Rainwater Harvesting Rules Have Developers Worried
They question how standards will affect their bottom lines
CARLI BROSSEAU
Published: 07.23.2008
Tucson, AZ
When local developers heard they may be required to harvest enough rainwater to irrigate 75 percent of the landscaping on any new property they develop, they got nervous.
Then they started asking questions: How much will this cost? How will it work? Will I need to buy cisterns? Have they considered that those things are ugly?
Nearly 900 New Species Discovered in Smokies
NANCI BOMPEY
Published: 07.23.2008
ASHEVILLE, N.C. – A 10-year project designed to document all living creatures in Great Smoky Mountains National Park has led to the discovery of nearly 900 new species, researchers say.
The success of the 10-year-old All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory project, the largest natural history survey ever undertaken in the United States, was cited during a Senate subcommittee field hearing this week at the University of North Carolina at Asheville.
Rights and Resources Initiative
Public release date: 14-Jul-2008
Contact: Jeff Haskins
jhaskins@burnesscommunications.com
254-729-871-422
LONDON (14 July 2008) — Escalating global demand
for fuel, food and wood fibre will destroy the
world’s forests, if efforts to address climate
change and poverty fail to empower the
billion-plus forest-dependent poor, according to
two reports released today by the U.S.-based
Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI), an
international coalition comprising the world’s
foremost organisations on forest governance and
conservation.
The studies were delivered today at an event in
the House of Commons hosted by Martin Horwood, MP
for Cheltenham. Sponsored by RRI and the UK-based
Forest Peoples Programme, speakers included
Gareth Thomas, the UK Minister for Trade and
Development; authors of the two reports; as well
as advocates for forest communities in Africa and
Asia.
“The main thing we found is that if you want to
conserve species, that policy might not be
compatible with carbon sequestration,” said
co-author Andrew Plantinga, a professor in the
Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics
at Oregon State University. “On the other hand,
if you want to get carbon out of the atmosphere,
it’s not clear that will be good for species.”
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Incentives For Carbon Sequestration May Not Protect Species
ScienceDaily (July 9, 2008) – Paying rural
landowners in Oregon’s Willamette Basin to
protect at-risk animals won’t necessarily mean
that their newly conserved trees and plants will
absorb more carbon from the atmosphere and vice
versa, a new study has found.