Take me to the world

I changed the vertical axis to the employment rate of population age 15 and older while keeping the horizontal axis as income per person and observed the distribution pattern of countries in year 2007. One of the surprising patterns I have noticed is that the employment rate of poorer developing countries like those in Africa is actually very high as most of them are sitting on the right upper portion of the graph. It is not the case that poorer countries has low employment rate, it is quite the opposite.

The cause of this paradox lies in the large population and unbalanced industrial structure of these developing countries. “The economy grew an annualized 1.4 percent in the third quarter as manufacturing and mining contracted, threatening the government’s goal to create 5 million jobs by 2020.” (Martinez 2012) factories and retailers are adding more jobs as the manufacturing boost. However, as the jobs that have been created are mainly lower level manual labors like mining and manufacturing, they are still earning little. In addition, though the economy of African countries is boosting through these years, per capita income is not able to increase significantly when we take the large population into account.

My ecological footprint is 8.3 global hectares, which means 4.6 planet earths we’d need if everyone lived like me. The shelter part of consumption has the biggest impact on my personal footprint follows by the services. I changed some of my answers to reflect someone who is less sustainability-conscious than me by increasing the consumption of packaged food and the usage of cars. These reactions yielded a 9.7 global hectares footprint. The reason of this significant footprint increase lies in the energy cost and CO2 emission while transporting packaged food and commuting by cars. One way that I could do to directly reduce my footprint is to ride public transit, carpool, ride a bike or walk to school instead of driving,

Even though broader aspects of nature conservation are frequently mentioned, little attention is given to forest-specific nature conservation. Creation of reserved and protected forests, however, is one of the important strategies to mitigate climate change today. In India, many important policies and rules governing the protection and conservation of forests are made to reduce indiscriminate diversion of forest land for non-forestry purposes since as early as 1894.

This conservation-based forest policy has prevented the loss of forest, which contributes to stabilize carbon stocks in forests, and reduce carbon dioxide emissions. “With this approach India can claim to be maintaining the baseline stocks (8.79 gtC), as well as the increment (0.96 gtC).”( Rawat 2008) Evidence showing that the forest conservation method is working is that in the year 2000, total India per capita CO₂ of equivalent emissions were roughly 10 times less than those of developed countries like USA and Germany and about half of those of developing countries.

Conservation of forest is making a positive contribution to stabilize global climate change and to promoting sustainable development. Forest management, however, could not contribute to a full but half of a wedge. A second half-wedge would be created by reforesting or afforesting in tropic or temperate zone and nonforested land.

About 14 concerned governors, scientists and farmers from acrossCanadadebated the development of biofuels Thursday afternoon at a town hall meeting organized by UBC EOSC department. Though the crowd gathered in City Council chambers was small, the concerns raised were varied, ranging from worries about biofuel transportation to its possible impacts on food prices.

The BC government opened the meeting by claiming that biofuel is an environmentally friendly substitute of fossil fuels because it reduces the emission of CO₂ and air pollutants. Also, the increasing demand of feedstock for biofuels provides new opportunities for farmers which could in turn benefit the domestic agriculture. Two scientists added that the development of biofuels helps us to meet energy needs and lower the sky-high oil price.

The con side of the panel fought back by foregrounding one of their major concerns with the globe food prices: biofuel industry may bring up food prices as crops were converted to biofuels instead of being consumed. Scientists from the other side, however, saw a different picture. They stated that agriculture by-products, food wastes and other organic materials like seaweed are recently being investigated to replace food crops as new biomass feedstock, thus the globe food price would not see a biofuel driven increase.

Another problem posed by biofuel industry, according to the con side engineers, was the cost of energy of transporting biofuels. They proposed that more renewable feedstock for biofuels and more efficient alternative energy sources were needed to release today’s energy crises.

Finally, the panel urged us to manage the amount of energy we use throughout our entire home and reduce the energy consumption to save the environment.