Water lilies grow next to a wetland in Georgia. (© AP Images)

February 2 is World Wetlands Day.

Wetland ecosystems are cradles of biological diversity, offering water and productive platforms that so many species of plants and animals depend on for survival. They support critical concentrations of birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, fish, insects and worms, and are an important storehouse for plant genetic materials. Rice, a common wetland plant, is the staple diet of more than half the world’s population.

Every year since 1997, World Wetlands Day has marked the signing of the Convention on Wetlands on February 2, 1971, in the Iranian city of Ramsar on the shores of the Caspian Sea. Government agencies, nongovernmental organizations and groups of citizens from many communities mark the day and the Ramsar Convention with activities that raise public awareness of wetland values and benefits.

The Sapling Project, an urban tree planting campaign started by two Mumbaikars is inspiring citizens across India to create more green spaces in their local communities and make a commitment to combat climate change one tree at a time. The movement is spreading quickly and gaining attention from the Indian press and the international community.

This web-based project uses social media platforms to organize tree distribution drives in cities around the country. Saplings are distributed to participants free of charge with one caveat: they must make a commitment to monitor and post updates on the growth and progress of their planted trees on a social media platform over the next two years.

On January 26, the Sapling Project organized tree distribution and planting activities in Mumbai, Bombay, Bangalore and Chennai. The project’s founders, Satish Vijaykumar and Ranjeet Walunj, spent the day delivering trees around Mumbai while friends and volunteers coordinated events at local gardens and schools. As citizens celebrated Republic Day, India’s day of independence, they also had something else to celebrate - a step toward a cleaner, greener India for future generations.

I spoke via e-mail with Satish Vijaykumar (one of the organization’s founders) and asked him a few questions about the project:

Q: What inspired you to start the Sapling Project?

A: “One day, I was at a restaurant and I realized that we normal citizens don’t have a cause that we are associated with or think is worth living for. Then I thought that I shall buy a few saplings and hand them out to people who cared for the environment. I called up my friend Ranjeet and shared the idea. He also bought the idea and suggested we go online and involve more people and that snowballed into The Sapling Project.”

The Sapling Project's organizers

Q: How do you use social media to spread your message?

A: “We have a Facebook group ‘the Sapling Project’ and we drive the traffic to our website (http://thesaplingproject.com) from our Twitter, Facebook and Orkut messages. Our website allows users to provide their details (demographics/contact details), which we use to organize the sapling distribution drive in their location.”

Q: How will the sapling project help the environment and combat climate change?

A: “We think that we have triggered a small movement across the nation where normal individuals can come together and collectively do good for the environment and society at large.”

Q: What do you hope people will learn from the experience of planting a tree and monitoring its growth?

A: “We are looking to inspire people to have ‘connection’ with the nature. When people are participating in the Sapling Project; they are actually making a commitment to take care of the sapling till it grows into a small tree.

It’s like growing your own child when you are taking care of the sapling. And in the process they are essentially providing better future to next generation.”

This tree planting campaign represents one of many grassroots green movements that are taking place around the globe. What grassroots green campaigns are you involved in?

ARPA-E - for Advanced Research Project Agency-Energy - was established with $400 million in funding. It’s a bold concept - focus on high-risk, high-payoff concepts developed by small businesses, academic institutions and large corporations and turn them into technologies that promise true transformations in areas like large-scale use of energy efficiency technology, alternative and advanced energy sources, smart-grid power generation and management, and energy-storage technology.

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World leaders, delegates, media and protesters have gone from Copenhagen’s Bella Center, but the 15^th Conference of the Parties (COP-15) to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) did produce an outline that shows how the world might move forward on the problem of climate change.

For those of you who don’t already know, America.gov has got your connection to what’s going on in Copenhagen for COP-15.  Not only are Steve Greenstreet and Brandon Bloch in “Hopenhagen” shooting video from the streets outside the Bella Center and uploading photos to the Flickr stream on a daily basis, the CO.NX Web chat team is steaming content from inside different meetings and official side events now through the end of the week. 

The CO.NX chats are your opportunity to listen in on what’s happening in Denmark and then ask your questions directly to U.S. Government officials involved in the negotiations. Tomorrow, for example, features a Q&A session with officials from the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) following a presentation on increasing fuel efficiency to help decrease emissions.

Last week, internet giant Google announced that it had created a new tool to help climatologists, policy makers and regular citizens alike visualize the impact a changing climate will have on their day-to-day lives. Google and the government of California launched a version of Google Earth known as CalAdapt that shows data on climate and weather trends for the state over 30 years and projects how these trends will play out into the future under different carbon emissions scenarios. (Google is also preparing a second case study on Kenya for this project.)

Across the Internet, on the evening news and in newspapers and scientific journals, people are talking about the November 17 hacking of a computer server used by the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. The hackers sent to various websites more than 1,000 e-mails to and from CRU climatologist Phil Jones, 2,000 documents and computer code created over 13 years. Police are investigating the criminal breach.

A screen-grab from the virtual conference on green workspaces in Second Life.

The State Department’s Office of Innovative Engagement and the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication convened a conference of international speakers last week to discuss “Virtual Worlds as Green Workplaces.” The twist?  It happened on Public Diplomacy Island in the computer environment Second Life.

Second Life is a virtual world that represents real people at their computers as avatars in the cyber-environment created by the program. Inside the program, avatars can interact with one another and even, as the meeting I attended suggests, collaborate on projects. One participant commented on the “immersive quality of the interaction” in Second Life as opposed to a phone or video conference. Another noted how the “sense of shared space makes a real difference in teamwork.”