The United Nations has declared 2010 the International Year of Biodiversity. It is intended to be "a celebration of life on earth and of the value of biodiversity for our lives". Countless initiatives will be organized to communicate the importance of biodiversity and encourage us all to take action to reduce the accelerating loss of biodiversity worldwide.
Whether we are aware of it or not, our lives are tightly linked with biodiversity in so many ways. This enormous variety of other animals and plants - including the places they live and their surrounding environments - provide us with the food, fuel, medicine and other essentials we simply cannot live without.
When biodiversity is lost it impoverishes us all and weakens the ability of the living ecosystems, on which we depend, to cope with growing threats such as climate change. Yet this rich diversity is being lost at an ever accelerating rate because of us humans, all over the world.
Sustainable Development Update (SDU), our newsletter on evironment - development issues since 2001, has a new format from now on. This is a way of adapting the newsletter to the new ways people use the Internet today.
The new format of "Sustainable Development Update" means that the newsletter will be transformed from a bimonthly newsletter to a continuously updated newsblog (but of course with the possibility to subscribe to monthly email updates). This is a natural next step to make SDU more in tune with current web development while also benefiting more from "Web 2.0 functions", like twitter feeds, Youtube channels and blog posts. We hope you like it!
Read the Beta-version of the SDU-news blog here: www.sdupdate.org
The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) has released a report with tools for Decision-makers. TEEB is an independent study hosted by the UN Environment Programme with financial support from the European Commission. It shows that the cost of sustaining biodiversity and ecosystem services is lower than the cost of allowing them to dwindle.
All policy makers who factor the planet's multi-trillion dollar ecosystem services into their national and international investment strategies are likely to see far higher rates of return and stronger economic growth in the 21st century, argues the new report for decision makers prepared by The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) initiative. The report calls on more sophisticated cost benefit analysis before policy decisions are made, and demands policy-makers to accelerate, scale-up and embed investments in the management and restoration of ecosystems.
– Nature's multiple and complex values have direct economic impacts on human well being and public and private spending. Recognizing and rewarding the value delivered to society by the natural environment must become a policy priority, said Pavan Sukhdev, TEEB's Study Leader, at a press conference in Brussels on Friday 13 November.
Discrimination against women and the lack of attention to the ways gender inequality hampers development, health, equity and overall human well-being all undermine countries' resilience to climate change. This is concluded in The State of World Population 2009, released November 18 by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA).
– Poor women in poor countries are among the hardest hit by climate change, even though they contributed the least to it, says UNFPA Executive Director Thoraya Ahmed Obaid in a press release.
The majority of the 1.5 billion people in the world living on $1 a day or less are women and depend on agriculture for a living. Consequently, they are more likely to go hungry or lose their livelihoods when droughts strike, rains become unpredictable or hurricanes move with unprecedented force. In addition, these poor women tend to live in marginal areas, vulnerable to floods, rising seas and storms. Hence, women are more likely than men to die in climate change related natural disasters, with this gap most pronounced where incomes are low and status differences between men and women are high.
A group of 28 leading scientists has made a first attempt to identify and quantify a set of nine planetary boundaries. Keeping within these will act as a safety barrier for sustainable human development, according to the group of scientists in an article published in Nature, September 24.
– Human pressure on the Earth System has reached a scale where abrupt global environmental change can no longer be excluded. To continue to live and operate safely, humanity has to stay away from critical ‘hard-wired’ thresholds in Earth’s environment, says lead author Professor Johan Rockström, Director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University.
Listen to Professor Johan Rockström of the Stockholm Resilience Centre when he introduces the Planetary Boundaries concept.
Albaeco has been involved in the writing of a report and the design of an exhibition for two key meetings on the Swedish west coast during the Swedish EU presidency. The report entitled “Biodiversity, Ecosystem Services and Resilience: Governance for a Future with Global Changes" has been prepared by a working group led by Miriam Huitric of Albaeco and Stockholm Resilience Centre.
The report is a scientific background report intended to support deliberations at the high level meeting “Visions for Biodiversity Beyond 2010 - People, Ecosystem Services and the Climate Crisis" in Strömstad, 7-9 September, during the Swedish EU Presidency. It calls for a better management of the dynamics between social-ecological systems.
- Halting biodiversity loss and sustaining ecosystem services for human well-being beyond 2010 requires better recognition of the dynamic interplay between biodiversity, ecosystem services and human development in the context of rapid global environmental change, says Miriam Huitric, editor of the report.
How many insects does it take to make a hamburger? How do you fit hundreds of litres of water into one bottle of beer? Can we eat our way to sustainable development? All of this – and much more – is taken up in Manna, a different exhibition about food, the environment and our hidden dependence on nature.
On September 1 Manna opens at the Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm. Manna is based on the latest trans-disciplinary environmental research and focuses on current and “urban” food, like hamburgers and sushi. The goal is to show how the foods we eat originate from nature by using a visual, pedagogic approach to describe the food production system and the global trade system that we are all a part of.
A new report from Global Humanitarian Forum is the first ever exclusively focused on the global human impact of climate change. It calculates that more than 300 million people are seriously affected by climate change at a total economic cost of $125 billion per year.
The new report “Human Impact Report: Climate Change – The Anatomy of a Silent Crisis” projects that by 2030, worldwide deaths will reach almost 500,000 per year, people affected by climate change annually expected to rise to over 600 million and the total annual economic cost increase to around $300 billion.
– Climate change is a silent human crisis. Yet it is the greatest emerging humanitarian challenge of our time. Already today, it causes suffering to hundreds of millions of people most of whom are not even aware that they are victims of climate change, comments Kofi A. Annan, President of the Global Humanitarian Forum, in a press release.
It is high time to invest much more in the conservation, rehabilitation and management of forests, peatlands, soils and other ecosystems. This can safeguard existing stores of carbon, reduce emissions and maximise the potential for removing carbon from the atmosphere, according to a new report from the UN Environment Programme.
The new report “The Natural Fix? The Role of Ecosystems in Climate Mitigation” was released on the 5th of June to mark World Environment Day 2009, just under six months before the crucial UN climate convention meeting in Copenhagen, Denmark.
– Tens of billions of dollars are being earmarked for carbon capture and storage at power stations with the CO2 to be buried underground or under the sea. But perhaps the international community is overlooking a tried and tested method that has been working for millennia, the biosphere, says Achim Steiner, UNEP Executive Director, in a press release.
UNEP concludes that the Earth’s living systems might be capable of sequestering more than 50 gigatones (Gt) of carbon over the coming decades with the right market signals. This means not only that we are combating climate change, but potentially delivering a number of crucial ecosystem services, including improved water supplies, soil stabilization and reduced biodiversity loss. Not to mention a number of potential new “green” jobs in natural resource management and conservation.
If overall water resources in river basins were acknowledged and managed better, future food crises could be significantly reduced. This is concluded in a recent analysis carried out by researchers from Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) and Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
The researchers quantify for the first time the opportunities to use effectively both “green” and “blue” water (see box below) to adapt to climate change and to feed the future world population. Their study, entitled “Future water availability for global food production: the potential of green water for increasing resilience to global change” was recently published in the journal Water Resources Research. The findings change fundamentally the conventional bleak predictions for future water scarcity in the world.
Can lift billions out of water poverty The current approach to water management considers only blue water, that is, river discharge and groundwater. This limits the options to deal with increasing water scarcity and water risks induced by climate change. Under those conditions, over three billion of the current world population are estimated to suffer from severe water scarcity.
Unsustainable overfishing on coral reefs is not simply an issue of too many people fishing on the reefs. A new study shows that it is the level of socio-economic development of coastal communities that determines how intensively nearby reefs will be fished.
The American, Australian, British and Kenyan scientists behind the study surveyed 19 coral reefs and the adjacent coastal communities in the western Indian Ocean region. They measured the amount of fish on the reefs (fish biomass) and a range of social, economic, demographic and cultural indicators in the human communities. In a recent issue of the scientific journal Current Biology they publish their results showing that human population density in fishing villages was a rather poor predictor of the amount of fish in adjacent reefs. Rather it was the level of socio-economic development, such as access to water, paved roads and electricity, that was strongest correlated to fish biomass.
Actually, the authors found less fish on reefs in areas with moderate levels of socio-economic development. In contrast, the areas with the lowest and highest levels of socio-economic development had up to four times as much fish on the reefs.
The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) has released a report with tools for Decision-makers. TEEB is an independent study hosted by the UN Environment Programme with financial support from the European Commission. It shows that the cost of sustaining biodiversity and ecosystem services is lower than the cost of allowing them to dwindle.
How many insects does it take to make a hamburger? How do you fit hundreds of litres of water into one bottle of beer? Can we eat our way to sustainable development? All of this – and much more – is taken up in Manna, a different exhibition about food, the environment and our hidden dependence on nature.
