Containing nature’s wrath

Imagine the whole Lagos Island, the commercial hub of Nigeria which houses up to 80 per cent of the headquarters of the country’s blue chip companies submerged in water. That sounds frightening. The very religious will simply echo “it is not our portion” at the mere thought of it ever happening. But that is precisely what experts at the just-concluded United Nations climate change conference in Accra say could happen by 2099.
The scientists and environmentalists say the swathes of West Africa’s coastline extending from the orange dunes in Mauritania to the dense tropical forests in Cameroon could be underwater by the end of the century as a direct consequence of climate change. "The coast of Guinea will cease to exist by the end of this century," said Stefan Cramer, a marine geologist and head of Heinrich Boll Stiftung, a German environmental NGO in Nigeria. "The coastline [as it is now] will be completely changed by the end of this century because the sea level is rising along the coast at around two centimetres every year," said Cramer.
Cramer said the effects of sea-level rise will be most “dramatic” in Nigeria's economic capital Lagos which is just five metres above sea level, with some parts of the city lying below sea-level. He estimates that most of the 17 million inhabitants of Lagos could be displaced and Nigeria’s southern Delta region where oil installations are located could also be swamped. Other major cities in west and central Africa which experts say stands threatened are Banjul in The Gambia, Nouakchott in Mauritania and Bissau in Guinea Bissau and the archipelago nation of Sao Tome.
Obviously, the message of Cramer and his colleagues is grim. The experts from 150 countries met in Accra to continue preparatory negotiations for a landmark climate change conference due to be held in Copenhagen in December 2009 where a successor to the Kyoto Treaty is to be signed. The simply interpretation of their message is - nature is angry. The conference participants blame the threat on the gradual melting of the 3,000 metre-thick Greenland ice cap in the Arctic as being responsible for the coastal erosion along the Coast of Guinea. Greenland is three times the size of Nigeria and its emptying into the Atlantic causes a rise in the sea-level.
Sea levels are rising because of climate change. The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates sea levels are rising at a rate of about 3.1 millimetres per year. "It is all due to climate change - the greenhouse gas emissions result in global warming and subsequent melting of the Greenland ice cap," Cramer said. Climate change represents a nightmare scenario for the future of the people of Africa, the world's poorest continent, according to a report at the conference.
In Ghana, "up to 1,000 kilometres of land may be lost in the Volta Delta owing to sea-level rise and inundation," Yvo de Boer, head of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, UNFCCC, said at the meeting. The devastation wrought by rising sea levels, he noted, is amplified by increasingly violent tropical storms, which can create sea surges up to three metres (10 feet) high. Even if carbon dioxide emissions drop dramatically, these experts say, sea levels would continue to rise for 50 to 100 years.
According to a report by Africa Renewal, a publication of the UN Public Information Department, the catch is that not all countries contribute to or are affected by climate change in the same way. The industrial “greenhouse” gases that contribute to climate change, including carbon dioxide, come mostly from wealthy industrialized countries or rapidly growing economies, such as those in China and India. Poor developing countries without much industry, as in Africa, contribute little to the problem — but are hurt by it nonetheless. As Rajendra Pachauri, head of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, notes, the poor “are certainly going to be the worst sufferers,” since they and their societies lack the money and technology to adapt.

From Bali to Copenhagen, a rocky road

On December 1, 2009, delegates will gather in Copenhagen, Denmark, for the 15th Conference of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol. It will be a meeting of extraordinary importance for the future of every person on the planet – and of millions yet unborn. At stake is whether an agreement can be reached that will effectively reduce emissions of greenhouse gases enough to keep the world’s climate change within tolerable limits.
http://www.chinadialogue.net/article/show/single/en/2177-From-Bali-to-Copenhagen-a-rocky-road

Can we engineer a cooler earth?

Launch myriad mirrors into space to deflect a fraction of sunlight from reaching Earth. Seed the stratosphere with sulfur or other particles to cut some of the sun’s rays. Bioengineer trees to soak up huge amounts of carbon dioxide from the air. Scatter unmanned self-powered ships to roam the world’s oceans funneling sea spray high in the sky to help form protective clouds.
http://features.csmonitor.com/environment/2008/07/16/can-we-engineer-a-cooler-earth/

An African perspective on climate change

When the United Nations met in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 to deliberate on and sign the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, it seemed to delegates that what was being discussed then was relevant only in the dim and the distant future. Climate change was then seen as an environmental concern with which people perceived to be overly serious like vice president Al Gore need bother with. If only they knew what has just occurred in Mexico, and earlier on in Africa, from west to east.
http://www.chinadialogue.net/article/show/single/en/1529

Your Laptop's Dirty Little Secret

Coal, steel, oil — we think of these old-economy industries, and we picture pollution. Smoggy skies, fouled rivers, toxic waste. As we make the transition to a new economy, we imagine that industrial pollution will become a thing of the past. Mobile phones, laptops, MP3 players — they conjure images of spotless semiconductor factories and the eternal summer of Silicon Valley where the digital economy was born.
But the tech industry has a dirty little secret: it has toxic waste of its own. Phones and computers contain dangerous metals like lead, cadmium and mercury, which can contaminate the air and water when those products are dumped. It's called electronic waste, or e-waste, and the world produces a lot of it: 20 to 50 million tons a year, according to the UN — enough to load a train that would stretch around the world. The U.S. is by far the world's top producer of e-waste, but much of it ends up elsewhere — specifically, in developing nations like China, India and Nigeria, to which rich countries have been shipping garbage for years. There the poor, often including children, dismantle dumped PCs and phones, stripping the components for the valuable — and toxic — metals contained inside. In the cities like the southern Chinese town of Guiyu, they work with little protection, melting down components and breathing in poisonous fumes. What can't be recycled is simply dumped, turning already poisoned rivers into toxic sludge. It's all done in the hope of earning a few dollars from the detritus of the clean digital economy.
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1819127,00.html

Playing Climate Change Catch-Up

Even the most uninformed student of climate change could tell you that the solution to global warming is to mitigate global greenhouse gas emissions, and fast. But the political difficulties of mitigation aside (the first major federal cap-and-trade legislation will be up soon in the Senate, and isn't expected to pass), the problem is that the sheer amount of greenhouse gases we've already pumped into the atmosphere has irreversibly bound us to a certain amount of warming over the next several decades — no matter what we do, we'll have to adapt to it.
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1811058,00.html

The global politics of climate-change

The stock response of many campaigners and activists to the sorts of headline announcements that emerge from G8 summits is that the devil is in the detail. Whether the topic is development aid or climate change, their consistently wary advice is: "Read the small print". In the aftermath of the 2008 summit in Hokkaido, Japan, the reverse is true: for although the Japanese government hosts had sought to make climate change a central theme of the gathering, it is the lack of detail in the final summit statement on this issue that bedevils the G8 leaders' approach.
http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/the-global-politics-of-climate-change-after-the-g8

A nugget of purest Green!

These days, most of the people the Informer meets consider themselves to be making at least a token effort towards Saving The Planet. There are some, of course, who do a great deal, although they are in the minority. But at the very least most human beings of his acquaintance are motivated to sort their domestic waste for recycling where applicable.
Naturally attitudes and commitments will vary from market to market but the Informer was nonetheless surprised to discover this week that only three per cent of consumers worldwide recycle their old mobile phones. This stat came from a Nokia study, accompanied by the news that 75 per cent of handset users never contemplate recycling discarded phones and almost half are unaware that it is even a possibility.
Researchers interviewed 6,500 mobile users in 13 countries – Brazil, China, Finland, German, India, Indonesia, Italy, Nigeria, Russia, Sweden, UAE, UK and USA – and concluded something that we all know only too well: the majority of disused phones end up gathering dust in a drawer somewhere around the house. This is clearly better than throwing them into landfill though, a fate that’s befallen only four per cent of used handsets according to the study. 44 per cent remain at home, 25 per cent are handed down to friends or family and 16 per cent are sold. As you might expect, awareness of recycling was lowest in the emerging markets where the population have a different set of priorities to those in Western territories.
http://blog.telecoms.com/2008/07/11/a-nugget-of-purest-green/

Vodafone's green strategies

Vodafone's group head of corporate responsibility, Chris Burgess, outlines the carrier's green strategies.
http://www.telecoms.com/itmgcontent/tcoms/features/articles/20017561732.html

Tackling climate change

The global discussion on green IT gathered momentum in 2007 when ICT analyst Gartner announced that the information and communications technologies (ICT) sector contributes two per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions. The recent study SMART 2020: Enabling the low carbon economy in the information age came to the same conclusion about today's figures, and looking out to 2020, saw that the global market penetration of PCs, data centres, telecoms networks and devices would cause the emissions to double in real terms under business as usual assumptions.
http://www.telecoms.com/itmgcontent/tcoms/news/articles/20017559422.html;jsessionid=299C4AF806E1EC8822AB649CCEBEBDB7

Money talks when going green

Going green must serve the overriding goal of making money for their shareholders. As such, three realities should drive action. First, energy - electricity, mainly - has significant direct costs for telcos, and these costs are rising, in some cases dramatically. Second, environmental and energy cost concerns give rise to a number of sizable business opportunities to service providers. Third, green is "in": credible, sustained commitments by corporations to environmentally friendly practices can pay off with public goodwill.
http://www.telecoms.com/itmgcontent/tcoms/features/articles/20017560705.html

Green building rating tool to be launched in November

South Africa’s Green Star rating tool for green building in offices would be launched at the inaugural Green Building Council of South Africa (GBCSA) convention and exhibition, which will be held in Cape Town in November.
http://www.engineeringnews.co.za/article.php?a_id=139946

Sachs says "Green Africa Now!"

Development expert Jeffrey Sachs is urging donor agencies and the international community to support African agriculture as the key catalyst in reducing hunger and poverty through economic growth and halting destruction of the environment. Addressing African Fertilizer Summit participants in Nigeria, Sachs advocated rapid action to get fertilizers and high yielding-seeds to African farmers.
http://www.africangreenrevolution.com/en/green_revolution/africas_predicament/fertilizer_summit/sacs_says/index.html

Making Mobile Networks Cheap and Green

There are over 1 billion people around the world who don't have access to mobile phones. They mainly live in poorer regions, and many of them can afford to pay only a couple of dollars per month at most for service. Setting up mobile phone infrastructures in these areas will require cost-cutting innovations, and a new equipment maker, VNL, thinks it has a way to do it.
http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/64054.html?u=nagod&p=ENNSS_a4e35c7ff430368ceb8cc9267ca35049

Computers pile up in Ghana dump

Have you ever wondered where old computers end up? China and India have been popular destinations, but in Ghana the piles of old computers are increasing every week even though the trade is illegal.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7543489.stm

Get biotechnology on the agenda for Africa

At present there is resistance from Europe, and even Japan is dragging its feet on this vital issue.Critics often argue that using modern biotechnology in African agriculture would harm farmers, wreck the environment and expose consumers to unknown risks. But by failing to adopt biotechnology, Africa puts its poor populations at greater risk of starvation. Without substantial investment in biotechnology to address critical challenges such as drought, Africa will continue to experience food deficits.
http://greenbio.checkbiotech.org/news/2008-07-02/Get_biotechnology_on_the_agenda_for_Africa/