Green Blog

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.

For more information on WED 2011 have a look at http://www.unep.org/wed/

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. 

See http://www.epa.ie/news/pr/2011/name,30968,en.html  for more details.

Tropical rainforests are the lungs of the planet and play a vital role in regulating levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.  Deforestation is a major cause of increasing levels of this greenhouse gas in the atmosphere and various efforts have been made, with little success, to curtail the activities of loggers and ranchers who slash and burn vast areas of tropical forest each year.

Now Guyana, a South American country on the Atlantic coast north of Brazil, has entered into an agreement with Norway to keep its tropical forests intact in return for a cash payment.  Each year Norway will make a payment to Guyana provided the tropical forests are not destroyed and Guyana will use the money on a range of sustainable projects.  In 2011 some $40million is being transferred and the money is being used to install solar panels on houses of indigenous people, to link remote communities to the internet and for other sustainable projects in the area of health, education and business. The total amount of money to be transferred will be calculated on the basis of how successful Guyana is in preventing deforestation but will run into hundreds of millions of dollars over the next 5 years.

This initiative could provide a template for other countries in the developed world to recognize the priceless services that rain forests provide to the entire world.  It can also assist poor countries such as Guyana to make it more profitable to keep the forests intact rather than to cut them down.

Meanwhile, back in Ireland, the Environmental Protection Agency has published its forecast for greenhouse gas emissions up to 2020.  The emissions projections are calculated on the basis of the best available economic forecast.  Because of the economic slowdown Ireland will be able to meet its commitments under the United Nations Kyoto Protocol for the 5-year period from 2008 to 2012.  However it will not be able to meet commitments made under the EU Commission’s Energy and Climate Package which commit member states to legally binding emission limits up to 2020.  Even using the best scenario the annual limits will be breached by 2016 and could amount to 8.8 million tonnes of CO2 by 2020.  If the economy recovers faster than predicted then the breach could be even higher than that.

The figures show that we should not rely on an economic recession to meet our climate change obligations.   Instead, we should use this time to develop and implement a new energy strategy that is not dependent on imported fossil fuel.  Fortunately we have the natural resources of wind, wave and tide to free us completely from the stranglehold of the fossil fuel industry.  Using a combination of wind power and pumped water storage we can eliminate our fossil fuel bill of over six billion euro each year.  If our new Government has the foresight and courage of its predecessors, who built the hydro –electric station at Ardnacrusha in the 1920s as the country took its first steps into independence, then we, like Guyana, could become an example for the world.