| EMPLOYEE FELLOWSHIPS:
Spotlight on the ASPAC region
 Since 2001, 493 British American Tobacco employees from the Asia
Pacific (ASPAC) region have applied to become employee fellows,
with 36 applicants in the 2008 round alone.
The programme has always
been popular amongst ASPAC employees and over the past seven years
applications have been received from nineteen different countries
across the region, including Indonesia, Taiwan, China, New Zealand
and Papua New Guinea.
In 2007, six employees from the ASPAC region were successful in
their applications and joined Earthwatch research projects. Shareryar
Kharram, Shadman Khattak, Nubair Misbah (Pakistan) and Iryna Berestuyk
(Ukraine) joined Rainforests of Northern Australia, gathering
data on the multitude of biodiversity in the region and contributing
toward the conservation of two World Heritage listed tropical ecosystems.
Meanwhile, Saadia Rehman (Pakistan) and Chloe Wei Li (China) traveled
to South Africa to aid Earthwatch lead scientist Dr Michelle Hamer
in her efforts to shed light on the vital role invertebrates play
in healthy ecosystems, on South Africa’s Hidden Species. For
Chloe, joining Michelle’s project was the inspiration for
her small grant application on returning to China and she is currently
working on her own local biodiversity project entitled “Less
Is More – What YOU can do for biodiversity.” She
explains:
“My Earthwatch project in South Africa allowed
me to learn more about the importance of invertebrates, as well
as how to protect them. The aim of my project is to raise
awareness among people about how the small changes in life could
benefit the environment protection and save the natural habitats
of invertebrates. “
Chloe’s project focuses on the use
of disposable chopsticks and raising awareness of the impacts
their production has on biodiversity. Every year China consumes
45 billion pairs of disposable chopsticks, which equates to 25
million full-grown trees. As Chloe observes:
“This
is an astonishing number. People don’t realise that they’re
destroying nature while they’re eating every meal every day.
The biggest threats to invertebrates at the moment is the destruction
of natural habitats and pollution on water and on land.” She
plans to work with CORA and procurement teams at British American
Tobacco China to produce “easy-to-carry” re-usable
chopsticks for staff and promote their use.
It is hoped that the 2008 employee fellowships programme will
inspire more ASPAC fellows in their own local biodiversity initiatives.
As well as supporting longstanding research projects in Australia
(Climate Change in the Rainforest) and Vietnam (Butterflies
of Vietnam), this year’s programme will feature a new
Earthwatch project in Malaysian Borneo, Tropical Rainforest
Ecosystems, led by Dr. Glen Reynolds of The Royal Society
South East Asia Rainforest Research Programme (SEARRP).
The remaining rainforests of South-East
Asia support much of the region’s biodiversity, play a crucial role in the provision
of key ecosystem services and are an important source of income
to the local people as well as on a national scale. These
rainforests face serious threats from shifting cultivation and
unsustainable timber harvesting practices which cause forest degradation,
clearance for agricultural plantations and, perhaps most serious
of all, climatic change in the form of droughts and other severe
weather conditions. These threats may be severely impacting recruitment
and regeneration of the most important group of tree species of
the South-East Asian rainforests, the dipterocarps, with potentially
disastrous implications.
The necessity to reverse rainforest degradation and prevent further
loss makes it essential to both restore degraded areas of forest
in a manner which allows biodiversity and ecosystem function to
be maintained, and to assess the likely resilience of the rainforest
system and its key components and hence mitigate the impacts of
climate change. The British American Tobacco employee fellows joining
this project in October 2008 will assist Earthwatch scientists
in gathering data to tackle these pressing issues.
The 24 successful applicants to the 2008 Earthwatch employee fellowship
programme will be announced in mid-April, with six places available
on projects in the ASPAC region.
For more information visit: www.earthwatch.org/europe/ |
Q1/2008
