KENYAN INNOVATION TAKES PLASTIC BAGS OUT OF FORESTRY

Hello All,

please find here below an article I recently found in a BBC link which was talking about plastic pollution and reforestation.
Kenya already banned the use of plastic bags in 2017, what are we waiting for?

Great highlights and new points of view form Kenya, enjoy the reading!!

"KENYAN INNOVATION TAKES PLASTIC BAGS OUT OF FORESTRY

Plastic bags are known for their environmental impact. They slowly release toxic chemicals once in the soil, for instance, and find their way into the guts of animals that often choke and die as a result.

Kenya banned the use of plastic bags in 2017. And thanks to a 43-year old Kenyan, Teddy Kinyanjui, an innovative afforestation and reforestation method for developing seedlings without using plastic bags is in place.


A resident of Nairobi and founder of Cookswell Jikos Limited, Kinyanjui has invented small, portable seed balls to grow and easily disperse seedlings. He is working in partnership with Kenya Forestry Research Institute (KEFRI), which certifies seeds.This photo gallery shows Kinyanjui’s ingenuity in using the seed balls instead of the usual plastic bags.

When tree seedlings are grown in plastic bags in a nursery, he explains, the roots get squeezed and this limits their ability to grow fast. The seed ball method enables roots to adapt easily, with less disturbance.

Kinyanjui says he has engineered a method of coating each seed with charcoal dust, and corn or cassava starch, to bind each ball so the seeds are protected from prey, pests and diseases.

He says he has the capacity to make one tonne of the seed balls per day. So far, since the project’s initiation in 2016, about one million seeds of different species of certified indigenous trees have been dispersed throughout Kenya through partnerships with locals and with a germination rate of 60 per cent.

“People use charcoal every day, necessitating for more trees. Climate change has also caused community conflicts, especially among pastoralists in Northern Kenya who fight over pasture for their animals,” says Kinyajui. “Good environmental management is, therefore, crucial for peace among these communities.”

He hopes to partner with like-minded organisations and youth who herd livestock with slings to disperse more seeds in arid lands.

“We would [also] like people to see the value of this simple technology as a contributing factor in combating and adapting to effects of climate change, as this is the cheapest way to encourage tree planting, especially in arid and semi-arid areas,” adds Kinyanjui."

Full article can be found:

https://www.scidev.net/global/environment/multimedia/kenyan-innovation-takes-plastic-bags-out-of-forestry.html

HOW TO GREEN THE WORLD'S DESERTS AND REVERSE CLIMATE CHANGE | Allan Savory

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI

This video is from a TED talk of the 2013 and it perfectly explains how we can fight the deserts expansion in our beloved planet Earth. 

Absolutely great!! 💗

Have a look and tell me what you think!!

Thank you Allan Savory!!

THE LONG HOT SUMMER

Hello All,I would like to report another article from "The Economist" which hightlight the consequence that this constant increasing heath of the globe is causing to many countries, not only to the natural environment but also economically and financially.Enjoy the reading and let me know what you think!!"Heat is causing problems across the worldWorryingly, such weather events may not remain unusual

SODANKYLA, a town in Finnish Lapland just north of the Arctic Circle, boasts an average annual temperature a little below freezing. Residents eagerly await the brief spell in July when the region enjoys something akin to summer. This year they may have wished for a bit less of it. On July 18th thermometers showed 32.1°C (89.8°F), which is 12°C warmer than typical for the month and the highest since records began in 1908. But Sodankyla is not the only place that is sizzling.

Wildfires have killed at least 80 people near Athens. Sweden has suffered a rash of forest fires, sparked by unusually hot and dry weather. Britain and the Netherlands look more parched than they did in 1976, one of the driest summers on record. Some 80,000 hectares of forest are burning in Siberia. Japan has declared its heatwave to be a natural disaster. On the night of July 7th, the temperature in downtown Los Angeles did not drop below 26.1°C. That seems positively nippy compared with Quriyat in Oman, which recorded a 24-hour minimum temperature of 42.6°C a few days earlier.
Heatwaves bring problems, especially in the developing world. Crops are ravaged, food spoils and workers become less productive. Studies have linked rising temperatures to violent crime and civil strife. And heat can kill on its own. In 2003 more than 70,000 Europeans may have died as a direct result of an infernal summer.
That was seen as a once-a-millennium heatwave at the time. By comparison, notes Geert Jan van Oldenborgh of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, outside of northern Europe the summer of 2018 looks unremarkable, so far, in terms of temperature. The Netherlands, for instance, can expect scorchers every couple of years. Except, he adds, a century ago that might have been once every 20 years. A few years back, a team led by Peter Stott of Britain’s Met Office calculated that, by 2012, summers like the one in 2003 would be expected to occur not every 1,000 years but every 127.

Hot times ahead

No consequence of global warming is as self-evident as higher temperatures. Earth is roughly 1°C hotter today than it was before humanity started belching greenhouse gases into the atmosphere during the Industrial Revolution. If this so-called thermodynamic effect were all there was to it, temperatures now considered unusually hot would become more typical and those regarded as uncommonly cold, uncommoner still. But climate being a complicated thing, there is more to it.
Weather patterns can change because the colder poles warm faster than balmier lower latitudes. As the thermal difference between the two diminishes, so does the velocity of the jet stream, a westerly wind which blows at an altitude of around 10km. That means the weather it carries can stay in place for longer. Sometimes, it offsets the thermodynamic effects, leading to cooler temperatures than might be expected. Often, it amplifies them.
When and by how much is a matter of hot debate among climate scientists. It is hard to pin any particular heatwave, drought or flood on the effects of man-made pollution. Freak events happen; the highest temperature ever recorded on Earth was 56.7°C in Death Valley, California, but that was on July 10th 1913, when concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were much lower.
By using clever statistics to compare the climate’s actual behaviour with computer simulations of how it might have behaved in the absence of human activity, researchers can calculate how mankind has made a particular weather event more likely. The first such study, co-authored by Dr Stott in 2004, found that the likelihood of the 2003 European summer had doubled as a result of human activity. Since then similar “event attribution” research has burgeoned. A year ago Carbon Brief, a web portal, identified a total of 138 peer-reviewed papers in the field, covering 144 weather events. Of 48 heatwaves, 41 contained humankind’s imprint in the data.
More studies have appeared since then. World Weather Attribution, a website run by Dr van Oldenborgh and Friederike Otto of Oxford University, posts a new one practically every month. Besides scrutinising past weather, many of the studies look ahead—in particular at how the likelihood of future extreme events changes depending on how seriously countries take their commitment in Paris in 2015 to limit global warming to “well below” 2°C relative to pre-industrial levels (and better yet, to no more than 1.5°C).
The picture that emerges is bleak. One study, published in June by Andrew King of the University of Melbourne and his colleagues, found that the number of Europeans who can expect to witness a temperature above the current record, wherever they happen to live, would double from 45m today to 90m if the planet warmed by another 0.5°C or so on top of the 1°C since the 1880s. If, instead of 0.5°C, it warmed by 1°C, the figure would rise to 163m.
This looks even more alarming if you factor in humidity. Human beings can tolerate heat with sweat, which evaporates and cools the skin. That is why a dry 50°C can feel less stifling than a muggy 30°C. If the wet-bulb temperature (equivalent to that recorded by a thermometer wrapped in a moist towel) exceeds 35°C, even a fit, healthy youngster lounging naked in the shade next to a fan could die in six hours.
At present, wet-bulb temperatures seldom exceed 31°C. In 2016 Jeremy Pal of Loyola Marymount University and Elfatih Eltahir of the Massachusetts Institute for Technology found that if carbon emissions continue unabated, several cities in the Persian Gulf, including Abu Dhabi and Dubai, could exceed wet-bulb levels of 35°C by the end of the century. A follow-up study reckoned that, by 2100, parts of South Asia, which is much more populous than the sheikhdoms and a lot poorer, could suffer a wet-bulb level of 34.2°C every 25 years.
The effects could be devastating. The World Bank has warned that rising temperatures and changing monsoons could cost India 2.8% of GDP per person by 2050 and affect the living standards of 600m Indians in areas identified as hot spots. The global cost of productivity lost to heat has been estimated at $2trn by 2030.
The toll on human lives is hard to imagine. But at least people can learn from past mistakes. Thanks to better government responses, particularly in care for the elderly, in 2012 Europe survived a summer hotter still than 2003 with fewer casualties. As Indians get richer more will be able to afford air-conditioning; even those in shantytowns can paint their corrugated-iron roofs white to reflect sunlight. If only the world could take in a similar lesson about the importance of stopping climate change in the first place."

Full article: https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2018/07/28/heat-is-causing-problems-across-the-world

WHERE DO THE FLOODS COME FROM?

http://www.ziarpiatraneamt.ro/de-unde-vin-inundatiile


This amazing short video shows an experiment made in order to prove where the floods come from... Food for thoughts!!! 

It explains the importance of having trees that with their roots protect from landslides, slips and most important they help to purify water.


Please watch it and let me know what you think!!

HOW MANY TREES DO WE STILL HAVE TO KILL?

... we need to change this trend NOW!!

Self explanatory image about the effect our society is having on the environment..

REGREENING THE PLANET

Hello all,


please have a look at this documentary, it is amazing!!

Now I feel like buying a piece of land and working on it, I found this video very inspiring and motivating!!

It explains how China, Egypt, Spain and India have fight and are fighting the desert expansion and how it reflects on the environment and community economy, super interesting, I loved it!!

Let me know what you think!


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OC_Y1ZTZXQ4

TOO HOT TO HANDLE - CLIMATE CHANGE IS MAKING THE ARAB WORLD MORE MISERABLE from The Economist

Hello All,

I am reporting an article I read in these days in 'The Economist' interesting but never the less alarming.It concerns me how the majority of people are still underestimating the problem of the global warming and not doing enough to divert this trend.
Full article can be found @: https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2018/06/02/climate-change-is-making-the-arab-world-more-miserable
TOO HOT TO HANDLECLIMATE CHANGE IS MAKING THE ARAB WORLD MORE MISERABLE

"SIX years ago Nabil Musa, a Kurdish environmentalist, returned from over a decade abroad to find Iraq transformed. Rivers in which he had swum year-round turned to dust in summer. Skies once crowded with storks and herons were empty. Drought had pushed farmers to abandon their crops, and dust storms, once rare, choked the air. Inspired to act, he joined a local conservationist group, Nature Iraq, to lobby for greener practices. But Kurdish officials pay little attention. “One of the last things we want to think about is climate change,” says Mr Musa.

Apathy towards climate change is common across the Middle East and north Africa, even as the problems associated with it get worse. Longer droughts, hotter heatwaves and more frequent dust storms will occur from Rabat to Tehran, according to Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Chemistry. Already-long dry seasons are growing longer and drier, withering crops. Heat spikes are a growing problem too, with countries regularly notching lethal summer temperatures. Stretch such trends out a few years and they seem frightening—a few decades and they seem apocalyptic.

The institute forecasts that summer temperatures in the Middle East and north Africa will rise over twice as fast as the global average. Extreme temperatures of 46°C (115°F) or more will be about five times more likely by 2050 than they were at the beginning of the century, when similar peaks were reached, on average, 16 days per year. By 2100 “wet-bulb temperatures”—a measure of humidity and heat—could rise so high in the Gulf as to make it all but uninhabitable, according to a study in Nature(though its most catastrophic predictions are based on the assumption that emissions are not abated). Last year Iran came close to breaking the highest reliably recorded temperature of 54°C, which Kuwait reached the year before.

Dry and discontented

Water presents another problem. The Middle East and north Africa have little of it to begin with, and rainfall is expected to decline because of climate change. In some areas, such as the Moroccan highlands, it could drop by up to 40%. (Climate change might bring extra rain to coastal countries, such as Yemen, but that will probably be offset by higher evaporation.) Farmers struggling to nourish thirsty crops are digging more wells, draining centuries-old aquifers. A study using NASA satellites found that the Tigris and Euphrates basins lost 144 cubic kilometres (about the volume of the Dead Sea) of fresh water from 2003 to 2010. Most of this reduction was caused by the pumping of groundwater to make up for reduced rainfall.

Climate change is making the region even more volatile politically. When eastern Syria was ravaged by drought from 2007 to 2010, 1.5m people fled to cities, where many struggled. In Iran, a cycle of extreme droughts since the 1990s caused thousands of frustrated farmers to abandon the countryside. Exactly how much these events fuelled the war that broke out in Syria in 2011 and recent unrest in Iran is a topic of considerable debate. They have certainly added to the grievances that many in both countries feel.

The mere prospect of shortages can lead to conflicts, as states race to secure water supplies at the expense of downstream neighbours. When Ethiopia started building an enormous dam on the Nile, potentially limiting the flow, Egypt, which relies on the river for nearly all of its water, threatened war. Turkish and Iranian dams along the Tigris, Euphrates and other rivers have raised similar ire in Iraq, which is beset by droughts.

Scientists have laid out steps that Arab countries could take to adapt to climate change. Agricultural production could be shifted to heat-resilient crops. Israel uses drip irrigation, which saves water and could be copied. Cities could be modified to reduce the “urban heat-island effect”, by which heat from buildings and cars makes cities warmer than nearby rural areas. Few of these efforts have been tried by Arab governments, which are often preoccupied with other problems. Mr Musa says the Kurdish officials he lobbies have been distracted by a war with Islamic State, a failed referendum on independence and, now, repairing relations with Iraq’s central government in Baghdad.

Politics often gets in the way of problem-solving. Countries are rarely able to agree on how to share rivers and aquifers. In Gaza, where the seepage of saltwater and sewage into an overused aquifer raises the risk of disease, a blockade by Israel and Egypt has made it harder to build and run desalination plants. In Lebanon there is little hope that the government, divided along sectarian lines, will do anything to forestall the decline in the water supply predicted by the environment ministry. Countries such as Iraq and Syria, where war has devastated infrastructure, will struggle to prepare for a hotter, drier future.

Some countries are, at least, trying to curb emissions. Morocco is building a colossal solar-power plant in the desert, as is Dubai, part of United Arab Emirates (UAE). Saudi Arabia is not going to stop exporting oil, but it plans to build a solar plant that will be about 200 times the size of the biggest such facility operating today. Like other sun-drenched countries in the region, it sees solar power as a cost-effective way to increase the electricity supply and cut energy subsidies. “When I first started, people looked at environmentalists as tree-huggers,” says Safa al-Jayoussi of IndyACT, a conservationist group in Beirut. “But now I think the most important argument is the economic one.”

States in the Middle East and north Africa can do little on their own to mitigate climate change. Inevitably, though, they will need to adapt. So far depressingly little has been done. “Sometimes I feel like I’m on a treadmill,” says Mr Musa."