Wild Gift - Empowering Better World Entrepreneurs

A Gender-Sensitive Strategy for Building Resilient Communities

Tsechu Dolma — Thu, 01 Dec 2016 19:03:42 +0000

Now more than ever, we need gender specific strategies to respond to the environmental and humanitarian crises induced by climate change. Women are disproportionately impacted by climate change as they make up majority of the world’s poor; face social, economic and political barrier; and are more dependent on natural resources for livelihood (Source: UN Women Watch). In our part of the world, the Himalayas, we have already witnessed how short-term and long-term impacts of climate change have exacerbated gender-based violence, girls access to education and women’s health issues.

This year, Mountain Resiliency Project has launched our first ever Tibetan Women Fellowship, an incubator for Tibetan refugee women to lead social enterprises to solve pressing issues affecting women in our community. The US State Department’s Julia Taft Grant for Refugees has funded this fellowship.

We kicked off the fellowship in three different regions in Nepal, Kathmandu Valley October 21st and 22nd, Mustang Valley October 23rd and 24th, and Nubri Valley November 6th and 7th. In total, we had 40 Tibetan refugee women representing 7 Tibetan refugee camps.

The fellows shared issues facing women in mountain communities, such as gender-based violence, economic inequality, and lack of women in leadership positions. The retreat trainers guided the fellows through various development tools such problem mapping, human centered design thinking, solutions mapping, business model and systems thinking. Fellows then designed social enterprise solutions to solve women’s issues in their community. For the next ten months, 15 fellows will be leading social enterprise projects in 6 Tibetan refugee camps. Our fellowship projects range from women’s peer health education in Jawalakhel Refugee Camp to women farmer’s enhanced agricultural productivity in Mustang Refugee Camp and Dhorpattan Refugee Camp. The fellows will receive specialized guidance and seed funding for the next ten months to execute their social enterprise.

Sonam Dolma, from Tashi Palkhiel Tibetan Refugee Camp, shared her experience “this retreat and fellowship has given me the resources to lead my social enterprise, which is to improve textile development skills for women in my camp. This opportunity will be transformational for my personal and my community’s growth. We have never had an opportunity like this for Tibetan women”.

They have developed gender specific strategies that will build their community’s resilience in light of uncertain times ahead. Follow facebook.com/mountainresiliency and mountainresiliency.org to receive more updates on the girls journey for the next ten months.

Related Links:

Mountain Resiliency website

Mountain Resiliency facebook

Mountain Resiliency Lauches Tibetan Young Women Fellowship

Deborah Knapp — Tue, 29 Nov 2016 21:48:58 +0000

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Tsechu Dolma

Coral Vitae in the Washington Post

Deborah Knapp — Tue, 29 Nov 2016 21:42:47 +0000

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Sam Teicher

Bringing Reefs Back to Life

Sam Teicher — Wed, 26 Oct 2016 15:49:45 +0000

Two weeks ago, an “obituary” for the Great Barrier Reef flew across the Internet like grapeshot fired from a cannon. But the pronouncement was premature. Coral reefs are indeed dying, but they are not yet dead. Witness textbook hyperbole: “The Great Barrier Reef was predeceased by the South Pacific’s Coral Triangle, the Florida Reef off the Florida Keys, and most other coral reefs on earth. It is survived by the remnants of the Belize Barrier Reef and some deepwater corals.” Roughly 30% of the northern Great Barrier Reef suffered severe bleaching from spikes in ocean temperatures this year and coral cover in the Caribbean has declined up to 80% since the 1970s. There’s no doubt the world’s reefs are at grave risk, but it’s not yet time to lose hope or deal in falsehoods.

As someone who’s dedicating my life to preserving coral reefs through my venture Coral Vita, I appreciate how seriously pollution, overfishing, and warming & acidifying oceans threaten their health. But for the average reader, who likely may not possess even a passing awareness of what’s happening to our world’s reefs, this story risks becoming accepted fact. That’s exactly why the article went viral, and why a host of coral scientists stepped out to vociferously condemn the dangers of Rowan Jacobsen’s piece.

Russell Brainard, chief of NOAA’s Coral Reef Ecosystem Program told the Huffington Post he fears Jacobsen reinforces a popular sentiment that “If there’s nothing that can be done, let’s not do anything and move onto other issues.” And that’s not just some heedless anxiety: dozens of people asked me if the Great Barrier Reef is really dead in the days following the obituary’s trending Internet status. I can only imagine what beliefs countless readers now hold about the fate of coral reefs.

So what can be done? In my view, there are three general courses of action: stop killing reefs, actively restore reef health, and instill hope in people that we can make things better.

Stopping reefs from dying is the most obvious and important strategy, but also the most challenging and time-consuming. Mitigating risks is always the smart choice. Why pay an excess financial, social, and environmental price after the damage is done rather than spending less up front to prevent the pain from occurring? It seems like a no-brainer. But how bullish are you feeling about betting on governments and private industry to enact policies to stop overfishing, excess coastal development, and pollution while implementing a strong & sufficient greenhouse gas emissions reduction treaty?

I’m an optimistic guy, but I’m also a realist. And even if the best-case mitigation scenario went live, the lag time before positive effects are felt in the oceans would still not be fast enough to prevent mass coral die-off. This is not an argument against mitigation - it remains an absolute necessity. But it’s also an acknowledgement that simultaneous strategies must be pursued.

This brings us to adaptation, and the field where I work: coral reef restoration. I launched Coral Vita with my friend Gator Halpern in order to provide a scalable means to enact large-scale restoration. And we hope that by growing climate change resilient corals en masse, we can not only help preserve reef health but also galvanize hope and inspire people to act to meaningfully protect our planet.

Coral Vita is commercializing proven methods of coral farming that allows us to grow heat- and acidity-tolerant corals up to 50x faster. This translates into corals that are better prepared to survive climate changed-oceans and that can reach mature sizes in months rather than decades. These methods - assisted evolution and microfragmenting - were developed by two of the world’s leading reef scientists and Coral Vita advisors - Dr. Ruth Gates of the University of Hawaii and Dr. David Vaughan of the Mote Marine Lab. After growing native corals in our land-based farms (6-12 month cycles depending on species), we than transplant them into reefs to help revitalize their health and ecosystem services. As noted in a recent Science News article, by “testing an arsenal of options to rescue a diversity of underwater communities…[restoration] could be a quick and affordable way to help severely damaged reefs bounce back.”

Coral Vita believes that selling restoration to clients - such as governments, hotels, fishing associations, and the re-insurance industry - that depend on the $30B annual tourism, fisheries, and coastal protection benefits of reefs will help inject the needed capital to help fight off global degradation. Our pilot coral farm, which we are over halfway through fundraising for, will be a small-scale facility based at a resort in the Dominican Republic. We will restore the local reef attraction while allowing guests and local communities members to participate in the restoration process. From there, we plan to operate a large-scale farm that can service an entire nation’s reefs, with the ultimate vision of managing a global network of farms that can help preserve reef health for future generations.

I wouldn’t be dedicating my life to this cause if hope for healthier oceans wasn’t viable. The journey ahead is not easy. The news of dying reefs must serve as an impetus for stakeholders to act to stop killing the reefs that over 500M people depend upon to survive. But for those feeling like they are growing and losing hope amidst a sea of sobering and misleading news, search for the term #OceanOptimism on social media to shepherd us all back to the promise of a better world. For impactful solutions are now possible, practical, and affordable, made possible by an incredible global community of practitioners working tirelessly make reefs great again. And when you're planning your next beach vacation, think about visiting the Dominican Republic: the Coral Vita team looks forward to planting corals with you and your friends sometime soon.

Images below:

1) The Florida Reef Tract has suffered catastrophic degradation since the 1970s. Here, we see the Carysfort Reef in 1975 vs. 2014. Photo credit: Phil Dustan

2) Land-based farms are scalable and enable growing conditions to be optimized to promote strengthened resiliency & accelerated growth. Photo credit: Mote Marine Lab

3) The massive coral species typically takes decades to reach this size in the wild. Through Mote's microfragmenting method, the piece you see here was grown in six months. Photo credit: Mote Marine Lab

Sources: Outside Magazine, Florida Department of Environmental Protection, Huffington Post, Science News

Heat: The Next Frontier for Renewables

Arun Gupta — Sun, 09 Oct 2016 03:41:34 +0000

There have been tremendous advances in renewable energy in the past two decades – specifically, renewable electricity. Utility scale wind is now cost-competitive with fossil fuel power plants. Solar photovoltaic costs have fallen more than 80% in the past 15 years, and PV installation is growing at tremendous rates in residential, commercial, and utility-scale markets. In 2015, wind added the most new electric generation capacity in the United States, edging out natural gas. Solar was not far behind in third place.

However, more than 70% of total energy use in all buildings in the United States is used not in the form of electricity, but rather as heat. More fossil fuels are burned for heat in the United States than for transportation fuel. Heat is used for more than heating homes and hot showers. It's required to manufacture almost all of the products that we take for granted in our every day lives. One example of this is the food processing industry. Condensed and dehydrated foods such as condensed milk, juices from concentrate, and powdered mashed potatoes are some of the most energy-intensive foods out there.

While options for renewable electricity are becoming cost-competitive, there are relatively few options available for renewable heat. The best and most widely-used option is biomass. This means burning wood, corn husks, etc. Biomass energy may be viable for industries that produce biomass waste, such as the paper industry, but it is incredibly expensive and labor intensive for everyone else. Bio-mass burning also produces air pollution and emissions. Other options aren't great either. Geo-thermal is only an possible in geologically active areas, and its expensive. Using an electric heater powered by renewable electricity is also expensive. Today's solar water heaters get lukewarm at best, and they have a history of questionable reliability.

Because heat accounts for such a large percentage of total national energy use, I see heat as the next frontier for renewables. Skyven Technologies is pioneering this frontier with a next-gen solar thermal system that produces high temperature heat from the sun. We've focused heavily on reliability and cost, so that as the nation starts looking beyond electricity to reduce fossil fuel consumption, we're there with an excellent solution.

Sources: EIA and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

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Skyven Technologies

Energy Use Breakdown in the USA

Sources of New Electricity Generation in the USA