Climate Change

Parks cover more than 4 million hectares of Victoria. They protect many important environments but sit in a broader landscape that is changing. They play a crucial role in protecting biodiversity, providing clean air and water, regulating climate, maintaining healthy waterways, preventing soil erosion, maintaining genetic resources, providing habitat for native species and pollination.

Parks play an important role in removing carbon from the atmosphere, storing it in vegetation and soil is critical.

Climate change is recognised by the Victorian government as presenting major risks to our environment, our way of life and our economy.

Parks are at substantial risk from climate change.  Increased incidence of extreme bushfire weather and conditions, storms and water shortages are already with us. Other emerging risks threaten the flora and fauna, opportunities for recreation, the tourism industry and our cultural heritage.

While uncertainty remains about the scale and timing of climate change impacts, and the best methods to reduce the greenhouse emissions that are driving the warming of the planet, park managers must adapt to cope with impacts that are already occurring.

Reference

Ecosystems are generally recognised by the characteristic vegetation they support. Victoria’s land area supports a wider range of ecosystems than any area of a similar size in Australia: alpine, mallee, grasslands and grassy woodlands, forests, heathlands and heathy woodlands, inland waters and estuaries, and coasts.

This richness, in the number of different ecosystems and different species, and the genetic variety they exhibit — is what we call biodiversity.

Parks play a crucial role in protecting Victoria’s ecosystems including the numerous habitats, floral and faunal communities and ecosystem services (e.g. clean air, clean water) they support.

Parks protect 93 per cent of Victoria’s native flora species and 86 per cent of native fauna species. Our ecosystems are a scientific, cultural, spiritual and economic inheritance that is distinctly Victorian, and one that we must conserve and manage for future generations.

Victoria’s marine environment is shaped by the high energy cool waters of the Southern Ocean and the relatively calmer, but warmer waters of the south-western Pacific, and have developed independently from other major marine regions of the world. This has resulted in many species being found nowhere else.

Victorian natural ecosystems support at least:

• 3140 native species of vascular plants
• 900 lichens
• 750 mosses and liverworts
• 111 mammals
• 447 birds
• 46 freshwater and 600 marine fish
• 133 reptiles
• 33 amphibians
• an untold number of invertebrates, fungi and algae.
• More than 12,000 species of marine animals and plants, most of which are found nowhere else in the world.
• Reference

Hong Kong Roof Farm Exploring Urban Agriculture

“You just need to plant it, nature comes, and then you enjoy it,” said Andrew Tsui. Together with us are Michelle Hong and Pol Fabrega, who co-lead the Rooftop Republic, a social enterprise aimed at greening the city’s dazzling skyline.

Reference

Why is air pollution a problem?

Air pollution contributes to around 40,000 premature deaths in the UK each year and is linked to heart attack and stroke. Lucy Trevallion looks at this invisible problem and how you can reduce your risk.

What is air pollution?

Air pollution can be defined as an alteration of air quality that can be characterized by measurements of chemical, biological or physical pollutants in the air. – It can be classified in 2 sections: visible and invisible air pollution.

Local.

this concerns the quality of ambient air within a radius of a few kilometers

Regional.

pollution like acid rain, photochemical reactions and degradation of water quality at distances of a few kilometers to a thousand kilometers

Global.

depletion of the ozone layer and global warming caused by the emission of greenhouse gases, mainly carbon dioxide (CO2)

Air pollution causes

Air pollution is caused by the presence in the atmosphere of toxic substances, mainly produced by human activities.

Anthropogenic air pollution sources are:

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• 1.Combustion of fossil fuels, like coal and oil for electricity and road transport, producing air pollutants like nitrogen and sulfur dioxide
• 2.Emissions from industries and factories, releasing large amount of carbon monoxide, hydrocarbon, chemicals and organic compounds into the air
• 3.Agricultural activities, due to the use of pesticides, insecticides, and fertilizers that emit harmful chemicals
• 4.Waste production, mostly because of methane generation in landfills

Air pollution effects

1. ON THE ENVIRONMENT
2. GLOBAL WARMING
3. ON HUMAN HEALTH

Air pollution solutions

1. Renewable fuel and clean energy production
2. Energy conservation and efficiency
3. Eco-friendly transportation
4. Green building

————https://solarimpulse.com/air-pollution-solutions

1. What caused Shimano’s Coasting-program to fail ?

PLACE : The author think Coasting should expand market sale to other country, not just in America. – YANNIGROTH

Trough this article, I find some useful thinking ways. We should more comprehensive to have look every problem and to analysis it.

Economic, culture and political is s good point to start research.

Make ultimate outcome

Common Cause
The Case for Working with our Cultural Values

It is inescapably the case that any communication or campaign will inevitably serve to convey particular values, intentionally or otherwise.
Moreover, in conveying these values, the communication or campaign will help to further strengthen those values culturally.
People’s decisions are driven importantly by the values they hold – frequently unconsciously, and sometimes to the virtual exclusion of a rational assessment of the facts. In particular, some values provide a better source of motivation for engaging bigger-than-self problems than other values.
The conjunction of these two insights – that communications and campaigns inevitably serve to strengthen particular values, and that a person’s values have a profound and usually unconscious effect on the behavioural choices that they make –raises profound ethical questions [see Section 1.6].
The practical response to this ethical challenge cannot be to strive for value-neutral communications (this would be impossible). Rather, it is to strive for transparency, communicating to an audience not just what values a particular communication or campaign is intended to convey, but also why those values are considered important.
In the light of this, if one accepts that there are ethical imperatives for addressing bigger-than-self problems, one is presumably also likely to accept that there are ethical imperatives for conveying some values
rather than others – provided that these are conveyed with a high degree of transparency.

Values and behaviour are intimately connected

There is a large body of evidence about the way in which people’s values are organised across cultural contexts, and this report reviews some of these results.
In particular, two research findings are of importance: First, people’s values tend to cluster in remarkably similar ways across cultures; second, the relationship between different values is such that some sets of valuecan easily be held simultaneously while others oppose one another.