The final design for a “doomsday” vault that will house seeds from all known varieties of food crops has been unveiled by the Norwegian government.

The Svalbard International Seed Vault will be built into a mountainside on a remote island near the North Pole.

The vault aims to safeguard the world’s agriculture from future catastrophes, such as nuclear war, asteroid strikes and climate change.

Construction begins in March, and the seed bank is scheduled to open in 2008.

The Norwegian government is paying the $5m (£2.5m) construction costs of the vault, which will have enough space to house three million seed samples.

For more information: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6335899.stm

Nigel sent in this article which appeared on Yahoo! news today - what do people think of this article? Is it really fair?

Supermarkets are scrambling to capture the millions of “green” pounds spent by increasingly environmentally aware shoppers.

Farmers’ markets across the country are buzzing with conscientious customers buying locally grown knobbly carrots and leeks pulled straight from the soil.

With the threat of climate change racing up the global political agenda, people are going green when they shop. And their sights are set on food miles.

“The concept of food miles has absolutely rightly entered into people’s consciousness in Britain,” says Bill Vorley, head of the sustainable markets group at the British International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) think-tank.

The idea of reducing food miles seems straightforward — simply buy produce which has travelled the shortest possible distance from farm to plate. Continue Reading »

As reported in the Guardian, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a group funded by Exxon Mobil is offering scientists and economists up to $10,000 to produce articles which discredit or emphasise the shortcomings of the report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The UN report was written by international experts and is widely regarded as the most comprehensive review yet of climate change science. It will underpin international negotiations on new emissions targets to succeed the Kyoto agreement, the first phase of which expires in 2012. World governments were given a draft last year and invited to comment. Continue Reading »

It seems like climate change fever is hotting up (no pun intended). In the last week, there has been a deluge of information and opinion about what’s going to happen and what the expected rise in temperatures are etc etc. There are still the doubters out there - I watched a broadcast from ‘Live with Larry King’ and there was a guy who thought that temperature rises would be a good thing and that global systems (such as the Atlantic drift) were driven by wind and not by temperature.

The UK government today announced that Al Gore’s ‘The Inconvenient Truth’ would be distributed to all english schools as global warming will be taught as part of the national curriculum. This is due to the clarity of the message and the scientific basis of the arguments put forward. Hopefully, seeing this film can influence a generation.

In other news today, BBC lunchtime news had a major section on global warming and interviewed one of their reporters (known as ‘Ethical Man’) who went on a vegan diet during January to examine the implications of diet on global warming. There will be full report on Newsnight later tonight. An interesting comment slipped out from the presenter, who, after stating he had been on a vegan diet, said “… the rest of us are not quite ready yet to go that far…” - the key word was ‘yet’ - in other words, some people are actually accepting that this is something many more people may have to do in the future! Bring it on I say!

In the US, Federal scientists have been pressured by the White House to play down global warming, advocacy groups testified Tuesday at the Democrats’ first investigative hearing since taking control of Congress.

The hearing focused on allegations White House officials for years have micromanaged the government’s climate programs and have closely controlled what scientists have been allowed to tell the public. Continue Reading »

The UK government have officially acknowledged that the production of meat and milk is more harmful to the environment and climate change than other foods because of the way they are produced, packaged, transported or cooked. Continue Reading »

Greenpeace: Car manufacturers are trying to sabotage a new European climate law that would force them to improve the efficiency of their new vehicles. But there’s time to act to make sure that Europe’s cars are cleaner and greener in future.

Last week in Brussels, a behind the scenes tussle was raging that had implications for the future of our planet. The European Environment Commissioner had intended to announce new measures that would force car manufacturers to produce more efficient cars.

European cars, he proposed, would have to reduce the average emissions of their new cars 120g of carbon dioxide per kilometre by 2012. It was a simple and attainable measure that would have an immediate impact on reducing Europe’s spiralling greenhouse gas emissions. Continue Reading »

Is it possible for communities to become sustainable ‘from the bottom up’? It seems to be happening in Calderdale in West Yorkshire. A group of activists have formed the ‘Calderdale Climate Challenge’ to help people work together to reduce their personal contribution to climate change at home, at school, at work and at leisure.

The group was boldly launched last year, with an e-briefing sent far and wide, including to the staff of Calderdale Council. The challenge was launched at the end of last year via an email newsletter which was sent to, amongst many others, 3000 Calderdale Council staff. The project is co-ordinated by Anthony Rae explains that in the Calderdale area, ‘Streets, homes and workplaces have suffered from the flooding, along with the disruption and expense that go with it.’

Calderdale is a hot-spot of sustainable activity - Treesponsibility work on ecological restoration, and have already planted 60,000 trees and hedge plants in the area. Local businesses can fund local tree planting through Treesponsibilty’s CO2mmitment programme.

The Soil Associations conference a few days ago was called “One Planet Agriculture - Preparing for a post-peak oil food and farming future”

The conference focused on the urgent need to develop new models of localised food and farming systems. This is in anticipation of the central role that farmers and growers will play in averting climate change and delivering food security in an era of scarce and expensive energy.You can download ‘PodCasts’ (also known as MP3 audio files) of some of the key speakers who between them put forward the case that we have reached ‘peak oil’ and then look at ways some communities are preparing themselves (Transition towns) etc.

If you don’t have the time to listen to all of the speeches, the most notable ones are:

• Energy Shortages: How soon and how serious? - Dr Colin Campbell
• Climate change and peak oil: The two great oversights of our time - Dr Jeremy Leggett
• Energy descent plans: The Kinsale and Totnes projects - Rob Hopkins

The last one by Rob Hopkins is particularly inspiring!

Download & listen to them here: http://soilassociation.org/conference
Rob Hopkins website can be found at: http://www.transitiontowns.org/Totnes/

From BBC News website:

Chief executives of some of the largest companies in the US have urged President George W Bush to introduce measures to tackle global warming. The executives from nine corporations said Mr Bush should support a mandatory cap on greenhouse gas emissions.

Mr Bush will address the issue in his State of the Union speech on Tuesday, but will not introduce binding rules for emissions, the White House says. President Bush has in the past rejected mandatory controls on greenhouse gases.

The US withdrew from the Kyoto protocol in 2001 (GreenVeg note:  although the US withdrew from Kyoto, several US cities and states have independently ratified the agreement. Concerns now however, are that Kyoto agreed CO2 levels etc are far too high to have a real impact on fighting global warming).

Read the full article on the BBC News website here.