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This week, the flagship of that effort, the Global Seed Vault near here, received its first seeds, millions of them. Bored into the middle of a frozen Arctic mountain topped with snow, the vault？ s goal is to store and protect samples of every type of seed from every seed collection in the world.<br>As of Thursday, thousands of neatly stacked and labeled gray boxes of seeds — peas from Nigeria, corn from Mexico — reside in this glazed cavelike structure, forming a sort of backup hard drive, in case natural disasters or human errors erase the seeds from the outside world.<br>Descending almost 500 feet under the permafrost, the entrance tunnel to the seed vault is designed to withstand bomb blasts and earthquakes. An automated digital monitoring system controls temperature and provides security akin to a missile silo or Fort Knox. No one person has all the codes for entrance.<br>The Global Vault is part of a broader effort to gather and systematize information about plants and their genes, which climate change experts say may indeed prove more valuable than gold. In Leuven, Belgium, scientists are scouring the world for banana samples and preserving their shoots in liquid nitrogen before they become extinct. A similar effort is under way in France on coffee plants. A number of plants, most from the tropics, do not produce seeds that can be stored.<br>For years, a hodgepodge network of seed banks has been amassing seed and shoot collections in a haphazard manner. Labs in Mexico banked corn species. Those in Nigeria banked cassava. Now these scattershot efforts are being urgently consolidated and systematized, in part because of better technology to preserve plant genes and in part because of the rising alarm about climate change and its impact on world food production.<br>“We started thinking about this post-9/11 and on the heels of Hurricane Katrina,” said Cary Fowler, president of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, a nonprofit group that runs the vault. “Everyone was saying, why didn？ t anyone prepare for a hurricane before？ We knew it was going to happen.“Well, we are losing biodiversity every day — it？ s a kind of drip, drip, drip. It？ s also inevitable. We need to do something about it.”<br>This week the urgency of the problem was underscored as wheat prices rose to record highs and wheat stores dropped to the lowest level in 35 years. A series of droughts and new diseases cut wheat production in many parts of the world. “The erosion of plants？ genetic resources is really going fast,” said Dr. Rony Swennen, head of the division of crop biotechnology at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, who has preserved half of the world？ s 1,200 banana types. “We？ re at a critical moment and if we don？ t act fast, we？ re going to lose a lot of plants that we may need.”<br>The United Nations International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources, ratified in 2004, created a formal global network for banking and sharing seeds, as well as for studying their genetic traits. Last year, its database received thousands of new seeds.<br>A system of plant banks could be crucial in responding to climate crises since it could identify genetic material and plant strains better able to cope with a changed environment.<br>Here at the Global Vault, hundreds of gray boxes containing seeds from places ranging from Syria to Mexico were moved this week into a freezing vault to be placed in suspended animation. They harbor a vast range of qualities, like the ability to withstand drier, warmer climate.
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When night falls in remote parts of Africa and the Indian subcontinent, hundreds of millions of people without access to electricity turn to candles or flammable and polluting kerosene lamps for illumination.<br>Slowly through small loans for solar powered devices, microfinance is bringing light to these rural regions where a lack of electricity has stymied economic development, literacy rates and health. A woman sews clothes on a sewing machine driven by solar energy in Ahmedabad/ Photo credit: Amit Dave/ Reuters<br>“Earlier, they could not do much once the sun set. Now, the sun is used differently. They have increased their productivity, improved their health and socio-economic status,” said Pinal Shah from SEWA Bank, a micro -lending institution.<br>Vegetable seller Ramiben Waghri took out a loan to buy a solar lantern which she uses to light up her stall at night. The lantern costs between $66-$112, about a week？ s income for Waghri.<br>“The vegetables look better by this light, and it？ s cheaper than kerosene and doesn？ t smell,” said Waghri, who estimates she makes about 300 rupees ($6) more each evening with her lantern.<br>“If we can use the sun to save some money, why not？”<br>In India, solar power projects, often funded by micro credit institutions, are helping the country reduce carbon emissions and achieve its goal to double the contribution of renewable energy to 6%, or 25,000 megawatts, within the next four years.<br>Off-grid applications such as solar cookers and lanterns, which can provide several hours of light at night after being charged by the sun during the day, will help cut dependence on fossil fuels and reduce the fourth biggest emitter？ s carbon footprint, said Pradeep Dadhich, a senior fellow at energy research institute TERI.<br>“They are reaching people who otherwise have limited or no access to electricity, and depend on kerosene, diesel or firewood for their energy needs,” he said.“The applications not only satisfy these needs, they also improve the quality of life and reduce the carbon footprint.”<br>SEWA or Self Employed Women？ s Association, is among a growing number of microfinance institutions in India focused on providing affordable renewable energy sources to poor people, who otherwise would have had to stand for hours to buy kerosene for lamps, or trudge miles to collect firewood for cooking.<br>SKS Microfinance, India？ s largest MFI, offers solar lamps to its 5 million customers, while Grameen Surya Bijlee (Rural Solar Electricity) Foundation helps fund lamps and home and street lighting systems for villagers in India, Nepal and Bangladesh.
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A year ago, this lush coastal field near Rome was filled with orderly rows of delicate durum wheat, used to make high quality Italian pasta. Today it overflows with rapeseed, a tall, gnarled weedlike plant bursting with coarse yellow flowers that has become a new manna for European farmers: rapeseed can be turned into biofuel.<br>Lured by generous new subsidies to develop alternative energy sources - and a measure of concern about the future of the planet - European farmers are plunging into growing crops that can be turned into fuels meant to produce fewer emissions than gas or oil when burned. They are chasing after their counterparts in the Americas who have been cropping for biofuel for more than five years.<br>"This is a much-needed boost to our economy, our farms," said Marcello Pini, a farmer, standing in front of the sea of waving yellow flowers he planted for the first time this year. "Of course we hope it helps the environment, too."<br>In March, the European Commission, disappointed by the slow growth of thebiofuels industry in Europe, approved a directive that included a "binding target" requiring member states to use 10 percent biofuel for transport by 2020 - the most ambitious and specific goal in the world.<br>Most EU states are currently far from achieving the target, and are introducing new incentives and subsidies to boost production.<br>As a result, bioenergy crops have now replaced food as the most profitable crop in a number European countries. In this part of Italy, for example, the government guarantees the purchase of biofuel crops at €22 per 100 kilograms, or $13.42 per 100 pounds - nearly twice the €11-to-€12 rate per 100 kilograms of wheat on the open market last year. Better still, European farmers are allowed to plant biofuel crops on "set-aside" fields, land that EU agriculture policy would otherwise require them to leave fallow to prevent an oversupply of food.<br>But an expert panel convened by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization this month pointed out that the biofuels boom produces both benefits as well as tradeoff and risks - including higher and wildly fluctuating global food prices. In some markets grain prices have nearly doubled because farmers are planting for biofuels,<br>"At a time when agricultural prices are low, in comes biofuel and improves the lot of farmers and injects life into rural areas," said Gustavo Best, an expert at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome. "But as the scale grows and the demand for biofuel crops seems to be infinite, we&39;re seeing some negative effects and we need to hold up a yellow light."<br>Josette Sheeran, the new head of the UN World Food program, which fed nearly 90 million people in 2006, said that biofuels created new dilemmas for her agency. "An increase in grain prices impacts us because we are a major procurer of grain for food. So biofuels are both a challenge and an opportunity." In Europe, the rapid conversion of fields that once grew wheat or barley to biofuel oils like rapeseed is already leading to shortages of ingredients for making pasta and brewing beer, suppliers say. That could translate into higher prices in supermarkets.<br>"New and increasing demand for bioenergy production has put high pressure on the whole world grain market," said Claudia Conti, a spokeswoman for Barilla, one of the largest Italian pasta makers. "Not only German beer producers, but Mexican tortilla makers have see the cost of their main raw material growing quickly to quickly to historical highs."<br>For some experts, more worrisome is the potential impact to low-income consumers from the displacement of food crops by bioenergy plantings. In the developing world, the shift from growing food to growing more lucrative biofuel crops destined for richer countries could create serious hunger and damage the environment in places where wild land is converted to biofuel cultivation, the FAO expert panel concluded.<br>But officials at the European Commission say they are pursuing a measured course that will prevent the worst price and supply problems that have plagued American markets.<br>"We see in the United States farmers going crazy growing corn for biofuels, but also producing shortages of food and feed," said Michael Mann, a commission spokesman. "So we see biofuel as a good opportunity - but it shouldn&39;t be the be-all and end-all for agriculture."<br>In a recent speech, Mariann Fischer Boel, the EU agriculture and rural development commissioner, said that the 10 percent EU target was "not a shot in the dark," but rather carefully chosen to encourage a level of biofuel industry growth that would not produce undue hardship for the Continent&39;s poor. Over the next 14 years, she calculated, it would push up would raw material prices for cereal by 3 percent to 6 percent by 2020, while prices for oilseed may rise between 5 percent and 18 percent. But food prices on the shelves would barely change, she said.
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Plans are well under way for a year of celebrations to mark the upcoming bicentennial of one of Poland&39;s favorite native sons-Frédéric, Chopin.<br>The prestigious International Chopin Competition for pianists will mark its 16th edition in October 2010. Held every five years, the competition draws scores of young musicians from all over the world. In addition, Warsaw&39;s Chopin Museum, with the world&39;s largest collection of Chopin documents and other artifacts, will undergo a total redesign, modernization and expansion.<br>A lavishly illustrated new guidebook called "Chopin&39;s Poland" was already published this year. It leads visitors to dozens of sites in Warsaw and elsewhere around the country where the composer lived, ate, studied, performed, visited or even partied.<br>"Actually, Chopin doesn&39;t need to be promoted, but we hope that Poland and Polish culture can be promoted through Chopin," said Monika Strugala, who is coordinating the Chopin 2010 program under the aegis of the Fryderyk ChopinInstitute, a body set up by the Sejm in 2001 to promote and protect Chopin&39;s work and image.<br>"We want to confirm to all that he is a very, very important Polish symbol," she said. Indeed, it&39;s not much of an exaggeration to say that Chopin&39;s music flows through the Polish national consciousness like some sort of cultural lifeblood. The son of a Polish mother and a French émigréfather, Chopin was born in a manor house at Zelazowa Wola, about 50 kilometers, or 30 miles, west of Warsaw, and moved to Warsaw as an infant.<br>The manor is something of a Chopin shrine-since the 1930 s it has been a museum and center for concerts. Like the Chopin Museum in Warsaw, it, too, is undergoing extensive renovation as part of bicentennial preparations.<br>Chopin spent his first 20 years in and around Warsaw. He was already a noted pianist as a boy and composed concertos and other important works as a teenager. He carried Polish soil with him when he left Warsaw on a concert tour in 1830, just a few weeks before the outbreak of the November Uprising, an abortive Polish revolt against Czarist Russia, which then ruled Warsaw and a broad swath of Polish territory.<br>Chopin remained in exile in France after the uprising was crushed. But so attached was he to his native land that after his death in Paris in 1849 his heart-on his own instructions-was brought back to Warsaw for interment. The rest of his body is buried in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris.<br>"For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also,"reads the Biblical inscription on a plaque where his heart is kept today, preserved in an urn and concealed in a pillar of the Holy Cross Church in central Warsaw. Mozart&39;s"Requiem" will be performed here as part of Bicentennial events.<br>Exile and patriotism, as well as extraordinary genius, have long made Chopin&39;s appeal transcend all manner of social and political divides.<br>Polish folk motifs thread through some of his finest pieces, and patriotic fervor, as well as homesick longing, infuse some of his best-known works.
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Last Friday an advisory panel to the European Environment Agency issued an extraordinary scientific opinion: The European Union should suspend its goal of having 10 percent of transportation fuel made from biofuel by 2020.<br>The European Union&39;s biofuel targets were increased and extended from 5.75 percent by 2010 to 10 percent by 2020 just last year. Still, Europe&39;s well-meaning rush to biofuels, the scientists concluded, had produced a slew of harmful ripple effects - from deforestation in Southeast Asia to higher prices for grains.<br>In a recommendation released last weekend, the 20-member panel, made up of some of Europe&39;s most distinguished climate scientists, called the 10 percent target "overambitious" and an "experiment" whose "unintended effects are difficult to predict and difficult to control."<br>"The idea was that we felt we needed to slow down, to analyze the issue carefully and then come back at the problem," Laszlo Somlyody, the panel&39;s chairman and a professor at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, said in a telephone interview.<br>He said that part of the problem was that when it set the targets, the European Union was trying desperately to solve the problem of rising transportation emissions "in isolation," without adequately studying the effects of other sectors like land use and food supply.<br>"The starting point was correct: I&39;m happy that the European Union took the lead in cutting greenhouse gasses and we need to control traffic emissions," Somlyody said. "But the basic problem is it thought of transport alone, without considering all these other effects. And we don&39;t understand those very well yet." The panel&39;s advice is not binding and it is not clear whether the European Commission will follow the recommendation.<br>It has become increasingly clear that the global pursuit of biofuels - encouraged by a rash of targets and subsides in both Europe and the United States - has not produced the desired effect.<br>Investigations have shown, for example, rain forests and peat swamp are being cleared to make way for biofuel plantations, a process that produces more emissions than the biofuels can save. Equally concerning, land needed to produce food forpeople to eat is planted with more profitable biofuel crops, and water is diverted from the drinking supply.<br>In Europe and the United States, food prices for items like pizza and bread have increased significantly as grain stores shrink and wheat prices rise.<br>The price of wheat and rice are double those of a year ago, and corn is a third higher, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization said this week.<br>"Food price inflation hits the poor hardest, as the share of food in their total expenditures is much higher than that of wealthier populations," said Henri Josserand of the Food and Agriculture Organization<br>For example, the European Environment Agency advisory panel suggests that the best use of plant biomass is not for transport fuel but to heat homes and generate electricity.<br>To be useful for vehicles, plant matter must be distilled to a fuel and often transported long distances. To heat a home, it can often be used raw or with minimal processing, and moved just a short distance away.
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The prehistoric monument of Stonehenge stands tall in the British countryside as one of the last remnants of the Neolithic Age. Recently it has also become the latest symbol of another era: the new fiscal austerity. A plan to replace the site？ s run-down visitors center with one almost five times bigger and to close a busy road that runs along the 5,000-year-old monument had to be mothballed in June. The British government had suddenly withdrawn ￡ 10 million, or $16 million, in financing for the project as part of a budget austerity.<br>Stonehenge, once a temple with giant stone slabs aligned in a circle to mark the passage of the sun, is among the most prominent victims of the government？ s spending cuts. The decision was heavily criticized by local lawmakers, especially because Stonehenge, a UnescoWorld Heritage site, was part of London？ s successful bid to host the 2012 Olympic Games.The shabby visitors center there now is already too small for the 950,000 people who visit Stonehenge each year, let alone theadditional onslaught of tourists expected for the Games, the official says.<br>Stonehenge is the busiest tourist attraction in Britain？ s southwest, topping even Windsor Castle. But no major improvements have been made to the facilities there since they were built 40 years ago.For now, portable toilets lead from a crammed parking lot, a makeshift souvenir shop in a tent, a ticket office opposite a small kiosk that sells coffee and snacks.<br>The overhaul was scheduled for next spring in 2011. The plan, held by Denton Corker Marshall, the architectural firm, would keep the stone monument itself unchanged. But the current ticket office and shop would be demolished and a new visitors center would be built on the other side of the monument, about 2.5 kilometers, or 1.5 miles, from the stones.The center would have included a shop almost five times the size of the current one, a proper restaurant, three times as many parking spots and an exhibition space to provide more information about Stonehenge？ s history.<br>A transit system would have shuttled visitors between the center and the stones while footpaths would have encouraged tourists to walk to the monument and explore the surrounding burial hills. The closed road would be grassed over to improve the surrounding landscape.Last year, the ￡27 million project won the backing of former Prime Minister<br>Gordon Brown. After more than 25 years of bickering with local communities about how and where to build the new center, planning permission was granted in January. Construction was supposed to start and be completed in time for the Olympics, but the economic recession has changed.<br>The new prime minister, David Cameron, has reversed many of his predecessor？ s promises as part of a program to cut more than ￡99 billion annually over a period of five years to help to close a gaping budget deficit. The financing for Stonehenge fell in the first round of cuts, worth about ￡6.2 billion, from the budget for the current year, along with support for a hospital and the British Film Institute.<br>English Heritage, a partly government-financed organization that owns Stonehenge and more than 400 other historic sites in the country, is now aggressively looking for private donations. But the economic downturn has made the endeavor more difficult.<br>Loraine Knowles, Stonehenge？ s project director, said she was disappointed that the government had withdrawn money while continuing to support museums in London. But she said she was hopeful that English Heritage could raise the money elsewhere. Stonehenge, she said, could then also become “a shining example of how philanthropy could work.”
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