Current Savers Blog

Forests and farms don’t mix, according to conventional wisdom.

Farmers are often portrayed as the villains, slashing and burning trees to clear land for crops and wrecking forests from the Amazon to Indonesia (…not to mention Europe, where people cleared most forests thousands of years ago).

But a report today by the World Agroforestry Centre indicates that farms aren’t such enemies of trees as usually thought - it says tree canopies cover at least 10 percent of almost half the world’s farmland.  That is a gigantic area the size of China, or Canada. (For a story, click here).

Ten percent doesn’t sound much but one common definition of a “forest” by the U.N.s’ Food and Agriculture Organisation is an area where tree canopies cover at least 10 percent. It excludes farmland or urban areas (– otherwise your local supermarket car park might qualify if it’s got a few trees dotted around the tarmac).

Farmers sometimes keep trees as a backup if their main crops fail — with their deeper roots, trees producing fruit or nuts, for instance, can withstand droughts or floods better than many crops. Farmers also keep trees for uses such as a source of building materials, medicines or shade.

So trees are more common on farms than thought — and a home to a wider variety of insects or animals than a swathe of grassland, maize or wheat. They may also be a bigger store of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide than expected, with a role in limiting global warming.

So have farmers got too bad a rap for deforestation?

(Pictures: top: Cows graze under a solitary maple tree on a hill near the central Bohemian town of Votice 63 km (40 miles) south of Prague, July 18, 2009. REUTERS/Petr Josek. Centre left: Pedestrians walk over an empty parking lot in Beijing’s central buisiness district August 20, 2007. REUTERS/Reinhard Krause. Bottom right: Cattle graze in a deforested jungle near Maraba, in Brazil’s central state of Para May 3, 2009. Soon thousands of cows will be chewing pasture on the freshly cleared land in Brazil’s Amazon state of Para, just a tiny part of Brazil’s 200-million-strong commercial cattle herd, the world’s biggest. REUTERS/Paulo Whitaker)

You have to be creative when you’re a Russian scientist, bad weather is preventing your research ship from picking you up for your expedition and you’ve got time to kill in Nome, Alaska.

Such was the case for a group waiting to begin a joint mission with U.S. researchers in the Bering Sea in late August.

But a side trip into the rolling, lichen-covered hills around Nome, the one-time gold rush town on the Alaskan coast, proved to be more than worth their while for the prize they stumbled upon — mushrooms.

A hillside was spotted with the large, red-topped variety Russians crave in soup or fried with onions and potatoes. Thrilled, the team fanned out to gather armfuls of the fungi.

The scientists are part of the RUSALCA expedition, brought together by the Russian Academy of Sciences and U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. They will spend the next month and a half studying the impact of climate change on the water, air and organisms in the body of water between the two countries.

But today is about mushrooms, and there’s no concern whatsoever about anyone mistakenly plucking a poisonous one. “Russians know what these mushrooms look like,” said Elizaveta Ershova, a zooplankton specialist.

The plan is to give them to the chefs on the research ship Professor Khromov, after it finally enters port to load people and gear, to whip up a dinner with the delicacy.

“There’s a similarity to the gold rush,” Aleksey Ostrovskiy, an expedition coordinator, said of the excitement of discovering the mushrooms. “We just don’t have them like this in the Moscow area.”

(Photo - Elizaveta Ershova, Aleksey Ostrovskiy and Alexander Savvichev toast mother lode of mushrooms outside Nome, Alaska, on August 22, 2009. REUTERS/Jeffrey Jones)

Two German ships set off on Friday on the first commercial journey from Asia to western Europe via the Arctic through the fabled Northeast Passage – a trip made possible by climate change. Niels Stolberg, president and CEO of Bremen-based Beluga Shipping, said the Northern Sea Route will cut thousands of nautical miles off the ships’ journey from South Korea to the Netherlands, reducing fuel consumption and emissions of greenhouse gas. I had the chance to ask Stolberg a few questions about the Arctic expedition:

Question: What’s the status of the voyage?
Stolberg: MV “Beluga Fraternity” and the MV “Beluga Foresight” have just started to sail from Vladivostok (on Friday) with the destination Novyy Port at the river Ob.

Question: When did they leave Vladivostok and when will they arrive in Europe?
Stolberg: They’ve just left Vladivostok. They are scheduled to arrive in Novyy Port around September 6th. After discharging, they will proceed via Murmansk to Rotterdam. Estimated time of arrival is still to be confirmed and up to further voyage development.

Question: How much time/fuel/money/CO2 will this northern route save?
Stolberg: The amount of time, fuel, money or emission saved will be significant by transiting the Northeast Passage instead of sailing the traditional way through the Suez. From Ulsan via the Suez Canal to Rotterdam it would be a roughly 11,000 nautical mile journey whereas the short cut between Asia and Europe utilising the Northeast Passage is a 8,700 mile journey. The saved distance in detail always depends on the route, so the routes could be about 3,000 to 5,000 miles shorter. Savings of about three million euros by sending six vessels through the Northeast Passage per open time frame is realistic. Saving distance means saving bunker means saving money: That is the formula.

Question: Your company has been a pioneer in reducing costs/CO2 — is that why you’re so eager to sail the northern route?
Stolberg: It is a hallmark of the corporate philosophy of Beluga Shipping to go off the beaten tracks whenever possible and reasonable: MV “Beluga SkySails”, co-powered by a towing kite system, or many projects developed and driven by our own department “Research & Innovation” follow that principle with the overall intention and make shipping more efficient as well as into a greener business. In this sense, we reckon that the Northeast Passage offers unmatched chances for efficient sea traffic when as an effect of global warming in the summer there is the chance of using this seaway for a couple of weeks, thus connecting the markets in Europe and Asia

Question: Is drawing attention to global warming an aspect of this journey?
Stolberg: This is not our intention nor does it reflect our business. My personal opinion is that global warming and climate change, obviously, are developments with some negative effects. However, the melting ice in the Northeast Passage and thus the possibility to transit through this passage for commercial purpose has positive effects, too. This development enables shipping companies to reduce bunker consumption and as a consequence CO2 and other emissions as well which, in turn, are small factors to limit the scope of the global warming.

Question: Do you think many other ships will be taking this Arctic short cut?
Stolberg: The possibility to transit the Northeast Passage in combination with the cargo flow between Europe and Asia is a major reason and motivation why the Northern Sea Route will become even more attractive for shipping companies. So, it is our goal to utilise this seaway regularly, if possible, and we could imagine others will follow our example. You also have to have appropriate modern vessels, you have to have an experienced team of experts on board and all behind in the onshore offices and you have to be granted permission by the authorities.

Question: Why have no other ships tried this northern route yet? Why are you the first?
Stolberg: Russian submarines and icebreakers have used the northern route in the past. But it wasn’t open for regular commercial shipping until now because there are many areas with thick ice. It was only last summer that satellite pictures revealed the ice is melting and a small corridor opened which could enable commercial shipping through the Northeast Passage. We’re the first company to travel the route this summer because we have suitable vessels and are well prepared to master the challenge.

Question: What are the dangers of the northern route?
Stolberg: There are numerous challenges and some risks awaiting both vessel and crew. Even though the ice is melting in the respective time frame, cold temperature and ice, drifting ice fields or ridges can become a problem and produce a risk of injury to the crew as well as a risk of damage to the vessel. The look out is highly important. Also the ship material and not least the seaworthy and all lashings of the cargo have to be checked constantly under this even more rough and inhospitable conditions than elsewhere on the ocean. There is no expertise or field report we could rely on. However, we are well prepared and have been intensively working on this project for far more than a year now.

Question: When exactly is the “window”? Will it be opening wider soon?
Stolberg: The open window for transiting the Northeast Passage roughly is a six to eight weeks time frame in the Russian summer between August and September. This is when the sun powers up to 20 or even more degrees Celsius in Russia and the ice along the route is mostly melting. Thereafter the sun loses power again and the area refreezes. Whether or not the window will open wider soon is a question only climate experts can answer.

PHOTO: The Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E), a high-resolution passive microwave Instrument on NASA’s Aqua satellite, shows the state of Arctic sea ice on September 10 in this file image released September 16, 2008. Arctic nations are promising to avoid new “Cold War” scrambles linked to climate change, but a thaw may allow new shipping routes. REUTERS/NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio

In an age of angst about security and Arctic sovereignty, it’s no mean feat piecing together an oceanographic expedition involving scientists from the United States, Russia and elsewhere and launching the whole affair from a northern U.S. port.

In the choppy waters of the Bering Sea just off Nome, Alaska, the Russian research ship Professor Khromov is waiting to come in to port, where strict security protocols will be adhered to under the watchful eye of U.S. authorities.

As many as 50 scientists are teaming up for two legs of study in the Bering Strait and northward in August and September, and those without special U.S. Transportation Security Administration clearance cards will be escorted aboard by people designated to do so. No exceptions.

The mission is called RUSALCA, or Russian-American Long Term Census of the Arctic. During the voyage, the multinational team will gather data on water, air and lifeforms in the only place where the Arctic and Pacific oceans meet. It’s a follow up to the initial RUSALCA expedition in 2004 and the data will be gathered and compared to help gauge the impact of climate change in the region where the former Cold War foes previously studied each other’s movements.

But before any of that happens, last-minute preparations are taking place in Nome, the town best known as the finish line for the Iditarod dogsled race. The town’s no-nonsense harbor master, Joy Baker, must be sure that all security issues and logistics are dealt with for the passengers and their thousands of pounds of high-tech gear.

Also, conditions on the Alaskan Coast — the region is being hit with wind, rain, rough water — have to improve for the Khromov’s safe loading.

That’s much less regulated.

(Picture - Nome, Alaska’s damp main drag on August 21, 2009. Nome is the starting point for a joint U.S.-Russian scientific expedition in the Bering Sea in August and September. REUTERS/Jeffrey Jones.)

Academics? They barely count in this survey of top schools by the Sierra Club. Its grades of U.S. college and university green credentials focus on how the institutions directly affect the environment. Building efficiency, where food is from, waste management; it’s arguably a list of which schools are walking the green walk.

The University of Colorado, Boulder came out on top, despite a miserable 3 out of 10 for energy. It topped the chart in waste management and transportation. Three University of California schools — Santa Cruz, Berkeley and UCLA - were in the top 10. The Ivy League didn’t crack the top 10; Harvard made #11 thanks to a good energy efficiency score.

(Picture: A visitor to the University of Colorado at Boulder’s entry at the Solar Decathlon looks over their team’s solar-powered house entry in Washington, October, 15, 2007. The competition was among 20 college teams from around the world to design, build and operate the most liveable, energy-efficient, completely solar powered house. REUTERS/Jim Young)

Ban Ki-moon isn’t having a good year for public relations. Halfway through a five-year term as U.N. secretary-general, he’s been hit with a wave of negative assessments by the Financial Times, The Economist, London Times, Foreign Policy and other media organizations. In a March 2009 editorial entitled “Whereabouts Unknown,” the Times said Ban was “virtually inaudible” on pressing issues of international security and “ineffectual” on climate change, the one issue that Ban claims he has made the biggest difference on. The Economist gave him a mixed report card, assigning him two out of 10 points for his management skills while praising him on climate change (eight out of 10 points).
    
This week, Norway’s Aftenposten newspaper made an unpleasant situation much worse. It published a confidential memo assessing Ban’s 2-1/2 years in office from Oslo’s deputy U.N. ambassador, Mona Juul, to the Norwegian Foreign Ministry. Juul’s report is scathing — and it comes from a representative of one of the world’s body’s top financial contributors. She says the former South Korean foreign minister suffers from a “lack of charisma” and has “constant temper tantrums” in his offices on the 38th floor of the United Nations building in midtown Manhattan.
    
She describes Ban as a “powerless observer” during the fighting in Sri Lanka earlier this year when thousands of civilians were killed as government forces ended a 25-year civil war against Tamil Tiger rebels, trapping them on a narrow strip of coast in the country’s northeast. In Darfur, Somalia, Pakistan, Zimbabwe and Congo, she wrote, Ban’s “passive and not very committed appeals seem to fall on deaf ears.” She says that his recent trip to Myanmar was a failure and that some people in Washington refer to Ban as a “one-term” secretary-general.
    
Juul’s letter could hardly have come at a more inopportune time. Ban is planning to visit Norway in the coming weeks, where he intends to meet with government officials and visit the Arctic circle to see for himself the effects of global warming and the melting polar ice. Now U.N. officials fear reporters will be more interested in what he says about Juul’s memo than climate change.

So far Ban has not reacted to the letter. However, a Norwegian diplomat told Reuters that Ban’s press office had been instructed to hold off on confirming his visit to Norway shortly after the news of Juul’s memo began to spread.
    
Ban’s PR difficulties didn’t start this year. In March 2008, his chief of staff Vijay Nambiar sent a memo to U.N. employees explaining how to say his boss’s name. “Many world leaders, some of whom are well acquainted with the Secretary-General, still use his first name mistakenly as his surname and address him wrongly as Mr. Ki-moon or Mr. Moon,” Nambiar complained.
 
Then came Ban’s own speech to senior U.N. officials in Turin, Italy last year, in which he described how difficult it was to improve the working culture inside the United Nations. The secretary-general seemed to acknowledge that his internal management style had failed. “I tried to lead by example,” Ban said. “Nobody followed.”
    
Ban’s aides vehemently defend him, saying he’s being treated unfairly by the press. One senior U.N. official suggested privately that Ban could very well turn out to be “the greatest secretary-general ever.” They complain that people continue to compare him to his predecessor Kofi Annan, who was a very different U.N. chief and relied less on “quiet diplomacy” than Ban. Annan became a hero to many people around the world for standing up to the administration of former U.S. President George W. Bush over the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Annan called the March 2003 invasion illegal. U.N. officials also complain bitterly about the indefatigable blogger Matthew Lee, whose website Inner City Press regularly accuses Ban and other U.N. officials of hypocrisy and failing to keep their promises to reform the United Nations and root out corruption. (Some U.N. officials accuse Lee of not always getting his facts right, but his blog has become unofficial required reading for U.N. staffers around the world.)
    
Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, diplomats in New York say, is among those supporting a campaign against a second term for Ban. Juul’s memo said Helen Clark, New Zealand’s former prime minister and current head of the U.N. Development Program, “could quickly become a competitor for Ban’s second term.” But diplomats say they expect the United States, Britain and other major powers to reluctantly back a second term for Ban, if only because there appears to be no viable alternative whom Russia and China would support.
    
A recent article in the Times of London said the best U.N. chief in the organization’s 64-year history was not Swedish Nobel Peace Prize laureate Dag Hammarskjold but the Peruvian diplomat Javier Perez de Cuellar, who held the top U.N. post for 10 years until 1992. Nicknamed “mumbles” because he was so difficult to understand, Perez de Cuellar kept a low profile and, like Ban, preferred backroom diplomacy, not Annan’s bully pulpit. Among the Peruvian diplomat’s successes were managing the end of the Cold War, leading a long-delayed revival of U.N. peacekeeping and encouraging member states to back a U.S.-led military operation to drive Iraq’s invading forces out of Kuwait in 1991.
    
Whether Ban’s preference for quiet diplomacy will produce similar successes remains to be seen.

A growing number of Investors, including state-owned funds, are looking to invest in water to benefit from efforts to tackle climate change.

According to multi-asset manager Armstrong Investment Managers, less than 0.01 percent of water is easily accessible freshwater and global water use has tripled since 1950 — increasing faster than the world’s population.

“Demographic and climate changes will lead to two thirds of the population inhabiting areas with scarce water,” the firm says.

Armstrong likes water equipment and water treatment stocks and water utilities as these should benefit from sustainable growth opportunities.

Norway’s $350 billion sovereign wealth fund is aiming to invest 20 billion crown ($3.24 billion) investments over the next five years into water and other environmental technologies, such as carbon-capture storage and waste and pollution management.

The Norwegian fund says water was an important input or production factor for about 1,100 companies in its, whose combined market value is some $43 billion.

U.S. President Barack Obama has made climate change legislation one of his top goals and has pushed for more clean, renewable energy like solar and wind power.

But back in 1979, when another Democrat was in the White House, 32 solar panels graced the roof above the Oval Office.

Part of an initiative called “Solar America,” the panels turned sunlight into electricity that heated water in the staff kitchen — which President Jimmy Carter often used. They were removed during Ronald Reagan’s administration in 1986.

Now, one of those presidential solar panels has joined the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, DC.

“The White House solar panel is evidence of an American president leading by example to promote his administration’s agenda,” Harry Rubenstein, chair of the museum’s division of politics and reform, said in a statement. “It displays how President Carter reinforced his policies through a personal gesture taking place in his own home.”

Unity College donated the panel to the museum this summer. The college in rural Maine got the panels in 1991. It refurbished some of them and installed them on top of the college cafeteria, and the panels heated water there until they maxed out their life span in 2005.

We were wondering if readers would like to see Obama install solar panels on top of the White House again?
It would certainly send a message — similar to the example set by First Lady Michelle Obama when she planted a vegetable garden on the White House lawn to promote healthy eating.

– Writing and reporting by Laura Isensee

(Photo Credit: United College and GreenBang/President Jimmy Carter inspects solar panels installed on top of the White House on June 30, 1979)

What is the latest and most important environmental concern these days? Global warming? Disappearing ice caps and rain forests? Reliance on non-renewable energy?

Wrong. According to a new survey sponsored by Molson Coors Brewing Co, water pollution ranked No. 1, followed by fresh water shortages, depletion of natural resources, air pollution and loss of animal and plant species.

The survey was commissioned by Circle of Blue, a nonprofit affiliate of the Pacific Institute, a water and climate think tank. It polled people in 15 countries, including the United States, Mexico, China and India, about their views on water issues including sustainability, management and conservation.

Molson Coors, maker of Coors Light and Molson Canadian beers, sponsored the survey as a first step in trying to understand how people in international markets — where it hopes to expand its business — view water. 

Molson Chief Executive Peter Swinburn said that as the company expands internationally, it must understand what a local community’s issues are and try to address them before spending money and building a factory.

“We’re a branded organinzation. We live by research and consumer opinion,” Swinburn said in an interview. ”To try and address a problem without going to consumers and understanding their perceptions is difficult to do.”

Of the seven ”focus” countries, consumers in Mexico seemed to take the problem of water pollution the most seriously, with 90 percent of respondents calling it a “very serious problem.” The rest of the countries ranged from 58 percent in Britain to 71 percent in Canada.

The survey included a “water concern index” which measured people’s concern about water issues by aggregating their concerns about water pollution, lack of safe drinking water, lack of water for agriculture and the high cost of water.

According to that index, Mexico and India were much more concerned than average. China and Canada were right above average. Britain, the United States and Russia showed below-average concern.

Swinburn said conserving water can improve its profit margins by reducing costs, while helping people get access to clean water increases the health and economic vibrancy of a community, making it a stronger potential marketplace. 

“From the microcosmic level of our margin through to the broader social impacts, it affects our bottom line,” Swinburn said, proving that risks related to the world’s fresh water supply ripple through the beverage industry.  

Another interesting point concerned responsibilty for ensuring clean water. Respondents in Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States said they believed that water companies were the most responsible, followed by the government, large companies, citizens, farmers and non-governmental organizations.

In Canada, China, India and Mexico, respondents thought the government should be most responsible.

Following the discussion on water, Swinburn took a few moments to answer Reuters’ questions about its business outlook for the rest of the year.

Slow-moving Morakot stormed into Taiwan’s typhoon hall of infamy this past week, rescue teams complained, largely because clouds hovered in the hardest hit areas even after the killer storm had passed.

The clouds blocked any aerial views of mountain villages in southern Taiwan where hundreds of people are presumed dead from landslides.

Disaster officials on this western Pacific island, a veteran of raging late summer typhoons, couldn’t even confirm the biggest landslide, which buried a village that was home to more than 1,000 people, until a day after it had happened.

But Taiwan’s National Space Organization aims to change that in five to six years by designing a radiometer that could be launched into space on one of its heavier satellites, Formosat-2 or Formosat-5. Positioned around 800 km (500 miles) above earth, the radiometer would check water levels, potentially showing whether a river had suddenly changed course, said Nick Yen, a space organisation programme director.

The same radiometer could also detect changes in the sea level, hinting at tsunamis after an earthquake, for which Taiwan is also known.

“The National Space Organisation isn’t able to do this yet, but we are working on that,” Yen said in an interview. “It’s quite a useful tool for rescue operations.”

Taiwan will seek help from academia and possibly from the United States, which has already developed the technology, Yen said. He did not specify a budget but said developing the radiometer would cost more in labour than in materials. Taiwan, the world’s No. 37 space power, would share radiometer data internationally but keep the technology to itself, he said.

(Pictures - Top: Family members of flood victims look at the site of a major landslide that destroyed the mountain village of Hsiao Lin in Kaohsiung County, southern Taiwan, August 15, 2009. REUTERS/Stringer. Centre right: A destroyed home lies partially submerged in a river in Gaushu township after Typhoon Morakot swept through Pingtung county, southern Taiwan, August 14, 2009. REUTERS/Stringer. Bottom left: Taiwan’s first satellite is launched into orbit atop a U.S. Lockheed Martin Athena 1 rocket from Florida, in January 1999. REUTERS/Stringer.)