The Federal Ministry of Environment (BMU) will make available 10 million euros for the protection of tropical forests.
Summit in Nagoya, Japan, Norbert Rottgen, Federal Environment Minister, said “at present, nearly 13 million hectares of forest disappear annually tropical forests are also of exceptional importance good for biodiversity and for the fight against climate change. In their loss we destroy not only our resources essential to life but also those of future generations. “ Mr. Röttgen took part in Nagoya at a ministerial meeting on the theme of global partnership to protect tropical forests. This meeting took place as part of the tenth meeting of the Conference of Parties (COP 10) of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). This partnership promotes international negotiations on climate through the development of a global mechanism whose goal is to stop deforestation and destructive use of forests. This mechanism known as REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) was under discussion for several years.
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As a teenager in Taiwan, his native country, Bo-Wen Shen noted with frustration and powerlessness as a typhoon after another struck a small island. Without advanced warning systems, storm left a trail of casualties and destruction in their wake. Determined to find ways to mitigate the devastation, Shen chose a university in which to study the tropical climate and atmospheric sciences.
Now, as a scientist of a research project conducted at the University of Maryland and NASA has used the supercomputer Shen Pleiades (Pleiades) NASA’s highly detailed and atmospheric data to simulate the tropical cyclone Nargis that devastated Myanmar in 2008. As a result, he and his colleagues have obtained the first model to predict in detail the formation of tropical cyclone five days in advance.
To save lives before the action of strong winds and floods associated with tropical cyclones (also known as hurricanes and typhoons), the experts who make forecasts need to warn of impending disasters such as far ahead as possible and with higher degree of accuracy when and where a storm will exercise its violence. In a computer simulation model through the storm occurred, Shen managed to get a proper prognosis of the storm five days before his birth as such a vital time in a region where meteorological observation and monitoring of cyclones are seriously hampered by the paucity of data.
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On the occasion of the 7th International Conference on Earthquake Engineering in urban areas and the 5th International Conference on Earthquake Engineering, a Japanese team of researchers of the Department of Built Environment “from the Tokyo Institute of Technology and engineers from the French company Menard, Stephane and Emmanuel JAVELAUD BRULE, presented their joint research on the method of seismic noise, there invented over twenty years in Japan by Nakamura Yatuka.
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