LAST year Cesar Pasco, a businessman from San Pablo City, Laguna, shipped several container vans of water hyacinth (Eichhornia crassipes) handicrafts abroad. After a few weeks, all the items—covered with molds—were returned to him.

“I did not know then how to dry and preserve the water hyacinth stems correctly,” Pasco says.

A seminar conducted by Forest Products Research and Development Institute (FPRDI), an agency of the Department of Science and Technology (DOST), helped wipe out this problem. Today Pasco enjoys brisk business, exporting durable, fungi-free water hyacinth wine-bottle holders to Europe.

“Starting last year, training on water-hyacinth processing has been among our most in demand courses,” says Dr. Emelyne Cortiguerra, head of the FPRDI’s training unit. “People working in the industry ask us to teach them how to protect water-hyacinth stems from fungi and insects.”

This is a big concern as the material has a very high moisture content that it is an easy target for molds. Entrepreneurs are also taught dyeing techniques so that they can make their products as varied and as artistic as possible.

UXBRIDGE, Canada—Save the living environment and the physical environment will automatically be saved, according to E.O. Wilson, the world’s leading biologist and father of the online Encyclopedia of Life (EOL), which plans to create a Web page for every known species—all 1.8-plus million.

LONDON—Scientists, led by a former cochairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), warned that the United Nations negotiations aimed at tackling climate change are based on substantial underestimates of what it will cost to adapt to its impacts.

The real costs of adaptation are likely to be two to three times greater than estimates made by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), said Prof. Martin Parry and colleagues in a new report published by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) and the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College London.

The report, launched over the weekend, added that costs would be even more when the full range of climate impacts on human activities is considered.

Parry and colleagues warned that the underestimate of the cost of adaptation threatens to weaken the outcome of UNFCCC negotiations, which are due to culminate in Copenhagen in December with a global deal aimed at tackling climate change.

“The amount of money on the table at Copenhagen is one of the key factors that will determine whether we achieve a climate-change agreement,” said Parry, visiting research fellow at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College London. “But previous estimates of adaptation costs have substantially misjudged the scale of funds needed.”