03.14.06
The 4th World Water Forum
Sampsa Daily has couple of thorough posts about water privatisation debate and the problems of financing the water sector. Good reading before The 4th World Water Forum beginning on 16th of march in Mexico.
03.05.06
FAO: World progresses towards sustainable forestry
The new Global forest resources assessment 2005 by Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) shows positive global progress towards socially and environmentally sustainable forest management. The progress has been espcially strong in forest policies and legistlation.
According to the report, there are more positive than negative trends at the global level, including a move in forest management towards multiple-use, including social and environmental benefits. Forests dedicated for conservation of biological diversity have increased by 6.4 million hectares per year to include 11 percent of all forests.
Forests for protection of soil and water and for recreation have also increased significantly. Planted forests are expanding and provide an increasing proportion of the world’s wood supply.
However, negative trends are still alarming in some regions. Forests are rapidly being lost to agriculture in Africa, Central America, South America and in Southeast Asia, accounting for almost 90 percent of the world’s deforestation of 13 million hectares per year.
Primary forests, crucial for maintaining biological diversity, are converted to agriculture or degraded through logging at a rate of 6 million hectares per year, mainly in South America and Southeast Asia.
Here is the full report Global forest resources assessment 2005
02.21.06
Tools for policy influence in natural resource management
Power tools offers an excellent collection of policy tools for people and organisations working with natural resources management. The tools are especially directed to marginalised groups or those working with them. The tools they offer are transferable, not static, meaning that they are a set of ideas that can be taken from one place or a context to another. These tools try to avoid the usual problem with participatory methods; guiding too much and making the methods and tools unflexible. So when you use the tools be creative and don’t take them as the only way to do things.
The tools are divided into (1) tools for understanding, (2) tools for organising, (3) tools for engaging and (4) tools for ensuring. They include such power tools as: Community tradeoffs assessment, Mechanisms for organisation, Connecting communities to markets and People’s law.
All tool documents are available for free download in pdf -format in four languages (English, French, Spanish and Portuguese).
Power tools: for policy influence in natural resource management
02.15.06
Help to predict climate change
BBC and several universities have joined forces to predict climate change, and they need your help. Dowload a small program on your computer and you will give your small share to this effort.
By combining the processing power of thousands of home computers it’ll hopefully be possible to make more accurate climate change predictions (to make people act). You don’t have to do anything else than download and open the program. Whenever you have your computer on the program will calculate the chosen climate prediction in the background.
Every contributor has his individual variable changes for the prediction, which is calculated from the year 1920. If your model ends up with a climate unsimilar to current year 2006, your experiment will stop. However, if the model is close enough it will continue to calculate untill it reaches 2080. This will give researchers multiple models to compare climate changes happening in the coming years.
TAKE PART IN THE BIGGEST CLIMATE CHANGE EXPERINENT EVER UNDERTAKEN: climateprediction.net
01.17.06
Visualising the World with Maps
I ran into even better maps than before. Maplecroft a specialist research and advisory company for large multinationals, offers flash maps which portrait environmental, social and political information of overs 200 states around the World. Maplecroft’s aim with the maps is:
“This innovative tool is designed to raise awareness amongst corporations, government and non governmental organisations, academics and students of how an organisation’s operations interact with wider society, and how the risks and opportunities generated can be responsibly managed through stakeholder engagement and partnership.”
You can choose the issue you want to know more about from the drop down menus above the map. The topics include global pandemic risk in 2006, climate change (actually, who is responsible of it), digital inclusion, aid depth ratio, military expenditure, human rights and many more. By clicking the maps you can find more information on specific countries or cases.
01.12.06
Thai Travelogue
A paragraph from my Thai travelogue:
“…The day for unit’s workers started 8 o’clock with the national anthem and rising of the Thai flag in front of the office. The first day we walked through different plantation to find the most suitable ones to measure. The mountainous terrain offered beautiful views over the valleys with the highest mountain of Thailand Doi Inthanon looming behind the smoky sky. Only one plantation was chosen for closer measuring. This vast area had parts which had suffered a major forest fire six years ago and another part that hadn’t had a fire during it’s standing age of 26 years. Finally I would get the comparison that I needed. The two workers helping me were fun to be with, older Thai man knew all the plants like his own pockets and was constantly pointing around telling which trees produced something delicious to eat or chewing tobacco. He had a small bag with him where he kept this forest tobacco; fermented and dried leaves, bark and some white glue he called acid. All this would be wrapped inside a leaf and placed under a lip. The result: black teeth. The young Karen guy talked a bit English and worked as a scribe and a translator. He was especially pleased when he heard that there are hill-tribe people living in Finland called Saame people who nowadays use helicopters and snowmotorcycles (snowmobiles) to look after their reindeer. After the last days work (which took 10 hours) we headed to the Hmong village close to the unit grounds to buy couple of beers and a pair of Hmong trousers for my girlfriend. Villagers were playing football in the square while we bargained for the trousers. After half an hour I gave up and paid too much for the pants…”
Read more with pictures: Forest Inventories in Thailand and Then Some
01.08.06
The Taungya System
The traditional forest plantation system, Taungya or Shamba has been critisised in kenya. The critics claim that it leads to destruction of water catchments and loss of biodiversity.In taungya, plantation forest is established on a government owned land by the local farmers. The government provides seedlings and tools as well as instructions and training. In return for their work local people have an opportunity to cultivate the plantation area until the canopy closes, usually this takes from 2 to 4 years.
As the system is only used in plantation areas, I think the argument about loss of biodiversity is out of place. The main objective of plantation management being a high yield of raw material for forest industry. Of course there are several methods to attain this goal, with monoculture plantation or multiple species plantation. The rule of thumb is that the more you have species the more complex and difficult it’ll be to achive a high output of desired wood. With multiple species the biodiversity might be a bit higher for a decade or two before clear cutting.
The destruction of water catchments by plantation forestry depends mostly on species selection and in some degree on carefull planning of logging (where to place roads etc.) not on plantation forestry itself. With site matching tree species possible negative effects can be reversed so that the site’s water holding capacities actually increase (if that’s the aim).
The protection of biodiversity, in my view, should not alter the livelyhood of local people. Sufficient amount of protected areas and nature reserves are the places where this protection should take place. Of course, one can argue that Taungya could be brought up to date by taking the government off the equation with a land reform that would decentralise the land rights. This would minimise the need of local people to destroy the seedlings in order to prolong the cultivation period, as they would get even higher revenues from the wood crop. But this is a decision that should be made by politicians not by foresters. Today, community or private ownership with appropriate extension work is found to be the most efficient way to manage and protect forests at the same time.
People simply take better care of their own property.
Farmers ‘eat away’ Kenyan mountain forests – article in People and the Planet
Banning shamba system will not replenish forests – open letter in The Standard
Shooting government in the head – Article in The East African Standard
01.04.06
Mike Fay’s Megaflyover Images in GoogleEarth
Across Africa, you will see the familiar yellow National Geographic logo. Zoom in to see the title of each feature article or photograph. Click the icon and a pop-up balloon shows a photo and description along with links to the content…The Megaflyover images are stunning. Mike spent more than a year taking 92,000 high resolution photographs of the continent.
more in…GoogleBlog
