C-FISH: Mesh Donated to Fishers in Bluefields, Jamaica

As part of their grant from The C-FISH Initiative, the Bluefields Bay Fishermen's Friendly Society (BBFFS) in Jamaica handed over 50 rolls of legal-sized mesh (valued at USD$5,000) to fishers. The hand over took place at Belmont Fishing Beach with the support of Minister of State in the Ministry of Agriculture, Hon. Luther Buchanan.

Read further information on the C-FISH website here.

Featured Project: Solar Nano Grids, Kenya & Bangladesh

Since the first solar home system was introduced in Bangladesh in 1996, two million more have been installed throughout the nation with the help of financing from international funding bodies. It’s a similar story in Kenya (albeit on a smaller scale), where in the past two decades about 300,000 of the systems have been connected to homes.

Many of the benefits of solar energy are abundantly clear. Households with these systems can make gains in areas like health and education by, for example, cutting down on air pollution from kerosene lamps and powering lights so children and other family members can study.
But there is no such certainty around the economic benefits – there’s scant evidence that these individual systems have the power to lift people out of poverty or have any financial advantages over other ways of generating electricity, for small-scale users beyond the reach of major power grids. The individual systems are also unaffordable for many of the world’s poorest households.

It’s possible then that clusters of about 20 families in rural communities could be better off linking up to a small-scale, communal solar power system that could also be connected to an agricultural or industrial application like an irrigation system. These “nano-grid systems” could supply enough electricity for each household’s need as well as generate an income for the community, reducing the cost of energy for each family.

INTASAVE, in partnership with Loughborough University in England and United International University in Bangladesh, aims to investigate just how viable that option is for families in Bangladesh and Kenya, particularly as climate change increasingly rules out the use of fossil fuels, like oil and gas.

With funding from Britain’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the inter-disciplinary team of social scientists and engineers is investigating the social, technical and economic merits of solar nano-grids in rural communities. The researchers will compare and contrast the grid approach with household systems in Kenya and Bangladesh and draft business models for broader use across those countries.

It’s a significant project that rests on a detailed understanding of the energy uses and needs of households and communities. Is the technology cost-efficient compared with other sources? Is there an obvious advantage for members of a community to pool their interests? Is the community organized enough to manage such a system? These are just some of the questions that the team is seeking to answer.

For further information contact: admin@intasave.org

Sustainable Tourism Indicators

European Tourism Indicator System for Sustainable Management of Tourism Destinations

The tourism industry has long based its growth on visitor numbers but these rarely give the full picture. Data like visitor arrivals and room occupancy give a quick snapshot of a resort’s economic health but don’t show the full scope of an industry’s impact on the environment or local communities.

In 2012, the European Commission enlisted INTASAVE, the University of Surrey and Sustainable Travel International to come up with a series of measures that destinations could use to monitor the sustainability of tourism in their area.

The project - officially known as “A Study on the Feasibility of a European Tourism Indicator System for Sustainable Management at Destination Level” - is part of the European Commission’s drive to make the tourism industry more competitive and improve social, environmental and economic sustainability.

The first step in the project was to analyse the pros and cons of existing indicator systems. The lessons learned from this exercise were then fed into the development of a refined set of indicators, with a manual outlining a system to use for their implementation. This system and the revised indicators were then tested at workshops across Europe to see if they would be useful for every type of tourism destination, from ski centres to beach resorts.

The result is the European Tourism Indicator System, a set of, ready-to-use core measures to help all those connected with tourism at a destination build up an accurate picture of what is really going on. So for the first time sectors like waste disposal, utility companies, local planners, business owners, tourist authorities and others can come together to look at this picture and decide together on how they would like it to evolve.

As Malcolm Bell, from Visit Cornwall said: “The European Tourism Indicator System enables destinations to develop the tourism they want, rather than the tourism they end up with.”

The system was officially launched by the European Commission in Brussels in February 2013. Destinations across Europe are now adopting it to feed back into a revision planned for 2015, and the system is expected to continuously evolve.

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European Union Indicators for Sustainable Management at Destination Level
A Europe-wide feasibility study and implementation of a system of indicators and toolkit for national and local stakeholders funded by the European Commission.

 

 

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Culture of Climate Change Index; Temperature Fluctuations for 27 Countries

The Culture of Climate Change Index accounts for a variety of factors and a wide range of data that set a benchmark for 27 countries to see how far each is along the road to sustainability.

Sponsored by the British Council (China), the index is a combination of soft and hard information that incorporates factors as diverse as public awareness and civil society to average surface temperatures and energy consumption.

INTASAVE provided the critical temperature data for each of the countries, spanning the globe from Australia to Sudan to Venezuela. These numbers are essential if the index is to have a solid foundation of climate science evidence on which to base later comparisons.

Using triangulated methodologies, INTASAVE’s researchers calculated and plotted mean average temperature fluctuations across each country over a five-decade period. It was a vast task that revealed significant variations in temperature in all but one of the countries over the study period.

Numbers are not solutions but they serve as important guides for measuring a country’s impact on the environment. The data provided and index, as a combined analysis, can also give impetus to action and point to models that other countries might follow to improve sustainability.

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