The Charcoal Project

Via Surfbirds News

With Madagascar’s priceless biodiversity on the line, a new report says “Go for it!” to USAID.

Twenty-five years of environmental assistance in Madagascar by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has achieved major progress in the biologically spectacular nation, but the gains are at critical risk of being reversed – and will likely be lost all together – if the international community continues to punish its government for the ongoing political situation.

That was the conclusion of a major new report which was commissioned by USAID’s Bureau for Africa, following the 2009 coup d’état in Madagascar and subsequent US suspension of environmental funding. The report, a comprehensive review of environmental assistance by the United States to Madagascar dating back to 1984, was produced by the International Resources Group (IRG), and launched at Conservation International’s (CI) global headquarters in Arlington this week.

Read the whole story.

A lesson in Coca Cola's World Cup video.

Does anyone know someone at Coca Cola?

We sure could use their deft marketing expertise as displayed in the video above made by the corporate giant for the World Cup! (Click on the image to play the video.)

Granted, selling the beautiful game loved by billions is easier than promoting energy efficiency technology and policies for the base of the pyramid.

Still, making a video that mists the eyes of the most hardened anti-soccer mysanthrope is no small feat.

While we wait for Coca Cola to helps us produce the perfect video that will help the energy-efficiency-technology-and-policies-solutions community tell its story (we can start by giving it a real name!) , we’ve compiled four slideshows recently published in the New York Times that we think help visualize the energy hunger/energy obesity world we live in.

Two of these four slideshows appear in Andy Revkin’s weekly roundup of green news on the NYT’s website.

Finding Design Solutions for the forgotten ones

William Kamkwamba attended the MIT sessions

The first piece is a slideshow narrated by the Time’s Andy Revkin reporting on the great work being done by Amy Smith at MIT’s D-Lab. We are thrilled to see that her annual sustainable design workshop has this year brought together folks from around the world to think about simple design solutions to many of the challenges faced by those living at the base of the pyramid.

This is a good opportunity to note that Smith was an early booster of our work here at The Charcoal Project.

No, really. These photos are worth more 1000 words!

Tibetan glaciers' vanishing act

The second piece is a more sobering slideshow about the dramatic recession of Asia’s Tibetan glaciers. The images are taken from a current photo exhibition at New York-based Asia Society. The idea of documenting receding Tibetan glaciers by matching photographic images taken from the same vantage point is not new. In fact, one of our scientists at The Nature Conservancy did this back 2005 using photographs taken in the first half of the XXth century.

Read New York Times columnist Nick Kristoff’s take on the images.

Add concrete, mix, and voila!

The third slideshow is titled China’s Instant Cities and the images speak for themselves.

Pizza delivery for Apt. 1,288,757 - A? (Photo: Christoph Gielen)

Quoting from the story intro: This year China will add more than 17 million people to its urban population. To house this unprecedented wave of migration from the country side, cities like Shanghai and Guangzhou are building countless high-rise residential towers at breakneck speed.

Climate Change? What Climate Change?

Finally, the last slideshow is a collection of images documenting the record-breaking heatwave that is baking many parts of the world, including our hometown, New York City.

We hope this selection of New York Times slideshow will help people who have the power to effect change to connect the dots because the time to take action is now!

Kim & Nina

OPINION

We almost choked on our first Red Bull of the day when we opened up our social media apps and stumbled upon this tweet.

How could we possibly not be excited by the influential David Roberts (Grist) tweeting about the UNDP’s call for greater attention to alleviating energy poverty as a key strategy to achieve the MDGs?

But, like a puzzled puppy who’s favorite chew bone has been taken away for no reason, we were disappointed by what we read when we clicked on the link: it was yet another lofty paragraph written in “development-ese” leading to a bunch of UN reports about how important energy poverty relief is to achieving the MDGs.

Hey, folks at the UNDP, a list of reports does little to sway policy-makers and public opinion.

To really move the needle on this issue we need a coordinated marketing, communications, and advocacy strategy that will engage public opinion and decision makers.

At The Charcoal Project we think a window for action will soon open up when the US Congress takes up discussion on a national energy (and climate change?) bill later this summer. This will be the time to lobby key Congressmen and Congresswomen to include language and funding that will address energy poverty alleviation beyond the borders of the US.

As we’ve written before on this blog, energy obesity and energy hunger are two sides of the same coin. What’s more, the technological and policy solutions exist, are proven, and require very little funding compared to, say, developing carbon capture from coal power plants (CCS), or a hydrogen economy.

This upcoming debate is a great opportunity for Ms. Helen Clark, the UNDP’s administrator and the first woman to ever run the agency, to load the bus to Washington with  some of the UNDP’s Goodwill Ambassador like Lebron James, Didier Drogba, Ronaldo, Maria Sharapova, and Antonio Banderas, and tell the folks in Congress how important the issue is and how easy and inexpensive it would be to make a huge impact on the 3 billion people who are still using caveman technology and fuels for their primary energy.

We think Zorro is the man to take on energy poverty alleviation.

Subject: USAID RFA – Supportive Environments for Healthy Households and Communities

Dear PCIA Partners,

Please see below for a recently released global Request for Application (RFA) from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) that may be of interest. Approximately 20 percent of the proposed work will focus on indoor air quality. The RFA lists “increased use of alternatives to cooking with biomass fuels using traditional stoves and/or increased use of housing improvements to improve indoor air quality” as a key environmental health intervention.

Best regards,
The PCIA Coordination Team

———-

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) seeks to award a five-year $100 million Cooperative Agreement, Supportive Environments for Healthy Households and Communities. This activity will support the further development, introduction, and delivery of high-impact interventions in the areas of water supply, sanitation and hygiene, and indoor air quality. The activity, will support USAID programs in achieving public health impact by improvements in key behaviors and environmental conditions.

For more information and to download the full text of the RFA, see:

http://www.grants.gov/search/search.do?mode=VIEW&oppId=55298

OPINION

Bill Gates last week joined the CEOs of GE, Bank of America, Xerox, Lockheed Martin, and others, in calling on the United States to modernize its energy systems with investments in cleaner, more energy efficient technologies.

With Europe and China eating corporate America’s energy innovation lunch, I, too, would be a worried CEO if I saw my country giving up the lead in the driver of all future global economic growth.

What seemed especially ironic is how the group’s exhortation could easily have come from the top CEOs of companies based in developing countries.

Listen to this:

“As business leaders, we feel that America’s (substitute the Global South, Developing World, or whatever you choose to call it) current energy system is deficient in ways that cause serious harm to our economy, our national security, and our environment. To correct these deficiencies, we must make a serious commitment to modernizing our energy system with cleaner, more efficient technologies.

Of course, the irony here is that industrialized societies and the climate change movement are adamant about not funding more coal fired power plants to meet the energy needs of developing countries. But that’s another story we’ve blogged about before, so let’s not go there now.

Quoting from their manifesto, the CEOs remind us that to “continue with the energy status quo, we will expose ourselves to risks that pose significant threats to our way of life.”

Alas, this is already the state of affairs for those who depend on biomass for their primary energy.  The irony of course is that the solutions exist, are inexpensive, and can be rapidly deployed to the great benefit of all, not just the energy poor.

While The Charcoal Project couldn’t be more supportive of this call to arms by America’s top managers, we hope they will also recognize the importance of promoting clean energy and improved fuels for the world’s 3 billion energy poor who are still burning biomass using 10,000 year old technology. 

Kim