Few people can have failed to hear of climate change and the effect it will have on sea levels, climate patterns and agriculture, but spare a thought for those poor old penguins who are being cheated out of their icy home.

In actuality not all penguins live in icy habitats, although they do all occur in the southern ocean, but nevertheless they all need a hand from conservation minded people. Issues that affect penguins include habitat loss, hunting, entanglement in fishing nets and oiling.

Fortunately there are a number of charities involved in penguin conservation and you can support them through the ever popular method of adoption.

Here is a list of organisations that I found on the internet that offer penguin adoption:

1. World Wildlife Fund - adopt an Emperor penguin from $25.

2.World Wildlife Fund - Adopt a Rockhopper Penguin, from $25.

3. Defenders of Wildlife - Adopt a Penguin and support conservation work, from $25.

4. Seabirds.org - Adopt and name a Magellanic Penguin and help protect its nest burrow, for $49.

5. Falklands Conservation - Adopt a King Penguin on East Falkland, for £25.

6. Southern African Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds - Adopt an African Penguin and pay for its treatment and rehabilitation, for R500.

7. Oamaru Blue penguin Colony - Adopt a Little Blue Penguin in New Zealand and help protect its nest, from NZ$40.

8. Penguin Foundation, Phillip Island - Adopt a Little Blue Penguin in Phillip Island, Australia for AS$75.


You can read about more animal adoption schemes here: Adopt Wild Animals.

I have been saying for a long time that one of the best ways to save rainforests is sinply to buy it where possible. The RSPB in conjunction with Birdlife International and Burung Indonesia has a project in operation which protects and restores rainforest in Sumatra. This is a project well worth supporting.

Why protect Rainforest?
Apart from protecting rainforest for its innate value it is home to an enormous number of species; there is more biodiversity in a lowland rainforest than almost anywhere else.

Rainforest has a huge part to play in combating climate change too. Locked in all the plant material is a lot of carbon that if burned would create carbon dioxide, the most famous greenhouse gas. Not only that, but when rainforest is cut down the soils dry out releasing vast amounts of methane - a gas which has a greenhouse effect about 14 times that of carbon dioxide. Protecting rainforest stops this from happening.

Whilst doing some research on the subject I came across the following quote on toiletpaperworld.com

"In the early 1970s, an EPA study for Congress concluded that using one ton of 100% recycled paper saves 4,100 kwh of energy (enough to power the average home for six months) and 7,000 gallons of water. It also keeps more than 60 pounds of pollution out of the air and saves 3.3 cubic yards of landfill space, which is increasingly important as many local landfills near their capacity. Paper industry representatives have actually estimated that one ton of recycled paper saves approximately 17 trees."

I was quite shocked by this, firstly because I couldn't believe that there was a website devoted to toilet paper, but secondly by the size of the environmental benefits of recycled toilet paper.

If this is true then the energy savings alone would be reason enough to use recycled toilet paper, but together with savings on landfill, pollution and water usage then surely recycled toilet paper must be the choice of the environmentalist?

The saving of 17 trees sounds impressive too, but most of these trees would be from plantations which are of low biodiversity, so that is less important than perhaps it sounds. However, some of the pulp for toilet paper (including recycled toilet paper) comes from virgin forests, so any saving is lenghtening the lifetime of these forests.

However, there is the problem of bleaching in the process of making recycled toilet paper!

Still, this article suggests that there are real environmental benfits to using recycled toilet paper, just so long as one realises that using it does not mean that there is no environmental impact: Behind the label: Recycled Toilet Tissue.

There are many people who support conservation in principal but are not sufficiently motivated to participate themselves or to question polititians about what they are doing. A number of conservation bodies of a variety of types have come up with a way in which these people are able to actively support conservation; by adopting an animal. In these schemes, one does not actually take an animal into ones home like an adopted child, rather a payment is made to the conservation charity who then send information about the adopted animal and usually supply regular updates. the money they recieve for this goes directly towards the conservation of this particualr animal and the organistaion's conservation work in general. I have made a page on Squidoo.com listing a large number of available animal adoptions for conservation: Adopt Animals for Conservation.

Please take a look at this list and see if there is an animal or charity that you would consider supporting.

One of the biggest threats that wildlife faces, other than habitat loss, is direct persecution from humans. The illegal trade in wildlife is still a huge industry in many parts of the world, particularly southeast Asia, and this unsustainable harvesting of wildlife poses a real threat of extinction to many species.

Tigers and rhinoceros are species which are under great threat of total extermination due to poaching for parts involved in traditional medicines and even in developed nations such as the United Kingdom, direct persecution is still a problem for raptors, especially the Hen Harrier.

On thaibirding.com I have catalogued persecution events of birds as I have heard of them or discovered them myself and unfortuantely there will be many hundreds of cases that I am unaware of: Bird Persecution. In Thailand birds are captured for food, to prevent them from eating farmed fish, for the cage bird trade and for releasing to make merit in Buddhist culture.

Unfortunately, as well as suffering loss of habitat at an accelerating rate, wildlife is still under direct threat of destruction at the hands of humans.

I have built a page on squidoo.com which discusses these issues; please take a look at it: Methane is a Greenhouse Gas.

This page expands upon that whioch I have mentioned here and also suggests some reading material. There is also place to vote on which source of methane poses the greatest threat to the environment in terms of its contribution to the greenhouse effect.

environment, global warming, climate change, greenhouse effect

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What appears to be a breakthrough in technology by Go Sun Solutions in New Zealand could make solar power an attractive prospect for every household. Current solar panels are based on silicon which is an extremely common element within the earth's crust, however, refining it into a form useable for solar panels is a very energy-hungry process and gives fuel to those that argue that solar panels are an irrelevance (given this fact, they could be right).

In this new breakthrough scientists use photo sensitive dyes to produce electricity at a greatly reduced cost. Fortunately, isolating the elements needed for these dyes is a low energy process. Apparently many companies are interested in using this technology and these new panels could be in production by the end of this year. If this is true it could result in a massive change in the way we get our electricity, particularly as these solar panels work at low light levels. If solar energy beomes financially attractive, large numbers of people may make the switch, reducing carbon emissions and giving individuals greater freedom from large corporations.