Archive for March, 2009

IISD’s Richard Grosshans has spent the past few years studying Canada’s Netley-Libau Marsh and is now working on interesting research that offers potential for multiple environmental and economic benefits for Manitoba’s Lake Winnipeg and beyond.

Netley-Libau Marsh is one of the largest freshwater coastal wetlands in Canada, located at the south end of Lake Winnipeg-the most environmentally damaged large lake in the world.

Grosshans believes the harvesting of cattails can improve habitat, aid nutrient removal, and produce renewable feedstock for bioenergy. At the same time, the production and harvest of cattails could help improve the quality of water flowing into the lake.

He presented his work last week to the 2^nd Annual Biomass Workshop at the University of Manitoba: Cattails for Nutrient Removal and Bioenergy – Current research on Netley-Libau Marsh. The event was hosted by Manitoba Agriculture, Food and Rural Initiatives and attracted a cross-section of participants, including entrepreneurs.

IISD’s Matthew McCandless also attended the workshop to better understand how these new alternative energy sources could create greater opportunities for sustainable agriculture and what impact they will have on such things as water resources.

McCandless and Grosshans are part of IISD’s newly established Water Innovation Centre, which will act as an international hub of knowledge for water management. Its activities focus on the development of innovative watershed management policies and practices, and other policy tools. Lessons learned from Lake Winnipeg will be shared with the Institute’s international partners, to create sustainable and cost-effective solutions for watersheds around the world.

You can support the work of the Water Innovation Centre at CanadaHelps.

IISD’s Livia Bizikova is co-author of recently published guidebook for Canadian communities on adaptation and climate change. The work was produced as part of her postdoctoral work at the University of British Columbia, prior to joining IISD’s measurement and assessment program.

The guidebook will be of use to planners, decision-makers, local practitioners and to anyone interested in responding to climate change and building a resilient community. It emphasizes the importance of being proactive in creating responses that prepare communities for future climatic, policy and development challenges. It also provides additional reference materials, including: information on how to interpret the consequences of climate change; an extensive list of adaptation options available; a list of other published guidebooks; and several other resources available for consultation.

Canadian Communities’ Guidebook for Adaptation to Climate Change is published by the Adaptation and Impact Research Division (Environment Canada) and Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability (University of British Columbia.

The report recommends the following approaches to help communities build resilience to climate change:

• Proactive: adaptation actions should be proactive in a way that they help communities and local governments create responses that prepare communities for future policy and development challenges and local and global forces of change that include but are not limited to climate change.
• Participatory: adaptation responses often cut through diverse sectors, jurisdictions and expertise; therefore collaboration is necessary between stakeholders including researchers and experts from various fields, community representatives, private sector and many others.
• Flexible: as new knowledge about climate change impacts, effectiveness of adaptation responses, best practices and challenges both from climate change and development are becoming available during implementation, we need to have flexibility to tweak our adaptive responses
• Practical and empowering: many of the adaptation options are already familiar to decision-makers and communities, even if they are not explicitly recognized as helping to reduce vulnerability to climate change. Building on the familiarity of these actions increases the empowerment of local communities and decision-makers as they can see themselves as valuable sources of knowledge for developing their relevant responses to climate change.

I am happy to announce the 29th CSIN Learning Event will be on Data Visualizations and will take place on Thursday April 2nd 2009 from 11:00 to 12:30pm central time and feature presentations by Dr. Brian Eddy and Dr. Doug May. The event will be hosted using a virtual meeting room power by Elluminate Live!(r) 7.0. This Elluminate Live!(r) meeting room has been generously donated to CSIN by Thompson Rivers University. To Register: Please ensure that you have read all the system requirements stated in this email and then reply to csin@iisd.ca indicating that you would like to be a participant in this Learning Event.

About the Presentations:

Presentation 1 – Dr. Brian Eddy will focus on geovisualization and mapping of community-based indicators using Google Earth and a number of socio-economic variables derived from StatsCan Census data. This objective of this is to highlight the importance of ’scale’ and ‘locational context’ in working with quantitative indicators, and to discuss some of the implications this has in policy development related to sustainability and development issues.

Presentation 2 – Dr. Doug May will discuss the structure, data and analytical tools available in the Community Accounts. Community Accounts is an innovative information system providing users at all levels with a reliable source of community, regional, and provincial data. A public-wide, online data retrieval system for locating, sharing and exchanging information related to the province and its people, the Community Accounts provides users with a single comprehensive source of community, regional, and provincial data that would normally not be readily available, too costly to obtain, or too time consuming to retrieve and compile. This innovative system allows users to custom generate a limitless number of tables and illustrative graphics on key social and economic indicators organized by geography and data topic within a system of distinct accounts, while the Well-Being account allows users to compile indicators from each of the above domains to develop a better understanding of the factors that determine the status and progress of their communities and regions.

Biography – Dr. Brian Eddy

Brian completed his Ph.D. in Cybercartography and GI Science at Carleton University in 2006. In addition to his academic research background, Brian has more than fifteen years experience working in the geomatics industry covering a wide array of applications including geology, oceanography, land-use, biodiversity and protected areas; and most recently, mapping indicators of sustainability and wellbeing. His research focuses GIS-based mapping and visualization of sustainability indicators, and integration of human and environmental data frameworks.

He is presently developing a methodology for Fisheries and Oceans Canada for mapping indicators of coastal communities as part of their Human Dimensions of Large Ocean Management Areas program.

Biography – Dr. Doug May

Dr. May is Professor of Economics at Memorial University (Newfoundland and Labrador) with a cross-appointment in the Faculty of Business Administration and the Division of Community Health and Ethics in the Faculty of Medicine. He currently teaches labour economics as well as applied welfare economics.

Dr. May is a former Head of the Department of Economics (MUN) and Past-President of the Atlantic Canada Economics Association. He is currently a member of the National Accounts Advisory Committee of Statistics Canada and a member of the Canadian Index of Well-Being (CIW) National Working Group chaired by Roy Romanow for the Atkinson Foundation.

Much of his past research efforts in the area of productivity analysis were with Michael Denny (Toronto) in the areas of real value-added and homotheticity, productivity measurement and technical change, natural resources and regional productivity comparisons. His current research interests include sustainable community development, and the measurement of human and social capital.

Dr. May is an advisor to various departments of the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador. He oversees the conceptual development of the System of Community Accounts (SCA) (www.communityaccounts.ca). Currently his focus is on the soon-to-be-released Production Accounts, which measure productivity and competitiveness within the provincial economy.

Information on Software

When you log in for the first time, you may be prompted to download Sun Microsystem’s Java Web Start (or OpenJNLP for Mac), a pre-requisite for the vClass Meeting Room. You only need to do this the first time you use the Meeting Room.

Online Tutorial

First time in the Meeting Room? This tutorial shows you how it works and provides assistance in setting up your speakers and microphone.

Technical Requirements

The Meeting Room is accessible on both PC and Macintosh platforms. The minimum PC requirements are a Pentium II 266 MHz with 64MB of memory and a sound card. The minimum Mac requirements are a G3 233 MHz with 64MB of memory when using OS 9.0 – 9.2 or 128MB of memory when using OS X. Make sure the software requirements comply with your system and security settings http://www.elluminate.com/support/index.jsp.

To get maximum benefit from using a meeting room, users should have speakers or headphones; a microphone is recommended but not required. We suggest going through the initial download and setup at least 30 minutes prior to the start of the first virtual meeting you plan to attend.

How To Register

Please ensure that you have read all the system requirements and then email csin@iisd.ca and indicate that you would like to participate in this Learning Event. We will send you a confirmation and follow-up with a reminder and details on how to access the Meeting Room a few days prior to the Learning Event.

Cheers,
Christa

www.iisd.org
www.csin-rcid.ca

With the capture of rebel leader Laurent Nkunda and subsequent easing of hostilities in the eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo, wildlife rangers have been able to return to the Mikeno sector of Virunga National Park for the first time since September 2007.

This is good news for conservation: Mikeno is home to about 200 of the last 700 remaining mountain gorillas, and is an important ecosystem for the area’s fauna and flora. But it is also good news for the communities that surround the park and depend on it for food, fuel and other ecosystem services; wresting control of the park back from the rebels is one step towards better natural resource management in the area.

IISD’s Alec Crawford co-authored a 2008 case study on the park, which offers timely analysis and recommendations on what role the international community can play in this post-conflict state to protect this threatened environment.

Unless there is an integrated approach to addressing both the humanitarian and environmental issues, Crawford says hope and change will remain far from reality for the Congolese and a threatened environment.

IISD announced its new Water Innovation Centre at a meeting of Manitoba business leaders in Winnipeg, today (March 24, 2009).

Charles Loewen, IISD Chair of the Bridging the Gap Capital Campaign, made the announcement at a meeting of the Manitoba Chambers of Commerce, attended by Christine Melnick the Manitoba Minister of Water Stewardship.

The Water Innovation Centre will be based in IISD’s head office in Winnipeg, and will focus on the development of integrated watershed management policies and practices, economic instruments and other policy tools.

IISD will take the science of water management and turn it into policy. The centre will be headed up by IISD’s Henry David Venema, Director – Sustainable Natural Resources Management, with a world-class team of water experts, made up of members of its staff, associates and networks around the world. It will be a neutral, centralized coordinator that will provide technical, logistical and policy support to community groups and municipalities.

The centre’s first project will focus on Lake Winnipeg. This iconic lake’s watershed stretches from the Rocky Mountains in Western Canada to the edge of Lake Superior in the East. The watershed affects the lives of 7 million people and 17 million livestock.

It covers 90 per cent of the agricultural land in Western Canada-including the provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario, as well as the U.S. states of North and South Dakota, Minnesota and Montana.

Lessons learned from Lake Winnipeg will be shared with the Institute’s international partners, to create sustainable and cost-effective solutions for watersheds around the world.

IISD’s Oli Brown believes the time is right to revisit the topic of commodity income stabilization for developing countries and producers.

“The global economic crisis is an opportunity to rethink how we manage commodity markets to ensure they act as an engine of sustainable growth, rather than a motor for speculation,” he says in a recent commentary.

After a deep plunge in commodity prices, recent news suggests commodity prices have bottomed out and set to rebound, as the Reuters/Jefferies CRB Index of 19 commodities has rallied the past few weeks.

Brown says the financial crisis has exposed weaknesses in the world economy for which we are simply not ready.

“It is clear the increased sophistication of instruments and investors has allowed speculators to move large amounts of money in and out of commodity markets, increasing price volatility around a general trend. The highs have been higher and the lows have been lower.”

Brown says this type of commodity price volatility impedes poverty reduction, and has co-authored a book on what to do about it.

“The good news is there are a variety of mechanisms that can help producers and governments get more predictable, reliable incomes from their commodity sales. Many of them have nothing to do with any notion of price fixing.”

Find out more about IISD’s policy recommendations to tackle price volatility.

“If the present global crisis has demonstrated one thing it is how interlinked our economies have become. “

This is just one of the views IISD’s Mark Halle expresses as a guest blogger of the prestigious GEG Blog of the University of Oxford.

Halle says the world’s trading system needs to play a role in the transition to a green economy – a world characterized by growing equity and respect for social justice and human rights.

And he urges G20 leaders to move quickly to remove trade-related obstacles to that transition.

“The real political challenge is to accept that the game is up, the economic paradigm to which we were all taught to pay obeisance is dead, having not only failed to deliver social justice, poverty alleviation and environmental responsibility, but having failed even to deliver rigorous economic management. The rich did indeed get richer, but the poor got poorer as well as we built massive pyramid schemes of wealth divorced from productivity, marginalized millions and drove our climate over the cliff.”

Halle points to just two options – and only one is acceptable. Read the blog to find out more. Harnessing Trade for a Global Green Transition