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Tag archives for sustainability

Making fun of climate change

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Swedish cartoonist Riber Hansson's modern Noah's Ark.

Taking climate change seriously doesn’t mean you cannot joke about it. That’s the idea behind the exhibition Facing the Climate where Swedish cartoonists have their take at one of our time’s greatest challenges. And often I think humour is one of the best ways of approaching a difficult subject. At least I know it works very well for me, leaving me somewhere between laugh and tears.

When I went to the Stockholm+40 meeting last week, I found some of the interpretations exhibited in one of the rooms, working as a powerful reminder of why we were all there.

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Sara Jeswani - Sustainability

May 3, 2012

Helping the Swedish eels get to their sea of love

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Some of Sweden's lovesick eels get a helping hand from a fisherman in lake Ringsjön. Photo: Kerstin Söderlind.

Humans may think we are inventors of the globalized society, but in fact the eels were masters at this long before us.

In case you don’t know it: All the European and American eels start their lives in the depths of the Sargasso Sea, in the North Atlantic Ocean. Here the eel larvae hatch. The European ones follow the Gulf Stream towards the north and more than 10 months later some of them arrive in their future homes in Swedish lakes and rivers.

But the traveling life of the eels doesn’t stop there. When the eel one day (about 20 years later) becomes sexually mature, the globetrotter yearnings are once again awaken. Because an eel cannot meet his or her future love in the next lake, or even in the sea outside Gothenburg.

It has to be in the Sargasso Sea. Read more » >>

Sara Jeswani - Sustainability

April 30, 2012

Swedish artists and politicians pick litter all week

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The artist Pernilla Andersson, herself living in the Swedish archipelago, is one of the celebrities who encourage people to go out and clean our beaches. Photo: Christian Pohl.

Sweden has a loooong coastline – 2400 kilometers to be more exact. This is actually one of the longest in Europe.
Open sea is of course a blessing in many ways, but for a lot of the communities along the Swedish coast, there are also a problem associated to this: Litter.

In a recent survey, a majority of Sweden’s coastal municipalities stated that waste along their coasts is a big concern for them. People leave their rubbish directly on the beaches, or throw it in the sea, which then brings it in to the beach.
Only in the North Sea, about 200 000 tons of waste are dumped every year. Mostly plastic, but also wood, aluminium cans and glass bottles. Most of these materials take a long time to decompose (plastic can even take from 100 to 1000 years!).
Fulmar birds found in the North Sea have on an average 33 pieces of plastic in their stomachs, and sea mussels also absorb microscopic pieces of plastic – that can end up in the human being eating them.

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Sara Jeswani - Sustainability

April 26, 2012

Sustainability in Stockholm, 40 years later

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Panel-discussion Summing up what has happened since 1972. The secretary-general of the Stockholm Conference in 1972 Maurice Strong is the first at the left of the panelists. Note the Swedish king in profile between the first and second panelists from the right! Photo: Sara Jeswani.

Many may not know it, but it is often said that it was in Stockholm that the sustainability discussion first started. The 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment, also known as the Stockholm Conference, is widely recognized as the beginning of modern political and public awareness of global environmental problems.

This week it has been 40 years since then, and to commemorate this Stockholm is now hosting a new forum, leading up to the Rio+20 UN Conference on sustainable development that will be held later this year, dealing with the tricky mission of “defining pathways to a safer, more equitable, cleaner, greener and more prosperous world for all” .

So right now we have more than 30 ministers from all over the world, and hundreds of international participants in Stockholm – in fact just a few blocks away from my office.

This morning I went there to listen to a panel made up of former participants of the conferences held ever since 1972, being asked what has actually happened since then.
“Not enough” was the harsh answer from the panel’s oldest member, Maurice Strong who was secretary-general at the Stockholm Conference in 1972.
– There’s nothing wrong with the agreements made during this time, but the problem is in the implementation of these agreements. Today we are in a more urgent situation than then, but the will has faded. Frankly, we need a revolution. Because the survival of humanity is at risk, he said.

A reminder from the parallel conference: There is no planet B! Photo: Sara Jeswani.

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Sara Jeswani - Sustainability

April 23, 2012

Meeting globally, locally

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Meeting at Stockholm university and everywhere in the world – at the same time. Photo: Will Ockenden (CC: By)

Would you like to go to a seminar with well-known speakers from the US, Sweden, UK and other countries, and then top it off with a discussion with participants from Sweden, Venezuela, South Africa, Canada and Austria?

Sounds like something you have to apply for and then travel a long way in order to participate in. But in this case it’s the wonders of technology that make a so-called Global Teach-In possible.
The idea is to gather people, interested in the big challenges the planet face today (climate change, economic crisis, democracy issues), in different countries and let them participate in the same event simultaneously. Some interactions will happen through the screen, some will be face to face.

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Sara Jeswani - Sustainability

April 19, 2012