Seaweed fishing in Zanzibar

Zanzibar has two main islands and around 50 surrounding islets and if you’re on one of the islands as the sun rises chances are that you will see the woman of Zanzibar knee deep in the water harvesting seaweed.

Seaweed fishing in Zanzibar. 

Seaweed is the third largest industry after tourism and cloves. 80% of the workforce are women and the money they make can help send their children to school and to build houses. Lisa De Bode travelled to Zanzibar, for the World Policy Journal, to meet the women and find out what the challenges will be moving forward and whether or not the women be able to meet them?

Listen to the ABC Radio National discussion with Geraldine Doogue - “Seaweed fishing in Zanzibar.”

Business sustainability and climate change discussion for Shepparton

A woman with an acute understanding of business sustainability and climate change will speak in Shepparton later this month.

Dr Sarah Birrell Ivory.

Dr Sarah Birrell Ivory will be a guest at a lunch on Wednesday, December 20, hosted jointly by the Committee for Greater Shepparton and La Trobe University.

Dr Ivory is an Early Career Fellow in Climate Change and Business Strategy at the University of Edinburgh where she recently established the Global Challenge for Business compulsory first-year course for all undergraduate students.

She is a member of the Centre for Business and Climate Change which develops dedicated educational and research material relating to aspects of business and management that impact, or are impacted by, climate change issues.

She is also a member of the Sustainable Business Institute which advises and engages with the business and wider community on sustainability issues.

Dr Ivory also teaches Climate Change and Environmental Policy in the Master of Science Carbon Finance as a part of a team delivering the strategic leadership module in the flagship MBA program at the Edinburgh University. 

She worked in Singapore and Australia before moving into academia and attended St Brendan’s Primary School in Shepparton and then the Shepparton High School before moving to the Presbyterian Ladies College in Melbourne.

The hour-long lecture at the Shepparton campus of La Trobe University starts 12:15 pm following a light lunch at 11:45n am.

More information from Rebecca White at the Committee for Greater Shepparton, phone 5821 9177.

Convenience gone mad - a root cause of climate change

“Convenience” is among those things at the root of climate change.

The much sought after convenience comes at an alarming cost and that is mostly fossil fuel powered energy and then an  equally alarming amount of waste; a waste that has been both environmentally costly to produce and then dispose of.

An example of the wasteful convenience came recently in America when a woman noticed individually packed, peeled oranges for sale in an “upscale” supermarket.

The founder of Clean Up Australia Day has labelled the sale of packaged peeled oranges in the United States as "convenience gone mad".

Twitter user Nathalie Gordon shared a photo of the peeled fruit she spotted online when the new concept was brought to the shelves of US upscale supermarket, Whole Foods.

Her tweet about the skinless citrus has since gone viral, attracting more than 80,000 retweets.

Responses ranged from those who were outraged by the wastage and deriding the concept as "stupid" while others said they liked the convenience.

But Clean Up Australia Day founder Ian Kiernan said the payoff for convenience was not worth ruining the environment.

Read the ABC story - “Packaged peeled oranges 'convenience gone mad', Clean Up Australia Day founder says.”