New approach to programming may boost ‘green’ computing

A Binghamton University computer scientist with an interest in “green” software development has received the National Science Foundation’s most prestigious award for young researchers.

Yu David Liu received a five-year, $448,641 grant from the NSF’s Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program. The highly competitive grants support junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research.

Liu joined Binghamton’s faculty in 2008, after earning master’s and doctoral degrees in computer science from Johns Hopkins University. He also recently received a $50,000 grant from Google for a related research project.

Computers and electronic devices, ranging from smartphones to servers, consume a steadily growing amount of energy. In recent years, computer scientists have developed an interest in paring back this consumption, though generally they’ve approached the challenge through modifying hardware or perhaps operating systems. Liu plans to tackle the problem by considering how programmers can create more energy-efficient software.

“Saving energy is an activity that should come from many layers,” said Liu, who plans to build energy-related parameters into a programming language.

A change at that level would permit and encourage programmers to express their energy-saving intentions directly when software is developed. “Saving energy is often a trade-off,” Liu said. “Sometimes you’re willing to run your program slower so your cell phone battery can last longer.” For such settings — often specific to the nature of the applications — no automated algorithms know as much as programmers.

“Programs today are not just 50 lines of code,” Liu said. They have often grown to be thousands or even millions of lines long. He hopes to employ advanced programming language technologies known as “type systems” to answer questions such as “What is the energy-consumption pattern of a large program, given the consumption patterns of its fragments?” and “Do programmers have conflicted views of the energy-consumption patterns of their software?”

Energy-efficient solutions at the level of programming languages also enjoy a high degree of platform independence, meaning they can have an impact all along the spectrum from phones to servers. “In an era when new platforms are introduced every year,” Liu explained, “an approach that’s platform-independent would be beneficial because it can be applied more broadly.”

None of the mainstream computer languages supports energy-aware programming, he said. However, language designers often create a blueprint that can be extended. Java, for instance, could be extended as EnergyJava and remain 90 percent the same. Such moderate changes would make it possible for programmers to adopt it relatively easily.

There isn’t much history in this area, Liu said, so it’s hard to say how quickly industry will react to the development of an energy-efficient language. However, new language designs have the potential to influence how millions of programmers think.

“I think every researcher wants to make the world better, and we just put it into our own perspective,” he said. “Sometime in the future, every Computer Science 101 class may include a lecture or two on energy-aware programming. As an educator, I’m excited about helping to ensure that next-generation programmers are green-conscious from the beginning of their careers.”

 

Reference Link

http://discovere.binghamton.edu/features/liu-3583.html
Courtesy
Binghamton University State University of New York

Cell Phone Chargers to go Green

Today cell-phones have become an integral part of our life and are the most used mode of communication. More prevalent the use of cell-phone, more imperative is the need to curtail eco-pollution that emanates from the huge number of still-in-use and out-of-use cell phones. Toxic products like lead, mercury, cadmium and other materials pose a real threat to our ecosystem. Handset manufactures, recognizing the need of the hour, are showing great interest and emphasis on manufacturing not only environmentally-friendly handsets but also eco-friendly chargers.

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Next generation phones:
The need for mobile communication to go green has brought forward innovative new designs with latest technology & expertise to satisfy the customers. Solar energy, kinetic energy and wind energy are a few of the energy sources that will be harnessed to power the handsets.

Solar energy for towers:
India with one of the largest markets for cell-phones has proposed plans for cell-phone towers that are powered by solar energy. China Mobile, the leading Chinese telecommunication operator, has already set up the world’s biggest solar-energy-powered base station in China.

Powered by radio frequency:
Nokia is trying to manufacture cell-phones that will use ambient radio waves. Their prototype can harness 50mW of power from radio waves. This is sufficient to power the cell-phone in standby mode.

Solar power for cell-phones:
All major players in the cell-phone manufacturing industry are now busy into launching solar-powered cell-phones. Pop by LG, Blue-earth by Samsung and two other Sharp Models are all new prototypes using solar power.

Cell-phone chargers:
With eco-friendly cell-phones gaining popularity, cell-phone chargers are also going green. Many are the chargers that will be made with environmentally friendly materials and powered by renewable energy sources.

More future ideas:
Since solar power is unavailable at night time, the idea of using kinetic energy to generate electrons is now being explored. Motion of any form is utilized to generate power for charging the phone. Using airbed foot pumps to drive an embedded turbine to generate energy and convert it to electric power is now being tried.

Unconventional sources:
There are a number of plans on the anvil like fuel cells which can generate power from water; generating power from sources that are unconventional like cold drink or alcohol. So the day is not far off when the mobile communication goes totally green and uses only power made from renewable energy.

Reference Link
http://www.alternative-energy-news.info/cell-phone-chargers-to-go-green/

Courtesy
AE News Network

Sanyo to sell chip unit to focus on green technology

(Reuters) – Japan‘s Sanyo Electric (6764.T) is to sell its loss-making chip unit to ON Semiconductor(ONNN.O) for about 33 billion yen ($373 million), turning its focus to environmentally friendly technology, it said on Thursday.

The companies plan to complete the combined cash and stock transaction by the end of the year, executives told a news conference in Tokyo.

Sanyo, majority owned by Panasonic Corp (6752.T), plans to refocus by pouring $1.8 billion into its rechargeable battery and solar cell businesses over the next three years.

With its ninth acquisition in a decade, Arizona-based ON Semiconductor, spun off from Motorola Inc (MOT.N) in 1999, expects to become a top 20 global player, CEO Keith Jackson told reporters.

The U.S. firm will try to turn Sanyo Semiconductor profitable by investing in new equipment and pushing sales in Europe and the United States to make use of spare capacity at Sanyo, CEO Keith Jackson said in an interview.

“We’ve already said that we expect this to be not just profitable, but accretive for ON Semiconductor within the first year,” Jackson said in the interview.

No layoffs are planned for the time being and Sanyo Semiconductor’s management will stay in place.

REFOCUS

The world’s No.1 rechargeable battery maker, Sanyo is a small player in the global chip market, but its semiconductor unit is strong in analog chips, especially for visual and audio products.

Analog chips, a majority of which are power management chips, are used in products that involve data such as electrical input, sound waves and pressure, which cannot be broken into ones and zeros — the stuff of digital signals.

Sanyo Semiconductor, which employs about 8,260 workers, including those at fully-owned subsidiaries, made a 7.1 billion yen loss in the year to March 2010, helping to push Sanyo into a loss for the year.

“Quite apart from the price, it is a good thing for Sanyo to get rid of businesses it is not planning to focus on,” said Mitsushige Akino Chief Fund manager at Ichiyoshi Investment Management Co Ltd, noting that the deal was part of a trend toward greater focus in Japanese industry

Last month Fujitsu Ltd (6702.T) and Toshiba Corp (6502.T) said they would merge their mobile phone businesses in October to create Japan‘s second largest cellphone maker.

In October last year, Toshiba Corp took over Fujitsu’s hard drive business.

ON Semiconductor, which has about 13,000 employees globally, competes with Texas Instruments Inc (TXN.N), Intersil Corp (ISIL.O) and Fairchild Semiconductor International Inc (FCS.N) and acquired California Micro Devices for $113 million in cash in January.

The pace of its acquisitions is likely to slow as it digests the current deal, Jackson said.

“In the near term, this is a very significant transaction and of course it’s cross-cultural as well. So the difficulties are quite a few. I would expect us to slow down in our progress in acquisitions and take a long pause, because it will take us a while to optimize the situation,” he said.

Reference Link

Reference Link
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE66E2I120100715?feedType=RSS&feedName=innovationNews

Courtesy
Thomson Reuters

Akathethara builds a green bridge to the future

The grama panchayat in Palakkad displays admirable ecological consciousness and rides on the wings of technology

Green initiatives:Finance Minister T.M. Thomas Isaac inaugurating the Palakkad Gap afforestation scheme of the Akathethara grama panchayat.

Akathethara (PALAKKAD): Ecological disasters and environmental degradation might be issues beyond the scope of a local body. But grassroots-level initiatives to restore the ecological balance at least at the local level have great relevance, especially in an environmentally sensitive part of the world.

Akathethara grama panchayat, lying in the lap of the Western Ghats, is engaged in such an endeavour in a bid to reverse degradation of the nearby forest areas that has hurt the living conditions of the people.

The terrain, known popularly as the ‘Palakkad Gap’, is said to be one of the longest forest passes in the world and the effort of the panchayat over the last two years has been to green this stretch by planting more than one lakh saplings.

The panchayat launched the programme on June 5, World Environment Day, last year. Christened ‘Green the Gap’ programme, the panchayat’s initiative has received widespread praise with a survey undertaken by the Forest Department showing that 90 per cent of the saplings have survived.

The 40 km-wide natural gap in the 1,960-km Western Ghats plays a key role in determining the special characteristics of the district such as its climate and commercial and cultural exchanges with the rest of the country.

Instead of resting on its laurels , the panchayat has planted another 25,000 saplings beginning June 5 this year, thereby taking its greening initiative to the entire panchayat with the help of the Forest Department, says panchayat president D. Sadasivan.

The panchayat has also taken up planting of saplings on private land and the sides of roads and canals and, most importantly, on the banks of the Kalpathy river. Last year, bamboo was planted on 25 acres under the Centrally sponsored ‘Hariyali scheme’. The panchayat also launched a watershed development programme with the involvement of local padasekhara samithis and karshaka samithis under the supervision of the Akathethara Integrated Watershed Council.

Farmers are being given tips on good farming techniques and machinery by the agro clinic set up by the panchayat and their labour requirements are met to a large extent by its ‘labour bank’.

Akathethara has also fast tracked itself into the cyber world with a fully computerised office with a front office flaunting a touch screen enquiry facility. The people of the panchayat can now submit applications and petitions online and get certificates of ownership, birth, death, residence, etc. without the usual hassle.

It has also taken up many social welfare schemes and formed a ‘Senior Citizens Club’ to make it a ‘senior citizen friendly panchayat’. Health care is being provided to terminally ill patients under the ‘Ashraya Scheme’.

The panchayat has set up a solid waste management plant in its bid to become a ‘zero waste panchayat’.

It has won the Nirmal Puraskar carrying a purse of Rs.5 lakh from the Central government for its total sanitation initiatives.

Reference Link
http://www.hindu.com/2010/07/06/stories/2010070659060400.htm

Courtesy
The Hindu

Clean, green panchayats bestowed with honour

More to come:Collector M. Jayaraman with the presidents of village panchayats which won the Nirmal Gram Puraskar in Tirunelveli

TIRUNELVELI: Collector M. Jayaraman on Monday felicitated the presidents of 11 village panchayats for having received the Nirmal Gram Puraskar, being presented by the Centre to the clean and green rural local bodies.

The Central government gives Nirmal Gram Puraskar awards to the village panchayats for ensuring the construction of toilets in every house under its jurisdiction, planting trees in every street, constructing drainage channel and converting the garbage into vermicompost.

The award carries a memento, certificate and cash award ranging from Rs. 50,000 to Rs. 5 lakh, based on the population of the award-winning local body.

And, this amount could be spent for sanitary operations, to augment drinking water supply, constructing drainage channels, establishing infrastructure facilities for solid and liquid waste management.

Since the district administration was executing the ‘Total Sanitation Campaign’ in the district with much vigour, so far 38 village panchayats in the district had bagged the Nirmal Gram Puraskar award since 2005-2006.

For the year 2008-2009, nineteen village panchayats had been selected for this award.

Mudaliyarpatti (Kadayam union), Oormelazhagiyaan (Kadayanallur), Soorankudi (Kalakkad), Inaamvellakkaal (Keezhapaavoor), Usilankulam and Chitthirampatti (Kuruvikulam), Kaanaarpatti, Karunkaadu (Maanur), Chinna Kovilaankulam (Melaneelithanallur), Chinthamani (Nanguneri), Thiruvenkatanathapuram (Palayamkottai), Chaattupaththu (Pappakudi), Aanaikudi (Radhapuram), Ilaththur and Karkudi (Shencottai), Aayiraperi (Tenkasi), Pazhavoor and Levingipuram (Valliyoor) and Ramanathapuram (Vasudevanallur) had been selected.

Since the heads of eight of these village panchayats were felicitated in a function held at Vickramasingapuram on June 21, others were honoured by Mr. Jayaraman on Monday in a simple function held at the Collectorate.

Complimenting the village panchayats that had bagged the Nirmal Gram Puraskar Award, Mr. Jayaraman informed that the district administration had nominated the names of fifty village panchayats for the award for the year 2009-2010 as these rural local bodies had fulfilled all mandatory norms to get the honour. Project Officer, District Rural Development Agency R. Sankar was present.

Reference Link
http://www.hindu.com/2010/07/06/stories/2010070657780200.htm

Courtesy
The Hindu

NY skyscraper wins highest "green" certification

(Reuters) – The U.S. Green Building Council gave the Bank of America Tower its highest rating for environmental performance and sustainability on Thursday, meaning New York City’s second-tallest building is also its greenest.

The 54-story building completed in 2008 at a cost of $2 billion became the first commercial high-rise to win the “platinum” certification from the non-profit council that promotes environmentally friendly construction and design.

The certification was based on water and energy efficiency, indoor air quality, the environmental friendliness of construction materials and other criteria.

At 1,200 feet, it is the second tallest building in the city after the Empire State Building. Years before the building opened, Bank of America and developers from the Durst Organization decided to create an example at the corner of 42nd Street and Sixth Avenue.

“They came to us and said they wanted to build the largest environmentally responsible building they could. That was our goal from the get-go,” said project architect Serge Appel of Cook+Fox Architects.

The building has its own 4.6-megawatt co-generation plant, and its floor-to-ceiling windows reduce the need for artificial lighting. The roof captures rainwater. Waste water from the sinks is recycled. The men’s rooms even have waterless urinals. The measures save an estimated 8 million to 9 million gallons of water per year.

The steel was made of 87 percent recycled material, and the concrete from 45 percent recycled content — in this case, blast furnace slag.

The project broke ground in 2004, four years before the financial crisis that led to Bank of America acquiring Merrill Lynch and Countrywide, and the accolade comes as Wall Street’s reputation with the public is poor.

“It’s helped with employee morale. In terms of how the financial services industry is seen by the public … a more buoyant economy and lower unemployment will make a bigger difference in our image,” said Anne Finucane, the bank’s global strategy and marketing officer.

Developers say the lower carbon dioxide content in the air helps people avoid that drowsy feeling in the afternoon, and spectacular views from higher floors are enough to keep eyes open.

“There’s a psychological advantage to being able to see outside the building,” architect Appel said. “It’s very different from the way buildings were built in the 1980s with tinted glass windows. It always looked like it was stormy outside.”

Reference Link
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64J3LW20100520?type=domesticNews

Courtesy
Thomson Reuters

Thinking Green: Function Over Form

Sergio Gómez

A botanical garden in Medellín, Colombia, part of a building initiative in this city once plagued by drug wars.

By HOLLAND COTTER

As we know, everything is connected. So what happens when the butterfly in Brazil, whose fluttering wings are creating wind-power in Texas, dies off because of pollution or deforestation? Somewhere on the planet, wind drops, energy stalls, lights go out. And whether we know it or not, we’re all in trouble.

Multimedia

Surely there are steps we can take to head off such catastrophes. The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum says there are. And it offers dozens of possibilities in the current edition of its National Design Triennial, which comes with a title in the form of rhetorical question: “Why Design Now?”

The exhibition, the fourth since the triennial was initiated in 2000, is the largest yet and the most international in its reach. It’s also hands down the most ecology-conscious version so far. Design as defined here isn’t about how to make the House Beautiful more beautiful; it’s about how to keep the globe afloat and ensure that all its occupants have access to a healthy patch of it.

To this end, the Modernist imperative of less is more has been both sharpened and broadened. Reduce, reuse, recycle are the commandments now. In embracing them, the show doesn’t hesitate to slight comely form in favor of worthy function.

And some of the functions are pretty esoteric. You will find, for example, body armor designed to be worn when clearing mine-fields; a hand-driven grain thresher, now being field-tested in Mali, made from a bicycle wheel; and an LED light bulb fueled by dirt. (If you water the dirt occasionally, the bulb is good to go for ages.) These items don’t fully reveal their uses at a glance, so you’ll need to read some exhibition labels. But in this case even old art-should-speak-for-itself types won’t mind. The labels are fascinating, each a little sociology lesson, clearly written and down to earth.

Organized by a team of four Cooper-Hewitt curators (Ellen Lupton, Cara McCarty, Matilda McQuaid and Cynthia Smith), the show is divided into several thematic groupings, with some themes (e.g., energy) more concrete than others (simplicity). All overlap to some degree, with the bottom line throughout being that design, whatever its form, should deliver the maximum social good to the maximum number of people.

Most sections mix realized designs with others still on the drawing board. In the energy section solar-charged lamps created by German and Sri Lankan designers for a Laotian power company are already in use in Afghanistan and Uganda. And Renzo Piano’s radically green California Academy of Sciences building in San Francisco, with a 2.5-acre grass-and-flower field for a roof, is up and running.

By contrast the dirt-fueled lamp remains in the prototype stage. And a hugely ambitious experiment in alternative-energy living called the Masdar Development is still an excavation and a snazzy computer simulation. If all goes as planned, it will eventually be a city of 40,000 people in Abu Dhabi, and the first car-free city in the world.

One section of the show is devoted to transportation, a notorious energy eater and pollution producer. Among several proposed solutions for reducing its ill effects is a plug-in vehicle called the MIT CityCar, designed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and intended for short-term urban use. This squat two-seater would be rentable by the hour with the swipe of a charge card and is small enough to be stored in stacks when not in use.

Even more eco-friendly, though, is the old-style pedal-cycle, which may find new use in India as the engine pulling a multipurpose cart. Made of bamboo and rattan, the cart was conceived to ease and expand the mobility of women, providing them with an efficient vehicle for transporting children to schools or doctors, and for bringing handicrafts to market to earn extra money.

Health and prosperity also have sections of their own. The first includes condom applicators from South Africa, a prosthetic arm that is responsive to neural impulses, and an Internet-based disease-surveillance system that streams updated news of medical crises around the world. The second is primarily about green entrepreneurship, from solo ventures in off-the-grid couture and furniture design, to communal projects like the vast urban farm established and tended by members of the Vietnamese-American population of New Orleans.

What could be called the nuts-and-bolts part of the exhibition, the materials section, is low on visual zip but high on oddness and ingenuity, and distinctive in that nothing is what it looks to be. “Stone” is actually recycled glass; “plastic” is made from processed grass; and “lumber” is partially composed of loofah, a cucumberlike vegetable grown in Paraguay.

In a related way the true functions of many designs are hidden in plain sight.

A set of delicate, porcelainlike Japanese dishes turns out to be a line of disposable paper tableware made of repurposed materials. A zany piece of furniture called the Cabbage Chair looks modishly high end but is strictly D.I.Y.: You take an upright roll of tightly layered paper and peel back the sheets until you have the seat you want.

Finally, three elegant Swedish drinking glasses, which swell gently outward just below midpoint, couldn’t look more straightforward as to use, though they were conceived with a specific function in mind. The swell was meant to serve as a stabilizing grip so that the glasses could be comfortably held by people with neural or muscular disorders that produce numbness or tremors.

Like all design, architecture is a social art. It’s about sharing and shaping the world, and the triennial is at its most inspired in its display of architectural models and renderings.

Not all are wildly innovative. The so-called Loblolly House, to be assembled from premade parts, is basically an updated version of a Sears Kit Home with reduced environmental impact.

But the creation of new civic architecture in Medellín, Colombia, is the story of a social revolution in progress. Plagued with drug wars, Medellín was one of the most violent places on earth until a team of politicians, urban planners and architects began to erect brilliantly conceived public buildings in poor, war-zone neighborhoods. Before long, through this and other social initiatives the street battles stopped, the gangs cleared out, the city changed.

Frankly, set beside this heroic example of why design matters, some things in the triennial feel a bit silly. It’s hard to believe that Issey Miyake’s “Color Hunting,” which involves matching fabric dyes to the colors of the Brazilian rain forest, is going to do much to raise consciousness about conservation.

And how good an idea is a publication like Good Magazine, which has an editorial mandate to deliver — I quote the description in the triennial’s catalog — only upbeat news to “young, educated readers seeking optimistic analysis of the world’s problems”? At this point, with the green movement deradicalized and sedated by marketing forces, skeptical questions about the relationship of design to the world’s problems are badly needed and in short supply.

And to a degree, the triennial contributes to this problem. Too many of the catalog’s project descriptions have the promotional tone of advertisements, just as too many of the designs in this global survey seem conceived to fit comfortably in upper-middle-class first-world homes.

That the show is installed in a home, namely the former residence of Andrew Carnegie, causes different problems, about which little can be done. The Cooper-Hewitt’s Gilded Age interior tends to overpower whatever is in it, particularly work that is visually unassertive, as much of this is.

That the show is engaging despite these drawbacks is a credit to the curators’ diligence, and to the vitality of the questions posed and answers given by the projects they’ve chosen.

A carless city. Architecture that creates (or contributes to) peace. An earth-friendly light bulb that shines for years. Such concepts are already producing winds of change that might, if only science and design themselves can avoid complacency, gain transformative force in the decades ahead.

Reference Link
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/14/arts/design/14design.html?pagewanted=1&nl=nyregion&emc=urb1

Courtesy
The New York Times Company.

A bus evoking green thoughts

Eco concerns:Forest Minister Benoy Viswom flagging off the ‘Rahma Green Messenger’ bus from the mofussil bus stand in the city on Monday.

Kozhikode: With the monsoon just a few weeks away, it’s an eco-campaign with a difference. An ordinary bus has been transformed into a piece of forest with huge trees, wild rivulets and massive rocks sculpted on the outer body. Inside, the bus is turned into a home theatre ready to screen videos urging viewers to save the earth by planting trees and conserving rain water. It also has a plethora of similar messages displayed in different forms calling upon the spectators to do something for the earth with great urgency.

With an amused crowd watching the unusual ‘bus’ on the road all set to roll on, Forests Minister Benoy Viswom flagged off the ‘Rahma Green Messenger’ mobile exhibition bus on the premises of the Mofussil bus stand on Monday morning.

The exhibition, which is aimed at spreading the message of water conservation and environmental protection, is part of a six-month long eco-campaign organised by Rahma, a social service project recently launched by a collective of earth-lovers, philanthropists and community leaders.

The Green Messenger, which will travel across six districts of Malabar, will stop at several points in all these districts and let the public watch DVDs and slide-shows on water conservation and environmental awareness.

“Sending a message of water conservation to save our earth from an acute drinking water shortage is one of the main objectives of our campaign,” said a Rahma member.

Precious rain water

On an average, Kerala receives 3,000 mm rain annually, which is well above the national average. “But we are able to save only five per cent of it and the rest ends up in the sea in no time,” he said.

Studies have found that around 30 per cent of the rain water can be conserved if people take effective measures. “The Green Messenger is out to spread this valuable message to all,” he said.

According to the organisers, the Green Messenger will be given receptions by environmental activists and socio-cultural organisations in all the districts.

Reference Link
http://www.hindu.com/2010/05/11/stories/2010051156020300.htm

Courtesy
The Hindu

Science promotion with a green touch

‘Environmental problems cannot be left to market mechanism’

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‘Environmental problems cannot be left to market mechanism.’

C.T.S. Nair, who is entrusted with the task of revamping Kerala’s S&T research institutes, shares his goals and ideas with T. Nandakumar.

Back home after a 40-year-long career spanning three continents, he could have opted for a peaceful retired life, watching the world go by. But less than a year after retirement, C.T. Sivasankaran Nair is already into his second innings.

As Executive Vice-President of the Kerala State Council for Science, Technology and Environment, he is now focussed on revamping the research institutes under the Council and injecting fresh dynamism into the scientific establishment in the State.

Mr. Nair’s stints as an IFS (Indian Forest Service) officer and later with the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) have exposed him to many challenges. As Chief Economist of the FAO forestry department, he was a lead author of The State of the World’s Forests 2009, a key U.N. report that highlighted the impact of climate change and recession on the health of forests.

Forest-rich nations

Talking to The Hindu recently, Mr. Nair outlined his perspective on the need to transform institutions to deal with emerging challenges.

He believes that democratically functioning institutional arrangements at the grassroots level are critical for the success of initiatives to protect forest resources.

He is cautious in his approach to the United Nations Collaborative Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries (UN-REDD), an initiative that involves payment of compensation by developed nations to forest-rich developing countries not to cut down trees. Mr. Nair feels it is time for Kerala to move towards a green economy.

Pressure on resources

“The density of population here has placed enormous pressure on natural resources. So, any issue involving land and natural resources tends to be contested. Also, consumerism has left its impact on the fragile environment.”

He says uncontrolled growth of tourism poses a bigger problem today than the encroachments by small farmers in the previous decades.

He sees the need for a firm hand to deal with encroachments. “While in the case of small farmers, encroachment was a social issue with livelihood concerns, encroachment by tourism lobby has to be seen as more of a law and order issue.” Spelling out his priority, Mr. Nair says he will try to develop a long-term strategy for the science and technology (S&T) sector in Kerala. “The plan covering 20 years will take into account the likely social and economic changes in the State. It will incorporate the impact of climate change and identify appropriate technologies. The strategy will be formulated in consultation with scientists, researchers, NGOs and officials.” “Institutions will have to overcome inertia. They have to be reprogrammed to adapt to change. The system that spends more money at the top, with far too little at the field level, must be changed.” Mr. Nair wants to focus on decentralisation of institutions in the S&T sector, with a systematic social audit. “These institutions face a serious crisis in human resources. Many experienced scientists are due to retire in two to three years. There is an urgent need to recruit young scientists.” He also stresses the need to change rules to promote scientific research. The better part of Mr. Nair’s career was involved in building up institutions. He was part of the team tasked with the establishment of the Kerala Forest Research Institute, Peechi. His FAO assignments in Sudan, Bangkok and its headquarters at Rome exposed him to various institutions. Mr. Nair believes that a robust political environment and strong institutions are needed to conserve forest resources. Mr. Nair asserts that environmental problems cannot be left to market mechanism. Ultimately there is no escape from carbon tax, he says.

Reference Link
http://www.hindu.com/2010/05/03/stories/2010050358820200.htm

Courtesy
The Hindu

'Green' exercise quickly 'boosts mental health'

Just five minutes of exercise in a “green space” such as a park can boost mental health, researchers claim.

There is growing evidence that combining activities such as walking or cycling with nature boosts well-being.

In the latest analysis, UK researchers looked at evidence from 1,250 people in 10 studies and found fast improvements in mood and self-esteem.

The study in the Environmental Science and Technology journal suggested the strongest impact was on young people.

The research looked at many different outdoor activities including walking, gardening, cycling, fishing, boating, horse-riding and farming in locations such as a park, garden or nature trail.

The biggest effect was seen within just five minutes.

With longer periods of time exercising in a green environment, the positive effects were clearly apparent but were of a smaller magnitude, the study found.

Looking at men and women of different ages, the researchers found the health changes – physical and mental – were particularly strong in the young and the mentally-ill.

Green and blue

A bigger effect was seen with exercise in an area that also contained water – such as a lake or river.

Study leader Jules Pretty, a researcher at the University of Essex, said those who were generally inactive, or stressed, or with mental illness would probably benefit the most from “green exercise”.

We would like to see all doctors considering exercise as a treatment where appropriate Paul Farmer, Mind

“Employers, for example, could encourage staff in stressful workplaces to take a short walk at lunchtime in the nearest park to improve mental health.”

He also said exercise programmes outdoors could benefit youth offenders.

“A challenge for policy makers is that policy recommendations on physical activity are easily stated but rarely adopted widely.”

Paul Farmer, chief executive of mental health charity Mind, said the research is yet further evidence that even a short period of green exercise can provide a low cost and drug-free therapy to help improve mental wellbeing.

“It’s important that people experiencing depression can be given the option of a range of treatments, and we would like to see all doctors considering exercise as a treatment where appropriate.”

Mind runs a grant scheme for local environmental projects to help people with mental illness get involved in outdoor activities.

Reference Link
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8654350.stm

Courtesy
BBC News