Air pollution in Bucharest, one of the worst in Europe, has a "serious impact" on the health of its inhabitants, Romanian environmental NGO Ecopolis warned on Wednesday....
read here
Showing posts with label pollution. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pollution. Show all posts
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Friday, August 27, 2010
Carbon menace? Indian man's device to help the world go green
Virendra Kumar Sinha, who runs a workshop in East Champaran in Bihar, was ignorant about the possibilities of his pollution control device that can be attached to generators or other diesel engines to reduce noise and air pollution. With emissions of carbon dioxide forecasted to touch 43 percent by 2035, Virendra's device could go a long way in making a big difference in the world, which requires a cleaner and greener environment.
full story
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Native grasses could destroy explosives pollution
The notion started with mounting evidence that native grasses could render harmless a common weed killer.
Saturday, June 6, 2009
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Saltwater solution to save crops
Technology under development at the University of New South Wales could offer new hope to farmers in drought-affected and marginal areas by enabling crops to grow using salty groundwater.
Associate Professor Greg Leslie, a chemical engineer at UNSW’s UNESCO Centre for Membrane Science and Technology, is working with the University of Sydney on technology which uses reverse-osmosis membranes to turn previously useless, brackish groundwater into a valuable agricultural resource.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Halt all carbon emissions by 2050: Worldwatch
To avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change, world carbon emissions will have to drop to near zero by 2050 and "go negative" after that, the Worldwatch Institute reported on Tuesday.
This is a deeper cut than called for by most climate experts and policymakers, including President-elect Barack Obama, who favors an 80 percent drop in U.S. carbon emissions by mid-century.
Limiting carbon emissions aims to keep global mean temperature from rising more than 3.6 degrees F (2 degrees C) over what it was before the Industrial Revolution -- but one Worldwatch author said even this is too dangerous.
"Global warming needs to be reduced from peak levels to 1 degree (Celsius, or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) as fast as possible," co-author William Hare said at a briefing on the "State of the World 2009" report. "At this level you can see some of the risks fade into the background."
Global mean temperature has already risen 1.4 degrees F (0.8 C) since 1850, so drastic cuts in emissions of climate-warming carbon dioxide are needed, according to Hare, now working at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.
Hare said that global greenhouse gas emissions would need to hit their peak by 2020 and drop 85 percent below 1990 levels by 2050, and keep dropping after that. He said carbon dioxide emissions would have to "go negative," with more being absorbed than emitted, in the second half of this century.
The burden of cutting greenhouse emissions should fall more heavily on rich countries than poor ones, Hare said, with industrialized nations reducing emissions by 90 percent by 2050, allowing developing nations to let their economies grow and develop new technologies that will ultimately reduce climate-warming gases.
2009: A PIVOTAL YEAR?
Even with these dramatic changes, the world may face an additional rise of nearly 1.8 degrees F (1 degree C) because the impact of past greenhouse emissions hasn't yet been felt on surface temperatures, the report said.
This year could be pivotal in the movement against climate change, said co-author Robert Engelman, with "scientists more certain and concerned, the public more engaged than ever before, an incoming U.S. president bringing to the White House for the first time a solid commitment to cap and then shrink this country's massive injections of greenhouse gases ... into the atmosphere."
Engelman also noted this year's deadline for a global agreement to craft a successor pact to the carbon-capping Kyoto Protocol. This is set to happen in December at a meeting in Copenhagen.
Engelman said the Copenhagen meeting could put in place a new "financial architecture" that discourages greenhouse emissions and rewards actions that take these emissions out of the atmosphere.
This could take the form of a cap-and-trade system or a carbon tax, he said, and could also include "the best terms of trade, investment and credit" for countries that make the transition to a low-carbon economy.
"However this turns out, we still have some precious time and a clear shot at safely managing human-induced climate change," Engelman said. "What's at stake is not just nature as we've always known it, but quite possibly the survival of our civilization. It's going to be a really interesting year."
Friday, December 12, 2008
Fishy project to save Indian lake
Thousands of fish have been released into a picturesque lake in India's northern Nainital in an attempt to restore the areas lost grandeur.
Nainital is a hill resort 2,000 meters above the sea level in Kumaon hills. It's known as the "Switzerland of India" because of its picturesque lakes.
source:Reuters
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Rising CO2 accelerates coral bleaching: study
Rising carbon dioxide levels in the world's oceans due to climate change, combined with rising sea temperatures, could accelerate coral bleaching, destroying some reefs before 2050, says a new Australian study.
The study says earlier research may have significantly understated the likely damage to the world's reefs caused by man-made change to the Earth's atmosphere.
"Previous predictions of coral bleaching have been far too conservative, because they didn't factor in the effect of acidification on the bleaching process and how the two interact," said Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg from the ARC Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and Queensland University.
The study says earlier research may have significantly understated the likely damage to the world's reefs caused by man-made change to the Earth's atmosphere.
"Previous predictions of coral bleaching have been far too conservative, because they didn't factor in the effect of acidification on the bleaching process and how the two interact," said Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg from the ARC Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and Queensland University.
Saturday, October 25, 2008
Thursday, October 2, 2008
Friday, September 26, 2008
Climate Change - Cities Are The Solution, Not The Problem
Cities are unfairly blamed for greenhouse gas emissions by misguided politicians and well-meaning people who listen to them, and this threatens efforts to truly impact climate change, warns a study in the October 2008 issue of the journal Environment and Urbanization. The paper says cities are commonly blamed for 75 to 80 percent of emissions but that the true value is around half that and the potential for cities to help address climate change is being overlooked because of this error.
United Nations agencies, former US President Bill Clinton’s climate change initiative and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg have all claimed that between 75 and 80 per cent of emissions come from cities even though data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) shows that only 40 percent of all greenhouse gases are from human activities generated within cities.
“Blaming cities for greenhouse gas emissions misses the point that cities are a large part of the solution,” says the paper’s author, David Satterthwaite, a Senior Fellow at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED). “Well planned, well governed cities can provide high living standards that do not require high consumption levels and high greenhouse gas emissions.”
Satterthwaite says agriculture and deforestation account for another 30 percent of greenhouse gas emissions and the final 30 percent are from heavy industry, coal, oil or gas fuelled power stations located in non-metropolitan areas and wealthy households, like politicians live in when they are misstating data.
The paper also highlights how it can be misleading to allocate greenhouse gas emissions to places at all. For instance, emissions from power stations should be allocated to those that consume the electricity, not the places where the power stations are located. Emissions generated by industries would therefore be shared by the person consuming the goods the industries produce.
“Consumer demand drives the production of goods and services, and therefore the emission of greenhouse gases,” says Satterthwaite. “Allocating emissions to consumers rather than producers shows that the problem is not cities but a minority of the world’s population with high-consumption lifestyles. A large proportion of these consumers live not in cities but in small towns and rural areas.”
Allocating greenhouse gas emissions to consumers increases the share of global emissions from Europe and North America, which makes self-loathing activists happy, but also clarifies the very low emissions per person of most city inhabitants in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
In general, wealthy people outside cities are responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than those in cities as they have larger homes that need to be heated or cooled, more automobiles per household and greater automobile use.
“The way cities are designed and run can make a big difference,” says Satterthwaite. “Most cities in the United States have three to five times the gasoline use per person of most European cities but not three to five times the living standards.”
Satterthwaite points out that cities offer many opportunities to reduce per capita greenhouse gas emissions, such as by promoting walking, bicycling and public transport and having building designs that require much less energy for heating and cooling.
United Nations agencies, former US President Bill Clinton’s climate change initiative and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg have all claimed that between 75 and 80 per cent of emissions come from cities even though data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) shows that only 40 percent of all greenhouse gases are from human activities generated within cities.
“Blaming cities for greenhouse gas emissions misses the point that cities are a large part of the solution,” says the paper’s author, David Satterthwaite, a Senior Fellow at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED). “Well planned, well governed cities can provide high living standards that do not require high consumption levels and high greenhouse gas emissions.”
Satterthwaite says agriculture and deforestation account for another 30 percent of greenhouse gas emissions and the final 30 percent are from heavy industry, coal, oil or gas fuelled power stations located in non-metropolitan areas and wealthy households, like politicians live in when they are misstating data.
The paper also highlights how it can be misleading to allocate greenhouse gas emissions to places at all. For instance, emissions from power stations should be allocated to those that consume the electricity, not the places where the power stations are located. Emissions generated by industries would therefore be shared by the person consuming the goods the industries produce.
“Consumer demand drives the production of goods and services, and therefore the emission of greenhouse gases,” says Satterthwaite. “Allocating emissions to consumers rather than producers shows that the problem is not cities but a minority of the world’s population with high-consumption lifestyles. A large proportion of these consumers live not in cities but in small towns and rural areas.”
Allocating greenhouse gas emissions to consumers increases the share of global emissions from Europe and North America, which makes self-loathing activists happy, but also clarifies the very low emissions per person of most city inhabitants in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
In general, wealthy people outside cities are responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than those in cities as they have larger homes that need to be heated or cooled, more automobiles per household and greater automobile use.
“The way cities are designed and run can make a big difference,” says Satterthwaite. “Most cities in the United States have three to five times the gasoline use per person of most European cities but not three to five times the living standards.”
Satterthwaite points out that cities offer many opportunities to reduce per capita greenhouse gas emissions, such as by promoting walking, bicycling and public transport and having building designs that require much less energy for heating and cooling.
“Achieving the needed reductions in greenhouse gas emissions worldwide depends on seeing and acting on the potential of cities to combine a high quality of life with low greenhouse gas emissions,” he says.
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Saturday, July 26, 2008
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Monday, July 21, 2008
Researchers map risk of arsenic contamination
Researchers have produced a series of maps that highlight areas at risk from groundwater arsenic contamination in South-East Asia and Bangladesh.
The researchers, whose paper was published last week (11 July) in Nature Geoscience, used existing data on surface sediments and soil properties to map a variety of 'hotspots' in the region — some of which have not been tested previously for arsenic contamination.
The team calculated the probability of arsenic contamination using eight geological variables such as soil texture. They found that contamination was most likely in very young sediments, deposited before the last Ice Age.
"Until now, no detailed risk maps for arsenic in groundwater existed," Lenny Winkel, a researcher at Eawag, the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, and one of the authors of the report, told SciDev.Net
"There was only one way to find out if water from a groundwater well contains arsenic and that was by sampling and analysing the groundwater — a time-consuming and costly matter."
The researchers found that their maps correlate with existing knowledge on arsenic contamination in South-East Asia and Bangladesh. But the maps also highlighted additional regions.
"There are several known areas at risk, such as the Bengal delta area, the Red River delta of northern Vietnam and the Mekong delta," Michael Berg, a co-author of the study also from Eawag, told SciDev.Net. "But these maps pinpoint areas where arsenic has not been tested for."
The new areas include the Irrawaddy delta in Myanmar and a largearea on the eastern Sumatran coast in Indonesia.
The researchers confirmed their findings by analysing groundwater tests conducted in the Irrawaddy delta in 2002, and collecting groundwater samples in the province of southern Sumatra last year.
Winkel says that these maps provide a "helpful tool" to immediately pinpoint areas that need to be prioritised for groundwater tests.
Arsenic poses a global threat to health, affecting over 100 million people worldwide. It enters drinking water supplies through natural deposits released into the groundwater. It can cause cancers, skin diseases and respiratory illness, even if ingested in small doses.
The researchers now want to apply the method to other areas including Africa and northern Asia.
Alexander van Geen, a researcher at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Institute at the US-based Columbia University told SciDev.Net that the map emphasises the problem areas rather than why there is no arsenic in other areas.
Van Geen also pointed out that the model is based on two-dimensional surface maps, whereas geological information contains a three-dimensional component — something that the authors themselves acknowledge, pointing out that in some situations, the environment at the surface differs from the geology at depth.
"The authors say there is not enough geological data to make such assertions [about why some areas are not contaminated] and I agree with them. But they could have still looked at it in some sort of depth-stratified way."
Source : http://www.scidev.net/
The researchers, whose paper was published last week (11 July) in Nature Geoscience, used existing data on surface sediments and soil properties to map a variety of 'hotspots' in the region — some of which have not been tested previously for arsenic contamination.
The team calculated the probability of arsenic contamination using eight geological variables such as soil texture. They found that contamination was most likely in very young sediments, deposited before the last Ice Age.
"Until now, no detailed risk maps for arsenic in groundwater existed," Lenny Winkel, a researcher at Eawag, the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, and one of the authors of the report, told SciDev.Net
"There was only one way to find out if water from a groundwater well contains arsenic and that was by sampling and analysing the groundwater — a time-consuming and costly matter."
The researchers found that their maps correlate with existing knowledge on arsenic contamination in South-East Asia and Bangladesh. But the maps also highlighted additional regions.
"There are several known areas at risk, such as the Bengal delta area, the Red River delta of northern Vietnam and the Mekong delta," Michael Berg, a co-author of the study also from Eawag, told SciDev.Net. "But these maps pinpoint areas where arsenic has not been tested for."
The new areas include the Irrawaddy delta in Myanmar and a largearea on the eastern Sumatran coast in Indonesia.
The researchers confirmed their findings by analysing groundwater tests conducted in the Irrawaddy delta in 2002, and collecting groundwater samples in the province of southern Sumatra last year.
Winkel says that these maps provide a "helpful tool" to immediately pinpoint areas that need to be prioritised for groundwater tests.
Arsenic poses a global threat to health, affecting over 100 million people worldwide. It enters drinking water supplies through natural deposits released into the groundwater. It can cause cancers, skin diseases and respiratory illness, even if ingested in small doses.
The researchers now want to apply the method to other areas including Africa and northern Asia.
Alexander van Geen, a researcher at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Institute at the US-based Columbia University told SciDev.Net that the map emphasises the problem areas rather than why there is no arsenic in other areas.
Van Geen also pointed out that the model is based on two-dimensional surface maps, whereas geological information contains a three-dimensional component — something that the authors themselves acknowledge, pointing out that in some situations, the environment at the surface differs from the geology at depth.
"The authors say there is not enough geological data to make such assertions [about why some areas are not contaminated] and I agree with them. But they could have still looked at it in some sort of depth-stratified way."
Source : http://www.scidev.net/
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