BDPollution

With less than 13 days left for the Rio +20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable development, the question arises will this summit be the turning point or just a get together of world leaders thinking about how to cook their food or just fall asleep into discussions.

 

After all the conferences that lead up to this, it is expected Rio to be the last hope or as the slogan for this conference is “The Future we want.” The conference will focus on two broad issues

 

- Green economy in the relevance to sustainable development poverty eradication

- Institutional framework for sustainable development.

 

These two broad issues then have been broken down into 7 critical issues that will need a proper framework  to pave for a sustainable future. The issues are

 

1- Jobs

2- Energy

3- Cities

4- Food

5- Water

6- Oceans

7- Disasters

 

Each one of them are interlinked with each other making it harder to maintain some sort of equilibrium. It is said that it would cost $100bn to sustain climate change each year. So that would mean if such a proper framework is to be finalized at Rio(fingers crossed), then this money of $100bn would be spent tackling these 7 critical issues. Looks like we have to wait and see…

 

To know more visit the site at UN Conference on Sustainable Development..

 

 

 

       Having a personal connection to a wonderful campaign, although no more in touch with it that often due to daily life, I do still want to promote it when I can. So here I am talking about it. This year 10:10 Global came with a fantastic idea about recycling old things into reusable things and gave it a name that would go with it “REMADE”. This project will be observed in the month of April. All round the world wherever 10:10 reach goes, people will be working hard “REMADING”. As it goes, every country that is involved with it would have to come up with activities of their own to promote REMADE, and so in Dhaka, Bangladesh, the great team here will be organizing an international photography exhibition. Although the exhibition will be held at a later time, they will be receiving photos in the month. To know more I am posting the details below:

 

If you are interested in photography and want to do do something positive about climate change, then this competition is for you:

 

Categories:

• Category I: Natural wonders of our country
• Category II: Climatic disaster or climate refugee in Bangladesh
• Category III: The Urban Jungle

 

INTERNATIONAL CATEGORY:

• Category IV: Pictures of things REMADE (e.g. a photo of a repaired piece of clothing)

 

Submit entries to:

• All submissions must be made online as attachments to the following address: bd1010_photosubmission@yahoo.com

 

Submission deadline:  15 April 2012

ELIGIBILITY CRITERIA

• Participant must be at least 18 years or older

• Participants cannot be a member of organizing committee of 10:10 Bangladesh in 2011 and 2012.

• All photographs submitted must be from Bangladesh for categories I,II and III, AND all photographs for CATEGORY IV can be from citizens all over the world.

 

RULES:

Each contestant (Bangladeshi) may submit a single photograph or a single photo story in each category. A single photograph can be either colour or black and white. Photo stories must have a minimum of 3 and a maximum of 5 photos in each category.

Only non Bangladeshi participants can residing outside Bangladesh can submit one photograph/ one photo story in Category 4 and cannot send photos in catergories 1,2,3.

 

General guidelines:

• All pictures submitted must be taken by the participant following the eligibility criteria

• Images must be free of manipulation other than ordinary changes that might be made using conventional darkroom/digital techniques, such as spotting dust and scratches, changing color balance, conversion to black and white, adjusting contrast and other levels

• Composite images and photos with special effects, borders, added backgrounds, and/or embedded names (such as photographer names or agency names) are not permitted

• 1010 Bangladesh reserves the right to verify the authenticity of the submissions or the eligibility of the participant at any stage of the competition by any means and/or to disqualify images where post-processing is deemed to have exceeded acceptable photo-journalistic practices.

• Participants retain copyright to any images they submit to the contest

• By submitting images, participants agree that 10:10 Bangladesh will have the right to reproduce and print any images for the purpose of exhibition or promotion of 1010 Bangladesh

• Entries from Bangladesh will be returned.
• International entries will not be returned.

• Submissions for which have been selected for exhibition must pay a participation fee, the amount of which will be specified after primary selection or as earlier as deemed possible by 1010 Bangladesh.

International entries sent from outside Bangladesh are exempted from paying any participation fee.
However, any entries from non- Bangladeshi from within Bangladesh will have to pay a participation fee.
Non Resident Bangladeshis are also eligible to pay a participation fee.

• Images must be at least 2500 pixels along the longest side
• Images must not be more than 5 mb in size
• The single images must be named as following: category_name of participant_title of image (e.g. Category I_Tashique Alam_our future.jpg)
• For photostory the participant must submit a short essay in a separate document file. The essay must not exceed 350 words. The essay file must be named as: category_name of participant_photostory title. The pictures must be named as category_name of participant_serial number. Both the pictures and essay document must be kept in a separate zip/rar file, which is named as: category_name of participant_photostory title.

 

• In a separate document the participant must submit the following details
o Name of participant
o Age
o Gender
o Address
o Contact number
o Email
o Educational Institution (if student)
o Nationality/Place of birth

 

Selection:

After the end of submission deadline, the submitted photographs and photostories will pass through a primary selection. Only the results of the primary selection will be selected for exhibition. Selected participants will receive certificates as being part of 10:10 Global campaign AND an exhibition of their submissions. Further details following primary selection will be available shortly. We appreciate your patience and participation.

 

Prize:

To be announced shortly (SURPRISE) – (in addition to a 10:10 campaign Photofest participation certificates for selected entrants and an exhibition of the selected photography at the 10:10 Photofest 2012)

 

Venue: Dhaka, Bangladesh

 

Organizer: 10:10 Bangladesh, the Bangladesh wing of 10:10 Global >>>> 10:10 is a Global campaign building the world’s largest community taking positive action on climate change by reaching out to people, businesses and organisations around the world and encouraging them to cut their carbon emissions by 10% every year.

Web: http://www.1010global.org/
BD web: http://www.1010global.org/bd (sign up for the campaign if you haven’t already!)

10:10 Bangladesh facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/1010Bangladesh

For further inquiries write to: bd1010_photosubmission@yahoo.com

 

 

There are six different forms of asbestos that can be found naturally in soil and rocks around   the  world.Although asbestos is not dangerous when left undisturbed in the ground, mining or removal of the mineral can release asbestos fibers into the air, where environmental exposure can lead to serious illnesses such as malignant mesothelioma cancer and lung cancer.

Some types of asbestos, such as amosite and crocidolite, are usually found in their natural form in foreign countries like Africa.

However, environmental asbestos exposure in the United States is more common than many people understand, with rocky areas and mountain ranges being the typical spots of natural asbestos deposits.Large deposits of various forms of asbestos have been found in California, in the Rocky Mountains, in the Kootenai Mountains in and around Montana and also in other U.S. national parks and forests.

Unfortunately, many people unknowingly stir up naturally occurring asbestos while hiking and picnicking. Vacation activities such as four-wheeling through asbestos-contaminated hills can stir up the asbestos dust and cause inadvertent exposure. Once asbestos fibers are airborne, even walking through the area can lead to inhalation or ingestion of the fibers.

Although these fibers are natural, they are hardly harmless.

The six types of asbestos are labeled as carcinogens, and hundreds of other asbestiform minerals are thought to cause similar health problems. Illnesses that have been directly linked to environmental asbestos exposure include mesothelioma, lung cancer and asbestosis. Some cases of other cancers, such as ovarian cancer and laryngeal cancer, also have been linked to asbestos exposure.

To help reduce the chance that you are environmentally exposed to asbestos, you should take extra precaution while engaging in any outdoors activities in areas where asbestos is a known threat.

These are areas include Coalinga, California, Sall Mountain, Georgia and Libby, Montana. Be sure to heed any asbestos warnings posted in state parks and recreational areas, and avoid disturbing any rock or mineral deposits where asbestos may occur.

Another environmental exposure to be aware of is that of a damaged or imploded building. We’ve all seen on TV: hotels, office towers, parking garages, old sports arenas and civic center’s get imploded. One minute they are there, 30 seconds later they have disappeared in a carefully engineered pile of rubble.

All good, except: Old buildings have asbestos in them, and dust from these implosions is not good to breathe in.

The safety lesson, then, is not to be a spectator for or cheerleader of these implosions and also to stay away from the rubble afterward. Unless the building was abated before it was ruined, asbestos fibers are in the air and can be breathed in.

 

iPic Theaters is organizing a Film Festival Contest themed under “Earth Preservation“.   The winning video will have their  chance to get their video premiered at iPic Theaters  for a month. The winning contestant will also receive $4000.

How to get involved?

Create a short film on the theme of Earth Preservation with a timeline of two to six minutes. Submissions will be accepted from Jan 7th,2012 – Feb 10th,2012. Results will be published on Earth Day, April 22nd 2012. Time is running out as the deadline approaches. To know more about the event go over to the facebook event here.

*All applicants must be 21 years or older

Catch this post on the Bangladesh Section here.

 

When going green started out couple of years back, businesses were very reluctant not to go towards that. There was a myth that going green was a waste of money and just a business-killer. However over time becoming more environmental-friendly became an investment to companies in the long run.

 I worked on some technical aspects on green investments for businesses/industries in Dhaka and found certain things why it’s worth it

When it came to energy auditing, generally the entire energy flow would be mapped. Then after mapping that, you know where you are losing extra energy. So if you plug that portion of energy down, you save energy. So what’s the benefit of saving energy? Firstly you spend less fuel (with fuel prices increasing, you would be definitely glad if fuel was saved), you save electricity are just some places where you save. However the strongest motivation is money, and trust me you save a lot of money. For businesses

Saving Money    =    Profits.

 

Anyways I got an article from The Economist on as to why firms go green.

 

Link courtesy Julika Niehaus- Global Campaign Manager at 10:10

 

 

A program launched on Earth Day 2010, GreenMyParents  is a concept developed by young people to teach their parents and their peers to help the economy, earn money at home and to save the planet through simple everyday actions. When it started it targeted 100 kids to save $100 and spread through more kids so that through Earth Day 2011, it was intended to save $100 million.

Its actually simple! By following household efficiency and conserving energy it will take you a long way ahead in savings. They have also launched a book to give you tips on how to manage and be efficient. You can grab a copy at Amazon. Anyways to get a starter kit head down to their    website .

Chevron is back up against the ropes after a United States federal court judge denied a bid made by the corporation to stop Ecuadorian plaintiffs from collecting a damages award of $18 billion. Federal court judge Lewis Kaplan was asked to freeze assets owned by the plaintiffs until the result of a fraud lawsuit against the Ecuadorians was known. Unfortunately for Chevron, the bid was denied.

Adding to that, just a few days before the bid to freeze assets was made, Chevron was hit with one more nail in the coffin. An Ecuadorean appeal court upheld the $18 billion judgement over the oil damage in the county’s Amazon region. If the fraud lawsuit against the Ecuadorian plaintiffs fails, the oil giant has just one more option left, and that’s to make an appeal to Ecuador’s Supreme Court.

What caused the pollution?

The exact circumstances of the pollution in question happened under Texaco, which has been part of Chevron Corporation since 2000. Texaco developed and operated the Lago Agrio oil field in the country from 1972 up until 1993, and during that time it is alleged that they did not dispose of industrial waste safely. It has been claimed that Texaco released up to 18 billion gallons of produced water into the Amazon rainforest, leaving a toxic trail that damaged vegetation, killed wildlife, and caused a variety of sicknesses in the local indigenous population. An environmental audit of the area pressured Texaco and Petroecuador, the two companies that extracted oil from the Lago Agrio oil field, to fund a $40 million remediation program from 1990 onwards. In 1998 a scientific team took water and soil samples only to find that around half of the samples analysed still had unsafe levels of petroleum hydrocarbon in them.

Action taken against Chevron 

After years and years of campaigning, the Ecuadorian people finally managed to bring a case against Chevron in 2003. 30,000 Ecuadorean people were responsible for creating enough pressure and finding enough money to take on the multi-national corporation, and it paid off 8 years later. On the 15^th of February 2011, an Ecuadorian court fined the oil company $8.6 billion for polluting the Amazon rainforest and the consequences of the damage. It was claimed during the lawsuit that local cancer rates increased, and crops and livestock were lost to the pollution.

The penalty rose to $9.5 billion dollars once an additional 10 per cent for reparations was included, but the total sum requested by Ecuadorian plaintiffs ended up being $27 billion. The court granted $18 billion, and the result of the case set a precedent, because it was the first instance of indigenous people suing a multinational corporation in a court located within the country the pollution actually happened in. Environmental activists celebrated and saw it as a start to charges being brought against other companies that pollute developing countries without punishment.

Chevron fights back 

Chevron has opposed the fine since it was imposed, and filed a lawsuit against the Ecuadorian plaintiffs for fraud. The corporation believes that they have cleaned up their part of the damage to the rainforest, and they are being charged too much for the damages that have been claimed against them. Chevron has claimed that fraud and corruption have been used by the Ecuadorian plaintiffs, and the racketeering lawsuit they filed in New York in 2011 has yet to be decided.

This is not the first time that Chevron has been accused of illegal pollution, and they have even broken laws in America concerning pollution, namely the Clean Air Act. Other notable incidents were the 2002 oils spills in Angola that resulted in a claim for $2 million by the government of Angola for the damage. Only last year Chevron were prohibited from activities in Brazil after over 400,000 litres of oil were leaked into the ocean off the coast of Rio de Janeiro. The legal action that is being brought against Chevron in the Brazil case is demanding that $10.6 billion is paid in damages.

The controversy over Chevrons actions in Ecuador and whether they have been treated unfairly has been debated many times, but perhaps this new ruling is the beginning of the end to the case. What is certain is that no amount of money can turn the clock back and make good the damage done to the Amazonian rainforest.

–

This is a guest post.

Olivia Lennox is a green freelancer from London. Normally she’ll be extolling the virtues of tempurpedic products or the latest organic soaps, but she has her finger on the pulse of international environmental law too.

Happy New Year to all you! Although I doubt it this will be last New Year I will be wishing considering the fact that 2012 is supposed to be the end. Anyways no more about the impending doom,let me go on with my updates. I have been out for over a year and ever since I had the recent realization, it was time I came back. Although I have become much busier than I was, the fight must go on. So with that in mind, I have actually decided to expand my horizon.

 

Firstly I have moved back to my domain again, BDPollution , and will shift to that completely soon. I am going through a transition period where I will be posting duplicate posts one on Blogger and on BDPollution. Eventually once work on BDPollution is complete and is stable, I will probably close down Blogger.

 

Secondly when I began this blog I considered the international viewer ship, although over time, I have been meaning to consider local news and now that I now broadening my horizon, So I will be having a dedicated section on Bangladesh, which will be covering on Bangladesh’s environmental issues.

 

So hopefully have a lot of things to do and now back to regular posting..

I begin this post more than a year apart with great disappointment and a recent experience which reminded me how things might look like in the future. Why disappointed? The recent outcome of COP17 at Durban just makes it clear that even though with such visible changes about the environment, countries are still willing to fight over petty things. Although some say that this conference did somewhat have a positive outcome but nonetheless it reminded me of a similar conference that was held two or three years before where all the countries were in a rush to come up with a decision and in the end a three-page document was created containing absolutely nothing solid about proper climate change mitigation targets.

For rich countries, climate change sure does not seem like a big issue considering the current economic crises, and I understand that but for LDCs its a major dilemma. Least to say that they are the worst affected; such countries are stranded in the middle of a ping-pong court, just bouncing from one side to another. Hence I come to the point that reminded of a personal experience that I had recently.
I live in a supposedly posh area in Dhaka, and in such an area it is expected to get continuous water, electricity and gas supply or just to say the basic utilities. I never had complains about any of these issues unlike places in Dhaka where you would to wait in line to get water from the water authority.

So I was having this water shortage at my place and I remember that every time I would wake up from sleep to head to office, I knew if i was lucky that I could get a nice proper shower but that was not the case. I remember when I switched on the tap, it was clear only drops of water would fall, so I would quickly find a bucket to save as much as I could. From whatever water I saved, I would brush my teeth and manage to have a shower.

When I would get back from office, I could not even wash my hands, since there was no water. It became more than a necessity to me than anything, and not for lavish purpose of taking a nice long bath, but doing the basic things, like brushing your teeth, having a shower, washing your clothes, all of these things. Later eventually we bought water bottles, so that we could at least manage the basic necessities. It then popped in my head that buying water was cheap in Dhaka, hardly less than a dollar, if I consider a 5 liter water bottle. I know abroad that water is expensive.
For Bangladesh, water crisis is a norm, where a majority of people are used to it. Although not many rich countries are accustomed to such situations, with the effects of climate change, things will change.

So I started to imagine that the water shortage I had in a week, not having enough water to do the basic necessities will become a usual activity in the future. Water will become an expensive commodity and the people rich enough will have money to buy whereas for those who are poor would not be able to afford it. It might begin first with water territory issues then slowly will lead to war and so many more issues, and water is just of many problems we will face with climate change.

Hence with all of this disappointment and rabbles going on inside my head, I came to a realize that I almost gave up on the fight for climate change and with such outcomes at COP17 just made it clear that, the fight must go on and should never give up…