UN warns climate change melting glaciers at alarming rate

Yahoo News 16 Mar 08;

The world's glaciers are melting at an alarming rate, the UN said Sunday, calling for immediate action to prevent further constraints on water resources for large populations.

"Millions if not billions of people depend directly or indirectly on these natural water storage facilities for drinking water, agriculture, industry and power generation during key parts of the year," said Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

The culprit is climate change, according to data from the World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS), based at the University of Zurich and supported by UNEP.

The centre drew its findings from nearly 30 glaciers in nine mountain ranges revealing that in 2004-2005 and 2005-2006 the average rate of melting more than doubled.

"The latest figures are part of what appears to be an accelerating trend with no apparent end in sight," said Wilfried Haeberli, director of WGMS.

According to UNEP, the speed at which the glaciers are melting has accelerated in recent few years, with what had been a record loss for two decades -- 0.7 metres (2.3 feet) in 1998 -- having been exceeded in three of the past six years.

Steiner said that "it is absolutely essential that everyone sits up and takes notice," adding that the forecast is not entirely gloomy given the growth of the so-called green economy.

However, Steiner said the 2009 climate convention in Copenhagen will provide the true litmus test of governments' commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the carbon pollution from fossil fuels damaging Earth's climate system.

"Otherwise, and like the glaciers, our room for manoeuvre and the opportunity to act may simply melt away."

WGMS measures the thinning of glaciers in terms of water equivalent, for instance, estimating that in 2006 shrinking was equivalent to 1.4 metres of water, compared with half a metre in 2005.

Some glaciers have particularly suffered, such as Norway's Breidalblikkbrea glacier, which thinned almost 3.1 metres in 2006 compared with 0.3 metres in 2005.

Other glaciers to have experienced dramatic loss in Europe are Austria's Grosser Goldbergkees glacier, France's Ossoue glacier, Italy's Malavalle glacier, Spain's Maladeta glacier, Sweden's Storglaciaeren glacier and Switzerland's Findelen glacier.

Only four percent of the 30 glaciers WGMS tracks for changes have thickened.

UN: World's glaciers melting faster
Yahoo News 15 Mar 08;

Glaciers are shrinking at record rates and many could disappear within decades, the U.N. Environment Program said Sunday.

Scientists measuring the health of almost 30 glaciers around the world found that ice loss reached record levels in 2006, the U.N. agency said.

UNEP warned that further ice loss could have dramatic consequences particularly in India, whose rivers are fed by Himalayan glaciers.

The west coast of North America, which gets much of its water from glaciers in mountain ranges such as the Rockies and Sierra Nevada, also would be affected, it said.

"There are many canaries emerging in the climate change coal mine," UNEP's executive director Achim Steiner said in a statement. "The glaciers are perhaps among those making the most noise and it is absolutely essential that everyone sits up and takes notice."

He urged governments to agree stricter targets for emissions reductions at an international meeting next year in the Danish capital, Copenhagen.

On average, the glaciers shrank by 4.9 feet in 2006, the most recent year for which data are available.

The most severe loss was recorded at Norway's Breidalblikkbrea glacier, which shrank 10.2 feet in 2006, while Chile's Echaurren Norte glacier was the only one to grow slightly thicker.

"The latest figures are part of what appears to be an accelerating trend with no apparent end in sight," said Wilfried Haeberli, director of the World Glacier Monitoring Service.

The Zurich-based body conducted the study on which the findings are based.

Haeberli said glaciers lost an average of about a foot of ice a year between 1980 and 1999. But since the turn of the millennium the average loss has increased to about 20 inches.

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Best of our wild blogs: 16 Mar 08

Another heron killed by a discarded fishing line
on the bird ecology blog

Abandoned fishing lines kill
more about what can be done on the wildfilms blog

Garbage: The Revolution Starts at Home
a new film about a family that kept their garbage for 3 months on the Garbage website

Raffles Museum of Biodiversity Research
where nature comes alive! on the wildfilms blog and colourful clouds blog

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1,230 kids take part in record-breaking Easter egg hunt

Channel NewsAsia 15 Mar 08;

[wildnews comment: what happened the plastic eggs the kids didn't find? Will they end up in the sea?]

SINGAPORE: Over 1,200 children spent Saturday looking for Easter eggs at West Coast Park as part of a record-breaking event.

Their mission was to pick up as many of the 10,000 plastic eggs as they could find.

Some of these eggs had been stuffed with prize slips and the top prize for this hunt was a Nintendo Wii.

Organisers from City Harvest Community Services Association added 'decoys' such as ping pong balls and boxes in the hunt.

1,000 participants from different races and religions were invited for this event, but the turnout was bigger than expected – 1,230 kids aged 3 to 12 turned up, along with 265 adults.

One of the goals for this hunt – which eventually made its way to the Singapore Book of Records – was to promote a sense of camaraderie in a fun way.- CNA/so

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Small skirmishes mark Asia battle to save elephants

Gillian Murdoch, Reuters 15 Mar 08;

KOMPONG SPEU, Cambodia (Reuters) - From nightfall until 3 a.m. the villagers of Trang Troyeung commune, in Cambodia's southwest Kompong Speu province, battled to protect their banana grove from attacks by elephants.

Camped in a field that backs onto Kirirom National Park, where some of Cambodia's last 250 wild elephants roam, they repelled the animals' by banging pots and patrolling frontlines. But not for long.

"We fell asleep because we were tired and the elephants came back and ate the bananas at 4 a.m." said human-elephant conflict expert Tuy Sereivathana of the fateful night about a year ago. "We stayed up all night. We slept in the field. But we lost".

Such small turf wars have plagued countless agricultural communities for thousands of years. But rapid forest clearances and dwindling elephant numbers have raised the stakes, both for humans and Asia's 40,000-50,000 endangered elephants.

The continent's fragmenting forests and high population densities mean more human lives are lost every year to rampaging elephants than in Africa, which is home to ten times more elephants.

And with less than 300 Asian elephants left in six of the 13 Asian countries in which they range, experts fear skirmishes over banana groves and rice fields have become a deadly threat that could edge vulnerable populations to extinction.

SMALL SKIRMISHES

From the tea plantations of Sri Lanka to the rice fields of Vietnam, villagers who cannot afford to lose their crops turn on destructive elephants, hunting and killing them.

With elephants restricted to ever-smaller habitat blocks, violence flares more often now, said Simon Hedges, co-chair of the World Conservation Union's Asian elephant specialist group.

"As they aspire to a better quality of life people become less tolerant of human-wildlife conflict," Hedges said.

Rodents, birds, or primates, can cause greater damage to crops, but elephants inspire more animosity because they often injure or kill people during raids.

India, home to 60 percent of Asia's wild elephants, holds the world record for annual human deaths from elephant conflict.

Between 200 and 250 people die in such confrontations every year, said Bangalore-based Raman Sukumar, one of the world's leading authorities on Asian elephants.

This is far more than the 50 people killed annually in the second top flashpoint, Sri Lanka, where hundreds of crop raiding elephants have been shot with ancient shotguns, had acid thrown at them, and been sickened by pumpkins injected with poison.

While large populations such as India's 30,000 elephants weather such losses relatively well, others are dangerously low. Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, China, Nepal and Vietnam may have less than 300 individuals left, experts fear.

In Vietnam, where 80 elephants live in small groups by the border with Cambodia and Laos, the continent is facing its first recent elephant extinction because of habitat loss and hunting.

"The elephant habitats are in very sensitive areas where very poor people who needed to develop economically live," said Ha Bich Nguyen, of conservation group Fauna & Flora International (FFI)'s Vietnam office.

"The conflict was whether people or the elephants survive," she said, adding that humans appear to have won as the ratio of male to female elephants is now inviable.

"With all our efforts and doing our best, we cannot help save them from extinction".

FIGHTING BACK

Reducing such conflicts to help elephants, and humans, is possible with careful management; but totally stamping out attacks is a tall order, Sukumar said.

"It's a double-edged sword. You can put part of the blame on humans who have fragmented elephants' habitat," he said.

"(But) once elephants have tasted crops, they develop a taste for it. They're just going to come out and seek them, because they are far more attractive to them than wild forest food".

Cambodian expert Sereivathana believes it is possible to reverse negative attitudes to the beasts whose revered image adorns Cambodian cigarette packets and Thai beer bottles, but who also trash crops, destroy houses, and smash fishermen's boats.

Blazing into remote villages with armed police to tell locals to leave elephants alone does not get results, he said.

Instead, in Kompong Speu and half a dozen other villages, FFI has built wooden watch towers, strung up anti-elephant electric fences, and started guarding groups to frighten off marauders.

"Three things go together -- law enforcement, education, and livelihood programs," Sereivathana said. "We need to think about livelihoods, how people can find a new job ... Education is also very important, so people understand."

His group also gives seed money to villagers to encourage them to swap frontline crops such as sugarcane, watermelon, bananas and rice, which elephants love, to unpalatable ones they won't touch, such as aubergines and chillies.

For some farmers, however, the logic of changing crops to avoid conflict with elephants does not soften the economic loss.

"I'm still thinking about growing sugarcane... It gets more money and it's more popular than aubergine," said villager Siep Nait, 50, as she picked piles of the purple-black vegetables in a quiet field that was once regularly raided by elephants.

"(But) If I grow sugarcane I'm scared that the elephants will come and I'll get none," she said.

(Editing by Megan Goldin)

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Rare Leatherback Turtles Gain Protection in Costa Rica

Stefan Lovgren, National Geographic News 14 Mar 08;

As dawn breaks on Playa Grande, the light reveals shallow sand pits where leatherback sea turtles laid their eggs the night before.

This Costa Rican beach, a 2-mile-long (3.2-kilometer-long) stretch of sand popular with surfers, is guarded around the clock by a small army of biologists and volunteers from the Leatherback Trust, a nonprofit group working to save the world's largest sea turtles from extinction.

That means ensuring that every turtle nest on the beach—which is open to the public for recreation—is kept undisturbed.

"This is the most important nesting beach for leatherbacks in the eastern Pacific," said Gabriela Blanco, who heads the trust's monitoring station.

"If we don't protect the beach, this population is going to disappear."

Declining Numbers

As adults, leatherback turtles can grow as long as six-and-a-half feet (two meters) and weigh up to 2,000 pounds (900 kilograms).

Ranging further than any other reptile, they are found in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans as well as in the Mediterranean Sea.

Recently a leatherback turtle migrated 12,774 miles (20,558 kilometers) across the Pacific Ocean—the longest recorded migration of any sea vertebrate.

But the animals are highly endangered due to human threats such as poaching, beach development, and harmful fishing practices.

For instance, scientists estimate that less than 5,000 nesting leatherbacks exist in the Pacific Ocean today, a 95 percent drop from 1980.

This is the third year that Blanco, an Argentine graduate student at Dexler University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, has spent the November-to-March leatherback nesting season at Playa Grande.

She and her colleagues cataloged up to 80 females and about 400 nests this season.

That number is up from 58 turtles that came ashore during the 2006-to-2007 season, but fewer than the 108 that were seen in the 2005-to-2006 season.

Leatherbacks do not nest every year, so the reptiles' cycle of nesting populations repeat about every three years.

The overall number of turtles nesting at Playa Grande, however, is down dramatically from the 1980s, experts say.

"There used to be more than a thousand turtles on the beach every night, but now we see at most four to five turtles [a] night," Blanco said.

Twenty years ago, the poaching of turtle eggs—considered a delicacy in much of Central America—was so rampant that every egg was taken during Playa Grande's nesting season.

"We're now seeing the results of that poaching 20 years ago," Blanco said.

Poaching was eliminated after Playa Grande became part of the Las Baulas National Park in 1991.

Since then, the beach has been under strict surveillance by park officials and nonprofit groups.

"This national park fulfills an important function to protect one of the species—the leatherback turtle—that is in critical danger of extinction," said Rotney Piedra, the park's director.

Beach Nursery

Young leatherbacks face bleak prospects even without human threats.

Leatherbacks lay about 70 eggs in a one-time process that takes up to two hours. Afterward they return to the sea and take no further part in the care of their offspring.

(See a photo of a leatherback laying her eggs.)

Only a few of the eggs produce hatchlings. Once they break out of their shells at night, the babies must survive a dangerous crawl to the water, with crabs, seagulls, and hawks snagging many along the way.

Researchers don't know much about what happens to the surviving hatchlings after they enter the ocean, but it's believed that only a few in every thousand survive to become adults.

At least 800 hatchlings have been born at Playa Grande since November 2007.

Eggs found below the high-tide line or at risk of being trampled by beachgoers are taken by conservationists to an enclosed nursery set up on the beach.

Recently Blanco showed a visitor three hatchlings that had come out of the nursery that morning. She kept them in cool shade inside a shed at the group's compound.

"As soon as it gets dark again, we will release them onto the dry sand and let them crawl into the water," she said, carefully handling a tiny turtle, its front flippers sticking to her latex gloves.

Disorienting Lights

Many of the beaches where turtles once nested are now lined with hotels and resorts.

The reptiles are disoriented by lights and noise, which prevents them from finding their way back into the sea.

Tamarindo, a popular tourist town next to Playa Grande, once had an important nesting beach, but no turtles have been seen there in more than 15 years, experts say.

"Lighting, sand mining, and pollution caused by coastal development are all seriously damaging not only to sea-turtle nesting beaches but also the overall environment," said Alec Hutchinson, director of nesting-beach projects for PRETOMA, a Costa Rican sea-turtle advocacy group.

No-Building Zone

Las Baulas National Park, where Playa Grande is located, has a zone measuring 410 feet (125 meters) from the high-tide line that must be protected from any development.

Under a new law, Costa Rica's government has ordered the expropriation of an undisclosed number of properties that are located inside the no-building zone on land totaling 113 acres (46 hectares).

The government plans to pay about U.S. $500 million in compensation to landowners, mostly Europeans and U.S. citizens—some of whom have resisted the decision.

The process has been bogged down for several years, but in late February, Costa Rican President Óscar Arias finally signed six of the expropriation decrees in a move that environmentalists call a victory.

"We must save every single nest, and this can only be attained by preserving their natural nesting habitat from human alterations," said Randall Arauz, PRETOMA's president.

"The more pristine the environment, the better it is for the turtles."

Hooked

However, protecting the beaches alone will not ensure the survival of the leatherbacks, conservationists say.

In fact the animals' biggest threat may be longlines, where they can get caught in hooks intended for other marine life and drown.

"By saving only the beaches, we will make sure the longliners catch the leatherbacks," Arauz said.

(Related: "Reopening Hawaii Fishery May Harm Sea Turtles, Experts Say" [April 1, 2004].)

He advocates creating more marine protected areas and temporary longline fishing closures in areas where sea turtles are common.

Different types of hooks are being developed that may reduce sea turtle catch, but the new designs could increase the catch of other endangered species, such as sharks.

"Relying on hook designs alone is not going to benefit sea turtles or other organisms unless coupled with an efficient reduction of fishing effort and training of fishermen, so that they learn how to release turtles from fishing gear," Arauz said.

Hutchinson, PROTEMA's nesting director, said more conservation work needs to be done.

"To successfully mitigate threats to sea turtles and other marine life," he said, "it is necessary to look at the big picture and create a holistic approach to conservation that protects turtles both in the water and on the beach."

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Shenzhen on alert for flu outbreaks

Caryn Yeo, Straits Times 16 Mar 08;

SHENZHEN - PATIENTS on drips filled an entire room and hospital beds overflowed into corridors.

This was the scene at two of three main hospitals that The Sunday Times visited yesterday in the mainland boomtown of Shenzhen, which borders Hong Kong.

Hospital staff and officials said that there has been an increase in the number of flu cases this year due to a longer cold spell.

But the good news is that the flu virus is less virulent this year, said provincial officials.

Five flu outbreaks have been reported across Guangdong province, two in the provincial capital of Guangzhou and one each in Shenzhen, Zhuhai and Shaoguan.

Each outbreak involves at least 15 cases a week. No one has died from these outbreaks.

But news of the flu outbreak in Hong Kong, which has claimed the lives of a seven-year-old boy and a three-year-old girl, have apparently unnerved many parents in Shenzhen.

The deaths had prompted Hong Kong to order last Wednesday a two-

week closure of all primary schools and kindergartens - the first time such a drastic move has been taken since the deadly Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (Sars) outbreak in 2003.

Hong Kong confirmed late last Friday that gene sequencing on flu viruses from the two victims showed that no new, deadlier flu strains have emerged. Both children have since been found to be suffering from other illnesses.

Still, a 42-year-old Shenzhen mother told The Sunday Times yesterday that she now washes her daughter's hands and toys more frequently.

'You don't know what children touch and put in their mouths,' said the woman, who wanted to be known only as Madam Chen, carrying her two-year-old daughter Yu Lixiang in her arms.

They were waiting in line at the Peking University Shenzhen Hospital for Lixiang to receive a fluid infusion. The toddler had been having a cough for over two weeks, her mother said.

'I am usually not that afraid of her coughing but these days, it's better to be safe than sorry, especially with all these reports from Hong Kong,' she added.

With more than eight million people crossing the Shenzhen-Hong Kong border every month, officials here have kept a close eye on the situation in Hong Kong.

It has sent health experts to the territory for joint investigations.

Across the border in Hong Kong, the spread of flu appeared to be slowing with only one new outbreak reported yesterday.

There have been 19 confirmed flu outbreaks and 880 affected people since March 6. Most of the outbreaks occurred at schools.

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