The ripple effects from the sub-prime crisis and the resultant credit crunch in the United States is being felt well beyond the financial sector. Investments in clean energy in the U.S. are down, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. It notes that investments from private equity firms totalled just $2.4 billion (£1.2 billion) in the first quarter of 2008, down from $3.7 billion in Q1 2007. By our maths, that's a greater-than 50 per cent drop year-on-year. Not a promising start to the year.

According to an editorial in The San Francisco Chronicle, any reduction would be bad news as private equity is the fastest growing area of clean energy investment. The author of the commentary, Daniel M. Kammen, from the Energy and Resources Group, noted that "no nation is better positioned to adopt a low-carbon energy diet than we (the United Nations) are."Kammen calls for more government investment in this area.

Perhaps, market forces (and some help from canny Spanish investors) will make up the difference. As the always reliable Greenbang reports, Spanish utility Iberdrola has promised to invest €8.6 billion into the US renewable energy market between 2008 and 2010, with an eye to claiming 15 per cent market share of the U.S. renewables market by the end of the decade.

With credit-strapped U.S. competitors feeling the pinch, it might get there sooner.

All this movement comes as the multilateral process headed by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is trying to encourage private investors to get more involved in clean energy. They meet next month.

As Burma and the international community start to grapple with the true scale of destruction from last week's cyclone, one top regional politician claims massive mangrove destruction exacerbated the damage.

Speaking at a meeting of the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Singapore, secretary-general Surin Pitsuwan said widespread coastal developments had resulted in mangroves, which act as a natural defence against storms, being destroyed, the BBC reports.

"Encroachment into mangrove forests, which used to serve as a buffer between the rising tide, between big waves and storms and residential areas; all those lands have been destroyed," the AFP news agency reported him as saying.

"Human beings are now direct victims of such natural forces."

Burma's coastal degradation has been a worry for some time. In 2002, The World Rainforest Movement highlighted the problems in a report "in which it described the mangroves of the Irrawaddy Delta as 'some of the most degraded or destroyed mangrove systems in the Indo-Pacific'. WRM blamed the declining mangroves on upstream deforestation and the conversion of mangrove forests into prawn farms," the Democratic Voice of Burma website reports.

This is not a new trend. As the Wall Street Journal writes, "Researchers in Myanmar estimate that 83% of the mangroves in the Irrawaddy were destroyed between 1924 and 1999. The destruction was spearheaded by British colonial authorities who encouraged rice cultivation in the delta, which was once known as the "rice bowl" of the world."

And neither is Burma an exceptional case. As the WSJ notes, the cyclone highlighted "an environmental problem plaguing Asia's coastlines: widespread degradation of mangrove forests that once protected coastal villages from tidal surges and strong winds."

Continued heavy logging in Canada's boreal forest could ignite a "carbon bomb" that could drastically worsen global warming. That's the warning of a new report prepared by researchers at the University of Toronto and commissioned by Greenpeace.

The report, titled Turning Up the Heat, estimates the boreal forest currently stores 186 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide, which is more than 27 times the world's annual fossil fuel emissions. However, it says the combined threats of forest fires, insect outbreaks, permafrost melting and industrial development are undermining the boreal forest's resistance to the impacts of global warming.

"If left unchecked, these problems could culminate in a catastrophic scenario known as 'the carbon bomb': a massive release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere driven, for example, by a widespread outbreak of forest or peat fires," says the report.

"Research is starting to show that the forest is tipping from being an annual carbon sink to being an annual carbon source," said Christy Ferguson, Greenpeace's forests campaigner in Toronto.

Canada's forest industry has argued that because harvested trees are replanted, carbon released through logging is eventually recaptured as the new trees grow. The Canadian Forest Products Association intends to make the industry carbon neutral by 2015 without having to purchase carbon offset credits.

The Greenpeace report estimates that logging removes about 36 million tonnes of above-ground carbon annually - that's more yearly carbon emissions than all the passenger vehicles in Canada combined, according to an Environment Canada report on greenhouse gas sources.

Yet late last week the report was attacked by a senior federal government expert on forestry.

"Increased temperatures and changes in precipitation are already having impacts on the severity of forest fires and insect infestations," wrote Dr. Werner Kurz, a leading scientist in the department's Canadian Forest Service and a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "But these impacts are the result of global climate change, not local logging activities."

UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, last week called for a comprehensive review of the organisation's policy on using biofuels to help fight fossil fuel-led climate change.

"We need to be concerned about the possibility of taking land or replacing arable land because of these biofuels," Ban told the Guardian.

His comments comes as a new peak in global food prices - partly due to  the increased use of crops for energy generation - threatens to trigger social instability throughout the world. The UN's World Food Programme said last week that 33 countries in Asia and Africa now face political instability as the urban poor struggle to feed their families. As the Daily Telegraph reported, the World Bank said last week "that the price of staple foods has risen by 80 per cent in the past three years".

The latest alarm over the rush to embrace biofuels - something the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman calls "Grains Gone Wild" - comes as the  "EU is being urged to take action to stop a biofuel trading scam that exploits US agricultural subsidies and undermines the fight against global warming," writes the Guardian.

This so-called "splash and dash" scam where, as the Wall Street Journal explains, traders ship biodiesel from Asia or Europe to U.S. ports, where it is blended with a “splash” of regular diesel.  That qualifies for   U.S. export subsidies and then it is shipped back to Europe where it is  sold below domestic prices, undercutting Europe's biofuel industry.

As the WSJ writes, "Biofuel’s already-tarnished environmental reputation comes under more fire, because round trips across the Atlantic add unnecessary transport emissions to the mix".

So, with food prices set to rise for a few years to come according to biofuel executives will the UN turn its back on the biofuel "solution"? Ban doesn't think so:

He tells the Guardian: "At this time I wouldn't make any definitive judgment or definitive plans, in particular vis-à-vis these biofuels.....I know there are some concerns raised by certain quarters about biofuels. But biofuels are a renewable source of energy when we are experiencing extreme difficulties [with] resources."

Whither the vine  - and the wine for that matter - as climate change increases? That was the pressing question being considered last week at the Climate Change and Wine Conference in Barcelona.

Three hundred and fifty of the world's top wine producers grappled with their industry's high carbon footprint - "wine production emits large quantities of CO2" notes AFP - and the affects of a changing climate on growing conditions and yields.

Two years of drought in Australia have put an end to the glut of mass-produced, water heavy Australian export wine but it has also focused world winemakers' minds on how their own wines will be affected.

Australian viticulture specialist Dr. Richard Smart warned the conference "fine wine regions like Bordeaux will cease to be viable as global warming redraws the world wine map," writes Decanter. It's not only southern France that should worry. California also faces major problems as growers seek to flee the baked inland valleys of Napa and Sonoma and head instead to the coast.

So where does the future of good wine reside? China, just north of Beijing for one. "China is lucky," Smart told delegates. "The warming temperatures are opening up new regions.

Also on Smart's viticultural real estate tip list in a warming world: Chile, Argentina, Tasmania and New Zealand says the Los Angeles Times.

It writes: "The Southern Hemisphere is dominated by oceans, which mitigate the effects of global warming, [Smart] says. These places down under won't suffer the temperature shifts that could make life difficult in more established wine regions in the Northern Hemisphere. In each of these regions, it is possible to plant vineyards at elevations 100 meters higher than current plantings. Or they have cool coastal vineyard regions or the ability to move their viticultural zones south, toward Antarctica."

Residents of Aceh ultimately could receive $26 million in carbon credits for the long-term protection of rainforests from logging in an innovative avoided deforestation project that has the support of the Government of Aceh, UK-based conservation organization Fauna & Flora International (FFI) and Australian company Carbon Conservation.

The plan would protect the 1.9 million-acre Ulu Masen forest, a tract of rainforest rich in biodiversity and home to the Sumatran elephant, the Clouded Leopard and the Sumatran Orangutan. By preventing logging and conversion of Ulu Masen forest for oil palm plantations, planners expect to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 100 million tons over 30 years. The proceeds — in the form of carbon credits — will help fund health and education projects in the local community.

The proposal hinges on the sale of credits to companies and individuals seeking to offset emissions and burnish their environmental reputations, writes Bloomberg News. The credits typically cost $4 to $8 per ton of pollution reductions.

Critically, the project has won approval from the Climate, Community & Biodiversity (CCB) Alliance, which includes NGOs such as The Nature Conservancy and the Rainforest Alliance and companies such as Intel Corp. and Weyerhaeuser Co. Its qualifying criteria is meant to ensure any land use projects are designed to mitigate climate change and deliver compelling community and biodiversity benefits.

The Ulu Masen project is the first project for reducing emissions from deforestation in developing countries (REDD) to be independently-approved as conforming to the CCB Standards.

Project organizers estimate they will be able to reduce deforestation by 85 percent over 30 years and avoid the emission of more than 3.3 million tons of carbon dioxide annually. This will be accomplished largely by transforming logging concessions into conservation areas and community forestry zones where limited harvesting is allowed.

Local residents will benefit by receiving financial incentives to protect their resources and develop alternative livelihoods such as sustainable small-scale forestry operations and agro-forests using income from carbon sales. In addition, the project will support increased forest monitoring, provide funding to civil society organizations to monitor project activities, and support a scheme of forest restoration and reforestation.