India named Global Host of World Environment Day 2011
Nairobi (Kenya), 22 February 2011 : The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) today announced that India, with one of the fastest growing economies in the world that is embracing the process of a transition to a Green Economy, will be for the first time ever the global host of World Environment Day 2011 (WED) on 5 June.
This year's theme 'Forests: Nature at Your Service' underscores the intrinsic link between quality of life and the health of forests and forest ecosystems. The WED theme also supports this year's UN International Year of Forests.
India is a country of 1.2 billion people who continue to put pressure on forests especially in densely populated areas where people are cultivating on marginal lands and where overgrazing is contributing to desertification.
But the Indian Government has also found solutions. While the socio-economic pressures on the country's forests are tremendous, India has instituted a tree-planting system to combat land-degradation and desertification, including windbreaks and shelterbelts to protect agricultural land.
In conserving its critical ecosystem, India has successfully introduced projects that track the health of the nation's plants, animals, water and other natural resources, including the Sunderbans - the largest deltaic mangrove forest in the world, and home to one of India's most iconic wildlife species: the tiger.
India has also launched a compensation afforestation programme under which any diversion of public forests for non-forestry purposes is compensated through afforestation in degraded or non-forested land. The funds received as compensation are used to improve forest management, protection of forests and of watershed areas. Moreover, a government authority has been created specifically to administer this programme.
Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary General and UNEP Executive Director, said: "Over close to the 40-year history of WED, India's cities and communities have been among the most active with a myriad of events undertaken across the country each and every year-so it is only fitting that this rapidly developing economy is the host in 2011."
"India is famous for its culture, arts, movies and world-beating Information Technology industries. Increasingly it is at the forefront of some of the 'green shoots' of a Green Economy that are emerging across the globe," he said.
"From its manufacturing of solar and wind turbines to its Rural Employment Guarantee Act which underwrites paid work for millions of households via investments in areas ranging from water conservation to sustainable land management, foundations are being laid towards a fundamental and far reaching new development path," added Mr. Steiner.
This is underlined by India's introduction of the Clean Energy Fund into its national budget which provides subsidies for green technology and has been the basis for a National Action Plan on Climate Change which sets specific targets on issues such as energy efficiency and sustaining the Himalayan eco-system.
India is currently planning one of the largest green energy projects in the world that will generate 20,000 megawatts of solar energy and 3,000 megawatts from wind farms on 50,000 acres in Karnataka in southwest India. The first phase of the US$50 billion project will start next year.
In its ground-breaking report on the Green Economy launched yesterday, UNEP cites India, where over 80 per cent of the US$8 billion National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, which underwrites at least 100 days of paid work for rural households, invests in water conservation, irrigation and land development. This has generated three billion working days-worth of employment benefiting close to 60 million households.
"India's offer to host WED is another expression of India's strong commitment to work with the global community for sustainable development. This event will serve as the inauguration of a series of events leading up to the hosting of the 11th Conference of Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity. It will also flag off the celebrations of the international decade for biodiversity. This will in addition signal India's commitment to the biomass economy so dependent on the sustainability of our natural resources," said Dr. T. Chatterjee, Secretary for Environment and Forests of the Government of India.
Two of India's most prominent cities - Mumbai and Delhi - will be the venue for this year's global celebration of the environment, with a myriad of activities over several days to inspire Indians and people around the world to take action for the environment.
The celebrations in India on 5 June are part of thousands of events taking place around the globe. WED 2011 will emphasize how individual actions can have an exponential impact, with a variety of activities ranging from school tree-planting drives to community clean-ups, car-free days, photo competitions on forests, bird-watching trips, city park clean-up initiatives, exhibits, green petitions, nationwide green campaigns and much more.
This year UNEP plans to make WED 2011 into a bigger celebration than ever before, building on the unprecedented success of WED 2010 - when people in more than 112 countries registered activities on the WED website and WED was thrust into the blogo-sphere with the first-ever WED- blogging competition.
The WED 2011 website will inspire, inform and involve people through unprecedented interactivity, offering daily tips, information and statistics on forest conservation, a platform where people around the world can register their activities, social networking campaigns and competitions to get people on every continent involved. See: http://www.unep.org/WED. Anyone can organize an event and register it on the WED website, and each of these individual actions when taken collectively will go a long way to securing important forests services for generations to come.
For more information please contact:
Nick Nuttall, UNEP Spokesperson/ Head of Media, on Tel: +254 7623084 /Mobile +254 (0)733632755, E-mail: nick.nuttall@unep.org
Wambui Munge, UNEP Special Events on Tel: +254710758017, Email: wambui.munge@unep.org
Fieldi, the innovative and interactive digital publishing platform, has been launched.
Fieldi is a free platform for publishing, reading and interacting. It is a digital interactive Social Media Publishing Platform which allows free publication and free reading of books and other publications worldwide in a format that is easy to read. There is facility for unlimited interaction - authors with authors, authors with readers and readers with readers. It has all the latest innovations in the paperless publishing technology integrated into it.
Traditional publishing on paper is ringing the death knell of our planet. One ton of wood goes into the production of 150 reams of paper. It takes 75,000 trees to print a Sunday Edition of the New York Times. Imagine the number of trees felled for News Papers alone all over the world. And what about the paper used for other publications? The US uses 68 million trees each year to produce 17 billion catalogues and 65 billion pieces of direct mail. Approximately 324 Litres of water, which is already a scarce resource, is used to produce 1 KG of paper. Dioxin, a by-product of paper-bleaching with chlorine, is a proven carcinogen and has immunological, developmental and neurological effects even at very low levels. When paper rots it emits methane gas which is 25 times more toxic than CO2. Changeover to paperless publishing is the need of the hour.
The books which are printed in the traditional method of publication have to be transported to long distances and distributed to the readers resulting in a lot of human effort, financial expenses and time to complete the process. All these expenses, effort and time, including transportation charges, fuel charges, commission to distributors, etc can be saved by changing over to digital publication. Digital publishing is the most eco-friendly innovation to have taken place in the field of publication since the movable-type printing press was invented.
This platform allows writers to publish books and readers to read them with the unbridled freedom of all participants to interact with each other. Advantages of digital interactive publishing, combined with the latest technological breakthroughs in communication, will make it possible for people to read their favourite books anywhere and everywhere and interact with the authors and other readers and form communities of like-minded readers. The writers can publish their works with the least expense and difficulty and interact with their readers and other writers and form communities.
Social Media Publishing is a basic shift from a broadcast mechanism based on one-to-many information to a broadcast mechanism based on many-to-many information through democratized interaction platforms. It is changing the source of information from one at a time to several at a time, with no single source claiming the whole truth. The truth is evolved through interaction between several sources, as it should really be.
In Internet-based interactive publishing, we can say without a doubt that sky is the limit. Any number of writers can publish their works and any number of readers can read them simultaneously. The scope for interaction between writers and writers, between writers and readers, between readers and writers and between readers and readers is unlimited.
A registered reader will have a profile page and have access to facilities like social media sharing, interaction with the authors, etc. New releases will be intimated to the readers as and when these take place. Readers will have the advantages that it can be read more easily by magnifying in the computer and by going to the selected page or matter more easily, that it can be shared with others while reading and that the readers can interact with the authors and publishers. The readers of identical tastes can group themselves into small communities and enhance their reading pleasure and in-depth understanding of the books through interaction among themselves.
Each author will have a profile page with his/her photograph, bio-data, etc, including a list of his other books. He/she will have access to his/her administration panel. He/she will also have SMS facility for propaganda purposes and facilities for sharing through social networks, for interacting with their readers or other authors and for forming communities. Besides, the book will be available all over the world, at the very moment of publishing, to any number of subscribers/readers simultaneously. Each author gets a signature space in the World Wide Web and a niche for his/her global presence free of cost.
In our universities and other institutions of higher education, erudite volumes written by professors, readers and students, either as part of their assignments or as their personal initiatives or creative urge, are lying unpublished because of several constraints, the foremost being want of funds. Fieldi Campaign will visit all universities, colleges and other centres of higher education in the country to make the authors and students sign up and become publishers and readers.
Youth clubs, libraries and cultural organizations have members who will be very interested in reading books. If a copy of a popular book arrives at a library, there will be more than one trying to get hold of it. Fieldi can satisfy all at the same time. On the way to the universities and colleges the Campaign Caravan will stop at such places and get their members to sign up.
There are thousands of Non-Governmental Organizations and Government-aided bodies that can spread the word of this new project among the millions that come into contact with them. So such organizations and institutions will be visited by Fieldi staff and contact sessions with their associates and beneficiaries will be arranged to get as many to sign up as possible.
As the Campaign gathers momentum, the Fieldi sign-up campaign will turn into a major socio-cultural popular movement and environmental crusade that will sweep the Country from North to South and East to West to bring about a world of change in publishing and reading.
Fieldi is the greatest happening in the field of democratization of knowledge and mass communication since Johannes Gutenberg invented the mechanical movable type printing press in 1439. In the facilities for interaction and social media communication, Fieldi has no parallel. The prospect of environmental restoration, through saving of paper and trees, makes Fieldi one of the most effective initiatives in saving Mother Earth.
We are glad to announce here that Heritage India Foundation which brings out fieldi platform, in association with JB Multimedia, has become the first Indian participant in the Climate Neutral Network of UNEP. This is in recognition of the considerable benefits that will come out of fieldi in the form of conservation of forests and resultant lessening of global warming.
The official launch of the platform will coincide with the World Environment Day Celebrations and will actually be a part of the celebrations by UNEP at New Delhi, on June 5, 2011. The finer details of the programme are being finalised in consultation with UNEP and Government of India officials.
