The United Nations has designated 5 June as World Environment Day (WED) with a special emphasis on forests. The theme is ‘Forests: Nature at your service’ to highlight the environmental, economic and social roles played by the world’s forests. India is the host nation for WED 2011 and there are many events planned to raise awareness of the damage done through deforestation and of the need to manage forests in a sustainable way.
About 30% of the land on earth is covered by forests. Across the world humans are cutting down forests at an estimated rate of 13 million hectares per year - that’s over 32 million acres of trees disappearing each year. The impact of this rate of deforestation is not just habitat loss. Trees act as carbon sinks and absorb the greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, from the atmosphere. There is more carbon stored in forests than in the entire atmosphere and when trees are cut down to make way for farmland that stored carbon is released back into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. The United Nations stated, in their latest assessment report, that reducing or preventing deforestation would have the largest and most immediate impact on climate change in the short term.
Forests are also the most diverse ecosystems on land, because they hold the vast majority of the world's terrestrial species and rain forests are among the oldest ecosystems on Earth. Only a fraction of known species has been examined for potential medicinal, agricultural or industrial value and many are lost to extinction before they can be investigated.
Here in Ireland the Environmental Protection Agency has organized a competition on Twitter to mark WED 2011. The public are asked to follow the EPA on Twitter and, using the hashtag #WEDIreland, send a tweet advising on a positive action they can take on World Environment Day to help protect the environment. The competition is open until noon on Wednesday next 8 June and the prize for the best entry is a hotel break in one of Ireland’s Green Hotels to the value of 250 euro.
Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland and former High Commissioner for Human Rights at the United Nations has established the Mary Robinson Foundation for Climate Justice. The Foundation is a centre for thought leadership, education and advocacy on the struggle to secure global justice for victims of climate change who are usually forgotten – the poor, the disempowered and the marginalised across the world. The Foundation will be based at Trinity College, Dublin.
It is a platform for solidarity, partnership and shared engagement for all who care about global justice, whether as individuals and communities suffering injustice or as advocates for fairness in resource-rich societies. The Foundation provides a space for facilitating action on climate justice to empower the poorest people and countries in their efforts to achieve sustainable and people-centred development.
Mary Robinson delivered the 11th lecture in the EPA’s series of lectures on Climate Change on Tuesday 23 November 2010 to a packed Mansion House. In the course of the lecture she said:
"In hard times it can be difficult to attend to the long term. When recession and debt pose urgent constraints, ten-year targets and fifty-year plans may appear a luxury.
Climate change can appear far away, in both time and space. And yet, of course, it is not far away, it is not merely a ‘long-term’ problem. Climate change is what we are doing right here and right now."
"What is crystal clear is that, from now on, the wellbeing of those in richer and poorer countries is intimately related... it is not enough for me to realise that my carbon-saturated life here today has in part caused the climate refugee fleeing her flooded home in Bangladesh tomorrow. I must also recognise that if she is to be
denied access to carbon-fuelled economic growth, I must also, surely, be obliged to provide her some substitute form of wherewithal."
Climate justice links human rights and development to achieve a human-centered approach, safeguarding the rights of the most vulnerable and sharing the burdens and benefits of climate change and its resolution equitably and fairly.
Climate justice insists that all the peoples of the world (and not just the rich and powerful) have a right to development. A developmental approach to climate justice recognises this fact while also demanding that it should be made both possible and attractive for such development to occur in a sustainable way
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently launched their online environmental information website entitled Environment in Focus. The website allows easier public access to environmental data that has been gathered by the EPA and external bodies. Information is presented as a dashboard of key environmental indicators arranged under seven themes - climate change, air, water, waste, land, nature and socio-economics. The indicators are presented graphically so that trends may be easily observed with backup data also provided.
Over the period 1990-2008 Ireland’s total annual primary energy requirement grew in absolute terms by 72 per cent. Fossil fuels accounted for 96 per cent of all energy used in Ireland in 2008, with oil the dominant energy source. This highlights the need to develop our own renewable energy resources as quickly as possible.
Both air and water indicators are generally satisfactory apart from traffic-generated oxides of nitrogen (NOx) in air that continue to breach limits set by the European Union.
On climate change, the data shows that for 2008 (the first year of the 5 year Kyoto Protocol period) Ireland’s greenhouse gas emissions were 7% above the limit set by the Protocol and, despite the economic downturn since then, meeting the limit by 2012 will be challenging.
On waste, the indicators show that the amount of municipal waste produced has increased steadily over the last decade to approximately 3 million tonnes. While the quantity dropped slightly in recent years, the forecast from the Economic and Social Research Institute’s Sustainable Development Model for Ireland (ISus) is for the total volume of municipal waste to increase quite substantially within the coming decade, necessitating future investment in waste management infrastructure. This forecast brings the debate about the size of the waste incinerator at Ringsend into sharp focus.
You can access Environment in Focus via the EPA website.
On 30 June the EPA hosted a conference on Climate Change in the new Aviva Stadium in Dublin. Over 300 delegates attended.
The conference gave an overall perspective on some of the key challenges presented by climate change for Ireland, and explored developments in the climate science and policy arenas. These included the important target of keeping the global temperature increase to below two degree Celsius (2deg.C) and a major financial package for developing countries to assist them with adaptation and mitigation actions.
One of the keynote speakers was Dr Olive Heffernan, Climate Science editor of Nature. Dr. Heffernan reviewed the issues of communicating science via the popular media and suggested that recent events had damaged climate science in the minds of the general public. These events she categorised as the 3 Cs – Climategate, Copenhagen and the Cold spell.
Climategate related to the leaking of emails from the Climate Research Unit in the University of East Anglia that suggested the suppression of data that did not fit with the consensus at that time. Copenhagen related to the failure of heads of state to reach agreement on a post-Kyoto policy at the UN conference in that city in December last year and the cold spell that was experienced across many parts of the Northern hemisphere.
These three issues has cast doubt in many people’s minds about global climate change and this is reflected in surveys in both Europe and America. A poll in January showed that the percentage of Americans who think that global warming is occurring dropped from 71 to 57 percent between 2008 and 2010. Similarly a BBC poll found that the proportion of people who believe that global warming is largely caused by humans dropped from 41 percent in November to 26 percent in February.
Dr Heffernan’s main point is that these shifts in opinion did not reflect any change in the facts but that scientists are poor at communicating the underlying uncertainty and the public do not use the news media as scientists assume.
This website (greenquest.ie) will continue to communicate the key messages about global climate change in non-scientific language and, in so doing, will hopefully alert the public to the dangers posed and the steps they can take to mitigate the effect and adapt to what cannot be avoided.
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