Visit to South Africa

After the Christmas holidays I will be spending a month in the lab of Belinda Reyers at the CSIR in Stellenbosch, South Africa, where I hope to model the potential for carbon sequestration across the African continent. I hope to gain much from the visit - it sounds like their group is doing a lot of work that relates to my proposed project.

Finished

...literally and figuratively. I handed in my 99-page half-way report this afternoon. It was a good exercise in reflecting on what I had done in the last 17 months of my PhD, and where I'm going the last 19. I realize that I have learnt many skills since my start here and that I have gained much from the courses and experience of my colleagues. On the other hand, I also feel like I haven't managed as much as what I'd hoped to have done by now, and I hope to be able to make up for some of that at least in part in the next part of my PhD.
However, for now I'm exhausted and looking forward to not getting home from work at 11pm every night, and, in the not-so-distant future, a holiday in (hopefully) sunny South Africa.

While preparing for my half-way examination I have been reading up about Clean Development Mechanisms (CDMs), particularly in Africa. It's a little disappointing that many of these projects involve planting plantations of exotic eucalypts on large tracts of natural grassland (Jindal et al. 2009). That's just one more reason for me to think that putting a price on carbon isn't such a good idea; it just seems like one evil replacing the other. Having grown up in an area which had largely been transformed from grasslands to monospecific plantations, which harboured very few of the indigenous species and caused many of the streams in the region to almost dry out, I cannot see how these can be considered instruments to 'save the environment'.