Beyond Copenhagen

Read Benoit Vermander's take on the Copenhagen Climate conference
http://www.erenlai.com/index.php?aid=2944&lan=3

A Land of Steel and Iron

Amazing pictures of China: 'Showcase: Infernal Landscapes' by Lu Guang on the impacts of industrialization.

Also watch the flash animation introducing the city of Panzhihua (Sichuan) on eRenlai.com

A liquid asset.

In Taiwan, everybody strongly advises not to drink water from the tap. Even boiled water is not enough, as the water is said to contain excessive quantities of heavy metals. Most people here in Taiwan therefore filter water before drinking it, or even drink only bottled water.

But it looks like drinking bottled water is not so environmentally friendly either. Some environmental activists are actually calling to boycott bottled water, which they describe as a far more wasteful product than tap water. Mayors of some cities in the US are urging their citizens to drink water from the tap instead of bottled water.

And so arises my dilemma in Taiwan. On one hand, I would like not to buy bottled water or bottled drinks so often, but on the other hand, I do not completely trust the filtering efficiency of my house tap (since I moved in one year ago, I think we only have changed the filter once!) I sometimes use the fountain at the office but I do not really picture myself carrying liters of mild water from work to home!

On the official website of the Taiwan Water Corporation, it is said that although Taiwan’s rainfall is the triple the global average, only 1/5 of that rainfall is exploited. I am not trying to throw stones but it looks more like a problem of management than a lack of water itself. Furthermore, I have never seen any campaign against wasting water in Taiwan! A Spanish friend living in Taipei indignantly told me that he was surprised by the total absence of rules to avoid wasting water here, when in Spain basic ones like closing the tap while brushing one’s teeth are very common.

On June 26, the WHO published a report entitled Safer water, better health which depicts country-by-country estimations of the burden of disease due to water, sanitation and hygiene. According to this report, dirty water is the cause of 10% of deaths and 6% of illnesses in the world, with strong inequalities between highly developed and less developed countries. The report stresses the importance of clean water but also the fact that investments in drinking-water and sanitation can be highly profitable not only from the health point of view but also from an economical point of view. Its benefits come in several forms, such as healthcare savings, gains in productivity from such things as improvements in school attendance, time savings resulting from more convenient drinking-water and sanitation services etc. Thus, the total return on an annual US$ 11.3 billion investment would be US$ 84 billion per year—that is to say 7 times the initial outlay.

CQFD

Follow the flow:

An interview of Joël Cicéron, director of Veolia Water in Taiwan

Veolia: Water and Social Responsability

China's Water Challenge, a flash presentation by Sabrina Bourouga

Global Challenges of Water Resources, by Michel Camdessus

(Photo by Aurelie Kernaleguen)

Nominate 2008 Life Sustainability Awards recipients!

Dear friends,

You are invited to nominate recipients for the 2nd Life Sustainability Awards. eRenlai magazine and Renlai monthly will distinguish 9 people making significant contributions to life sustainability in Taiwan, thus helping to give a new image of Taiwan’s spirit and mission in the international community.

By “life sustainability” is meant the promotion of cultural and natural diversity through initiatives that foster community spirit, personal development and awareness of global challenges. Readers are encouraged to nominate recipients who have shown special creativity at the grassroots level and whose story proves to be an inspiration for other people. This year, their experience should at least illustrate one of these three aspects:
-some significant commitment to the fight against global warming
-promotion of cultural diversity by realizing or encouraging the encounter of different cultures
-participation in the enhancement of a healthier mental environment

The prices will be announced in Renlai monthly and its website on September 1st and the award ceremony will take place on October 4, during the international Forum on “Cultural Partnership against Global Warming: Taiwan’s Contribution” held by Renlai Monthly／eRenlai Magazine in association with ROC’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Council for Cultural Affairs, Taipei County Government and WeShare Education & Charity Fund.

Please nominate recipients before July 15 through email at awards@erenlai.com or by fax at 02-2365-4508. Nominations should include name and address of the nominated person plus a description of his/her achievements. Please, also leave us your contact information (telephone number and/or email address).

Today is the Lantern Festival in Taiwan

In fact it started yesterday but today is also a big day of celebration. New concerns rise among environmentalists as the lanterns sent into the air at the occasion may be a strong cause of pollution:
"Every year the debris from thousands of burned-out lanterns litters the Taiwan countryside. Some even ignite fires: In 2006, according to press reports, a sky lantern set a field on fire next to Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport, sending up huge clouds of smoke and forcing officials to temporarily shut a runway." (Herald Tribune, 20/02/08)

The debate opposes environmentalists and authorities who promote the festival as it is a very important source of revenue and economic development. The article also recalls that the lantern Festival is not the only Chinese tradition to be questioned : for example, some alternative solutions are also figured out about the burning of paper money for the ghosts or, in mainland China, authorities had to take some measures to prevent people from burning plastic cellphones or any kind of plastic objects as offerings for the defunt souls... As well, every year, some people show some concerns about the tradition of doing a barbecue during the mid-automn festival.

The "technological" alternatives such as virtually lighting a lantern on internet seem not to be satisfying for the moment... and if we'd just try to invent some new activities more eco-friendly to compete and maybe also to balance the negative effects of these traditions that people still cherish a lot?

Scooter or no scooter?

I have been living in Taiwan for two years and a half and I am a pitiful pedestrian. As a matter of fact, in Taipei, the pedestrian is not at all the ruler of the street. The true king of the streets (and the sidewalks) in Taipei is the scooter.
At first it could look practical to move about the city on two motorized wheels as a real urbanite! Scooters are fast, not that expensive in Taiwan and easy to park… Easy to park? Really? There are more or less one million scooters in Taipei for its more than 2,600,000 population which means that there is almost one scooter for every three persons in the city! I could verify this number on a smaller scale citing my Taiwanese relatives: my family of four members living in Taipei owns a total of three scooters and two cars!

Moreover, scooters in Taipei are also a notorious danger for pedestrians, bicycles and for themselves! At least half of the people I know have had an accident involving a scooter and it’s astonishing to see how much the radiography rooms are crowded in the hospitals. A friend of mine, a hard-practicing-scooterer, once told me that she has to frequently bypass the security driving rules because of other scooters! For example, Taipei streets have on the largest streets a special place designated on the ground where scooters can wait for the light to become green; according to my friend, there is always one scooter starting to cross while the light is still red, then all the other scooters have also to cross at once so half of the herd is already in the middle of the street and the other half is urging poor you in the middle to do the same… I can still point out that, although everyone shares the same instinct of survival, the herds’ ways of acting are perhaps not the best ones to preserve one’s life and, in this case, they especially do discourage any courtesy between the street users.

Also, in the motorized jungle of the city, the scooters and motorcycles have their own predators: cars, taxis, trucks and buses. A new trend of smoking completely the windshield of four-wheel drives so that the driver cannot be seen from outside just worsens the discrepancy between the hard world of the street person and the safe cocoon of the big car. Apart from the fact that the people outside have no idea if the driver has spotted them or not, it also appears to be a lousy way to drive and to interact with others. If “I” feel good, I do not need to worry about others’ feelings even less about their safety.

For your information: production and sales of cars doubled in 2007 on the Chinese market which is the second biggest in the world after the US.

No river, no fish

My father was born in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia in the late thirties. He left Cambodia around 1959 to go back there only in 1997. When I was a kid, my father would tell me stories about his childhood: for example, he used to go fishing in the Mekong only using a stick, some thread and a hook. “There were so many fishes that you didn’t even need a lure, you could just throw the hook into the water to catch a beautiful fish!”

How times have changed…

“In a story published in The Cambodian Scene Magazine (July/August 2005), the water levels of the Tonle Sap and its nearby tributary the Dang Tong Lake, were so low in May 2005 that residents in the area discovered an ancient tree, claimed to date back to the 11th century.”

This was extracted from Downstream Countries, an article on eRenlai about the draining and the pollution of the Mekong River. A little bit of geography: “The Tonle Sap is a combined lake and river system of huge importance to Cambodia. It is the largest freshwater lake in South East Asia and is an ecological hotspot that was designated as a UNESCO biosphere in 1997.” (Borrowed from Wikipedia’s article about Tonle Sap).

The Tonle Sap is also known because it reverses its flow once a year: the water is pushed up from the Mekong into the lake, flooding a large area and creating a huge pond ideal for breeding fishes! That’s why the reversal is also important for Cambodian people who celebrate the event every year. If the water keeps going down, it will not only affect the ecological system around but also all the people living and depending on fishing.

Today’s favourites
Downstream Countries by Moeun Nhean.

Conservation awareness by Prabha Gautam.
Prabha exposes the needs for Nepal to take the path of sustainable development.

China's Environmental Challenge

During one of these “café conversations”, when one is remodelling the world with friends, the topic turned to China's Environmental Challenge. In fact, China’s environmental problem is a concern for the world and not only Asia. Recently an article from Spiegel Online (China's Poison for the Planet 2 February 2007) pinpointed the fact that China was most of all “An export world champion -- in pollution!”

From a global perspective or an inside view, the question is also how much are the Chinese people aware of environmental protection’s necessity? And how do Chinese individuals perceive their natural environment? It would mean that it is not only a matter of policy decided by an upper governance because, maybe at the end, the decision to cut the last tree or to overexploit the resources is to be made by individuals. But most of the individuals have almost no influence on the policies made by institutions like the WTO or the UN. Still, in the Chinese context, it may be mandatory to start with a focus on education and with the reinterpretation of the Chinese tradition to achieve a better relationship between development and nature.

Today’s favourites
Climate Change: a Call for World Governance and China's Environmental Challenge
by Benoit Vermander, chief editor.

Climate change

”This year the weather is very weird, there are no more seasons!”

How many times does one hear this sentence! As for myself, I’ve heard it so many times, I think every year or even at every season’s change, to the point that I’m not even paying attention to it anymore. But climate change is a reality!

On February 2, 2007, a panel of experts working on the “Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change” came out with the most precise conclusions ever drafted on the reality, causes and impact of climate change.

Here’s an extract of the eRenlai’s summary of the report, which also gives you access to the PDF version of the whole document:

- “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global sea level.

- Eleven of the last twelve years (1995 -2006) rank among the 12 warmest years in the record of global surface temperature (since 1850). The 100-year trend (1906–2005) is larger than the corresponding trend for 1901-2000. The warming trend over the last 50 years is nearly twice that for the last 100 years. The total temperature increase from 1850–1899 to 2001– 005 is 0.76 C.”

Today’s favourites
Benoit Vermander, chief editor.
Climate Change: a Call for World Governance