Monday 16 April 2007

Asphalt Jungle: BR-163

The BR-163 highway is in the state of Para, Brazil. The road cuts directly through the National Forest and is used for illegal logging operations and deforestation inside the protected area. The 1,100 mile road is the main north south artery. Built in the 1970's to open up the jungle to colonisation.

April 2007 President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has announced that 600 miles of this road is to paved. This will be called the Sustainable BR -163 Plan and is Brazils most ambitious attempt to reconcile growth and conservation.

YOU do not drive on the right of the BR-163, nor do you drive on the left. You drive on whichever bit of the road seems least likely to tear off the undercarriage of your vehicle. During the six-month rainy season, when the road becomes a river of mud, men with tractors wait for you to founder and haul you out for a fee. Under such conditions, the 1,765km (1,097 mile) journey from Santarém, a port on the Amazon River, to Cuiabá, capital of the state of Mato Grosso, can take a fortnight.

Within four years, if Brazil's government has its way, the BR-163 will be a super-highway, launching commodities towards markets in Europe and Asia, speeding computers and cell phones from Manaus to São Paulo and ending the near-isolation of hundreds of thousands of people living along its unpaved stretches.

Yet the paving of the BR-163 is feared as much as it is yearned for.

The road joins what Brazilians call, without great exaggeration, the “world's breadbasket” to the “world's lungs”—the fields and pastures of Mato Grosso to the Amazonian rainforest. If the past is any guide, the lungs will suffer. Paving the BR-163 could lay waste to thousands of square kilometres of forest, carrying deep into the jungle the “arc of deforestation” through which it passes. It may visit similar destruction on the small farmers, gatherers and indigenous folk clustered along its axis. In Pará, the more northerly of the BR-163 states, older settlers are already battling loggers and land grabbers up and down the road. “On the one hand [it] will bring development,” says Cícero Pereira da Silva Oliveira, head of the union of rural workers in Trairão, a settlement 380km south-west of Santarém. “On the other it will bring ruin to the region—more land grabbing, more drug trafficking. Total violence will arrive.”

Road development could deforest 30-40% of the Amazon by 2020, according to one estimate. But the paving of the BR–163 is supposed to be a different sort of roadworks, bringing growth that is ordered rather than chaotic, reducing social inequities rather than exacerbating them, preserving the Amazon rather than despoiling it.

Getting it right has now become a global project, involving NGOs, multinationals and grass-roots groups, as well as all levels of Brazil's government. There are plenty of disagreements, but this throng is forming unlikely alliances, overturning assumptions about how to police the forest and proposing novel ideas for reconciling growth and conservation.

The road will transform as well as transport, but not necessarily for the better. The Amazon forest has already shrunk by 15% since the 1960s. In general, some 85% of deforestation takes place within 50km of a road, because a road makes it more profitable to fell trees, first for timber and then for pasture, the biggest contributor to the denuding of the forest. The paving of the BR-163, which passes through one of the Amazon's most varied bird habitats, will destroy 22,000-49,000 square kilometres of forest within 35 years, according to a report in 2002 by two research institutes, IPAM and the Instituto Socioambiental. Without law and order, the road could usher in the strong and flush out the weak.

Links to : the Economist magazine

GREENPEACE

TIME MAGAZINE

Energy

Did you know that all of the uranium on Earth was formed in exploding stars about 6.6 billion years ago? We depend on energy from the world around us to make electricity and fuel. We collect it from places where it's stored, as fuels like uranium or oil buried deep underground. Or we catch it as it passes, like the energy in flowing water or the wind. Try our quiz on energy. See if you can get 10 out of 10. Along the way you can also visit some bonus stuff: games, animations and stories from around the world.

Did you know that washing a pair of pants again and again during its lifetime uses more energy than making it in the first place?
Without energy on tap, life would be very different. Energy is costly to capture, easy to waste and using it to make electricity and fuel takes its toll on the planet. The world's favourite energy stores are fossil fuels. Now we're under pressure to cut back and clean up.

Here's the challenge: future energy supplies must deliver enough to power all our lives, without unnecessary damage to the planet. We can't rely on fossil fuels for ever - but different places will need different energy alternatives. By joining the debate we can all help to get power to the people.

LINK

Supervolcano

Link to BBC - Science & Nature - Supervolcano

The beauty of America's Yellowstone National Park masks one of the rarest and most destructive forces on Earth - a supervolcano.

A two-part BBC factual drama asked: 'What if Yellowstone erupted?'

Centre for the Observation and Modelling of Earthquakes and Tectonics

Link to Centre for the Observation and Modelling of Earthquakes and Tectonics

Good site giving good information on Earthquakes.

Tornadoes....Nature's Most Violent Storms

Although tornadoes occur in many parts of the world, these destructive forces of nature are found most frequently in the United States east of the Rocky Mountains during the spring and summer months. In an average year, 800 tornadoes are reported nationwide, resulting in 80 deaths and over 1,500 injuries. A tornado is defined as a violently rotating column of air extending from a thunderstorm to the ground. The most violent tornadoes are capable of tremendous destruction with wind speeds of 250 mph or more. Damage paths can be in excess of one mile wide and 50 miles long. Once a tornado in Broken Bow, Oklahoma, carried a motel sign 30 miles and dropped it in Arkansas!

Link to Tornadoes....Nature's Most Violent Storms

Maps and Graphics at UNEP/GRID-Arendal

LINK

This service is an on-going project to collect and catalogue all graphic products that have been prepared for publications and web-sites from the last 15 years in a wide range of themes related to environment and sustainable development.

There are currently 903 graphics available in the database, with the last update April 12, 2007.

An interactive world atlas with country statistics related to sustainable development. Globalis aims to create an understanding for similarities and differences in human societies, as well as how we influence life on the planet.

The Gapminder World 2006, beta

LINK

Version of Gapminder that comapres countries in terms of progress beiong made towarsd the MILLENIUM dEVElOPMENT GOALS.

games4geog: interactive geography games for starters and plenaries

Link to site

This site offers a collection of interactive geography games on various KS3 and KS4 topics.

Games are arranged vaguely in topics and it would be advisable to keep checking back as new ones will be added every week

BBC NEWS Special Reports Climate change around the world

Good case study information in the following categories.

Water, Ecosystems, Food, Coasts, Industry and health.

Link to BBC

Google Earth Library: Interesting things to do with Google Earth

The basic idea is to categorize interesting content that’s available for Google Earth. The blogs intention is to keep this site focused on content instead of news items.

link to Blog

Globalisation

Link to BBC

Globalisation attracts increasing interest and importance in contemporary world affairs. It also inspires passionate supporters and critics. These in depth reports explore different facets of the complex, evolving phenomenon of globalisation.