Climate Change - a Challenge For Europe and Cyprus

von Engin Karatas

In the beginning of the 21st century climate change has become a central challenge of global policy making and in terms of sustainable development. Unless it can be stopped in time, there will be incalculable consequences for the economic and social development of a globalized society. The member states of the European Union and the EU itself has to come forward in the vanguard of climate policy. Climate protection requires not only the use of renewable energy sources, energy saving and improvement of energy efficiency, but also mitigation of adverse impacts through nature conservation and preservation of biodiversity, better water management, CO2 sinks, as well as an improved environmental education. This book confronts the most urgent questions facing us now from a general and also from a Cyprus’ specific point of view: The outstanding tableau of authors from Europe and Cyprus brings the right expertise to have an insight view into the challenges the island’s nature is already facing in the context of climate change. This book is the result of the second “Conference on Sustainability” of the German-Cypriot Forum in Cooperation with Friends of Nature Cyprus, which took place in November 2009 in Nicosia. One of the biggest problems of Cyprus is water scarcity. The island has a semi-arid climate and limited water resources which depend mainly on rainfall. However, rainfall in Cyprus is unevenly distributed with considerable regional variations, water resources are scarce and expensive to exploit and droughts occur frequently. In this book you find proposals for improving water management in Cyprus. Another chapter is the look at renewable energies. Cyprus as a sun island is very suitable for solar energy. The so-called bio-energy is the most problematic of all renewable energies. Not only because of severe competition for limited space and water resources for nature conservation and food production. To be economically feasible bio-energy is normally grown in huge monocultures (in woody plants often based on single clones), and in the near future it can be foreseen also with genetically modified organisms. These plantations are characterized by heavy use of fertilizers and pesticides with all its environmental problems. Finally there should be an improvement of Environmental Education. The Earth Summit of Rio de Janeiro 1992 enriched the vocabulary of environmental protection with an important term that has