Africa is increasingly seeking to formulate a common African position ahead of key international events.
Thursday, February 26, 2015
Thursday, February 19, 2015
6,000 mosques to go solar in Jordan
By Sami Grover, Treehugger
We've already heard about a solar-powered mosque in Turkey and a wind-powered one in Germany. Now, according to reports on a website called Eden Keeper, the government of Jordan is putting its weight behind a plan to solarize the country's 6,000 mosques.
Billed as a cooperation between Jordan's Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources and its Ministry of Awqaf and Islamic Affairs, the project will initially see some 120 mosques receive funding for solar power systems, with installation starting this year, but the eventual plan is apparently to install solar on all of Jordan's mosques.
There are many reasons why this is very, very cool. Just like when a church goes solar, or when the World Council of Churches divests from fossil fuels, the immense symbolism and cultural influence of religious authorities can be used to set the tone for how we think about energy and the world around us. Indeed, the push for solar mosques coincided with a campaign to promote solar on residential rooftops too.
Of course there is also something else cool about Jordan's solar powered mosques: They are used. And they are used a lot.
With five regular prayer times a day, mosques are busy spaces with whopping energy bills. According to Aisha Abdelhamid of Eden Keeper, Jordan imports most of its energy at very high prices. If these spaces can use solar power to lessen their impact, the cumulative impact should contribute to a lower demand on the country's strained electricity grid.
We look forward to seeing this scheme roll out.
We've already heard about a solar-powered mosque in Turkey and a wind-powered one in Germany. Now, according to reports on a website called Eden Keeper, the government of Jordan is putting its weight behind a plan to solarize the country's 6,000 mosques.
Billed as a cooperation between Jordan's Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources and its Ministry of Awqaf and Islamic Affairs, the project will initially see some 120 mosques receive funding for solar power systems, with installation starting this year, but the eventual plan is apparently to install solar on all of Jordan's mosques.
There are many reasons why this is very, very cool. Just like when a church goes solar, or when the World Council of Churches divests from fossil fuels, the immense symbolism and cultural influence of religious authorities can be used to set the tone for how we think about energy and the world around us. Indeed, the push for solar mosques coincided with a campaign to promote solar on residential rooftops too.
Of course there is also something else cool about Jordan's solar powered mosques: They are used. And they are used a lot.
With five regular prayer times a day, mosques are busy spaces with whopping energy bills. According to Aisha Abdelhamid of Eden Keeper, Jordan imports most of its energy at very high prices. If these spaces can use solar power to lessen their impact, the cumulative impact should contribute to a lower demand on the country's strained electricity grid.
We look forward to seeing this scheme roll out.
Friday, February 13, 2015
How A Dam Is Destroying Rainforest And Displacing Thousands In Brazil
The world’s third-largest hydroelectric dam is under construction on the Xingu River in Brazil, a process that will destroy swaths of rainforest and displace tens of thousands of people. Igre and her indigenous Xikrin tribe are among the communities facing an imminent threat to their way of life.
Thursday, February 12, 2015
Five ways to shake up climate change deliberations | SciDev Net
By SciDev Net
The Delhi Sustainable Development Summit, held last week (5-7 February), is in its 16th year and is a slick, formidable affair. It felt like an inspired combination of activism, research seminar and symbolic communication. It is plastic-free, vegetarian and managed to attract an array of heads of state and celebrities (including Arnold Schwarzenegger!) to its opening ceremony.
For me though, the summit’s enduring value was best captured by a session I attended on the future of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It was relevant, connected and pulled no punches.
The session featured three former IPCC report authors, climate negotiators and some from the Climate and Development Knowledge Network, which is primarily tasked with sharing climate science with policy audiences.
There were some reasonably radical ideas on offer.
Climate change is the only multilateral negotiating process underpinned by a scientific partner (the IPCC) that has secured moral authority and academic respect equally — so there might not be much appetite for big changes. Yet it is this success that presents the overwhelming concern: more than once at the summit, delegates noted that science had ‘won’ and the challenges of climate change now lie elsewhere.
It was this concern about enduring relevance that underpinned many of the ideas floated during the session. Here are a few of them:
1. Communication
Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the IPCC and director-general of TERI (The Energy and Resources Institute, which organised the summit), said the panel’s Fifth Assessment Report, which was released last year, has data and analysis that is important for mitigation and adaptation strategies, suggesting that questions over the IPCC’s continuing relevance are misplaced. What his rebuttal proved most effectively is that the IPCC has a fundamental challenge around its brand. Currently, it is simply known as the panel that set out the overwhelming evidence that climate change is happening. There were suggestions in the session that the IPCC conduct more digitally aware communication campaigns or publish more prescriptive reports. But these are all part of a broader argument that the IPCC needs a more versatile brand.
2. Regionalisation
Nearly everyone agreed that the reports need to be more geographically granular. A planner from India’s Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change made an impassioned plea for the authors to develop reports that would be meaningful in his constituencies. From this, it’s clear that the way the IPCC’s reports have tried to geographically differentiate impacts have not resonated and need to be presented differently and more clearly. Arvid Hallén, director-general of the Research Council of Norway, pointed out that this would include getting better at engaging the social sciences to assess the feasibility of scientific interventions in various social contexts. (This has some methodological implications, but we’ll come to that.)
3. Research updates
A number of speakers noted that in many ways the schedule of the panel’s assessment reports is decidedly awkward. They often come in too quick a succession to capture substantive incremental shifts in scientific knowledge, and the schedule is quite disconnected from both global and national policy deliberations. To combat this, there was a suggestion that a parallel reporting process could capture breakthroughs in climate science as they occur. Eswaran Somanathan, a former IPCC author who works at the Indian Statistical Institute, thought these updates would allow a shorter review process. Of course, the panel will never have the flexibility of your average research consortium, but there is no fundamental reason why it has to stick to producing only the large and time-consuming assessment reports.
4. Content focus
Two suggestions were made about where the IPCC’s focus should be.
The first was for more attention on monitoring, including of financing. Related to this was a suggestion that the methodological focus should shift from computer modelling to physical observation. This might be useful in that it would leave the panel less vulnerable to constant challenges about the reliability of climate models, although it could bring a new kind of awkwardness, in that the observations might give the panel more of a ‘naming and shaming’ role.
The second idea was about better integration, not just between the panel’s various internal working groups, but also with the science community working at the interface with development studies. It was clear for instance, that Peter Holmgren, who heads the Center for International Forestry Research, had a mission to press for a closer working relationship between the consultative body CGIAR and the IPCC. (Efforts towards integration might even be smoothed by the update reports suggested above.)
5. Inclusivity
This is perhaps the most confounding challenge for the panel. Many of the authors present, notably the women, said the IPCC needs to do more about including work by developing world researchers. The exclusion is a natural consequence of relying on the existing research establishment — after all less than one per cent of authors in top journals are based in the developing world. While this is understandable, not addressing it will be a missed opportunity for the IPCC. Purnamita Dasgupta, another of the panel’s report authors, suggested restructuring the panel to allow more plurality as a way to address this challenge.
Academia is a conservative enterprise, so radical reform is regarded with suspicion. But since our responses to climate change will require profound societal changes, the scientists and negotiators involved might expect that fervour will be necessary at some point.
For me though, the summit’s enduring value was best captured by a session I attended on the future of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It was relevant, connected and pulled no punches.
The session featured three former IPCC report authors, climate negotiators and some from the Climate and Development Knowledge Network, which is primarily tasked with sharing climate science with policy audiences.
There were some reasonably radical ideas on offer.
Climate change is the only multilateral negotiating process underpinned by a scientific partner (the IPCC) that has secured moral authority and academic respect equally — so there might not be much appetite for big changes. Yet it is this success that presents the overwhelming concern: more than once at the summit, delegates noted that science had ‘won’ and the challenges of climate change now lie elsewhere.
It was this concern about enduring relevance that underpinned many of the ideas floated during the session. Here are a few of them:
1. Communication
Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the IPCC and director-general of TERI (The Energy and Resources Institute, which organised the summit), said the panel’s Fifth Assessment Report, which was released last year, has data and analysis that is important for mitigation and adaptation strategies, suggesting that questions over the IPCC’s continuing relevance are misplaced. What his rebuttal proved most effectively is that the IPCC has a fundamental challenge around its brand. Currently, it is simply known as the panel that set out the overwhelming evidence that climate change is happening. There were suggestions in the session that the IPCC conduct more digitally aware communication campaigns or publish more prescriptive reports. But these are all part of a broader argument that the IPCC needs a more versatile brand.
2. Regionalisation
Nearly everyone agreed that the reports need to be more geographically granular. A planner from India’s Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change made an impassioned plea for the authors to develop reports that would be meaningful in his constituencies. From this, it’s clear that the way the IPCC’s reports have tried to geographically differentiate impacts have not resonated and need to be presented differently and more clearly. Arvid Hallén, director-general of the Research Council of Norway, pointed out that this would include getting better at engaging the social sciences to assess the feasibility of scientific interventions in various social contexts. (This has some methodological implications, but we’ll come to that.)
3. Research updates
A number of speakers noted that in many ways the schedule of the panel’s assessment reports is decidedly awkward. They often come in too quick a succession to capture substantive incremental shifts in scientific knowledge, and the schedule is quite disconnected from both global and national policy deliberations. To combat this, there was a suggestion that a parallel reporting process could capture breakthroughs in climate science as they occur. Eswaran Somanathan, a former IPCC author who works at the Indian Statistical Institute, thought these updates would allow a shorter review process. Of course, the panel will never have the flexibility of your average research consortium, but there is no fundamental reason why it has to stick to producing only the large and time-consuming assessment reports.
4. Content focus
Two suggestions were made about where the IPCC’s focus should be.
The first was for more attention on monitoring, including of financing. Related to this was a suggestion that the methodological focus should shift from computer modelling to physical observation. This might be useful in that it would leave the panel less vulnerable to constant challenges about the reliability of climate models, although it could bring a new kind of awkwardness, in that the observations might give the panel more of a ‘naming and shaming’ role.
The second idea was about better integration, not just between the panel’s various internal working groups, but also with the science community working at the interface with development studies. It was clear for instance, that Peter Holmgren, who heads the Center for International Forestry Research, had a mission to press for a closer working relationship between the consultative body CGIAR and the IPCC. (Efforts towards integration might even be smoothed by the update reports suggested above.)
5. Inclusivity
This is perhaps the most confounding challenge for the panel. Many of the authors present, notably the women, said the IPCC needs to do more about including work by developing world researchers. The exclusion is a natural consequence of relying on the existing research establishment — after all less than one per cent of authors in top journals are based in the developing world. While this is understandable, not addressing it will be a missed opportunity for the IPCC. Purnamita Dasgupta, another of the panel’s report authors, suggested restructuring the panel to allow more plurality as a way to address this challenge.
Academia is a conservative enterprise, so radical reform is regarded with suspicion. But since our responses to climate change will require profound societal changes, the scientists and negotiators involved might expect that fervour will be necessary at some point.
Monday, February 9, 2015
Perspectives from farmers: What is the future of food for the world? | CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS)CCAFS
Farmers from India, Peru and Kenya share their climate change stories, and tell us what they want to see in the future.
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