UN has launched a year-long celebration of the world's forests. It is about recognizing the wide range of ecosystem services that forests provide, everything from mitigating climate change to providing wood, medicines and livelihoods for people worldwide.

“Forests for People” is the main theme of the International Year of Forests, which was launched at a recent ceremony at UN Headquarters in New York attended by world leaders, Nobel Laureate Wangari Maathai and other forest experts.

With this initiative UN seeks to raise awareness on the management, conservation and sustainable development of all types of forests, on which at least 1.6 billion people depend for their daily livelihoods and subsistence needs. Forests are also home to over 60 million people, mainly members of indigenous and local communities, who reside in forests.

The Stockholm Seminar with Professor Juan Carlos Castilla from Friday 28 January, 2011 is now available on video at Stockholm Resilience Centre's website.

Full seminar title: "The 2010 Earthquake and Tsunamis in Chile: bio-physical and social impacts along the coast and on the small-scale artisan fisheries?"

Time and place: Friday 28 January, 2011, 14.00-15.00 Linné Hall, Beijer Hall, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Lilla Frescativägen 4, Stockholm

This picks up from Fredriks latest post on "killing the extinction message" and creating more positive conservation messages. Edward Morris and Dmitri Siegel set up the Green Patriot Posters because they felt the sustainability movement needed better images and messages to connect to people. The site allows artists to upload their posters and provide commentary on the underlying thought behind them. Its a great place to get inspired, and its also led to the release of a Green Patriot Poster book.

We are the change - by marian16rox

Artists comments: We are all clamoring for solutions, but the biggest one out there - the game-changer - is ourselves. We can choose to consume less, recycle more. We can give fossil fuels the boot and rely on clean energy. We can live sustainably. We can dream up green innovations. We can be change that the planet needs.

Science has become increasingly effective in providing detailed knowledge on the broad effects of human impacts on the environment. The IPCC reports are a great example of how, through a global (well, almost) consensus-based process, such knowledge can fuel political and public policy and debate. However, the real challenge lies in tackling such global environmental risks, while simultaneously meeting the broad suite of socio-economic goals envisioned through the sustainable development agenda.

In a recent Policy Forum paper in the journal Science a prominent group of environmental and social scientists (including the Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom and Stockholm Resilience Centre director Johan Rockström) map out five "Grand Challenges" that will better align Earth system science toward sustainable development. The paper begins by asking:

It then maps out the five great challenges that will have to be confronted in order to reach these goals

1) Improve the usefulness of forecasts of future environmental conditions and their consequences for people.

In essence this requires a huge step-forward in our capacity to build integrated Earth system simulators complete with ocean, land and atmosphere components. All this is very complicated, and still a long way off. But, when coupled with research on how environmental changes affect livelihoods, health and food security, such tools could give us improved capacity to forecast human impacts on the Earth system and the reciprocal effects.

“I have a dream” is much more effective than “I have a nightmare” when communicating sustainability issues.

One fifth of all vertebrates species are threatened with extinction and populations of mammal, bird, reptile, amphibian and fish species have declined on average by 30 % over 40 years. This was recently revealed in the most comprehensive inventory ever of the world’s vertebrates, “Evolution Lost”, produced by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL).

I first heard about the “Evolution Lost” via my Twitter feed and a link to a short movie (see below) on Youtube presenting the report’s findings. I found the short film and the report interesting, but in the comment area below someone had written: “Hey, Lady Gaga now has 45 MILLION followers on Facebook! That's the REAL story, not this boring old end of the world, global warming blah blah...... who cares?… stop bringing us DOWN!”


Being an ecologist and communicator myself I struggle every day with these kind of reactions. After all biodiversity is in deep crisis and my favourite ecosystems coral reefs, which I studied during my time as a PhD-student, are more threatened than ever. I do care. And I do worry! And of course I would like everybody to be as worried as I am. But as a communicator I have over the years slowly realised that our current biodiversity communication is not very effective. If it were we wouldn’t be losing so much of it, right?

In this context I was very happy when I came across the sobering report (booklet) “Branding Biodiversity” that challenges communicators to swap extinction and complex scientific concepts for a set of simple brand values that inspire the public to act on conservation:

“You will have to make a choice: will you try to change your audience into you, or will you change your message to inspire them? This booklet is for those who choose the second route.”

The worlds largest marine protected area has recently been enforced in the Chagos archipelago. Although a step forward in protecting the Earths marine ecosystems, it also underlies how much more is required in order to reach goals set by the international community on marine protection.

The worlds largest MPA came into force on November 1st in the British territorial waters of the Chagos Archipelago.  The Chagos reserve is substantial and covers an area of 544,000 square kilometres – twice the size of Britain. In general, ecologists and conservationists have welcomed this move since the Chagos waters are home to one of the world's largest coral reefs, a habitat for more than 1,200 species of coral and fish (actually, Chagos contains 49% of the 'Least Threatened' reefs in the Indian Ocean, all within one jurisdiction!) and many charismatic species such as the critically endangered hawksbill turtle. Its creation comes at a time when alarming reports highlight how the marine life in the waters of the Chagos Archipelago has been hit hard by overfishing. For example, the Zoological Society of London estimates that, over the past five years, around 60,000 sharks, an equivalent number of rays and many other species have been caught there as "by-catch" – as an accidental adjunct to commercial fishing for tuna, for example.

However this new sanctuary, serves to underline how catastrophically the international community has fallen short of goals set almost a decade ago to protect marine life. In 2002, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the World Summit on Sustainable Development made a commitment to protect 10 per cent of the world's oceans by 2012. Today, with only 15 months to go, it is estimated that just 1.17 per cent of the world's oceans are under some form of protection, and a mere 0.08 per cent classified as "no-take" zones. At the recent UN conference on biodiversity held in Nagoya, Japan, government officials put the 2012 deadline back to 2020. Marine experts warned that it is scandalous that the original deadline will not be met, and said the 10 per cent target falls far short of what is needed. A third of ocean waters need protection to give species a fighting chance of survival, they said.

The synthesis report of The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) clearly shows the potential of incorporating the value of nature into decision-making. The launch of the two-year study, which has involved hundreds of experts from around the world, took place yesterday, October 20, at the Convention on Biological Diversity's 10th Conference of the Parties meeting "COP10" in Nagoya.

Many now hope that the economic importance of the world's natural assets will be firmly on the international political radar as a result of this assessment showcasing the enormous economic value of forests, freshwater, soils and coral reefs, as well as the social and economic costs of their loss.

- TEEB has documented not only the multi-trillion dollar importance to the global economy of the natural world, but the kinds of policy-shifts and smart market mechanisms that can embed fresh thinking in a world beset by a rising raft of multiple challenges. The good news is that many communities and countries are already seeing the potential of incorporating the value of nature into decision-making, said study leader Pavan Sukhdev, who heads up the Green Economy Initiative of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP).

The TEEB study calls for wider recognition of ecosystem service's contribution to human livelihoods, health, security, and culture by decision-makers at all levels. It promotes the demonstration, and where appropriate, the capture of the economic values of nature's services through an array of policy instruments and mechanisms.

http://www.teebweb.org/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=bYhDohL_TuM%3d&tabid=924&mid=1813

What is the best solution to tackling climate change and other environmental problems? There is no panacea, and we have to experiment with multiple approaches, says Elinor Ostrom, winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in economics, in a recent interview published in the Global Change magazine.

In 2009, Elinor Ostrom became the first woman to receive the prestigious Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for her work showing how common resources — forests, fisheries, oil fields or grazing lands — can be managed successfully by the people who use them, rather than by governments or private companies. In the newly published interview she explains the reasoning behind her work in her own words:

“At one end of the spectrum, the belief that government ownership is the best way to manage natural resources – forests, for example – has in some cases led to a marked reduction in the resource. At the other end, imposing decentralisation as a remedy without a proper understanding of the local society has triggered ethnic conflict. Social-ecological systems are complex and nested, and resource users around the world vary widely in their preferences and perceptions. Such systems are not amenable to being characterised by simple models.”

Read the whole interview in the latest issue of the eminent Global Change magazine from the International Geosphere Biosphere Programme (IGBP). It can be accessed online at: http://www.igbp.kva.se/page.php?pid=231