News

The Handbook of Sustainability Literacy was launched on September 18th, 2009. This important new education resource takes a sharp look at the skills, attributes and competencies that learners will need for surviving and thriving in the 21st century.

“……Poverty reduction and sustainable development remain core global priorities. A quarter of the population of developing countries still lives on less than $1.25 a day. One billion people lack clean drinking water; 1.6 billion, electricity; and 3 billion, adequate sanitation. A quarter of all developing country children are malnourished. Addressing these needs must remain the priorities both of developing countries and of development aid—recog­nizing that development will get harder, not easier, with climate change.

Failure to agree a new UN climate deal in December will bring a "global health catastrophe", say 18 of the world's professional medical organisations.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8257766.stm
The Lancet

A new report published by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) and the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College London indicates that the real costs of climate change adaptation are likely to be two-to-three times greater than estimates made by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

Stop emitting CO2 or geoengineering could be our only hope
The future of the Earth could rest on potentially dangerous and unproven geoengineering technologies unless emissions of carbon dioxide can be greatly reduced, the latest Royal Society report has found.
http://royalsociety.org/document.asp?tip=0&id=8729

This report by the new economics foundation (nef) highlights that the notion of sustainable food can serve as the basis of an agenda for action with the objective of re-orienting the food system so that its explicit objective is to enhance well-being, and as such is both fairer and greener. The proposition underlying this agenda for action is that the transition towards more sustainable food must go hand-in-hand with fundamental changes in where and how we live and work, our family and neighbourhood interactions and consumption patterns.

As the world's population grows, competition for food, water and energy will increase. Food prices will rise, more people will go hungry, and migrants will flee the worst-affected regions.
That's the simple idea at the heart of the warning from John Beddington, the UK government's chief scientific adviser, of a possible crisis in 2030.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8213884.stm

Intersting articles and links to reports on psychology and behavior change.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327222.100-how-psychology-can-he...
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327225.700-triumph-of-the-common...
http://www.conservationpsychology.org/

One report outlines in detail a review of the 355 applicants to NESTA's Big Green Challenge. The full research analyses the different characteristics of the applications, including the CO2 reduction measures targeted, their innovation goals and processes and their approaches to delivery. It groups the applications into nine broad proposal types and highlights the distinctiveness of community led responses to change.

Large cuts in emissions of greenhouse gases are needed if we are to avoid the worst effects of global climate change. This Rapid Assessment Report describes the vital contributions which ecosystems can and must make to improve these efforts. It presents carbon capture and storage through a Green Economy lens, outlining the potential in terms of natural systems, from forests to grasslands which have been doing the job in a tried and tested way for millennia.