Soil Carbon Advances Could be Key to Improving Food and Water Security-

UK - The Global Advances in Soil Carbon Management recommendations, which have been compiled by a team of international scientists, could have a significant impact on land degradation, food security, water quality and greenhouse gas emissions from land. ...
http://www.thecropsite.com/news/17112/soil-carbon-advances-could-be-key-to-improving-food-and-water-security

Biochar helps soil microbes cope with drought

NEWS Jul 15, 2014 Biochar helps soil microbes cope with drought Biochar, a solid material obtained from the carbonization of biomass, has many uses as a soil improver and also as a method of carbon sequestration. Now a team from Spain and China has discovered another useful property of biochar – it improves the resistance of soil communities, such as bacteria and fungi, to drought. Researchers from the Universidad Politec

http://environmentalresearchweb.org/cws/article/news/57897

Saraki, Others to Raise $500m Fund for Clean Global Cookstoves Project, Articles | THISDAY LIVE

Hammed Shittu in Ilorin.
The Chairman, Senate Committee on Environment and Ecology, Dr. Bukola Saraki has joined former US Secretary of States, Hillary Clinton in raising about $500million, comprising $286m in grants, $127m in investments and several millions in guarantees for the global clean cooking sector during the Cookstoves Future Summit’s inaugural commitment roundtable last weekend.


The aim of the fund rais
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Saraki, Others to Raise $500m Fund for Clean Global Cookstoves Project, Articles | THISDAY LIVE

Saraki, Others to Raise $500m Fund for Clean Global Cookstoves Project, Articles | THISDAY LIVE

Saraki, Others to Raise $500m Fund for Clean Global Cookstoves Project, Articles | THISDAY LIVE

Change the way clean cook stoves are marketed | Devex

• INSIDE DEVELOPMENT

#SHEBUILDS INNOVATIONS: KATHLEEN O’DELL & SOPHIA PETERS

Change the way clean cook stoves are marketed

By Sophia Peters, Kathleen O’Dell21 March 2014

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Women use fuel-efficient stoves to cook their meals in the Rwanda camp for internally displaced people in Tawila, North Darfur — part of the Safe Access to Firewood and Alternative Energy project run by the World Food Program. Photo by: Albert Gonzalez Farran/UNAMID /  CC BY-NC-ND

Despite known benefits, improved technologies, renewed vigor from international donors and new high-profile supporters, the vast majority of the world’s poor have yet to fully embrace clean cook stoves.

This means that, after 30 years of effort from the donor and philanthropic community, only one third of the target market has adopted an improved cook stove, leaving approximately 1.6 billion traditional consumers of biomass without a clean stove.

This not only calls for a paradigm shift in how clean cook stoves are promoted and distributed, but also an overhaul in the strategy to improve the quality of life for this segment of the world’s population. With this in mind, a team at Deloitte surveyed what donors and philanthropic organizations are currently doing around clean stoves and made some suggestions on how it can be improved.

Why the current distribution of cook stoves is ineffective

With so much need for the product and so many recent improvements in product design, the question then became: Why are these stoves not in demand? And how can development and health organizations stimulate demand so that their benefits can be more widely realized by those who need them most?

how funders can use their investments to be impactful and enhance market-based approaches without hindering commercial activity. read at: 

http://dupress.com/articles/generating-consumer-demand-for-clean-cookstoves-in-base-of-pyramid-markets/ 

We draw on illustrative examples of socially beneficial consumer durable goods for insight, such as water filters, electric burners, and purified water sachets, which have been marketed to bBOP populations around the world. 

Change the way clean cook stoves are marketed | Devex

Deutsche Bank Partners with the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves to Mobilize USD 100 Million in New Investments

Deutsche Bank Partners with the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves to Mobilize USD 100 Million in New Investments

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Published: Nov 21, 2014 8:20 a.m. ET

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NEW YORK, Nov 21, 2014 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Deutsche Bank today announced, in partnership with Bank of America, the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, development finance institutions and private investors, a continued commitment to investment in the clean cooking sector through creating a USD 100 million fund to support social enterprises that advance and deploy clean cookstove solutions. To help finance early-stage clean cooking ventures with affordable capital, the Bank’s Global Social Finance Group, together with the Alliance, established a USD 4 million Clean Cooking Working Capital Fund.

The Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves was formed to address the use of traditional cookstoves and open fires, which typically employ coal, wood or other solid biomass for fuel. Relied upon by more than three billion of the global population, these inefficient cookstoves produce toxic fumes and pollutants that are responsible for some 4 million premature deaths each year in developing countries, according to the World Health Organization.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/deutsche-bank-partners-with-the-global-alliance-for-clean-cookstoves-to-mobilize-usd-100-million-in-new-investments-2014-11-21

Cool Planet: can biochar fertilize soil and help fight climate change?

Cool Planet: can biochar fertilize soil and help fight climate change? Although market information and long-term impacts remain unknown, a biofuel byproduct can store carbon and enhance soil quality – and its market is growing despite higher costs A green energy startup intends to produce bio-based fuels from woody plants, and use the burnt byproducts as the basis for its biochar products.
Kaesekamp is very pleased with a certain group of around 20,000 grapevines he has been nurturing. Their yield has been 5% better than what he’d expected. Their root mass is greater than his other vines as well – which means they’ll hold water better. In drought-hit California, that’s gold. Kaesekamp, whose Knights Grapevine Nursery supplies vines and rootstocks to the region’s wineries, believes these vines did especially well thanks to a soil treatment called CoolTerra – a product made from a carbon-rich substance called “biochar” that is supposed to improve soil fertility and increase water and nutrient retention. Cool Planet Energy Systems – the startup company that manufactures CoolTerra – formed to produce a biofuel replacement for gasoline. The master plan was and remains to use wood chips, corn stover and non-food crops as the feedstocks for this fuel. The firm always intended to have a side venture in selling the byproducts as biochar. But right now, the business is all about CoolTerra – which is bringing in modest sep/02/cool-planet-biochar-charcoal-biomass-energy-gasoline-soil-fertilization#comments amounts of revenue.

http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2014/sep/02/cool-planet-biochar-charcoal-biomass-energy-gasoline-soil-fertilization#comments

Carbon Cookstoves and Kids

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Carbon, Cookstoves, And Kids

Author: Kelley Hamrick

http://www.ecosystemmarketplace.com/pages/dynamic/article.page.php?page_id=10638&section=news_articles&eod=1 

About This Series

Everyone uses stoves to cook food, but not everyone risks respiratory illness – or even death – by using them. For almost three billion people in the world, open fires and rudimentary stoves are the norm. There is a growing solution, championed by development agencies, entrepreneurs and private companies: “improved” cookstoves and fuels. 

Yet getting those models on the ground isn’t as simple as swapping them for the older, dangerous stoves. Even with good marketing and distribution networks, projects often run into a key barrier. Most of their customers – the poorest of the poor – can’t afford the new stoves. That’s where carbon finance can step in. 

Ecosystem Marketplace is launching a series on some of the projects built around this type of financing.

Part One: Cookstove Distribution Soars; Carbon Finance Now Top Funding Source We look at the larger supply and demand trends for cookstove carbon offsets, using data from the newly-released Results Report 2013. The report is the second year-long effort by the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves and Ecosystem Marketplace to track activities in the improved stoves and fuels market. 

Part Two: Carbon, Cookstoves, and Kids We go to Honduras, the second poorest country in Central America. After witnessing children with smoke inhalation problems, Richard Lawrence decided to take action. Proyecto Mirador works to distribute clean stoves to rural Hondurans with the help of carbon finance.

Part Three: Carbon Conservation: From Giant Pandas to Swiss Grocer Deep in China, the giant pandas remain at risk from encroaching human populations and deforestation. WWF teamed up with Swiss grocery chain Coop to finance the distribution of cookstoves that will use less firewood for fuel, thus decreasing panda habitat loss. 

Part Four: Building Carbon Markets from Soot We examine the Nepalese government’s initiative to ensure clean cooking for all by 2017 through the lens of a Dutch partner non-profit SNV. The organization is trying to build up a private market for stoves, but first uses carbon finance to lower costs for people used to receiving stoves for free.

Bringing clean cookstoves to Honduras, a country where more than half of rural households struggle with extreme poverty, was no easy task. Proyecto Mirador’s founders initially relied on the generosity of friends and family to build the cookstoves program, but tapped into the carbon markets to take it to the next level.

When Hurricane Mitch blew through Central America in 1998, the result was catastrophic. The second deadliest Atlantic hurricane in history claimed 11,000 lives and caused an estimated $6 billion in damage.

Honduras, a poor country with even poorer infrastructure, did not fare well. Humanitarian aid groups flocked to the region, including medical mission volunteers Richard Lawrence and his daughter Skye. The medical mission headed towards Atima, a town in the mountainous coffee growing-region of the country surrounded by countless rural villages.

Richard Lawrence, Executive Chairman of Overlook Investments and future Founder of Proyecto Mirador, acted as a translator for doctors on the trip. Standing in the midst of the crush of people who waited to see the doctors in a primary school temporarily converted to a medical clinic, he was struck by the number of children lined up against one wall of the schoolroom breathing with nebulizers.

“I’m not a doctor, and I thought, the air seems really clean so it beats me what it’s about,” he said.

Skye stumbled upon the explanation by chance, when she visited one of the local children’s homes. The inside of the house was black and filled with smoke from the cooking stove. The stove was constructed of adobe mud, with an oil drum for a cooktop and a wide stove mouth stuffed with logs. There was no chimney, so the smoke curled around the room and turned the ceiling black.

http://www.ecosystemmarketplace.com/pages/dynamic/article.page.php?page_id=10638&section=news_articles&eod=1 

Geschlossene Kreisläufe

Menschlicher Mist im Kreislauf 05. Nov 2014 | von freier Autor | Kategorie: Entwicklungspolitik Zwei Prototypen der Trenntrockentoilette in Chonyonyo im Nordwesten Tansanias Nährstoffe und Mineralien aus menschlichen Ausscheidungen müssen wieder zurück in den Boden, damit dieser seine Fruchtbarkeit nicht verliert. Bodenauslaugung ist ein weltweites Problem, das bei einer wachsenden Weltbevölkerung langfristig zu Nahrungsmittelunsicherheit führt. Doch wie geschieht die Rückführung von Nährstoffen in den Boden sicher, sauber und kostengünstig? Von Julia Schell Das Prinzip versteht jedes Kind: Im Ackermann
http://e-politik.de/artikel/2014/menschlicher-mist-im-kreislauf

Biological power to gas

http://www.electrochaea.com/technology.html

IRON-RICH BIOCHAR FILTERS ARSENIC FROM WATER

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDArightOriginal Study Posted by Kimberly Moore Wilmoth-Florida on November 4, 2014 Biochar may be a fast, inexpensive, and easy way to remove arsenic—one of the world’s most common pollutants—from water. For a new study, researchers used used iron-enhanced carbon cooked from hickory chips to successfully remove the toxin. Arsenic finds its way into drinking water supplies through natural or human-made sources, affects millions of people worldwide, and has been shown to cause cancer.

Biochar from palm waste

From palm waste to crop yields Lina Yousef, assistant professor of chemical and environmental engineering at the Masdar Institute in Abu Dhabi. Christopher Pike / The National Daniel Bardsley Oct 25, 2014 Share this article One of the nicest things about driving in the UAE is the rows of palm trees that line many of the central reservations and roadside verges.

Active coal like biochar treats waste water

News - full story Using the residue as forest fertiliser would be good for Finland's pulp and paper industry 22/10/2014 Gasification waste product treats wastewater Spent product can then be used as forest fertiliser Helen Tunnicliffe RESEARCHERS in Finland have developed a technique to use the carbon residue from biomass gasification to produce activated carbon and remove nitrate and phosphate from wastewater. The biomass gasification process to produce heat and power produces carbon residue. As the process gains in popularity, large amounts of carbon residue will be produced, which under EU laws, must be used, recycled, or disposed of in an environmentally beneficial manner. The researchers, led by Toivo Kuokkanen from the University of Oulu, investigated whether this residue could be used to produce activated carbon, a useful adsorbant already used in some water treatment processes.
http://www.tcetoday.com/latest%20news/2014/october/waste-product-treats-wastewater.aspx#.VGxEetO1LJv

How to reduce global warming for fun and profit

How to reduce global warming for fun and profit:

Power to fuel" could be used in combustion engines, which means, theoretically, you could drive green without an electric car. Kiss your Tesla justifications goodbye. And if everything goes right, Joule says, its fuel could be sold for roughly $50 a barrel, or $1.20 gallon."

'via Blog this'

Agroforestry systems | World Agroforestry Centre

Agroforestry systems Maximizing on-farm productivity of trees and agroforestry systems Smallholder farmers in the tropics have enjoyed few livelihood improvements because agricultural productivity has stagnated, prices for basic necessities and inputs have risen and farmers are poorly integrated into local and regional markets. Climate change, rainfall variability, and degraded land and ecosystem services have kept agricultural productivity low. Our research focuses on understanding how agroforestry systems can function better, be more profitable and be sustainable in the long term. It includes investigations into nutrient cycling among trees, animals and crops; using local ecological knowledge to develop improved agroforestry management; expanding tree species diversity; developing coping mechanisms for climate variability; enhancing water use efficiency by trees and agroforestry systems; and considering tree-soil interactions to match species to sites and systems."

read at Agroforestry systems | World Agroforestry Centre:



'via Blog this'

Agroforestry systems | World Agroforestry Centre

Agroforestry systems Maximizing on-farm productivity of trees and agroforestry systems Smallholder farmers in the tropics have enjoyed few livelihood improvements because agricultural productivity has stagnated, prices for basic necessities and inputs have risen and farmers are poorly integrated into local and regional markets. Climate change, rainfall variability, and degraded land and ecosystem services have kept agricultural productivity low. Our research focuses on understanding how agroforestry systems can function better, be more profitable and be sustainable in the long term. It includes investigations into nutrient cycling among trees, animals and crops; using local ecological knowledge to develop improved agroforestry management; expanding tree species diversity; developing coping mechanisms for climate variability; enhancing water use efficiency by trees and agroforestry systems; and considering tree-soil interactions to match species to sites and systems."

read at Agroforestry systems | World Agroforestry Centre:



'via Blog this'

Study: Biochar alters water flow to improve sand and clay | (e) Science News

Study: Biochar alters water flow to improve sand and clay

Published: Thursday, September 25, 2014 - 00:57 in Earth & Climate

As more gardeners and farmers add ground charcoal, or biochar, to soil to both boost crop yields and counter global climate change, a new study by researchers at Rice University and Colorado College could help settle the debate about one of biochar's biggest benefits -- the seemingly contradictory ability to make clay soils drain faster and sandy soils drain slower. The study, available online this week in the journal PLOS ONE,offers the first detailed explanation for the hydrological mystery.

"Understanding the controls on water movement through biochar-amended soils is critical to explaining other frequently reported benefits of biochar, such as nutrient retention, carbon sequestration and reduced greenhouse gas emissions," said lead author Rebecca Barnes, an assistant professor of environmental science at Colorado College, who began the research while serving as a postdoctoral research associate at Rice.

Biochar can be produced from waste wood, manure or leaves, and its popularity among do-it-yourselfers and gardening buffs took off after archaeological studies found that biochar added to soils in the Amazon more than 1,000 years ago was still improving the water- and nutrient-holding abilities of those poor soils today.

Studies over the past decade have found that biochar soil amendments can either increase or decrease the amount of water that soil holds, but it has been tough for experts to explain why this occurs, due partly to conflicting results from many different field tests.

read at: Study: Biochar alters water flow to improve sand and clay | (e) Science News:

'via Blog this'

Study: Biochar alters water flow to improve sand and clay | (e) Science News

Study: Biochar alters water flow to improve sand and clay

Published: Thursday, September 25, 2014 - 00:57 in Earth & Climate

As more gardeners and farmers add ground charcoal, or biochar, to soil to both boost crop yields and counter global climate change, a new study by researchers at Rice University and Colorado College could help settle the debate about one of biochar's biggest benefits -- the seemingly contradictory ability to make clay soils drain faster and sandy soils drain slower. The study, available online this week in the journal PLOS ONE,offers the first detailed explanation for the hydrological mystery.

"Understanding the controls on water movement through biochar-amended soils is critical to explaining other frequently reported benefits of biochar, such as nutrient retention, carbon sequestration and reduced greenhouse gas emissions," said lead author Rebecca Barnes, an assistant professor of environmental science at Colorado College, who began the research while serving as a postdoctoral research associate at Rice.

Biochar can be produced from waste wood, manure or leaves, and its popularity among do-it-yourselfers and gardening buffs took off after archaeological studies found that biochar added to soils in the Amazon more than 1,000 years ago was still improving the water- and nutrient-holding abilities of those poor soils today.

Studies over the past decade have found that biochar soil amendments can either increase or decrease the amount of water that soil holds, but it has been tough for experts to explain why this occurs, due partly to conflicting results from many different field tests.

read at: Study: Biochar alters water flow to improve sand and clay | (e) Science News:

'via Blog this'

Investors Sought To Back Cleanest Wood Burning Stove On The Planet Unforgettable Fire, LLC, manufacturer of the Kimberly(TM) gasifier wood stove,  seeks investors to bring second wood stove to market.  The re-engineered Katydid(TM) gasifier wood stove is believed  to be the cleanest wood stove on the planet. BURTON, WA / ACCESSWIRE / April 28th, 2014 / Just as inventor Roger Lehet finalized preparations to take his second invention, the Katydid™ gasifier wood stove to an EPA lab for certification testing, the Environmental Protection Agency moved to change its federal emission standards from the current 7.5 grams per hour to the proposed 1.3 grams per hour. Initially distraught with the new hurdle before him, Lehet took his Katydid(TM) gasifier wood stove back to the drawing board. In last week’s tests, Lehet’s re-engineered non-catalytic Katydid(TM) prototype produced a shockingly-low 0.366 grams per hour particulate emissions at its lowest burn rate, the point at where wood stoves typically output their highest emissions. Yes — that’s one third of a gram per hour, well below the proposed EPA target of 1.3 grams per hour.  "If our production models can reproduce the test results from our Katydid(TM) prototype (and we believe that they can) we have developed the cleanest wood burning stove on the planet - and we have done so without the use of catalytic elements," Lehet emphasized. Visit http://www.unforgettablefirellc.com for more information. Contact Info Name: Roger Lehet Organization: Unforgettable Fire, LLC Phone: 206-850-2322 Email: roger@unforgettablefirellc.com Address: P.O. Box 13491, Burton, WA 98013 SOURCE: Unforgettable Fire, LLC

read at: Baystreet.ca - ACCESSWIRE

Wasserdampf als Schlüsselfaktor für die Klimaerwärmung Positive Rückkopplung verstärkt CO2-Wirkung um das Doppelte

„In Bezug auf das Klima ist der Wasserdampf der ‚Big Player‘ in der Atmosphäre.“

Wasserdampf ist das häufigste Treibhausgas auf der Erde, sein Anteil an der globalen Erwärmung war allerdings umstritten. Jetzt ist es Wissenschaftlern mithilfe von Satellitendaten gelungen, den wärmespeichernden Effekt des Gases genauer als zuvor zu bestimmen. Wie sie in der Fachzeitschrift „Geophysical Research Letters“ berichten, hat Wasserdampf demnach eine weitaus wichtigere Rolle im Klimawandel als bisher angenommen. 
Read at: http://www.scinexx.de/wissen-aktuell-9129-2008-11-19.html