La Mosquitia, one of the last remaining tropical forest areas left in Central America, is the most impoverished region in Honduras. Local communities, including the indigenous Miskito (or Mosquitia) people, have struggled to keep alive their distinctive cultural heritage while dealing with the threats of environmental and economic uncertainty.
Through a carbon-neutral biofuel initiative, the MOPAWI (from Mosquitia Pawisa) seek to generate equitable social development through sustainable microenterprise utilizing palm oil that is used for a variety of purposes. This approach will provide financial, social, and environmental returns in order to:
Increase local employment while decreasing out-migration;
Lower the cost of production and with lower agricultural labor;
Reduce waste and increase product yield; and,
Decrease emissions and deforestation.
“The beauty of this enterprise,” says David Hircock, Senior Advisor for Estée Lauder, “is the multidimensional, entrepreneurial approach. Many elements of this approach can bring much-needed cash into the economy and also negate the need for cash. For example, the indigenous community may not need to purchase diesel. Additionally, the enterprise incorporates important elements affecting local security issues, such as food, water, land and economics. Perhaps most importantly, this enterprise could show that the Mosquitia people are integral to the sustainable development of the area and local economy of Puerto Lempira, whereas at the moment they are so often marginalized. Now they can have a much-needed voice.”
This report summarizes key themes and “lessons learned” from the “Microfinance and Climate Change: Can MFIs Promote Environmental Sustainability?”Speaker’s Corner, held November 18-20, 2008. Nearly 200 participants from over 40 countries participated in this discussion hosted by GreenMicrofinance, allowing participants to connect and learn about each other's activities.
William Kamkwamba, raised in a village in Malawi, one of the world's poorest countries. He dropped out of school at age 14 due to famine - his family was forced to choose between food or school for their son. He poured through books at a local mini-library, and - inspired by a picture of a windmill - set to work fabricating one from salvaged objects. A new book chronicles his story. Now 22, he is featured on none other than Jon Stewart - check him out!
Solar Pumps operate anywhere there is Sun ray. It will not run when there is rain but there is no need of pumping water when it rains.
OFF GRID refers to a power system that generates electricity such as power from a Solar PV array. The electricity produced is stored in Batteries for later use and the energy system isn't connected to the utility Power Grid. In the Developing World, where there is abundant sunlight and a large rural population without the proper infrastructure to develop an electrical grid, PV is very attractive option because of its modular features, its ability to generate electricity at the actual point of use, its low maintenance requirements and its non-polluting technologies. PV is also important to rural health clinics in developing countries. These clinics require electricity for lighting, vaccine refrigeration and water pumping and purification. PV has proven to be a reliable system for these isolated clinics. Even If you live in urban areas where grid is serving only a part of your requirement or facing power disruption and power outage then it is a good option to install OFF GRID solar power system to fulfill your power requirement when needed.
Monday night GreenMicrofinance and Jamii Bora announced their intent to work together on the Jamii Bora gamechanger: Kaputei, its eco-village outside Nairobi, eventual home to 10,000 Jamii Bora members. This microfinance institution, which has grown to nearly a quarter million borrowers in just a decade, is headed by the indefatigueable Ingrid Munro. Here you see her (she's on the left) and GMf's Elizabeth Israel, putting their heads together, strategizing about how poverty can be alleviated, families strengthened, education provided, and health improved, all while taking good care of planet Earth. These two wise women have some fantastic answers to those perplexing questions! (And hats off to Ingrid as she addresses the Clinton Global Initiative tomorrow.)
“We’re coming together, two organizations that have been working toward the same goals, Jamii Bora and GreenMicrofinance,” said Munro.
“The needs we’ve seen in Kenya are the tip of the iceberg,” said Ira Wagner, of GreenMicrofinance. “We hope to use Kaputiei as a model for interventions aimed at ameliorating such growing environmental problems as the 885 million people who rely on polluted, contaminated drinking water, a result of the absence of sanitation.”
Yuval Susskind, a rising Israeli greentech star, would like to put an Aora solar tower and array in every village in Africa. His company's innovative design meets the gap between household solar panels and utility-sized giant solar farms. The system creates energy 24 hours a day; if the solar supply is insufficient, the system can run on biofuel or other non-fossil fuel sources. So a whole village, if the funds were available for launching the system, could be truly ENERGY INDEPENDENT. No waiting around for the grid to arrive - in a few decades at the earliest!
Pictured here is their installation in the Arava desert in Southern Israel.which supplies Kibbutz Samar, an agricultural collective with around 230 residents. The hope is that this type of innovative technology designed for our resource-constrained world will be accessible to the world's poorest communities....
Some headlines just fail to surprise, like the recent one announcing that "low income workers are often cheated out of their wages." Unfortunately, the fact that global warming's greatest impacts are on the world's poor is not really news; we at GMf are well aware of this terrible truth. But this recent article in mainstream USA Today sums the situation up well:
Global warming will fall heaviest on the desperately poor, finds a study of agricultural economics.
Released this week in Environmental Research Letters, the study led by Syud Ahmed of The World Bank in Washington, D.C., looked at the economic impacts of increases in atmospheric temperatures and climate variability, droughts, floods and storms, projected for the last three decades of this century across 16 developing nations. They based the estimate on the economic effects of similar weather in those places from 1970 to 2000.
"We find that extremes under present climate volatility increase poverty across our developing country sample -- particularly in Bangladesh, Mexico, Indonesia, and Africa -- with urban wage earners the most vulnerable group," write the authors. "We also find that global warming exacerbates poverty vulnerability in many nations."
Farmers in poor nations actually see their wages increase under global warming, says study co-author Noah Diffenbaugh of Purdue University, as the price of grain goes higher in nations experiencing more drought, but city dwellers, who spend much of their income on food, do worse.
The study fed projections of climate effects in two future scenarios produced by the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report into its economic forecasts. One was a hot, "business as usual", scenario, with industrial emissions of greenhouse gases continuing unabated into the future. The other was a "low emissions" model with limited emissions of greenhouse gases, which trap heat in the atmosphere. Poverty was worse in the high-emissions model, Diffenbaugh says.
"IPCC identified the poor, the elderly, and the very young as the most vulnerable categories of people on the planet ... regardless of location, as Katrina and the European (2003) heat wave taught us," says economics professor Gary Yohe of Wesleyan University, an author of the IPCC report. "Nonetheless, the most vulnerable are more likely to live in developing countries where they face multiple stresses. For many, climate change itself is a source of multiple stress because it is manifest in so many different ways."
However, climate scientist David Battisti of the University of Washington in Seattle is critical of the study, explaining by email that "the climate models do a poor job at simulating rainfall in many places...As well, the climate models do an extremely poor job at estimating natural variability and extreme events in temperature and precipitation. In particular, they overestimate the variability in summertime temperature and extreme events. Without correcting for these biases -- which are ubiquitous in the climate models -- it is very likely that the extreme event information input into the impact models is grossly exaggerated," Battisti says.
But Diffenbaugh notes that the poor in developing countries, who live on less that a dollar a day, have been vulnerable historically to climate swings, as seen in the study's look at numbers from the 20th century. "These folks are already vulnerable to climate, so climate 'change' seems unlikely to make things better for them."
Environmental justice is the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people, regardless of race, ethnicity, income, or education level, in environmental decision-making. Working closely with residents and businesses to make sure that the basic necessities of life-water, air, food, and shelter-are of the highest quality, the city's Environmental Justice (EJ) program has committed itself to providing fundamental rights to a safe and healthy environment in every San Francisco community. The program collaborates with other city agencies, nonprofit organizations, and community groups to promote the issues of air quality, food availability, renewable energy systems, sustainable land use, and the reduction of greenhouse gases.
Mayor Gavin Newsom announced plans to install over 365 kw of solar panels on two San Francisco Housing Authority properties. The solar panels will provide hundreds of thousands of kilowatts of clean, renewable electricity to public housing residents. "With initiatives like GoSolarSF, San Francisco is lighting the way with solar power," said Mayor Newsom. "Solar power will reduce greenhouse gases, grow our green economy, and lead the state towards a future of clean, renewable energy."
WHY DO MICROFINANCE organizations usually focus their assistance on women? And why does everyone benefit when women enter the work force and bring home regular pay checks? One reason involves the dirty little secret of global poverty: some of the most wretched suffering is caused not just by low incomes but also by unwise spending by the poor — especially by men. Surprisingly frequently, we’ve come across a mother mourning a child who has just died of malaria for want of a $5 mosquito bed net; the mother says that the family couldn’t afford a bed net and she means it, but then we find the father at a nearby bar. He goes three evenings a week to the bar, spending $5 each week.
Barh Koh ESDA in Chad approaches poverty relief through environmental protection, working to provide environmentally safe alternative energy sources to the disadvantaged inhabitants and refugees in the region of Maro in southern Chad. The group's focuses on cooking and indoor lighting, to help reduce dependence on firewood, thereby reducing deforestation.
Their plan of action shows the many ways clean technology can transform life in off-grid villages - providing power and preserving habitat. It's always good to read about clean energy's impact on the ground! As a northern city dweller, protection from reptiles is not something I've ever needed to contend with! (#3) 1) Providing solar cookers/ovens to poor rural families. Solar cookers cost approximately $40 while solar ovens are in the vicinity of $300; which constitute a very small investment to help relieve poverty and save the environment at the same time. Solar cookers and stoves are safe; they cause no danger of fire, burns or smoke inhalation associated with wood burning. 2) Providing solar lanterns for poor families and students. A set of two solar lanterns can cost around $40 to $60, including shipping and handling. Solar lanterns are eco-friendly and will reduce the risks of fire hazards associated with kerosene lamps and firewood burning. A solar lantern will also enable a rural student to study and do homework after sunset. Solar lanterns also provide indoor lighting in the otherwise dark rural dwellings. 3) Providing solar flashlights to poor families and students. A single solar flashlight could save lives in a rural family that spends its evenings and nights in perpetual darkness, subject to all sorts of insects, reptiles and other elements. A solar-powered flashlight costs between $20 to $30 and can make a significant difference in a rural villager's life.
In the Developing World, where there is abundant sunlight and a large rural population without the proper infrastructure to develop an electrical grid, PV is very attractive option because of its modular features, its ability to generate electricity at the actual point of use, its low maintenance requirements and its non-polluting technologies. PV is also important to rural health clinics in developing countries. These clinics require electricity for lighting, vaccine refrigeration and water pumping and purification. PV has proven to be a reliable system for these isolated clinics. Even If you live in urban areas where grid is serving only a part of your requirement or facing power disruption and power outage then it is a good option to install OFF GRID solar power system to fulfill your power requirement when needed. 
Global warming will fall heaviest on the desperately poor, finds a study of agricultural economics.
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