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"Mangrove conservation is 'economic' CO2 fix By Nick Crumpton BBC News Conserving mangroves could be an economic way of mitigating greenhouse gases Continue reading the main story Related Stories Global decline in mangrove forest Coral, mangroves good for economy Protecting mangroves to lock carbon away in trees may be an economic way to curb climate change, research suggests. Carbon credit schemes already exist for rainforests; the new work suggests mangroves could be included too. But other researchers say the economics depend on the global carbon price. Presenting their results in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the US-based team emphasises that protecting mangroves has important benefits for wildlife as well. Continue reading the main story " Start Quote We can preserve important habitats critical to coastal fisheries, rich in biodiversity, and home to hundreds of species of plants and animals" Dr Juha Siikamaki Resources for the Future Mangrove habitats comprise less than 1% of all forest areas across the world. But for the biodiversity they support, and the benefits they bring to communities in the form of fishing habitats and storm protection barriers, they are extremely important. They are also being lost at a greater rate than tropical rainforests. Similar to rainforests, they store carbon within their "biomass", which is released when the habitat is destroyed. Their ability to capture carbon may be on average five times that of tropical rainforests, so they have become of interest to carbon-focused conservation strategists. Now, Dr Juha Siikamaki of the think tank Resources for the Future and his US colleagues have shown that protecting mangroves and thereby reducing the amount of CO2 released may be an affordable way for countries to mitigate their carbon emissions. Mangroves are being re-planted in some places, for shore protection and nature "We make the surprising finding that in most places, preserving mangro

"The third industrial revolution The digitisation of manufacturing will transform the way goods are made-and change the politics of jobs too Apr 21st 2012 |From the print edition THE first industrial revolution began in Britain in the late 18th century, with the mechanisation of the textile industry. Tasks previously done laboriously by hand in hundreds of weavers' cottages were brought together in a single cotton mill, and the factory was born. The second industrial revolution came in the early 20th century, when Henry Ford mastered the moving assembly line and ushered in the age of mass production. The first two industrial revolutions made people richer and more urban. Now a third revolution is under way. Manufacturing is going digital. As this week's special report argues, this could change not just business, but much else besides. A number of remarkable technologies are converging: clever software, novel materials, more dexterous robots, new processes (notably three-dimensional printing) and a whole range of web-based services. The factory of the past was based on cranking out zillions of identical products: Ford famously said that car-buyers could have any colour they liked, as long as it was black. But the cost of producing much smaller batches of a wider variety, with each product tailored precisely to each customer's whims, is falling. The factory of the future will focus on mass customisation-and may look more like those weavers' cottages than Ford's assembly line. In this section The third industrial revolution Cristina scrapes the barrel Beyond battlefield medicine Flip back please Never again? Reprints Related topics China Technology Science and technology Digital Fabrication Henry Ford Towards a third dimension The old way of making things involved taking lots of parts and screwing or welding them together. Now a product can be designed on a computer and "printed" on a 3D printer, which creates a solid object by building up successive laye

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