Oceana.org    April 17, 2013   Jessica Wiseman

Yesterday, Belize’s Supreme Court declared offshore drilling contracts issued by the Government of Belize (in 2004 and 2007) null and void, providing a dramatic and potentially definitive setback to The Government of Belize and the petroleum prospecting companies issued the contracts.

The ruling, handed down by Justice Oswell Legall, was in response to a case brought by Oceana, COLA, and the Belize Coalition to Save Our Natural Heritage. It effectively ends the Belizean government’s immediate effort to allow offshore oil drilling in the Meso American Reef, the second largest barrier reef in the world.

Corn in the hands of a farmworker in South Africa. Photograph: Greatstock Photographic Library/Alamy

guardian.co.uk - by John Vidal - April 13, 2013

Millions of people could become destitute in Africa and Asia as staple foods more than double in price by 2050 as a result of extreme temperatures, floods and droughts that will transform the way the world farms.

As food experts gather at two major conferences to discuss how to feed the nine billion people expected to be alive in 2050, leading scientists have told the Observer that food insecurity risks turning parts of Africa into permanent disaster areas. Rising temperatures will also have a drastic effect on access to basic foodstuffs, with potentially dire consequences for the poor.

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US National Climate Assessment
http://assessment.globalchange.gov/what-we-do/assessment/draft-report-information

Image: The poll found a vertiginous decline in trust in the EU in countries that were traditionally pro-European. Photograph: Ian Waldie/Getty Images

guardian.co.uk - April 24th, 2013 - Ian Traynor

Public confidence in the European Union has fallen to historically low levels in the six biggest EU countries, raising fundamental questions about its democratic legitimacy more than three years into the union's worst ever crisis, new data shows.

After financial, currency and debt crises, wrenching budget and spending cuts, rich nations' bailouts of the poor, and surrenders of sovereign powers over policymaking to international technocrats, Euroscepticism is soaring to a degree that is likely to feed populist anti-EU politics and frustrate European leaders' efforts to arrest the collapse in support for their project.

Image: Limits of Earth logo.

blogs.scientificamerican.com - April 18th, 2013 - Ramez Naam

As part one of this series showed, we are up against incredible challenges: feeding a world with a rapidly growing appetite, the continuing loss of the world’s precious forests, the ongoing collapse of fish species in the oceans, the rapid depletion of our fresh water resources, and the over-arching threat of climate change, which makes all others far worse.

Ending growth isn’t a realistic option.  Billions of people in the developing world want access to more resources, deserve those resources as much as those of us in the rich world do, and need them in order to rise out of poverty.

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Image: Limits of Earth logo.

blogs.scientificamerican.com - April 17th, 2013 - Ramez Naam

The world is facing incredibly serious natural resource and environmental challenges: Climate change, fresh water depletion, ocean over-fishing, deforestation, air and water pollution, the struggle to feed a planet of billions.

All of these challenges are exacerbated by ever rising demand – over the next 40 years estimates are that demand for fresh water will rise 50%, demand for food will rise 70%, and demand for energy will nearly double – all in the same period that we need to tackle climate change, depletion of rivers and aquifers, and deforestation.

One view of these looming threats is that we’ve exhausted planet’s resources.

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earth-policy.org - by Janet Larsen
April 25, 2013

Politicians, lobbyists, and tourists alike can ride bicycles along a specially marked lane between the White House and the U.S. Capitol, part of the 115 miles of bicycle lanes and paths that now crisscross Washington, DC. In Copenhagen, commuters can ride to work following a “green wave” of signal lights timed for bikers. Residents in China’s “happiest city,” Hangzhou, can move easily from public transit onto physically separated bike tracks that have been carved out of the vast majority of roadways. And on any given Sunday in Mexico City, some 15,000 cyclists join together on a circuit of major thoroughfares closed to motorized traffic. What is even more exciting is that in each of these locations, people can jump right into cycling without even owning a bicycle. Welcome to the era of the Bike Share.

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tomdispatch.com - by Michael Klare - April 21, 2013

In his pathbreaking 2001 book Resource Wars, Michael Klare wrote: “Natural resources are the building blocks of civilization and an essential requirement of daily existence.  The inhabitants of planet Earth have been blessed with a vast supply of most basic materials.  But we are placing increased pressure on those supplies, and in some cases we face, in our lifetimes, or those of our children, the prospect of severe resource depletion.”

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Image: Dennis Meadows

carsoncenter.uni-muenchen.de - December 4th, 2012

2012 marks the 40th anniversary of the publication of  The Limits to Growth. Not only has this book been  translated into more than 30 languages,  it has also sold more than 30 million copies, thus making it the highest selling environmental book in world history. The Limits to Growth unleashed a debate that has yet to end.

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chathamhouse.org - April 2013 - Jon Liden

The decade 1998-2008 was a period of rapid growth in the resources devoted to global health problems and of unprecedented innovation in the way these resources were delivered.
 
The innovation was principally manifested in new forms of partnerships which included in their governance the private sector, foundations and civil society alongside governments.

This institutional innovation was driven forward by dynamic new leadership at the World Health Organization under Dr Gro Harlem Brundtland and by political leaders in the G8 countries seeking to give globalization a human face, who were themselves heavily influenced by the moral and political force of AIDS activists and protestors.

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earth-policy.org

Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity

by Lester R. Brown

With food scarcity driven by falling water tables, eroding soils, and rising temperatures, control of arable land and water resources is moving to center stage in the global struggle for food security. “In this era of tightening world food supplies, the ability to grow food is fast becoming a new form of geopolitical leverage. Food is the new oil,” Lester R. Brown writes.

What will the geopolitics of food look like in a new era dominated by scarcity and food nationalism? Brown outlines the political implications of land acquisitions by grain-importing countries in Africa and elsewhere as well as the world’s shrinking buffers against poor harvests. With wisdom accumulated over decades of tracking agricultural issues, Brown exposes the increasingly volatile food situation the world is facing.

(SEE ADDITIONAL INFORMATION IN LINKS BELOW)

http://www.earth-policy.org/books/fpep

Chapter 1. Food: The Weak Link
http://www.earth-policy.org/books/fpep/fpepch1

Image: A worker mounts solar panels on the roof of a  barn in Binsham, Germany, in March 2012. (photo: Michaela Rehle/Reuters)

slate.com - March 29th, 2013 - Andrew Curry

It’s been a long, dark winter in Germany. In fact, there hasn’t been this little sun since people started tracking such things back in the early 1950s. Easter is around the corner, and the streets of Berlin are still covered in ice and snow. But spring will come, and when the snow finally melts, it will reveal the glossy black sheen of photovoltaic solar panels glinting from the North Sea to the Bavarian Alps.

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The researchers found the highest levels of lead in rice from China and Taiwan

submitted by Lloyd Helferty

bbc.co.uk - by Jason Palmer - April 10, 2013

Analysis of commercially available rice imported into the US has revealed it contains levels of lead far higher than regulations suggest are safe.

Some samples exceeded the "provisional total tolerable intake" (PTTI) set by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) by a factor of 120.

The report at the American Chemical Society Meeting adds to the already well-known issue of arsenic in rice.

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Journal of Environmental Science and Health (Part B)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22099990

Click on each balloon for more information on individual patients infected with the avian flu virus: blue, patients infected with the H7N9 virus under treatment; red, those infected with H7N9 who have died; and pink, those infect with the H1N1 avian flu virus.

CLICK HERE - WHO - Global Alert and Response - Disease Outbreak News

CLICK HERE - ProMED-mail updates on H7N9 Bird Flu (Avian Influenza) - www.promedmail.org

ALSO SEE ADDITIONAL INFORMATION IN LINKS BELOW:

China reports nine bird flu cases amid allegations of cover up on social media

xinhuanet.com - China reports 2 more H7N9 bird flu cases

National Health and Family Planning Commission of the People's Republic of China

China's deadly new H7N9 bird flu virus may be harder to track than predecessors, scientists say

foreignpolicy.com - by Laurie Garrett - April 1, 2013

China's mysterious pig, duck, and people deaths could be connected. And that should worry us.

Here's how it would happen. Children playing along an urban river bank would spot hundreds of grotesque, bloated pig carcasses bobbing downstream. Hundreds of miles away, angry citizens would protest the rising stench from piles of dead ducks and swans, their rotting bodies collecting by the thousands along river banks. And three unrelated individuals would stagger into three different hospitals, gasping for air. . .

. . . the facts delineated are all true, and have transpired over the last six weeks in China.

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