Public support creation of marine nature reserve

By Emily Beament, Press Association
Monday, 8 June 2009
The Independent

More than four fifths of people support the introduction of a nature reserve in our seas to protect stocks of fish, according to a survey published today on World Oceans Day.


The poll came ahead of the launch of a film, The End Of The Line, which reveals the impacts of overfishing on the world's oceans...

African Women and Water Update

Women's Earth Alliance

Following our 2008 African Women and Water Conference in Nairobi, co-organized by A Single Drop, Crabgrass, Groots Kenya, and Women's Earth Alliance and hosted by the Greenbelt Movement, our women participants returned to their communities invigorated--each team has received seed grant to implement innovative water projects. Women across Africa are building solar cookers, erecting water storage tanks, constructing water filters, and training others to do the same. We are receiving exciting reports from A Single Drop and GROOTS Kenya advisors, who are coordinating site visits to the women's projects and supporting them in their steps toward creating income-generating water projects.

We invite you to watch a short video from our African Women and Water Conference, which features our special guest, Dr. Wangari Maathai. For an inside look at partner's successes, visit the blog at www.africanwomenandwater.org. Stay tuned for updates on our West Africa program, being launched in Ghana in early 2010.

Military sonar blamed for mass dolphin strandings

Mass strandings of dolphins and whales could be caused because the animals are rendered temporarily deaf by military sonar, experiments have shown.

Tests on a captive dolphin have demonstrated that hearing can be lost for up to 40 minutes on exposure to sonar. Hearing is the most important sense for dolphins and other cetaeceans, and losing it is likely to cause them to become disorientated and alarmed...

Pepsi Adopts Human-Right-to-Water Policy

"This agreement moves beyond the vague promises of water conservation that many corporations claim to support," said Julie Goodridge, CEO of NorthStar Asset Management, a socially responsible company that helped Pepsi develop its new resolution on water. "It fully commits the company to respecting the right to sufficient clean water, as well as individuals' rights to be involved in the development of processes that extract water from their communities."..."

The UN estimates that currently a billion people in the developing world, mainly poor and marginalized communities, lack access to water and that figure is projected to grow to two out of three people in the near future," writes Mark Hays of Corporate Accountability International....

Water Rights Activists Blast Istanbul World Water Forum as “Corporate Trade Show to Promote Privatization”

Sunday was World Water Day and marked the close of a week-long gathering held in Istanbul, Turkey to discuss water policy at a time when over a billion people lack access to clean water and 2.5 billion people lack water for proper sanitation. Activists from the People’s Water Forum, an alternative formation representing the rural poor, the environment and organized labor, slammed the official event as a non-inclusive, corporate-driven fraud pushing for water privatization and called for a more open, democratic and transparent forum...

Speak out to ban unregulated imported swordfish

The Marine Mammal Protection Act bans fish imported from foreign countries whose fishing practices harm and kill more marine mammals than allowed by U.S. standards, but the law is not being enforced. Urge the National Marine Fisheries Service to ban imported swordfish until foreign fishing vessels employ the same measures to protect marine wildlife that are required of U.S. fishermen.

Take Action Now: http://www.nrdc.org/action/

Setting Annual Catch Limits for U.S. Fisheries: An Expert Working Group Report, 2007

Solutions to Overfishing; we'd like to keep eating!

http://www.pewtrusts.org/our_work_report_detail.aspx?id=30769&category=150&WT.srch&source=google