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Category: climatology

Warrior for our planet!

Commissioner Virginijus Sinkevicius:

Commissioner Sinkevičius is the youngest EU Commissioner appointed to the EU Commission. He is a Lithuanian politician, a European Commissioner since 2019. Prior to his appointment as Commissioner, he was the Minister of the Economy and Innovation of the Republic of Lithuania.

Andrea Macdonald founder of ideaXme Commissioner Virginijus Sinkevičius, European Commissioner for the Environment, Oceans and Fisheries.

European Commission:

The Commission helps to shape the EU’s overall strategy, proposes new EU laws and policies, monitors their implementation and manages the EU budget. It also plays a significant role in supporting international development and delivering aid.

Following the result of the European elections, and the mandate received from the European Council and the European Parliament, the Dr Ursula von der Leyen Commission put forward a set of ambitious goals for Europe’s future: climate neutrality by 2050; making the 2020s Europe’s Digital Decade; and making Europe stronger in the world with a more geopolitical approach.

On this ideaXme show the Commissioner talks of:

- His role as EU Commissioner of the Environment, Oceans and Fisheries.

- The new plans, policies and laws put in place to protect the environment, oceans and fisheries.

- The Commissioners work spearheading action on both the European and International levels.

- How the EU Commission creates laws.

- The importance of Public participation in the roadmap to creating law to protect the environment, oceans and fisheries.

#climateaction #climateemergency #climatejustice #climateactionnow #eucommission #virginijussinkevičius #virginijussinkevicius #environmentaljustice #chemicalsensitivity #ideaxme #movethehumanstoryforward #europeancommission

IdeaXme

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Here, he became an authority on the aurora, and after that the director of the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He later used his reputation and connections to establish the International Arctic Research Center. His look-away-from-the-crowd nature once made a writer describe him as Alaska’s climate-change skeptic.

Wearing suspenders and a button-up dress shirt, Akasofu would — every weekday until the 2020 pandemic — drive 3 miles into the university for a few hours. His workspace is a cubicle in the Akasofu Building. That sun-catching, metal-and-glass structure on the highest part of the Fairbanks campus houses a science institute — the International Arctic Research Center — that would not exist without him.

Akasofu’s Alaska journey began when he wrote a letter to Sydney Chapman, a British space physicist who lived a reverse-snowbird existence, living in Fairbanks in the winter and Boulder, Colorado, in the summer.

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Dogmatic individuals tend to form less accurate judgements thanks to a generic resistance to seeking out additional information, according to new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The findings shed new light on the cognitive underpinnings of dogmatic worldviews.

“We have never been so free to decide if we have enough evidence about something or whether we should seek out further information from a reliable source before believing it,” explained study author Lion Schulz, a doctoral researcher in the Department of Computational Neuroscience at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics.

“In turn, if we don’t check on quick and uncertain judgements, this can leave us quite vulnerable to misinformation. Understanding the mechanism behind such decisions and how different people approach them is therefore important when we try to understand the current societal climate.”

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Plant scientists have revolutionised science and innovation. Research around the cell or cell biology was born out of plant science.

Researching plants is vital for our food security, maintaining our ecosystems and in our fight against climate change. Plant science is equally important to generate new knowledge that breaks disciplinary barriers to revolutionise several fields of research and innovation. But despite its valuable contribution, scientists and prospective young scientists often overlook plant science. It’s because of this low recognition, plant science doesn’t get the same prestige as other disciplines. This is detrimental to the future of plant science as bright young students continue to choose a career away from plant science. I never considered studying plants myself — it was entirely accidental that I studied plant science.

In other words, scientists and prize committees question the influence of basic plant science across different disciplines.

But the fact is that ever since the early days of science, plants have been central to breakthroughs. Discoveries in plant science have enabled technological advances that we enjoy today. Therefore, I’m aiming to write a series of blog posts to highlight a few significant findings from research in plants. Here, I explain how plant research revolutionised the field of cell biology.

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While we are opening our preliminary discussion for the 3rd SRI World Congress, a number of questions and concerns are being expressed by the main space columnists, about what could be the philosophic setup of the space policy defined by the new US Administration, should it be confirmed the next December 14th. Though Joe Biden didn’t yet say very much about space policy, the most accredited plans foresee cuts to the budget of NASA’s manned space flight programs, in order to give more fuel to the observation of Earth, climate change, and environmental issues.

We are not against raising the budget to Earth observation programs, which are much needed in the current climatic and environmental situation. Besides Earth observation, space agencies should also begin considering the use of space technologies to mitigate the effects of the climate change and the environmental issues, i.e. active space strategies targeted to control the Earth climate.

However, the most important point to be duly focused is that the same priority granted to environmental space programs should be given to bootstrapping the geo-lunar space region settlement and industrialization. Space development is the primary strategy against the awful multi-crisis that is striking our globalized civilization: pandemics, economic, climatic-environmental, resource conflicts, migrations, unemployment.

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Greening the Desert / De-Desertification.

Ira Pastor, ideaXme life sciences ambassador interviews Dr. Paul Elvis Tangem the Coordinator for the GGWSSI at the African Union Commission, in the executive/administrative branch of the AU, headquartered in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Desertification is a type of land degradation in dry-lands in which biological productivity is lost due to natural processes, or induced by human activities, whereby fertile areas become increasingly arid, and may be caused by a variety of factors, such as climate change and over exploitation of soil.

One of the countermeasures for mitigating or reversing the effects of desertification is reforestation and in 2007 the African Union (AU) started the Great Green Wall Initiative (GGWSSI) Africa project in order to combat desertification in 20 countries across the Sahel and Sahara regions. The wall is projected to be 8,000 km wide, stretching across the entire width of the continent and has US$8 billion dollars in support so far. To date, the project has restored 36 million hectares of land, and by 2030, the initiative plans to restore a total of 100 million hectares. The Great Green Wall has created many job opportunities for the participating countries, with over 20,000 jobs created in Nigeria alone.

Dr. Paul Elvis Tangem is the Coordinator for the GGWSSI at the African Union Commission, in the executive/administrative branch of the AU, headquartered in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Before joining the African Union Commission, Dr. Tangem worked as Regional Enterprise Development Manager for Tree Aid International, a UK based international development charity. He also worked with The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (UN-FAO) as Technical adviser for the programs to promote different groups engaged in forest products based enterprises. He has also served with other organizations including Centre in Scotland, Environmental Justice Foundation, London, and the Watershed Task Group in Cameroon. He is also a mentor and coach, and is behind the establishment of well known start-ups in Cameroon, West Africa.

Dr. Tangem holds a BSc from University of Dschang — Cameroon, MSc in Ecology & Management University of Edinburgh, an Executive MBA from PGSM Paris, and PH.D in Business Administration, and several other certificates and diplomas. He is a member of several professional networks including Junior Chambers International where is a Senator, and a pioneer member of World Greening Alliance created by World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) and Elion Group in China.

On this episode we will hear from Dr. Tangem about.

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The UN population forecast predicts that by 2050 there will be almost 10 billion people on the planet. They’ll live mostly in cities and have an older median age than the current global population. One looming questions is, what will they eat?

The Green Revolution of the 1960s used selective breeding to double crop yields of rice and wheat in some areas of the world, rescuing millions of people from food shortages and even famine. Now, the fast-growing global population combined with the impact of climate change on our ability to produce food—increased droughts and extreme weather events many crops can’t withstand—points to the need for another green revolution.

Luckily there’s already one underway. It’s more decentralized than the last, which makes sense given there are different challenges surfacing in different parts of the world. A Norwegian startup called Desert Control has a running start on solving a problem that’s only likely to get worse with time.

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