Unit 11. Economy and Environment. Climate Change

Lead-in

Exercise 1. Starting up: Work in two groups, make up a list of the human activities that might cause CO2 emissions.

Vocabulary and Listening

Exercise 2. You are going to listen to the report on the problem of wetlands. Match the English words and phrases from the report with their Russian equivalents:

1. coincident	высушивать
2. to apportion blame	излучение, выделение
3. peaty weatland	распределять, разделять вину
4. to preserve	грешник, преступник
5. emission	совпадающий
6. a culprit	подвергать, выставлять
7. oxidative effect	привычная статистика
8. to drain	парниковые газы
9. to desiccate	торфяное болото
10. greenhouse gases	осушать
11. to ex­pose	эффект окисления
12. conventional figure	сохранять

Exercise 3. Listen to the report on wetlands and answer the following questions (“The Economist”, November 7^th 2009):

1. What amount of CO2 do wetlands emit a year? Is human activity influence the process of draining the wetlands?

2. What two reports are considered in this article?

3. Which countries are mentioned here as guilty for these emissions?

4. What amount of man-made CO2 emissions does tree-felling cause?

5. Should people preserve bogs as well as forests?

6. What trees are recommended to grow in the marshlands?

7. What does the report by McKinsey suggest?

Exercise 4. Listen to the report again and fill in the gaps in the script using the target vocabulary (Exercise 2):

For peat’s sake, stop

The world's wetlands are big sources of greenhouse gases

Bogs, mires, marshes, swamps, fens and quagmires – whatever they are called, and wherever they are found, peaty wetlands emit about 1.3 billion tonnes of CO2 a year as a result of human activity that __________ them and thus exposes them to the oxidative effect of the atmosphere. Nor does this figure include the effect of fire on dried-up bogs. That can double the amount of CO2 released in a year, in those places it affects.

That, at least, is the conclusion of a report published by Wetlands International, a lobby group, at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change meeting being held in Barcelona this week. Hansjoosten of the University of Greifswald, in Germany, who is one of the report's authors, said that although drained peat occupies a mere 0.3% of the world's land surface, it is responsible, in total, for 6% of man-made CO2 _________________.

The report also apportions blame. Top of the list, by a long way, is Indonesia-which emits 500m tonnes of CO2 a year, not including the consequences of fire. But richer countries are guilty, too. The next __________ is Russia, followed by China, America and Finland.

The report's findings, raising the profile of peat, contrast with the conclusions of a paper on ________________ pub­lished this week in Nature Geoscience. This suggests the volume of emissions caused by cutting down trees may not be as great as is generally believed.

The conventional figure is that tree-felling causes 20% of man-made CO2 emissions. Guido van der Werf of the Free University of Amsterdam, who wrote the paper, reckons the figure is closer to 12%. There is probably some double-counting in the two sets of fig­ures, because many peat bogs are found in forests, and are thus drained as those forests are cleared. Nevertheless, the ____________ publication of these studies suggests a change of emphasis may be needed, and that efforts should be made to ____________ not just forests, but also bogs.

One approach might be to encourage uses of marshland that do not desiccate the peat – for example, growing moisture-loving rubber trees rather than oil palms, which need dry soils. Another might be to pay for the "reletting" of abandoned land. Controlling fires is also important. Indeed, a recent report for the Indonesian government by McKinsey, a consultancy, suggests that a combination of __________ the further deforestation of non-con­verted marshes, better water manage­ment, reletting dried peat and fire control might reduce the amount of CO2 emitted from the country's peatlands by 900m tonnes a year out of a total – fire-damage and all – of 1.5 billion tonnes.

Exercise 5. Look through the report again (Exercise 4) and find synonyms for the word “wetland”.

Reading

Exercise 6. Read the report on the climate change and decide if the following statements are true (T) or false (F):

1. Green activists around the world have been waiting for 20 years for American action, everybody is cheering.

2. However much bosses may care about the planet, they usually mind more about their bottom line.

3. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was designed to get scientists to work out what was happening to the cli­mate, and to get governments to sign off on the scientists' con­clusions.

4. The ambiguities of science sit comfortably with the demands of politics.

5. Implying that Britain's children face some sort of Saharan future is wrong, and dangerous.

6. The most recent IPCC report had claimed that the Himalayan glaciers were going to disappear by 2034, instead of 2350.

7. Most research supports the idea that warming is not man-made.

8. Just as a householder pays a small premium to protect himself against disaster, the world should do the same.