Wandojo Siswanto, one of the negotiators for Indonesia's delegation at 2009 climate talks in Copenhagen and a key architect of its Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) partnership with Norway, has been sentenced to three years in prison for accepting bribes.
Following an investigation by the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK), Wandojo was found guilty of receiving a bribe of about $10,000 from Anggoro Widjojo, a director of PT Masaro Radiokom, to win favorable treatment in the Ministry of Forestry's budget for the telecommunications company. Wandojo had been named in at least two other corruption probes, including a 2008 case where he admitted to taking a Rp 50 million ($4,600) kickback from lawmaker Al-Amien Nasution.
Wandojo was removed as a Special Advisor to the Minister of Forestry in September. Wandojo's arrest and sentencing highlight concerns about the capacity of Indonesia's forestry ministry to manage potentially billions of dollars of payments under the proposed REDD+ program, which aims to reduce Indonesia's greenhouse gas emissions by shifting its development model away from one that consumes forests to one that protects forests. Several governments—including Norway, which has already committed up to a billion dollars—are supporting the initiative.
Concerns over the fate of Indonesia's REDD funds have been raised before. Critics cite the country's reforestation fund, which lost $5.25 billion between 1994 and 1998, according to Ernst and Young audit. The fund was managed by the forestry ministry. Losses have continued through 2009. Chandra M. Hamzah, deputy chairman at the KPK, told Reuters in September that the forestry sector is "a source of unlimited corruption."
Wandojo was quoted in The Jakarta Post in 2010 responding to Norway's initial refusal to provide additional funds for tree planting "We will renegotiate the agreement with Norway. Indonesia needs money for tree planting."
Wandojo has been one of several figures in the investigation. In August the Corruption Court convicted Anggodo Widjojo -- the brother and business partner of PT Masaro Radiokom's Anggoro Widjojo -- for attempting to bribe officials from the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) with as much as Rp 5.1 billion ($566,000) in an attempt to get it to drop a corruption case against his brother. Anggodo Widjojo was sentenced to four years in prison, while his brother has been at-large since August 2008.
Kaban, the forestry minister from 2004 to 2009 and a legislator from 1999-2004, is also a person of interest in the case. Kaban has been linked to several other corruption cases, including bribe-taking for issuance of forest concessions, according to the Jakarta Post.
Earth the feature film came out in 2007, but I just watched the DVD over the weekend. I was immediately struck by the photography, which is nothing short of remarkable. Each landscape and habitat is shown in glorious HD, and you really need to see it on an HD television in order to get the most from it. Watch it on a standard television set and you'd really be missing out.
I only regret not seeing this in the cinemas when it first came out, but I'm guessing Indonesian cinemas would never show anything of this much value in any case. The documentary itself is divided into life stories which focus on certain species and their hunt for food or water. It's very similar to the National Geographic "Great Migrations" which came out recently, and which I'll also be reviewing shortly. In that, I mean it shows at least a great journey carried out by a few select species and their hardships along the way.
We see an adult polar bear on the search for seals, desperately venturing onto the sea ice in a race against time before the ice thaws. This window of opportunity is getting smaller and smaller each year as the ice caps melt earlier and global temperatures rise. A herd of elephants are also shown making their annual migration towards the Okavango delta on the trek for water. Again we are reminded of desertification, deforestation and the fact that these crucial waters are beset on their route by human extraction for a variety of uses, but primarily farmland irrigation.
A humpback whale and her calf make the journey southwards on the hunt for krill and along the way we are treated to a variety of dazzling oceanic spectacles which really bedazzle you with their glorious HD imagery. However, there is the constant reminder of climate change as these creatures are dependent of course on krill which are in turn dependent on ice.
It really is a fascinating documentary and cannot be faulted. I highly recommend anyone to watch it and I have since shown it to one of my classes. Despite their usual indifference towards any subject matter that doesn't involve hollywood celebrities or handheld gadgets it met with a favourable reception. I think the message of the film hit home, and they as I shared the somewhat pessimistic opinion that it won't be long before the species we see here are a myth which we will pass on to our grandchildren but will eventually be forgotten. And so it is that this fantastic documentary is overshadowed by sadness. Sadness at being almost certain of the fate that awaits these glorious creatures unless we do something about it, and fast. You can get involved and the film urges us to in it's closing credits. Visit Life Is to find out more.
If radioactive material from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant - disabled by the March11 tsunami and earthquake - continues to enter the ocean, marine life could be threatened, experts say. In the past week, seawater samples taken near the nuclear power plant, on Japan's eastern coast, have shown elevated levels of radioactive isotopes, including cesium 137 and iodine 131, according to the New York Times.
All life on Earth and in the oceans lives with exposure to natural levels of ionizing radiation - high-frequency radiation with enough energy to change DNA. Most such genetic damage heals, but the addition of human-made radiation can make it harder for the body to repair broken genes.
Radiation concentrations in the Japanese seawater samples have fluctuated in past days, but on Wednesday the amount of iodine spiked to 3,355 times the legal limit for seawater, Japanese nuclear safety officials told the Associated Press.
That level is the highest so far—and an indication that more radiation is entering the ocean, though how is still unknown, the agency reported. Cesium was also found to be 20 times its safety limit on March 28, according to the Times.
Radiation Can Cause "Bizarre Mutations" Once in seawater, radiation can hurt ocean animals in several ways—by killing them outright, creating "bizarre mutations" in their offspring, or passing radioactive material up the food chain, according to Joseph Rachlin, director of Lehman College's Laboratory for Marine and Estuarine Research in New York City.
"There will be a potential for a certain amount of lethality of living organisms, but that's less of a concern than the possible effects on the genetics of the animals that become exposed," Rachlin said. "That's the main problem as I see it with radiation—altering the genetics of the animal and interfering with reproduction."
Even so, according to radioecologist F Ward Whicker, the concentrations of iodine and cesium levels "would have to be orders of magnitude larger than the numbers I've seen to date to cause the kind of radiation doses to marine life that would cause mortality or reductions in reproductive potential. I am very doubtful that direct effects of radioactivity from the damaged reactors on marine life over a large area off the coast of Japan will be observed."
Likewise, using legal limits to gauge damage to marine life is of little value right now, he said. To make a "credible assessment" of the risk to marine animals, scientists would have to know the actual concentrations of radioactive iodine in the water and fish or other marine animals off Fukushima Daiichi, he said.
Radiation Hardest on the Little Ones It's possible that levels of radioactive contamination near the Fukushima nuclear reactors could increase and cause some harm to local marine life, Whicker said. "If this happens, the most likely effects would be reductions in reproductive potential of local fishes. ... ," he said. "Marine organisms' eggs and larvae are highly sensitive to radiation, since radioactive atoms can replace other atoms in their bodies, resulting in radiation exposure that could alter their DNA."
Most such deformed organisms don't survive, but some can pass abnormalities on to the next generation, Lehman College's Rachlin said. Either way, the radiation exposure could hurt the population's ability to survive long-term. Rachlin thinks the most susceptible critters would be soft-bodied invertabrates such as jellyfish, sea anemones, and marine worms - which can take up the radiation more quickly than shelled creatures - though Whicker said fish may be most at risk.
Whicker added, "I would expect any temporary losses in reproduction in local fish to be offset by immigration of unaffected individuals from surrounding areas that would be impacted to a lesser degree." In addition to its threats to reproduction, pockets of radioactive material can can burn fish passing through, hitting them like a stream of searing water, Rachlin said.
Complicating matters is the fact that predator species in the Pacific such as tuna and sailfish are already stressed by overfishing, according to Rachlin. "I'm concerned—this is the spawning season. ... If this impacts the survivorship of the young and larvae, this will be a further insult."
Radiation Threat Here to Stay? According to chemical oceanographer Bill Burnett, "In the short run [the radiation] could have some definite negative impacts" on marine life. "The good news is the half life [of iodine] is only eight days," added Burnett, an expert in environmental radioactivity at Florida State University. So "if they stop the source of radioactive leakage, this is going to be a short-term problem." However Fukushima Daiichi's leaking cesium is potentially more serious, since that isotope takes 30 years to decay, Burnett said.
Radiation Can Travel Up the Food Chain There could also be some movement of radiation up the food chain if animals eat irradiated plants and smaller, radioactive animals, Rachlin said. In particular, plants such as kelp can quickly absorb iodine, FSU's Burnett said. There's a possibility that the devastation of towns in northeastern Japan caused by the earthquake and tsunami also released toxic metals such as lead into the soil and water, according to Texas Tech University ecotoxicologist Ron Kendall.
Previous studies have shown that metals can work in concert with radiation to suppress immune systems in vertebrates, making them more vulnerable to disease, Kendall said. It's a "big issue for the environment and human health because of the widespread destruction. It takes me back to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina—this to me is even more complicated with the radiation."
Ocean Resilient Against Radiation The ocean has a "tremendous capacity" for diluting radiation, Colorado State's Whicker noted. "It also has resilience, in the sense that the area would recover over time as the situation improves and as the radioactivity decays and disperses." "But I should caution that we have not had much opportunity to study the effects of very large releases of radioactivity into marine ecosystems," he said. The best data comes from nuclear weapons tests in the Pacific in the 1950s and 1960s.
Texas Tech's Kendall also pointed out that there's not much known about radiation in seawater."The dose makes the poison," he said, "and the more concentrated the radiation, the more potential effects. It's something we definitely need to monitor." Added Lehman's Rachlin: "If it's a one-shot pulse, OK, not a problem. But if the radiation leaks continue for several months, Japan may be dealing with a more serious blow to marine life, he said. The coastline, after all, isn't Chernobyl, he said. "We can't cement [over] that whole area."
Something that I have really become passionate about recently is the concept of the Vertical Farm. The idea was coined by Dickson Despommier, a professor of environmental health sciences and microbiology at Columbia University in New York City, who developed the idea of vertical farming in 1999 with graduate students in a medical ecology class.
Despommier had originally challenged his class to feed the population of Manhattan (about 2,000,000 people) using 13 acres (5.3 ha) of usable rooftop gardens. The class calculated that, by using rooftop gardening methods, only 2 percent would be fed. Unsatisfied with the results, Despommier made an off-the-cuff suggestion of growing plants indoors, vertically. The idea sparked the students' interests and gained major momentum. By 2001 the first outline of a vertical farm was introduced and today scientists, architects, and investors worldwide are working together to make the concept of vertical farming a reality. In an interview with Miller-McCune.com, Despommier described how vertical farms would function:
"Each floor will have its own watering and nutrient monitoring systems. There will be sensors for every single plant that tracks how much and what kinds of nutrients the plant has absorbed. You'll even have systems to monitor plant diseases by employing DNA chip technologies that detect the presence of plant pathogens by simply sampling the air and using snippets from various viral and bacterial infections. It's very easy to do. Moreover, a gas chromatograph will tell us when to pick the plant by analyzing which flavenoids the produce contains. These flavenoids are what gives the food the flavors you're so fond of, particularly for more aromatic produce like tomatoes and peppers. These are all right-off-the-shelf technologies. The ability to construct a vertical farm exists now. We don't have to make anything new."
Preparation for the future
It is estimated that by the year 2050, close to 80% of the world’s population will live in urban areas and the total population of the world will increase by 3 billion people. A very large amount of land may be required depending on the change in yield per hectare. Scientists are concerned that this large amount of required farmland will not be available and that severe damage to the earth will be caused by the added farmland. Vertical farms, if designed properly, may eliminate the need to create additional farmland and help create a cleaner environment.
Increased crop production
Unlike traditional farming in non-tropical areas, indoor farming can produce crops year-round. All-season farming multiplies the productivity of the farmed surface by a factor of 4 to 6 depending on the crop. With some crops, such as strawberries, the factor may be as high as 30.
Furthermore, as the crops would be sold in the same infrastructures in which they are grown, they will not need to be transported between production and sale, resulting in less spoilage, infestation, and energy required than conventional farming encounters. Research has shown that 30% of harvested crops are wasted due to spoilage and infestation, though this number is much lower in developed nations. Despommier suggests that, if dwarf versions of certain crops are used (e.g. dwarf wheat developed by NASA, which is smaller in size but richer in nutrients) year-round crops, and "stacker" plant holders are accounted for, a 30-story building with a base of a building block (5 acres) would yield a yearly crop analogous to that of 2,400 acres (970 ha) of traditional farming.
Protection from weather-related problems
Crops grown in traditional outdoor farming suffer from the often suboptimal, and sometimes extreme, nature of geological and meteorological events such as undesirable temperatures or rainfall amounts, monsoons, hailstorms, tornadoes, flooding, wildfires, and severe droughts. The protection of crops from weather is increasingly important as global climate change occurs. “Three recent floods (in 1993, 2007 and 2008) cost the United States billions of dollars in lost crops, with even more devastating losses in topsoil. Changes in rain patterns and temperature could diminish India’s agricultural output by 30 percent by the end of the century.”
Because Vertical Farming provides a controlled environment, the productivity of vertical farms would be mostly independent of weather and protected from extreme weather events. Although the controlled environment of vertical farming negates most of these factors, earthquakes and tornadoes still pose threats to the proposed infrastructure, although this again depends on the location of the vertical farms.
Conservation of resources
Each acre in a vertical farm could allow between 10 and 20 outdoor acres of farmland to return to its natural state, and recover farmlands due to development from original flat farmlands.
Vertical farming would reduce the need for new farmland due to overpopulation, thus saving many natural resources, currently threatened by deforestation or pollution. Deforestation and desertification caused by agricultural encroachment on natural biomes would be avoided. Because vertical farming lets crops be grown closer to consumers, it would substantially reduce the amount of fossil fuels currently used to transport and refrigerate farm produce. Producing food indoors reduces or eliminates conventional plowing, planting, and harvesting by farm machinery, also powered by fossil fuels. Burning less fossil fuel would reduce air pollution and the carbon dioxide emissions that cause climate change, as well as create healthier environments for humans and animals alike.
Organic crops
The controlled growing environment reduces the need for pesticides. Advocates claim that producing organic crops in vertical farms is practical and the most likely production and marketing strategy.
Halting mass extinction
Withdrawing human activity from large areas of the Earth's land surface may be necessary to slow and eventually halt the current mass extinction of land animals.
Traditional agriculture is highly disruptive to wild animal populations that live in and around farmland and some argue it becomes unethical when there is a viable alternative. One study showed that wood mouse populations dropped from 25 per hectare to 5 per hectare after harvest, estimating 10 animals killed per hectare each year with conventional farming. In comparison, vertical farming would cause very little harm to wildlife.
Impact on human health
Traditional farming is a hazardous occupation with particular risks that often take their toll on the health of human laborers. Such risks include: exposure to infectious diseases such as malaria, exposure to toxic chemicals commonly used as pesticides and fungicides, confrontations with dangerous wildlife such as poisonous snakes, and the severe injuries that can occur when using large industrial farming equipment. Whereas the traditional farming environment inevitably contains these risks (particularly in the farming practice known as “slash and burn”), vertical farming – because the environment is strictly controlled and predictable – reduces some of these dangers. Currently, the American food system makes fast, unhealthy food cheap while fresh produce is less available and more expensive, encouraging poor eating habits. These poor eating habits lead to health problems such as obesity, heart disease, and diabetes.
Urban growth
Vertical farming, used in conjunction with other technologies and socioeconomic practices, could allow cities to expand while remaining largely self sufficient food wise. This would allow for large urban centers that could grow without destroying considerably larger areas of forest to provide food for their people. Moreover, the industry of vertical farming will provide employment to these expanding urban centers. This may help displace the unemployment created by the dismantling of traditional farms, as more farm laborers move to cities in search of work. t is highly unlikely that traditional farms will become obsolete, as there are many crops that are not suited for vertical farming, and the production costs are currently extremely lower.
Energy production
Vertical farms could exploit methane digesters to generate a small portion of its own electrical needs. Methane digesters could be built on site to transform the organic waste generated at the farm into biogas which is generally composed of 65% methane along with other gasses. This biogas could then be burned to generate electricity for the greenhouse.
Developers and local governments in the following cities have expressed serious interest in establishing a vertical farm: Incheon, Abu Dhabi, Dongchan, New York City, Portland, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Seattle, Surrey, Toronto, Paris, Bangalore, Dubai, Shanghai and Beijing. The Illinois Institute of Technology is now crafting a detailed plan for Chicago. It is suggested that prototype versions of vertical farms should be created first, possibly at large universities interested in the research of vertical farms, in order to prevent failures such as the Biosphere 2 project in Oracle, Arizona.In 2010, the Green Zionist Alliance proposed a resolution at the 36th World Zionist Congress calling on the Jewish National Fund to develop vertical farms in Israel.
A little while ago, Greenpeace initiated a campaign to get FaceBook users to play an active role in pushing the social networking site to opt for renewable energy when choosing it's data centre. They have done this by setting up a Facebook group page to "unfriend coal", with the deadline of Earth Day, April 22nd.
This action started because Facebook is due to move to a new data centre to cope with the increasing demand on its servers. This move will take place this year, and they have so far opted to move to Oregon. The area is well known as being driven by coal and fossil fuels for it's electricity needs. For a company with such a broad social impact, it it imperative that they send the right message to their followers. And that message should be to go green.
Greenpeace want Facebook to
Increase the use of clean energy to make Facebook coal free
Develop a plan to make Facebook coal free by 2021
Educate their users about how Facebook powers its services and its carbon footprint
Advocate for clean energy at a local, national and international level
Greenpeace has been working in the IT industry for half a decade to get companies to be greener. Facebook's coal problem is representative of the IT sector's growing demand for energy. At current growth rates data centers and telecommunication networks, the two key components of the cloud Facebook depends on, will consume about 1,962 billion kilowatts hours of electricity in 2020. That's more than triple their current consumption and more than the current electricity consumption of France, Germany, Canada and Brazil combined.
PacifiCorp is the power company which Facebook chose to supply their new US$ 180 million data centre in Prineville, Oregon. Pacific Power, whose parent company is PacifiCorp, gets almost 60 percent of its energy from burning coal. Facebook also went to a state, Oregon, with only one existing in-state coal plant (that's shutting down within the decade) and instead decided to throw its lot with a utility that imports dirty coal from Wyoming, two states over.
