Here is a brief article I wrote for Green Futures on moves multinational food corporations are making towards ‘sustainable’ palm oil procurement. 

Here is a brief article I wrote for Green Futures on moves multinational food corporations are making towards ‘sustainable’ palm oil procurement. 

I wrote a round-up on volunteering holidays in the UK for the Ecologist with some cool ideas for how to help the landscape and wildlife. Some of the trips involve getting stuck in on citizen science projects, collecting data for scientists to analyse. The cream of the crop (and most expensive!) is seabird and dolphin surveying on a live-aboard yacht in the Hebrides (pictured above).

I wrote a round-up on volunteering holidays in the UK for the Ecologist with some cool ideas for how to help the landscape and wildlife. Some of the trips involve getting stuck in on citizen science projects, collecting data for scientists to analyse. The cream of the crop (and most expensive!) is seabird and dolphin surveying on a live-aboard yacht in the Hebrides (pictured above).

Science journalism for teens

Today I created a Prezi for young students with tips on how to do research for journalism. This is for a group of teens working on a project for the launch of @KMBTweets’s new website Mad Science Magazine - a sister site to Better Bio. 

“…the most active seekers of mobile and online health and science news are Black and Latino parents and teen residents of inner-city neighborhoods, some even living alongside life science innovation districts. It is these untapped early adopters that BetterBio seeks to involve.” - BetterBio website.

Founder Khadijah Britton told me: “BetterBio is supposed to be for the parents, MadSciMag for the teens”. In both cases the mission is to involve people that aren’t traditionally catered for by the media to generate their own science news content. 

Here’s the Prezi:

Mad Science Magazine water quality research on Prezi

Last week, I wrote a news story based on a paper in Geophysical Letters for SciDev.net. The bare bones of the story is that a modelling study of West African rainforests and adjacent cropland found a pattern in local rainfall - rainfall increased by 4 to 6 times over cropland when next to rainforests, and fell by half over the rainforest.  Of course, rainfall in these areas is also affected by other factors such as ocean storms. But the local effect is significant, and, as I wrote in the SciDev.net article, can benefit farmers.  However, there is also a conservation aspect to this story. What happens to the rainforest due to the fall in rainfall is not known, and we can only speculate. But speaking to Tim Baker, a geographer at Leeds University, it was clear that he was concerned that the conservation angle should not be overlooked. One of the implications of the rainfall modelling study for farmers might be that they should deforest in a ‘patchwork’ or ‘fishbone’ way (read more about this in this Mongabay article). But Baker said: “There is so much deforestation in West Africa that the forest is already in many areas, such as Ghana, very fragmented.” FAO figures show that Africa has had the second highest rates of deforestation between 2000 and 2005. “So there is not a strong policy message to say that we should have corridors or a patchwork of deforestation rather than large patches,” Baker continued. “People talk about tropical rainforests ‘creating rain’ and being important because they maintain these cycles. It’s true, but it’s not just a forest…it’s a source of firewood, biodiversity, carbon storage…” he added.

Last week, I wrote a news story based on a paper in Geophysical Letters for SciDev.net. The bare bones of the story is that a modelling study of West African rainforests and adjacent cropland found a pattern in local rainfall - rainfall increased by 4 to 6 times over cropland when next to rainforests, and fell by half over the rainforest. 

Of course, rainfall in these areas is also affected by other factors such as ocean storms. But the local effect is significant, and, as I wrote in the SciDev.net article, can benefit farmers. 

However, there is also a conservation aspect to this story. What happens to the rainforest due to the fall in rainfall is not known, and we can only speculate. But speaking to Tim Baker, a geographer at Leeds University, it was clear that he was concerned that the conservation angle should not be overlooked.

One of the implications of the rainfall modelling study for farmers might be that they should deforest in a ‘patchwork’ or ‘fishbone’ way (read more about this in this Mongabay article). But Baker said: “There is so much deforestation in West Africa that the forest is already in many areas, such as Ghana, very fragmented.” FAO figures show that Africa has had the second highest rates of deforestation between 2000 and 2005. “So there is not a strong policy message to say that we should have corridors or a patchwork of deforestation rather than large patches,” Baker continued.

“People talk about tropical rainforests ‘creating rain’ and being important because they maintain these cycles. It’s true, but it’s not just a forest…it’s a source of firewood, biodiversity, carbon storage…” he added.

Government agencies are often responsible for regulating - or rather failing to regulate - the industry that is causing the damage

Michael Mansfield QC on how a real ecocide trial woud differ from the mock ecocide trial. Listen to the full Audioboo below.

Comment from Michael Mansfield QC (mp3)

I’ve been experimenting with different social media on my Scientific American blog Creatology. I based both posts on the radical (but do-able) idea of making a new international law of ‘ecocide’ based around a mock trial at the Supreme Court in London. I live-blogged the trial on Storify, and included obervations, tweets, interviews and images to give a multi-dimensional feel to what was going on on the day. I also published a Dipity timeline of environmental law and environmental disasters to show the history behind how we got ourselves into the kind of mess where we need to make ecocide a crime in the first place, what kinds of environmental laws work and how, eco-disasters, and recent environmental trials and outcomes.

I’ve been experimenting with different social media on my Scientific American blog Creatology. I based both posts on the radical (but do-able) idea of making a new international law of ‘ecocide’ based around a mock trial at the Supreme Court in London.

I live-blogged the trial on Storify, and included obervations, tweets, interviews and images to give a multi-dimensional feel to what was going on on the day.

I also published a Dipity timeline of environmental law and environmental disasters to show the history behind how we got ourselves into the kind of mess where we need to make ecocide a crime in the first place, what kinds of environmental laws work and how, eco-disasters, and recent environmental trials and outcomes.

Reading the Riots

I’ve been working for the past couple of weeks as a data researcher for the Guardian and LSE’s Reading the Riots project. I am really glad to have been involved in such an important study, inspired by the social research done after the violent Detroit riot in 1967. 

I live in East London, and was following the riots in London and around the country on the Guardian’s excellent liveblogs and on Twitter. When disturbances happened just down the road from where I live, I decided to Storify it rather than go out - which I thought was too risky. I published Tweets and images from sources that appeared authentic and information that was verified by images from other people. For instance, some of these sources were taking pictures from the flats on the high street above where the action was taking place - so they were eyewitnesses. This exercise brought home the whole question of verification of social media: is it better to stay ahead of the news curve and publish what you think is true, or whether you should wait for independent verification? Poynter published an interesting article on how to figure out whether to press publish, and so have many other blogs.

Imagine how a a love of cycling might be combined with a British version of the great American drive-in cinema screening
From my Guardian Bike Blog piece on the people-powered cinema trend. 
An image of El Nino spreading its warmth in 1997, taken by the Topex/Posiden satellite. The white represents the warm current originating the Pacific. El Nino has been implicated in civil conflicts in a Nature paper published this week. I wrote a report on the pattern for SciDev.net. Does the effect have implications for climate change? Not directly, say the study authors, but Mark Cane said at a press briefing: “[Our study] shows beyond any doubt that climate variations do have an impact on the propensity of people to fight in civil conflicts. It is difficult to see why that won’t be carried over into a world that is disrupted by global warming.” Pic: Wikimedia

An image of El Nino spreading its warmth in 1997, taken by the Topex/Posiden satellite. The white represents the warm current originating the Pacific.

El Nino has been implicated in civil conflicts in a Nature paper published this week. I wrote a report on the pattern for SciDev.net. Does the effect have implications for climate change? Not directly, say the study authors, but Mark Cane said at a press briefing: “[Our study] shows beyond any doubt that climate variations do have an impact on the propensity of people to fight in civil conflicts. It is difficult to see why that won’t be carried over into a world that is disrupted by global warming.”

Pic: Wikimedia

I wrote my first proper post for Creatology on the Scientific American Blog Network today. It’s about an artist/sailor hybrid called Lia Ditton.  Pic: Flickr/Lia Ditton

I wrote my first proper post for Creatology on the Scientific American Blog Network today. It’s about an artist/sailor hybrid called Lia Ditton. 

Pic: Flickr/Lia Ditton