NAIROBI, Kenya (PAMACC News) - Individuals, communities, civil society, businesses and governments around the world marked World Environment Day under the theme #OnlyOneEarth, with official celebrations held in Stockholm and host country Sweden announcing a ban on issuing new licenses for the extraction of coal, oil, and natural gas from 1 July this year to protect people and planet.
Announcing the ban at the official Word Environment Day celebrations in Stockholm, Sweden’s Minister for Climate and the Environment, Annika Strandhäll, said, “Making the green jobs of the future by accelerating the climate transition is one of the top priorities for the Swedish government. As part of our efforts to implement our climate ambitions, we must take actions against activities that have a negative impact on our health and our environment.”
“Our message to the global community is clear. The winners in the global race will be the ones that speed up the transition, not the ones that lag behind and cling to a dependency on fossil fuels,” she added.
Tens of millions of people around the world joined global conversations on social media demanding urgent action to conserve and restore the environment. Tens of thousands organized their own activities, including the planting of millions of trees, cleaning trash and taking actions to highlight that there is #OnlyOneEarth.
2022 marks the 49th time World Environment Day has been celebrated. It was established following the UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972, and is celebrated annually on 5 June, with a different country hosting it each year. This year’s theme – #OnlyOneEarth – mirrors the theme of the first World Environment Day in 1973. It calls for collective, transformative action on a global scale to celebrate, protect and restore our planet.
“Fifty years ago, the world’s leaders came together at the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment and committed to protecting the planet. But we are far from succeeding. We can no longer ignore the alarm bells that ring louder every day,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said in his World Environment Day message.
“The recent Stockholm+50 environment meeting reiterated that all 17 Sustainable Development Goals rely on a healthy planet,” he added. “We must all take responsibility to avert the catastrophe being wrought by the triple crises of climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss.”
The official event, held at the Tekniska Museet in Stockholm, included a discussion between Ms. Strandhäll, Inger Andersen, Executive Director of the UN Environment Programme, and young people.
“The triple planetary crisis is accelerating, and why? Because we consume 1.7 planets a year. We have only one Earth. We have to accept that we're not doing enough to protect it,” Inger Andersen, Executive Director of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) said at the event. “I stand before you because we have to do better. We know what to do. The science has told us we have to end fossil fuels. We have to restore nature to its full glory. We have to transform our food systems. We have to make our cities green.”
Around the world, countries and communities acted on World Environment Day to make a real difference to their environments. Religious leaders came together to sign a landmark appeal on climate-responsible finance. These organisations will only engage with financial institutions that are aligned with the Paris Agreement objective of limiting global warming to 1.5° C.
In India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the LiFe initiative to raise awareness about sustainable lifestyles.
New Zealand’s Government announced on World Environment Day that the Styx Living Laboratory and partners will receive $4.12 million of Jobs for Nature funding to protect the Styx River (Pūharakekenui).
Argentina has adopted the exotic invasive species national strategy, including joint management plans with Chile, while Paraguay will launch the Paraguay + Verde project to address climate change after receiving financial support of US$50 million from the Global Environment Facility.
To commence on World Environment Day, Singapore’s Quest Global, one of the world’s fastest growing engineering services firms, announced its Quest Global Pledge – a global reforestation drive. In partnership with One Tree Planted, the firm will plant 500,000 trees globally by 2025.
In conjunction with the United Nations Association Canada, and with funding from Environment and Climate Change Canada, an official event will launch a curriculum on Indigenous Conservation across Canada.
Uruguay announced that it will start participatory processes towards work on its second Nationally Determined Contributions towards the Paris Agreement Goals.
NAIROBI, Kenya (PAMACC News) - Individuals, communities, civil society, businesses and governments around the world marked World Environment Day under the theme #OnlyOneEarth, with official celebrations held in Stockholm and host country Sweden announcing a ban on issuing new licenses for the extraction of coal, oil, and natural gas from 1 July this year to protect people and planet.
Announcing the ban at the official Word Environment Day celebrations in Stockholm, Sweden’s Minister for Climate and the Environment, Annika Strandhäll, said, “Making the green jobs of the future by accelerating the climate transition is one of the top priorities for the Swedish government. As part of our efforts to implement our climate ambitions, we must take actions against activities that have a negative impact on our health and our environment.”
“Our message to the global community is clear. The winners in the global race will be the ones that speed up the transition, not the ones that lag behind and cling to a dependency on fossil fuels,” she added.
Tens of millions of people around the world joined global conversations on social media demanding urgent action to conserve and restore the environment. Tens of thousands organized their own activities, including the planting of millions of trees, cleaning trash and taking actions to highlight that there is #OnlyOneEarth.
2022 marks the 49th time World Environment Day has been celebrated. It was established following the UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972, and is celebrated annually on 5 June, with a different country hosting it each year. This year’s theme – #OnlyOneEarth – mirrors the theme of the first World Environment Day in 1973. It calls for collective, transformative action on a global scale to celebrate, protect and restore our planet.
“Fifty years ago, the world’s leaders came together at the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment and committed to protecting the planet. But we are far from succeeding. We can no longer ignore the alarm bells that ring louder every day,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said in his World Environment Day message.
“The recent Stockholm+50 environment meeting reiterated that all 17 Sustainable Development Goals rely on a healthy planet,” he added. “We must all take responsibility to avert the catastrophe being wrought by the triple crises of climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss.”
The official event, held at the Tekniska Museet in Stockholm, included a discussion between Ms. Strandhäll, Inger Andersen, Executive Director of the UN Environment Programme, and young people.
“The triple planetary crisis is accelerating, and why? Because we consume 1.7 planets a year. We have only one Earth. We have to accept that we're not doing enough to protect it,” Inger Andersen, Executive Director of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) said at the event. “I stand before you because we have to do better. We know what to do. The science has told us we have to end fossil fuels. We have to restore nature to its full glory. We have to transform our food systems. We have to make our cities green.”
Around the world, countries and communities acted on World Environment Day to make a real difference to their environments. Religious leaders came together to sign a landmark appeal on climate-responsible finance. These organisations will only engage with financial institutions that are aligned with the Paris Agreement objective of limiting global warming to 1.5° C.
In India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the LiFe initiative to raise awareness about sustainable lifestyles.
New Zealand’s Government announced on World Environment Day that the Styx Living Laboratory and partners will receive $4.12 million of Jobs for Nature funding to protect the Styx River (Pūharakekenui).
Argentina has adopted the exotic invasive species national strategy, including joint management plans with Chile, while Paraguay will launch the Paraguay + Verde project to address climate change after receiving financial support of US$50 million from the Global Environment Facility.
To commence on World Environment Day, Singapore’s Quest Global, one of the world’s fastest growing engineering services firms, announced its Quest Global Pledge – a global reforestation drive. In partnership with One Tree Planted, the firm will plant 500,000 trees globally by 2025.
In conjunction with the United Nations Association Canada, and with funding from Environment and Climate Change Canada, an official event will launch a curriculum on Indigenous Conservation across Canada.
Uruguay announced that it will start participatory processes towards work on its second Nationally Determined Contributions towards the Paris Agreement Goals.
ACCRA, Ghana (PAMACC News) - The African Development Bank Group’s Annual Meetings in May will focus on the impact of climate change on Africa and the need for a just energy transition on the continent, the Bank Group’s Secretary General has said.
Professor Vincent Nmehielle spoke during a virtual press conference convened to brief journalists about the agenda of the five-day meetings, to be held from 23 to 27 May in Accra, Ghana.
For the first time since 2019, many delegates at this year’s meetings: the 57th Annual Meetings of the African Development Bank and the 48th Annual Meeting of the African Development Fund, will meet in person.
Nmehielle said the theme, Achieving Climate Resilience, and a Just Energy Transition for Africa, was chosen to provide a framework for the governors of the Banks to share their experiences and engage in addressing climate change and energy transition challenges, as well as their policies and measures to deal with them.
“Governments will be able to show what their countries have done in this regard,” the Secretary General said. A key highlight during the Bank Group’s Annual Meetings will be a commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the African Development Fund, the Bank Group’s concessional lending arm.
The Annual Meetings will also serve as a precursor to the UN Climate Change Conference, or COP 27, which is being called the “African COP”, to be held in November in Egypt. Governments will once again lobby for the continent’s positions on climate change.
The Secretary General was joined by African Development Bank Acting Chief Economist and Vice President Professor Kevin Urama; Vice-President for Power, Energy, Climate and Green Growth Dr Kevin Kariuki; and the Director of the Agriculture and Agro-Industry department Dr Martin Fregene, who represented the Vice President of the complex. They answered questions from the over 80 journalists who attended the event.
Professor Urama emphasized the Bank’s role as a thought leader in Africa, saying the meetings would include three main knowledge events that would touch on topics such as building a digital economy, green jobs for youth and a special session on climate change that would include the launch of the African Development Bank’s African Economic Outlook for 2022 report.
The Bank officials fielded questions on a range of topics, including the Bank’s role in infrastructure development, Africa’s energy transition, and a $1.5 billion plan to avert a food crisis sparked by the war in Ukraine.
According to Urama, resilience was all encompassing. “The Bank will be focusing a lot more on infrastructure investments to build the resilience of countries, social resilience, economic resilience and also environmental resilience in general, including climate resilience,” he said.
Kariuki noted that the African Development Bank was no longer investing in new coal projects. “However, when it comes to gas, we do understand that Africa needs to address its energy poverty and in order to look at energy poverty, we need to look at all non-coal sources of energy…Therefore, from where we stand, as long as a gas project has been included in a country as part of Nationally Determined Contributions…then the bank will invest in those gas power plants,” he said.
Fregene said the $1.5 billion food plan would address immediate needs triggered by the ongoing conflict in Europe. The plan will support farmers with seeds and fertilizers in the next wet season which starts around October in the southern hemisphere. The Bank also has a medium- to longer-term plan to help countries build resilience, known as Mission 1 for 200, which will help farmers boost production to 100 million tonnes of food to reach 200 million people.
At the end of the session, Nmehielle urged journalists, as “partners and advocates for development,” to spread the word about the impact of the Bank’s work and to press their governments for the change they want to see.
“The Bank is a catalyst...The Bank exists to help regional member countries to achieve their socio-economic development,” Nmehielle said. “The Annual Meetings will be exciting. We look forward to seeing you in Accra,” he added.
PAMACC News: Mining, one of the main causes of the degradation of rivers and forests in the Amazon, can now be monitored remotely by journalists, scientists, and other concerned citizens. Today, the Pulitzer Center in partnership with Earthrise Media launches the Amazon Mining Watch, a platform powered by an algorithm that analyzes satellite imagery to detect gold mines and other open-pit mining activities in the world's largest rainforest.
In its beta version, the platform performs 326 million analyses of high-resolution images every 4 months, covering the entire Amazon region, which encompasses nine countries or 6.7 million square kilometers. The algorithm has identified an area with characteristics of mining activity the size of 6.8 thousand square kilometers. To get an idea of the size of the environmental impact, this area is equivalent to about four times the entire city of New York.
The Amazon Mining Watch platform is a partnership between the Pulitzer Center's Rainforest Investigations Network (RIN) and Earthrise Media. The two nonprofit organizations had already collaborated to investigate the alarming criminal expansion of gold mining operations in Brazil and Venezuela and, from this experience, they decided to expand their methodology to the entire Amazon region.
The AI model recognizes mining zones using topographical features, and therefore it is not possible to determine when using the platform which mining sites are legal and which are illegal. It is also important to point out that because it is an automatic detection method using satellite images, there are false positives. The main goal of Amazon Mining Watch is to encourage journalists, researchers, and activists to use the data as a springboard to further investigate the results, thus contributing to contextualizing the AI findings
How the algorithm was developed
Earthrise Media, an organization dedicated to supporting communicators and organizations in the use of geospatial analysis, enlisted high school students in the United States for "identification marathons" of looking at mines through satellite images of the Amazon. This human effort eventually "trained" the AI model to recognize the characteristics of an open-pit mine, making it possible for computers to distinguish between mining areas and other land uses, such as agriculture.
This statistical and computational model, known as an artificial neural network, was trained to look at patches the size of 44 by 44 pixels, an equivalent of 440m by 440m on the ground. It did this by looking at thousands of Sentinel 2 satellite images from the last four months.
In this way, every four months, Amazon Mining Watch will be able to update its analysis of the status of mining on Amazon.
The code behind the platform as well as the data generated is open to the public and can be downloaded for other uses.
Reporting from the analysis
The Rainforest Investigations Network (RIN) was created in 2020 by the Pulitzer Center to support investigative journalists in the three main rainforest regions: the Amazon, the Congo Basin, and Southeast Asia. In its two years of operation, the network has awarded 25 fellowships to reporters investigating environmental crimes, corruption, and the supply chains that drive forest destruction.
The Amazon Mining Watch platform originated from a series of collaborations with journalists seeking to expose illegal mining activity and document its impacts on the environment and Indigenous communities in Brazil and Venezuela.
One of these collaborations is the investigation “Illegal Mining Set Air Bases in the Jungle” (Las pistas illegales que bullen en la selva Venezolana)” published together by El País and ArmandoInfo in early 2022: The first story of the series Corredor Furtivo (The Stealthy Corridor) by RIN Fellows Joseph Poliszuk and María de Los Ángeles Ramirez.
