Arte-non-Vi

Tag: Sustainability

  • Child Mortality – The good news and the bad news

    Child Mortality – The good news and the bad news

    The good news: child mortality has fallen in every single country over the past few decades. 4 million fewer children died before their fifth birthday in 2015 than in the year 2000.

    The bad news: according to a detailed study published in The Lancet,

    despite remarkable progress in the improvement of child survival between 1990 and 2015, the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 4 target of a two-thirds reduction of under-5 mortality rate (U5MR) was not achieved globally.

    In other words, more than 60% of the world’s child deaths occur in just 10 countries…

     

    According to the WEF, the world has made enormous strides in reducing child deaths, cutting the under-five mortality rate by more than half (53%) between 1990 and 2015. But there’s still much more to be done, and this achievement fell short of the Millennium Development Goal target of cutting the under-five mortality rate by two-thirds.

    Estimates suggest that 5.9 million children under five died last year, including 2.7 million newborns. More than 60% of these deaths happened in just 10 countries in Africa and Asia: India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, China, Angola, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Tanzania.

    Links

  • MGC and Zayed Future Energy Prize

    Melbourne Girls School

    Impressive.

    The Melbourne Girls College won the Zayed Future Energy Prize in the category of Global Schools – Oceania back in January of this year. Seems somewhat ‘unheralded’ but worthy of recognition.

    The Zayed Future Energy Prize represents the vision of the Late Founding Father and President of the United Arab Emirates, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al Nahyan, who championed environmental stewardship. This annual award celebrates achievements that reflect impact, innovation, long-term vision and leadership in renewable energy and sustainability.

    Links:

  • Limits to Growth …was right…

    Limits to Growth …was right…

    Limits of Growth Cover
    [Source: Club of Rome]
    LTG
    Source: The Guardian

    I was a school student when this first Club of Rome Report was widely heralded.

    I was in University studying Geography, History, Literature and Politics when I looked closely at its research and findings.

    I was teaching when the “20 year old” report was critiqued as flawed and plain wrong.

    As Limits to Growth concluded in 1972:

     

    If the present growth trends in world population, industrialisation, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.

    Four decades after the book was published, Limit to Growth’s forecasts have been vindicated by new Australian research.

    -The Guardian

     

    The task was very ambitious. The team tracked industrialisation, population, food, use of resources, and pollution. They modelled data up to 1970, then developed a range of scenarios out to 2100, depending on whether humanity took serious action on environmental and resource issues. If that didn’t happen, the model predicted “overshoot and collapse” – in the economy, environment and population – before 2070. This was called the “business-as-usual” scenario.

    The book’s central point, much criticised since, is that “the earth is finite” and the quest for unlimited growth in population, material goods etc would eventually lead to a crash.

     

    So were they right? We decided to check in with those scenarios after 40 years. Dr Graham Turner gathered data from the UN (its department of economic and social affairs, Unesco, the food and agriculture organisation, and the UN statistics yearbook). He also checked in with the US national oceanic and atmospheric administration, the BP statistical review, and elsewhere.

    That data was plotted alongside the Limits to Growth scenarios.

    The results show that the world is tracking pretty closely to the Limits to Growth “business-as-usual” scenario.

    As described below, data from the forty years or so since the LTG study was completed indicates that the world is closely tracking the BAU scenario. In the BAU, during the 20th century increasing population and demand for material wealth drives more industrial output, which grows at a faster rate than population.

    LTG
    Source: The Guardian

     

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  • The Story of Send

    Google has posted an interesting [and fun] run-down of the energy pathway of an email through a well crafted online animation/cartoon.

    The environmental impact on growing data centres is very real and the question of sustainability is a strategic and governance challenge that cannot be ignored. The context of the current debate about carbon-pricing and mechanisms for capture and/or attenuation of future impacts is very real for these global companies.

    The Story of Send

    Links:

  • Water from Air

    Not a plant to be seen, the desert ground is too dry.

    Drinking Water Plant But the air contains water, and research scientists have found a way of obtaining drinking water from air humidity. The system is based completely on renewable energy and is therefore autonomous.

    Cracks permeate the dried-out desert ground, the landscape bears testimony to the lack of water.

    But even here, where there are no lakes, rivers or groundwater, considerable quantities of water are stored in the air.

    In the Negev desert in Israel, for example, annual average relative air humidity is 64 percent – in every cubic meter of air there are 11.5 milliliters of water.

    Drinking Water From Air Humidity.

    [ScienceDaily: Latest Science News]

    [Note: I was in Israel in the early 90’s and while on a tour a similar [yet simpler] type of device was described to us as “harvesting the morning air” -BC]

  • World unaware of Oil drying up.

    Oil drying up as world remains unaware.. On top of the other problems plaguing the world, such as global warming and the current financial meltdown, there’s a third pressing issue that threatens to bring the good life to an end: The world is fast running out of oil. [Environmental Health News]

  • Detroit and Cars with sparks .. Too late?

    Detroit Goes for Electric Cars, but Will Drivers?. Ford and other carmakers are betting billions on electric cars despite questions about consumer demand for them. [NYT > Business]

  • Growth… Can we? Should we?

    Peter McMahon, writing in the On line Opinion presents an intriguing position that…

    The radical impact of new information technologies and the rise of the global crises (global warming, peak oil and the like) are forcing a new kind of politics into being.

    He suggests [as many of us would agree] that twenty-first century society will be defined by the need to confront the material limitations of economic growth.

    Link: No more seduction by spin.

    [On Line Opinion]