Lost kittens is what we call the odds and ends we collect from the internet to share with you.
As 2010 draws to close, we think this is a great time to thank all of you who have written to encourage us since we embarked on our mission only one year ago.
Your words of support have kept us going and we hope you will continue sharing your thoughts in 2011.
Creating a global community of stakeholders in the energy poverty sector is part of our mission but we can’t do this without you!
We have a few treats in store for you in 2011, including the imminent re-launch of our site and the unveiling some new and hugely exciting initiatives.
In the meantime, from all of us in Brooklyn, New York, we wish you a very Happy New Year!
Nina, Christina, & Kim
PS – And please don’t panic this week if things are a bit slower than usual at The Charcoal Project. That’s because we plan to take the week off to ponder the past 12 months and prepare new content for 2011!
New York Times – African Farmers Displaced as Investors Move In (subscription required, but it’s free!) Across Africa and the developing world, a new global land rush is gobbling up large expanses of arable land. Despite their ageless traditions, stunned villagers are discovering that African governments typically own their land and have been leasing it, often at bargain prices, to private investors and foreign governments for decades to come.
IPS News Service – Emissions Punted to Durban, Breakthrough Seen on Forests (By Stephen Leahy) – Cancun, Mexico, Dec 11, 2010 – If success is measured by delaying difficult decisions, then the Cancún climate meeting succeeded by deferring crucial issues over financing and new targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to the next Conference of the Parties meeting a year from now in Durban, South Africa.
The Solutions Journal (online, free) The Promise of Microforestry – This blog post by the founder of microforestry non-profit, Komaza, was fascinating! Based in Kenya, KOMAZA seeks to create income-generating opportunities for smallholder farmers living in infertile and drought-prone regions by encouraging small-scale tree farming—we call it microforestry. By integrating poverty alleviation with environmental conservation, microforestry eases market pressure on indigenous forests, restores degraded landscapes, and helps Africa’s farmers—the majority of whom are women—make life-long investments in their families’ futures.
allAfrica.com New Laws in Kenya promote sustainable charcoal trade but result in spike in prices (14 December, 2010) — The new charcoal rules which are currently being enforced by the Kenya Forest Service (KFS) seek to regulate an industry that has largely been viewed as illegal and promote it as a sustainable enterprise but the short term effect has been a spike in the retail cost of charcoal, hurting household budgets.
Gorillacd.org (via YouTube) Gorillacd.org is a partner organization that helps protect the mountain gorillas and their ecosystem in Virunga National Park in the DRC in Africa. Through an innovative program, the Virunga project has successfully worked over the past few years to provide the hundreds of thousands of people that live around the park with improved cooking technology and sustainable solid biomass fuels, like fuel briquettes. Anatole Bantu works for the briquette project and in this video he shows us how the briquettes are made. It is always inspiring when simple technological solutions succeed in improving conditions for humans and nature.
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