Wednesday-Night

More on Water and on Wednesday-Night.com
Water: A finite resource (with pictures and graphs)
Although water covers 75 percent of the world’s surface, 97.5 percent of the earth’s water is salt water; of the remaining 2.5 percent, most is locked away as groundwater or in glaciers.

Whenever the topic of water comes up, we are reminded of […]

More on oil See also Wednesday-Night.com Alberta and Oil Notes

August 25
The politics of sand
What constitutes sustainability?
(The Economist) IT’S official: extracting oil from Canada’s vast deposits of bitumenous sand is unsustainable. So, at any rate, Britain’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) implicitly concluded when it ruled that Royal Dutch Shell was misleading the public by describing […]

See also World Hunger , Zimbabwe
(Xinhua) Backgrounder: Key facts about G8 summit
A world of troubles to tackle
(The Economist) The G8 leaders, meeting in Japan, have many challenges but few tools
Pricey oil, the food crisis and the credit crunch: the new challenges either have their roots beyond the G8, or have quickly raced across […]

See also Global Monitoring Report 2008
More on Wednesday-night.com
Sub-Saharan Africa is a highly complex Region of 47 countries with 7 distinctly different colonial histories. It is also highly diverse, with more than 700 million people of at least 1,000 different ethnic groups. The Region is a critical development priority—it has some of the world’s poorest countries […]

See also Inland Waters Biodiversity and The Ramsar Convention on Wetlands and the University of Guelph Canada’s Aquatic Environments

Photo of the Coorong and Lower Lakes Ramsar site, around Goolwa.
July 25
Rising demands threaten wetlands
The recent surge in demand for food and biofuel has increased the risks facing the world’s wetlands, warn scientists.
A declaration by 700 […]

June 28, 2008
As drylands get drier and violence grows, new crises resembling Darfur will arise.
Jeffrey Sachs
NEWSWEEK
The world will experience a growing risk of conflicts over food, energy and water in coming years. The population rises each year by about 80 million people, with most of the increase in impoverished regions already facing […]

Genetically modified oilseed rape, one of the four main commercial GM crops. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty
Background: The Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety; SciDevnet GM crops and Agriculture & Environment; Monsanto vs Percy Schmeiser
Related posts and Food on Wednesday-night.com

May 24
Sowing seeds of discontent
Since the dawn of civilization, farmers have saved seeds from the harvest and […]

World Bank IMF
IMF’s Global economic prospects for 2009 (.pdf)
April 11
Climate Change Rises On World Bank Agenda
(Reuters Planet Ark) WASHINGTON - Climate change is now one of the World Bank’s top concerns because of its expected impact on health and economic growth in developing countries, the bank’s lead environmental economist said.
Latin […]

Commercial and residential buildings have huge environmental impacts. It is estimated that, in the United States alone, commercial and residential buildings consume some 65 percent of all electricity generated, 12 percent of fresh water supplies and 40 percent of all raw materials, as well as contributing about one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions.
Green Building refers […]

March 12
While we scarcely agree with the all of the thoughts voiced in this article - not all biofuel production is bad - , the point is that the impact of the biofuel craze on world hunger could become devastating.
(The Ottawa Citizen) The poor pay the price
David Warren
A few weeks ago I wrote in […]