Author: Caroline Martinot

2010 has been declared the International Year of Biodiversity (IYB) by the United Nations. It was officially launched on January 10th in Berlin by Angela Merkel and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. The global campaign is being run by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) which was created after the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 to ensure the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity.

The campaign is an opportunity to promote the understanding of ecosystems and to raise awareness of the importance of biodiversity, the variety of life around the planet and how human activity is endangering it. And ultimately to slow if not to stop the extinction of many species.

“You are biodiversity. Most of the oxygen you breathe comes from plankton in the oceans of the world and lush forests around the globe. The fruit and vegetables you eat were likely pollinated by bees, and the water you drink is part of a huge global cycle involving you, clouds, rainfall, glaciers, rivers and oceans.”IYB Message (excerpt)

The campaign aims to impact both the world’s decision makers and citizens.

Indeed, 2010 will be punctuated by a series of official events.  On January 21st and 22nd in Paris, the UNESCO hold an inaugural event to present what we know about biodiversity and raise awareness of the alarming rate of biodiversity loss among world leaders.  During this meeting Ahmed Djoghlaf, Executive Secretary of the CBD highlighted that  member states “failed to fulfil the target to reduce the rate of loss of biodiversity by 2010” and warned that biodiversity was being lost at an “unprecedented rate”; stressing thereby the urgency of drastic actions. But as a good communicator and as recommended by the UN Campaign Guidelines, Ahmed Djoghlaf also instilled optimism and excitement to his audience by reminding them of the regional successes.  “We need to identify these important successes and build upon them as we prepare the next strategic plan of the CBD.”

Current trends make it hard to share his optimism.  Indeed, in 2010, approximately 34,000 plant and 5,200 animal species face extinction (the current global species extinction rate is estimated to be 50 to 1 000 times higher than the natural background extinction rate). Forests are home to much of the known terrestrial biodiversity, however, forest biodiversity is increasingly threatened as a result of deforestation, and about 45 per cent of the Earth’s original forests are gone, mostly during the 20th century. Climate change is also progressively becoming a more significant driver of biodiversity loss.

Anyway, in the UK the IYB is supported by the campaign “Biodiversity is life”. It showcases simple things you can do every day to preserve biodiversity: i.e. “eat organic”, “seek out a rare British food crop or animal, like Scottish Beremeal and support biodiversity by eating it”, “don’t mow your lawn”. There will be also a plethora of events run all over the country for the public. From the dodgy exhibition The Occurrence of Malformation in Amphibians (London 5- 31 March) to the hippie Bristol Festival of Nature (12–13 June).

The UN campaign for biodiversity preservation is well done. The UN have led to a multitude of national and local campaigns. By adopting some clear communication guidelines the UN incites the national actors to apply some basic communications tricks to foster awareness and behaviour change such as targeting audiences, being inspiring and translating the messages into practical actions. It’s tricky to assess the success of such planetary campaigns. The UN seems to be good at mobilising political and it’s a good thing that they delegate the task of communicating to citizen, to local actors. But who remember that 2009 was the International Year of Natural Fibres?

“It is hard to imagine a more important priority than protecting the ecosystem services underpinned by biodiversity. Biodiversity is fundamental to humans having food, fuel, clean water and a habitable climate.” Professor Georgina Mace

Article reproduced, author: Donald Carli*

Most people will tell you that they care about saving our forests, but they tend to be uninformed or misinformed when it comes to knowing the causes of deforestation or some of the places being affected most significantly by land use change that kills trees, pollutes rivers and contributes to climate change. Until recently the conventional wisdom has been to demonize paper and print media as the major culprit behind “killing trees” and to idealize digital media as “green and groovy” alternative without consideration for the full backstory or life cycle footprint of either.

Pixels Don’t Grow on Trees

Paper and print media supply chains are far from being sustainable, but may be far less of a threat to forests than the “Tree-Wash” claims about how digital media saves trees or how pixels are greener than pages. “Tree-Wash” is my term for a special class of “greenwash” making false, misleading or unsupported marketing claims that ignore the causes of deforestation associated with digital media, or that fail to identify the actual trees and forests allegedly being saved or planted.

However, the Copenhagen Climate Summit and technologies developed to verify land use are likely to play a major role in changing the status quo with regard to foot-printing forests, identifying trees and the calculating the climate impacts of coal-powered IT.

Are You Seeing REDD yet?

Deforestation and the sustainable management of the world’s forests are serious issues that should be top of mind given the world’s focus on climate change. Trees sequester carbon equal to half of their dry weight, and scientists estimate that as much 20 percent of total emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) are emitted due to deforestation, land use change and forest degradation. For that reason, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) is a major issue that will be addressed in Copenhagen.

Sustainable forestry will play an increasingly important role in supporting the literacy and sanitary existence of the world’s growing population. In addition to providing millions of jobs and providing the wood fiber used to produce over 350 million tons of paper per year, the world’s forests also serve as the planet’s “lungs” by converting or “sequestering” atmospheric carbon dioxide into woody biomass and providing other important environmental services. In addition, sustainably harvested forest biomass will increasingly be employed by a new generation of integrated biorefineries to replace fossil fuel energy and petrochemical feedstocks.

According to some reports just one day’s deforestation is equivalent to the greenhouse gas emissions of eight million people flying to New York; in order to address such a serious challenge and provide a basis to monitoring the reduction of deforestation and forest degradation, an impressive array of geo-locative and remote sensing capabilities are being developed to map the world’s forests and identify the location of individual trees with startling precision.

For example, as part of the Global Forest Resources Assessment 2010, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and its member countries and partners is undertaking a global remote sensing survey of forests covering the whole land surface of the Earth. FAO is also providing technical support for national forest assessments and the establishment of national forest monitoring systems. See: Global Forest Resources Assessment

Do You See the Forest or the Trees?

Remote sensing of forest biomass and geo-locative tagging of trees will become increasingly important as the exemption of carbon dioxide emissions from bioenergy use will only be appropriate if there is a system that also counts emissions from deforesting land and land use activities that degrade forest ecologies. In that way, if biomass for energy use results in deforestation, emissions are counted as land use emissions equivalent to fossil fuel emissions. However, these new applications will also be making it possible to stem the tsunami of “Go Digital, Save Trees” Tree-Wash marketing claims that many marketers of e-billing, e-books and digital media have been flooding the market with.

One of the little known but significant causes of deforestation in the United States related to digital media is the practice of Mountain Top Removal, employed to mine the coal used to generate electricity in states like West Virginia. In 2008 over 41 million tons of coal were extracted by means of Mountain Top Removal in West Virginia. Coal provides the majority of electric power in 32 states, and 99 percent of the electricity generated in West Virginia comes from coal.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that by 2013 an area the size of Delaware will have been deforested to extract coal. In addition to the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the energy consumed by digital media’s IT infrastructure, the deforestation, toxic air pollution and water pollution impacts associated with coal mining, coal combustion and coal waste need to be considered before making claims about digital media being greener than print or saving trees.

Truth in Augmented Reality

Deforestation, illegal logging and land-use changes that result in greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental damage are serious matters that billions of people care about. With today’s advanced remote sensing and geo-location capabilities consumers have every reason to expect marketers making claims about their offerings saving trees, or resulting in the planting of trees, to identify the trees in question and account for the life cycle impacts associated with their products. Even if the FTC does not yet prosecute such cases, that would not preclude a competitor from calling on the National Advertising Review Council to review the truthfulness and accuracy of a green marketing claim.

As we enter the “Post Madoff” trust-but-verify age of social-media powered transparency and climate awareness, it is becoming more possible and important than ever to monitor the green message content and supply chain impacts of advertising. Pixels may not grow on trees, but it is increasingly likely that remote sensing and augmented reality pixels can and will be used to hold marketers responsible for the carbon footprint of their media supply chains and the truthfulness and accuracy of advertising claims they make about saving or planting trees.

*Author: Donald Carli
Senior Research Fellow
Institute for Sustainable Communication
http://www.sustaincom.org

I attended the UK Premier of ‘Taking Root: The Vision of Wangari Maathai’ from the Green Belt Movement.  Taking Root tells the dramatic story of Kenyan Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Wangari Maathai whose simple act of planting trees grew into a nationwide movement to safeguard the environment, protect human rights, and defend democracy.

The Green Belt Movement (GBM) was founded in 1977 by Wangari Maathai (Nobel Laureate 2004). Green Belt Movement’s approach is based on the premise that truly sustainable development can only take place through recognizing the link between the environment, democracy, and peace.

Through its holistic approach to development, Green Belt Movement addresses the underlying causes of poverty and environmental degradation at the grassroots level. Green Belt Movement programmes use a ten-step development model that mobilizes communities to take action in their local environments. As a result over 40 million trees have been planted and hundreds of thousands of women in rural Kenya have lifted their families out of poverty.

I recommend seeing the film as it a true inspiration to all environmental campaigners. I believe it’s available on DVD at takingrootfilm.com/purchase.htm

The Green Awards Best Green Campaigner category is for those sorts of individuals. See www.greenawards.co.uk/categories_x_16/categories_x_16/best_green_campaigner_award We’re looking for any campaigner who has set a goal or campaign target, has set about achieving it and can explain what they were able to achieve against the odds. Campaigns can be as local as your street, school, college or company or may involve a town, city, borough or even a national campaign.

The Campaigner of the Year will be the individual who is judged to have been most creative in getting results for their chosen issue, regardless of the size of the campaign or the budget.

Wangari Maathai became the first environmentalist and the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. She overcame unimaginable obstacles that most of us never experience in daily life and yet still maintained a vision and reached into the consciousness of ordinary people to empower themselves to protect the environment and in doing so alleviate poverty. I think one thing I took from last night was the thought that no matter how big the problem is we face we can all make a difference and we should never just sit back through apathy when we hear of environmental degradation happening in other parts of the world such as the destruction of the forests. Because ultimately the planet will survive but the human race might not be quick enough to adapt to the changes that lay ahead because of the effects of global warming and climate change. We need to be focussed on our own survival and we need inspirational leaders to engage the mass consciousness. According to Wangari Maathai’s,Oslo, 10 December 2004, ”In the course of history, there comes a time when humanity is called to shift to a new level of consciousness, to reach a higher moral ground. A time when we have to shed our fear and give hope to each other.”

To enter the Best Green Campaigner Category visit: www.greenawards.co.uk/categories_x_16/categories_x_16/best_green_campaigner_award

For more information on the Green Belt Movement who is an Institutional partner for this year’s Green Awards visit:  www.greenbeltmovement.org