Dana Bucur in Ro media

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This is an interview first given to Active Watch mid February 2011. Reporter Maria Popa. Main Topics: Dana Bucur business activity, România, agriculture and rural development, creativity and innovation. All of it has been then published further by: one of the main business magazine Capital România (june 2011) -  and also by Think Outside the Box România (july 2011). Dana Bucur has 17 years of agricultural experience. Sometimes she worked even 14 hours without having a break. She started from the ground, building up from scratch a viable farm and now she has her own agribusiness company providing ag consultancy, including solutions for sustainable agriculture and organic farming. She graduated Economics, a Quality Master and 2 agribusiness MBAs (one in UK and the other a joint-venture between România and Germany). These are some of the reasons the sustainable community media decided to take an interview. Reporter: What kind of problems the Ro agriculture confronts with? Dana Bucur: Lack of branding,...
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Heat map

By dana.bucur Comment Closed
Via: http://www.economist.com The world is warming ON NOVEMBER 29th representatives of countries from around the world gathered in Cancún, Mexico, for the first high-level climate talks since those in Copenhagen last December. Incremental progress is possible, but continued deadlock is likelier. What is out of reach, as it was at Copenhagen, is agreement on a plausible programme for keeping climate change in check. The world warmed by about 0.7°C in the 20th century and by the end of the 21st century temperatures will be 3°C warmer than at the beginning of the industrial revolution. Increases in average temperature will be less noticeable than those in extremes. According to a 2009 comparison of over 20 climate models by David Battisti and Rosamond Naylor, by 2050 there is a 10-50% likelihood that the average summer in much of the world will be hotter than any summer recorded...
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Temperatures are rising over land and sea

By dana.bucur Comment Closed
Some critics argue that the global record of land surface temperature over the 20th century could be to some extent corrupted by heat from towns and other factors. There is a clear warming, though, if a lesser one, in two other records made independently; that of the temperature of the oceans' surface waters and of the night time air temperature over the oceans. While the larger warming over land could in part reflect some error of procedure, though that is not proven, the trends all have the same shape. Source: The Economist on-line http://www.economist.com/daily/news/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15748082&fsrc=nwl ...
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Just how fast is the climate changing?

By dana.bucur Comment Closed
Author: MATTHEW CAWOOD Source: Farmonline CLIMATE change has a speed: about 420 metres per year. That's the average rate at which temperature zones will shift across global landscapes during this century, according to research led by the Carnegie Institute in the United States. It is also an estimate of how quickly plants and animals will need to move to stay within current climatic zones, and an indication of the pressure on agriculture to adapt as seasonal conditions shift. Recently published in the scientific journal Nature, the research attempts to predict "temperature velocities" as a way of expressing how climate change will influence plants and animals adapted to certain climatic zones. Such work is not entirely new, according to Professor Barry Brook, who occupies the Sir Hubert Wilkins Chair of Climate Change at Adelaide University, but it does provide a useful picture of how climate change may advance across landscapes - including farmland. Unlike plants and animals, which must move or evolve to survive climate shifts, agriculture...
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Fifth hottest year for planet Earth

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AUSTRALIA will record its third warmest year on record in 2009, and the planet its fifth, according to data collected by the World Meteorological Organisation. The annual analysis found the 2000s were warmer than the 1990s, which were warmer than the 1980s, challenging claims that the globe has cooled in recent years. Only North America had a cooler-than-average year in 2009. Large parts of southern Asia and central Africa are expected to have their hottest year ever. Arctic sea ice - often at the centre of the debate about global warming - is at its third lowest level since detailed measurement began 30 years ago. The lowest level was in 2007. ''Every summer the amount of Arctic ice is getting very low,'' World Meteorological Organisation secretary-general Michel Jarraud said in Copenhagen. In Australia, the year was marked by three ''exceptional heatwaves'', including the wilting south-eastern summer that culminated in the Black Saturday bushfires that killed 173 people. Victoria recorded its highest ever temperature - 48.8 degrees. Heatwaves...
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Global reawakening of agriculture’s importance

By dana.bucur Comment Closed
Agriculture's success in feeding the world for several decades has had its drawbacks. As farming became boringly efficient, research funding dried up, business looked elsewhere for high-yielding investment and the best and brightest students looked for more exciting fields to study. Since the food price shock of 2008, those attitudes seem to have changed. Last week, for instance, The Economist's cover story was 'How to feed the world', in which the magazine noted that soaring levels of investment in agriculture are in conflict with a new era of protectionism based on food security concerns. (Time magazine's cover was 'Banking on trees', a crop that may also play a big part in the farms of the carbon-conscious future.) The Economist's weighing into the discussion is part of a global reawakening to the central importance of agriculture to human affairs. This fresh appreciation is bringing a flood of new investment to the area (if not yet a flood of new profits to farmers) – but with the rewards...
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GLOBAL temperatures could rise 4 degrees in the next 50 years

By dana.bucur Comment Closed
GLOBAL temperatures could rise 4 degrees in the next 50 years - faster than previously predicted - if greenhouse gas emissions increase unchecked, according to a report for the British Government. The climate science update, prepared by British Met Office scientists, found that the increase this century could top 15 degrees above pre-industrial levels in the Arctic and be up to 10 degrees for parts of Africa. In Australia, rainfall is projected to decline by at least one-fifth along parts of the coastline, worsening drought. The Met Office Hadley Centre's head of climate impacts, Richard Betts, said the most severe scenarios outlined in the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report now looked conservative. Pleaseread more on http://fw.farmonline.com.au/news/nationalrural/agribusiness-and-general/general/climate-update-points-to-2060-nightmare-rise/1635657.aspx?src=enews...
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Cooling the planet with crops

By dana.bucur Comment Closed
By carefully selecting which varieties of food crops to cultivate, much of Europe and North America could be cooled by up to 1°C during the summer growing season, say researchers from the University of Bristol. This is equivalent to an annual global cooling of over 0.1°C, almost 20% of the total global temperature increase since the Industrial Revolution. The growing of crops already produces a cooling of the climate because they reflect more sunlight back into space, compared with natural vegetation. Different varieties of the same crop vary significantly in their solar reflectivity (called ‘albedo’), so selecting varieties that are more reflective will enhance this cooling effect. Since arable agriculture is a global industry, such cooling could be extensive. To read more please go on http://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2009/6091.html...
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