Glacier Alarm Call - threat to Water Supply of Billions (UNEP)

United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) executive director Achim Steiner has called for adaptation strategies ranging from urban planning to improved water storage to be developed urgently in the face of intensified rainfall and glacier shrinkage, which the organisation warns ‘threaten the food security and livelihoods of hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people’.

Some glaciers put on a little bit, but most are loosing icemass at alarming rates. the "Water towers" of the East are increasingly under pressure, threathening the lives of billions of people.

Plant a Billion Trees Campaign 2007 (UNEP)

Happy to announce that we've completed our pledge of planting 10 trees (salix alba - knotwilg)in 2007. Camille proved to be very resourcefull: we know enjoy our weekly "aperitieverkes" near them, come rain or shine !

“The symbolism – and the substantive significance – of planting a tree has universal power in every culture and every society on Earth, and it is a way for individual men, women and children to participate in creating solutions for the environmental crisis.” Al Gore, Earth in the Balance

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has launched a major worldwide tree planting campaign. Under the Plant for the Planet: Billion Tree Campaign, people, communities, business and industry, civil society organizations and governments are encouraged to enter tree planting pledges online with the objective of planting at least one billion trees worldwide during 2007.

Facts & figures: Forests cover 30% of land

Stern and Sachs call upon UN to form urgent CO2 World Body

Source: World Bank Press Review

"A new international body could help in the fight against global warming but the need for action is too urgent to wait for one to be created, two leading economists and climate change experts said on Friday.
Nicholas Stern [former World Bank chief economist and current head of the UK Government Economic Service] and American Jeffrey Sachs both advocate urgent global action to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases that many scientists believe trap heat in the atmosphere with potentially catastrophic consequences.

Earlier this month, French President Jacques Chirac called for the creation of a UN environment body that would have more clout than the existing UN Environment Program, known as UNEP, a plan backed by 45 other nations but not the US, China or Russia. ‘

We probably will need some kind of organization,’ said Stern... ‘But we can't
wait for such an organization. We have to get on with it now,’ said Stern.

Sachs, director of Columbia University's Earth Institute and a UN anti-poverty adviser, said he favored creating a World Environment Organization, but

‘I don't believe it's necessary for solving this problem.’

Instead, the UN and existing agreements such as the Kyoto Protocol on curbing greenhouse gas emissions could do the job if world leaders took them seriously enough, Sachs said.

FRANCE JOINS UNEP’S TREE PLANTING CAMPAIGN

FRANCE JOINS UNEP’S TREE PLANTING CAMPAIGN UNEP has launched a second appeal to the international community to join its global tree planting campaign, “Plant for the Planet: the Billion Tree Campaign,” from France, with several French partners endorsing the initiative. The campaign, which seeks to help mitigate climate change and encourage environmental action around the world, has to date recorded over 157 million tree planting pledges globally, including 5.5 million in France.