The Cayman Institute

The business of governance - Richard Branson

2012-02-06T13:21:00.001-05:00

There are skills a CEO can bring to government, in terms of providing decisive leadership, creating accountability and guiding long-term planning

AT A recent conference in the British Virgin Islands, I was asked to imagine the country was one of my new companies: what would I do to help it perform better?

There are skills a CEO can bring to government, in terms of providing decisive leadership, creating accountability and guiding long-term planning. This year, the US presidential election is being fought on a mandate to turn around the largest company in the world — the US economy — after years of under-performance and faltering growth.

President Barack Obama will have to prove he can be an effective CEO by presenting a concrete plan to get the economy going, create jobs and bring the deficit down.

Leading the imaginary company BVI Ltd would be a somewhat smaller challenge, but one that would include my home, Necker Island. As chairman and CEO, here is my five-point plan:

Review Your Assets

To work out how strong BVI’s position is, we must ask these crucial questions: What made this company successful to date? What does it sell and where does its income come from? How secure are its assets, in case of future problems? What are the threats to the business?

BVI relies on its strengths in financial services and tourism. As an offshore financial centre, it is one of the top five countries in the world for the incorporation of companies, with hundreds of thousands of companies registered. Its business-friendly environment and proactive government should attract interest from around the world. However, this source of income is reliant on the policies of overseas governments, which can change unexpectedly. More

Does The Cayman Islands need to undertake a similar exercise to what Richard Branson describes in this article? Have we forgotten our core strengths and and direction? Editor.

The day I met Godzilla

2012-02-05T16:51:00.001-05:00

Fred Burton heads a mission in the British Overseas Territory of the Cayman Islands to rescue the iconic Grand Cayman Blue Iguana from extinction. His story is a rare thing in conservation: success on a shoestring.

Fred, who is a member of IUCN’s Iguana Specialist Group, has lived in Grand Cayman since 1979 and for the past nine years has been Director of the Blue Iguana Recovery Programme (BIRP). In small islands limited resources can often push individuals to shoulder a wide variety of responsibilities and develop diverse expertise. Fred is no exception.

A key player in protected areas planning, the conservation of parrots, seabirds and threatened plants and their habitats, Fred’s palette of experience is typically varied. Amongst this body of work, however, Fred is best known for his achievements with the Blue Iguana—unsalaried and reliant on grant-funding and the support of local and international organizations and volunteers. Fred is literally saving a species from the jaws of extinction—and succeeding where million-dollar initiatives can fail. More

England to develop climate change plans for colonies

2012-02-04T23:00:00.001-05:00

Four agencies of the United Kingdom plan to develop a Climate Change Programme specifically targeted for the UK overseas territories.

The programme will fill a perceived gap identified in recent reviews of current climate change programes, which show that the overseas territories are not eligible to benefit from certain programsmes.

Further, those which they can access do not fully meet their needs, according to the government.

The UK mentioned that many small island developing states are vulnerable by their nature, such as Montserrat, which it said was vulnerable to climate change because of high exposure to natural hazards such as tropical cyclones, storm surges, floods, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions.

Others, like the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands and the Turks and Caicos have thin water lenses and decreasing fresh water availability, and are highly sensitive to rising sea levels and changing rainfall distribution.

For more on the UK and climate change, read Caribbean Journal’s interview with John Ashton, the UK Foreign Secretary’s Special Representative for Climate Change. More

Finally they have listened. Editor

UCCI 50/50 Conference

2012-01-26T21:37:00.002-05:00

The University College of the Cayman Islands -- in collaboration with the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies (SALISES), the University of the West Indies, Mona, and the International College of the Cayman Islands -- invites you to the 50-50 Conference, 21-23 March, 2012. More

Happy New Year from the Cayman Institute

2011-12-29T19:31:00.002-05:00

South Africans enjoy getting into hot water and saving money

2011-12-26T16:00:00.001-05:00

DURBAN, South Africa (AlertNet) - At the recent U.N. climate conference in Durban, the South African government promoted its solar water heating programme as a way to cut planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions. But for poor local families, the benefits are much more personal.

“I am very happy that I can bathe in warm water, like other people,” said Lhle Mbele, 15, whose house has been equipped with a free solar-powered water heater.

Lhle, his 14 siblings and his parents live in a 20 square metre (220 square foot) house in the Kingsburgh district of Durban. Lhle’s father is unemployed and his mother earns a living as a domestic worker in an elite area of the city. Hot water for washing is a luxury the family could not previously afford.

South Africa is responsible for 70 percent of Africa’s carbon emissions. As the host of the two-week U.N. climate talks, which ended on Dec. 11, the country has been eager to demonstrate its commitment to low-carbon technology.

The government has committed to producing 10,000 gigawatt hours of electricity through renewable energy by 2013, and solar power for heating water is slated to account for 23 percent of this.

Since December 2010, more than 75,000 solar water heaters have been installed by the Gauteng-based Solar Academy of Subsaharan Africa (SASSA), a private company working for the government, in neighbourhoods whose residents cannot normally afford hot water. The programme includes cities such as Johannesburg, Cape Town, Port Elizabeth and Pretoria. More

Polly Higgins: Let's stand up for climate justice (and Survival)

2011-12-21T10:13:00.001-05:00

Polly Higgins: Let's stand up for climate justice (and Survival)

When David stands up to Goliath it is exciting to watch. And this is exactly what we saw at the Durban climate talks this week when six Canadian youth delegates thumbed their noses at Peter Kent, Canadian Environment Minister. Kent was speaking about Canada’s decision to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol when the youths stood up, swiveled, and turned their backs on him.

Their t-shirts read “People before Polluters”, and one of the courageous six said “It’s time to leave Canada behind” – but no words could speak louder than the gesture. The young people received a standing ovation from those who witnessed their protest.

These youths turned their backs in disgust not only on an intransigent government and a powerful fossil fuel industry lobby, but on the process of the climate talks themselves. The climate talks have created a growing industry of negotiators: 9,000 at Durban. But still they failed to agree any legally binding cuts to emissions that would prevent runaway climate change and benefit those most at risk from its adverse impacts.

Next up – literally – was Abigail Borah. A student at Middlebury College and a youth delegate for the US, she rose in front of the hall of delegates to protest that the US negotiators “cannot speak on behalf of the United States of America.”

What Borah went on to say stopped many in their tracks; not because it was radical but because it rang absolutely true. “The obstructionist Congress has shackled a just agreement and delayed ambition for far too long,” she said, “2020 is too late to wait.”

For stating plainly what the vast majority of negotiators were thinking, and climate scientists have been warning, Borah was unceremoniously marched out and ejected from the process – but not before she received the applause of representatives from around the world.

Anjali Appaduri, representing youth at COP17, also impressed with her rousing speech, ending “Deep cuts now! Get it done!”

I am full of admiration for these young leaders protesting for what is right at the Durban climate talks. Climate scientists say we need to keep global warming below 2 degrees C above pre-industrial levels to prevent catastrophic climate change, and emissions need to peak in 2020. But the deal made in Durban is vague about action that must be taken within the next five years. Therefore, we need hundreds, thousands, millions more of us around the world to choose to stand up to our governments and advocate for what is right: climate justice.

It is not right that that some countries are evading their global responsibilities to stop climate change in its tracks, while others are pleading for help. The Environment Minister of the small island nation Tuvalu described at Durban how their entire nation is in danger of flooding. This is sad, but sadder still is that as the law currently stands, no country is legally obliged to help another country in trouble.

Without law to impose a duty of care upon those who run companies and countries, profit will continue to be placed over and above people and planet. To change this we need “bold, courageous and moral leadership” in the words of Previn Gordhan, the Finance Minister of South Africa at the World Business Climate Summit this week.

Earlier this year we staged a mock trial at the Supreme Court in London, England to test one bold, courageous solution. A judge, jury and top QCs tried a new international law of Ecocide - under which heads of corporations would have to take personal responsibility for destruction of the environment. The jury unanimously found the CEOs of fictional energy companies exploiting the tar sands guilty of Ecocide.

An international crime of Ecocide is a way that we can seek climate justice. Making Ecocide law has been advocated at Durban by some of the most important names in environmentalism, including Nnimo Bassey, the chair of Friends of the Earth and Pablo Sólon, the former chief climate negotiator for Bolivia. "This Ecocide law may be the only way to make climate criminals rethink their crimes of commission and omission,” said Bassey.

Ecocide is the big idea that is being discussed as an alternative solution to the failing Kyoto Protocol. An international law of Ecocide would put in place the absent legislative framework that business needs. It may be the only thing that can enable governments, banks and corporations to change course in time.

About Polly Higgins
Polly Higgins is the lawyer who has proposed to the UN the law of Ecocide. During war it is a crime to destroy vast tracts of land, but during peace-time there is no crime against it. This anomaly in the law has allowed the damage and destruction of the planet to reach unprecedented levels which the UN say could trigger ecosystem collapse.

Over the past 7 years Higgins has become an expert in Earth law and has authored the book: "Eradicating Ecocide: Laws and Governance to Prevent the Destruction of our Planet". Her book was accoladed 'Winner of the Peoples Book Prize 2011' for non-fiction.

Higgins has mounted a global campaign to have Ecocide recognised as the 5th Crime Against Peace at the 2012 Earth Summit.

More information: Eradicating Ecocide

Energy giants lay out climate resilience plans: Should Cayman do the same?

2011-12-10T13:57:00.001-05:00

Defra releases new reports detailing Big Six plans to bolster climate adaptation efforts

Just days after storms swept across the north of Scotland, bringing down power cables and felling two wind turbines, the government will this morning release climate adaptation plans from the UK’s largest energy companies, detailing how they intend to make energy infrastructure more resilient to climatic impacts, including increasingly frequent winter storms.

The reports, which were requested by Defra, confirm that the Big Six energy firms are making “good progress” preparing for rising climate risks such as flooding, heat waves and extreme storms. However, it warns that more investment will be required over the coming years to adapt the UK’s energy infrastructure to cope with inevitable climate change that scientists predict will result in hotter, drier summers and milder, wetter winters.

Speaking on a visit yesterday to an E.ON power station in Enfield, Defra minister Lord Taylor urged utilities to bolster their climate change adaptation plans and take specific steps to improve their resilience. More

New NASA research into Earth's paleoclimate history foreshadows rapid climate change.

2011-12-10T11:59:00.002-05:00

New research into the Earth's paleoclimate history by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies director James E. Hansen suggests the potential for rapid climate changes this century, including multiple meters of sea level rise, if global warming is not abated. In the new research, Hansen and co-author Makiko Sato, also of Goddard Institute for Space Studies, compared the climate of today, the Holocene, with previous similar "interglacial" epochs – periods when polar ice caps existed but the world was not dominated by glaciers.

In studying cores drilled from both ice sheets and deep ocean sediments, Hansen found that global mean temperatures during the Eemian period, which began about 130,000 years ago and lasted about 15,000 years, were less than 1 degree Celsius warmer than today. If temperatures were to rise 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial times, global mean temperature would far exceed that of the Eemian, when sea level was four to six meters higher than today, Hansen said.

"The paleoclimate record reveals a more sensitive climate than thought, even as of a few years ago. Limiting human-caused warming to 2 degrees is not sufficient," Hansen said. "It would be a prescription for disaster." More

Water emergencies grip Tuvalu & Tokelau

2011-10-12T04:50:00.001-04:00

As governments and aid agencies scramble to deliver desalination plants and bottled water to drought stricken Pacific Island nations of Tuvalu and Tokelau, other Pacific Island nations - Samoa and the Cook Islands - are preparing for a similar fate.
Is this band-aid approach to solving this problem going to be enough?

Redina Auina, spokeswoman for the Tuvalu Faith Based Youth network, who partner with 350.org, is in Tuvalu and describes the feelings of people as they face the reality of less than 5 days of drinkable water in the nations capital, Funafuti --
Experts say the past 12 months have been the second driest in Funafuti's 78 years of records. While we do not make any claims to it being solely a climate change related event, the reality is that the line between what is normal climatic variation and what might be extremes resulting from accelerated climate change is being blurred. This is particularly true for the hydrological cycle, which is sensitive to even subtle variations in the global climate and often results in either too much water, or in our case at the moment, too little. With an intense La Nina weather pattern over much of the Pacific, we’re not likely to see rain for months to come. It’s these kind of extremes that we are told will become our new reality for Tuvalu and the Pacific region as a whole. More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

NASA's top climate scientist: US south could become uninhabitable

2011-10-04T11:49:00.001-04:00

Well, it doesn’t come as a huge surprise to see this statement from NASA’s James Hansen, perhaps the top climate scientist in the world. But

it’s a statement we seem to keep ignoring. Here’s the statement I’m referring to:

“Climate change — human-made global warming — is happening. It is already having noticeable impacts…. If we stay on with business as usual, the southern U.S. will become almost uninhabitable.”
Dr. James Hansen has a new paper out on global warming and climate science (and Monarch butterflies), but aside from tackling the science alone, Dr. Hansen also delves into the problems stopping us from addressing these problems. Here’s a piece of that:

There is ample evidence of growing climate disruption. But despite record or near-record heat and drought in the United States this past summer with simultaneous extreme flooding, and despite comparable extremes in China and elsewhere, there has been little public discussion of the connection of these climate extremes with human-made climate forcing.

The media are partly responsible for the silent summer, as they have mainly chosen not to examine connections between climate anomalies and human-made causes. A cynic may ask whether their silent summer is related to increasing right-wing control of media and large advertising revenues from fossil fuel companies. More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

World Food Day, 16 October 2011

2011-10-04T04:56:00.001-04:00

Food prices - from crisis to stability

Price swings, upswings in particular, represent a major threat to food security in developing countries. Hardest-hit are the poor. According to the

World Bank, in 2010-2011 rising food costs pushed nearly 70 million people into extreme poverty.

“FOOD PRICES – FROM CRISIS TO STABILITY” has been chosen as this year’s World Food Day theme to shed some light on this trend and what can be done to mitigate its impact on the most vulnerable.

On World Food Day 2011, let us look seriously at what causes swings in food prices, and do what needs to be done to reduce their impact on the weakest members of global society. More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

Pakistan: Another Victim of Climate Change

2011-10-02T11:13:00.001-04:00

By Zafar Iqbal ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, September 27, 2011 (ENS) - Environmentalists are blaming climate change for the unprecedented

massive monsoon rains in Pakistan, which so far this year have affected eight million people, claiming 350 lives and damaging 1.3 million homes.
Over the past month, the country's southern region has received the highest monsoon rains ever recorded, local metrological experts confirm.

In August, the southern parts of the country received 270 percent above-normal monsoon rains. And in September, the monsoons rains were 1,170 percent above normal, says Dr. Qamar-uz-Zaman Chaudhry, Adviser Climate Affairs.

The Sindh province, where six million acres of land were inundated in current floods, had experienced severe drought conditions before the monsoon season and had not received any rainfall at all during the past 12 months.

Aid agencies are scrambling to help the multitude of flood victims - more than 1.5 million people are living in temporary camps.

Pakistan has witnessed swift climate change because of rising temperature and flooding downpours in the past two years. Climate experts consider this unexpected change as a part of broader regional climate changes also happening in the neighboring countries. More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

Film on Climate Refugees Strikes a Chord

2011-10-01T19:57:00.001-04:00

During the shooting of his 2010 documentary “Climate Refugees,” the Irish-American filmmaker Michael Nash visited nearly 50 countries in about

18 months, interviewing politicians, scientists, health workers and victims of floods, cyclones, hurricanes and droughts.

Click here for film trailer

His conclusion was that short- and longer-term changes in climate are causing vast numbers of people to abandon their jobs, homes and countries to seek better lives elsewhere, or to simply survive. (Jeffrey Gettleman’s recent coverage of the Somali refugee crisis in The Times has offered some vivid and disturbing examples, although Somalia’s troubles are also inextricably linked to political turmoil.)

Mr. Nash poses a basic question: what will become of the millions of people whose lack of access to food and clean water leads them to take increasingly desperate measures? What type of strains will huge migration put on resources in more developed countries?

Will this dislocation eventually, as the retired Navy vice admiral Lee Gunn told Mr. Nash, pose a threat to Americans’ national security, too?

By focusing on the consequences of climate change rather than its scientific causes, some experts suggest that Mr. Nash succeeded in circumventing a divisive political debate over global warming and the extent to which human activity contributes to it. More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

Study Uncovers a Predictable Sequence Toward Coral Reef Collapse

2011-09-30T13:27:00.001-04:00

ScienceDaily (Sep. 29, 2011) — Coral reefs that have lots of corals and appear healthy may, in fact, be heading toward collapse, according to a study published by the Wildlife Conservation Society and other groups.

Using data from coral reef systems across the western Indian Ocean, an international team of researchers identified how overfishing creates a series of at least eight big changes on reefs that precipitate a final collapse. This information can help managers gauge the health of a reef and tell them when to restrict fishing in order to avoid a collapse of the ecosystem and fishery.

The study appears this week in the early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The authors of the study include: Tim R. McClanahan and Nyawira A. Muthiga of the Wildlife Conservation Society; Nicholas A.J. Graham and Joshua E. Cinner of James Cook University, Queensland, Australia; M. Aaron MacNeil of the Australian Institute of Marine Science; J. Henrich Bruggemann of Laboratoire d’Ecologie Marine, Université de la Réunion, La Réunion, France; and Shaun K. Wilson of the Department of Environment and Conservation, Perth, Western Australia. More >>>

Location:Cayman Islands

Israel to frack water supply exploiting oil shale

2011-09-29T11:56:00.001-04:00

Israel is looking to get in on the oil shale - tar sands act, BBC News reports.

The article, though mentioning environmental concerns about this so-called unconventional source of oil, essentially soft peddles these and instead focuses on how much oil could be extracted: “Israel is sitting on enough shale to produce around four billion barrels of oil, enough at today’s usage to keep the country in oil for more than 40 years.”

Here’s the kicker, the inevitable political and environmental justice flashpoint:

The drilling area [in the Valley of Elah in central Israel, roughly 30 miles from Jerusalem] is also to the site of a vital and politically sensitive water aquifer shared by both Israel and Palestinian areas of the West Bank.
More >>>

Palau, Marshall Islands to Seek Advice from World Court on GHG Impacts

2011-09-28T16:27:00.001-04:00

22 September 2011: The Governments of Palau and the Marshall Islands have called upon the UN General Assembly (UNGA) to seek, on an urgent basis, an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on the responsibilities of States under international law to ensure that activities carried out under their jurisdiction of control that emit greenhouse gases (GHGs) do not damage other States.

The announcement was made by Palau’s President Johnson Toribiong during the general debate of the 66th session of the UNGA. Toribiong said urgent action to combat climate change is vital, and that the ICJ has already “confirmed that customary international law obliges” States to ensure activities within their jurisdiction “respect the environment of other States.” Toriniong underscored it was time to determine what the “international rule of law means in the context of climate change.” More >>>

Location: Cayman islands

IDB, GDF Suez to Support Sustainable Energy Access to Isolated Regions

2011-09-28T00:39:00.001-04:00

21 September 2011: The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and GDF Suez signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to support social entrepreneurial projects aimed at providing sustainable energy access to disadvantaged populations.

During the annual Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) meeting, IDB and GDF Suez agreed to collaborate in a programme aimed at promoting economic and social development of isolated regions, and at reducing energy insecurity worldwide. GDF SUEZ hopes, through its corporate social responsibility programme, “GDF SUEZ Rassembleurs d’Energies,” to sponsor up to eight significant projects with high social impact by 2013. More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

UNITAR is pleased to announce its new online courses

2011-09-27T12:32:00.001-04:00

UNITAR is pleased to announce its new online courses on:
Drafting and Adopting United Nations Resolutions (in English), which will take place from 3 to 28 October 2011.

Chairing International Conferences (in English), which will take place from 10 to 21 October 2011.

These courses target members of the diplomatic community as well as government officials, staff of international and non-governmental organizations, professionals from the private sector, and post-graduate students. We would be grateful if you could share this information within your diplomatic academy and with your colleagues who may be interested in taking this course.

More information about the course content, fee, and registration is available at:

http://www.unitar.org/event/drafting-2011

http://www.unitar.org/event/chairing-international-conferences-oct11

Should you need further information, please contact the Multilateral Diplomacy Programme Team at: mdp-elearning@unitar.org

Location:Cayman Islands

The Economy, Peak Oil and Permaculture

2011-09-27T03:55:00.001-04:00

Richard Heinberg- Senior Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute is a Permaculturist.

His latest book describes The End of Growth- isn't looking for when the recession will end and we'll get back to "normal". He believes our decades-long era of growth was based on aberrant set of conditions- namely cheap oil, but also cheap minerals, cheap food, etc- and that looking ahead, we need to prepare for a "new normal". The problem, according to Heinberg, is our natural resources just aren't so cheap and plentiful anymore, and he's not just talking about Peak Oil, Heinberg believes in Peak Everything (also the title of one of his books). Heinberg thinks for many, adjusting to a life where everything costs a bit more, could be very hard, but he also thinks the transition to a new normal might actually make life better. "Particularly in the Western industrialized countries we've gotten used to levels of consumption that are not only environmentally unsustainable, they also don't make us happy. They've in fact hollowed out our lives. We've given up things that actually do give us satisfaction and pleasure so that we can work more and more hours to get more and more money with which to buy more and more stuff- more flatscreen tvs, bigger SUVs, bigger houses and it's not making us happier. Well, guess what, it's possible to downsize, it's possible to use less, become more self sufficient, grow more of your own food, have chickens in your backyard and be a happier person." This is not all theoretical. In the backyard of the home Heinberg shares with his wife, Janet Barocco, the couple grow most of their food during the summer months (i.e. 25 fruit & nut trees, veggies, potatoes.. they're just lack grains), raise chickens for eggs, capture rainwater, bake with solar cookers and a solar food drier and secure energy with photovoltaic and solar hot water panels. Their backyard reflects Heinberg's vision for our "new normal" and it's full of experiments, like the slightly less than 120-square-foot cottage that was inspired by the Small Home Movement. It was built with the help of some of Heinberg's college students (in one of the nation's first sustainability classes) using recycled and natural materials (like lime plaster). Heinberg admits it's not a real tiny house experiment since they don't actually live in it- his wife uses it as a massage studio, he meditates there and sometimes it's used as a guest house (though that's hush hush due to permitting issues). But their tiny cottage points to the bigger point behind why a transition to a less resource intensive future could equal greater happiness. "Simplify. Pay less attention to all of the stuff in your life and pay more attention to what's really important. Maybe for you it's gardening, maybe for you it's painting or music. You know we all have stuff that gives us real pleasure and most of us find we have less and less time for that because we have to devote so much time to shopping, paying bills and driving from here to there and so on. Well, how about if we cut out some of that stuff and spend more time doing what really feeds us emotionally and spiritually and in some cases even nutritionally." http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=cl8ZHDQQY7I

Our Weatherbeaten Nation

2011-09-20T11:14:00.001-04:00

Awakening a week or so ago to the aftermath of Hurricane Irene, and to several days of heavy rain, flooding, property damage and a feeling of powerlessness in my small suburban community, my thoughts turned to the debate over climate change in our country.

In a year when the number of tornadoes registered up to the end of June – approximately 1,600 – is already at a record level, 48 percent of Americans believe that the threat of climate change is exaggerated. At a time when eight of the top 10 worst disasters of 2010 (in terms of victims affected) were due to weather-related factors and the scientific consensus on man-made global warming is at 97% and growing, Americans are split on whether climate change is the result of human activities or non-human natural causes. U.S. public opinion on climate change has become increasingly polarized, as partisan think tanks, narrowcast media, chat rooms, divisive politicians and frustrated scientists have framed the discussion to recast an originally scientific topic into a political wedge issue.

Facts and education no longer seem to matter. Early environmental researchers found that level of education was the most consistent predictor of citizen concern over climate change. However, a study published in 2010 found something startling: concern about climate change increased with level of education among Democrats, but decreased with education among Republicans. That’s right: the higher the education level of Democrats, the more they believe in global warming, and the higher the education level of Republicans, the less they believe in it. This tells us that data, research and problem-solving are taking take a back seat to ideology, sentiment and politics. In other words, this divide has less to do with science and more to do with emotions and values. There is a great sense of disdain and suspicion right now for the liberal scientific elite in a significant portion of the U.S. population, and I’m afraid the feeling is often mutual. More >>>

Location:Amman, Jordan

Permaculture Design Course - Jordan 2011

2011-09-19T04:42:00.001-04:00

The graduates of the 2011 Permaculture Design Course in Amman, Jordan.
The Permaculture Design Certificate course is an internationally-recognized, seventy-two hour course resulting in a Permaculture Design Certificate. It provides an introduction to permaculture design as set forth by movement founder Bill Mollison.

The PDC serves as foundation for further permaculture work and study and is a prerequisite for the Diploma in Permaculture Design, offered through The Permaculture Institute. Credit for this course is now accepted by a growing number of universities around the world.

To date, thousands of permaculture designers worldwide have been certified through this course, and now comprise a global network of educators, ecological activists who influence major corporations, individuals creating new business alternatives and groups of committed people working together to change the way we view and design into our landscapes.

The course covers sustainable living systems for a wide variety of landscapes and climates. It includes the application of permaculture principles to food production, home design, construction, energy conservation and generation, and explores alternative economic structures and legal strategies supporting permaculture solutions. More >>>

Location:Amman, Jordan

Remote Island Paradise to Be Powered By Coconuts and Sunshine

2011-09-18T01:07:00.001-04:00

In the Malay language, the coconut palm is called “pokok seribu guna,” meaning “the tree of a thousand uses.”

Make that one thousand and one. In just over a year’s time, the entire chain of the Tokelau islands plans to get 100 percent of their energy from a heavenly mix of coconuts and sunshine, according to United Press International.

It is perhaps incontestably appropriate that an island paradise should power itself with its two most plentiful resources. The new energy policy should also help to make these tiny, vulnerable tropical atolls more self-sufficient, as well as send the world a message about the feasibility of locally sourced renewable energy.

Tokelau, a territory of New Zealand, consists of three small atolls located roughly halfway between Hawaii and New Zealand. About 1,500 people call Tokelau home. Since the highest point on the islands is only 16 feet, they are particularly vulnerable to the threat of rising sea levels.

Under the new energy plan, most of the islands’ power — 93 percent — is slated to come from solar energy. The coconut power will supply the remaining 7 percent, and will come into play when skies are overcast or when electricity demand exceeds solar supply.
More >>>

Location:Queen Rania Al Abdallah, Amman, Jordan

Climate change threatens to hike hunger in the Pacific – report

2011-09-14T04:45:00.001-04:00

BANGKOK (AlertNet) – Climate change threatens to increase hunger and malnutrition among millions of poor people in the 14 small and geographically remote island nations of the Pacific unless action is taken, a new report by the Asian Development Bank said.

Food Security and Climate Change in the Pacific: Rethinking the Options urged Pacific nations, many of which are in fragile and conflict-affected situations and suffering from slow economic growth rates, to manage natural resources better and increase local food production, particularly of climate-resistant crops such as taro, yam, and cassava.

"Rising temperatures and rising tides due to climate change could reduce food supply in the Pacific,” Mahfuzuddin Ahmed, a senior economist in the Asian Development Bank’s Pacific Department who wrote the report, said in a statement.

“With over 10 million people in developing countries in the region, this is a threat that we cannot ignore," he added.

The region is already seeing a decline in agricultural production per capita and productivity has stagnated, the report said, partly due to an increase in migration from rural to urban areas and also because of fragile ecosystems and a limited natural resource base.

The Pacific is also considered one of the most vulnerable to impacts of climate change such as natural disasters and sea level rises, which are expected to reduce the agricultural output further. More >>>

UN Secretary-General Underlines Threats of Climate Change in the Pacific

2011-09-07T22:50:00.001-04:00

5 September 2011: During his official visit to Kiribati, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon congratulated the President of Kiribati on his active participation in multilateral efforts to address climate change, in particular by promoting dialogue among parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

Ban met with the President on 4-5 September 2011, and acknowledged the value of initiatives like the Tarawa Climate Change Conference, organized by Kiribati in November 2010, in preparation of the Cancun Climate Change Conference. Both agreed that climate change represents "an urgent and irreversible threat to the people of this region and the planet," and called for urgent action by all parties. They underscored the specific vulnerability of SIDS to the impacts of climate change, adding that it threatens to undo progress achieved in the Pacific region towards achieving sustainable development goals. They both stressed the need for urgent international action to reduce emissions consistent with the science, and for adaptation financing to enable the implementation of critical adaptation programmes.

They noted the actions that can be taken in the Pacific to address climate change, highlighting the actions of Kiribati such as mangrove forest management, biodiversity conservation initiatives, water resource management and the enhancement of coastal resilience. Ban also visited a mangrove planting site and met with the Minister of Environment, Lands and Agricultural Development, as well as with communities that have lost homes, land, and fresh water to rising sea levels. More >>>

Location:Cayman Islands

The Peak Oil Crisis: Efficiency is the Solution

2011-09-07T22:03:00.001-04:00

If there is a way to get through the loss of fossil fuels, it lies in developing new and more efficient ways to generate renewable energy and more efficient ways of utilizing the fossil fuels we have left.

Renewable sources currently provide only 16 percent of our energy in the U.S. and 11 percent of our electric power. Unless the production of these renewables can be increased substantially in the next 50 years and the efficiency with which we use energy increased many fold, then the world is going to become a very dark and stagnant place.
There is running debate going on between people who believe all is lost without copious supplies of fossil fuels to power the global civilization and those who believe that the conservation and efficiency that will come with very high fossil fuel prices will provide a recognizable future for civilization. The great unknowns in all this is whether there will be sufficient financial and other resources available to effect the transition and whether or not the damage wrought by a changing climate will be so serious that a global transition to renewable energy will be difficult if not impossible.

For the immediate future, however, much of what life in the future will be like will depend on the technologies that will enable civilization to continue while using only a fraction of the energy that is consumed today and to develop the technology to produce large quantities of cheaper renewable fuels. The manner in which our fossil fuels are being used is so wasteful of the energy contained in fossil fuels that major reductions can be made with little real impact on the activities that consume energy. The prime examples of this waste is the internal combustion engine which uses only 14 percent of its fuel to turn the wheels while wasting most of the rest. Huge central power plants waste most of the energy that devours coal and natural gas, and produce much waste heat that is dumped into the air or local water bodies or in line losses. Without the massive waste, the fossil fuel age could last a lot longer. More >>>

Location:Amman, Jordan

The Kingdom of Magical Rhinking

2011-08-28T23:18:00.001-04:00

In 1935, an oilman visiting the Middle East reported back to his headquarters, "The future leaves them cold. They want money now."

Although the temptation of overspending has repeatedly undermined oil-rich governments from Caracas to Tehran, Saudi Arabia avoided this trap over the last decade through fiscal discipline that has kept its expenditures below its swelling oil receipts.

But in a recent report striking for the candor of its unpalatable conclusions, Saudi investment bank Jadwa laid out the kingdom's inexorable fiscal challenge: how to balance soaring government spending, rapidly rising domestic oil demand, and a world oil market that gives little room for further revenue increases. And that was before the recent economic turmoil knocked $20 per barrel off oil prices.

Saudi Arabia's government spending, flat since the last oil boom in the 1970s, is now rising at 10 percent or more annually. And it will rise faster still: The House of Saud's survival instinct in the wake of the initial Arab revolutions led King Abdullah to announce $130 billion of largesse in February and March. The resulting increases in government employment and salaries can be cut only at the cost of more discontent.

And that's only what the kingdom is spending on its "counterrevolution" at home. Saudi Arabia will pay the lion's share of the pledged $25 billion of Gulf Cooperation Council aid to Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, and Oman. With Iraq, Syria, and Yemen likely flashpoints yet to come, the bill will only increase. Already, nearly a third of the Saudi budget goes toward defense, a proportion that could rise in the face of a perceived Iranian threat. More >>>

Location:Cayman Islands

10 Water-Saving or Water-Cleaning Technologies.. & Your Chance to Do Something!

2011-08-26T16:55:00.001-04:00

This post is a contribution to Important Media’s celebration of World Water Week.

While most of the technologies we write on here on CleanTechnica – solar power, wind power, energy efficiency, and clean transportation technologies – are focused on addressing our climate and energy crises, another critical crisis facing the world today is the water crisis.

Did you know that 80% of the world’s people face water insecurity and lack of clean water kills more people each year than war?

The clean technologies above do actually go a long way in helping us address the water crisis, but there are others out there focused solely on that goal. Here are 10 water-saving and water-cleaning technologies we’ve written about so far: More >>>

Location:Cayman Islands

Hurricane Irene: Is climate change affecting hurricane formation?

2011-08-25T19:36:00.001-04:00

Hurricane Irene is a large and dangerous storm. In this image, taken by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on the Terra satellite on August 25, bands of thunderstorms spiral tightly around a dense center, forming the circular shape of a well-developed hurricane.

At the time the image was taken, 11:50 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time, Irene was moving over the Bahamas with sustained winds of 185 kilometers per hour (115 miles per hour).
Irene has a long reach. The storm is large, spanning nearly 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) from east to west in this image. Though the storm is moving north-northwest at a mere 20 km/hr (13 mph), it will be within reach of U.S. shores within 48 hours, warns the National Hurricane Center. At the time the image was taken, a tropical storm watch extended from north of Edisto Beach, South Carolina to Surf City, North Carolina, and a hurricane watch covered the area from Surf City to the Virginia border. This means that tropical storm or hurricane conditions are possible in the next two days. See the National Hurricane Center for current watches and warnings.
Irene was a Category 3 storm when this image was taken, and it could intensify slightly in the next day or two. The storm’s currently forecasted track takes it over the Outer Banks and along the U.S. East Coast before going ashore over New England.
Even as cities throughout the densely populated East Coast prepare for the storm, residents of the Caribbean are beginning to assess the damage caused by the passing storm. Initial damage estimates are at $3.1 billion, said the Associated Press. Floods and mudslides forced 38,000 people from their homes in the Dominican Republic, which received a glancing blow from the storm. More >>>

As Hurricane Irene rumbles through the Atlantic Ocean, it needs fuel to sustain itself. Warm water is the main fuel, and there is plenty of it right now, as there usually is this time of year.

The map above shows sea surface temperatures (SST) in the Atlantic Ocean, Gulf of Mexico, and the Caribbean Sea on August 23, 2011. The measurements come from the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E) on NASA’s Aqua satellite and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instruments on both the Terra and Aqua satellites. The satellites measure the temperature of the top millimeter of the ocean.
Waters typically need to be above 27.8 degrees Celsius (82 Fahrenheit) to properly fuel tropical storms with warm, moist air. Red, orange, and yellow colors depict waters above the 27.8 degree mark. The warmer the water, the more intense the storm can grow, if upper level wind patterns cooperate. In the map above, such waters dominate the Gulf of Mexico and tropical Atlantic in late August 2011. They also run up the southeastern coast of the United States, following the Gulf Stream to Cape Hatteras before giving way to slightly cooler waters (shades of blue) in the Middle and North Atlantic.
As of 5 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time on August 24, 2011, the NOAA National Hurricane Center reported Irene had maximum sustained winds of 195 kilometers (120 miles) per hour and was located at 23.1 degrees North and 74.7 degrees West, about 45 kilometers (30 miles) east-southeast of Long Island in the Bahamas. The forecasted path had the hurricane sweeping over nearly all Bahaman islands, then turning toward the North Carolina coast and eventually New England. Forecasts are updated roughly every six hours.
Irene is the first hurricane of the Atlantic season, and potentially the first to make landfall in the United States in several years. More >>>

Location:Cayman Islands

Time to refine energy security

2011-08-25T15:59:00.001-04:00

What are we to make of the energy debate? If good public policy is the art of distilling the signal from the noise, the challenge has never been greater.

How to balance the risks of climate change against the costs of doing anything about it? And what, in turn, might these decisions mean for energy security?

For the past six months our national attention has, understandably, been focused on the carbon tax issue. The policy agenda now needs to move in a related, but different direction. The reason is a three-letter word – oil.
While oil producers will be affected by the carbon tax, politics ensures that there will be no tax on petrol.

Yet oil is, arguably, one of Australia’s key energy problems. As a nation, we passed ‘‘peak oil’’ some time ago. Domestic production plateaued more than 20 years ago, and since 2005, has been in decline. The oil that is left is a long way offshore, and a long way down. Extracting it will be costly and risky.

Australian refining capacity is more constrained now than it was a decade ago. South Australia lost its one oil refinery in 2003. A number of the refineries in Queensland, Victoria and NSW are small in scale, and subject to stiff competition from imported, refined products. Further rationalisation of refining capacity seems likely as imports continue to increase, particularly from large-scale refineries in Asia. More >>>

Location:Cayman Islands

Tourist island of Zanzibar to host climate change conference in December

2011-08-23T08:08:00.001-04:00

DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania (eTN) - Standing among small island states threatened by effects of climate change, the tourist island of Zanzibar has organized a three-day symposium to deliberate the impact of climate change in small island states.

Scheduled from December 12 to 14 this year, the symposium bears the theme of “First International Symposium on Impact and Vulnerability and Adaptation to Climate Change in Small Island Developing States.”

Organizers of the event, the State University of Zanzibar, said the symposium is aimed to raise national and international awareness on threats of climate change to small island states, which are leading tourist attraction destinations in the world, including the island of Zanzibar.

Climate change scientists had earlier raised their concern over climate changes in Zanzibar and threats to rising water levels of the Indian Ocean, and predicted dangers ahead, among them, a possible sinking of some islands which make the Zanzibar archipelago.

Experts further warned of a possibility to see key beaches of Zanzibar and a big part of this island totally sinking in the Indian Ocean within the coming 100 years.

According to the State University of Zanzibar, key speakers will be drawn from other island states including Samoa and Japan. Other speakers confirmed to attend will come from Tanzania and South Africa. More >>>

Location:Cayman Islands

Clean energy is path for security, not the proposed Keystone XL tar sands pipeline

2011-08-21T12:08:00.001-04:00

The August 13 Washington Post editorial (Oil pipeline politics) diagnoses the problems with tar sands and then gets the solution wrong.

The proposed Keystone XL tar sands pipeline will take us in the wrong direction, making global warming worse and bringing additional dangers of oil spills to America’s heartland. The United States is the main market for the bitumen that is strip-mined and drilled from under Canada’s Boreal forest. Despite Canadian claims that they’ll sell tar sands to China if we don’t take it, not only are there no major pipelines to the Canadian coasts, but opposition to these pipeline proposals is fierce. Instead of providing energy security, the proposed Keystone XL tar sands pipeline will give oil companies a Gulf Coast deepwater port for export and raise gas prices in the Midwest. After a summer of droughts and heat waves, we need to be working harder than ever to reduce our demand for oil. With fuel efficiency standards and cleaner ways to move people around, America can be a leader in clean energy rather than giving into our oil addiction. That is the path of true energy security. More >>>

Location:Cayman Islands

Beyond Supply Risks: The Conflict Potential of Natural Resources

2011-08-19T14:51:00.003-04:00

While the public debate about resource conflicts focuses on the risk of supply disruptions for developed countries, the potentially more risky types of resource conflict are usually ignored.

As part of a two-year research project on behalf of the German Federal Environment Agency, adelphi and the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Energy, and Environment have analyzed the risks of international conflict linked to natural resources in a series of reports titled Beyond Supply Risks – The Conflict Potential of Natural Resources.

Resource extraction, transportation, and processing can create considerable crises and increase the risk of conflicts in producing and transit countries. This phenomenon – widely referred to as the “resource curse” – impacts consuming countries only if it leads to shortages and higher prices. However, in the producing and transit countries it can have much wider destabilizing effects – from increasing corruption to large-scale violent conflict. In addition, the extraction, processing, and transportation of resources often create serious environmental risks. Overexploitation, pollution, and the degradation of ecosystems often directly affect the livelihoods of local communities, which can increase the potential for conflict.

The eight reports that comprise Beyond Supply Risks explore plausible scenarios over the next two decades, focusing on four case studies: copper and cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo; theNabucco natural gas pipeline project across Southern Europe and Turkey; lithium in Bolivia; and rare earth minerals in China. More >>>

Jamaican Delegation Attends 4th Singapore International Water Week

2011-08-16T15:19:00.001-04:00

Permanent Secretaryin the Ministry of Housing, Environment and Water, Genefa Hibbert, and Chairman of the Water Resources Authority of

Jamaica, Dr. Parris Lyew-Ayee Jr., recently attended the 4th
Singapore International Water Week, Water Convention and Water Leaders Summit. The week-long event held in the South- East Asian city-state, was attended by over 2,500 delegates from around the world. Major issues, such as climate change, urbanization and water supply, as well as water security were discussed. High level meetings and discussions were also held with regional and global water ministers, as well as industry and academic leaders.

A session was also held with the Singaporean Prime Minister, Mr. Lee Hsien Loong on the policy and strategic direction for water affairs for the country, as well as providing leadership and sharing expertise with the rest of the world.

The Jamaican delegation met with senior members of Singapore’s Ministry of Environment and Water Resources including the Minister, Dr. Vivian Balakrishnan; Junior Minister, Mrs. Grace Fu Hai Yien. More >>>

Location:Cayman Islands

Raging Storms and Rising Seas Swelling the Ranks of Climate Refugees

2011-08-15T12:26:00.001-04:00

In late August 2005, as Hurricane Katrina approached the U.S. Gulf Coast, more than 1 million people were evacuated from New Orleans and the small towns and rural communities along the coast.

Once the storm passed, it was assumed that the million or so Katrina evacuees would, as in past cases, return to repair and rebuild their homes. Some 700,000 did return, but close to 300,000 did not. They are no longer evacuees. They are the first large wave of modern climate refugees.

One of the defining characteristics of our time is the swelling flow of environmental refugees, including those displaced as a warmer climate brings more-destructive storms and rising seas. The prospect for this century is a rise in sea level of up to 6 feet. Even a 3-foot rise would inundate parts of many low-lying cities, major river deltas, and island countries. Among the early refugees will be millions of rice-farming families from Asia’s river deltas, those who will watch their fields sink below the rising sea.

The flow of rising-sea refugees will come primarily from coastal cities. Among those most immediately affected are London, New York, Washington, Miami, Shanghai, Kolkata (Calcutta), Cairo, and Tokyo. If the rise in sea level cannot be checked, cities soon will have to start either planning for relocation or building barriers that will block the rising seas.

River deltas contain some of the largest, most vulnerable populations. These include the deltas of the Mekong, Irrawaddy, Niger, Nile, Mississippi, Ganges-Brahmaputra, and Yangtze Rivers. For example, a 6-foot sea level rise would displace 15 million Bangladeshis living in the densely populated Ganges-Brahmaputra delta. The London-based Environmental Justice Foundation reports that “a one meter [3 foot] sea-level rise would affect up to 70 percent of Nigeria’s coastline affecting over 2.7 million hectares. Egypt would lose at least 2 million hectares in the fertile Nile Delta, displacing 8 to 10 million people, including nearly the entire population of Alexandria.”

Low-lying islands will also be hit hard. The 39 members of the Alliance of Small Island States stand to lose part or all of their territories as sea level rises. Among the most immediately threatened are Tuvalu, Kiribati, and the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean and the Maldives in the Indian Ocean. Well before total inundation, islanders face salt water intrusion that can contaminate their drinking water and make it impossible for deep-rooted crops to survive. Eventually, all crops will fail. More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

On thin ice

2011-08-14T09:43:00.001-04:00

The Arctic — a mosaic of oceans, glaciers and the northernmost projections of several countries — is a place most of us will never see. We can imagine it, though, and our mental picture is dominated by one feature: ice.

Yet the Arctic sea ice is changing dramatically, and its presence shouldn’t be taken for granted, even over the course of our lifetimes. According to new research from MIT, the most recent global climate report fails to capture trends in Arctic sea-ice thinning and drift, and in some cases substantially underestimates these trends. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report, released in 2007, forecasts an ice-free Arctic summer by the year 2100, among other predictions. But Pierre Rampal, a postdoc in the Department of Earth, Atmosphere, and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), and colleagues say it may happen several decades earlier. More >>>

Location:Cayman Islands

SIDS DOCK Launched to Catalyze Renewable Energy

2011-08-09T16:17:00.001-04:00

3 August 2011: The Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) has announced the launch of SIDS DOCK, an international organization intended to catalyze sustainable energy projects in small island developing States (SIDS).

With US$14.5 million in funding from Denmark's parliament, SIDS DOCK will operate as a "docking station," connecting small islands with US and EU technologies, capital and carbon markets. SIDS DOCK is expected to be operational by September 2011.

According to Vince Henderson, Dominica's Ambassador to the UN, and Chair of the SIDS DOCK Steering Committee, the majority of small islands currently rely on fossil fuel imports and face growing debt as a result. In order to "radically transform" their economies, SIDS DOCK was developed jointly by AOSIS, the Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre (CCCCC) and the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP). SIDS DOCK will be led by an Executive Director and overseen by a Board of Directors, including AOSIS members, development partner organizations and technical experts. The organization also will partner with the World Bank and UN Development Programme (UNDP).

National Coordinators of SIDS DOCK will be responsible for coordinating the development of national, regional and inter-regional priorities in renewable energy, energy efficiency and conservation projects, and for ensuring successful project coordination and outcomes. The first meeting of the SIDS DOCK National Coordinators, held from 27-28 July 2011, served as the launch.

According to AOSIS, SIDS DOCK aims to facilitate the development of a sustainable energy sector in small islands, providing the foundation for low carbon economic growth and adaptation to climate change, with the result of assisting small islands to generate at least 50 percent of their electric power from renewable sources, decrease petroleum use by 20 to 30 percent, and increase energy efficiency by 25 percent (using a 2005 baseline) by 2033.
More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

Managing Contraction, Redefining Progress

2011-08-07T23:22:00.001-04:00

Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When the crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend upon the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to
existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.
—Milton Friedman (economist)

Many analysts who focus on the problems of population growth, resource depletion, and climate change foresee gradually tightening constraints on world economic activity. In most cases the prognosis they offer is for worsening environmental problems, more expensive energy and materials, and slowing economic growth.

However, their analyses often fail to factor in the impacts to and from a financial system built on the expectation of further growth—a system that could come unhinged in a non-linear, catastrophic fashion as growth ends. Financial and monetary systems can crash suddenly and completely. This almost happened in September 2008 as the result of a combination of a decline in the housing market, reliance on overly complex and in many cases fraudulent financial instruments, and skyrocketing energy prices. Another sovereign debt crisis in Europe could bring the world to a similar precipice. Indeed, there is a line-up of actors waiting to take center stage in the years ahead, each capable of bringing the curtain down on the global banking system or one of the world’s major currencies. Each derives its destructive potency from its ability to strangle growth, thus setting off chain reactions of default, bankruptcy, and currency failure. More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

The World Needs a New Language

2011-08-04T18:03:00.001-04:00

We know it is dangerous to cross a red light, so we wait until it turns green.

We do not go out sailing when the weather forecast promises a great storm. We accept it when a doctor tells us to take medicine to prevent hypertension.

We do not drink the water if there is sign saying that it is contaminated. We are constantly accepting different potential risks and manoeuvring to limit them.

But when it comes to climate change, our willingness to accept it as a potential great risk is missing - and so is our motivation to respond to it with our normal risk-behaviour.

97 percent of the climate scientists believe global warming is happening, that humans are largely responsible and that we need to take action now. From their perspective there is a mountain of evidence on the reality of climate change; the nearest thing to an open-and-shut case that scientist can produce. They are constantly trying to convince us -- the public -- of this fact.

But still the concern shared by almost every scientist is not concurrent with the general public opinion. 44 percent of Americans still believe that global warming is primarily caused by planetary trends, according to a poll from Rasmussen Reports conducted in April. And 36 percent do not believe climate change is a serious problem.

Thus we are currently witnessing an enormous reality gap between science and the public -- with very different perceptions of the risks posed by climate change.

If scientists could solve climate change on their own, the lacking public support wouldn't be a problem. But they can't. Without the endorsement from the general public, the fight against climate change does not stand much of a chance. More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

UNGA Debate on Right to Water Highlights Impact of Climate Change

2011-08-02T15:27:00.001-04:00

27 July 2011: The UN General Assembly (UNGA) held a debate on the human right to water and sanitation, during which a number of speakers highlighted that climate change constitutes an obstacle to the enjoyment of this right, stressing the particular situations of small island low-lying States.

The debate took place on 27 July 2011, at UN Headquarters in New York, US. In his opening address, Joseph Deiss, UNGA President, recalled that, in July 2010, the General Assembly adopted a resolution on the human right to water and sanitation, which he said was an important first step towards the explicit acknowledgment of that resource as a human right.

Egypt said States must take all necessary measures to extend human rights, including the right to clean water and sanitation. He added that Egypt’s efforts were challenged by funding, climate change, population growth and other factors, and indicated that his Government had adopted an integrated national plan to address these challenges. Senegal stressed the need to address climate change and drought in order to achieve the right to water, calling for increased assistance.

Cuba called for enhanced cooperation in the face of climate change, calling for the creation of mechanisms that are not dependant on the international financial institutions.

Saint Vincent and the Grenadines expressed support for the UNGA resolution by which the Assembly had recognized the right to water and sanitation as a human right. He underlined that his country's achievements in terms of ensuring the realization of that right, considering its limited resources, illustrate the importance of political will. He emphasized the urgency of “looming threats” to achieving the right to water, namely climate change and desertification. He added that his country often resorts to transporting water by ship and said sea-level rise would have a disastrous effect. He concluded by calling for mainstreaming the issue in the global agenda.

Maldives explained that her country's main source of water is shallow groundwater, underscoring its extreme vulnerability to water scarcity. She called for considering the legally binding right to water in the context of sea-level rise, climate change, and other critical phenomena. More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

Scholarships and Bursaries Call for Caribbean Nationals in Graduate Studies in Climate Change

2011-07-30T12:24:00.001-04:00

Scholarships and Bursaries Call for Caribbean Nationals in Graduate Studies in Climate Change

Study areas related to Climate Change that can be considered for these Scholarships and Bursaries are:
Climatology; Environmental Sciences; Coastal Management; Water Resources; Sustainable Tourism; Gender Studies

The CARIBSAVE Partnership, the University of the West Indies (UWI) and the University of Waterloo (UW), Canada, announce a joint research project entitled:

Partnership for Canada-Caribbean Community Climate Change Adaptation (ParCA)*

Students’ scholarships and bursaries will focus on ParCA; a project that will conduct comparative case study research in Tobago, Jamaica and two Atlantic Canadian provinces. The project will use a community-based vulnerability assessment (CBVA) framework in collaboration with coastal communities and local partners to identify vulnerabilities and exposures, and develop strategies for adaptation to climate change. Under this program, funding is available for Caribbean Nationals to study at the University of the West Indies or the University of Waterloo at Masters and PhD levels.

ELIGIBILITY for Scholarships and Bursaries

Must be a Caribbean National
Must have successfully completed an undergraduate or graduate degree at a high level in an area relevant to Climate Change including Climatology, Environmental Sciences, Coastal Management, Water Resources, Sustainable Tourism, Gender Studies.
Must have been accepted and registered in a Masters or PhD Programme at UWI or UW.
Evidence of professional experience in any of the fields indicated above will be an asset.
Applicants for Scholarships and Bursaries will be assessed by a Selection Committee established by the University of the West Indies, the University of Waterloo and The CARIBSAVE Partnership.

HOW TO APPLY:
Applications should be sent via email to The Office of Research, The University of the West Indies: pvcresearch@admin.uwi.tt and must be copied to The CARIBSAVE Partnership: hr@caribsave.org When applying please include ‘ParCA’ as Subject in the email.

The following should be included in your Application: an up to date Curriculum Vitae; a covering letter indicating qualifications; professional experience; preferred study location (UWI Campus or Waterloo); your area of interest for graduate studies and full contact details for three Referees. Closing date for this round of applications is 31 August 2011.

* Funding for this project and its student scholarships and bursaries is kindly provided by the Canadian IDRC and the Tri Council and disseminated through The CARIBSAVE Partnership, The University of Waterloo and The Unversity of the West Indies. More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

An effective response to climate change

2011-07-28T15:46:00.001-04:00

Foreign Secretary William Hague has delivered a speech titled 'The Diplomacy of Climate Change' to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

Thank you Governor Whitman. I am most grateful for your generous introduction.

I am delighted to be here at the Council on Foreign Relations. In the modern networked world, diplomacy is no longer the sole preserve of diplomats. Instead, we all have a stake in global affairs. That is why the work of renowned bodies such as this is more valuable than ever.

Today I want to talk about why I believe we, as foreign policy practitioners, need to up our game in building a credible and effective response to climate change. Climate change is perhaps the twenty-first century’s biggest foreign policy challenge along with such challenges as preventing the spread of nuclear weapons. A world which is failing to respond to climate change is one in which the values embodied in the UN will not be met. It is a world in which competition and conflict will win over collaboration.

We are at a crucial point in the global debate on climate change. Many are questioning, in the wake of Copenhagen, whether we should continue to seek a response to climate change through the UN and whether we can ever hope to deal with this enormous challenge.

I will first argue that an effective response to climate change underpins our security and prosperity. Second, our response should be to strive for a binding global deal, whatever the setbacks. And third, I will set out why effective deployment of foreign policy assets is crucial to mobilising the political will needed if we are to shape an effective response. More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

The scourge of 'peak oil'

2011-07-25T11:53:00.001-04:00

Energy derived from oil reaches, quite literally, every aspect of our lives.

From the clothes we wear, to the food we eat, to how we move ourselves around, without oil, our lives would look very differently.

Yet oil is a finite resource. While there is no argument that it won't last forever, there is debate about how much oil is left and how long it might last.

Tom Whipple, an energy scholar, was a CIA analyst for 30 years - and believes we are likely at, or very near, a point in history when the maximum production capacity for oil is reached, a phenomenon often referred to as "peak oil".

"Peak oil is the time when the world's production reaches the highest point, then starts back down again," Whipple told Al Jazeera. "Oil is a finite resource, and [it] someday will go down, and that is what the peak oil discussion is all about."

There are signs that peak oil may have already arrived.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) recently increased its forecast for average global oil consumption in 2011 to 89.5 million barrels per day (bpd), an increase of 1.2 million bpd over last year.

For 2012, the IEA is expecting another increase of 1.5 million bpd for a total global oil consumption of 91million bpd, leaving analysts such as Whipple to question how production will be able to keep up with increasing consumption. Whipple's analysis matches IEA data which shows world oil production levels have been relatively flat for six years.

"This is getting very close to the figure that some observers believe is the highest the world will ever produce," Whipple wrote of the IEA estimate in the July 14 issue of Peak Oil Review. He told Al Jazeera that peak oil could be reached at some point in the next month, or at the latest, within "a few years". More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

What hope is there for us if America is driven to the brink of meltdown?

2011-07-17T16:11:00.001-04:00

When President Obama, the supreme rationalist, says that there are just days to avert Armageddon, everyone should sit up and listen.

For months, Republicans have used their new majority in the House of Representatives to block any move to lift the artificial cap on the amount the US government can borrow. If by this Friday they still refuse – insisting on up to $4trillion of spending cuts, excluding defence, and no tax increases as the price of their support – then the US will be unable to service its public debts. The biggest economy on Earth will default.

The results will be catastrophic, argues JP Morgan chief executive Jamie Dimon – a warning repeated by Obama. The US government will have to start to wind down: soldiers' wages and public pensions alike will be suspended. But in the financial markets there will be mayhem. Interest rates will shoot up and there will be a flight from the dollar. Banks, uncertain about their expected income from their holdings of US Treasury bonds and bills, will call in their loans, creating a second credit crunch. Some may collapse. Even to get days away from such a prospect, says Obama, will now have costs: every creditor to the US has been shaken to the core by American politicians not taking their responsibilities as borrowers seriously. They will exact a higher price for lending in future, even if a bargain is struck now.

These are politicians who in some respects have more in common with Islamic religious fundamentalists than the Enlightenment tradition which gave birth to western democracy.

But the Democrats cannot agree to the Republicans' absolutist demands, in part because the arithmetic of deficit reduction does not work without tax increases and cuts in defence spending, in part because they passionately believe that with taxes the lowest for 50 years, the US's rich should share in the pain and in part because in any human exchange there is an element of horse-trading. The Republicans want to suspend the rules by which not just Washington but any political system operates. They want to be political winners who take all, risking even the collapse of the US economy to get their way. More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

Dramatic Climate Swings Likely as World Warms: Ancient El Niño Clue to Future Floods

2011-07-16T16:09:00.001-04:00

ScienceDaily (July 15, 2011) — Dramatic climate swings behind both last year's Pakistan flooding and this year's Queensland floods in Australia are likely to continue as the world gets warmer, scientists predict.

Researchers at the Universities of Oxford and Leeds have discovered that the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), the sloshing of the warmest waters on the planet from the West Pacific towards the East Pacific every 2-7 years, continued during Earth's last great warm period, the Pliocene.

Their results suggest that swings between the two climatic extremes, known as El Niño and La Niña, may even have occurred more frequently in the warmer past and may increase in frequency in the future. Extreme ENSO events cause droughts, forest fires and floods across much of the world as well as affecting fishery production.

Reporting in the journal Paleoceanography, the team of geochemists and climate modellers use the Pliocene as a past analogue and predictor of the workings of Earth's future climate. More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

Best Climate Change Remedy? More Trees, Study Says - International Business Times

2011-07-15T18:01:00.001-04:00

Forget wind power and extra efficient lightbulbs — trees are an incredibly effective climate change weapon given the amount of greenhouse gases they absorb, according to a new study in the journal Science.

Trees are natural sponges, or “carbon sinks.” The study found that they cumulatively absorbed almost a third of annual fossile fuel emissions, or nearly 2.4 billion tons of carbon. And tropical forests that have been allowed to grow back after deforestation are removing an astounding 1.6 billion tons of carbon from the atmosphere, co-author Josep Canadell told Agence-France Presse.

“This is the first complete and global evidence of the overwhelming role of forests in removing anthropogenic carbon dioxide,” Canadell said. “If you were to stop deforestation tomorrow, the world’s established and regrowing forests would remove half of fossil fuel emissions.”

An international team of climate scientists compiled data spanning nearly two decades, from 1990 to 2007, to present the findings. The central implication, given the capacity of forests to act as safeguards against rising CO2 emissions, is that “forests are even more at the forefront as a strategy to protect our climate,” Canadell said. More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

OAS Member States Approve Draft Declaration on Sustainable Tourism Development in the Americas

2011-07-13T16:57:00.001-04:00

The representatives of the Member States of the Organization of American States (OAS), at a meeting in Washington, DC, approved the draft Declaration of San Salvador for Sustainable Tourism Development in the Americas, which will be considered for final approval by the Ministers and High Authorities of Tourism in San Salvador on September 29 and 30, 2011, in the framework of the 19th Inter-American Travel Congress.

The Preparatory Meeting for the 19th Inter-American Travel Congress was held June 23 and 24, 2011, at OAS headquarters in Washington, DC, and was presided by El Salvador’s Alternate Representative to the Organization of American States, Agustín Vásquez.

The meeting addressed subject areas of cooperation to be financed by the Special Multilateral Fund of the Inter-American Council for Integral Development (FEMCIDI). The delegates identified the following subject areas: competitiveness in the tourism industry, particularly those of micro, small and medium enterprises, and the support for human capabilities development at the public and private levels through training and the use of information and communication technologies; promoting Sustainable Tourism Development, through the mitigation of negative environmental impacts; raising awareness of the importance of maintaining the ecological balance of tourist attractions; the relationship between tourism and other sectors of the economy; and the support for ecotourism and sustainable tourism through dialogue between the public and private sectors.

At the end of the meeting, the Governments of Ecuador and Honduras offered to host the next Inter-American Travel Congress in 2013, a decision that will be made in the upcoming months after consultations among the Member States of the Organization.

Furthermore, a proposal was made to organize a promotional fair for regional tourism to be held during the Congress in San Salvador to further highlight the event and promote tourist attractions in the Americas.

The Inter-American Travel Congress, created in 1939 with the objective of promoting the development of tourism in the Americas, is one of the oldest institutions of the Inter-American System. The last Travel Congress was held in Guatemala in 2003.

A gallery of photos of the event is available here.

For more information, please visit the OAS Website at www.oas.org.

Location: Cayman Islands

Cook Islands: 100% Renewable Energy by 2020

2011-07-13T15:27:00.001-04:00

5 July 2011, Rarotonga Cook Islands – The Cook Islands has an electricity target of 50% renewable energy by 2015 and 100% by 2020. While this may seem like an extreme target, according to the Prime Minister of the Cook Islands Hon. Henry Puna – “it is ambitious but it is not impossible

Plans are already underway to bring this to fruition.

The Cook Islands will be launching their Renewable Energy Chart this year – Te Atamoa O Te Uira Natura, the plan that outlines how they will achieve their renewable energy targets. This chart has undergone consultation with relevant stakeholders and has taken into account input from numerous supporting partners. It is now in the process of being finalised for endorsement.

“It is flexible to take into account possible changes which may happen, as well as addressed the long term concerns – for example the outer island of Aitutaki now has a peak demand for electricity of 900 kilowatts,” said Repeta Puna, the Policy Adviser from the Office of the Prime Minister.

“In Te Atamoa O Te Uira Natura we have planned for a two megawatt solar plant for Aitutaki to take into account the future demand for electricity.”
More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

CCCCC and EU Sign Agreement to Support Caribbean Forum Countries in Meeting Climate Change Challenges

2011-07-13T15:22:00.001-04:00

4 July 2011: The Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre (CCCCC) and the EU have entered into an agreement to, among other things, support Caribbean Forum (CARIFORUM) countries in meeting the challenges of climate change.

Under the agreement, the EU has allocated €8 million to support 17 CARIFORUM countries to meet the challenges of climate change. The four-year project will be managed by the CCCCC, with the objective of developing and strengthening the Caribbean region’s efforts in reducing the impacts of climate change on its economic and social development. The overall objective of the project is to support the sustainable development efforts of the Caribbean region and preserve the progress of the countries towards the attainment of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), by, inter alia: enhancing national and regional institutional capacity in areas such as climate monitoring, data retrieval and the application of space-based tools for disaster risk reduction (DRR); building regional and national capacity to access carbon financing; and implementing adaptation pilot projects that may be subsequently replicated. [CCCCC Press Release]

Location: Cayman Islands

World on the Edge by the Numbers – Shining a Light on Energy Efficiency

2011-07-12T17:35:00.001-04:00

Our inefficient, carbon-based energy economy threatens to irreversibly disrupt the Earth’s climate.

Averting dangerous climate change and the resultant crop-shrinking heat waves, more-destructive storms, accelerated sea level rise, and waves of climate refugees means cutting carbon emissions 80 percent by 2020.

The first key component of the Earth Policy Institute’s climate stabilization plan is to systematically raise the efficiency of the world energy economy. One of the quickest ways to increase efficiency, cut carbon emissions, and save money is simply to change light bulbs.

Some 19 percent of world electricity demand goes to lighting. The carbon emissions generated by this sector equal roughly 70 percent of those produced by the global automobile fleet.

Of the 3,400 terawatt-hours of electricity consumed annually by the world’s light fixtures, more than 40 percent is used by commercial buildings, including offices, retail businesses, schools, and hospitals. Close to one third is used in the home; 18 percent in industrial buildings; and the remaining 8 percent in outdoor applications, such as lights at traffic stops and in parking lots. More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

Political Sustainability and Human Security

2011-07-11T11:55:00.001-04:00

Economic Revival Requires a Revival of our National Community

New York - As the nation's debt deadline approaches, and the political and media gamesmanship in our nation's capital increases in intensity, I find myself thinking more and more about community. The value with which we hold each other, and our relationship to those with whom we share our living space. The political parties blame each other for the stubborn persistence of unemployment, now over 9% officially and over 16% when we count those who have given up on the job market or are underemployed.

The Republicans blame the declining economy on over-taxation. The Democrats blame job loss on Republican resistance to additional stimulus. Twice this year the Republicans have been willing to "play chicken" with the President and the nation's well being: first over the budget by threatening a government shutdown, and now by holding the entire economy hostage while threatening to default on our debt. Ideology is dominating debates that should be settled by data, not wishful thinking. People in America need work. Our community has work that needs to be done. It's time to close that loop.

The creation of a global economy and communication network has placed the American economy and our society in uncharted territory. We do not really understand the complex economic, political, ecological, social and cultural forces that drive the world economy. We don't really know the answers to the problems we face. Like FDR during the New Deal we need to pragmatically experiment. We need to learn what works and what doesn't. What collective community responses are needed? What private entrepreneurial forces need to be unleashed? In March of 1933, as FDR assumed the Presidency in the depths of the Great Depression, some of his speeches and articles were collected in a book entitled Looking Forward. At the dawn of the New Deal, Roosevelt wrote:
"The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it; if it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something." Franklin D. Roosevelt, Looking Forward, chapter 2, p. 51 (1933). More >>>

Going forward into this century all states need to have all political parties work together for the benefit of their country and people. To deal with the perfect storm that we are faced with, climate change, sea level rise, energy shortages, and a rapidly rising population it is imperative that political stalemate becomes a thing of the past. Editor

Location: Cayman Islands

UNEP-Risoe Launches Technology Transfer Publication Series

2011-07-05T17:40:00.001-04:00

29 June 2011: The UN Environment Programme (UNEP)-Risoe Centre has announced the launch of a new publication series titled "Technology Transfer Perspectives," which aims to stimulate debate and information sharing on technology transfer among academics, experts, policy makers, practitioners and other stakeholders, and will include mitigation and adaptation-side approaches.

The first edition of the series, titled "Diffusion of renewable energy technologies: case studies of enabling frameworks in developing countries," will be complete in time for the 17th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 17) to the UNFCCC in Durban, South Africa, at the end of 2011.

The first four articles of this first edition are available: FIT for use everywhere? Assessing experiences with renewable energy feed-in tariffs, by James Haselip, UNEP Risoe Centre, Denmark; Bioenergy in India: Barriers and Policy Options, by Darshini Ravindranath and Srinivas Shroff Nagesha Rao, UN Development Programme (UNDP) India; Enabling Environment and Policy Principles for Replicable Technology Transfer: Lessons from Wind Energy in India, by Emi Mizuno, Climate Strategies, UK; and An enabling framework for wind power in Colombia: What are the lessons from Latin America? by Isaac Dyner, Yris Olaya and Carlos Franco, Universidad Nacional de Colombia.

According to the articles, an effective enabling environment for technology diffusion requires consideration of the market, as opposed to projects specifically. [Publication: Technology Transfer Perspectives Series]

Location:Cayman Islands

Warming Ocean Layers Will Undermine Polar Ice Sheets, Climate Models Show

2011-07-05T12:19:00.001-04:00

Warming of the ocean's subsurface layers will melt underwater portions of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets faster than previously thought, according to new University of Arizona-led research. Such melting would increase the sea level more than already projected.

The research, based on 19 state-of-the-art climate models, proposes a new mechanism by which global warming will accelerate the melting of the great ice sheets during this century and the next.

The subsurface ocean layers surrounding the polar ice sheets will warm substantially as global warming progresses, the scientists found. In addition to being exposed to warming air, underwater portions of the polar ice sheets and glaciers will be bathed in warming seawater.

The subsurface ocean along the Greenland coast could increase as much as 3.6 °F (2 °C) by 2100.

"To my knowledge, this study is the first to quantify and compare future ocean warming around the Greenland and the Antarctic ice sheets using an ensemble of models," said lead author Jianjun Yin, a UA assistant professor of geosciences.

Most previous research has focused on how increases in atmospheric temperatures would affect the ice sheets, he said.

"Ocean warming is very important compared to atmospheric warming because water has a much larger heat capacity than air," Yin said. "If you put an ice cube in a warm room, it will melt in several hours. But if you put an ice cube in a cup of warm water, it will disappear in just minutes."
Full Article >>>

Location:Cayman Islands

CCCCC Update Takes Stock of Bonn Climate Change Conference

2011-07-05T10:58:00.001-04:00

28 June 2011: The Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre (CCCCC) has published the 10th issue of its monthly Climate Change News Update, which compiles international and regional climate change-related news.

The issue features an article on the lack of agreement on key areas at the Bonn climate change talks, held from 6-17 June 2011 in Bonn, Germany.

The Update also highlights statements made by developing country officials and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that developed countries have not provided the US$30 billion of climate financing they pledged at the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference in December 2009. The Update further reports on the announcements by Norway and Germany that they would provide US$50 million and €30 million, respectively, to the World Bank Carbon Fund, to help slow tropical deforestation, one of the major causes of climate change.

The issue also compiles regional news on climate change, including warnings by regional experts that Caribbean States are likely to fall into perpetual recession as a result of the impacts of climate change on their tourism and agriculture industries. Other news includes US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s announcement of new programmes to support Caribbean States’ priorities, and discussions between Guyanese President Bharrat Jagdeo and German leaders and senior officials, which focused on the need for sustained political action on climate change. [Publication: Climate Change News Update Issue 10]

Location:Cayman Islands

Why Climate Change Requires A Consciousness Change

2011-07-02T17:05:00.001-04:00

Einstein famously said that we cannot solve problems with the same level of perception that created them.

We have to step up to a higher and more inclusive level of seeing what is going on in order to understand and solve great challenges. Certainly climate disruption represents one of the greatest tests humanity has ever faced because it is a much higher level problem than the actions which have created it: countless local actions (driving cars, running factories, etc.) have produced global consequences that respect no national boundaries and that imperil our collective future.

Here is how James Speth, former head of the Council on Environmental Quality and a top Washington policy maker, describes the up-leveling of perception required: "I used to think the top environmental problems facing the world were global warming, environmental degradation, and eco-system collapse.. but I was wrong. The real problem is not those three items, but greed, selfishness and apathy. And for that we need a spiritual and cultural transformation." The transformation that Speth speaks about is a shift to a higher level of attention and seeing the world from a more objective vantage point with a witnessing or reflective consciousness.

Simply stated, what is required is a shift from an "embedded consciousness" that is locked inside the habits of our thinking mind to a more spacious "reflective consciousness" that enables us to become a fair witness or objective observer of our lives. This does not mean we stop thinking; instead, we stand back and, without judgment, simply watch what we are thinking and how we are relating to both the world and ourselves.
Full Article >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

Warming Oceans Cause Largest Movement of Marine Species in Two Million Years

2011-07-02T14:14:00.001-04:00

Warming ocean waters are causing the largest movement of marine species seen on Earth in more than two million years, according to scientists.

Warming ocean waters are causing the largest movement of marine species seen on Earth in more than two million years, according to scientists. (AP Photo/Guillermo Arias, file)
In the Arctic, melting sea ice during recent summers has allowed a passage to open up from the Pacific ocean into the North Atlantic, allowing plankton, fish and even whales to into the Atlantic Ocean from the Pacific.

The discovery has sparked fears delicate marine food webs could be unbalanced and lead to some species becoming extinct as competition for food between the native species and the invaders stretches resources.

Rising ocean temperatures are also allowing species normally found in warmer sub-tropical regions to into the northeast Atlantic.

A venomous warm-water species Pelagia noctiluca has forced the closure of beaches and is now becoming increasingly common in the waters around Britain.

The highly venomous Portuguese Man-of-War, which is normally found in subtropical waters, is also regularly been found in the northern Atlantic waters. Full Article >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

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

2011-06-25T20:04:00.001-04:00

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

2011-06-24T17:30:00.001-04:00

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

Groundwater Depletion Rate Accelerating Worldwide

2011-06-23T12:01:00.001-04:00

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

Summary Of The UNCSD Subregional Preparatory Meeting For The Caribbean 20 JUNE 2011

2011-06-22T16:03:00.001-04:00

The United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD) Rio+20 Subregional Preparatory Meeting for the Caribbean convened at the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Headquarters in Georgetown, Guyana, on Monday, 20 June 2011.

Over 50 participants, including representatives from governments, UN bodies, and non-governmental and inter-governmental organizations attended.

The meeting generated Caribbean inputs in preparation for the UNCSD in June 2012. Participants discussed creating a green economy in the context of sustainable development and poverty eradication, the need for a blue economy addressing oceans and related issues, the institutional framework for sustainable development (IFSD), and emerging issues and partnerships.

Participants recognized that there is much work to be done in the lead-up to UNCSD and little time to do it. They identified the value and benefits in engaging in the process and the opportunities that it represents, particularly in regard to the green economy. The meeting generated interest and momentum within the Caribbean subregion, which promise to lead to further discussions over the coming weeks and months. More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

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

2011-06-22T15:03:00.001-04:00

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

The Shrinking Pie: Post-Growth Geopolitics

2011-06-18T12:38:00.001-04:00

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

2011-06-17T15:37:00.001-04:00

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

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

2011-06-16T19:49:00.001-04:00

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

Joint Efforts to Map Water Levels Across Arab Countries

2011-06-15T08:20:00.001-04:00

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.

2011-06-14T12:32:00.001-04:00

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

2011-06-13T19:32:00.001-04:00

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: major impacts on water for farming

2011-06-09T09:48:00.001-04:00

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

2011-06-08T16:28:00.001-04:00

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

Sustainable development must be as much blue as it is green

2011-06-08T09:09:00.001-04:00

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

Countries get guidance on climate change financing

2011-06-06T09:04:00.001-04:00

NEW YORK, United States, Friday June 3, 2011 – The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has launched a guidebook that provides advice to decision-makers in developing countries, like those in the Caribbean, on how to tap into growing environmental finance markets as funding becomes increasingly available to tackle the challenges of climate change.

The guidebook, entitled “Catalysing Climate Finance,” draws on UNDP’s experience managing hundreds of climate projects in 140 countries over the past two decades. It contains step-by-step guidance for identifying and implementing a mixture of public policies and funding instruments to raise climate finance.

“In the absence of effective capacity building and appropriate advisory services, there’s a significant risk that only a few emerging economies will fully benefit from these positive developments,” UNDP Associate Administrator Rebeca Grynspan said yesterday.

“By some estimates around 90 percent of investments in clean energy go to G20 [Group of 20 economies] countries and the remaining 10 percent go to the rest of the world.” More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

Climate to wreak havoc on food supply, predicts repor

2011-06-04T14:48:00.001-04:00

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.
More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

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

2011-06-03T19:18:00.001-04:00

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

The Peak Oil Crisis: An Announcement

2011-06-03T17:12:00.001-04:00

With little fanfare, a press release appeared last week on the website of the UK Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security (ITPOES).

The release said that during a meeting between Chris Huhne, the UK's Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, and representatives of ITPOES, an agreement had been reached that Her Majesty's Department for Energy and Climate will collaborate with ITPOES on a joint examination of concerns that global oil supply will begin to fall behind demand within as little as five years. This collaboration is seen by the British government as the first step in the development of a national peak oil contingency plan.
There are many implications buried in this seemingly innocuous announcement.

First, American readers should note that the British government recognizes that energy policy and climate change are inextricably linked so that you cannot formulate policies for one without the other. The major step forward, however, is the official and semi-public recognition by a major government that global oil supplies will fall behind demand in as little as five years. After years of official denial this is indeed a breakthrough worthy of note.

Gone is the rhetoric about the billions of barrels of oil remaining that will last for so many decades that nobody alive today needs to worry. Official recognition has been given to the concept that the remaining oil will be so expensive to extract or will be locked into the earth by intractable political disputes, so that it simply will not be available in the unlimited quantities or at the prices we have known for the last 100 years.
Also implicit in the announcement is that ever-rising real energy costs will destabilize nearly all of the world's economies and that economic growth in the form we have come to know it will no longer be possible.

Location: Lawrence Bl, Cayman Islands

Editorial: Global Energy Shortages

2011-06-03T10:33:00.001-04:00

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

2011-06-02T16:29:00.001-04:00

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

2011-06-02T15:29:00.001-04:00

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.
More >>>

Location:Sandalwood Crescent,George Town,Cayman Islands

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

2011-06-02T08:25:00.001-04:00

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

Sea levels could rise a metre by 2100

2011-05-26T12:44:00.001-04:00

The federal government's climate commission says global warming could cause the world's sea level to rise up to one metre by the end of the century - higher than previously thought.

The commission, established by Labor to spruik the case for tackling dangerous climate change, is also calling for a fresh approach to reducing carbon emissions.

It suggests that rather than focusing on interim targets based on percentage cuts, governments should commit to emitting no more than an agreed carbon dioxide "budget" by 2050. This so-called budget approach would allow greater flexibility and encourage investment in the most-effective technologies rather than quick-fix solutions.

The commission is releasing its first major report, The Critical Decade, on Monday.

"A plausible estimate of the amount of sea-level rise by 2100 compared to 2000 is 0.5 to one metre," it says.

That's higher than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's top range of 0.18m to 0.76m.

Commissioner Will Steffen, a Canberra-based climate scientist, made the assessment after surveying the existing literature and speaking to experts.

"Some people may take issue with that - but that's my judgment," Professor Steffen told AAP ahead of the report's release at Parliament House.

The report states that even a rise of 0.5m could lead to an increase in extreme flooding events for coastal areas of Sydney and Melbourne "by factors of 1000 or 10,000 for some locations". More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

Energy industry hopes to renew interest in smart grid

2011-05-24T17:08:00.001-04:00

SANTA CLARA, Calif. (KGO) -- SmartMeters were supposed to be the first step toward a new kind of interconnected power network, called the smart grid. However, concerns over health risks have stalled progress. Now there's an effort under way to get the smart grid moving again.

SmartMeters have generated more opposition than PG&E ever expected.

"We never realized at the time that they would become so front and center to peoples' primary focus of concern," said PG&E Sr. Vice President Tom Bottorf.

They were designed to be an information gateway linking consumers to the power grid. Instead, health concerns surfaced, while talk of an interconnected smart grid faded.

"The critical thing is to bring them together and to have a different kind of dialogue under one roof," said Connectivity Week organizer Anto Budiardjo.

That's the goal of a conference this week at the Santa Clara Convention Center. Called "Connectivity Week," consumer advocates, environmental watchdogs, and utility companies hope to find common ground. More >>>

Location: Cayman Islands

Education Leads to Lower Fertility and Increased Prosperity

2011-05-12T12:08:00.000-04:00

As the world continues to add close to 80 million people each year, high population growth is running up against the limits of our finite planet,

threatening global economic and political stability. To stay within the bounds of the earth’s natural resources, the world’s population will have to stabilize.

The United Nations’ recently revised “medium” projection shows world population exceeding 9 billion by 2045. In the “high” projection, which assumes high levels of fertility, world population would top 10 billion by the same year. But spreading hunger and poverty, along with the conflict and disease that come with them, could forcibly curtail growth before we reach 9 billion. Alternatively, the “low” projection suggests it is possible for world population to peak at just over 8 billion around 2045 if we voluntarily make rapid reductions in family size. More >>>

Location:George Town, Cayman Islands

AFB to host regional climate change workshop

2011-04-28T17:28:00.000-04:00

LATIN America and the Caribbean's ability to adapt to the devastating impacts of climate change is expected to improve with the hosting of a major capacity-building workshop in the region this year.

The workshop, one of three or four being hosted by the Adaptation Fund Board (AFB), is to help enhance the ability of national implementing entities in the region to write strong proposals and carry out activities geared at reducing climate change impacts. This was disclosed by the Group of Latin America and the Caribbean representative on the AFB, Jeffrey Spooner, who last month attended the 13th meeting of the board in Bonn, Germany.

"The workshop in Latin America and the Caribbean is one of the first of the series of regional workshops that are to be held. The decision to host the workshops came out of the climate change meeting in Cancún , Mexico in December 2010," he said.
Read more: http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/environment/AFB-to-host-regional-climate-change-workshop_8702397#ixzz1Kr6B9nle

A Review of Lester Brown’s Latest: World on the Edge

2011-02-24T05:44:00.001-05:00

In today’s (February 3, 2011) Financial Times, Ed Crooks reviewed World on the Edge by Lester Brown, saying that it “manages to cover both the grand sweep of global trends and the fine detail of some of the ideas being developed in response.”
He also calls it “a provocative primer on some of the key global issues that businesses will face in the coming decades.” “It provides a persuasive vision of the markets that are likely to present the greatest challenges, and the technologies and business models that have the greatest potential, in a world of escalating environmental and social problems.” More >>>

The Peak Oil Crisis: 2011 – A Pivotal Year?

2010-12-29T16:02:00.000-05:00

DECEMBER 29 2010 - Wall Street is getting nervous. As oil prices continue to creep up and as more evidence accumulates that the age of ever-growing energy production and economic growth is coming to an end, a specter is haunting the great investment banks and brokerage houses of New York.

For five years now Wall Street and its chorus in the financial media have ignored or denied that global oil production has reached a plateau after 150 years of steady growth. Those who did admit to a problem were quick to assert that the markets would find substitutes first in the form of endless quantities of coal waiting to be exploited and more recently 100 years' worth of shale gas would come seamlessly to the rescue.

The nervousness of course is that once global energy production starts to decline, capitalism as we have known it for the last few centuries will no longer be the same. While some new form of an economic system will evolve, the transition is likely to be long and painful. Many, if not most, jobs in the financial industry will simply melt away. Hence, for many, putting off the fateful day when we have to admit the inevitable is much preferred solution. More >>>

Red Seaweed Could Be the Next Biofuel Super-Crop

2010-12-20T13:58:00.000-05:00

Red is about to become the new green, if researchers from the University of Illinois are on the right track. They’ve developed a new super-efficient strain of yeast that can easily break down red seaweed into biofuel.

The new development could help small island nations and other sea-bound regions grow biofuel crops without giving up scarce land resources that are needed to grow food. But it also opens up some challenges down the road as human use of the marine environment increases.
Biofuel from Red Seaweed

When it comes to extracting fuel from non-food biomass, seaweed has general advantages over land crops. The most obvious one is the relative absence of hard fibers that are difficult to break down into sugars. Marine biomass degrades much more easily than land crops, but there is still a catch. When red seaweed is broken down it yields both glucose and galactose (a less “sweet” form of sugar), and until now it has been difficult to find an efficient fermentation process for galactose. The University of Illinois team identified three genes in a common microbe, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, that can be pumped up to increase galactose fermentation by 250 percent. More >>>

Unstable Antarctica: What's Driving Ice Loss

2010-12-16T15:23:00.000-05:00

Dec 16, 2010 Scientists have previously shown that West Antarctica is losing ice, but how that ice is lost remained unclear. Now, using data from Earth observing satellites and airborne science missions, scientists are closing in on ice loss culprits above and below the ice.

The findings, presented Dec. 15 at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco, Calif., are expected to improve predictions of sea level rise.

Time Not Healing Glacial Wounds
A new analysis by Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder Colo., and colleagues found that more than a decade after two major Antarctic ice shelves collapsed, glaciers once buttressed by the shelves continue to lose ice. More >>>

Climate-vulnerable island states get boost for moving into renewable energy

2010-12-14T11:43:00.000-05:00

13/12/2010

Some of the smallest and most vulnerable island nations in the world will benefit from a new initiative signed off in Cancun last week, aimed at increasing these countries’ access to renewable sources of energy.

A memorandum of understanding was signed between the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), the Government of Denmark, the World Bank, and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), recognising the disproportionate harm of climate change for small island developing states and aims to support island countries to scale up their renewable energy efforts and shift to greater energy efficiency.
An 80 million Danish kroner (€11 million) pledge of support from the Government of Denmark has helped kick off the initiative, which is expected to help island states from the Africa, Caribbean, and Pacific Islands regions transition to low-emission, climate-resilient development paths.
World Bank Group President Robert B. Zoellick jointly signed the agreement with Tillman Thomas, Prime Minister of Grenada and head of AOSIS; Lykke Friis, Denmark’s Minister for Climate and Energy; and Helen Clark, UNDP Administrator. Zoellick said the initiative supports a group of nations that have been among the most active and most vocal at climate negotiations for many years.
“Small island developing states have been sounding the alarm about climate change for years now and have earned the title of ‘the conscience of the climate convention’,” Zoellick said. “They are leaders in taking actions on adaptation, and the World Bank Group has increased support to them for this purpose. This new initiative extends this support to clean energy, which will contribute to mitigation and also help reduce the islands states’ very high import bills for fuel.”
Breaking oil dependence
Because of their size and remoteness, most small island developing states are heavily dependent on imported petroleum for their energy needs. Some countries spend an estimated 25 – 50 percent of their GDP on imported oil, which leads to very high domestic electricity costs.
“Reducing fossil fuel consumption is a ‘win-win’ for small island developing states”, said Helen Clark of the UNDP. “It reduces the greenhouse gas emissions responsible for the rise in global temperatures, while at the same time improving energy security and freeing up national spending for investment in climate-resilient development.”
One of the expected benefits from this renewable energy initiative will be the freeing up of “fiscal space” for governments to spend on development and climate-resilient action.
“Climate change has the potential to derail all the good work that countries have undertaken for decades to overcome poverty and boost growth,” Zoellick said. “In countries with the possibilities of renewable energy sources, overall development is undermined if governments are spending so much on imported fossil fuels.”
The World Bank and the UNDP will facilitate the trust fund that will be established from the memorandum of understanding.
For additional information: http://bit.ly/fzaVI0

World Bank: Governance and Climate Change

2010-12-10T15:49:00.001-05:00

Governance and Climate Change

According to the World Bank Group’s Governance and Anticorruption Strategy (GAC), governance is “the manner in which public officials and institutions acquire and exercise the authority to shape public policy and provide public goods and services”. Poor governance permits and even promotes corruption resulting in private gain and abuse of public office. Resources that should fuel development and reduce poverty enrich corrupt elites. Institutions matter, and civil society groups and parliaments can promote transparency and accountability, thereby strengthening governance and helping countries achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

Good governance is necessary to effectively overcome development challenges and ensure sustainable development. The urgency of addressing these challenges is heightened by the need to combat the impacts of climate change. For developing countries, better management of floods, droughts and storm surges is necessary, while also maintaining gains made in reducing poverty.

Climate change also provides opportunities in using new financial instruments to achieve low carbon, climate-resilient and socially equitable development. However, for countries to receive international financing to address climate change, adequate governance institutions in developing countries must enable effective use of funds. Other governance-related questions include the following:

• Can funds support public sector works and do adequate institutions exist for implementing projects without corruption concerns?

• Can policy and legislative frameworks be developed for market-based instruments to be used effectively by the private and public sectors for climate-friendly development?

• Can existing institutional frameworks effectively combine weather-related insurance and natural disaster risk management as part of the adaptation agenda?

• Can different line ministries work together to address the climate-development challenges?

• Can public policies provide an umbrella for public-private initiatives, i.e., to: inform consumer choice on energy efficiency appliances and building construction; and ensure land tenure, access and rights of local and indigenous peoples are not eroded through reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD)?

• Can policies be developed to help reduce land-based carbon emissions and land-water degradation, and provide payments to local and indigenous communities to help reduce poverty?

To address some of these questions, the World Bank Institute (WBI) is bringing together its work on governance and climate change in many of its activities and for different stakeholders. For example, youth activists are critical to social accountability efforts, and, as future leaders, they have a role to play in shaping climate-friendly development. Parliamentarians shape national development agendas, and their representative, legislative and oversight responsibilities are essential for taking action on climate change and development. This issue of the e-bulletin addresses what WBI is doing to engage with and enhance the capacity of these stakeholders.

WBI’s Climate Change Practice is also facilitating action on adaptation, particularly in many African countries. The section on knowledge products and activities of the agriculture, water and natural resource management program showcases our efforts in this arena. This e-bulletin also covers other areas WBI is focusing its efforts on, such as Cities and Climate Change. It also addresses the ongoing work of Carbon Finance Assist, which highlights the use of market and, increasingly, non-market instruments to reduce emissions.

I would like to thank Mitchell O’Brien and Miriam Bensky in the WBI Governance Practice for their contribution to this preface. We hope you enjoy these articles and we look forward to interacting with you further.

Habiba Gitay
Sr. Environmental Specialist and Acting Practice Manager
WBI Climate Change Practice

Many Strong Voices Holds First Advisory Committee Meeting

2010-12-08T13:13:00.000-05:00

30 October 2010: Many Strong Voices (MSV), a collaboration between Arctic and small island developing States (SIDS) that seeks to promote the wellbeing of these areas vulnerable to climate change, held its first Advisory Committee meeting in the Seychelles from 28-30 October.

The purpose of the Seychelles meeting was to review the MSV five-year plan (2008-2012) and communications strategy, and to identity opportunities and next steps for the MSV initiative.

The MSV Advisory Committee is made up of representatives from Arctic indigenous organizations, nongovernmental organizations, and SIDS representatives. Meeting participants included representatives from the Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre, Organization of American States (OAS), Indigenous Peoples Global Summit on Climate Change, Inuit Circumpolar Council, Cayman Institute and Government of the Cook Islands, as well as the University of Seychelles and the Sea Level Rise Foundation.

Key outcomes of the meeting included: a revised MSV five-year Strategic Plan with a focus on activities in the next two years; agreement on the coordination of an MSV side event on "Voices from the North and South: Food Security and Human Rights in Small Island Developing States and the Arctic" at the 16th Conference of the Parties (COP 16) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Cancun, Mexico; agreement on the initiation of new projects on food security, ecosystem-based adaptation to climate change, and human rights; and the development of a new project on black carbon.

The meeting coincided with an exhibition, titled "Portraits of Resilience," photo and stories on climate change by youth from communities in the Seychelles, Fiji, Tuvalu, Alaska, Greenland, Canada, and Norway. [IISD RS Sources] More >>>

Outside Cancún climate conference, Caribbean Sea testifies to global warming

2010-12-06T11:07:00.000-05:00

2010 was one of the deadliest years on record for coral reefs. The Caribbean Sea just outside the Cancún climate conference offers evidence of global warming's negative effect.

This summer’s extreme heat may seem like a distant memory as winter approaches the United States.

But the summer that broke heat records across the Northern Hemisphere is still being felt below the surface of the Caribbean Sea: 2010 will likely be one of the most deadly years on record for coral reefs.

If diplomats attending the two-week global climate change talks that opened Monday in Cancún, Mexico, want more evidence of the negative and potentially devastating affects of warming temperatures, they need look no further than the blue sea outside their hotels. Researchers say that throughout the Caribbean coral reefs are “bleaching,” a condition that occurs when they are under extreme stress due to warmer-than-normal sea temperatures. More >>>

Never an Empty Bowl: Sustaining Food Security in Asia

2010-12-04T14:17:00.000-05:00

For the first time in history, the number of people suffering from chronic hunger reached one billion globally in 2009, with Asia accounting for approximately two-thirds of the world’s hungry.

The future looks even more daunting. Population growth, increasing demand from changing diets, dwindling land and water resources for agriculture, higher energy costs, and the huge uncertainties regarding the effects of climate change present scientists and policy makers with additional challenges.

A new Task Force report issued jointly by the Asia Society and the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) brings together a pragmatic approach to public policy and the best science, with substantial input from key players in the field, to advance a comprehensive plan of action to address food insecurity and poverty in the region. More >>>

Small Island Developing States seek international commitment

2010-10-15T18:15:00.000-04:00

Dessima Williams

Alliance of Small Island States’ Chairperson and Grenada’s Ambassador to the United Nations Dessima Williams in an exclusive interview with MediaGlobal’s Nosh Nalavala

9 October 2010

MediaGlobal (MG): The most recent talks in Bonn showed that the 194 negotiating countries have failed to even define a common target or method for curbing greenhouse gases. Where do the negotiating countries go from here? Does Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) have a strategy for breaking this deadlock?

Dessima Williams (DM): Our strategy is to be prepared for progress and for lack of progress, in the sense that we are working for very ambitious, deliberate and timely outcomes. What we have done is to stress the situation of our islands and of the world. The whole world is suffering from a worsening situation in climate change. Island countries are on the forefront of global climate deterioration. Many economic and physical science studies suggest that we are in trouble. The earth is now hotter than it has ever been, and 93 percent of the warming over the past 50 years has gone into the oceans, which directly affects our coral levels, fish stock, sea-level rise and thus the security of islands. For those reasons, negotiations ought to be moving faster. More >>>

How Warm Was Summer 2010? : Image of the Day

2010-10-07T11:42:00.003-04:00

NASA Satellite Image Showing Global Temperature Anomalies

More >>>

China leading the world in clean energy investment

2010-10-03T13:11:00.000-04:00

SHANGHAI -- September 30, 2010 -- As weary visitors wait to enter the Shanghai Corporate Pavilion at Expo 2010, a sprinkler system using recycled rainwater and powered through a solar thermal system cools them off with periodic misting.

Once they enter the exhibit at the world's largest fair, tourists learn about high-speed trains and other energy-efficient inventions that have begun to proliferate in China.

"Shanghai has developed so fast, its natural resources have disappeared," reads one placard at the expo. Several yards away, a film presentation plays in which the narrator asks, "What's the future of Shanghai?"

It is a question that is far from decided. But China's emphasis on developing clean energy sources has rattled some of its economic competitors and could transform the global energy marketplace. More >>>

Warming in Deep Southern Ocean Linked to Sea-Level Rise

2010-09-21T15:19:00.000-04:00

Warming waters in the deepest parts of the ocean surrounding Antarctica have contributed to sea-level rise over the past two decades, scientists report today (Sept. 20).

In an attempt to pinpoint all culprits for the rising oceans, scientists analzyed warming trends in the abyssal ocean — below about 3,300 feet (1,000 meters), said study team member and oceanographer Sarah Purkey of the University of Washington in Seattle.

The scientists found that the strongest deep warming occurred in the water around Antarctica, and the warming lessens as it spreads around the globe. The temperature increases are small — about 0.05 degrees Fahrenheit (0.03 degrees Celsius) per decade in the deep Southern Ocean, and less elsewhere. More >>>

Peak oil: two words to worry about

2010-08-28T15:41:00.000-04:00

The crisis would be so severe, we wouldn't be able to run our tractors, heat our homes or drive our cars

AUGUST 27, 2010 - As if you don't have enough to worry about, add two more words to your list: peak oil.

Forget climate change -peak oil is the biggest problem on the human horizon according to some. Bullcrap, say others.

The idea is actually hard to explain, which may be why many have never heard of it. But if the peak oil theory is true, it will affect us all drastically, so it's worth a shot:

Technically, there is lots of oil left in the world. We're often told the supply could last 40 or 50 years. But peak oil is the exact point at which oil production peaks. The idea is you don't need to run out of oil to get into trouble. You just have to reach the "peak," the point where you've passed maximum output and start to run out. At that point, oil becomes finite and something big happens -the price surges. That jump would be so violent and unavoidable, say some, that the global economy would simply run out of affordable gas and, in a worst-case scenario, would collapse. The crisis would be so severe, we wouldn't be able to run tractors, heat our homes or, naturally, drive our cars. Soon we'd be living like 17th-century pioneers in the shell of our former gas-driven civilization. More >>>

If a Country Sinks Beneath the Sea, Is It Still a Country?

2010-08-23T13:08:00.000-04:00

Rising ocean levels brought about by climate change have created a flood of unprecedented legal questions for small island nations and their neighbors.

Among them: If a country disappears, is it still a country? Does it keep its seat at the United Nations? Who controls its offshore mineral rights? Its shipping lanes? Its fish?

And if entire populations are forced to relocate -- as could be the case with citizens of the Maldives, Tuvalu, Kiribati and other small island states facing extinction -- what citizenship, if any, can those displaced people claim?

Until recently, such questions of sovereignty and human rights have been the domain of a scattered group of lawyers and academics. But now the Republic of the Marshall Islands -- a Micronesian nation of 29 low-lying coral atolls in the North Pacific -- is campaigning to stockpile a body of knowledge it hopes will turn international attention to vulnerable countries' plights.

"At the current negotiating sessions and climate change meetings, nobody is truly addressing the legal and human rights effects of climate change," said Phillip Muller, the Marshall Islands' ambassador to the United Nations. More >>>

Caribbean Storm Damage Costs May Rise 50% With Global Warming

2010-08-20T15:05:00.000-04:00

Aug. 19 (Bloomberg) -- Climate change may add 50 percent to the storm damage costs incurred by some Caribbean nations over the next two decades, said Swiss Reinsurance Co., the world’s second-largest re-insurer.

Wind, storm surges and inland flooding already cost some Caribbean nations up to 6 percent of their economic output each year, the Zurich-based company said today in a statement on its website. Global warming could add costs amounting to another 1 to 3 percent of output by 2030, it said.

Insurers are being hit with more claims as damages from natural catastrophes rise. Costs to clean up after storms and other natural disasters reached a record $180 billion in 2005, of which insurers covered about half, according to Munich Re, the biggest re-insurer. More >>>

Rising Sea Levels Threaten Drinking Water Supplies for 15 Million East Coast Residents

2010-08-10T14:19:00.003-04:00

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How Will Small Businesses Survive Peak Oil?

2010-08-09T17:29:00.002-04:00

From Yahoo to Virgin, big business is waking up to the threat of peak oil.

So much so, that Virgin bross Richard Branson believes we should bemobilizing for peak oil as if for war. But what about the little guy? It's often assumed that because peak oil will make global shipping a challenge, that we'll just transition back to smaller, more local economies. I suspect the truth will be a little more complicated than that.

As much as we TreeHuggers like to espouse the virtues of local business and human scale economies, there can be few businesses out there—big or small—that find themselves immune to the threat of rising energy prices or economic volatility. And as recent events have shown, while corporations may find themselves on shaky ground, there is often a helping hand out there to stop the giants from failing. Will that be the same for the small operators? A small social enterprise in the UK is aiming to ensure that we head the problem off before it becomes a crisis. More >>>