Nairobi, 29
July 2010 - The United Nations Environment
Programme (UNEP) and The Nippon Foundation
today officially launched the 2011 UNEP
Sasakawa Prize to find the most innovative
environmental project in the developing
world - with a cash prize of US$ 200,000
awaiting the winner.
The UNEP Sasakawa Prize
is awarded every year to a grassroots organisation
judged to have made an outstanding contribution
to the protection and management of the
environment, and to social development.
The theme for this year's prize is "Forests
for People, Forests for Green Growth"
in support of the United Nations International
Year of Forests in 2011.
Of particular interest
to this year's jury will be projects that:
Promote the conservation
and sustainable management of forests
Contribute to a meaningful
reduction in carbon emissions caused by
deforestation or forest degradation
Maintain forest ecosystems
to improve resilience to climate change
Support development
among forest-dependent communities
Conserve biodiversity
and help protect ecosystems in forests
The UNEP Sasakawa Prize
is designed to nurture innovation and research
in green solutions to environmental challenges
by offering financial support to the winner.
The jury is especially interested in sustainable
projects that can be scaled up or replicated
elsewhere, thus helping to inspire others
to take a greater interest in protecting
our environment and to increase its scope
of beneficiary, especially in the under-served
rural communities.
By helping these entrepreneurs
scale-up their activities, the prize is
able to boost local economies and help tackle
poverty and marginalization, while promoting
the sustainable use of resources and ecosystems.
The winner of the 2011
UNEP Sasakawa Prize will receive the prestigious
award at a special ceremony to be held at
the meeting of the UNEP Governing Council
from 21 - 25 February 2011 in Nairobi, Kenya.
First awarded in 1984,
the UNEP Sasakawa Prize has helped nurture
a wide range of grassroots environmental
initiatives across the world, spurring fledgling
projects onto great success.
One of the recipients
of last year's Prize was Nuru Design; a
project that brings innovative lighting
solutions to rural communities in Rwanda,
Kenya and India. By replacing kerosene and
firewood lamps with solar-powered lights,
Nuru Design not only helps reduce the high
levels of CO2 produced by traditional lamps,
but also tackled the health and literacy
problems caused by a lack of access to affordable
lighting. Thanks to Nuru Design's efforts,
over 3,000 households in Rwanda are switching
from kerosene to Nuru lights every month.
It is this kind of innovative,
inspirational project that the UNEP Sasakawa
judges hope to reward in 2011.
Nominations will be
accepted until 30 September 2010 via the
UNEP Sasakawa Prize website: www.unep.org/sasakawa
For more information,
please contact: Lucita Jasmin, Head of Special
Events, UNEP Division of Communication and
Public Information, Email: lucita.jasmin@unep.org
Global warming pushes
2010 temperatures to record highsScientists
from two leading climate research centres
publish 'best evidence yet' of rising long-term
global temperatures
• Jeffrey Sachs: Obama
must take a lead on climate change
(447)Tweet this (264)Comments (490) Juliette
Jowit guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 28 July
2010 18.02 BST Article history
A Pakistani boy cools off as temperatures
reached 51C in a heatwave last month. Photograph:
MK Chaudhry/EPA
Global temperatures in the first half of
the year were the hottest since records
began more than a century ago, according
to two of the world's leading climate research
centres.
Scientists have also
released what they described as the "best
evidence yet" of rising long-term temperatures.
The report is the first to collate 11 different
indicators – from air and sea temperatures
to melting ice – each one based on between
three and seven data sets, dating back to
between 1850 and the 1970s.
The newly released data
follows months of scrutiny of climate science
after sceptics claimed leaked emails from
the University of East Anglia (UEA) suggested
temperature records had been manipulated
- a charge rejected by three inquiries.
Publishing the newly
collated data in London, Peter Stott, the
head of climate modelling at the UK Met
Office, said despite variations between
individual years, the evidence was unequivocal:
"When you follow those decade-to-decade
trends then you see clearly and unmistakably
signs of a warming world".
"That's a very
remarkable result, that all those data sets
agree," he added. "It's the clearest
evidence in one place from a range of different
indices."
Currently 1998 is the
hottest year on record. Two combined land
and sea surface temperature records from
Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies
(GISS) and the US National Climatic Data
Centre (NCDC) both calculate that the first
six months of 2010 were the hottest on record.
According to GISS, four of the six months
also individually showed record highs.
A third leading monitoring
programme, by the Met Office, shows this
period was the second hottest on record,
after 1998, with two months this year –
January and March – being hotter than their
equivalents 12 years ago.
The Met Office said
the variations between the figures published
by the different organisations are because
the Met Office uses only temperature observations,
Nasa makes estimates for gaps in recorded
data such as the polar regions, and the
NCDC uses a mixture of the two approaches.
The latest figures will give weight to predictions
that this year could become the hottest
on record.
Despite annual fluctuations,
the figures also highlight the clear trend
for the 2000s to be hotter than the 11000s,
which in turn were clearly warmer than the
previous decade, said Stott.
"These numbers
are not theory, but fact, indicating that
the Earth's climate is moving into uncharted
territory," said Rafe Pomerance, a
senior fellow at Clean Air Cool Planet,
a US group dedicated to helping find solutions
to global warming.
The Met Office published
its full list of global warming indicators,
compiled by Hadley Centre researcher John
Kennedy. It formed part of the State of
the Climate 2009 report published as a special
bulletin of the American Meteorological
Society by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration, which runs the NCDC temperature
series.
Seven of the indicators
rose over the last few decades, indicating
"clear warming trends", although
these all included annual fluctuations up
and down. One of these was air temperature
over land – including data from the Climatic
Research Unit at the UEA, whose figures
were under scrutiny after hacked emails
were posted online in November 2009, but
the graphic also included figures from six
other research groups all showing the same
overall trends despite annual differences.
The other six rising
indicators were sea surface temperatures,
collected by six groups; ocean heat to 700m
depth from seven groups; air temperatures
over oceans (five data sets); the tropospheric
temperature in the atmosphere up to 1km
up (seven); humidity caused by warmer air
absorbing more moisture (three); and sea
level rise as hotter oceans expand and ice
melts (six).
Another four indicators
showed declining figures over time, again
consistent with global warming: northern
hemisphere snow cover (two data sets), Arctic
sea ice extent (three); glacier mass loss
(four); and the temperature of the stratosphere.
This last cooling effect is caused by a
decline in ozone in the stratosphere which
prevents it absorbing as much ultraviolet
radiation from the sun above.
One key data set omitted
was sea ice in the Antarctic, because it
was increasing in some areas and decreasing
in others, due to reduced ozone causing
changes in wind patterns and sea-surface
circulation. This data set showed no clear
trend, said Stott. These figures were also
in the last report from the UN's Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007.
"It's not that
the IPCC didn't look at this data, of course
they did, but they didn't put it all together
in one place," he added.
The cause of the warming
was "dominated" by greenhouse
gases emitted by human activity, said Stott.
"It's possible there's some [other]
process which can amplify other effects,
such as radiation from the sun, [but] the
evidence is so clear the chance there's
something we haven't thought of seems to
be getting smaller and smaller," he
said.
