1,226 Bird Species Threatened By Climate Change
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the world oldest and largest global environmental network, is doing an excellent job of allerting the world about the negative impact of climate change to bird species. The 2008 IUCN Red List gives us useful intormation of the threathened species of birds owed to long-term drought, sudden extreme weather and loss of breeding habitats. Top Ten countries listed for threatened bird species are: Brazil, Indonesia, Peru, China, Philippines, Colombia, India, Ecuador, United States, and New Zealand. Just to take one example of the birds that have been uplisted from “Endangered” to “Critically Endangered”,
Spoon-billed Sandpiper. About 57% of their breeding habitat could be destroyed by 2070. An admirable work is being done in this area by an NGO, Bird Life International. Spoon-billed Sandpiper is now on their list of “Species Champions” of the Preventing Extinction Programme targetting 190 critically endangered birds that are on the 2008 IUCN Red List. Bird Life International finds
Species Champions who will fund the work of nominated ‘Species Guardians’ for each bird. Organizations and individuals best placed to carry out the conservation work necessary to prevent the loss of the bird species in all regions can join them in this very creative programme. Birds are under enormous pressure from Climate Change. This gigantic efforts by IUCN and Bird Life International are worthy of our support no matter where we live in the world.
Agreement on Work Program for Climate Change
I am glad that negotiators from 163 countries have agreed at the end of the UN-sponsored meeting in Bangkok, which runs from March 31 to April 4, on the work program for the Bali Action Plan for Climate Change. People are hopeful that industrialized developed countries and developing countries can come up with solutions that both sides “can live with”, based on a common interest to deal urgently with the problems and the pressing issues of global warming, while the Antarctica Ice Shelf is cracking and disintegrating at this moment. Action requires the industrialized countries to stop the increase in global emissions within the next 10 to 15 years. and to dramatically cut back emission by 2050, said the UN environmental scientists. They warn us that failure to do so will see average world temperature increase over 2 degrees, leading to adverse effects such as food and water shortages, rising seas level and increase in extreme weather events. Further discussions will continue for a year and a half, to be concluded in 2009, at a major summit in Copenhagen, Denmark. Key areas that the government representatives will focus their discussion on are: human intervention to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emission; helping developing countries to adapt to the ravages of global warming; cleaner technologies for economic growth; and a financial package to help developing countries to find appropriate responses to climate change. A successor agreement must be ready for ratification three years before the Kyoto Protocol, which will expire in 2012, to allow countries to make its law in time. Climate change is a threat to us all. It is a matter of “life or death” for island developing countries. So we must pressure our own government to speed up negotiations to prevent future disaster.
Filed under Environment | Comment (0)The Bali Meeting on Climate Change
Actions by the people and all states are very important to mitigate and to adapt to climate change The intergovernmental process in the context of the Convention and the Kyoto Protocol begins on 3 December in Bali. Negotiations by 180 country representatives, with the help of world scientists, and with facilitation by United Nations staff will continue for two weeks ending on the 14th. China, India and the United States are three biggest contributors to the problem of climate change. People around the world expects them to make changes in their policies to play a constuctive role in the negotiation to come up with a new treaty to follow-up Kyoto protocol, which will end in 2012. Their constuctive participation in the meeting will result in heading off forcast by the scientific communities that our world will face catastrophic floods and droughts resulting from the melting of the ices and glaciers in the North and South Poles. Developing countries need assistance to avoid these disasters which will kill millions. I join others in hoping for a success outcome when participating government representatives agree to sign a new Climate Change Treaty. I wish the Indonesian Government best wishes in organizing this important global meeting.
Filed under Environment, United Nations, World Affairs | Comment (0)Art for the Environment and Effective Resource Management
The new “Art for Environment” initiative of the United Nations Environment Programme is most encouraging. An online exhibition of photographs and paintings on the theme of earth’s environment done by world artists are beautiful, not only to the eyes, but to the souls and human spirits. The special exhibition/photo gallery of pictures taken by Luo Hong on the Swans at the Natural World Museum are thought provoking. For me, it is emotionally touching to see groups of swans flying above the melting snow and ice in the North. This is a very effective way in generating individual and community interests, and in moving them to take action on global warming problems and environmental degradation issues. Arts can create common value of safeguarding our Planet. Paintings and photographs of our natural world can create a common language of loving and caring for all living things on earth. Achim Steiner, UNEP Executive Director, should be congratulated for this. He should also be thanked for setting up a new global think tank on resource efficiency, the International Panel for Sustainable Resource Management. The task of this think thank is to tackle pressing issues of biofuel production, metal recycling, security, and environmental impact of selected products and services worldwide. He has invited members of the civil societies to get involvedwith these two initiatives at local, regional, and global levels in the effort to promote a deeper understanding of the interconnection of human behaviors and the future of our natural world and global environment.
Filed under Art, Environment | Comment (0)Well-Deserved Noble Prize
It is good week for those of us in the environment movement trying to educate the World of the danger of Global Warming and Climate Change. I am delighted in hearing the news that IPCC and Al Gore are the winners of the Noble Peace Prize this year. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), created by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) has been working since 1988 to alert the World of the danger of global warming. IPCC team of scientists have presented us with facts and figures to convince us that climate change is human-made, therefore we can reverse the effects of it by changing behavior of human beings. I want to congratulate Rajendra Pachauri for his excellent work as chairman of IPCC in moving the international communities and governments to take action to deal with global warming, and Al Gore, for his life-long dedications to the global environment issues. He has convinced me of the danger of global warming by his excellent presentation of facts and figures in the film “An Inconvenient Truth”. I have changed my way of living after seeing the film. Al Gore and Davis Guggenheim, the film producer, have succeeded in getting people in the World to change their ways of living to reverse the effects of global warming. As part of a world communities that want to do things differently
to reduce global warming, I try to reduce the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in my day-to-day living by driving less. I try to reduce waste and the demand for fossil fuels; to use less heat and air conditioning; to buy energy-efficient products; and to replace regular light bulbs with compact fluorescent light bulbs in my home and office. Beyond individual’s effort, there is a need for real action, such as emission reduction, by governments to avoid the grave consequences of accelerated environment deterioration and societal upheaval as a result of global warming.
Successful Leadership On Global Warming
I congratulate the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon for his success in taking a bold initiative to bring global leaders together on 24th September 2007, before the opening of the 62 General Assembly, for one day meeting to discuss global warming phenomenon. It was an impressive gatherings of people, from Arnold Schwarzenegger, Governor of California, Arti Mehra, Mayor of New Delhi, to Al Gore, Former United States Vice-President and present world environment champion; a real break through, indeed, on our efforts to deal with Climate Change. Participants included 40 heads of State or government, 9 deputy prime ministers and vice presidents and 70 cabinet ministers from all over the world come together to discuss under three important theme: mitigation, innovating a climate-friendly world through new technology; and financing the response to climate change. It is true what Al Gore said. The old divide between North and South, between developed and developing countries is now obsolete and business cannot continue as usual. At the end of the session at the UN Headquarters in New York, the leaders agreed to take appropriate actions by working together in reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, focusing on clean technologies and making massive economic change needed to cut global emissions from industries. Women leaders attended the meeting, gave useful ideas on how we should move ahead on this: German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, suggested that a global carbon-trading scheme, which places a price on industries’ carbon-dioxide emissions, should play a central role in future attempts to fight global warming; Gro-Harlem Brundtland of Norway, Special Envoy of the UN Secretary-General, and Mitchelle Bachelet, President of Chile, led important plenary discussions on “Mitigation”; United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice suggested that the world must find ways to “transcend” fossil fuels in the search for clean, renewable alternatives; and Meena Raman of Friends of the Earth International gave advice to industrialized countries to cut carbon-dioxide emissions to give more “wiggle rooms” for developing countries to act. Ban Ki-moon succeeded in his aim to “jump-start” and build-up of political support as a momentum for the Bali December 2007’ Climate Change Negotiation. As host, Indonesian President Sosilo Bambang Yudhoyono said that success of the meeting is when we have agreements on what action to take between now until 2012, the end of the Kyoto agreement to reduce greenhouse gases, and action afterwards. He said that the Bali meeting must yield a “new roadmap” that spells out what developed and developing countries agree to do to save humankind and our planet from the looming tragedy of climate change. Ban Ki-moon was certain that we know enough to act, but warned that what we do not have is time.
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Tackling Effects of Global Warming: Grass-roots Solutions
We have moved forward a little bit in tackling the effects of global warming when 1700 community activists from 62 countries agreed on the 12-Month Framework for Action on Climate Change. Members of the NGOs and civil societies met last week at the United Nations’ organized Conference focusing on,“Climate Change: How It Affects Us All”. It is good timing for the grass-roots solutions before the problems of global warming become irreversible. The agreed 12-Month Framework for Action at grass-roots level surely is a major step forward to protect our future ecosystems and infrastructures. Since we share one Planet Earth, leaders of each community will have to find appropriate action locally, aiming to stop people’s behavior which will end up polluting the Earth’s environment. Governments and industrial leaders have begun to take concrete action to reduce greenhouse gas or to find alternative sources of energy. Financial and development institutions give incentives to foster climate-friendly technologies towards the eventual phase-out of fossil fuels and nuclear-based technologies. Each community should make their own action plan to face the severity of impact of climate change, which is different from one community to the other, depending on geography and location. For example, sea level rise will affect the livelihood of the people who live along coastal areas or on small islands more than those living on mountain terrains, while the melting of the Himalayan glaciers will affect people in Central and East Asia more than people living in South America. This agreed Framework For Grass-roots Action has given us hope in that, together, we can combat global climate change. We are all responsible to change our own bad habit of excessive consumption, and bad practice of waste of clean water and other precious natural resources. Our positive action can prevent disaster for ourselves and for billions of other people who will face famine, mass dislocations and death that will come from global warming and climate change. This successful last week conference has increased the momentum leading up to the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Meeting to address the leadership challenge of climate change, which is scheduled for 24 September in New York, andthe United Nations Climate Change Conference at Nusa Dua in Bali from 3-14 December 2007.
Filed under Environment, United Nations, World Affairs | Comment (1)Shortages of Freshwater
The World is facing a freshwater crisis. Only 23 years from now the global urban population will reach sixty per cent, placing enormous pressure on the available clean water supplies, which already are very limited. By 2020, the average water supply per person worldwide is expected to be a third smaller than today. Phil Dickie, the author of the report, “Making Water” of the WWF’s Global Freshwater Programme, estimated that 1.1 billion people are at the moment living without adequate water supply, and twice that number without adequate sanitation. The warning also came from 23 United Nations’ agencies working together at the World Water Assessment Programme based in UNESCO headquarters in Paris, that the water crisis is so severe it could take almost 30 years to eradicate hunger and that the “availability of clean water supply” is an issue that can threaten the world’s social stability. We have to create awareness around the world to stop wasteful water consumption. By 2025, The United Nations Environment Programme predicts that the amount of freshwater wasted by different sectors will rise to 1000 for agriculture, 1100 for domestic use and 500 cubic km for industry. Second only to global warming, scientists worldwide said that water shortages are most worrying problems for the new Millennium. Good news is that on 15 August 2007, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development launched a very useful
“Global Water Tool” at the World Water Week in Stockholm, Sweden, showing where water risks are in the World to guide future action. We need to know the water situation and problem locally in order to manage water supply globally for the survival of all of living beings in this World.
Growing Cities
This year, the State of the World Population Report 2007, issued by the United Nations Population Fund, highlights the positive and negative aspects of the rapid increase of people living in cities around the world. In Asia alone, it is estimated that urban population grows from 1.4 billion to 2.6 billion between the year 2000 and 2030. Together, we need to plan action to face this global phenomenon, with full participation of city people, including present slum dwellers. The special needs and rights of the urban poor have to be considered in each city plan. No one can survive living in the city without having adequate shelter, sanitation, electricity and clean water supply. Women, whether rich or poor, need special reproductive health and family planning services. City youth need, not only education and employment opportunity, but also sexual/health and environment-related education, especially the prevention of HIV/AIDS. I recommend that all policy-makers read this interesting report in order to make urbanization a positive force for change. They are key groups of people that can take real action to prevent future disaster that will come from a more crowded-living space and the danger that will come from the rising of sea level as a result of global warming. Also, all governments need to have better policy to stem population migration into urban areas.
Filed under Environment, United Nations, World Affairs | Comments (2)New York City Steam Pipe Explosion
Earlier this month, as my son and I were watching a historical documentary about the underground infrastructure of New York City, we said to each other that it was scary that anything could happen underneath our feet as we walk and we would not even know about it. The steam-pipe explosion that happened two days ago at Lexington Avenue and 41st Street, for us, was “closer to home”. It was in the area where my son and I usually walk to work, eat or meet friends. We considered ourselves lucky for not being in the city on that particular day. But I am certain that many of our friends, out on the street at the time of the explosion– getting home from work, that were hit by falling debris, steamy hot mud on their heads and bodies. They have our sympathy. Mayor Bloomberg and those of us who live in New York City have to find ways to check safety conditions of our underground infrastructures so that accident like this will not happen again. For a long time, I have never feel safe when walking on the street of old cities like New York, Tokyo, Rome, London and Paris, knowing what could go wrong underneath my feet at any moment. It turns me into a fatalistic world traveler, rather paranoid, waiting for a disaster to happen at any moment.
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