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CCCCC adds LiDAR to boost Caribbean’s Climate Change Fight

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Credit: Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre. Not for use without written permission.

Belmopan, Belize; November 30, 2018 – The Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre (CCCCC) through the USAID-funded Climate Change Adaptation Program (USAID CCAP) is about to launch its most recent initiative to significantly boost the Caribbean’s ability to limit the ravages of climate change by improving its capability to monitor and plan for physical changes to the land and marine environments.

On Monday, December 3, the Centre will launch a US$2million Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) System, acquired through the United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID) three-year CCAP Project.

The acquisition of an Airborne LiDAR system by the Centre – also known as the 5Cs – is possibly the most significant achievement for data capture in the Caribbean. For decades, countries of the region have clamoured for LiDAR produced data the high cost all but prohibited its application; and…

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CARICOM Unified on COP24 Expectations

caribbeanclimate's avatarcaribbeanclimate

The twenty-fourth Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate, known as COP24, will take place in Poland from December second to the fourteenth. The key objective of this year’s conference is to adopt the implementation guidelines of the Paris Agreement. It brings together world leaders and champions of the environment in a number of high-level events. Belize is part of the block of countries identified as Small Island Developing States. Last week, CARICOM member states of the grouping met in Barbados to prepare for the conference. The Caribbean Community Climate Change Center’s Carlos Fuller shares the region’s expectation of the event:

Carlos Fuller

Carlos Fuller, International & Regional Liaison Officer, CCCCC

“For us, COP24 is an important one because it is the most significant COP after the Paris Agreement, which will actually provide the rules of the Paris Agreement. So, when you read through the…

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Trickle Down Economics Vs Extinction

 

Homo Sapiens are a curious race, for although our name means Wise Man we have swallowed the bait of capitalistic Kool Aid with alacrity, and now fully subscribe to the theory that enriching the elite 1% will benefit everyone.
If this were not the heights of ignorance, our lack control over the fossil fuel industry and the imperial war machine will certainly be the our undoing, leading, in all probability, to extinction of life on this planet.
Let us therefore live a life in keeping with our species name and cooperate globally to save our Home World, this planet Earth.
Nicholas Robson, Cayman Islands, 18 November 2018

GCF signs off funding for Barbados water sector resilience project

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PRESS RELEASE – Songdo,

On 1 November, GCF and the Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre (CCCCC) signed the Funded Activity Agreement (FAA) for the project Water Sector Resilience Nexus for Sustainability in Barbados (WSRN S-Barbados).

The project aims to make the provision of potable water in Barbados less vulnerable to the impacts of hurricanes which have been increasing in intensity over the past decades. It involves installing a photovoltaic (PV) power generation field next to one of the main pumping stations, yielding a mitigation benefit from the reduced dependency on diesel-generated electricity. In addition, the installation of water storage tanks and rainwater harvesting systems in several strategic locations on the island will ensure that any disruptions in water supply do not lead to immediate loss of potable water to vulnerable populations.

Patrick Van Laake, Senior Ecosystems Management Specialist at GCF and Task Manager for the project, stated: “The 2017 Atlantic…

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Our symbiotic guardians: bacteria, viruses, yeasts, and other microscopic species who defend us.

A Doomsday Vault for Seeds Isn’t Enough, We’ll Also Need One for Our Germs

“These microbes co-evolved with humans over hundreds of millenia,” lead researcher and professor of Biochemistry, Microbiology and Anthropology at Rutgers-New Brunswick University, Maria Gloria Dominguez-Bello said in a statement. The 20th century is undoing all that good evolution, and as our microbiomes lose diversity and industrialization sweeps across nations, conditions from allergies to obesity will continue to rise.

(https://www.inverse.com/article/49529-microbiome-vault-for-global-health?utm_campaign=science-innovation-2018-10-03&utm_medium=inverse&utm_source=newsletter

Initiation into a Living Planet | Charles Eisenstein

 

Most people have passed through some kind of initiation in life. By that, I mean a crisis that defies what you knew and what you were. From the rubble of the ensuing collapse, a new self is born into a new world.

Societies can also pass through an initiation. That is what climate change poses to the present global civilization. It is not a mere “problem” that we can solve from the currently dominant worldview and its solution-set but asks us to inhabit a new Story of the People and a new (and ancient) relationship to the rest of life.

A key element of this transformation is from a geomechanical worldview to a Living Planet worldview. In my last essay, I argued that the climate crisis will not be solved by adjusting levels of atmospheric gases, as if we were tinkering with the air-fuel mixture of a diesel engine. Rather, a living Earth can only be healthy – can only stay living in fact – if its organs and tissues are vital. These comprise the forests, the soil, the wetlands, the coral reefs, the fish, the whales, the elephants, the seagrass meadows, the mangrove swamps, and all the rest of Earth’s systems and species. If we continue degrading and destroying them, then even if we cut emissions to zero overnight, Earth would still die a death of a million cuts.

(https://charleseisenstein.net/essays/initiation-into-a-living-planet/

Maya Farmers in South Belize Hold Strong to Their Climate Change Experiment

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In one of Belize’s forest reserves in the Maya Golden Landscape, a group of farmers is working with non-governmental organisations to mitigate and build resilience to climate change with a unique agroforestry project.

Magnus Tut a member of the Trio Cacao Farmers Association cuts open a white cacao pod from one of several bearing treen in his plot. The group is hoping to find more buyers for their organic white cacao and vegetables. Credit: Zadie Neufville/IPS

BELMOPAN, Sep 5 2018 (IPS) – In one of Belize’s forest reserves in the Maya Golden Landscape, a group of farmers is working with non-governmental organisations to mitigate and build resilience to climate change with a unique agroforestry project.

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Gallery

The Benefits and Age-Old Success of Waffle Gardens: A history on one of the oldest sustainable farming methods of the Southwest

UNM Sustainability Studies Program's avatarABQ Stew

Located in the arid Southwest, on the Southeastern edge of the Colorado Plateau lives the A:shiwi also known as the Zuni people. Zuni Pueblo is the largest of the nineteen pueblos in New Mexico and perhaps the most isolated. Zuni Pueblo and its farming villages are nestled in valleys surrounded by Jurassic, Triassic and Early Cretaceous mudstone and sandstone mesas. Since the time Zuni was inhabited their survival was dependent on what the land provided. They developed different types of farming methods that enabled them to contest the variable water availability and inadequate soil quality that is common in desert soils. These methods include terrace gardening, a type of farming that allowed them to use the hillslopes of the mesas to divert water among several stair case terraces. On a larger scale is a type of agriculture known as dry-land farming or run-off agriculture which farmers used to grow…

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Smith Barcadere – Smith Cove, Grand Cayman

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by Ann Stafford

Historic area

People came from West Bay by boat to Smith Barcadere. They cut ‘tops’, the new, unopened leaves of the Silver Thatch Palms that were plentiful on the large estate of J. S. Webster.

180725 Smith Barcadere, Jul.25-18DID YOU KNOW THAT? 58 Tidbits of Cayman’s History….

By Captain Paul Hurlston

The first sea going vessel ever built in Grand Cayman was built at Smith’s Barcadere by a carpenter who was shipwrecked on Spotts Reef. He was the carpenter on the vessel that brought Rex Crighton’s ancestors to Cayman. Tidbit 36

Dolly Well    There was a well in South Sound called “Dolly Well” located in Webster’s Estate somewhere in the back of Lemuel Hurlston’s old house on Antoinette Avenue. It was round and not very deep and where all South Sounders got their water. It has since been filled in. Tidbit 13

180725 Smith Barcadere

Plants

Rare, Critically Endangered Trichilia trees (

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Using one occupation to legitimize another.

Miko Peled's avatarMiko Peled

Legitimizing The Occupation: An Occupied Palestine is a Land Without Hope

One of the most important achievements of the war of 1967 was making the conquests of 1948 legitimate, and now it was about post-1948 Israel “giving back” or not “giving back” the territories it occupied in 1967. One clear example of that is the well known and totally ignored UN resolution 242, which was passed in November of 1967. It mentions “withdrawal of Israel Armed Forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict;” in other words, the territories captured in 1948, in violation of prior UN resolutions regarding Palestine and regarding the status of Jerusalem, became irrelevant as a result of the 1967 conquests.

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