You know houseboats, you know cars that are build to swim or tanks. But can you image to live on water in a  real hous? That is reality for example in Nigeria, where the people of Makoko build their houses on stilts above the lagoon.  What is tradition there, might be a model idea which other parts in the world can adopt to.

Rising sea levels due to climate change will force many people to leave their homes and migrate to places that won’t be covered with water in future time.

Facing this Scenario, the Maledive Islands government had an unusual idea: floating islands. They cooperate with a Dutch arcitechtural company to build artificial islands that stay above, no matter how much the sea level rises.

Do you think this is a proper idea to realize on large scale?

Germany’s most famous urban garden is attracting hundreds of visitors each week. The farmers from the “Prinzessinnengarten” fear that the city of Berlin might be selling their plot soon. This would be the end of an exceptional ecological urban project.

In our GLOBAL IDEAS audio-slideshow founder Marco Clausen shows us around the Prinzessinnengarten:

Gardening goes guerilla in Berlin from DW_Global Ideas on Vimeo.

Money versus Vegetables
At the moment it is highly unsure, if the success story of the Prinzessinnengarten is going to be still around in 2014. The garden’s rental contract ends at the end of 2013. A spokesperson of the Berlin city council (“Senatsverwaltung für Finanzen”) told GLOBAL IDEAS that negotiations for a new contract are currently “ongoing”.

But the urban farmers are fearing that the city of Berlin will be selling off their plot to the most bidding party rather than setting up a new contract with them. Since new stores, an office space for freelancers and artists and a hotel chain have settled close to the Prinzessinnengarten, the area around Kreuzberg’s Moritzplatz got more and more popular with property prices rising. According to a spokesperson of the city’s own Property Fund, negotiations with investors looking at buying the formerly vacant plot have already been made.

Whilst the council of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, the communal political body, promised to be supportive of the project trying to help conserve it, the final decision lies in the hands of the city of Berlin. At the end of the day it will be mayor Klaus Wowereit and his government who will have to decide about the  Prinzessinnengarten’s future.

Let it grow!
To stop the sell-out of the Prinzessinnengarten, Marco and his co-founders started the campaign “Let it grow”. In an open letter to the city of Berlin they are demanding to prolong the rental contract for another five years. If the city does not agree, Marco and his team will have to leave the plot at the end of next year.

You can sign the open letter to the Berlin senate on the homepage of the Prinzessinnengarten.

Author and pictures: Kerstin Schnatz

Cups made from corn or electricity from sugar cane: Rio is eager these days to show that it can be environmentally friendly. The city is hosting the United Nations conference on Sustainable Development – better known as Rio+20. While the official part is only starting on Wednesday (June 20) the congress venue is already open for preparatory meetings and non-governmental events.

The Brazilian government is trying to make a point, it seems, of just how much it values the use of renewable resources  such as corn or sugarcane. Indeed, Brazil is well known as a biofuel-country: The standard blend cars run on consists of up to 25 percent of biofuel for example. Even the Brazilian airline that flew us in bragged about its green commitment in the inflight magazine. The carrier plans  to operate a domestic flight on biofuel especially for Rio+20.

Whilst renewable resources may emit less CO2 than fossil fuels, depending on how they are processed and transported, they can of course also create a lot of problems – monocultures, conflict between food and fuel production or soil degradation to name just a few.

This summer, 20 years on from the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janiero, Brazil, government representatives will meet at a ‘Rio+20’ summit to discuss sustainable development. We need to keep the pressure on, says the British “Stop Climate Chaos Coalition”. Absolutely right!

The Brazilian parliament has adopted a new, hotly-debated land law. Environmentalist fear that it puts the country’s rainforest, one of the world’s richest, at high risk.

Large landowners and peasants benefit from the law, because it eases existing restrictions: landowners are no longer bound to reforest riverbanks, for example, and environmental regulations have also been softened.

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