and extreme events, thanks to its geographical position in an earthquake and hurricane zone.

The experience of 260 families living on the settlement of Guadalupe in the Suchitepéquez region of the Pacific coast is typical. They lost much of their staple crop last year and the year before. There is more rain in winter now, and the rains that used to come in April now only come towards the end of May. Rains have recently been accompanied by increasingly violent storms, followed by prolonged drought. Deforestation and diversion of rivers by plantation owners producing food or biofuel for export have exacerbated the problems. More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands