‘Clean energy switch’:

Aid agencies could save more than $500 million by choosing clean energy over fossil fuels in war zones and disaster areas, global think-tank Chatham House said in a report on Monday.

Humanitarian agencies spent about five percent of their funds – or an estimated $1.2 billion – on

diesel last year, and could save $517 million each year by using cleaner energy sources such as solar power, it said.

“Humanitarians are operating in tough environments where saving lives come first,” said co-author Owen Grafham from the Moving

Energy Initiative (MEI), a partnership managed by London-based Chatham House.

“Energy is not given much thought – diesel is the go-to fuel because it’s what agencies are used to and it’s quick-to-deploy,” he said in a statement.

Carbon-emitting fossil fuels can be used as a weapon, hijacked by militants or sold on the black market and sometimes have to be flown vast distances to reach offgrid relief camps.

That creates costs that humanitarian groups can ill afford, with wars,

persecution and other violence having uprooted a record 68.5 million people last year, according to the UN refugee agency. (RTRS)

Drought hits Aussie wool:

Australia on Tuesday trimmed its forecast for wool production by nearly 5 percent as dry weather across the world’s largest producer of the fibre squeezes production to at least a 21-year low – the worst on record.

Wool production during the 2018/19 season will total 385,000 tonnes, the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences (ABARES) said, down from an estimate in September of 404,000 tonnes.

That forecast would mean the smallest amount of wool produced since before 1997 – Australia does not keep official records on wool production before this date.

With Australia’s east coast, home to the majority of the country’s livestock industry, seeing less than 40 percent of the rains it would normally receive in the last six months, farmers have been forced to cull sheep after pastures wilted. (RTRS)