International Earth Articles

Re-Connect with Nature Now… Before It Is Too Late!

ROME, Jun 5 2017 (IPS) - Now that president Donald Trump has announced the withdrawal of the world’s largest polluter in history—the United States, from the Paris Accord, perhaps one of the most specific warnings is what a United Nations independent expert on rights and the environment has just said: “We should be fully aware that we cannot enjoy our basic human rights without a healthy environment.”

Speaking in Geneva ahead of the World Environment Day on Monday 5 June, the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and the Environment, John H. Knox, said “We should all be alarmed at the accelerating loss of biodiversity on which healthy ecosystems depend.”

We depend on healthy natural ecosystems for so much – nutrition, shelter, clothing, the very water we drink and the air we breathe, Knox reminded. “And yet, natural forest area continues to decline, marine ecosystems are increasingly under siege, and estimated populations of vertebrate animals have declined by more than half since 1970.”

On March 1 1954, on Bikini Atoll, in the Marshall Islands, the US military detonated the world’s first lithium-deuteride hydrogen bomb, a thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. The radiation blew downwind, to the southeast, and irradiated the residents of Rongelap and Utirik atolls, and the crew of tuna boat Fukuryu Maru, “Lucky Dragon.”

The islanders and fishing crew suffered radiation sickness, hair loss, and peeling skin. Crew member, Aikichi Kuboyama, died six months later in a Hiroshima hospital. Island children, suffered lifelong health effects, including cancers, and most died prematurely. The Lucky Dragon sailors were exposed to 3-5 sieverts of radiation.

One sievert will cause severe radiation sickness leading to cancer and death. Five sieverts will kill half those exposed within a month (like the workers who died at Chernobyl within the first few week). Ten sieverts will kill any human being. Hiroshima and Nagasaki victims received 150 Sieverts. Even microorganisms perished.

Castle Bravo Blast - Creative Commons

Castle Bravo nuclear weapons test on Bikini Atoll

Today, inside the crippled Fukushima nuclear reactor-2, the melting core releases 530 sieverts per hour, enough to kill a human instantly and melt steel robotic equipment within two hours.

GROUPS PROTEST UN CLIMATE FUNDS FOR BIG DAMS

APRIL 4, 2017NEWS OUTLET THE GUARDIAN @GUARDIANAUTHOR ARTHUR NESLEN @ARTHURNESLEN130

StillWorksImagery / Pixabay

Nine environmental groups are challenging the use of money earmarked by the United Nations for “innovative and transformational” climate adaptation projects to build or refit large hydroelectric dams associated with severe damage to ecosystems and Indigenous communities, as well as elevated greenhouse gas emissions.

Signatories include Friends of the Earth, the Heinrich Böll Stiftung Foundation, and the Centre for International Environmental Law, The Guardian reports. The groups particularly object to plans to spend more than US$136 million from the UN’s Green Climate Fund on big dams in Nepal, Tajikistan, and the Solomon Islands.

The GCF, The Guardian recalls, was set up “to mobilize US$100 billion a year by 2020 for poor countries looking for innovative and transformational projects. These were supposed to promote ‘paradigm shifts’ to clean and climate-resilient energy, in the context of the UN’s sustainable development goals.”

Against that standard, “to use the Fund to build mega-dams ignores the risk they pose to ecology as well as climate,” the groups argue.

“Large dams are not suited to adapt to climate risks because they alter seasonal patterns, by storing floods and increasing dry period flows,” said Andrea Rodriguez, a senior attorney for the Inter-American Association for Environmental Defence. “Large infrastructure does not guarantee development or climate solutions.”

Many international agencies categorize hydropower as a clean renewable energy source because it emits no CO2 from water running through turbines to generate electricity. “But critics say this fails to take into account up to a billion tonnes of greenhouse gases created by dams each year,” The Guardian notes, “as well as the damage often inflicted on carbon sinks, and hydropower’s vulnerability to shifts in climate.” The dams in both Tajikistan and Nepal, for example, depend on water from dwindling mountain glaciers.