Sustainability has become so ingrained into my life that sometimes I inadvertently assume everyone knows what I’m talking about.

My days are filled with issues such as Climate Change, renewable energy, recycling, LEED buildings, CO2 sensors, de-lamping and composting. The reason for this is because when I’m not writing for EcoSalon, I’m the communications specialist for sustainability at Boston University.

On my way to work last week I was listening to the radio, surfing between Lady Gaga and NPR when I heard the uber-clever green moniker AstroTurfing. Astroturfing, taken from the root AstroTurf (the artificial grass laid down on sports playing fields) refers to events or missions planned by an organization, but masked to appear as grass-roots efforts, which are built on passionate people dedicated to helping a cause.

Here are eight other terms everyone should know that are sure to turn you into an eco-expert:

1. Greenhouse Gas

Chemical compounds that contribute to the greenhouse effect. When in the atmosphere, a greenhouse gas allows sunlight (solar radiation) to enter the atmosphere where it warms the Earth’s surface and is reradiated back into the atmosphere as longer-wave energy (heat). Greenhouse gases absorb this heat and “trap” it in the lower atmosphere.

2. Global Warming

The current concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is said to be approximately 385 ppm (parts per million). Before industrialization it was about 280 ppm. As stated in the U.S. Climate Change Conference data, analyses of air contained in ice from the Antarctic ice cap shows that there is far more CO2 in the air today than at any time in the last 650,000 years. The consequence is that the greenhouse effect is becoming stronger, and the earth is becoming warmer.

3. Greenwashing

Using environmental claims, which fall short, to sell a product. Check out the Greenwashing Index for the worst offenders.

4. Sustainability

In 1987, the Brundtland Report, also known as Our Common Future, defined sustainability as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

5. Phantom Energy

Also called Vampire power, this energy is taken from the grid when an appliance is plugged in but not being used. Think printers, cell phone chargers, TVs and computers. One easy way to stop this is by using a Smart Power Strip, which cuts off energy with the flip of one switch.

6. Carbon Footprint

The amount of carbon produced by an individual, organization, or location at a given time. Carbon footprint describes the environmental impact of carbon emissions, measured in units of carbon dioxide.

7. COP15

The United Nations Climate Change Conference, which takes place from December 7-18^th in Copenhagen, Denmark, will bring together world leaders to discuss the Climate Change Crisis and the Kyoto Protocol, which sets binding targets for 37 industrialized countries and the European community for reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

8. LEED

Developed by the U.S. Green Building Council, LEED is an internationally-recognized building system aimed at improving performance across all the metrics that matter most: energy savings, water efficiency, CO₂ emissions reduction, improved indoor environmental quality, and stewardship of resources and sensitivity to their impacts.

Image: Vincent Boiteau

We already know that we should eat less meat for the sake of the planet – the United Nations has said reduced meat consumption would help curb greenhouse emissions. While many ardent environmentalists are vegetarian, initiatives like Meatless Monday are trying to encourage all of us to do our part, as well.

So meat production helps cause global warming. But did you know that climate change might also affect the quality of meat? According to New Scientist: “Pork chops will become soggier and paler as the world warms, while steaks could be dark and smelly”.

It’s all to do with the effects of heat on the animal’s energy, or glycogen, reserves. The flesh from pigs that become heat-stressed on the way to the slaughterhouse will acidify more quickly, so the meat resembles “soggy white blotting paper”. While heat-stressed cows run out of glycogen before slaughter, darkening their meat.

It all adds up to less “mmm” and more “hmm”.

Millions of cattle and sheep make long sea journeys every year in cramped, over-heated conditions as part of the livestock trade. So far the best solution scientists have been able to come up with has been to spike the drinking water with sports energy drinks. But if we are to keep eating meat in a climate-changed world, we are going to have to come up with a better solution.

We could start by scaling back meat consumption – most of us could handle more plant foods in our diet anyway – and focusing on quality over quantity. Then we could decentralise the meat industry, rear livestock in natural conditions on farms, transport them to a local abbatoirs only a few miles away and eat them close to where they were raised. Doesn’t it just make sense?

Image: The Busy Brain

I’m sure you’ve heard of the Heinz food company. It’s been around since 1869, providing generation after generation with ketchup, baked beans and hundreds of other food products.

But have you heard of the annual Heinz Awards?

Set up in 1993 by the Heinz Family Philanthropies to honor the memory of US Senator John Heinz, these awards celebrate and acknowledge the achievements of extraordinary individuals in the five areas: Arts and Humanities,  Economy and Employment, the Human Condition, Public Policy, and Technology, and the Environment.

This year’s Heinz Awards, however, are all about the environment.

In announcing the 2009 Heinz Award recipients, Teresa Heinz, chairwoman of the Heinz Family Foundation (and widow of Senator John Heinz), stated “”At this unique time in history, when the environment is more important than ever to our lives, our economy, our national security and our future, it is only fitting that we focus exclusively on this critical topic,”

Scientists make up the bulk of the award winners which makes sense given they are on the forefront of trying to understand, explain and slow down global warming.

But they weren’t the only winners. Online media got a nod with the founder and publisher of Grist one of the ten.

These 10 Americans, leaders and innovators in environmental achievement, have been chosen as the 2009 Heinz Award recipients:

• Chip Giller, 38, Grist magazine (Seattle, Wash.)  – for creating an innovative media platform for delivering environmental information to new audiences.
• Robert Berkebile, 72, BNIM Architects (Kansas City, Mo.) – for his green building advocacy and promotion of sustainable design and planning.
• P. Dee Boersma, Ph.D., 62, University of Washington (Seattle, Wash.) – for developing greater understanding of the impact of humans on marine ecosystems.
• Christopher B. Field, Ph.D., 56, Carnegie Institution for Science and Stanford University (Stanford, Calif.) – for his leadership and innovation in carbon cycle and climate science.
• Ashok Gadgil, Ph.D., 58, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley (Berkeley, Calif.) – for his work as an inventor and humanitarian.
• Deborah Rice, Ph.D., 61, Maine Department of Health and Human Services, Environmental and Occupational Health (Augusta, Maine) – for research yielding new understanding about exposure to toxins during human development.
• Joel Salatin, 52, Polyface Farm (Swoope, Va.) – for creating alternative, environmentally friendly farming techniques.
• Kirk R. Smith, Ph.D., 62, University of California, Berkeley, (Berkeley, Calif.) – for  exposing the relationships among household air pollution, fuel use, climate and health.
• Thomas Smith, 59, Public Citizen – Texas (Austin, Texas) – for his advocacy of wind and solar energy efficiency.
• Beverly H. Wright, Ph.D., 61, Deep South Center for Environmental Justice (New Orleans, La.) – for her work as an environmental justice advocate.

Congratulations to them all.

Image: spisharam

Anyone wanting to know how global warming will affect their community in the future now has a new interactive tool, The Climate Wizard, at her fingertips.

Developed by The Nature Conservancy, the University of Washington and the University of Southern Mississippi, the Climate Wizard provides visitors with quick and easy access to information that usually would take hours if not days for them to research for themselves.

Using the Climate Wizard’s interactive map, visitors can access climate change data from the past and explore future predictions. Zoom tools let you refine your searches to examine different carbon dioxide emission scenarios (low, medium, and high) by location, month, season, and year.

I tried to check out my hometown, but for some reason New Zealand seems to have been left off the list of countries. (The image above is of Fox Glacier.) Hoping that it‘s absence was just an oversight and not an omen, I clicked on the neighbouring Australia instead. Flicking back and forth between the past and the future, it sure looks like Australia will be getting drier and hotter.

Head to the Climate Wizard to find out what’s happening in your neighbourhood.

- via The Daily Green

Image: thinboyfatter

In the buildup to the December summit in Copenhagen when the international community hopes to negotiate new emissions goals and implement a new climate treaty, there is debate raging on exactly how much adapting to climate change is going to cost. The UN climate change secretariat, UNFCCC, estimates that the global cost of adapting to the effects of climate change at around $40 billion to $170 billion a year until 2030.

But a report released last week by the International Institute for Environment and Development and the Grantham Institute for Climate Change has found that these numbers to be on the exceedingly low side.

Based on a six-month review of the estimated costs, the report has found that the true costs of adapting to climate change to be at least two to three times higher that the UNFCCC estimations.

According to this report, the UNFCCC, by focusing primarily on agricultural and health measures as growing drought-resistant crops and limiting the spread of diseases and ignoring the costs of adapting and protecting other industry sectors such as tourism, energy, manufacturing, retailing, and mining, has created a inaccurate idea of actual costs. This, in turn, could result in an inability nations, especially the least developed countries with little to no infrastructure, to cover the true costs of adaptation to climate change.

Either way you look at it, climate change is going to be expensive.

Image: r-z

It’s one thing to read about how some of the most amazing natural treasures in the world are endangered due to environmental degradation, or learn specifically about the dangers global warming poses to our national parks. It’s another thing to see it firsthand.

I was hiking in the Rockies earlier this month and saw for myself large swaths of dead, rust-colored Lodgepole pine trees throughout the forest (see gallery below).  Witnessing the actual damage done by human folly is heart wrenching in a way that is difficult to verbalize. For me, there’s a huge sense of loss and missed opportunity and a knot of pure anger in my stomach at the shortsightedness and power of denial in us humans.

At the same time, there’s a strange gratitude in the moment of experience at the fact that I’m lucky enough to stand surrounded by such inspiring beauty (despite the visible damage). Then there’s the feeling of awe and appreciation at the incredible beating nature is able to take before showing signs of wear.

The trees’ deaths were caused directly by an insect called the mountain pine beetle and indirectly by climate change. Pine beetles have always fed on certain species of trees, like the Lodgepole pines in the Rockies, but cold winters have kept the beetle’s population under control and plenty of water made the trees hardy and resistant to the beetle’s attacks.

Enter drought and successive years of warm weather. The population of beetles explodes, the trees are weakened and unable to secrete the resin that kills the beetles, and the trees die – to the tune of millions upon millions of trees. According to this National Parks Conservation Association Survival Guide, Forestry officials estimate that all mature Lodgepole pine forests in Colorado will be dead by 2013.

This all sounds hopeless and it is, especially for the Lodgepoles and the many birds, animals and fish that directly or indirectly depend on them for survival. So many dried, dead trees make the specter of devastating wildfires a sure bet.

Experts agree that the damage is irreversible. The only way to think positively is to ponder the new forest that will eventually grow up in this one’s place. Luckily, nature does have amazing powers of regeneration. But that doesn’t mean we can excuse the damage already done. To appreciate both the beauty and the scale of loss people need to see these places and truly experience them firsthand. That’s the only way we are ever going to save them.

Though heavy visitation has its own deleterious impacts on our national parks, I believe it is only through experiencing nature’s awe-inspiring beauty and mystery that humankind will muster the desire to live more lightly in hopes of saving what we still have.

Images: Vanessa Barrington

Australian citizens might not be shrinking but its birds sure are. That’s the word from an Australian National University and CSIRO study which measured eight bird species found in Australia’s southeast and compared them to the size of museum specimens from a century ago. Their findings show that each bird species measured had shrunk between 2 and 4 percent in the last 100 years.

During this time Australia’s daily temperature has risen 1.3 degrees F (0.7 degrees C).

Based on this information, the study concluded that the birds are shrinking due to climate warming. According to lead researcher Janet Gardner, animals in warmer climates tend to be smaller, allowing them to cool faster and therefore minimizing heat stress.

Sounds likes shades of Darwin’s “survival of the fittest,” where evolutionary change occurs in order to survive.

But while shrinking birds (and other animals) is a trend that is expected to continue, not only in Australia, but throughout the world, the same doesn’t seem to be happening for humans.

Image: mugley

Every 10 years, the United States Global Change Research Program is required to report on how climate change is affecting the United States.

The latest Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States report, released this week, is a comprehensive 188-page document written with the assistance of 13 federal agencies and John Holdren, President Obama’s science advisor.

Dealing only in cold, hard facts, the report outlines the many detrimental effects that global warming is already having on activities, industries, wildlife, the landscape and even health around the country.

This latest report highlights everything from the fact that the core of the domestic maple syrup industry has shifted from the U.S. to Canada to the fact that nation’s $7.6 billion winter sports industry is on the decline with opportunities to ice fish, ski, and snowmobile being reduced due to increased temperatures causing less snow.

It makes for fairly sober reading.

Read the full report here or check out the two-page regional factsheets for your area.

In the future, rising sea levels are going to drive people out of their low-lying communities and up to higher ground. But you might not know it’s going on right now.

As Luanne reported recently, the government of the Maldives is facing the prospect of inundation with admirable foresight by moving to a carbon zero economy by the end of the next decade and adding a splash of green to its luxury status.

The country is also going to use future profits to fund a wholesale relocation of the population to another part of the world before the island chain disappears under the waves by 2100.

Ninety years to prepare – sounds like luxury indeed if you’re from the Carteret Islands.

For the last 20 years, the inhabitants of this South Pacific atoll have been struggling to keep out rising tides, planting mangroves and erecting sea defences, but now the population of 2,600 are in full evacuation m0de, funded by the Papua New Guinea government.

Like the Maldives, the Carteret islands are low – just 170cm above sea-level at their highest point – and every high tide swamps the islanders’ efforts at subsistence agriculture and raises the salinity of the soil even further. It’s untenable, so they’re off.

Dan Box of The Ecologist has been watching the Carteretians rebuild their homes at Tinputz on the coast of Bougainville, and is currently preparing to visit the Carteret islands to see for himself how they’re faring.

Experts aren’t certain that the islands are being wiped out by global warming. This is a volcanic island chain, so sea floor movement is to be expected. But if independently rising sea levels aren’t primarily to blame, it could be the degradation of the coral that forms the backbone of the islands. When this dies, islands lose their natural defences against the sea – and coral is fragile enough to be killed by something as seemingly innocuous as sun screen, let alone the severely destabilizing effects of warmer seas.

However, as George Monbiot notes at The Guardian, these aren’t the world’s first “climate change refugees” – and they’re certainly not going to be the last.

For example, a rise of 20cm (well within the 88cm upper boundary estimated by the IPCC report in 2001) will make three quarters of a million people homeless in Nigeria alone.

We’re already coming up with innovative new ways to build flood-resistant homes, but until these become a widespread reality, we’re faced with the modern-day version of the King Canute story – and the best we can do is get out of the way.

Image: Addu Atoll, Maldives – nattu

Ever want to just pack up and move…your country?

If you haven’t heard by now, President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives insists buying a new homeland may be the only option for the 300,000 islanders who selected him last year as the country’s first democratically-elected leader.

That’s because nightmarish climate change could drown the emerald chain of 1,200 islands and 26 coral atolls that make up the territory located 435 miles southwest of Sri Lanka in the Laccadine Sea of the Indian Ocean.

Location, location, location.

Yes, that’s the draw to this magnificent tourist escape, as well as the exact cause of the looming threat of a paradise lost under rising waters by the year 2100, as forecast by the United Nations. The ground level averages 1.5m above sea level and the highest point is at 2.3m – which is the lowest high point in the world, according to Wikipedia.

So, what’s a new leader to do? Shop and save.

“We can do nothing to stop climate change on our own and so we have to buy land elsewhere,” Nasheed told the British Guardian after taking office. “It’s an insurance policy for the worst possible outcome. After all, the Israelis [began by buying] land in Palestine.”

The President told the Guardian that even a “small rise” in sea levels would inundate large parts of the archipelago.

Maldivian President Mohamed Nasheed (right) and Vice-President Hamid Ansari in Male

All eyes are on this rising star of Asia and his plan to set aside a portion of the Muslim country’s billion-dollar annual tourist income to invest in a new home, perhaps in Sri Lanka, India or Australia.

The Maldives is an unbelievably exclusive travel destination with spectacular resorts visited by the rich and famous. It’s where Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes went on their honeymoon; they rented a boat and just sailed around the atolls. No cameras can get to you there. It’s as far away as you can get. And naturally, those running the resorts do well as everything costs a fortune.

The Four Seasons resort at the Maldives is one of many ultra luxury hotels

Speaking out against the government once cost a fortune in terms of freedom for Nasheed, who was arrested and sentenced to prison several times for his political activism, which included writing a popular magazine called Sangu. Having ascended to power he is wasting no time advocating for his people, including unveiling a plan last month to make his country a carbon-neutral nation within the next 10 years.

According to The Observer, the plan developed by British climate change experts Chris Goodall (author of Ten Technologies to Save the Planet) and Mark Lynas seeks to establish a near-zero carbon economy by eliminating all fossil fuel use on the Maldive archipelago by 2020. Instead, it is calling for clean electricity to power homes, businesses and vehicles.

Features of the bold initiative include a new renewable electricity generation and transmission infrastructure with 155 large wind turbines, half a square kilometre of rooftop solar panels, and a biomass plant burning coconut husks. Battery banks would provide back-up storage for when neither wind nor solar energy is available.

As Goodall put it: “We don’t want to pretend that this plan is going to be easy to implement. There will be hiccups, and electricity supply will occasionally be disrupted. But we think that building a near-zero-carbon Maldives is a realistic challenge. Get it right and we will show the apathetic developed world that action is possible, and at reasonable cost.”

Norway also wants to be zero-carbon by 2030, but The Observer says the Norwegian plan lets a good percentage of global emissions to be offset by investments in forestry schemes abroad.

Meanwhile, Lynas believes Nasheed is on the “front line of climate change” as the Maldives is the most vulnerable country in the world. “It is a poor country, but here we have a government that is throwing down the gauntlet to the rich, highly polluting countries,” he said.

The price is huge, said to be about $110m a year for 10 years, but could pay for itself in time as the nation will no longer rely on imported oil products for electricity generation, transport and other functions.

As Nasheed sees it, it’s a small price when you consider the alternative of watching rich polluting world powers ruin your land.

“Climate change is a global emergency,” he reminds us. “The world is in danger of going into cardiac arrest, yet we behave as if we’ve caught a common cold. Today, the Maldives has announced plans to become the world’s most eco-friendly country. I can only hope other nations follow suit.”