Monday, May 21, 2012

What Sex Means for World Peace The evidence is clear: The best predictor of a state's stability is how its women are treated.


By Valerie M. Hudson. 24th April, 2012. Foreign Policy.

In the academic field of security studies, realpolitik dominates. Those who adhere to this worldview are committed to accepting empirical evidence when it is placed before their eyes, to see the world as it "really" is and not as it ideally should be. As Walter Lippmann wrote, "We must not substitute for the world as it is an imaginary world."

Well, here is some robust empirical evidence that we cannot ignore: Using the largest extant database on the status of women in the world today, which I created with three colleagues, we found that there is a strong and highly significant link between state security and women's security. In fact, the very best predictor of a state's peacefulness is not its level of wealth, its level of democracy, or its ethno-religious identity; the best predictor of a state's peacefulness is how well its women are treated. What's more, democracies with higher levels of violence against women are as insecure and unstable as nondemocracies.

To read more:

Fresh water demand driving sea-level rise faster than glacier melt Trillions of tonnes of water have been pumped up from deep underground reservoirs in every part of the world, says report


For three decades, Saudi Arabia has been drilling for water from underground aquifers. Engineers and farmers have tapped hidden reserves of water to grow grains, fruit and vegetables in the desert of Wadi As-Sirhan Basin. Photograph: Landsat/Nasa.
By Damian Carrington. The Guardian, 21st May, 2012

Humanity's unquenchable thirst for fresh water is driving up sea levels even faster than melting glaciers, according to new research. The massive impact of the global population's growing need for water on rising sea levels is revealed in a comprehensive assessment of all the ways in which people use water.

Trillions of tonnes of water have been pumped up from deep underground reservoirs in every part of the world and then channelled into fields and pipes to keep communities fed and watered. The water then flows into the oceans, but far more quickly than the ancient aquifers are replenished by rains. The global tide would be rising even more quickly but for the fact that man-made reservoirs have, until now, held back the flow by storing huge amounts of water on land.

"The water being taken from deep wells is geologically old – there is no replenishment and so it is a one way transfer into the ocean," said sea level expert Prof Robert Nicholls, at the University of Southampton. "In the long run, I would still be more concerned about the impact of climate change, but this work shows that even if we stabilise the climate, we might still get sea level rise due to how we use water." He said the sea level would rise 10 metres or more if all the world's groundwater was pumped out, though he said removing every drop was unlikely because some aquifers contain salt water. The sea level is predicted to rise by 30-100cm by 2100, putting many coasts at risk, by increasing the number of storm surges that swamp cities.

To read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/may/20/world-aquifers-rising-sea-levels?intcmp=122

Saturday, May 12, 2012

Population Pressure Impacts World Wetlands - Press Release CNRS


ScienceDaily (May 11, 2012) — The area of the globe covered by wetlands (swamps, marshes, lakes, etc.) has dropped by 6% in fifteen years. This decline is particularly severe in tropical and subtropical regions, and in areas that have experienced the largest increases in population in recent decades.

These are the conclusions of a study conducted by CNRS and IRD researchers from the Laboratoire d'étude du rayonnement et de la matière en astrophysique (CNRS / Observatoire de Paris / UPMC / Université de Cergy-Pontoise / ENS), Laboratoire d'études en géophysique et océanographie spatiales (CNRS / IRD / CNES / Université Toulouse III-Paul Sabatier) and the start-up Estellus.* To obtain these results, the scientists performed the first worldwide mapping of the wetlands and their temporal dynamics, for the years 1993 to 2007.

This study, which has just been published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, emphasizes the impact of population pressure on water cycles.

People and Planet: Full edit with the audience Q&A session



Sir David Attenborough full lecture about the planet.
RSA 2011



Friday, May 11, 2012

Melinda Gates' New Crusade: Investing Billions in Women's Health

Nigel Parry for Newsweek
Thanks to PMC for this article. By Michelle Goldberg, 7th May, 2012.
She plans to use the Gates Foundation's billions to revolutionize contraception worldwide. The Catholic right is pushing back. Is she ready for the political firestorm ahead?
In the 12 years since Melinda Gates and her husband, Bill, created the Gates Foundation, the world’s largest philanthropic organization, she has done a lot of traveling. A reserved woman who has long been wary of the public glare attached to the Gates name, she comes alive, her associates say, when she’s visiting the foundation’s projects in remote corners of the world. “You get her out in the field with a group of women, sitting on a mat or under a tree or in a hut, she is totally in her element, totally comfortable,” says Gary Darmstadt, director of family health at the foundation’s global health program.
Visiting vaccine programs in sub-Saharan Africa, Gates would often ask women at remote clinics what else they needed. Very often, she says, they would speak urgently about birth control. “Women sitting on a bench, 20 of them, immediately they’ll start speaking out and saying, ‘I wish I had that injection I used to get,’” says Gates. “‘I came to this clinic three months ago, and I got my injection. I came last week, and I couldn’t get it, and I’m here again.’”
They were talking about Depo-Provera, which is popular in many poor countries because women need to take it only four times a year, and because they can hide it, if necessary, from unsupportive husbands. As Gates discovered, injectable contraceptives, like many other forms of birth control, are frequently out of stock in clinics in the developing world, a result of both funding shortages and supply-chain problems. Women would tell her that they’d left their farms and walked for hours, sometimes with children in tow, often without the knowledge of their husbands, in their fruitless search for the shot. “I was just stunned by how vociferous women were about what they wanted,” she says.
Because of those women, Gates made a decision that’s likely to change lives all over the world. As she revealed in an exclusive interview with Newsweek, she has decided to make family planning her signature issue and primary public health a priority. “My goal is to get this back on the global agenda,” she says. She is sitting in an office in the Gates Foundation’s 900,000-square-foot headquarters in downtown Seattle, a pair of airy boomerang-shaped buildings flooded with natural light. It was here at headquarters late last year that she announced her new emphasis on contraception at an all-staff meeting, to thrilled applause.
Now the foundation, which is worth almost $34 billion, is putting her agenda into practice. In July it’s teaming up with the British government to cosponsor a summit of world leaders in London, to start raising the $4 billion the foundation says it will cost to get 120 million more women access to contraceptives by 2020. And in a move that could be hugely significant for American women, it is pouring money into the long-neglected field of contraceptive research, seeking entirely new methods of birth control. Ultimately Gates hopes to galvanize a global movement. “When I started to realize that that needed to get done in family planning, I finally said, OK, I’m the person that’s going to do that,” she says.

Uproar in NZ over free contraception plan


ABC News, The World Today, NZ correspondent Dominique Schwartz. 8th May, 2012
The New Zealand government is planning to offer free long-term contraception to women on welfare payments in a budget measure that is whipping up a storm of fury.
While some family planning organisations have welcomed the move, one poverty action group says it borders on state control of reproduction.
New Zealand has one of the highest rates of teenage pregnancies among OECD countries. A United Nations report last year also highlighted what it called the country's "staggering" rates of child abuse and poverty.
The government says it is committed to helping families break out of the beneficiary cycle by getting recipients back into education and jobs. To that end, it has unveiled a $230 million welfare reform package.

To read more:

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch Poses New Threat to Marine Life A landfill twice the size of Texas is floating in the middle of the Pacific, and scientists are starting to get worried.


Imagine a landfill twice the size of Texas, filled with junk, castoffs and other trash. Now imagine it’s floating in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

By Catherine Cooney. Time, Newsfeed, 11th May, 2012
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a swirling vortex of plastic and flotsam, stretches across a vast swath of the Ocean and has long been a concern of scientists worried about its effects on marine life. Now, researchers from the Scripps Institute of Oceanography have found that a sharp increase in debris floating in a region between Hawaii and California — dubbed the Eastern Garbage Patch — is significantly affecting the environment of one of the ocean’s smallest residents.
The finding, published Wednesday in Biology Letters, reports that a marine insect that skims the oceans surface is laying eggs on top of plastic bits rather than natural flotsam, which scientists are concerned could be replaced by debris in its habitat.

Top scientists urge governments to solve environmental 'dilemmas' Demand for water and energy, natural disasters and measuring carbon dioxide must be prioritised, leading institutions say


Flooding in Thailand in December 2011. Natural disasters have been taking an increasing toll in recent years – last year’s economic losses owing to natural disasters were the highest ever. Photograph: Damir Sagolj/Reuters


Fiona Harvey, The Guardian, 10th May, 2012.
The world's leading scientific institutions have urged governments to focus on three "global dilemmas": growing demands for water and energy, natural disasters and measuring carbon dioxide.
In a series of statements, the scientists recommended that governments should "engage the international research community in developing systematic, innovative solutions" to these pressing problems.
The heads of the national science academies of 15 countries, including the UK, the US, China, Germany, Russia and India, signed the statements, which are timed to be considered by governments at the forthcoming G8 meeting of the world's biggest industrialised economies, in the US.
They recommended that governments should prioritise the three areas they had identified, and work with scientists in order to develop ways of solving the problems.

To read more:

Monday, May 7, 2012

When Scientists Speak, Who Listens?


By Robert Walker, President, Population Institute. Thanks to PMC for this one.

Scientists get no respect these days. When they speak, no one listens. It doesn't matter how many scientists are speaking, what they are saying, or what their qualifications are, they get a fraction of the media attention lavished on a reality TV star or an American Idol contestant. Three thousand scientists and experts, including a number of Nobel Laureates, joined together and issued a warning several weeks ago about the planet and possible "catastrophic consequences" for global civilization, but Kim Kardashian and her alleged marriage woes stole the headlines. The Royal Society, the world's oldest and most distinguished academy of science, late last month issued a report on how increasing population and rising consumption are imperiling the planet. Sir John Sulston, the Nobel Prize Laureate who chaired the working group, cautioned about a possible "downward vortex of economic, socio-political and environmental ills," but his warning got less press attention in the U.S. than Mitt Romney's dog.
To read more: