The Sustainable Future

John McCain scores zero on environmental scorecard

If you're from the US and the environment is a major factor in your voting decisions, you may just want to stay away from John McCain, at least according to the League of Conservation Voters' environmental scorecard:

The scorecards, which rank individual U.S. legislators based on their votes on environmental issues, focused on 15 votes this year--all of which senator McCain missed, resulting in a 0% score.

Presidential candidates historically suffer from absenteeism, due to busy campaign schedules that keep them away from Washington. However, Obama and Clinton both missed only 4 environmental votes, and received scores of 67% and 73% respectively.

McCain's lifetime average, as scored by LCV, is 24%, far below Obama's 86% lifetime average and Clinton's 87% lifetime average.

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Click to save Swedish old growth forest

Want to save old growth forest, but just don't quite feel like chaining yourself to a tree? Here's a chance that is literally at your fingertips. Along the lines of sites like The Hunger Site that let you click to help feed the hungry, Ett klick för skogen (a click for the forest) lets you click to help buy Swedish old growth forest.

[via The Good News Network]

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Why environmentalism is hot in the US

More and more people in the US are hopping on the bandwagon of environmental concern. Here's an article from Newsweek exploring what is behind the growing environmental interest.

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How rainforests work

Rainforests play a key role in the earth's ecology, but I'd wager that most of us have only a vague notion of what that actually means. Here's a primer from How Stuff Works on how rainforests work. Go to the deforestation section for a better feel for why they're so important to the global environment.

[link found on the Project Rainforest page]

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China's Premier calls for renewed efforts to protect the environment

At the same time as China's economy has skyrocketed, so has its pollution problem. Premier Wen Jiabao, admitting that the previous five year plan in place to protect the environment was pretty much ineffective, "called for renewed efforts to protect the environment as rapid economic growth continues."

Isn't it funny how we learn to take a politician's words with a grain of salt regardless of the language they're speaking?

Wen described the issue as 'critical' and admitted that previous efforts at environmental protection had failed.

'We must fully recognize the critical and complicated situation as regards environmental protection in our country,' Wen told a national environmental conference.

'Lack of awareness, insufficient planning and a weak legal framework can be blamed for the severe environmental pollution in the country,' he added.

There's a new five year plan, which admittedly takes an agressive stance (on paper, anyway).

The premier referred to a new five year plan which aimed to cut energy consumption in terms of GDP growth by 20 pct and achieve a 10 pct drop in major pollutants by 2010.

I would love to see China succeed in that. I would be really curious to know what has changed since 2005 that makes the likelihood for success of this one any higher.

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Rainforest preservation incentive

Deforestation is a global problem, but it takes place on a local level. Most often the driving force boils down to poverty and a lack of alternatives for economic growth.

Building on the notion that deforestation is a problem that affects the whole planet, a group of developing countries is saying, "Pay us so we can preserve our forests." They're bringing a proposal to the United Nations conference on climate change this week.

It's not hard to make a case for the notion that the responsibility for maintaining the remaining forests should be spread across the globe.

"Right now, these rain-forest nations are providing enormous environmental services to the rest of the world — biodiversity, reduced greenhouse gas emissions — and they are not being compensated," said Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, part of a cadre of academics at Columbia University championing the proposal. "From the viewpoint of global economic efficiency, the best use for rain forests is to maintain them as rain forests."

Not only do forests play a vital role in the global eco-system, mowing them down and using the land for something else has played a huge role in increasing carbon dioxide emissions over the last decade.

Deforestation and other land-use changes accounted for as much as one-fifth of the excess carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere during the 1990s, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, hundreds of scientists who periodically summarize the consensus on global warming.

Yet international efforts to address the causes of climate change have focused on trying to reduce the burning of fossil fuels by wealthy countries rather than on slowing deforestation.

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Living Beyond Our Means

Yesterday I posted a link to the Millenium Ecosystem Assessment. On the same site, you can also download a shorter document, Living Beyond Our Means: Natural Assets and Human Well-being, which pulls out some of the key messages from that assessment.

Here's a summary of those key points:

• Everyone in the world depends on nature and ecosystem services to provide the conditions for a decent, healthy, and secure life.
• Humans have made unprecedented changes to ecosystems in recent decades to meet growing demands for food, fresh water, fiber, and energy.
• These changes have helped to improve the lives of billions, but at the same time they weakened nature’s ability to deliver other key services such as purification of air and water, protection from disasters, and the provision of medicines.
• Among the outstanding problems identified by this assessment are the dire state of many of the world’s fish stocks; the intense vulnerability of the 2 billion people living in dry regions to the loss of ecosystem services, including water supply; and the growing threat to ecosystems from climate change and nutrient pollution.
• Human activities have taken the planet to the edge of a massive wave of species extinctions, further threatening our own well-being.
• The loss of services derived from ecosystems is a significant barrier to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals to reduce poverty, hunger, and disease.
• The pressures on ecosystems will increase globally in coming decades unless human attitudes and actions change.
• Measures to conserve natural resources are more likely to succeed if local communities are givenownership of them, share the benefits, and are involved in decisions.
• Even today’s technology and knowledge can reduce considerably the human impact on ecosystems.
• They are unlikely to be deployed fully, however, until ecosystem services cease to be perceived as free and limitless, and their full value is taken into account.
• Better protection of natural assets will require coordinated efforts across all sections of governments, businesses, and international institutions. The productivity of ecosystems depends on policy choices on investment, trade, subsidy, taxation, and regulation, among others.

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Millenium Ecosystem Assessment

I just ran across the Millenium Ecosystem Assessment, published earlier this year. What is it, and why should you care? I'll let the people who put it together explain...

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Synthesis Report boils down the findings of the four working groups into a simple, straightforward description of Earth’s ecological health and its linkages to human well-being. It answers a series of key questions, such as

• How have ecosystems changed over the past 50 years?
• What are the most critical factors causing ecosystem damage?
• What options do we have for better conserving, restoring, and benefiting from ecosystems?

The volume then presents a snapshot of the health and prospects for each of the main services that ecosystems provide, including the provision of food, water, timber, fuel, climate regulation, disease prevention, and others. The Synthesis Report will prove ideal for students and laypersons interested in a quick, but nuanced, understanding of the state of Earth’s ecosystems.

It does a great job of taking something extraordinarily complex and boiling it down into something digestable. Worth either downloading for free (scroll down and download the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Synthesis Report - it's 15 MB) or buying the paper version.
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