Being Green

Nobel Prize in Physics Goes to Climate Change Researchers This week saw the announcement of the Nobel Prize in Physics, one of the Big Nobels. Coincidentally, or perhaps not so coincidentally, the news in London was full of flooding and disruptions after torrential rainstorms over the city.

The rapid expansion of the wine industry in the early 2000s led to concerns that the vineyards were encroaching on the Western Cape’s two unique global biodiversity hotspots – the Cape Floral Kingdom and the Succulent Karoo. So, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) decided to partner with farm owners who are effectively custodians of the land and therefore are able to ensure that the natural areas are protected. In this week’s edition of Being Green, Glynis Crook joined them in Paarl as the organisation and winemakers celebrated the fact that 50 Cape wine farms are now recognised as Conservation Champions.

A significant event took place a few days ago in Southern England. Not exactly earth-shattering, but we’ll probably look back on it in years to come as the start of a new age. An age of electric transport heralding another de-carbonisation initiative. What am I talking about? The first flight of Rolls-Royce’s electric aeroplane.

It’s National Recycling Day today, and in this week’s edition of Being Green, Glynis Crook speaks to Melanie Ludwig of Organics Recycling Association of South Africa about new rules coming into effect in the Western Cape next year with regards to organic waste in landfills, and how we can use ours to make compost.

Tuna Populations Bounce Back Good news for a change and it’s sorely needed amidst the political turmoil and natural disaster events abounding on the media at present, to say nothing of COVID-19, so we won’t say anything about it. Good news? Well, there is some, say marine conservation scientists. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature, the IUCN, is currently meeting in the French city of Marseille, an annual congress which announces the sate of the planet’s biodiversity and is reckoned to be the most authoritative voice on the subject. You will know the Extinction Red List, compiled by the IUCN.

In this week’s edition of Being Green, Glynis Crook speaks to the World Wide Fund for Nature-South Africa’s environment behaviour change lead, Pavitray “Pavs” Pillay, about the recent breach of a decommissioned landfill at Witsand which resulted in large quantities of litter spilling onto the beach and out to sea. They also discuss the need to improve waste management in Cape Town.

The fates seem to conspire sometimes, (I know that’s ridiculous coming from an old skeptic like me) BUT anyway…there was excitement a few days ago about the phenomena in the sky above Gauteng, when a slow-moving meteor seemed to be breaking up and heading in the direction of Botswana, with fiery trails and all. Pursued by many cell-phone cameras hastily deployed, and many What’s Apps and calls exchanged

Last week on Being Green, John Richards spoke about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s sixth climate assessment report which had been published a few days earlier. It was the first to be released by the United Nations body since 2014 and comes ahead of the COP26 summit. The meeting in Glasgow in November is widely seen as one of the last chances for the world to agree to limits on greenhouse gas emissions. The IPCC report’s warnings are stark, and it places the blame for changes in the world’s climate squarely on the shoulders of humans. It’s such an important story that on this week’s edition of the programme, Glynis Crook speaks to one of its lead authors, Francois Engelbrecht, who is a professor of climatology at Wits University’s Global Change Institute.

The climate-change community is abuzz with the latest report just put out by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to give it its full jaw-breaking title, but we’ll switch to IPCC, much easier. This is the final and authoritative report on the state of play before the COP 26 big event in Glasgow in just over 90 days time. And things have really been hotting up

In this week’s edition of Being Green, Glynis Crook speaks to Adam Harrower, a botanist at Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden about an alarming story in the New York Times detailing the extensive trafficking of succulents, many of them endangered, that are unique to the Western and Northern Cape. South Africa is home to about one-third of the world’s approximately 10,000 succulent species, and Cape Nature says there are fears that the level of poaching may result in some of them becoming extinct in the wild. It’s believed that the surge in smuggling is driven by a demand from collectors abroad, with foreign syndicates using locals to harvest the plants.