Archive for October 28th, 2010

DECC urges communities to embrace watermill ‘renaissance’

Business Green: The government has today called on local communities and businesses to harness the power of their rivers and streams in a bid to boost the UK's nascent hydropower market. Climate change minister Greg Barker urged communities to revive disused waterwheels and turbines, confirming they would be eligible for financial incentives through the Feed-in Tariff (FIT) scheme. In a bid to ensure projects are environmentally sustainable, the Environment Agency has also published a new hydropower guide,...

Step-by-step guide to installing small scale hydro

Business Green: The Environment Agency has today published a new guide to help businesses, households and communities generate electricity and earn money from hydropower. BusinessGreen.com outlines the path to gaining planning consent: Suitability Use the Home Energy Generation Selector tool on the Energy Saving Trust website to find out if a hydropower project could work for your business, home or community. Alternatively call EST on 0800 512 012 to speak to an advisor. Quotations Talk to an installer...

Undergrads in the Amazon: American students witness beauty and crisis in Yasuni National Park, Ecuador

Mongabay: Although most Americans have likely seen photos and videos of the world's largest rainforest, the Amazon, they will probably never see it face-to-face. For many, the Amazon seems incredibly remote: it is a dim, mysterious place, a jungle surfeit in adventure and beauty--but not a place to take a family vacation or spend a honeymoon. This means that the destruction of the Amazon, like the rainforest itself, also appears distant when seen from Oregon or North Carolina or Pennsylvania. Oil spills in...

Amazon suffers worst drought in 100 years

Telegraph: River levels in parts of the Amazon rainforest have fallen to their lowest in more than a century.

Need to Move Indonesia’s Capital Growing Urgent in Face of Climate Change, Experts Say

Yahoo: Sea level rise, worsening flooding and land subsidence in and around Jakarta have prompted Indonesian officials to resurrect plans to move the country's capital - but local residents and experts say Jakarta itself will not survive unless it adapts to cope with climate change. Plans to relocate Indonesia's central government, parliament and public offices to another province on the island of Java or to another island in the Indonesian archipelago have been proposed on and off since the 1930s because...

Hopes for treaty rise at UN biodiversity summit

AFP: Hopes rose that rich and poor nations will be able to forge a historic treaty to protect the world's ecosystems after grinding progress was made at a UN summit on Thursday, delegates said. Representatives of more than 190 countries have been meeting in the central Japanese city of Nagoya for nearly two weeks in an effort to set goals on saving habitats which would help to end the mass extinction of species. With talks due to wind up Friday, delegates said last-minute negotiations among environment...

World Bank to account for nature

BBC: The World Bank has launched a global partnership aimed at helping countries include the costs of destroying nature into their national accounts. Ten nations will take part in the pilot phase, including India and Colombia. The bank's president Robert Zoellick said environmental destruction happens partly because governments do not account for the value of nature. The partnership was launched at the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) meeting in Nagoya, Japan. "We know that human...

Runaway Global Economy Decimating Nature

Inter Press Service: One-fifth of all birds, fish and animals are threatened with extinction - as many as six million unique and irreplaceable forms of life – an authoritative new assessment warned Wednesday. Deforestation, agricultural expansion, overfishing, invasive alien species and climate change are the specific causes, but the main engine of destruction is an economic system that is blind to the reality that there is no economy or human well-being without nature, experts here say. "Without global conservation...