Best of our wild blogs: 15 Jun 08

New RGS Seagrass Team at Labrador
a new team is back with Mr Lim on the Labrador blog

Hantu Reef Survey
and reef seems well, on hbing's memories blog

Reclamation starts at Sentosa, massive works continue near Labrador
MPA notices on the wildfilms blog

Close encounter with an Asian Koel
on the Bird Ecology Study Group blog

A Northern Painted Jezebel visits Singapore!
on the Butterflies of Singapore blog

Colugo at MacRitchie
on the tidechaser blog

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The artful dodgers of Bring Your Own Bag Day

Some baulk at 10-cent donation for plastic bags; some won't shop, others get plastic bags elsewhere
Shuli Sudderuddin, Straits Times 15 Jun 08;

Housewife Winnie Loh, 52, was on her way to Prime supermarket in Tampines last Wednesday when she made an abrupt U-turn.

She had forgotten that it was Bring Your Own Bag (BYOB) Day.

'I forgot to take my bag and I think 10 cents is too expensive a donation to make for a thin plastic bag. I'll just come back tomorrow,' she said.

A Sunday Times check of 20 supermarkets and 100 customers islandwide last Wednesday found that 50 per cent of the shoppers came without a bag.

Twenty per cent of the customers bought fewer items or decided not to shop when they realised that it was BYOB Day.

But supermarket chains told The Sunday Times that there had been no adverse impact on their sales because of BYOB Day.

Mr Seah Kian Peng, the managing director (Singapore) for NTUC FairPrice, said that many customers had responded positively. He noted that since the campaign was launched, plastic bag use had dropped by over 12 per cent.

Supermarkets did not want to reveal their savings from the reduced use of plastic bags.

BYOB Day was started in April last year to address the issue of the excessive use of plastic bags: 2.5 billion of them are disposed of annually.

Run by the Singapore Environment Council, the programme involves supermarket chains such as FairPrice, Cold Storage and Giant. They encourage shoppers to donate 10 cents for each plastic bag used. Supermarkets said the cost of each bag ranges from one to five cents depending on its size.

The SEC said that, as of December last year, it had collected roughly $80,000 from the BYOB Day scheme. The money is used to fund environmental programmes.

Although BYOB Day was initially slated for the first Wednesday of each month, it has been held every Wednesday from June 4 to make it easier for consumers to remember the date.

But it seems it will still take some work to get everyone to support the scheme.

As a spokesman for Sheng Siong supermarket said: 'A very small proportion of customers refuse to accept the BYOB scheme as most of them are not aware of the programme or of environmental protection.'

Ms S.L. Ong, a private tutor in her late 40s, feels that BYOB Day is unfair. 'Everything has already increased in price and GST is so high. The provision of plastic bags should be a service, not something that supermarkets charge for,' she said.

Ms Cindy Neo, 37, who works in Luck Hup Chai trading minimarket next to Prime supermarket in Tampines, said that her customers buy small items on Wednesdays and then ask for big plastic bags. They then go to Prime to shop.

A check with 20 supermarket cashiers revealed that they sometimes experienced customer displeasure although the donation was not compulsory.

Ms Chong Pei Shan, 30, a cashier at Giant in Tampines, said: 'A man came last Wednesday with many items but, when I told him it was BYOB Day, he walked away leaving everything behind.'

But at least one company here has had success in making people pay for plastic bags. A spokesman for home furnishings company Ikea said that, after it started charging for bags last year, usage dropped by 85 per cent almost immediately. The reduction has remained strong at 80 per cent.

Can supermarkets follow in Ikea's footsteps?

Said Mr Poh Tang Seng, a manager at FairPrice's Bukit Batok MRT branch: 'You just can't force people to pay or they will walk away and not come to the supermarket any more.'

Additional reporting by Carmen Onggo, Alvin Lim and Gabriel Yue

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Singapore drivers find cheaper alternatives amid soaring fuel prices

Channel NewsAsia 15 Jun 08;

SINGAPORE: Petrol prices have gone up a staggering 12 times since last July with the latest price hike announced just last month.

Reports have it that public transport ridership has hit a record high of 4.78 million rides a day – a phenomenon that could also be due to increased capacity on trains and buses.

Even though it is still a challenge to find someone who has given up his or her car for public transport, Mr Lim Peng Han – who has done just that – tells of the merits of ditching private for public transport.

The 69-year-old retiree has sold his 1.3 litre Seat Ibiza after 40 years of driving.

He said: "I get savings of around S$400 because the cost of petrol has gone up so much. I take public transport, which is so convenient – buses and trains are air-conditioned."

Car dealers also said business is considerably slower now after the boom in the fourth quarter of last year. One company said it sees only about four to five customers on weekdays.

Nonetheless, the maddening morning rush hour squeeze means that for many Singaporeans who have already tasted the convenience of car ownership, going public is not an option.

Hoon Chieng Ming, a bank officer who gave up his 2-litre Subaru Forester for a motorbike, said: "After being a car owner for five or six years, it's something that's really difficult to give up."

Having made the switch to a bike, Mr Hoon said he now forks out less than S$100 a month for petrol.

Fuel prices aside, motorists in Singapore also have to contend with the 60 or so ERP gantries islandwide.- CNA/so

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Tianjin hopes for 'green' tie-up with Singapore

Peh Shing Huei, Straits Times 15 Jun 08;

Tianjin mayor Huang Xingguo said yesterday that he hoped the Eco-City project in the northern Chinese port city would pave the way for greater 'green' cooperation with Singapore.

The tie-ups do not have to be just on the government level, as he encouraged any enterprises - big or small, private or public - to invest in Tianjin's Binhai New Area.

The only criteria is that the projects must be green, and not 'highly polluted, with high emissions and energy consumption', he told Singapore reporters.

The Tianjin Eco-City is the biggest collaboration between Singapore and China since the Suzhou Industrial Park project, which was launched in 1994.

The 30 sq km Eco-City site is in Tianjin's Binhai district and aims to promote green living.

It could eventually accommodate 350,000 people when it is completed in 10 to 15 years' time.

Mr Huang, who is here on a three-day visit to learn more about Singapore's city management, sustainable development and public transportation policies, is a key player in the project.

He met Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong on Friday.

Mr Goh first mooted the idea of an eco-city during a meeting with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao in Beijing in April last year.

Mr Huang said he briefed Mr Goh on the development of the Eco-City, including the completion of the management building and service centre by the end of next month.

He added that Mr Goh proposed using the Slim City Initiative of this year's World Economic Forum to share the concept and experience of the Eco-City with mayors around the world.

The initiative is an exchange programme between cities and the private sector to support action on resource efficiency.

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Fule Price Hike Fallout

Race for alternative energy hots up
Japan car goes with the flow - on water
Straits Times 15 Jun 08;

The race for alternative fuels has become all the more urgent as oil prices soar in world markets, leading to protests and strikes in many countries. A look at the latest developments in three key areas of what may turn out to be the new frontier in energy usage.
Tokyo - Tired of petrol prices rising daily at the pump?

A Japanese company has invented an electric-powered and environmentally-friendly car that it says runs solely on water.

Genepax unveiled the car in the western city of Osaka on Thursday, saying that a litre of any kind of water - rain, river or sea - was all you needed to get the engine going for about an hour at a speed of 80km.

'The car will continue to run as long as you have a bottle of water to top up from time to time,' Genepax's chief executive officer Kiyoshi Hirasawa told TV Tokyo.

'It does not require you to build up an infrastructure to recharge your batteries, which is usually the case for most electric cars,' he added.

Once the water is poured into the tank at the back of the car, a generator breaks it down and uses it to create electrical power, TV Tokyo said.

Whether the car makes it into showrooms remains to be seen. Genepax said it had just applied for a patent and is hoping to collaborate with Japanese car manufacturers.

Most big automakers, meanwhile, are working on fuel cell cars that run on hydrogen and emit - not consume - water.

Hydrogen technology has been around for decades, but serious study of its use in cars is relatively new.

General Motors (GM) and Honda, like most other carmakers developing the technology, mix hydrogen gas with oxygen from the air in a device called a fuel cell to create electricity which drives electric motors.

Proponents note that hydrogen vehicles emit no greenhouses gases, unlike petrol-powered cars. They have a greater range than today's electric cars and can be refuelled faster than a battery can be charged.

Several car makers are also testing plug-in hybrids which could allow owners to plug the vehicle's battery into a standard wall outlet to recharge it. GM is developing such a vehicle - the Chevrolet Volt - which it hopes to launch in 2010.

And Toyota, the world's top maker of petrol-electric hybrids, announced on Wednesday that it would introduce a plug-in hybrid with next-generation lithium-ion batteries by 2010.

Lithium-ion batteries, commonly used in laptops and cellphones, can store more energy in smaller packages and are seen as crucial for extending the cruising distance of purely electric vehicles.

Reuters, Los Angeles Times, AP

California to get clean energy from 'sunflowers'
Straits Times 15 Jun 08;

The race for alternative fuels has become all the more urgent as oil prices soar in world markets, leading to protests and strikes in many countries. A look at the latest developments in three key areas of what may turn out to be the new frontier in energy usage.

Dimona (Israel) - On the scorched floor of Israel's Negev Desert blooms a field of 1,640 robotic mirrors that behave like sunflowers.

Slightly larger than ping pong tables and guided by a computer, the mirrors, called 'heliostats', turn imperceptibly to follow the sun and focus its rays on a water boiler at the top of a 60m tower.

Water inside the boiler turns to steam, which powers a turbine and produces electricity. The steam is then captured and cooled naturally so that the water, scarce in the desert, can be reused.

This futuristic assembly is Mr Arnold Goldman's scale model and testing ground for five larger solar fields his company plans to build in the Mojave Desert in California to supply as much as 900MW of clean energy to Californians over the next decade.

Mr Goldman, a 65-year-old Israeli entrepreneur, built the world's leading solar thermal power company, Luz International, in the 1980s, then watched it go bankrupt in 1991 as oil prices dropped.

Now he is a player again, and his comeback illustrates the extent to which thermal solar power is regaining favour with policymakers and investors.

His new company, California-based BrightSource Energy, signed a deal in April to deliver at least 500MW of solar energy to Pacific Gas and Electric - the largest power-purchasing agreement in the history of solar power.

As fossil fuels become more expensive, solar power is being sought after as a clean, renewable source of electricity. But harnessing the sun's rays has proved expensive and often inefficient.

BrightSource's chief executive officer John Woolard estimated that the new technology could cut the costs associated with solar energy by 30 per cent to 50 per cent.

The heliostats improve on previous designs and are cheaper to build and operate, he said. They also achieve a higher concentration of sunlight, higher temperatures - up to 537 deg C - and higher steam pressure.

'This is the highest performing, lowest cost solar thermal energy system in the world today,' Mr Goldman said at the inauguration of the pilot solar field on Thursday.

Los Angeles Times, AP

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Sri Lanka returns orphaned baby elephants to the wild

Yahoo News 14 Jun 08;

Sri Lanka on Saturday released eight orphaned baby elephants into the jungle after rescuing them from near certain death, wildlife officials said.

The eight baby jumbos were freed from the Elephant Transit Home where they had been cared for inside the sprawling Udawalawe wildlife sanctuary.

The jumbos arrived by truck and were let loose in the jungle to integrate with an estimated 400 wild elephants at Udawalawe park.

Their progress will be monitored with the aid of radio collars.

"This is the eighth batch of baby elephants we are releasing since we started this programme in 1998," said Tharaka Prasad, the vet taking care of the jumbos at the transit home.

With the eight taken deep into the heart of the wildlife sanctuary and made to fend for themselves, a total of 64 babies have been freed to re-integrate with herds inside Udawalawe, 210 kilometres (131 miles) south of Colombo.

"We minimise their contact with people and bring them up in semi-wild conditions," Prasad said.

Sri Lanka's elephant population has dwindled from an estimated 12,000 at the start of the 20th century to around 4,000.

Official figures show about 150 are killed annually by villagers whose crops are destroyed by marauding elephants that claim the lives of 50 farmers each year.

Many of those elephants cared for by the wildlife officials have been injured after being struck by trains or shot by farmers. Others are rescued from pits into which they had fallen.

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Floods force thousands from homes in Iowa

Channel NewsAsia 15 Jun 08;

DES MOINES, Iowa : Iowa's biggest cities were submerged Saturday after swollen rivers forced thousands of residents to flee their homes amid devastating floods in the Midwestern US state.

Unprecedented flooding covered hundreds of city blocks in Cedar Rapids as officials urged residents to limit their water use to drinking, according to the municipality's website.

In the state capital Des Moines, population 200,000, public works crews and Iowa National Guard soldiers raced to build a berm after a levee breached in the early hours of Saturday.

The University of Iowa, based in Iowa City, cancelled classes until June 22 as the flood threatened its dorms, research facilities, library and art museum. The university urged employees to work from home if possible or consider volunteering in the emergency relief efforts.

"This has been a very trying week for our state," Iowa Governor Chet Culver said in a statement. "Responding to a crisis like this takes the cooperation of everyone, from the federal government down to the local communities."

Extreme weather has left at least 15 dead and thousands homeless in the state in recent days, said Bret Voorhees, spokesman for the Iowa Homeland Security and Emergency Management.

Five others were killed in other parts of the Midwestern United States.

Two people were killed by floodwaters in Indiana and two delivery people drowned Sunday when their car fell off a washed out road into a flooded creek, the National Weather Service said.

Another person was killed Wednesday when a tornado ripped through the town of Chapman, Kansas.

The disaster began when a major tornado struck on May 25. It was followed by heavy rains, with more thunderstorms expected this weekend, and on Wednesday another twister touched ground in western Iowa, killing four boy scouts.

Serious flooding has hit the entire region, including parts of South Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Oklahoma and Arkansas and was expected to continue through next week.

"We're trapped with nowhere to go," said Gloria Hines, who lives about a dozen blocks from where the river spilled over in Cedar Rapids.

The floodwaters had not reached her home yet, but the street was made impassable by water gushing out of storm drains. A few small fish spilled out of the contaminated sewage ways.

Torrential rains Thursday left downriver towns preparing for the worst and the National Guard called in to help an army of volunteers with sandbagging and rescue efforts.

"Our predictions of a 100-year flood, or greater, are really coming to pass," said Iowa City Mayor Regenia Bailey.

A boat ride through Cedar Rapid's water-logged downtown saw every branch of government crippled by the floods.

The library, the federal building and city hall were all filled with water, which rippled through basements and pulled files and furniture out through the windows.

Inmates in the county jail were evacuated along with their mattresses.

On one building, clutching the cats that nearly cost them their lives, perched Charles Schmitt, 19, and girlfriend Kayla Lambreacht.

They had fled their nearby home when the basement filled with water. But when they stopped to take a picture one of the cats jumped into the river, prompting Schmitt to go in after it, and his girlfriend to follow.

Clutching two storage bins that Lambreacht tossed into the water, they floated for 45 minutes before they found a building to climb into.

"We kept calling 911 but the phone went out," Schmitt said. "We were up there for two hours."- AFP /ls

Flooding from a weather rut of clashing air masses
Seth Borenstein, Associated Press Yahoo News 13 Jun 08;

Hot sticky air hovers on the East Coast. Cool air is parked in the West. And when they repeatedly collide, it storms over an already saturated Iowa.

This has been the stuck weather pattern for weeks and it's led to tornadoes, thunderstorms, heavy rain and eventually record flooding.

Add to that La Nina in the Pacific Ocean, which some meteorologists think could be a factor. La Nina, which is the cooler side of El Nino, causes changes around the world, including more rain and snow in some of the Midwest. Even though La Nina itself is falling apart, its effects may still be felt in Iowa and Wisconsin.

Iowa's rivers and land probably could have handled the massive rain — more than 15 inches in the last two weeks in some places — if it weren't for the heavy snow in the winter and lots of rain in the early spring, said Rob Middlemis-Brown, director of the U.S. Geological Survey Water Center in Iowa City.

"The ground never dried out," he said.

That ground was saturated, rivers were already high when the latest batch of concentrated localized storms started in late May, leaving water nowhere to go but over river banks.

The Cedar River, like other flooding rivers in Iowa, eventually dumps into the Mississippi. The National Weather Service issued moderate to major flood warnings Friday for much of the middle Mississippi River region.

For parts of Iowa and southern Wisconsin, this year's flooding is worse than the 1993 great Mississippi and Missouri river floods, said Ken Kunkel, interim director of the Illinois Water Survey. More rain is falling and in a shorter time now than in 1993. But for the entire Midwest, it was worse 15 years ago, he said.

That's because this year's flooding — while it has the same weather pattern as 1993 — is much more concentrated and localized in the Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, Indiana region, Kunkel said. The flood 15 years ago was over a wider geographic area and lasted longer.

But give this year more time, he added. The 1993 flooding peaked in July and August. It's only early June, so flooding for the broader region could be as bad as 1993 or worse if current patterns hold, Kunkel said.

The good news is that after rains continue on-and-off through Sunday night, close to a week of dry weather is predicted, said Steve Hilberg, director of the Midwest Regional Climate Center in Champaign, Ill.

However, it's still too early to tell if that weeklong respite will be just a break or a real change in the weather, he said.

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Drought doubles number of Ethiopians needing aid: U.N.

Reuters 13 Jun 08;

GENEVA (Reuters) - Drought in Ethiopia has caused food shortages, killed livestock and more than doubled the number of people needing urgent humanitarian aid to 5 million, the United Nations said on Friday.

"Seasonal rains have been poor or have failed in many parts of Ethiopia with dramatic effects on harvests in crop-producing areas," said Elisabeth Byrs, a spokeswoman for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

The United Nations is seeking $325 million to provide nearly 400,000 tonnes of food aid as well as health and other assistance through November to people in Ethiopia's hard-hit south and southeastern regions, which border Somalia and Kenya.

Some 4.6 million people are now in need of assistance, compared to 2.2 million before the drought took hold, Byrs said.

As many as 75,000 children are already suffering from acute malnutrition and illness as a result of the drought, which the United Nations said has compounded pressure on poor Ethiopians squeezed by an increase in the global prices of cereals and other foods.

(Reporting by Laura MacInnis; Editing by Stephanie Nebehay)

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Climate talks progress 'feeble'

BBC News 14 Jun 08;

Progress towards developing a global strategy to cut emissions is too slow, according to environmental group WWF.

It issued its warning at the end of key UN talks that considered what measures should replace the current set of climate targets, which expire in 2012.

The group said the negotiations in Bonn had failed to make any progress because nations were presenting "shopping lists, not blueprints" for action.

The UN's climate chief agreed that the process needed to become more focused.

The two-week gathering is part of a process that will culminate at a key conference in Copenhagen towards the end of 2009.

It is hoped that the summit in the Danish capital will see nations agree on a new set of targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

'Daunting challenge'

"Progress at the end of this second round in a series of UN climate negotiations was considered feeble," said Kathrin Gutmann, WWF's climate policy co-ordinator.

"The science tells us that governments need to think at a much larger scale of action than ever before to get climate change under control," she added.

Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, agreed that the talks needed to become more focused.

But he added that the talks had seen delegates shift from discussions to negotiations.

"We now have a clearer understanding among governments on what countries would ultimately like to see written into a long-term agreement to address climate change," he observed.

"But with a little more than a year to go to Copenhagen, the challenge to come to that agreement remains daunting."

As well as setting new targets for reducing emissions, the talks also have to deliver agreements on how to help developing nations adapt to shifts in the climate, the development of green technology, and how the international community is going to finance the measures.

The next set of talks will be held in Ghana in August, with the final round of negotiations in 2008 being held in Poland in December.

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