Constantine Alexander's blog

EU LIFE project promotes effective communication approaches for encouraging waste reduction

Waste reduction is a top priority for the EU’s Waste Framework Directive and LIFE has been co-financing a major EU level initiative promoting waste reduction over the last three years. Using support from the LIFE Information & Communication component, the ‘European Week for Waste Reduction (EWWR)’ project has made beneficial progress in raising awareness about this important European policy goal across many countries.

LIFE’s inputs into the EWWR came to a conclusion recently with the project’s final conference, held in Paris. The conference focused on the important role that effective communication methods can play in promoting opportunities for reducing the amount of waste that society creates.

Speakers from six different countries (BE, IE, UK-Scotland, PT, IT & ES) presented and discussed a range of successful, often innovative, approaches to communicating waste reduction messages. Some 450 people attended the ‘EWWR’ project’s dissemination event, which was also designed to act as part of the LIFE 20 Years celebrations.

By networking such experience exchanges, the LIFE project contributed to other aspects of its work which includes providing an international platform for cooperation and knowledge transfer on low-cost/high-value waste reduction actions.

During the conference an award ceremony was held to recognise and applaud good practice examples of these types of waste reduction actions - which do not require significant investments but produce valuable contributions to the Waste Framework Directive objectives.

Janez Potocnik, European Commissioner for the Environment, congratulated the LIFE project and its award-winners through a video message that was broadcast at the conference.

Five prize categories made up the EWWR award scheme and these covered different types of waste reduction actions by: administrations and public sector authorities; NGOs and associations; business and industry; education establishments; with a final category available for EWWR actions carried out by other types of promoters.

Award-winners were selected from more than 7 000 different EWWR actions that took place during November 2011 in 32 countries throughout Europe and beyond. Out of these, 89 were pre-selected and submitted to an independent jury made up of European waste management specialists representing each category.

Austrian applicants from the agricultural and winery sector in Styria won the prize in the administration category for their efforts to increase the re-use of wine bottles.

Turkey’s Junior Chamber International Izmir took home the NGO award for an effective waste reduction project involving a beach clean-up as well as work raising awareness among schools, businesses and consumers.

Business & industry category winners came from Belfast in the UK, where a social enterprise providing student accommodation services received recognition for its successful approach to recycling materials and minimising carbon footprints.

Sweden’s Bjurhovda School Restaurant received the award for the best EWCC action in 2011 taken forward by an education establishment. Here, the focus was on reducing food waste through a novel approach to highlighting how much food could be saved by changing behaviour.

A project taking place in 162 nursing homes throughout France won the prize in the ‘others’ category. This initiative was acknowledged for its ability to encourage younger and older generations to work together to tackle waste challenges.

Full details about the EWWR award scheme can be found on the project website, which includes reference to the special additional prize that was awarded to the Catalan Waste Agency in recognition of its long-term achievements throughout the LIFE project’s duration.

 

FLAG: Fisheries Local Action Group

The new Priority Axis 4 of the European Fisheries Fund (EFF) provides support for the sustainable development of fisheries areas. In particular, it supports measures to promote economic diversification (tourism, food, renewable energy..) and an improved quality of life in areas affected by a decline in fishing activities. An important innovation in the implementation of Axis 4 is the emphasis on theterritorial approach, which encourages a focus on specific areas and seeks to mobilise local actors from all sectors: public, private and civil society, to work together as “groups” to design and implement integrated local development strategies.

FLAG: Fisheries Local Action Group

 

OCEAN, The Movie (video presentation)

The GoodPlanet Foundation  was created in 2005 to raise public awareness of environmental protection and to bring concrete solutions to the Earth’s ecological crisis. The foundation is chaired by Yann Arthus-Bertrand and today it presents its latest project the film Ocean.

Astonishingly, other planets such as Mars and Venus are better mapped than Earth, where a huge amount of water hides the topography of the ocean floor. Currently we can only attempt to map the sea bed using spatial altimetry, although it is only possible to measure the depth of the sea precisely in easily accessible areas. Yann Arthus Bertrand, President of GoodPlanet Foundation says that Ocean is a movie about love.

 

Remapping gang turf: Math model shows crimes cluster on borders between rivals

A mathematical model that has been used for more than 80 years to determine the hunting range of animals in the wild holds promise for mapping the territories of street gangs, a UCLA-led team of social scientists reports in a new study.

"The way gangs break up their neighborhoods into unique territories is a lot like the way lions or honey bees break up space," said lead author P. Jeffrey Brantingham, a professor of anthropology at UCLA.

Further, the research demonstrates that the most dangerous place to be in a neighborhood packed with gangs is not deep within the territory of a specific gang, as one might suppose, but on the border between two rival gangs. In fact, the highest concentration of conflict occurs within less than two blocks of gang boundaries, the researchers discovered.

The findings appear online today in Criminology, a peer-reviewed scholarly journal published by the American Society of Criminology, the world's largest society of scholars conducting research on crime.

"Maps of gang territories provide police with a better understanding of how to allocate resources," said research co-author George E. Tita, an associate professor of criminology, law and society at UC Irvine. "So figuring out the most accurate approach is really important for effectively deploying law enforcement."

Currently, law enforcement agencies map gang territories based on police observation of such clues as graffiti and where gang members hang out. In these maps, geographic features like streets, parks and schoolyards typically delineate gang territories.

For the Criminology study, the team used Lotka–Volterra equations, which were designed to model the population dynamics of species competing for common resources. Since the 1930s, ecologists have used the equations to study the relationships between competing groups as diverse as bee colonies, troops of chimpanzees and prides of lions.

The equations are based on the principle that competition between groups determines where the boundaries between rivals form, and even a tiny amount of competition is enough to cause territories to form.

"What's at work is a competitive balancing act where both gangs are trying to keep their rival as far away as possible," Brantingham said.

The model the researchers derived from the equation predicted that gang boundaries would form midway between the home bases of rivals and would run in a perpendicular line between them.

The team looked at 13 gangs in the 6.5-square-mile area of Boyle Heights, a densely populated neighborhood on Los Angeles' east side that is bounded by three freeways. Gang activity tends to be confined within the freeway-bounded area.

To determine the home bases for each gang, the researchers relied on a prior study by Tita and his UC Irvine colleagues. The locations of the home bases ranged from a specific street corner to someone's house, a neighborhood business or any other specific location where a gang gathers most frequently.

Using the Lotka–Volterra formula, Brantingham's team drew boundaries between the known gangs. Unlike law enforcement's maps, the resulting effort did not produce gang boundaries that neatly followed streets. Instead, the boundaries ran through the yards of homes and businesses and through alleyways. When the boundaries did land on streets, they were as likely to crisscross them as follow them.

Using police records, the researchers then mapped 563 known gang crimes that occurred between 1999 and 2002 and have been attributed by police to at least one of the 13 gangs. To their surprise, most of the crimes fell on the borders that the model laid between gang territories. When crime locations did deviate from the borders, they did so in a configuration that was consistent with the model. For instance, the theory predicted that 58.8 percent of the crimes would occur within one-fifth of a mile of the border between two gangs — or just under two blocks — and 87.5 percent within two-fifths of a mile of the border — or just over three blocks. Overall, 99.8 percent of crimes could be expected to occur within one mile of the border, according to the theory.

In fact, the team found that 58.2 percent occurred within two blocks of the border and 83.1 percent within just over three blocks of the border; in total, 97.7 percent of the crimes took place within one mile of the border between gangs.

"You would think that we're more complicated than other animals, so a model this simplistic shouldn't work, but I was surprised that it fit as well as it did," said co-author Martin B. Short, an assistant adjunct professor of mathematics at UCLA.

It's no coincidence that Lotka–Volterra equations would have bearing on the configurations of gang territories: The same forces that define territories in the animal kingdom also are at work in all kinds of rivalries between groups of people, the researchers stress.

"The findings match up with what we know about any conflict," Tita said. "Skirmishes tend to occur on disputed boundaries on which individuals, organizations or nation-states seek control."

The researchers plan to compare their gang maps with those derived by law enforcement.

The research, conducted in partnership with the Los Angeles Police Department, was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

UCLA is California's largest university, with an enrollment of nearly 38,000 undergraduate and graduate students. The UCLA College of Letters and Science and the university's 11 professional schools feature renowned faculty and offer 337 degree programs and majors. UCLA is a national and international leader in the breadth and quality of its academic, research, health care, cultural, continuing education and athletic programs. Six alumni and five faculty have been awarded the Nobel Prize.

Contact: Meg Sullivan
msullivan@support.ucla.edu
310-825-1046
University of California - Los Angeles

Better looking birds have more help at home with their chicks

		In choosing a mate both males and females rely on visual cues to determine which potential partner will supply the best genes, best nesting site, best territory, and best parenting skills. Credit: Katharina Mahr

In choosing a mate both males and females rely on visual cues to determine which potential partner will supply the best genes, best nesting site, best territory, and best parenting skills. New research published in BioMed Central's open access journal Frontiers in Zoology shows that male blue tits' (Cyanistes caeruleus) parental behavior is determined by female ornamentation (ultraviolet coloration of the crown), as predicted by the differential allocation hypothesis (DAH).

DAH makes the assumption that aesthetic traits indicate quality and arises from the needs of a parent's current need to ensure current reproductive success and the reproductive success of their offspring. Ornamentation and its maintenance is a cost which reduces energy available for reproduction, but without the ornamentation an individual may not be able to secure a mate. Ornamentation also plays a role in competition between males and between females, as well as signaling potential reproductive success.

But reproductive success does not only depend on the best genes and the best nest, it also depends on parenting skills. Researchers from Konrad Lorenz Institute of Ethology, supported by the "Sparkling-Science" Program, investigated the effect of female ornamentation on the chick-rearing behavior of their mates. Both males and female blue tits have feathers on the top of their heads which reflect UV light. After their chicks had hatched, female blue tits were captured and their crowns smeared with either duck preen gland oil containing UV-blocking chemicals or the oil alone.

Although the UV-blocking chemicals did not alter the behavior of the females, their mates made fewer hunting trips to feed their brood. However the males made the same effort to protect their nest and defend their chicks as males with oil-only treated females.

Dr Matteo Griggio, co-author of this study, commented, "This is the first study to show that male blue tit behavior depends on female ornamentation. Even though our experiment was minimally invasive to avoid partners not being able to recognize each other, the behavior of male blue tits in this study matched the DAH. DAH also predicts that less attractive females should increase their parental investment but we found no compensatory female behavior."

Reference: Female attractiveness affects paternal investment: experimental evidence for male differential allocation in blue tits Katharina Mahr, Matteo Griggio, Michela Granatiero and Herbert Hoi Frontiers in Zoology

Contact: Hilary Glover
hilary.glover@biomedcentral.com
44-020-319-22370
BioMed Central

Significant sea-level rise in a 2-degree warming world

The study is the first to give a comprehensive projection for this long perspective, based on observed sea-level rise over the past millennium, as well as on scenarios for future greenhouse-gas emissions.

"Sea-level rise is a hard to quantify, yet critical risk of climate change," says Michiel Schaeffer of Climate Analytics and Wageningen University, lead author of the study. "Due to the long time it takes for the world's ice and water masses to react to global warming, our emissions today determine sea levels for centuries to come."

Limiting global warming could considerably reduce sea-level rise

While the findings suggest that even at relatively low levels of global warming the world will have to face significant sea-level rise, the study also demonstrates the benefits of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. Limiting global warming to below 1.5 degrees Celsius and subsequent temperature reductions could halve sea-level rise by 2300, compared to a 2-degree scenario. If temperatures are allowed to rise by 3 degrees, the expected sea-level rise could range between 2 and 5 metres, with the best estimate being at 3.5 metres.

The potential impacts are significant. "As an example, for New York City it has been shown that one metre of sea level rise could raise the frequency of severe flooding from once per century to once every three years," says Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, co-author of the study. Also, low lying deltaic countries like Bangladesh and many small island states are likely to be severely affected.

Sea-level rise rate defines the time for adaptation

The scientists further assessed the rate of sea-level rise. The warmer the climate gets, the faster the sea level climbs. "Coastal communities have less time to adapt if sea-levels rise faster," Rahmstorf says.

"In our projections, a constant level of 2-degree warming will sustain rates of sea-level rise twice as high as observed today, until well after 2300," adds Schaeffer, "but much deeper emission reductions seem able to achieve a strong slow-down, or even a stabilization of sea level over that time frame."

Building on data from the past

Previous multi-century projections of sea-level rise reviewed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were limited to the rise caused by thermal expansion of the ocean water as it heats up, which the IPCC found could reach up to a metre by 2300. However, this estimate did not include the potentially larger effect of melting ice, and research exploring this effect has considerably advanced in the last few years. The new study is using a complementary approach, called semi-empirical, that is based on using the connection between observed temperature and sea level during past centuries in order to estimate sea-level rise for scenarios of future global warming.

"Of course it remains open how far the close link between temperature and global sea level found for the past will carry on into the future," says Rahmstorf. "Despite the uncertainty we still have about future sea level, from a risk perspective our approach provides at least plausible, and relevant, estimates."

Reference: Schaeffer, M., Hare, W., Rahmstorf, S., Vermeer, M. (2012): Long-term sea-level rise implied by 1.5° C and 2° C warming levels. Nature Climate Change [doi:10.1038/NCLIMATE158]

Contact: Mareike Schodder
press@pik-potsdam.de
0049-331-288-2507
Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK)

Cooperation in Rio Sets the Table for Transformative Action

Conservation International Statement on the Outcome of the Rio+20 UN Conference on Sustainable Development.

The following is a statement from Conservation International (CI) President Dr. Russell Mittermeier, on behalf of CI's delegation, regarding the outcomes of the Rio+20 summit :

"As the “Rio+20” United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development comes to a close, we leave this city with a positive spirit and expectant hope for the future of people and our planet.

"While participants arrived with modest expectations, viewed in the context of the Conference’s purpose and goals, Rio +20 delivered on its stated intent in the negotiating halls and produced some important and hopefully lasting results outside of the government delegates’ forum.

"Of greatest importance was the fact that for the first time we saw both governments and businesses explicitly recognizing that natural capital (biodiversity and ecosystem services) is the essential core element of sustainable development and that healthy ecosystems must be the foundation of human well-being.   This is an extraordinary and transformative change in mindset, as it finally moves the environment from a marginal issue to a central component of future development strategies.

"Rio+20 will also be remembered as a moment when 10 African nations, united under the Gaborone Declaration, emerged as global leaders to take the first steps to correct what has been up until now, a misguided development trajectory.  They were followed by 49 other nations, developed and developing alike, which collectively underscored the importance of natural capital to development, in supporting the Communiqué on Natural Capital of the World Bank with some 100 public, private and civil society partners.

"Additionally in Rio, the role and voice of business and civil society moved from the margins to the center, with the corporate world taking on a leadership role as a community unlike anything we’ve seen before. Also unique to the summit, non government organizations were included as active and valued participants - not mere observers - in defining a new development agenda. The green economy was embraced, not as a constraint on development, or an alternative to economic and social wellbeing, but rather as a fundamental underpinning – an imperative for the wealth and welfare of all generations and life on our precious Earth.

"Also of enormous importance was that, for the first time, the official and unofficial side events at this huge conference – an estimated 6,000 in all, became the main event, thanks to the great advances in social networking to amplify impact and ideas since Rio ‘92. The outcomes that were not explicitly written in the outcome text paragraphs were, in many ways, the main accomplishments of this meeting, and the sum total of all of those side events will multiply to deliver action in years to come.

"Over and over we heard global leaders strongly affirm that natural capital (biodiversity and ecosystem services) is central to sustainable development, and the fact that countries have now committed to implementing it through their national accounting systems is a major consequence that we will likely view as historic in years to come.  We must now address the issues of perverse incentives and subsidies and begin to account for negative externalities, or the hidden social and environmental costs of business as usual on our balance sheets.

"The role of protected areas also emerged in a major way, especially in the marine realm, where progress in the past few years has been little short of amazing.  Countries like Kiribati and the Cook Islands in the Pacific have created marine protected areas of 410,000 km2 and 1 million km2 respectively – highlighting these Small Island States’ globally important roles as Large Ocean Nations whose ecosystem services we all need. Australia, long a leader, has increased its protected areas coverage from 800,000 km2 to a staggering 3.1 million km2.   This has brought the blue end of the Green Economy concept into strong focus, and must also be seen as a new development stimulated in part by the buildup to Rio + 20.

"As always, the diverse voices of civil society were heard, both dissenting and supporting, but now more than ever before because of the new social media order. Their demand for action and commitment to hold leaders accountable is vital and valued.

"This “Rio+20” summit will be regarded as a moment when the global community -- as a collective – chose not to allow the desire for a perfect political outcome to prevent progress and action and when we recognized that prior agreements on climate, biodiversity and poverty alleviation must simply be implemented with greater urgency. It has provided new tools and a new affirmation that nature is an essential ingredient if development is to be truly sustainable over the long term.

"Leaders have set the table for the kind of development redesign we now need to follow. How will we respond to it?

"The Future We Want depends on urgent, smart, collective action. It is now up to all of us to get to work to deliver the future we, our planet, and our children all need."

• Download The Gaborone Declaration, May 2012
• Download Natural Capital Declaration