DHL Launches ‘Carbon Dashboard’ Emissions Tracker

DHL Global Forwarding has launched the GoGreen Carbon Dashboard, a service for its freight customers to track carbon emissions in their supply chain.

 

The system records carbon emissions coming from both DHL and third party sources, in an effort to provide users with a single carbon measurement platform, the freight firm says.

DHL says that the dashboard uses a “internationally recognized public standard” to calculate carbon emissions and treats CO₂ as an integrated business parameter, putting it into relation with other supply chain parameters such as volume shipped, product density and trade lane efficiency.

The dashboard also enables customers to dry run various carbon reduction scenarios using real data (pictured) and explore the effectiveness of different options for carbon reduction, DHL says. The Carbon Dashboard’s CO2 mapping is web-based and available instantly.

“Up to 50 percent of the carbon footprint of a product comes from the supply chain,” vice president of green strategy Kathrin Brost said. “DHL Global Forwarding, Freight now offers its customers a best-in-class tool to gain transparency on the carbon efficiency within their supply chain. In the future, carbon will become a global currency and DHL makes it easy for companies to integrate it in their balance sheet.”

DHL is committed to improving its carbon efficiency by 10 percent by 2012 and by 30 percent by 2020, against a 2007 base.

As a part of this commitment, in April the freight firm announced that it was introducing 30 electric vans and 50 hybrid trucks to its Manhattan fleet in an initiative that it said will cut CO2 emissions by over 50 percent, compared to traditional vans and trucks. The vehicles should all hit the streets by September 2011.

Both types of vehicles will be manufactured in the U.S. by Azure Dynamics and will use Ford chassis. DHL’s existing Ford E450s will be converted into hybrids, improving fuel economy by up to 40 percent while reducing emissions by about 30 percent, DHL said.

Source

India's 'recycled' school teaches environmental lessons

JAMKHANDIKAR (PUNE): On a regular school day, four-year-old Kush Bhattacharya can leave his mathematics class to run barefoot on grass, hide from his friends in a cave made of cow dung and return to recite nursery rhymes in a red bus that doubles up as a classroom.

Kush is a student at the Aman Setu school in Pune, an educational and technological hub three hours drive from Mumbai.

Almost every part of the school premises is made out of recycled material, including roofs made out of old hoardings, walls built from plastic bottles and hand-stitched uniforms made out of eco-friendly 'khadi', or handspun, cloth.

"It isn't a marketing thing, it's what we believe and how we live," says Madhavi Kapur, who started the school in 2008 with just four students. The school now has more than 140 students studying up to grade five.

"We didn't have too much money to begin with, and one of my (former) students, who is an architect came up with the idea of using recycled materials to build the school on a piece of land leased to me by my brother," she said.

Starting off with a modest 600,000 rupees ($13,500) Kapur and architect Saurabh Phadke devised ways to build walls from mud and old cement bags. They were then tamped down and plastered with mud.

Consisting of just two one-storeyed structures which house four classrooms, students at Aman Setu, which means bridge of peace, sit on rattan mats on a cowdung-plastered floor, use text books handed down from other students and grow their own vegetables in a small garden.

Children get to feed fish in a tank, watch a robin's egg hatch and travel to school by community transport - all in an effort to make them more environmentally conscious.

Kapur also acquired an old bus from the government transport authority, stripped it down, and refurbished it as a classroom.

"We don't mind them walking out of a maths class, feeding their favourite fish, taking a barefoot walk in the grass and then coming back in. We want them to be one with the surroundings," says teacher Bano Bhagwat, as she teaches a gaggle of excited kids how to make lemonade.

It might sound like a school straight out of a fairy tale, but it wasn't all smooth sailing.

"Parents weren't willing to send their kids to a school which had an old bus doubling up as a classroom. We started off with just four students, and I've had a hard time convincing parents that it was a safe environment" Kapur said.

Now that the school has grown she has an entirely different problem persuading parents that they should not tear down the concrete building down the road -- into which they have already moved some classes -- for a more environmentally friendly structure.

"We have moved to a bigger structure down the road. But that is a concrete building, and parents don't want their kids to move there. They want me to stay here." says Kapur.

"Now, they are giving me lessons in the environment. But for me, tearing down a concrete structure is also not ecologically sound."

For now, Kapur hopes to replicate her eco-friendly teaching methods at the concrete school as well, with plans for a rain water harvesting facility, a vegetable garden, and of course, a fence made of old plastic bottles.'

"This is a way of life, we plan to continue it no matter where we go," she says.

Source

How green is your internet ?

You might think cats power the internet, but the truth is that our wired world sucks up massive amounts of energy, releasing deadly carbon dioxide into our atmosphere and choking kittens (not exactly).

click this link : http://holykaw.alltop.com/how-green-is-your-internet-video?tu2=1

Southeast Asia's Tropical Peatlands could Disappear by 2030

Like Southeast Asia's tropical rainforests, the region's peatlands are disappearing at alarming rates. In fact, they could vanish altogether by 2030, says a new study published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.

Found mainly in peninsular Malaysia, Borneo, and Sumatra, peatlands consist of partially decayed organic material saturated by water. They form an important carbon sink, keeping large quantities of carbon out of the atmosphere while providing habitat for certain species of wildlife. However, tropical peatlands are disappearing due to increased draining, fires, and other ecosystem changes, releasing vast amounts of carbon into the atmosphere

In Indonesia and Malaysia, the palm oil industry has played a large role in the destruction of peatlands. Palm oil has become an important export used in numerous products from foods to cleaning supplies. The two nations are the world's largest exporters of palm oil, with Indonesia producing 87 percent of the world's supply, according to a March 2011 Nature article.

Between 1990 and 2010, the percentage of original peatland coverage dropped by 41 percent, says Dave Mosher in Science magazine. About 2,700 square kilometers of Southeast Asian peatlands disappear each year, he adds.

Peatlands form in wet lowland areas where lack of oxygen keeps vegetable matter from completely breaking down. The organic material piles up in partially decayed layers. Because peatlands are saturated by water, they are often called peat swamps. In the tropics, they form at about .5 mm to .20 mm per year, says the ASEAN Peatlands Forest Project (APFP). Existing peatlands have taken thousands of years to form. Preserving the remaining peatlands would require dramatic measures to protect them.

With 21 million hectares of peatlands, Indonesia holds the most by a wide margin. In May 2010, Indonesia pledged to implement a two-year moratorium on clearing natural forests and peatlands at the beginning of 2011, as part of a $1 billion agreement with Norway. However, the Indonesian president has yet to sign the decree, presumably because of confusion over what type of forest should be protected. Much of the country's forests and peatlands have been affected by humans, leading to ambiguity over what is ''natural.''

Six thousand species of animals live only in Southeast Asia's peatlands, says Mosher. Orangutans, critically endangered in Sumatra and endangered in Borneo, live in peatlands as well as fast-disappearing lowland forests. Further, the world's peatlands store more carbon than the rest of the world's plants combined, according to APFP.

Food prices driven up by global warming, study shows

Global warming has already harmed the world's food production and has driven up food prices by as much as 20% over recent decades, new research has revealed.

The drop in the productivity of crop plants around the world was not caused by changes in rainfall but was because higher temperatures can cause dehydration, prevent pollination and lead to slowed photosynthesis.
Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute, Washington DC, said the findings indicate a turning point: "Agriculture as it exists today evolved over 11,000 years of reasonably stable climate, but that climate system is no more." Adaptation is difficult because our knowledge of the future is not strong enough to drive new investments, he said, "so we just keep going, hoping for the best."

The scientists say their work shows how crucial it is to find ways to adapt farming to a warmer world, to ensure that rises in global population are matched by rising food production. "It is vital," said Wolfram Schlenker, at Columbia University in New York and one of the research team. "If we continue to have the same seed varieties and temperatures continue to rise, then food prices will rise further. [Addressing] that is the big question."

The new research joins a small number of studies in which the fingerprint of climate change has been separated from natural variations in weather and other factors, demonstrating that the effects of warming have already been felt in the world. Scientists have shown that the chance of the severe heatwave that killed thousands in Europe in 2003 was made twice as likely by global warming, while other work showed that the floods that caused £3.5bn of damage in England in 2000 were made two to three times more likely.
Food prices have reached new record highs this year, and have been implicated as a trigger for unrest in the Middle East and Africa. A rising appetite for meat is a critical factor, said Wolfram. "We actually have enough calories to feed the world quite comfortably, the problem is meat is really inefficient," as many kilogrammes of grain are needed to produce one kilogramme of meat, he said. "As countries get richer and have a preference for meat, which is more expensive, they price people in poorer countries out of the market."

"The research provides evidence of big shifts in wheat and maize production," commented Prof Tim Wheeler at the Walker Institute for Climate System Research, Reading University, UK, who added it had involved "heroic" statistical analysis. But he said that, while long-term climate change impacts were another pressure on food prices, short-term price spikes were linked to extreme weather events, such as the Russian heatwaves and wildfires in 2010.
The study, published in the journal Science, examined how rising temperatures affected the annual crop yields of all major producer nations between 1980 and 2008. Computer models were used to show how much grain would have been harvested in the absence of warming. Overall, yields have been rising over the last decades and the models took this into account. The scientists found that global wheat production was 33m tonnes (5.5%) lower than it would have been without warming and maize production was 23m tonnes (3.8%) lower. Specific countries fared worse than the average, with Russia losing 15% of its potential wheat crop, and Brazil, Mexico and Italy suffering above average losses. Some countries experienced lower production of rice and soybeans, although these drops were offset by gains in other countries.
The losses drove up food prices by as much as 18.9%, the team calculated, although the rise could be as low as 6.4% if the increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere strongly boosts plant growth and yields - a factor that is not well understood by scientists.

Global food prices have risen by about 200% in recent years, says Schlenker. Other causes of the rise are the increased demand for meat and the diversion of food into biofuels. Nonetheless, the researchers conclude that the negative impact on crops overall is "likely to be incurring large economic and health costs".
The US, which has the world's largest share of overall production, stood out in the analysis because it appears to have lost no production to climate change as yet. Schlenker said this was because the rise in temperature there was very small compared to other parts of the world. This was perhaps due simply to luck with the weather, or the cooling influence of aerosol particles, such as soot, that blocks warming.
"US farmers are having a good time in the sense that their yields have not been impacted much and prices have been pretty high, so for them it has been pretty profitable," he said. "But most climate models predict that eventually the US will warm."

Adapting farming to climate change could involved moving to cooler areas as existing areas warm, said Schlenker, but often soils are poorer in the new locations. He highlighted the potential of biotechnology - genetic engineering - to develop new crop varieties that are more resistant to heat, but said the potential remains unproven. "What happens over the next 20 years depends on how optimistic you are about finding those extra ways of adapting."

source 

Laut Menghangat Bikin Populasi Ikan Berkurang

Singapura - Studi baru menunjukkan, meningkatnya suhu laut secara acak di beberapa bagian dunia berdampak pada populasi ikan yang semakin berkurang jumlahnya.

Laut yang menghangat membuat pertumbuhan ikan terhambat. Parahnya, hal ini bisa meningkatkan stres bahkan risiko kematian ikan.

Hasil studi ini berdasarkan penelitan ilmuwan Australia yang berfokus pada spesies ikan Morwong di Laut Tasman, di antara Australia dan Selandia Baru.

Para ilmuwan menemukan, pertumbuhan ikan Morwong di beberapa wilayah melambat akibat naiknya suhu air laut hingga dua derajat celcius dalam kurun 60 tahun terakhir.

Penelitian yang diterbitkan dalam jurnal Nature Climate Change ini mengungkapkan, selain ikan Morwong, efek perubahan suhu juga berdampak pada jenis ikan lain dan terumbu karang.

"Sektor perikanan akan rugi besar,” papar Ron Thresher dari badan penelitian CSIRO.

Seperti dikutip Reuters, "Melalui penelitian ini, kami menemukan bukti pertumbuhan ikan melambat dan stres pada ikan mencapai ambang batas,” tutupnya

Sumber :  http://id.berita.yahoo.com/laut-menghangat-bikin-populasi-ikan-berkurang-190400519.html

Climate Change Population Increase Feather Worm

Climate change, especially the environmental temperature influence the population of caterpillars, because of increasing temperatures can accelerate the life cycle of caterpillar that, experts said pests and plant diseases, Faculty of Agriculture, Gadjah Mada University Suputa. ”The increased population of caterpillars is also due to the reduction in natural enemies, such as birds, parasitoids, and other predators,” he said in the discussion Pests Plague Worm Feather phenomenon in East Java, Yogyakarta, on Thursday.
According to him, due to high population, attacks caterpillars in Probolinggo, East Java, the more apprehensive. Caterpillars not only attack the leaves of mango in the district banks, Leces, Those are, and Tegalsiwalan, but also enter the house residents.”Leaves of mango varieties in the area Manalagi devour caterpillars. Mango trees live twigs and stems,” he said.
He said, the caterpillars prefer the leaves of mango Manalagi attack than other varieties of mango trees. Selection of the host caterpillars adults was carried out when laying an egg. ”The caterpillar hairs not including butterflies, but moths compatriots. Allegedly moth caterpillars that are laid eggs in cracks in the skin of the mango tree or under a leaf,” he said.
According to him, attack caterpillars are not a new phenomenon, because previous similar attacks have occurred. In fact, never happened before Java chilli plants which wilted plant yellowing due to pest attack. ”There are two species of caterpillar that attacks the leaves of mango in Probolinggo, namely arctornis sp and Lymantria atemeles Collenette. Caterpillar hairs that are nocturnal, the caterpillars are active at night,” he said.
He said no wonder that on the night often sounded like rain, and it was actually caterpillars eating the leaves of mango. ”If this worm attacks left unchecked, it will be many parties suffered losses. In addition to fear of economic losses as well,” he said.
Therefore, the control of caterpillar populations into steps that must be done immediately. Moreover, silkworm egg production capacity reaches 70-300 eggs per female worm. ”Integrated pest control by utilization of natural enemies, birds, parasitoids, UV light traps, pheromone traps and the use needs to be done,” he said.

Source. http://scienceray.com