EcoRadio

Category: Sustainable Settlement and Agriculture

The Generator is founded on the simple premise that we should leave the world in better condition than we found it. The news items in this category outline the attempts people have made to do this. They are mainly concerned with our food supply and settlement patterns. The impact that the human race has on the planet.

  • Uganda ‘at risk’ of losing all it’s forests

     

    In its State of the Environment Uganda 2008 report, published this month, NEMA attributes the acceleration of deforestation to expanding farmland, a population boom and increasing urbanisation. It says unless the situation is reversed, the knock-on effect will be catastrophic, contributing to and exacerbating soil degradation, declining food security, disease and conflict.

    “In 41 years time, if the current rate of deforestation continues, the per capital forest cover will be zero because already we are tending towards desertification-type conditions,” Aryamanya Mugisha, executive director at NEMA, told the UN newswire IRIN today.

    Annet Nakyeyune, an environmentalist at Makerere University, added that the poorest people living in rural areas, such as Katine, would be hardest hit.

    Desertification due to deforestation is likely to “tamper with the country’s food security because rainfall will be erratic, floods rampant,” she said.

    Nakyeyune also warned that water sources will disappear, water catchment areas will dwindle, agricultural productivity will be badly hit and livelihoods destroyed as a result. Disease will also inevitably increase.

    The situation is being blamed partly on Uganda’s booming population, which is growing at a rate of 3.2% per annum. Areas around the capital, Kampala, have lost more than 78% of forest land since 1990.

    NEMA also say that as only 10% of Uganda’s population has access to electricity and 89% of rural Ugandans use firewood to cook it will be an uphill struggle to reverse this alarming trend.

    If NEMA is correct, then the people of Katine are likely to be among the first hit by the effects of deforestation and climate change.

    Already farmers in Katine say they are struggling to adapt to what they perceive as rapidly changing and increasingly erratic weather patterns. Rain is not falling when it is supposed to and drought has left many farmers struggling to find enough food to feed their families.

    On the Katine site today, Joseph Malinga reports on farmers’ fears of serious famine as a result of poor rains.

    It is one of the greatest injustices that the world’s poorest will be the hardest hit by global climate change and the effects of deforestation and the destruction of the natural environment.

    The introduction of new strains of drought-resistant cassava as part of the Katine project’s livelihoods programme is one way the project is trying to help farmers mitigate against more unpredictable weather, but are we doing enough?

  • Mozambique agrees to protect lost rainforest of Mount Mabu

     

    At a meeting this week in the capital Maputo, government ministers agreed to put conservation measures in place before any commercial logging occurs there after meeting representatives from the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, the Mulanje Mountain Conservation Trust (MMCT), and numerous other groups involved in the project.

    “The three messages we conveyed were that there is rich biodiversity in Mozambique, that butterflies and botany can be as important as mammals, and that conservation policy should take into consideration areas such as these mountains or the coastal forests, that do not easily fit into the usual category of national park,” said Kew’s Jonathan Timberlake. The media coverage had clinched the participation of the government, added Paul Smith, head of the Millennium Seed Bank project at Kew.

    Julian Bayliss of MMCT, who first identified Mount Mabu as an area of possible exploration using satellite imagery on Google Earth said: “As scientists it is incredibly exciting to go into a previously unexplored area and discover new species of butterfly, snake and chameleon, but our aim was always to secure pledges of conservation towards the protection of these sites.”

    The first full-scale expedition to Mabu last October uncovered three new species of butterfly, a new species of bush viper, a number of rare birds and potentially unrecorded plants. “These expeditions into the area are absolutely essential to securing conservation measures,” said Smith. “Unless you know what’s there, then no protective decision can be taken about management of those areas.”

    Outside the forest, the land has been devastated by civil war, but inside the landscape was almost untouched. Ignorance of its existence, poor access and the forest’s value as a refuge for villagers during the fighting had combined to protect it. The scientists fear that with local people returning to the area, and Mozambique’s economy booming, pressure to cut the forest for wood or burn it to make space for crops will threaten the ecology.

    Just weeks before presenting their findings in Maputo, Bayliss was convinced that further new species could be discovered and so gathered a team of experts – and the Observer – for a final expedition into the area.

    After trekking into the thick forest, the team spent its time setting up butterfly traps in sunspots, overturning stones and fallen branches searching for frogs, and tapping at the huge mahogany buttresses to awaken sleeping snakes. Nights saw the bat nets go up and torch-lit searches for chameleons.

    “Hunting chameleons at night is much easier,” explained herpetologist Bill Branch. “Because at night they sit out in the open and they bleach to a white colour, which means they stand out in torch light.”

    The pygmy chameleons, no bigger than a thumb, were in abundance, but it took three nights to uncover a different beautiful creature with perfectly coiled tail. “It appears similar to the one that is considered endemic to Mount Mulanje, but frankly from the colouration I suspect we have a new species here. This is what I came to Mabu to find,” said Branch.

    The expedition discovered eight new species of amphibians, four of butterfly and a new pseudo scorpion.

    The findings were reported at the meeting in Maputo, where representatives from the Mozambican department of agricultural research, Birdlife International, WWF, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, and the British High Commission joined the others to convince the government to commit to protection. “It was an extremely positive outcome,” said Smith.

    The expedition team

    Bill Branch Herpetologist at Bayworld, Port Elizabeth, South Africa: “These mountains are some of the last explored areas in southern Africa; I came here specifically to hunt for a new species of chameleon.”

    Colin Congdon Lepidopterist based in Tanzania: “We leapt at the opportunity to join this expedition because nobody from the butterfly world has ever been into these places before.”

    Martin Hassan Lepidopterist based in Tanzania: “The Baliochila were flying high up in the canopy and I had to climb high up a vine and use extension poles on my net to catch them.”

    Steve Collins Director of African Butterfly Research Institute, Nairobi, Kenya: “It has been really exciting to see the place – seeing is believing – to get to the top of the mountain and look at the forest spread out is incredible.”

    Julian Bayliss Project field coordinator of this Darwin Initiative project and ecological adviser to the Mulanje Mountain Conservation Trust: “We don’t just want to finish this project with a series of technical reports put on the tables of various Mozambican departments, we want pledges of conservation towards the protection of these sites.”

    Hassam Patel Botanist: “Mabu is very important because it is such a big area of mountain forest. In the other sites it was mainly woodland, but this is very special and we are uncovering lots of new plants.”

  • China sacrifices forests for food

    Guardian picChinese Minister for Land and Resources, Lu Xinshe, has announced that the regime is struggling to maintain the 120million hectares of arable land required to feed China’s population because of urban and industrial sprawl. “We will not plan any new large scale projects to return farmland to its natural state, beyond those that have already been planned,” he said. China has bought vast tracts of arable land in poor nations. There are now estimated to be one million Chinese farmers in Africa, alone.

    Read related story

  • US starts bulldozing suburbs

    From the UK Telegraph

    Local politicians believe the city must contract by as much as 40 per cent, concentrating the dwindling population and local services into a more viable area.

    The radical experiment is the brainchild of Dan Kildee, treasurer of Genesee County, which includes Flint.

    Having outlined his strategy to Barack Obama during the election campaign, Mr Kildee has now been approached by the US government and a group of charities who want him to apply what he has learnt to the rest of the country.

    Mr Kildee said he will concentrate on 50 cities, identified in a recent study by the Brookings Institution, an influential Washington think-tank, as potentially needing to shrink substantially to cope with their declining fortunes.

    Most are former industrial cities in the “rust belt” of America’s Mid-West and North East. They include Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Memphis.

    In Detroit, shattered by the woes of the US car industry, there are already plans to split it into a collection of small urban centres separated from each other by countryside.

    “The real question is not whether these cities shrink – we’re all shrinking – but whether we let it happen in a destructive or sustainable way,” said Mr Kildee. “Decline is a fact of life in Flint. Resisting it is like resisting gravity.”

    Karina Pallagst, director of the Shrinking Cities in a Global Perspective programme at the University of California, Berkeley, said there was “both a cultural and political taboo” about admitting decline in America.

    “Places like Flint have hit rock bottom. They’re at the point where it’s better to start knocking a lot of buildings down,” she said.

    Flint, sixty miles north of Detroit, was the original home of General Motors. The car giant once employed 79,000 local people but that figure has shrunk to around 8,000.

    Unemployment is now approaching 20 per cent and the total population has almost halved to 110,000.

    The exodus – particularly of young people – coupled with the consequent collapse in property prices, has left street after street in sections of the city almost entirely abandoned.

    In the city centre, the once grand Durant Hotel – named after William Durant, GM’s founder – is a symbol of the city’s decline, said Mr Kildee. The large building has been empty since 1973, roughly when Flint’s decline began.

    Regarded as a model city in the motor industry’s boom years, Flint may once again be emulated, though for very different reasons.

    But Mr Kildee, who has lived there nearly all his life, said he had first to overcome a deeply ingrained American cultural mindset that “big is good” and that cities should sprawl – Flint covers 34 square miles.

    He said: “The obsession with growth is sadly a very American thing. Across the US, there’s an assumption that all development is good, that if communities are growing they are successful. If they’re shrinking, they’re failing.”

    But some Flint dustcarts are collecting just one rubbish bag a week, roads are decaying, police are very understaffed and there were simply too few people to pay for services, he said.

    If the city didn’t downsize it will eventually go bankrupt, he added.

    Flint’s recovery efforts have been helped by a new state law passed a few years ago which allowed local governments to buy up empty properties very cheaply.

    They could then knock them down or sell them on to owners who will occupy them. The city wants to specialise in health and education services, both areas which cannot easily be relocated abroad.

    The local authority has restored the city’s attractive but formerly deserted centre but has pulled down 1,100 abandoned homes in outlying areas.

    Mr Kildee estimated another 3,000 needed to be demolished, although the city boundaries will remain the same.

    Already, some streets peter out into woods or meadows, no trace remaining of the homes that once stood there.

    Choosing which areas to knock down will be delicate but many of them were already obvious, he said.

    The city is buying up houses in more affluent areas to offer people in neighbourhoods it wants to demolish. Nobody will be forced to move, said Mr Kildee.

    “Much of the land will be given back to nature. People will enjoy living near a forest or meadow,” he said.

    Mr Kildee acknowledged that some fellow Americans considered his solution “defeatist” but he insisted it was “no more defeatist than pruning an overgrown tree so it can bear fruit again”.

  • China suspends reforestation project over food shortage fears

     

    Lu Xinshe, deputy head of the ministry of land and resources, said the country was struggling to hold the 120 million hectare “red line” considered the minimum land areas needed for food self-sufficiency.

    With industrialisation eating into the countryside, he said the government would halt plans to restore arable land to nature.

    “We will not plan any new large scale projects to return farmland to its natural state, beyond those that have already been planned,” he was quoted as saying by the Reuters news agency.

    Any change in the balance of food production causes unease in a country where the elderly still remember the devastating famines of the early 1960s that killed between 15 million and 40 million people.

    But the decision to halt many environmental restoration programmes is likely to have a knock-on effect. The government has been compensating farmers in the north and west of China to give up farmland as a central pillar of its strategy to fight desertification and water shortages. The end of ploughing helps stabilise the soil, while stopping irrigation alleviates water shortages.

    Tree planting has also helped the country offset the increased emission of carbon dioxide from factories.

    But food is the more immediate priority. By the end of last year, the amount of arable land in China had decreased to within 1% of the “red line.”

    Against the backdrop of rising global food prices, Chinese companies have bought the rights to farm swaths of land in the Philippines, Laos, Russia, and Kazakshstan. They have invested in biofuel crops in Zambia and the Congo. By one estimate there are now one million Chinese farmers in Africa.

    But the government is committed to self-sufficiency, which requires the production of 500 million tonnes of grain a year. To maintain this level, prime minister Wen Jiabao has said the state would increase spending on agricultural production by 20%, well above inflation.

    He has also asked advisers to recommend new areas where cultivation can be expanded. Among the areas suggested is the Sanjiang region in Heilongjiang, a protected wetland.

    But as The Guardian reported last month, the pressure to industrialise the far western province of Xinjiang is likely to further erode food output, reducing the government’s options. With industrialisation set to continue for decades, the shrinkage of land is likely to increase the pressure to use more fertiliser and genetically modified crops. A fifth of the nation’s paddy fields now grow hybrid strains of rice, according to a report today by the Xinhua news agency.

  • Manure to fill gas grid

     

    “Biomethane is a fuel for the future,” Janine Freeman, head of National Grid’s Sustainable Gas Group said. “Not only are we reusing a waste product, but biomethane is a renewable fuel, so we helping to meet the country’s target of 15 percent of all our energy coming from renewable sources by 2020.”

    Biogas is produced through a process called “anaerobic digestion” when wastewater sludge is broken down by the action of microbes.

    The 4.3 million pound ($7.10 million) project should be operational by early 2011 and supply enough gas for about 500 homes. The overall potential of biomethane from a plant like Davyhulme would be to supply about 5,000 homes, National Grid said.

    Unlike electricity generated from wind turbines, biogas offers a steady stream of green energy.

    “Sewage treatment is a 24-hour process so there is an endless supply of biogas,” Caroline Ashton, United Utilities biofuels manager, said.

    “It is a very valuable resource and it’s completely renewable. By harnessing this free energy we can reduce our fuel bills and reduce our carbon footprint.”

    One of United Utilities’ sludge tankers has already been converted to run on the gas and the company expects to save hundreds of thousands of pounds a year in fuel costs with the 24 tankers it aims to convert initially.

    It was not clear whether Manchester’s home-made gas suppliers will get a discount on their own bills for their efforts.

    (Reporting by Daniel Fineren)