Our weekly round-up of must-read stories you might have missed. In focus this week: Mobilizing a $100 Billion Market to Bring Clean Cooking Solutions to the Poor, and this week we celebrated Wold Water Day and turned off the lights for Earth Hour!
Mobilizing a $100 Billion Market to Bring Clean Cooking Solutions to the Poor – March 18, 2013
“I’m on my way to Phnom Penh, Cambodia for the 2013 Clean Cooking Forum organized by the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves. Consider this stunning fact: household air pollution from cooking with solid fuels kills four million people each year. That’s the finding of the latest Global Burden of Disease study, published in December 2012. Unlike malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS, for all of which the death toll is dropping every year, the number of premature deaths due to household air pollution is actually rising. Why is this happening? About 2.8 billion people, over a third of the world’s population, rely on open fires or inefficient stoves to cook and heat their homes…”
World Water Day 2013 – March 22, 2013
International World Water Day is held annually on 22 March as a means of focusing attention on the importance of freshwater and advocating for the sustainable management of freshwater resources. An international day to celebrate freshwater was recommended at the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED). The United Nations General Assembly responded by designating 22 March 1993 as the first World Water Day. Each year, World Water Day highlights a specific aspect of freshwater. The UN International Year 2013 and the World Water Day, 22 March 2013, will be devoted to the theme “Water Cooperation”….
Earth Hour 2013 – March 23, 2013
In 2007, WWF-Australia inspired Sydney-siders to show their support for climate change action in the first ever Earth Hour event. It showed that everyone, from children to CEOs and politicians, has the power to change the world they live in. In Sydney, Australia, 2.2 million individuals and more than 2,000 businesses turned their lights out for one hour to take a stand against climate change. In 2008, the plan was to take Earth Hour to the rest of Australia. But then the City of Toronto, Canada, signed up and it wasn’t long before 35 countries and almost 400 cities and towns were part of the event…
