How can so many people be hungry when farmers produce enough food, at least in theory, to feed every person on the planet?
The answers are complex and involve everything from American farm politics and African corruption to war, poverty, climate change and drought, which is now the single most common cause of food shortages on the planet. more
If anyone's into Dr. Wangari Maathai, the Nobel Peace prize winner "tree lady" from Africa, i just did a little side gig for WorldLearning editing and putting up a good interview their president got last time she was here in Brattleboro. She's a great talker, I didn't even need any edits (at least not on their budget) except the beginning and end!
Interview on channel: http://www.youtube.com/worldlearning
Video source, with YouTube's new "call to action" lower third popup 10 seconds in: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOnYVeaETps
- Caleb Clark
~ Wk: http://gradcenter.marlboro.edu/academics/mat/faculty
~ Hm: http://www.plocktau.com
Knowledge about the condition and trend of African soils is highly fragmented and dated. There is an urgent need for accurate, up-to-date and spatially referenced soil information to support agriculture in Africa. This coincides with developments in technologies that allow for accurate collection and prediction of soil properties. The Africa Soil Information Service (AfSIS) will develop a practical, timely, cost-effective, soil health surveillance service to map soil conditions, set a baseline for monitoring changes, and provide options for improved soil and land management. more
Scientists agreed that snow in Kenya, a humid, tropical country with an amazing diversity of fauna and flora is clear evidence of a climate change. details
Destruction of the woodland by rampant illegal settlement, logging and charcoal burning threatens severe damage to Kenya's economy with an impact on energy, tourism, agriculture and water supply to cities and industry. more
Goes both ways: In London you can receive air quality info by SMS. Or sensors embedded in mobiles can detect and send radiation or pollen levels. "Grassroots citizen science" work by Eric Paulos in Ghana attached sensors to taxi drivers' phones in Ghana to measure pollution levels. Details here.
See also Urban sensing: Out of the woods: "Services such as Google Earth have driven to nearly zero the cost of this visualization measured in terms of dollars, time-to-deploy, and technical sophistication required." (See an example of the scientific use of Google Earth here.)
The mission of AfricanClimate@Home is to develop more accurate climate models of specific regions in Africa. This will serve as a basis for understanding how the climate will change in the future so that measures designed to alleviate the adverse effects of climate change can be implemented. World Community Grid's tremendous computing power will be used to understand and reduce the uncertainty with which climate processes are simulated over Africa.
See also Africa@home
NASA initiative extols the benefits of remote sensing, mapping, satellite imagery for improving crop yields, reducing fertilizer use, keeping records, increasing profits, reducing pollution.
Temperatures in Africa are expected to increase by at least 2.5 degrees Celsius by 2030, according to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It places Kenya in the area most at risk from climate change.
Mount Kenya, near Kiangwachi (one of the villages VeSeL is working with) may disappear as its glaciers melt; only 7 of the 18 recorded in 1900 still remain.
The World Meteorological Organisation says that the collection of weather data in Africa has gotten worse as many of the automatic weather stations it helped set up have fallen into disrepair.
Source: Economist story, 12 May 2007
ICT Update has special issues and relevant information on agriculture, technology, climate change, etc.
Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai joins a campaign to plant trees to offset climate change - which especially affects African countries like her native Kenya. "In Kenya for example, if the Government directs every farmer to plant 25 trees in every acre of land, our forest cover would increase from the current 1.7 per cent to 10 per cent which is the globally accepted minimum." Full story here.
Kenyan cut flowers make up 32% Of the EU market, 90% of cut roses to the UK market, according to this story. Kenya supplies all of the green beans bought by UK supermarket chain Marks & Spencer, and 75% of runner beans.
However, due to concern about 'air miles', UK retailers have begun labeling produce flown in with an airplane sticker (though have not reduced imports). A study is cited, however, that Kenyan produce produces less carbon than European, because of the year-round sunshine in the former, vs. greenhouse-grown produce in the latter.
An NGO charges big Kenyan flower produces of worker exploitation and exposure to poisonous chemicals.
See BBC story here about a timelapse camera at Kew Gardens, London, which captures images over the long term which help to show evidence of climate change. Such a device could be solar powered, but would require continuous access to the Internet, or intermittent access with an image cache.
