Friday, June 7, 2013

City parks and population growth

Do cities with growing populations have bigger parks? Not necessarily. While many things like crime, output in patents or its road network grows as population increases, the amount of green space really depends upon the choices made in different cities.

The City Life of Birds

City life can be hard for birds to cope with. A new study found that the light and sound of urban areas has “a profound effect on the internal clocks” of birds, waking up earlier and resting later than their forest counterpart. Their pattern of activity/rest was also a lot more scattered. This makes having large green space such as Kowloon Park as biodiversity refuges the more important in a 24-hour city like Hong Kong. http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2013/06/city-living-changes-biological-clocks-birds-study-shows/5813/

Wednesday, June 5, 2013

UN recommendation for post-2015 development agenda

Last week, a UN panel has released its much-anticipated recommendations for a post-2015 Agenda to replace the Millennium Development Goals, which has driven the global development actions in the past 12 years. The recommendations include the outright end to poverty, food, water and energy security, good governance and catalyzing long term finance. On the goal for conserving the world’s natural assets, gone are targets to stem biodiversity loss, and in is a fresh focus on forests ecosystems.
http://www.un.org/sg/management/pdf/HLP_P2015_Report.pdf

African warlord orders poaching for ivory

"The high price of ivory is increasingly incentivising the involvement of armed groups such as the [Lord’s Resistance Army], sustaining their atrocities in the region." The new report from the Enough Project estimates that elephant population in Garamba national park, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, has been decimated from around 20,000 in the 1970s to around 1,800 today. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/jun/04/lords-resistance-army-funded-elephant-poaching