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"The response is still ongoing… Most of the 200,000 plus people who were homeless at the end of August have by now been given shelter," Maurizio Giuliano, spokesman for the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), said.

In neighbouring Uganda, the minister in charge of refugees and disaster preparedness said that 300,000 people were in need of humanitarian assistance.

"The situation borders a crisis," Musa Ecweru said. He said nine Ugandans had died as a result of the floods, which he described as "a new phenomenon that we have not experienced for many years."

Assistance programs

Kenya has also suffered from the downpours, a year after unprecedented floods displaced 700,000 people.

"We have activated our disaster response and the Government and aid groups are providing food, shelter and medicine to those affected by the floods," government spokesman Alfred Mutua said.

The UN’s food agency (WFP) and the Ethiopian authorities announced Friday they had launched a programme of food assistance targeting some 60,000 people among the most affected by the floods across the country.

"An estimated 183,000 people have been affected by floods this year… 42,000 of which were displaced and are in temporary shelters," Ethiopia’s WFP spokeswoman Paulette Jones said.

"The figures are only estimated, they could rise once an assessment team concludes its study," she said.

Western and central Africa were not spared, as floods there have affected at least 500,000 people, according to the UN.

At least 33 people have died in Burkina Faso, 20 in Togo and six in Ghana, according to figures released by the UN humanitarian affairs office in Geneva.

Torrential rains and floods have also taken a heavy toll on Nigeria, where 41 people have died in northern and central regions.

In Togo, non-stop rain over several days has washed away or damaged 22,000 hut homes, more than 100 bridges and 58 schools and colleges, along with 1,500 hectares of food crops and has left 34,000 people homeless.

– AFP

One Washington source said the “temperature was rising” inside the administration. Bush was “sending a message to a number of audiences”, he said – to the Iranians and to members of the United Nations security council who are trying to weaken a tough third resolution on sanctions against Iran for flouting a UN ban on uranium enrichment.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) last week reported “significant” cooperation with Iran over its nuclear programme and said that uranium enrichment had slowed. Tehran has promised to answer most questions from the agency by November, but Washington fears it is stalling to prevent further sanctions. Iran continues to maintain it is merely developing civilian nuclear power.

Bush is committed for now to the diplomatic route but thinks Iran is moving towards acquiring a nuclear weapon. According to one well placed source, Washington believes it would be prudent to use rapid, overwhelming force, should military action become necessary.

Israel, which has warned it will not allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons, has made its own preparations for airstrikes and is said to be ready to attack if the Americans back down.

Alireza Jafarzadeh, a spokesman for the National Council of Resistance of Iran, which uncovered the existence of Iran’s uranium enrichment plant at Natanz, said the IAEA was being strung along. “A number of nuclear sites have not even been visited by the IAEA,” he said. “They’re giving a clean bill of health to a regime that is known to have practised deception.”

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, irritated the Bush administration last week by vowing to fill a “power vacuum” in Iraq. But Washington believes Iran is already fighting a proxy war with the Americans in Iraq.

The Institute for the Study of War last week released a report by Kimberly Kagan that explicitly uses the term “proxy war” and claims that with the Sunni insurgency and Al-Qaeda in Iraq “increasingly under control”, Iranian intervention is the “next major problem the coalition must tackle”.

Bush noted that the number of attacks on US bases and troops by Iranian-supplied munitions had increased in recent months – “despite pledges by Iran to help stabilise the security situation in Iraq”.

It explains, in part, his lack of faith in diplomacy with the Iranians. But Debat believes the Pentagon’s plans for military action involve the use of so much force that they are unlikely to be used and would seriously stretch resources in Afghanistan and Iraq.

What was clear from the two days of discussion on climate change was that the Australian business community is already galvanised, taking action and ready to take more action on climate change, more so than many of its international counterparts.

The sense of urgency was palpable: no bad thing, given that the British Stern report, released in October 2006, made it clear that it is not only better but cheaper to act on climate change now.

The report suggested that global warming was likely to shrink the global economy by 20 per cent and recommended that 1 per cent of global gross domestic product be spent immediately on tackling climate change.

Workshop participants talked about the need for urgent action to change trajectory and for real results. The language was powerful: people spoke of lighting a fire and of releasing a frenzy of innovation in the pursuit of better climate outcomes.

Participants agreed there was no silver bullet.

We are looking at broad, far-reaching change, well beyond single initiatives such as trading carbon credits on a global scale and installing solar panels at schools. But what is needed now is a shift in the mind-set.

Change will also come from the ground up and the broader community is ready. Workshop participants agreed that we need not so much to create community power as to unlock it and empower the community through education and dialogue.

The community needs information and incentives. One way of fast-tracking community involvement may be through creating a volunteer-based organisation that takes the best of our community-based operations, such as Landcare or Surf Life saving Australia, and creates additional organisations for tackling climate change.

Another thing that emerged from the session was the need to bridge a gap between community and business. Sanjit Roy, founder of India’s Barefoot College, said that where the community regarded business as being the source of problems rather than bringing solutions – as it sometimes did – dialogue was essential.

Australians want to see goals set for climate change. Long-term goals targeting outcomes in 20 or 50 years are needed but do not easily engage people. Shorter term, more tangible goals will help motivate and sustain community action. It will also be important for people to have some means of seeing the difference they are making, providing people with practical ways of measuring and changing their carbon footprints.

As C.S. Kiang, chairman of the Peking University Environment Fund, reminded the group, it is important to remember that climate change presents us not just with problems but with new political and business opportunities. There is the potential to form alliances with China and India to develop new, clean technologies.

With the business community beginning to act and ready to do much more, we need to capture the attention of political leaders and explain why they should move more quickly. Political leaders must understand there is a bigger risk of under-reacting to this issue than of overreacting.

If leaders want a legacy of action and achievement, or even as a matter of political survival, they need to take greater action on climate change.

Australians’ growing awareness of global warming and willingness to take action places our Government in what some of its international counterparts may regard as an enviable position. Atiq Rahman, executive director of the Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies, told the group: "All around the world, very often the response is that ‘government must do it’ or ‘business must do it’, and you shift the responsibility to somebody else. Here, what is very interesting (is that) the community has reached a level of maturity as well as being ready for action: that would be a major opportunity, to use that for mitigation and adaptation."

Rahman, who is also co-ordinator for the UN Global Forum on the Environment and Poverty, observed that by taking the initiative now on climate change, Australia could regain some of the ground it had lost on the world stage because of its previous stance on global warming.

With business and the broader community already taking action, we are looking to government to intensify and accelerate Australia’s response. Political one-liners are not the solution, nor are talkfests.

What Australians want is leadership and practical tools with which to tackle climate change.

Michael Roux is chairman of the Australian Davos Connection. This weekend’s climate change workshop was part of the Australian Leadership Retreat.

Palm oil plantations cause irreparable harm: "I call on the government to clearly rule out approval for an ethanol plant that uses palm oil as a feedstock," said Nicholls. "Palm oil production for the ethanol industry is an environmental blight on the landscape of Third World countries and contributes to greenhouse gas emissions across the globe. A BBC report a few weeks ago said the UN has been asked to act on this issue. A coalition of environmental groups in Indonesia has called on the United Nations to intervene in a palm oil project being planned in Borneo. The project will allocate up to 1.8 million hectares of land for palm oil plantations. The group fears the project will cause irreparable harm to Indigenous peoples’ territories and cultures."

Fuel from plants not necessarily green: "Dateline last month also broadcast a story about palm oil production and this should have prompted the minister into immediately ruling out the use of palm oil for ethanol production. The project should not be approved if there is any chance that Pinkenba has been selected so that imported palm oil can be unloaded for use as a feedstock. I hope the minister has not been suckered into the assumption that making fuel from plants must, by definition, be green and renewable. I join the Pinkenba community and Councillor McLachlan and call on the minister to categorically rule out the use of imported palm oil to produce ethanol."

Reference: Tim Nicholls, Member for Clayfield, Records of Proceedings, First session of the Fifty-Second Parliament, Queensland, 23 August 2007.

Erisk Net, 26/8/2007

Devondale (Murray Goulburn) says it supports the lifting of the Victorian State ban on genetically engineered (GE) canola. This is a serious threat to our GE-free dairy supply, since it is the biggest dairy company in Australia and canola meal is used as feed for dairy cattle. If you don’t want anything scary in your dairy take action now!

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In the words of The Economist, "Forget China, India and the Internet – economic growth is driven by women", wrote Heather Ridout, chief executive of the Australian Industry Group, in The Australian Financial Review (5/9/2007, p.63).

Active in APEC: "In late June, I chaired a meeting of 400 Asia-Pacific leaders from business, government, academia and civil society, who met to consider issues critical to building a sustainable future. We met under the umbrella of the APEC Women Leaders Network – and I presented the report of the meeting to the APEC Business Advisory Council in Sydney this week."

Women with clear vision: The 2007 APEC WLN was made up of women experienced in the challenges that face small to medium enterprise entrepreneurs. They have clear ideas about the importance of removing regulatory impediments to women establishing new businesses and the value of setting in place business targets on skills development, diversity in decision making and carbon neutrality.

Smart economics: "If we do not draw on the insights and experiences of more than half our population, we are ignoring the knowledge of half our collective brain. By anyone’s thinking, that is not smart economics," Ridout concluded.

Reference: Heather Ridout is chief executive of the Australian Industry Group.

The Australian Financial Review, 5/9/2007, p. 63