Victoria's Green Matters - 10th Dec 2015

Deal With IT's Secretary Victoria Nicholls writes a regular column in the East Kent Mercury:

Well, the long awaited and much heralded UN Paris climate talks are here at last. This is the 21st conference of the parties on climate change or COP 21. This summit is about reaching a global agreement on limiting climate change by cutting carbon emissions beyond 2020 and making finance available to help poorer countries cope with the changes to come.

There are representatives of 195 countries in Paris and many world leaders, including Barak Obama, Xi Jinping of China, Narendra Modi of India and David Cameron attended at the beginning of the conference and made speeches encouraging negotiators to reach agreement. It is now down to those negotiators to thrash out a deal which all can endorse, a mighty undertaking.

Pledges have already been submitted by more than 170 countries which represent 97% of the world’s carbon emissions but these fall short of the 2°C limit to global temperatures agreed by world leaders. The pledges would mean a rise of 2.7 – 3.3°C, enough to cause catastrophic climate changes but still infinitely better than no agreement at all which would result in an increase of at least 5°C.

The task seems momentous. Not only have agreements to be made but a process put in place to monitor these systems and review them so that targets can be increased in line with limiting warming to 2°C.

It is vital that agreements are reached over the next week. There is no planet B and we cannot continue to destroy the only planet we have.

Deal Beach Clean 6th Dec

Thank you to our 12 volunteers and three dogs who braved the weather for todays Deal Beach Clean. 

Eights sacks of rubbish collected with the usual interesting array - a traffic cone and recycling box, which have been recycled!

Thanks to Wendy for the mulled wine and Steve for the mince pies.

Hope to get a full listing of next year's Beach Cleans published over the Xmas period.

A big thank you to everyone who has supported the beach cleans in 2015

Gleaning in Kent on Sunday 6th Dec

Hello glorious gleaners of Kent!

Cauli gosh! We’ve just discovered HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of cabbages and cauliflowers going to waste on a farm in Kent, near Broadstairs! They're going to waste because there's a massive glut of brassica in the UK at the moment, yet supermarkets are still importing them from overseas!

This Sunday 6th December, 10am-5pm (TBC) we’re inviting volunteers to the massive glean to help harvest those tasty brassica and save them from waste, to surprise food poverty charities like FareShare with lovely fresh veg. You can witness the colossal waste first-hand, and have a great social day out for a fantastic cause. Check out some photos of our recent gleans.


Please spread the news of our glorious mission to save the cabbages and caulis to your friends and groups, by sharing this email, or here’s a sharable facebook pic and tweet!


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To join the big brassica glean, please fill in our sign-up sheet or for more info, please contact kent@feedbackglobal.org

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Please get in touch ASAP so we have an idea of numbers. Also, please do check whether you can make it, as lots of drop-outs at the last minute can jeopardise the gleaning day going ahead.


Usually travel expenses can be covered for those travelling from Kent – just check with us first (we generally cover up to £12 per gleaner, so a car with 4 people could be reimbursed up to £48 petrol expenses in total, at a rate of 23p per mile).


If you're receiving this you're already on our gleaning list, but if your friends want to receive emails about future gleaning days, get them to sign up to our gleaning list here.

If you can't join us this time, watch this space – we’ll have lots more gleaning days coming up as harvests come to an end for lots of the wonderful produce here around Kent so keep your eyes peeled for dates and locations where you can join us.

And here's some background about gleaning:

Gleaning is about working with farmers who, for reasons usually beyond their control, have large amounts of healthy, edible food that they cannot harvest and that at risk of going to waste. We step in with our band of volunteers (that's you!) to harvest the food and redistribute it to homelessness and food insecurity causes.

From our start in 2012 to the end of 2014, the Gleaning Network already gleaned over 110 tonnes of produce, equal to well over 1 million portions of fruit and veg, with over 500 volunteers across 56 gleaning days. We’ve launched gleaning hubs in Kent, Cambridgeshire, Sussex, Bristol, London, Worcestershire and the North West, and also around Europe! We also achieved extensive media coverage, including Channel 4's River Cottage, the Independent, BBC Radio 4's Food Programme. You can see some great short videos about us, too - by the Guardian, and Al Jazeera. And in 2014 we were winners of the BBC Food and Farming Award for the Best Initiative in British Food!

All the best!

Martin

Martin Bowman

UK Gleaning Coordinator 

T: +44 (0) 2030518633 | M: +44 (0) 78160 88210

Victoria's Green Matters - 3rd December 2015

Deal With IT's Secretary Victoria Nicholls writes a regular column in the East Kent Mercury:

The plight of the polar bear has been with us ever since we first heard about the loss of sea ice in the Arctic. Global warming is now the most important threat to the survival of this beautiful animal.

A new study by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has found that there is likely to be a 30% decline in our bear population of 26,000 by 2050 due to loss of habitat, which is disappearing more quickly than even climate models predicted.

The polar bear depends on seasonal sea ice from which it can catch its prey of ring seals and bearded seals; after its summer fast it is vital that it replenish its fat stores to prepare for the next breeding season. If there are more than five months free from ice, hunger will spread amongst the bears, leaving them facing starvation and reproductive failure. Global warming could also increase the incidence of disease among the bears’ prey, further emphasising their predicament.

Sea ice in western Hudson Bay, in Canada, has reduced by one day per year over the last thirty years which has also brought the polar bear into conflict with human settlements, such as Churchill. The bears are opportunists, so will scavenge anything, including human rubbish, when they are hungry. Recently, the five polar bear range states – Canada, Greenland, USA, Russia and Norway – agreed an action plan, described as a conservation strategy to safeguard polar bears in the wild. Let’s hope it is successful.