Promoting Critical Public Understanding of Science And Enhancing The GM (genetic engineering) Debate

The Institute of Science in Society (ISIS) is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1999 by Mae-Wan Ho and Peter Saunders to work for social responsibility and sustainable approaches in science. A major part of our work is to promote critical public understanding of science and to engage both scientists and the public in open debate and discussion. ISIS has been providing inputs into the GM debate that would have been conspicuously lacking otherwise.

Un sujet majeur sur le site ISIS : “le reverdissement du Sahel” : http://www.i-sis.org.uk/greeningTheDesert.php

” While the greening in the Niger Delta of Mali might be explained by an expansion of irrigation, different explanations must be found for the Central Plateau of Burkina Faso, which had been identified as a prime example of the desertification crisis some 20 years ago. Here, a recovery of vegetation greenness beyond what would be expected from the recovery of rainfall alone might be due to increased investment and improvements in soil and water conservation technique such as contour bunding, in response to the drought crisis experienced by farmers… In Chad, the greening hotspot was found, among other places, in the Chari-Baguirmi region. The West African Pilot Pastoral Programme has managed a few sites there since 1994 to test a participatory approach to holistic rangeland management. Pastoralists have evaluated the outcome as positive… Another study of satellite images supported the notion that more plants make more rain. Evidence was found for a positive feedback between vegetation and rainfall at the monthly time scale, and for a vegetation memory operating at the annual time scale. That means greater greenness the previous month tends to increase rainfall a month later, and a green year tends to increase rainfall the next year, as greater plant growth and deeper root systems tap into more ground water for making rain. This positive interaction between vegetation and rainfall increases the inter-annual variation in rainfall, accounting for as much as 30 percent of the variability in annual precipitation in some regions of the Sahel.”