Welcome to Roraima, the least populated state of Brazil, in the Amazon rainforest! 

Along the border between Venezuela and Brazil, the indigenous Yanomami people have fought vehemently against gold prospectors, invaders and illegal miners. The Yanomami are one of the largest isolated indigenous tribes in the world.

In 1992, after a long international campaign led by the indigenous leader Davi Kopenawa, the NGO Survival International and the Pro Yanomami Commission (CCPY), the Yanomami land of Brazil was finally demarcated as "Yanomami Park". However, the gold and gem prospectors returned. In 1993, 16 indigenous people were killed. Kopenawa continued campaigning and asking in international forums to protect their land and their people.

In 1989, Davi had addressed the Brazilian Congress, warning that the gold rush was destroying the Yanomami. In 1992, he participated in the UN Climate Summit in Rio de Janeiro. In 2002 he travelled to the United States to request the return of blood samples taken in the 1960s to Yanomami without their consent.

Davi Kopenawa and the association he presides over, Hutukara, were awarded the so-called alternative Nobel Prize, the Right Livelihood Award in 2019 for their "firm and determined fight to protect the forests and biodiversity of the Amazon, as well as the lands and culture of its indigenous peoples." Hutukara means "the part of the sky from which the earth was born." Yanomami found it from eleven regions of Brazil in 2004.

Hutukara campaigns got the Yanomami to recover land that ranchers had stolen from them in the 1970s and have forced the Brazilian government to expel illegal gold miners from their land, explains the NGO Survival.

Yours,
Lola & Tadeusz

Greetings from Belarus!

Greetings from Belarus, where the local NGO, APB-BirdLife Belarus fights to preserve and re-create the population of endangered species!

Ptushki means “birds” in Belarusian and for over twenty years (and with the help of over 20 000 volunteers and international NGO’s) this organization has been fighting for the wellbeing of birds and the general nature of Belarus and Europe. For the question of how many projects they completed, head of communications at APB-BirdLife Belarus, Alesia Basharymava answers: “I can’t even count...” but the number is surely higher than fifty.

One project that stands out is that of the greater spotted eagle. “It’s very rare and it’s globally endangered.” Belarus is a house to one of the biggest populations of that bird with 120-160 couples. “Over the years our expeditions mapped ⅔ of its territory,” says Alesia. “Thirty years ago nobody thought that we had this species in Belarus. It still has many mysteries to scientists.”

To resolve some of those mysteries Ptushki’s ornithologists attached some devices to several of those eagles. “Now, everybody can follow those eagles as they migrate on our map. Some go to Sudan, Zambia or Botswana!” Those eagles even have their names and profiles on the Ptushki page (though, you’d need google translate to understand them) , so it’s not a surprise that some may get attached to them.

“Signal from one of our birds was lost somewhere in Greece. We wrote to the scientists there to help us understand what happened. It turned out that there was a power line in this place… (...) Some months later one of our photo-traps showed that this eagle actually survived and it even had little eaglets.”

In 2019 the greater spotted eagle became the bird of the year in Belarus and stamps and coins with it were made.

But there are many more projects. Ptushki’s scientists were the first ones to prove the presence of the flying squirrel in Belarus. Belarusian scientists and wildlife conservation experts have not seen the flying squirrel since 1996, until it was found again in 2017 and now they are working on making its territory a protected zone.

Then, there is artificial housing for barn owls, as presented to us by Alisa Matavilava, a public relations specialist: “It’s a matter of architecture. They like to live in the attics of barns and churches and here, in Belarus we don’t have many of them or they are closed. So, we try to make it easier for them.” They also do a lot of information campaigns: “We do some lectures about our activities and when we talked about the barn owl, we did it with a Harry Potter theme. Many people were interested.”

In the end, none of us will receive an owl from Hogwarth but some may receive a barn owl family.

“We can’t accept money from abroad,” says Alesia. “But if people want to do something to help, it's best if they spread information about what we do.”

You can also see some beautiful photos on their Instagram or Facebook page as well as twitter. There are also videos and video lectures on their Youtube channel.

Yours,
Lola & Tadeusz

Dear Friend! Greetings from Medellín, Colombia, where climate change is fought as well as is crime and poverty!

Medellín was one of the most crime-infested cities in the world - a heritage from the times of famed Pablo Escobar. It was also one of the most struck by poverty - as it reached even 48%. With that came a seemingly “minor” issue of climate change. The city lies in the Colombian Andes - a region especially vulnerable to climate change. Being such a big city it faces many issues, including the urban heat island effect and the deteriorating quality of air. According to one research, the level of air contamination in 2009 exceeded by 200-400% the precautionary limits set by the WHO.

Authorities of Medellín worked hard to address all of those issues with the concept of people-first approach. Especially the people who have the least. After the fall of Pablo Escobar and with the help of the local business (including significant help from the city-owned Empresas Públicas de Medellín) it started to rapidly change the way the city is organized.

Now, everybody has access to public health, education, transport, and many cultural, economic, and online services. It spent almost half of its budget on development and services (median in Latin America being around a quarter). Now, five Metrocable’s gondola lines spread over the town - connecting favelas to the city center and helping to commute around 45 000 people a day - supplemented by the series of outdoor escalators.

That one together with many more massive changes started in the mid-1990s helped lower the murder rate from the by-far top in the world of 381 per 100 000 inhabitants in 1991 to around 20-25 by the mid-2010s. The poverty rate went down to around 14%. The city still has its troubles but it went a long way. One of its main targets is the quality of air and combating the effects of climate change - in February of 2020, it introduced the climate emergency. The city introduced the fleet of electric buses and electric taxis, it also started the initiative of inspection of private cars - checking tens of thousands for compatibility with regulations. Most of all, it created 30 corridors (around waterways and roads), especially in the zones that lacked green areas. 11 200 square meters of hard surfaces were changed into green ones. It helped to lower the temperature in those areas by over 2 degrees.

Yours,
Lola & Tadeusz

Greetings from Bangkok

The country's capital, Bangkok, is among the cities most endangered by the effects of climate change. That is why here ideas of groundbreaking urban architects like Kotchakorn Voraakhom are needed the most.

Like TURF, the biggest rooftop farm in Asia and an abbreviation from Thammasat University Urban Rooftop Farm. A massive, 22 000 square meters rooftop farm that takes from the concept of terraces and combines it with modern technology. Over 40 edible species found there provide 20 tons of food - or 80 000 student meals - a year.

One of the main concepts standing behind the philosophy of Miss Kotchakorn Voraakhom is inspiration from nature. As she mentions in the interview for Bloomberg: "I think there is so much to learn. It's not only just the form and the color and its beauty but also its function. How can we mimic those kinds of functions to really be part of how we create our city?"

The result is a multilayered space that comes with public green spaces, sources of organic food, a water management system, twelve outdoor classrooms, and energy house. One of the lessons the architect took from nature was that of gravity. Her project of TURF uses heights and angles, creating a system of zigzags that helps to use water efficiently, purify it and slow down the runoff, before collecting it in four retention ponds. That both keeps water in the city for the dry seasons and helps to reduce the size of floods caused by the extensive rainfall.

The massive flood in Thailand in 2011 was the formative moment for Miss Voraakhom. This is when she started to question the way we think of the role of urban architects and resilience. In the past, floods could be a positive factor, source of food, and fertilization, us seeing them as natural disasters comes more from the change of our lifestyle and perception. Miss Voraakhom calls it a "dance with nature".

In the interview with Bloomberg she says, smiling: "I think we are going to sink." but then she adds: "But we're going to live with water again."

Yours,
Lola & Tadeusz

Greetings from Patagonia!

"Atando Cabos started on holidays", says the founder, Michel Compagnon, in one of the short videos about the company.

It was the holidays in Patagonia, one of the most iconic tourist destinations in the world. Thousands of people go there every year to look for the pristine ecosystem and beautiful nature of that scarcely populated region. Many of them find beaches and fjords contaminated with plastic waste and old fishing ropes.

Atando Cabos came from with an idea of cleaning it and the philosophy stated by Michel was: "For me, plastic is never trash." Now, getting rid of plastic wasn't the only thing. Another was to make local fishermen help in it and then to make the whole thing economically feasible by using the recycled waste to produce crates, pallets and other long-term (and recyclable) products.

This is how the Circular Economy was created. The fishermen in Patagonia know best their own region and where there is plastic on the beaches. They are paid to collect waste and take it to the collection points. From there it is sent to the factory where the ropes and plastic are recycled into products sold globally.

Over the course of the first 18 months, over 2000 tons of plastic waste was collected. Some of the crates are now used to grow flowers in Netherlands!

Atando Cabos won many prizes for finding the solution to plastic waste and as you can see on their Instagram, they continue to clean Patagonia. And the best part about it is that, that the more they produce and sell, the more plastic waste will be taken away from nature.

Yours,
Lola & Tadeusz

Greetings from the Cuvette Central region in the basin of the Congo river, the heart of Africa.

The Brazzaville declaration is a crucial agreement because in its three signatory countries, the largest peatlands on the planet lie - the Republic of Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Indonesia.

Peatlands are a type of wetland soil in which organic material has accumulated, and they are critical for addressing climate change. This plant material does not fully decompose because it is too wet, accumulating over the years. The accumulated remains of plant material trap huge amounts of carbon. However, they only occupy 3% of the global land area, containing nearly 25% of soil carbonon the planet.

To understand how important conserving the peatlands is, you just need to look at the figures. In 2017, the UK and Congolese researchers team used satellite data to map the forest in the central Congo Basin. They discovered the impressive hidden peatlands covering 145,500 sq km – an area larger than Greece or Uruguay. The researchers explained in an article published in Nature magazine that these peatlands hold 30 billion tonnes of carbon stored, an equivalent to 15 years of the whole European Union emissions.

It means that conserving these giant natural carbon containers is key to combating climate change, but destroying them can be catastrophic. For instance, peat drainage in Indonesia and Malaysia due to fires or to provide land for palm oil plantations represents similar annual emissions to 70 coal plants, according to the World Resources Institute.

Unfortunately, since 2018, Greenpeace Africa has repeatedly denounced the threats to the Congo’s peatlands due to the forest concessions and oil explorations.

Yours,
Lola & Tadeusz

Greetings from Kawasaki!

Can we have industry without waste? Without outsourcing it to the developing countries and without creating poverty-dominated “rustle belts” where industry once thrived?

The city of Kawasaki in Kagawa, Japan came upon this doubt in a spectacular fashion. Its growth as one of the country’s industrial hubs came with waste, and by 1990 the situation was dire. A “waste emergency” was declared. At the same time, the local authorities realized that the industry is what the livelihood of many of the people in the area depended on. Remember: it was in the nineties when the Japanese GDP growth started to slow down rapidly.

They decided to work towards creating a recycling-oriented society both for citizens and the industry. In 1997 the Japanese government approved it as the first eco-town in the country.  

The city did a great job on many levels. It started a wide-range awareness campaign, vastly developed its recycling services and introduced a sophisticated waste management system for its industry. But the keyword is synergy. Kawasaki succeeded in creating a loop in which businesses use each other’s waste products and secondary products from their business activities. One Company’s plastic waste is the second company’s blast furnace fuel or a component for ammonia for another one.

Today, the area is a pro-environment place that didn’t lose its industry. It effectively uses a wide variety of waste (including sewage and construction sludge) to create zero or low-emission products, including cement, toilet paper, PET bottles, ammonia, steel, casting framework and nonferrous metals. Two thousand eight hundred hectares of the historical industrial waterfront area that once polluted and littered the city is now being changed into a zero-emission industry area.

Isn't it a nice idea? Maybe one day we will have a negative-emission industry that consumes waste, instead of producing it.

Yours,
Lola & Tadeusz