Beverage giant Carlsberg brews up new science-based targets.
Carlsberg Carlsberg has unveiled an ambitious new sustainability program aimed at wiping out the carbon footprint of its breweries by 2030 and putting the company in line with a 1.5 degree Celsius climate scenario.
The plan is described as "a response to increasing consumer demand for sustainable products at a time of global challenges such as climate change, water scarcity and public health issues."
Carlsberg revealed it worked with the Carbon Trust consultancy to gain full approval for its emissions targets through the Science-Based Targets initiative, becoming one of the first global corporations — after Tesco last month — to set goals in line with a scenario that tolerates global temperature increases of 1.5 degrees Celsius.
Our clear targets and ambitions reflect our founders’ mentality to strive for perfection and contribute to society through science.
"I’m certain that in achieving our targets we’ll create efficiency improvements, risk reduction and a more resilient business that exists in harmony with local communities and the environment," he said.
"Our clear targets and ambitions reflect the mentality of our founders to always strive for perfection and contribute to society through science."
Further bolstering its climate commitments, Carlsberg also announced plans to establish a community of young scientists led by its existing Carlsberg Research Laboratory to help improve the resilience of crops and "foster further scientific developments within CO2, water and sustainable brewing."
Tom Delay, chief executive of the Carbon Trust, praised the Danish brewer’s new climate ambitions for going "above and beyond" the levels of carbon reduction needed to stay within a 2 degrees Celsius scenario.
"Carlsberg has taken a genuine leadership position on some of the most critical environmental issues the world currently faces, by developing an ambitious long-term business strategy that focuses on delivering a sustainable future."

Across rural India, water bodies, including man-made lakes and reservoirs, are fast disappearing after decades of neglect and pollution.
For the past 2,500 years, India has managed its water needs by increasing supply.
Water scarcity is also exacerbated by a growth in water-intensive industries, such as thermal power production, extraction and mining, as India seeks to feed and power its growing population.
For nearly 50 years, a misguided groundwater policy has sucked India dry; water tables have declined by an average of one metre every three years in some parts of the Indus basin, turning it into the second most over-stressed aquifer in the world, according to NASA.
According to the Third World Centre for Water Management, only about 10% of waste water in the country is collected and properly treated.
What conservation?
Excess consumption is attributable in part to citizen indifference about conserving water after so many years of plentiful supply.
The century-long conflict over the Cauvery River, for example, involves Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka – three major south Indian states.
With each state demanding ever more water, the river simply cannot keep up.
Even policies from the national government, which claims to target water conservation and demand management, remain reliant on supply-side solutions.

Congress, BJP now contest on water scarcity issue days ahead of SMC.
Summary: SHIMLA: Both the BJP and the Congress have been trying to woo the voters in Shimla using the water shortage issue ahead of the municipal corporation elections that is scheduled on Friday.
Singh said in order to ensure round the clock water availability in Shimla, government has resolved to implement Rs 100 crore another scheme shortly.
He added that the scheme for Satluj river is being funded by World Bank.
He said in order to cater to the needs of a population of 1.9 lakh people in Shimla, state government has already approved Rs 410 crore scheme that would be implemented soon.
SHIMLA: Both the BJP and the Congress have been trying to woo the voters in Shimla using the water shortage issue ahead of the municipal corporation elections that is scheduled on Friday.
While opposition leader Prem Kumar Dhumal has promised to find a permanent solution to the problem of water scarcity , chief minister Virbhadra Singh has claimed to soon implement the Rs 410 crore scheme to lift water from Satluj While addressing mediapersons in Shimla, Dhumal alleged that during previous BJP regime, the scheme to lift water from Satluj river was approved but later the Congress government did not make required efforts to implement the scheme.
Dhumal recalled that the Congress and the CPI(M) were responsible for the supply and distribution of water in the state last year when around 20,000 persons were affected by jaundice while 32 died by jaundice after the consumption of contaminated water.He said a four-year-old boy from Shimla was murdered and his body was dumped in the water tank from where water was supplied to VIP area for judges.
He added that the scheme for Satluj river is being funded by World Bank.
Source: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/shimla/cong-bjp-now-contest-on-water-scarcity-issue-days-ahead-of-smc/articleshow/59151568.cms Subscribe to Shimla News

42 tubewells out of order due to shortage of funds Islamabad Senate Standing Committee on Climate Change on Thursday expressed serious concern over the threat to food security and scarcity of water in the future from impacts of global warming.
Director General, Ministry of Climate Change (MoCC), Irfan Tariq, told a committee ‘Production of wheat has dropped 15 percent due to shift in monsoon season.
Climate Change will have far reaching effects on Pakistan’s over all economy,’ ‘The rationing became necessary after water levels in both Simli and Khanpur dams dropped significantly.
Secretary Climate Change, Syed Abu Ahmed Akif complained that there was not a drop of water in his Sector F-6.
Senators, Sitara Ayaz and Mushahid Hussain Syed, expressed shocked over shortage of water in Islamabad.Both members urged the chairman of the committee, Senator Mir Muhammad Yousaf Badini, for a dedicated meeting on Islamabad’s water crisis.
Water in Khanpur Dam was down to 1, 925 feet compared to 1, 955 feet last year.
According to the official, out of 192 tube wells 42 were out of order due to lack of maintenance from shortage of funding.
While 20 will likely become functional within a month, remaining have become obsolete.
Secretary, Climate Change, Syed Abu Akif, proposed the government to charge residents for mining ground water.
Once completed, the twin cities will have 100 million gallons water per day each,’ said Sheikh Ansar Aziz.

University of Newcastle team tackles the global water crisis in XPRIZE competition.. Local Business A RESEARCH team from the University of Newcastle will pocket $1.75 million and potentially solve the global water shortage if the chemical engineers can figure out the best way to extract water from the air.
The team, known as Hydro Harvest Operation (H20) and led by Professor Behdad Moghtaderi, has begun working on a prototype for the $1.75 million Water Abundance XPrize competition.
“This could make water available to so many people,” Professor Moghtaderi said.
“The competition requires us to produce at least 2000 litres of water per day from the air, and at a cost of two cents per litre.” Of the 98 teams competing in the two-year, global competition, only four are from Australia.
The goal is to create decentralised access to water, giving people the power to access fresh water wherever they need it.
“The idea is to find the most efficient technology and fund it through the next stage of development and commercialisation,” Professor Moghtaderi said.
“We have a very interesting concept – unfortunately I can’t divulge what it is, but we are very excited about it.” The Water Abundance Xprize is a two-year competition where teams must create a device that extracts a minimum of 2000 litres of water per day from the atmosphere using 100 per cent renewable energy.
Zenia Tata, of Xprize, said they had been “thrilled” by the global response and the diversity of entrants.
It was launched in India in October 2016 at a United Nations day reception in New Delhi.
The winner will be announced in August 2018.

Water ATMs plan shelved.
​Hyderabad: The Hyderabad Metropolitan Water Supply and Sewerage Board (HMWS&SB) has shelved its grandiose plan to set up water ATMs, which proposed to provide drinking water at Re 1 per litre.
On an experimental basis a few ATMs were installed under the Secunderabad Cantonment Board limits and couple of other places which were found to be useful to quench the thirst of people particularly during summer time.
The Secunderabad Cantonment Board (SCB) in collaboration with a few NGOs set up 5 water ATMs at Bowenpally, Lal Bazar, Tadbund, Balamrai and Bolarum.
The water board had also set up two drinking water vending centres in slum areas near Indira Park and Karmika Nagar.
Further plan was to set up 200 such centres and hand over the maintenance to the Self Help Groups.
Yet, the water board has now decided to discard the plan as it feels that it was a difficult process to set up the units and maintain them.
The water board officials said that no such scheme would be executed in near future as drinking water supplies have been proven sufficient.
“The scheme was introduced as water scarcity persisted for the last two years.
With sufficient drinking water being supplied directly to every individual’s home, there is no need for such a scheme,” officials said.

Water level in NTR Jalasayam falls.
Chittoor: Depletion of water in NTR Jalasayam is a cause of concern as it is only the drinking water body which supplies water to Chittoor city.
Water levels have fallen drastically due to dry spell for the last three consecutive years.
Highlights: Chittoor city residents may face drinking water shortage Minister Amarnath Reddy assured of supplying Handri Neeva water to NTR Jalasayam To find a permanent solution for drinking water scarcity to Chittoor city, Chandrababu Naidu, who was the then Chief Minister, had laid foundation stone for NTR Jalasayam at Kalavagunta on September 19, 1996.
The project was aimed at supplying 8 Millions litres per Day (MLD) drinking water to Chittoor city every day.
The requirement of water for 1.4 lakh population of Chittoor city per day is 22 MLD.
Out of it, 8 MLD water is being supplied from NTR Jalasayam and the rest is being augmented through energized borewells in the city.
Due to shortage of funds, the Chittoor Municipal Corporation has suspended the transportation of drinking water in the city and has been supplying the water from NTR Jalasayam for the last 11 months.
“We can hardly supply the water to the city from the NTR Jalasayam for another month.
By C Prabhakara rao Sponsored

That’s the finding of international research that included the work of MSU water expert Yadu Pokhrel and made public today in the journal Nature Communications.
“This study used five global hydrological models to examine the movement of water scarcity.
One was a model that I developed,” said Pokhrel, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering and participating member in the Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project.
“Mine is one of the five modeling groups that provided the data presented in the paper.” Pokhrel said the overuse of groundwater is an unseen drought.
“The extremes are getting worse,” he said.
“With seven billion plus of us on the planet, we’ve got to start rethinking how we use fresh water."
That sentiment was confirmed by international researchers who assessed human intervention on water scarcity at a global scale.
But it’s not so straightforward,” said Ted Veldkamp, researcher at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and guest researcher at IIASA, who led the study.
Seasonal changes in precipitation and water storage make it difficult for modelers to estimate water availability and impacts of interventions, and the effects of climate change can be difficult to tease out from other impacts like human activities.
They also highlighted the separate impact of climate change and human interventions.

Michael Reinhard/Corbis/Getty Dams are supposed to collect water from rivers and redistribute it to alleviate water shortages, right?
Not so fast.
It turns out that in most cases they actually create water scarcity, especially for people living downstream.
Almost a quarter of the global population experiences significant decreases in water availability through human interventions on rivers, says Ted Veldkamp at Vrije University in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
They used this to assess water scarcity between 1971 and 2010, so they could identify the hydrological winners and losers from dam interventions.
Learn more at New Scientist Live in London from 28 September to 1 October: Come see our talk on geoengineering – the idea that we can intervene in the climate on a massive scale to reduce the effects of global warming The world has spent an estimated $2 trillion on dams in recent decades.
But Veldkamp’s startling conclusion is that the activity has left 23 per cent of the global population with less water, compared with only 20 per cent who have gained.
“Water scarcity is rapidly increasing in many regions,” says Veldkamp.
Under pressure Many nations see dams as an important way to fight climate change – both by diverting water to alleviate shortages and by generating low-carbon hydroelectricity to replace power stations that burn fossil fuel.
Building more dams “might mitigate tomorrow’s climate change impacts for a certain group of people whilst putting others under pressure today,” she says.

But interventions tend to solve water scarcity problems at a local level, while aggravating water scarcity downstream.
In a new study published in the journal Nature Communications, researchers have now assessed the impacts of human interventions on water scarcity at a global scale.
"It’s common sense that taking water out of a river will leave less for those people downstream.
But it’s not so straightforward," says Ted Veldkamp, researcher at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and guest researcher at IIASA, who led the study.
Seasonal changes in precipitation and water storage make it difficult for modelers to estimate water availability and impacts of interventions, and the effects of climate change can be difficult to tease out from other impacts like human activities.
This systematic approach allowed the researchers to come up with an estimate that is more realistic than previous approaches — and which also shows greater water scarcity than previous estimates.
From 1971 to 2010, the study found, human impacts have drastically reshuffled water scarcity hotspots, with impacts on approximately one-third of the global population.
On average, approximately 20% of the global population has experienced a significant increase in water availability due to human interventions, such as building water storage, alleviating water scarcity experienced by 8% of the population.
As climate change and population place further pressure on tight water resources, the researchers found that policymakers and water managers need to take a regional and global perspective on local decisions.
This is especially important for transboundary river basins, where policy development in one country may have consequences on different countries downstream.