I was just in Bonn for the mid-year meeting of the advisory bodies of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). For those who follow climate change talks, many familiar themes emerged.
I (Josh Galperin, Associate Director, Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy) have two forthcoming publications that argue against the growing "eat the invaders" or "invasivore" movement. Invasive species are a serious ecological and economic problem. The invasivore movement supposes that we can control biological invasions with a fork and knife. My collaborators and I see several problems with this argument. One of the leading problems is that generating enough culinary interest in an invasive species to actually impact its population will lead to cultural endearment. There are examples of invasive species, despite manifest ecological and economic damage, becoming important cultural icons. Even though it has nothing to do with food, the eucalyptus tree in California is one such example.
The following post, written by Professor Eric Biber and originally published on Legal Planet highlights problems of cultural endearment of invasive species by focusing on attempts to remove eucalyptus from the campus of UC Berkeley.
The United States Supreme Court didn’t do anything particularly interesting on Monday, May 13. All they did was issue a sound ruling on a reasonably simple legal question. The problem is that the facts of the case deal with thorny social issues that fuel the blogosfire: genetically modified foods and the role of multinational corporations.
In the our second annual Policy Workshop Webinar Series, we looked at “Emerging Issues in Shale Gas Development” with the help of a distinguished group of experts from multiple sectors and fields. In case you missed any of our events this year, or would like to review a presentation, I have catalogued our shale gas webinars and interviews, including links to summary blog posts and video recordings.
In recent decades, ambient levels of several different types of harmful air pollutants have fallen significantly in Canada’s urban centres, according to the report.
According to the internationally respected Environmental Performance Index (EPI), Canada is a world leader in this area.
[The Phillippines' Environment Undersecretary Demetrio Ignacio Jr.] said the [President's natural forsts log ban and National Greening Program] improved the Philippines’ ranking in the Environmental Performance Index from 50th in 2010 to 42th last year out of 132 countries.
The Philippines outranked South Korea (43rd), Australia (48th), the United States (49th), Singapore (52nd) and Israel (61st).
performer in the 2012 Environmental Performance Index Report of Yale and Columbia Universities. The Philippines ranked 42 out of 132 countries and outperformed South Korea, Australia, Singapore and the United States, Ignacio said.Paje reported that the Philippines has also successfully implemented clean development mechanism (CDM) projects to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through the use of environmentally sustainable fuel technologies.
He said the country is ranked 10th in the world in terms of number of CDM projects, with 59 registered with the United Nations. The country's success in implementing these CDM projects was also the reason why the Environmental Performance Index gave the Philippines a perfect score of 100 percent under the indicator for carbon dioxide per capita, Paje added.
“Good governance” has become a mantra in international circles. The consensus across a range of sectors is that good governance is critical to sound policymaking.
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