The Environment Chronicle

Dr. Bindeshwar Pathak, founder of the Sulabh Sanitation Movement in India, has been named the 2009 Stockholm Water Prize Laureate. He will formally receive the 2009 Stockholm Water Prize at a Royal Award Ceremony and Banquet during the World Water Week in Stockholm this coming August. Since he established the Sulabh Sanitation Movement in 1970, Dr. Pathak has worked to change social attitudes toward traditional unsanitary latrine practices in slums, rural villages, and dense urban districts, and developed cost effective toilet systems that have improved daily life and health for millions of people.

The United Nations new website on climate change, CoolPlanet2009 is online. It is a part of its European public information campaign on Climate Change. The website is the centrepiece of the CoolPlanet2009 campaign, a year-long campaign to raise awareness on environmental issues and to mobilize citizens in support of a new climate agreement in Copenhagen in December this year.

The Indo-German team of scientists from the National Institute of Oceaonography and the Alfred Wegener Institute has returned from its expedition on research vessel Polarstern. The cooperative project Lohafex has yielded new insights on how ocean ecosystems function. But it has dampened hopes on the potential of the Southern Ocean to sequester significant amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) and thus mitigate global warming. The scientists fertilized a 300 square kilometre patch of ocean inside the core of an eddy (a clockwise rotating water column with an area of about 10,000 square kilometres) with six tonnes of dissolved iron. They followed the effects of the fertilization on the plankton continuously for 39 days. Additionally they investigated ocean chemistry, particularly concentrations of CO2 and other greenhouse gases.

March 18th, 2009 marks the seventh International Polar Day, this time focusing on Polar Oceans. This includes marine biodiversity, physical oceanography.

Norway invited the Contracting Parties to the 1973 polar bear Agreement to a meeting of the parties in Tromsø 17 - 19 March 2009. Around 1970 widespread hunting had reduced polar bear populations in many parts of the Arctic. The polar bear Range States, Canada, Denmark/Greenland, Norway, Russia and USA, entered into an agreement in 1973 to protect polar bears and their habitat. The five Contracting Parties met last time in Oslo 1981 and decided then that the agreement would be valid indefinitely. The purpose of the 2009 meeting was to provide an update on the conservation status for the polar bears, review implementation of the polar bear Agreement, identify useful polar bear conservation strategies and discuss mechanisms for enhanced implementation of the polar bear Agreement.

On 16 March 2009 Greenpeace activists draped a giant banner from a Deutsche Bank tower in Frankfurt to demand more funding for efforts to combat climate change. The banner was hung to call for more financial commitment by the government to international climate protection.

Papua New Guinea has created its first national conservation area to preserve forever a swath of pristine tropical forest larger than Singapore. Named for its three main rivers – the Yopno, Uruwa and Som of the Huon Peninsula – the YUS Conservation Area covers 187,800 acres (76,000 hectares or 760 square kilometers) of tropical forest stretching from PNG’s northern coast to interior mountains.

Stockholm and Hamburg were today named as the first winners of the new European Green Capital award. The Swedish capital will be European Green Capital in 2010 followed by Hamburg in 2011. The European Commission's new award scheme encourages cities to improve the quality of urban life by taking the environment systematically into account in urban planning.

Budapest won the 2008 European Mobility Week Award. The Hungarian capital was judged by an independent panel of experts to have done the most to raise public awareness of air pollution from traffic and promote cleaner alternatives during European Mobility Week.

The environmental ministers from over 140 countries agreed to begin negotiating a treaty to control global mercury pollution at a meeting of the UN Governing Council in Nairobi, Kenya.

The Federal Minister for Education and Research, Dr Annette Schavan, inaugurated Neumayer Station III on 20 February, 2009. The new German research facility is located 6.5 km south of the old Neumayer Station on the Ekström ice shelf in Dronning Maud Land in the Antarctic. The construction project of about 40 million Euros was financed by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) with long-term funds for polar research, and it was realized within the framework of the International Polar Year.

Belgium opened a new 20 million euro "zero emissions" polar science station in Antarctica on 15 February, 2009. The Princess Elisabeth research station is totally energy self-sufficient and also aims not to emit any carbon dioxide emissions, according to the Belgian-based International Polar Foundation that runs the base.

Over 350 cities across Europe have made a green pledge to make a 20% cut in CO2 emissions by 2020. The "Covenant of Mayors" pledge was made Tuesday 10 February at the European Parliament. Each city will now draw up a sustainable energy action plan over the next 12 months.

In January 2009 the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft had founded the new Fraunhofer Institute for Wind Energy and Energy Systems Technology IWES. The new Fraunhofer IWES institute consists of the former Fraunhofer Center for Wind Energy and Maritime Technologies CWMT in Bremerhaven and will be extended during 2009 by the Kassel Institut für Solare Energieversorgungstechnik – ISET e. V. after the transfer had been completed with the prescribed formalities.

The Swedish parliament decided in 1980 that no further nuclear power plants should be built, and that a nuclear power phase-out should be completed by 2010. On February 5 2009, the Swedish Government announced an agreement allowing for the replacement of existing reactors.

The European Commission adopted the first ever EU Plan of Action for the Conservation and Management of Sharks. The aim of the plan is to ensure that effective steps are taken to help rebuild shark stocks wherever they are under threat and to set down guidelines for the sustainable management of the fisheries concerned, including those where shark are taken as by-catch. The plan also includes measures to improve scientific knowledge of shark stocks and shark fisheries. The measures set out cover not only sharks, but also related species, such as skates and rays, and will apply wherever the EU fleet operates, both within and outside European waters. The Commission is also committed to working to ensure that the EU's action in international bodies and agreements is coherent with its policy on sharks at home.

Elite scientists from all over the world will conduct research at the newly-founded Institute for Advanced Climate, Earth System and sustainability Studies (IASS) in Potsdam. Their aim will be to find solutions for the most pressing challenges of our time: climate change and the preservation of our environment. As the home of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Studies and the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, Potsdam is already a center of earth and climate research. The German Federal Government and the State of Brandenburg will support the IASS with 9 million euros annually for the next seven years, most of which will come from the budget of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. Klaus Töpfer, who has served as Germany’s Environment Minister and the General Director of the UN Environment Program has been tapped to lead the Institute.

At www.erneuerbare-energien.de/english the Federal Environment Ministry (BMU) now also provides a broad range of information in English about renewable energies. This gives the international public easier access to information which has been available in German at www.erneuerbare-energien.de since 2003 on the latest developments in the fields of solar and wind power, hydropower, biomass and geothermal energy.

HALO – High Altitude and Long Range Research Aircraft landed at Oberpfaffenhofen research airport on 24 January 2009. The aircraft, a Gulfstream G550, has been converted into one of the world’s most state-of-the-art research aircraft for climate and atmospheric research. After an approximately nine-hour ferry flight from Gulfstream’s manufacturing facility in Savannah in the US, HALO touched down on the landing strip of its new home airport shortly after 10am. With its range of up to 8 000 kilometres and ceiling of 15.5 kilometres, the new research aircraft can carry a scientific payload of up to three tonnes to areas above the ocean which could not be reached before, or to the polar regions.

The Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite (GOSAT) was launched from the Tanegashima Space Center in western Japan at 12:54 p.m. on Friday, local time, into an overcast sky.

The first annual Zayed Future Energy Prize was awarded on 19 January 2009 to Mr. Dipal Chandra Barua, Founding Managing Director of Grameen Shakti for his visionary efforts to bring renewable energy solutions to the rural population of Bangladesh. Mr. Barua's organization, Grameen Shakti (GS), has installed more than 200,000 solar PV systems that currently provide power for more than two million rural people.

The German Government is making 1.5 Milliard euros available for an environmental or scrapping bonus. Owners of cars more than nine years old will receive 2,500 euros if they replace them with a new car.

The German research vessel Polarstern is currently on its way to the Southwest Atlantic Sector of the Southern Ocean. The team of 48 scientists on board left Cape Town on 7th January to carry out the Indo-German iron fertilization experiment LOHAFEX. LOHAFEX will provide more basic information to further our understanding of the role of ocean ecosystems in the global carbon cycle. It will help filling the gaps of knowledge mentioned by international conventions to classify the potential role of ocean fertilization as a means of reducing carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere.

Greenpeace UK , the actress Emma Thompson, the comedian Alistair McGowan and millionaire Tory Zac Goldsmith have bought a piece of land the size of a football pitch in the middle the proposed development to expand the airport. The organisation are allowing members of the public to become "beneficial owners" of the "Airplot" in order to register their protest and in the hope it will make it more difficult for a compulsory purchase order.

The Federal Environmental Agency, Dessau is one of the first buildings in Germany certified 'Gold' by the German Council for Sustainable Building (Deutsche Gesellschaft für nachhaltiges Bauen / DGNB).

American president George W. Bush designated nearly 500,000 square kilometre of the Pacific Ocean as conservation areas just two weeks before leaving the White House. The world's largest protected marine area encompass three distinct areas: the Mariana Islands in the western Pacific, a chain of remote islands in the central Pacific, and the Rose Atoll off American Samoa. The conservation plan will ban commercial fishing, mining and energy exploration within the protected areas.

Operators subject to emissions trading in Germany emitted a total volume of 428.2 million tonnes of climate-damaging carbon dioxide (CO2) in 2009. As compared to the previous year, emissions sank by 44.3 million tonnes CO2, or 9.4 percent, which is the lowest level since introduction of emissions trading in Europe in 2005. The installations engaged in emissions trading were thus responsible again in 2009 for the greatest absolute reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in Germany. The emissions trading sector affirms the overall trend announced by the Federal Environment Agency (UBA) in early March 2010, according to which the financial and economic crisis has led to the steepest decline in climate gas emissions since the foundation of the Federal Republic. The greatest share in reduction within the emissions trading industry can also be traced to declines in production resulting from the economic downturn in 2009.

2009 is the year of biosphere reserves in Germany. The first German biosphere reserves – Vessertal and stretches of the Middle Elbe valley – were designated as long ago as 1979, only three years after the nomination of the first biosphere reserves in the world. The German biosphere reserves cover almost 3 % of the German land area. Biosphere reserve is a category in the German federal law for nature conservation. All 13 territories designated under German law are at the same time UNESCO biosphere reserves. The 13 territories represent important German habitats, typical types of landscape and the diversity of ecosystems, fauna and flora in this country.

In 2009 renewable energies accounted for more than 10 percent of total heat, electricity and fuel consumption in Germany. This is the key finding of the report by the Working Group on Renewable Energies - Statistics (AGEE-Stat), which Federal Environment Minister Norbert Röttgen presented on 24 March 2010 in Berlin. According to this report, not only was the renewables sector able to avoid the economic crisis to a large extent, it even increased its share in energy supply in Germany, and as a result of rising investments was able to record a further growth in employment figures. More than 300,000 people now work in this sector. While electricity generation from conventional energy forms decreased in 2009, renewables remained stable - their share in electricity consumption rose further to 16.1 percent. In comparison with the previous year there was also a significant increase in biogas, photovoltaic and wind-power installations. Investments in the renewables sector reached a record total of 17.7 billion euros. The number of employees rose once again. Over 300,000 people, around 8 percent more than in the previous year, found a relatively secure job in the renewables sector.