Sustainability by Design Conference 2012

The 27-30 November 2012 Sustainability by Design conference themes are Mobility: How we get around,Resources: What we use (water, energy, food, oil) and how we get them (delivery mechanisms, infrastructure etc) and Liveability: How and where we live (lifestyles, housing, materials etc).
Presentations will envisage where we need to be in the future and develop the strategies, the plans, the research and the new ideas, which will move us to a sustainable future. Where can you and your ideas, innovations, research and company fit within these visions and how can you help make them happen?

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Rio+20 talks move up a gear

The Rio+20 conference is making progress, surprisingly quickly. Now it's up to the politicians to engage in any further horse-trading, writes Vernon Rive
With preliminaries out of the way, the second phase of the Rio+20 Conference kicked off with a three-day session involving more than 115 world leaders, as well as high-level political representatives joining officials and advisers who have been driving the process so far.

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New Zealand's wind energy industry will generate major employment

By 2030 New Zealand's wind energy industry will generate employment and GDP on par with oil and gas exploration and extraction sector, or aquaculture.
A BERL report for the New Zealand Wind Energy Association, Economic Benefits of Wind Farms in New Zealand, is the first to identify current employment in the industry and its potential growth.

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How about a home wind turbine for your backyard?

A revolutionary wind turbine could create benefits not just for New Zealanders, but also for less developed countries.  Powerhouse Wind, the developer, expects to see its Thinair turbine on the market as a viable energy source. The power input from the turbine could potentially provide about half of what an average household would use.

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Australia needs to retain its carbon price floor

Amid tumbling international carbon markets and calls to weaken the carbon pricing scheme, Fergus Green makes the case for retaining an Australian carbon price floor.

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Fleeing Vesuvius: Overcoming the Risks of Economic and Environmental Collapse

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Although I have numerous tasks to get on with, right now I can barely drag myself away from Feasta’s latest book Fleeing Vesuvius: Overcoming the Risks of Economic and Environmental Collapse.  The book draws together many ideas developed over the last few decades and applies these to a single question – how can we resolve the complexity of inter-related issues we find ourselves in?

It proposes that the financial crisis affecting the world's richest countries since 2008 is a turning point in human history because it begins an era wherein economies will tend to decrease rather than grow. Incomes will decline because the natural resources required for growth - particularly oil, the lifeblood of the world economy - can no longer be extracted in increasing quantities. Why? Because the rising global demand for cheap fossil fuels is now head up against a static and eventually depleting supply.

Indeed, as this book shows, the financial crash itself was due to this irresistible force. Its collection of twenty-seven essays by well-known international authors, all leading thinkers in their fields, extrapolates out from this fact across interlinked areas: Energy Availability, Business, Money and Finance, New Ways of Using the Land, Dealing with Climate Change, Changing the Way we Live, Changing the Way we Think and Ideas for Action.

The solutions it puts forward involve changes to our economy and financial system, but they go much further: this substantial, wide-ranging book also looks at the changes needed in how we think, how we use the land and how we relate to others, particularly those where we live.

While it doesn’t discount the complexity of the problems we face, Fleeing Vesuvius is practical and fundamentally optimistic. It can arm readers with the confidence and knowledge they need to develop new, workable alternatives to the old-style expanding economy and its supporting systems. It’s a book that can be read all the way through or used as a resource to dip in and out of.

Timely, practical, and fundamentally optimistic, this is a must-read for anyone concerned with reducing our risk of environmental and societal collapse.

http://www.feasta.org/ Is gradually uploading a free online edition of this book and welcomes comments on each section as they appear online.

Freshwater cleanup urgent

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The Fresh Start for Fresh Water package of reforms announced by the Government in May, came out of the Land & Water Forum, which recommended these principles: More national direction; Limits on the resource; Good management practice; Efficient allocation and Transferable water permits.

To its credit the NPS uses an integrated land and catchment management model, with councils expected to work closely with local iwi and communities to develop ‘broad values-based narratives before focusing these down to actual standards based on: Safeguarding ecosystems and indigenous species; Reducing and avoiding over-allocation; Improving and maximising efficient water allocation and use; and Protecting wetlands.

By providing additional certainty around freshwater impacts, the NPS is expected to create greater efficiency in the resource consenting process, while at the same time  avoiding the ‘salami’ approach where a lot of small water uptakes and effects ramp up to being too much with regional councils and territorial authorities expected to work together.

However, the Green Party goes much further with the following urgent plan to clean up our rivers and lakes:

1. Implement clear, robust standards for clean water that set limits to the amount of water being taken from rivers and lakes, and the amount of pollution going into them. This will include a minimum standard for intensive agricultural practice, which is one of the main causes of our current water quality decline.

2. Introduce a fair charge for irrigation water through creating incentives for the efficient use of water by putting a fair price on its commercial use. This will help stop over-use of our precious water resources. A charge of 10 cents per 1,000 litres would raise $370-570 million dollars per year of which we would use $138 million to fund river clean-up projects by farmers and councils.

3. Support water clean-up initiatives by providing financial assistance to farmers and councils to help them clean up our waterways. This will create jobs that help the environment by funding people to work with farmers to fence and plant their streams to keep stock and pollution out of rivers. In addition, by providing financial assistance to councils to upgrade their sewage treatment plants so that wastewater no longer pollutes our rivers.