5 June: World Environment Day - IFAD green group launches "Back to the TAP (Traditional Acqua, Please) campaign"

To commemorate World Environment Day, IFAD's Green Group launched " Back to the TAP (Traditional Acqua, Please) campaign".

Moses, Hazel, Dunia and other colleagues set up a stand outside of the cafeteria to raise awareness about the devastating environmental impact of our bottled water consumption. Did you know that:

• on a daily basis the bar sells 300 small bottles
• each day, cleaners collect on average 4 bags of plastic bottles. Only 10 of us recycle plastic bottle properly!!! REMEMBER the BLUE bag is for PLASTIC!

Leaving IFAD behind, on a global scale, did you know that:

• Italians drink the most bottled water per person, at nearly 184 liters in 2004—more than two glasses a day and more than two times the consumption of Portugal. Mexico is second in world per person consumption of 168 litres and first in the American continent. Perhaps, Italy is still leading in the per person consumption of bottled water yet it has the world largest number of public fountains dating back to the Roman Empire.
• In contrast to tap water, which is distributed through an energy-efficient infrastructure, transporting bottled water long distances involves burning massive quantities of fossil fuels. In 2004, for example, Nord Water of Finland bottled and shipped 1.4 million bottles of Finnish tap water 4,300 kilometers (2,700 miles) from its bottling plant in Helsinki to Saudi Arabia, implying a huge carbon footprint.
• Fossil fuels are also used in the packaging of water. The most commonly used plastic for making water bottles is polyethylene terephthalate (PET), which is derived from crude oil. For example, making bottles to meet Americans’ demand for bottled water requires more than 17 million barrels of oil annually, enough to fuel more than 1 million U.S. cars for a year.
• Worldwide, some 2.4 million metric tons of plastic are used to bottle water each year.
• But bottled water is not guaranteed to be any healthier than tap water. In fact, roughly 40 percent of bottled water begins as tap water; and the French Senate even advises people who drink bottled mineral water to change brands frequently because the added minerals are helpful in small amounts but may be dangerous in higher doses
• The United Nations Millennium Development Goal for environmental sustainability calls for halving the proportion of people lacking sustainable access to safe drinking water by 2015. Meeting this goal would require doubling the $15 billion a year that the world currently spends on water supply and sanitation. While this amount may seem large, it pales in comparison to the estimated $100 billion spent each year on bottled water while more than 1 billion people around the globe still lacking access to a safe and reliable source of water.

So, after hearing these shocking facts, we are all looking forward to seeing water fountains installed in strategic corners of the building.... I think it is safe to say that we all subscribe to NO PLASTIC campaign. And let's not forget that water coolers or water fountains are great knowledge sharing venues, just like the shuttle bus has proven to be a fantastic knowledge sharing vehicle!!!

Read more:

• World Environment Day
• Greening the Blue (learn how the UN is becoming more environmental friendly)
  

Gender focal points from 16 countries in Asia meet to plan work for MDG3 torch

Partners and stakeholders pictured here from IFAD country programmes and projects in Afghanistan Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia,China, India, Indonesia, Kygystan, Laos, Maldives, Mongolia, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Viet Nam met last week in Cambodia to work together to uphold IFAD's commitment to the MDG3 Torch received late last year from the Government of Denmark.

Focal points collaborated in drafting their own plans for including one additional activity for gender equality and women's empowerment to their workplans for 2010. During the meeting, focal points received a copy of the Gender in Agriculture Sourcebook, published by IFAD, FAO and the World Bank. Together with Kyoko Kuskabe, Associate Professor of Gender and Development at the Asian Institute of Technology they studied how to draw on the reference material in the Sourcebook in the context of their own fieldwork.

The occasion also served to hold a Knowledge Market, share experiences and acquire new insights from one another using knowledge sharing methods learned during training provided earlier under the Knowledge Networking Programme for Rural Asia and the Pacific, a grant-fund regional programme cofinanced by IFAD and IDRC to support the development of the IFAD Asia and Pacific Regional Network.

Focal points, all members of the IFAD Asia and Pacific Gender Network that is just one part of the larger IFAD Asia and Pacific Regional Network, agreed to expand the gender network further by inviting colleagues from projects and programmes who could not attend the face-to-face meeting in Siem Reap.

They also committed to developping and sharing more sector-specific materials on how to make sure that project targetting and support to beneficiaries in technical fields like animal husbandry and microfinance can be improved.

A high point of the meeting was the technical competence and commitment to gender mainstreaming transmitted by The Chhun Hak, Chief of the Local Governance Unit at of the Ministry of Womens Affairs in Cambodia who explained in detail how his institution works with women and men in IFAD-funded village level investment activities to achieve MDG3 objectives.