Best of our wild blogs: 10 Jul 08

Coral cover at Kusu
results of the latest underwater survey on the blue water volunteers blog

Anemonefish on Hantu
on the wildfilms blog

Cyrene Critters
more delightful sightings on the wildfilms blog

Northern stars of Singapore
and other low tide highlights on the singapore celebrates our reefs blog

Rare snail surprise
on the singapore celebrates our reefs blog

What is a Red List?
on the wildfilms blog

Eurasian Sparrowhawk on webcam
on the Bird Ecology Study Group blog

Vegetables from the Kampong
on the Garden Voices blog

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Climate change hurts coral sex life

tvnz.co.nz 10 Jul 08;

Climate change could be confusing coral about when to have `sex'.

Researchers have recently discovered that the marine organisms spawn almost around the world at the same time in what experts say may be the world's biggest orgasm.

But experts believe global warming could leave corals confused, leading them to spawn at different times and in different places.

This cuts their fertilisation and lowers the replenishment rates for the fragile species, according to coral scientists meeting this week at the International Coral Research Symposium (ICRS) in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Co-chairing the conference session on coral reproduction is Dr Andrew Baird of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University in Townsville.

Dr Baird said it was previously thought that mass spawning events in coral were mainly confined to a few major reef systems, such as Australia's Great Barrier Reef and Ningaloo Reef.

"However, new research is revealing these mass spawning events occur throughout the Indo-Pacific, from French Polynesia to the Red Sea, wherever there are large numbers of coral species present, and even to a degree in the Caribbean," he said.

But global warming is putting the mass release of coral eggs and sperm under threat, said the session's co-chair Dr James Guest of the University of Newcastle.

"We're still in the process of working out exactly what the cues are which prompt many different coral species to spawn together, on the same night," Guest said.

"But it is clear that water temperature is a significant factor and under climate change that is likely to change.

"This raises the risk that corals will become confused under climate change, start spawning all over the place at different times, reducing fertilisation success and leading to less effective replenishment of coral populations."

If the corals fail to regenerate properly, as has been the case in the Caribbean, they become less able to withstand human impacts such as over fishing and pollution or climatic impacts such as hurricanes or bleaching.

The scientists say there were many factors, including moonlight-sensing genes, solar radiation, tides and possibly other seasonal cues such as the length of days, which prompt corals to spawn en masse, particularly the Acropora and favid varieties.

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How to cut your paper footprint

The Independent 10 Jul 08;

Globally, 70 per cent of the 335 million tons of paper the world uses each year comes from natural, un-farmed sources.

Each of us throws away, on average, a quarter of a ton of paper every year. Vicki Hill meets a woman on a mission to slash our waste and save the forests

First came two great bales of flattened cardboard then a tower of 1,500 catalogues, magazines, reports and printouts, topped off with a tumble of 120 toilet rolls, two bin bags full of junk mail and a thick layer of brown paper bags. Finally, Mandy Haggith tipped hundreds of receipts and bus tickets over the 5ft heap. Then she stood back and waited.

Villagers trickled into the hall one by one, smiles at the spectacle quickly fading as they realised that Mandy's mountain represented the 250kg of paper they, personally, had thrown away over the last year. Much of it barely used, most of it made by sending an ancient tree from the most threatened areas of the world crashing to the forest floor.

"People were really shocked," says Haggith, 41, who gathered the six loaded wheelbarrows full of paper from local businesses at her Highland home of Lochinver. "Paper comes in and out of our lives so fast we barely notice it. Put it in a pile and then get people to imagine it at 20 tons, which is the amount they will use in a lifetime, and it gets frightening. Especially when they realise that apart from a few books, this is also the amount they will end up throwing away."

No one likes to think of trees being felled, but many of us have a cosy image in our heads that it all comes from recycling or "sustainable" woodlands growing in neat rows, perhaps somewhere in Sweden. It's a myth. Globally, 70 per cent of the 335 million tons of paper the world uses each year comes from natural, un-farmed sources. In Canada, the UK's biggest source of pulp, 90 per cent of its output comes directly from its ancient forests.

"Paper production is revolting and it's lethal," says Haggith. "Leaving aside the destruction of the forests, the poisoning of the rivers from the processing of the wood, the decimation of local communities and wildlife ... the co2 that results is making a massive contribution to global warming. Exposed peat lands and felled trees give off huge amounts of methane and carbon and then you have further CO2 release when it all ends up in landfill at the end.

"The Bali climate change conference recognised deforestation as the source of around 20 per cent of all emissions: that's three times the amount resulting from global aviation. And for what? Flyers advertising double glazing, fashion magazines we skim through, a bundle of paper napkins in a café we leave behind on the table."

Haggith's paper mountain and a slideshow of what she uncovered on her trip, had an immediate effect on her village. A Recycling Group was set up with local parents, shop owners and a ranger. After lobbying the Highlands council and a letter campaign to the local paper, the village got its first paper bank – "which is always crammed". They are now stepping up the pressure for cardboard recycling – one local shop has been given a bailing machine and flattens and keeps all their old boxes until the village can find a trader willing to buy the waste cardboard: "Or we will come up with some other way of re-using it locally such as shredding it for animal bedding or insulation," says Haggith. "The idea is to be able to sell or reuse every bit of all the community's cardboard."

One of the first visitors to Mandy's Mountain was the local school and now, led by enthusiastic teachers, they have set up paper recycling bins all over school. There are very few people in the village who are not involved in some way. "Telling people what is really happening is the first step, then it's vital that you show them what they can do about it," says Haggith. "That's giving people back control and they can become very motivated very quickly when that happens." Almost everyone has vowed to cut down on their paper usage.

Haggith, a veteran forest campaigner and the co-ordinator of the 21-member European Environmental Paper Network (EEPN), began the local action on her return from the trip in 2006 which took her round most of the great forests of the world for her new book: Paper Trails. It tracks the devastation left behind by the production of the 12.5 million tons of paper gobbled up by the UK every year.

Although about 42 per cent of that figure comes from recycled sources, we generally only reprocess paper once (it can be used up to 10 times). Haggith, an Oxford graduate with a PhD in artificial intelligence, began fighting for the forests by developing software for organisations such as the UN, to link people involved in forest protection across the world. She set up "Worldforests" with her partner, land rights campaigner Bill Ritchie, working with scientists and activists to bring governments and communities together. By the time of her trip she realised the worldwide consumption of paper had increased fourfold in her lifetime.

"I had visited many forests in the early days of campaigning and I wanted to see if anything had changed. In many cases it was far worse," she says. In Indonesia, she describes how she stood at the edge of a ruined forest in the beating Sumatran sun, weeping with rage. Before her stretched thousands of acres of scorched, lifeless land. Beside her, Pak Jafri the tribal leader of the nearby village of Kuntu, pointed to the area where his people had picked herbs, to the hills where they had gathered honey. All before the government licensed the forest to a multinational paper company, which slashed it down to plant non-native acacias: fast growing, toxic, rampant and perfect for producing office copier paper for the UK.

"I was speechless," says Haggith. "Every last living thing had rotted away except for these plastic-leafed acacias rising like Triffids out of a dried up moonscape. And I was embarrassed. As a British person using copier paper, I was the root cause of all this destruction."

The story was the same throughout Malaysia, Vietnam and Thailand, but there was a brief respite for Haggith in, of all places, China. Although using vast amounts of timber for construction, their paper record is inspiring. Much of it comes from recycled sources – this is where most of the UK's recyclable paper is sent. But more horror was waiting over the border in Russia. Having traced UK copier paper to Sumatra, Mandy had also visited the great paper mills of Finland, which supply most of our ready-made paper products. While there was some good news – the Finns have tight pollution controls, for example – despite being covered in artificial paper-producing pine forests, Finland, Europe's biggest manufacturer and consumer of paper, is running out of wood and is now importing it on a massive scale from Russia. "Forget the Amazon," says Haggith. "Russia and Canada, between them, hold 50 per cent of our vital forests. But where the Amazon can regenerate very quickly, these northern boreal forests take 200 years to re-grow."

After a good start in Karelia, where hard-line campaigning has managed to protect some of Russia's primeval forests, Haggith visited the ancient shores of Lake Baikal, which contains 25 per cent of the world's fresh water. It is also the home of the Baikalsk pulp mill. "It stank," says Haggith. "This is partly because it has been pouring lethal chlorine compounds into the lake for 40 years. The lake hosts the only freshwater seals in the world and 75 per cent of its species are only found here, all of which will now have absorbed, irrevocably, the mill's carcinogenic effluents.

"But it was Canada that depressed me the most," she says. "Canada is incredibly wealthy, yet 90 per cent of its logging is from old growth forests and its pollution record is horrific. It has some of the worst cases of paper mill pollution I found. Native Americans living near the mills have nerve and skin diseases and soaring rates of cancers from the bleaches used on the pulp."

Canada is also relentless in its pursuit of profit. "Ten years ago I was one of the blockaders fighting to stop the building of logging roads into the temperate rainforest of Clayoquat Sound on Vancouver Island," she says. "It's a vital forest of giant red cedars and spruce and home to bears and wolves." After years of campaigning, a moratorium was finally set to halt the felling. "To my horror, on my return, I discovered this had been arranged to last only 10 years. I had to watch as the logging trucks drove past me and back into the forest. It was chilling."

Haggith is appalled by the paper industry, but years of experience have taught her that focusing on shreds of hope is the only way forward. She highlights the reforms sweeping the book publishing industry after Canadian publisher, Cindy Connor, insisted that the Harry Potter books were printed on recycled paper. This has had a direct impact on companies such as Penguin and HarperCollins who are now changing their paper sourcing policy in the UK.

Another success has been the UK's newspaper industry which voluntarily agreed to raise its recycled paper content to 70 per cent. "This led to a UK paper mill converting to processing recycled paper," says Haggith. "It's an invaluable example to try to pressure the government to set up more." And ironically, it was through conversations with the paper barons that Haggith began to realise where the real answer lies. Presenting to corporate chiefs at the Paper World conference in Frankfurt at the start of her trip, she was expecting opposition and instead found common ground. "Many of them genuinely want to clean up their act," she says. "But they are waiting for the demand to come from their customers. I now know that I don't need to go to Borneo or Ecuador or Russia any more to find the people who can save the forests. The answer lies right here, it's us.

"We have enormous power. By simply making sure we only buy loo roll from recycled sources, we will have an immediate effect on what's happening. Then we need to influence the business consumers who make the decisions for us – such as the producers of junk mail. That starts by simply saying: no."

Last month the EEPN launched "Shrink", an interactive website to help individuals and businesses make a pledge to cut their paper use and take action on a wider scale. And although she has had to stand before so many of the scarred and bleeding forests of the world, Haggith still has unshakeable hope for the future. "Its a wonderful feeling to fight back," she says. "Not just for us but people in the paper industry, too. When Cindy Connor placed her recycled paper order, she said it felt great that she was no longer signing a death warrant for the trees. The forests are, quite literally, our future. If we realise we have the power to save them, there's just a chance we'll act now and stop chucking them in the bin."

www.shrinkpaper.org

Paper Trails by Mandy Haggith is published Virgin Press £12.99. To order this book for the special price of £11.69 (including p&p) call Independent Books Direct on 0870 0798897 or go to www.independentbooksdirect.co.uk

How to save the trees

* Do not pick up paper napkins in cafés.

* Ask yourself: do I need to print this? If so, use both sides of the paper.

* Sign up to the Mail Preference Service: www.mpsonline.org.uk

* Make sure any paper you buy (toilet rolls through to writing paper) comes from recycled sources.

* Re-use paper bags or compost receipts and torn-up bank statements

* Cut down on and share magazines, return unwanted catalogues to the sender.

* Re-use envelopes and make your own cards.

* Read small print carefully and never tick the "more information" box.

* Ask your boss to buy recycled paper for your workplace.

Pulp facts

* Deforestation caused by paper production is thought to be a bigger cause of global warming than transport.

* Each person in the UK gets through 250kg of paper a year. The worst offenders are the Finns at 333kg. The average Somalian uses 20g.

* Much of the UK's paper is barely used and a large proportion ends up in landfill. Just 42 per cent is recycled – but as there are so few recycling mills in the country, most of this ends up being sent abroad.

* It is a myth that most paper comes from sustainable sources. Seventy per cent of it comes from natural forests.

* The UK produces virtually none of its own pulp and imports 80 per cent of its pulp.

* Around 75 per cent of the paper for magazines is production wastage and is never read.

* Advertisers know that 99.7 per cent of recipients of junk mail throw it away unread. They think it's worth it for the 0.3 per cent who might.

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Marina Barrage completed

Freshwater dam completed
Straits Times 10 Jul 08;

A construction worker checking out the completed $226 million Marina Barrage, a dam built across the Marina Channel to create a freshwater reservoir. Singapore's first urban freshwater reservoir - at 10,000ha, or one-sixth of Singapore - will provide desalinated water to meet the country's growing demand. The barrage will also serve as a flood-control gate and a tourist attraction.

The new reservoir - together with supplies from imported water, Newater and desalinated water - will help Singapore become self-sufficient in water by 2061, when its water agreements with Malaysia end. Singapore currently consumes 1.36 billion litres of water a day, equivalent to 500 Olympic-size swimming pools.

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Construction of US$2.3 billion petrochemicals project begins on Jurong Island

JAC to start on mega project by year-end
US$2.3b aromatics complex to come on stream in 2011
Ronnie Lim, Business Times 10 Jul 08;

DESPITE some earlier financing hold-ups - no thanks to the credit crunch and also difficult market outlook - Jurong Aromatics Corporation (JAC) now expects to start construction of its mega US$2.3 billion petrochemicals project by year-end, officials told BT.

Once it completes financial closure - the cause of the project delay - this third quarter, it will start site-levelling. Piling work on the 1.5 million-tonne aromatics complex, which will be built near the upcoming LNG terminal on Jurong Island, is then expected to start before year-end.

The financing delay - JAC had earlier scheduled construction to start in early-2008, when it first announced the investment last October - means the complex will now only come on stream in late-2011.javascript:void(0)
Publish Post

JAC explained that 'because of the poor credit environment and lenders' concern about the cyclicality of the petrochemical industry', the group has had to restructure its financing arrangements to meet these challenges. Another factor is said to be lenders' lack of familiarity with JAC's main sponsors.

The JAC consortium is 60 per cent owned by Jurong Energy Corporation - a group led by Vijay Goradia and MY Ling, both founding members of the Continental Chemical group.

The remainder 40 per cent is held by Swiss oil trader Glencore, South Korea's SK Energy and Kuwait's Ikarus Petroleum Industries (each holding 10 per cent), and Jiangsu Sanfangxiang Industrial Group (China's largest polyester producer) and Singapore's EDB International (with 5 per cent each).

While over one-third, or 37 per cent, of the project's US$2.4 billion cost will come from equity, JAC needed to secure US$1.55 billion worth of debt financing, of which it has so far obtained close to US$1 billion, or two-thirds.

This is largely thanks to a restructure of the project's original financing arrangements into a so-called 'club deal', where JAC can request specific borrowers to be in on the deal, or at least know who they are.

JAC director Ewe Ee Foong told BT: 'With approximately US$1 billion (of debt financing) already raised and having Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), one of the world's largest financial services groups, as our coordinating lead-bank, JAC's plans are on track for construction to kick off later this year.'

One of the reasons for the financing delay was that JAC initially received in-principle credit approval from RBS and ABN Amro early this year, but because of the credit crunch plus integration of the two banks, JAC only received the final credit from RBS in May, the company explained.

'Actual financing really started in April, and within one month, JAC has now got three other banks, namely, KBC, Intesa and WestLB joining the ranks, alongside Export-Import Bank of Korea which is providing 40 per cent of the debt financing,' it added.

JAC is currently in talks with several other banks, and the mandated lead arrangers are targeted to be formed by mid-July, before extended lead syndication, which will be coordinated by RBS, thereafter.

'Both JAC and RBS are confident that the financial closure will be completed by the third quarter,' the company said in an email response to BT queries.

JAC's Mr Ewe added that 'our feed supply is fully locked up and our products are fully subscribed for. JAC has secured long term agreements with key international players, each of them leaders in their own fields. This has made the deal attractive to lenders'.

He was referring to JAC's deals like the US$10 billion-plus, combined feedstock/end-product one with British Petroleum, under which the oil major will supply it with raw materials, while some of JAC'S products will go to BP. JAC is also getting some of its feedstock from Glencore and SK Energy, which are its shareholders.

The three feedstock suppliers plus Petrochemical Corporation of Singapore and several others like Mitsui Chemical are understood to have committed to taking about 75 per cent of JAC's output.

JAC's aromatics complex will produce 800,000 tonnes of paraxylene, 200,000 tonnes of orthoxylene and 450,000 tonnes of benzene annually. It also has a condensate splitter - Singapore's first new niche refinery - which will produce about 2.5 million tonnes of oil products.

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Motorists work on cost-saving measures to counter new ERP gantries

Lynda Hong, Channel NewsAsia 9 Jul 08;

SINGAPORE : Driving a car into the central business district (CBD) is now more expensive, after the five new Electronic Road Pricing (ERP) gantries started operations on Monday. To reduce costs, some motorists are choosing to car-pool.

"It's along the route to work. So with or without the passengers, we will still be travelling the same route," said Jessie Goh, a motorist who decided to car-pool.

However, some said to car-pool after work is a little difficult.

"I cannot (confirm) that I'll be going straight home (after work) everyday, so I won't be car-pooling back from work," said Rashid Johari, who also car-pools.

For Kiang Chee Khuen, his courier business deploys vans and lorries to handle the deliveries, but motorbikes are preferred for the business district to reduce ERP costs. And delivery is planned between 10am and noon when the gantries are not in operation.

ERP costs and fuel prices now account for about half his business costs. He estimates ERP rates for a motorbike to increase by 50 per cent to over S$5 daily, but passing on the cost to customers will be difficult.

"(Business) is getting slower. If you want to increase prices, customers, though they know that prices have to be increased, are not willing to pay (more) because it’s just a service (to them)," said Kiang, who owns The Courier People.

While smaller courier companies are feeling the pinch, bigger set-ups like SingPost are not expecting costs to go up significantly as ERP expenses form a small component of total operating costs.

SingPost said to mitigate such operating cost increases, it conducts route planning to maximise and optimise its routes and fleet in order to make deliveries in a more cost-efficient manner. - CNA /ls

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Huge Newfound Coral Reef Teems With Life

Greg Soltis, LiveScience.com Yahoo News 9 Jul 08;

The largest and most diverse reef system in the South Atlantic Ocean, the Abrolhos Bank, is twice as large as thought and teeming with life, scientists now say.

"We had some clues from local fishermen that other reefs existed, but not at the scale of what we discovered," said Rodrigo de Moura, Conservation International Brazil marine specialist and co-author of a study about the discovery. "It is very exciting and highly unusual to discover a reef structure this large and harboring such an abundance of fish."

Home to a variety of marine species such as soft corals and mollusks found only in Brazil, the Abrolhos Bank is recognized as one of the planet's most valuable coral reefs. And the most prevalent coral in this reef, the Mussismilia coral genus, represents the only remaining plants from a coral fauna with origins in the Tertiary period, which ranges from about 2 million to 65 million years ago.

Other creatures found at the reef include the dog snapper, black grouper, and adult and juvenile masked boobies.

The researchers used a side-scan sonar to generate a 3-D map of the coral reef. Located 9 to 124 miles off the Brazilian coast, the reef's depth varied from 60 to 200 feet.

"Due to their relative inaccessibility and depth, the newly discovered reefs are teeming with life, in some places harboring 30 times the density of marine life than the known, shallower reefs," said Guilherme Dutra, Conservation International's director of marine programs in Brazil. "That's the good news. The bad news is that only a small percentage of marine habitats in the Abrolhos are protected, despite mounting localized and global threats."

Efforts are made to safeguard the reef, located off the southern coast of Brazil's Bahia state, by groups including the Marine Protected Areas in the Abrolhos. But they struggle against over-fishing, coastal development, oil drilling and ocean acidification.

Researchers from Brazil's Federal University of Esp'rito Santo and Federal University of Bahia contributed to the study, which was presented Tuesday at the International Coral Reef Symposium in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

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Eight New Natural Wonders Named

Andrea Thompson, LiveScience.com Yahoo News 9 Jul 08;

Eight new natural wonders, including the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve in Mexico and what has been dubbed "the Galápagos of the Indian Ocean," have been added to the World Heritage List.

World Heritage Sites are named by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The sites, both cultural and natural, added to the list are deemed "of outstanding value to humanity" and deserve protection and preservation, according to the UNESCO Web site.
With the new additions, the World Heritage List now boasts 878 sites (679 cultural, 174 natural and 25 mixed) in 145 countries. The eight new natural sites added this year include:

Joggins Fossil Cliffs (Canada) Mount Sanqingshan National Park (China) Lagoons of New Caledonia: Reef Diversity and Associated Ecosystems (France) Surtsey (Iceland) Saryarka - Steppe and Lakes of Northern Kazakhstan (Kazakhstan) Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve (Mexico) Swiss Tectonic Arena Sardona (Switzerland) Socotra Archipelago (Yemen)


"These eight stunning natural sites are amongst the best of what nature has to offer," said David Sheppard, head of the IUCN's Protected Areas Program, which recommended the sites. (IUCN stands for International Union for Conservation of Nature.)

Below are details on all the sites:

The Socotra Archipelago is known as "the Galápagos of the Indian Ocean" and is home to 825 plant species of which 37 percent can only be found there. Ninety percent of its reptile species can be found nowhere else. Its marine life is also diverse, with 253 species of reef-building corals, 730 species of coastal fish and 300 species of crab, lobster and shrimp.

Socotra is already well set up for long-term conservation, IUCN officials say, as about 75 percent of its land area is already included in natural sanctuaries and national parks.

The Joggins Fossil Cliffs have also drawn a comparison to the diverse Pacific Islands made famous by Charles Darwin's work, as they are sometimes called "the Coal Age Galápagos." The cliffs are considered to be an excellent reference site to the Coal Age (about 300 million years ago). The rocks there bear witness to the first reptiles in Earth's history and preserve upright fossil trees.

"This is a fascinating site where you can literally see a slice of history," said Tim Badman, World Heritage advisor of IUCN's Protected Areas Program.

Surtsey, a new island formed by volcanic eruptions off the southern coast of Iceland from 1963 to 1967, is interesting for the new life forms that have settled there. The young bit of land has provided a unique scientific record of the ways in which plants and animals colonize land.

The Mariposa Monarca Biosphere Reserve protects eight areas of wintering habitat of the monarch butterfly in the oyamel fir forests of central Mexico. After traveling thousands of kilometers, as many as a billion monarchs overwinter there.

More than 200,000 hectares of Central Asian steppe, a vast region of open grassland, is found in Saryarka, Kazakhstan - more than half of it is pristine. The area's Korgalzhyn-Tengiz lakes provide feeding grounds to around 16 million birds and support hundreds of thousands of nesting waterfowl.

"The wetlands of Korgalzhyn and Naurzum State Nature Reserves are key stopover points for migratory birds," Sheppard said. "Some of these species are globally threatened. Saryarka offers them a safe haven on their journeys from Africa, Europe and South Asia to their breeding grounds in Western and Eastern Siberia."

Saryarka is also home to the critically endangered saiga antelope (Saiga tatarica).

Mount Sanqingshan National Park in China was selected for its "outstanding natural beauty," the IUCN said. The park features a diverse forest and unusual granite rock formations, including shaped pillars and peaks, which can be viewed from suspended walking trails.

The Swiss Tectonic Arena Sardona, on the other hand, was picked for its geological value; it features a dramatic display of mountain-building, including an area called the Glarus Overthrust, where older rock overlays younger rock.

The highly diverse coral reef ecosystems of the Lagoons of New Caledonia put it on the new list - they equal or possibly surpass the larger Great Barrier Reef in coral and fish diversity.

These eight natural sites were accompanied by 27 cultural sites as inductees into the World Heritage program. The IUCN also helps monitor conservation at the natural sites. It has deemed several World Heritage sites as under threat, including the Galápagos Islands, in Ecuador, Machu Picchu, in Peru, and Virunga National Park, in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

See also photos of the 8 Natural Wonders Added to UN Heritage List on the National Geographic website

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Battle to save Cambodian dolphin

Guy Delauney, BBC News 9 Jul 08;

Sun Mao leans forward in the boat, shades his eyes with his hand, and squints across the wide expanse of the Mekong River where it twists through the town of Kratie.

He is looking for one of the world's rarest mammals - the Mekong Irrawaddy dolphin.

Older people in this part of northern Cambodia talk of how they used to take the dolphins for granted.

Little effort was needed to see them in their dozens. Now, scientists say, there are less than 100 remaining.

National heritage

With a practised eye, Sun Mao spots a group of five dolphins, collectively known as a pod.

They briefly break the surface as they come up for air - grey-brown, bullet-headed and exhaling with an old man's rasp.

It is an awe-inspiring sight, but nothing new to Sun Mao.

As part of a local organisation, the Cambodian Rural Development Team (CRDT), he has put years of work into preserving the dwindling population.

For him it is an issue of national heritage.

"This is the last place for these dolphins in the world," he says over the clatter of the boat's outboard engine.

"We have to conserve and keep them alive in this river for our next generation."

CRDT has tried to educate the local human population about what they can do.

A government-enforced ban on the use of gill nets - nets set vertically in the water so that fish swim into them and are entangled in the mesh - has cut down the number of dolphins accidentally caught by fishermen.

Instead, CRDT has helped locals to reduce their reliance on fishing by offering alternatives such as poultry farming.

Villagers on Pdao Island, just outside Kratie, greet Sun Mao as an old friend as he clambers up the muddy riverbank.

Tourist influx

They happily show off their CRDT-sponsored chickens, water-pumps and fish ponds, and declare themselves delighted to be part of the dolphin preservation efforts.

It would be a heart-warming tale, if only the statistics were not so brutally depressing.

A scientific survey taken three years ago estimated the dolphin population at 127. The latest study by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) puts the figure at 71.

It comes as a devastating blow after all the work that local and international organisations have put in.

As well as banning the use of gill nets, the government has established a network of river guards to patrol the dolphin habitats.

While CRDT has been working with the local human population, WWF scientists have been looking into ways of protecting the dolphins.

Everyone was hoping that the dolphin population would at least stabilise, if not flourish.

Payback would come in the form of an influx of tourists to see the pods at play and bring much-needed revenue to the local economy.

Contaminants

That dream recedes as each dead dolphin washes up on the banks of the Mekong.

Most worryingly, most of the recent casualties have been calves. Without the babies, there is no future for the species.

"There are theories that the immune systems of the dolphins have been compromised by stress," says Richard Zanre, dolphin programme manager for WWF.

"The river environment has been encroached upon by new developments. There is also the problem of contaminants in the river."

The answers need to be found quickly. As it stands, WWF still classifies the remaining population as "sustainable".

If the numbers fall much further, however, there will no longer be enough diversity for the dolphins to breed successfully.

That would spell the end for this unique species.

Read more!

In Wake of Gorilla Murders, Isolated Group Offers Hope

Stefan Lovgren, National Geographic News 9 Jul 08;

For the world's last remaining mountain gorillas (Gorilla beringei beringei), there is little room to move.

Numbering only about 700, these great apes are split into two populations and confined to two separate areas, both located in one of the most densely populated—and troubled—regions of Africa.

More than half live in the Virunga highlands that straddle the border of Uganda, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The remaining 300 gorillas find refuge in the isolated forest of Uganda's Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, just 15 miles (24 kilometers) north of the Virunga mountains.

Bwindi and the Virungas boast some of the highest biodiversity in Africa, providing habitat for myriad mammals, birds, butterflies, and frogs.

But the parks, particularly those in the Virunga mountains, have suffered through genocide, armed rebel incursions, rampant poaching, and constant pressure from millions of land-starved villagers whose subsistence farms push right up against the gorilla sanctuaries.

In this unstable environment, Bwindi stands out as relatively secure. Here, wildlife rangers can safely patrol the forest and researchers have the luxury of spending time monitoring the gorillas—unlike in Virunga National Park, where warring militias have appropriated parkland and forced gorillas into the cross fire.

However, Bwindi gorillas aren't home free. "In Bwindi, I would like to say we can be optimistic for conservation, but not complacent," says conservation biologist Martha Robbins, who has studied the critically endangered animals in Bwindi for the past decade.

"The key conservation activities are more or less the same [in both Bwindi and the Virunga parks]," Robbins says.

Conservationists are trying to tackle poaching, reduce other illegal activities, encourage responsible ecotourism, and provide programs for improving the economic situation for people who live around the park, Robbins says.

Where Bwindi and the Virungas differ, she explains, is in their ecology, or the ways in which the gorilla populations can grow.

Constant Pressure

The two mountain gorilla habitats are essentially ecological islands, separated and surrounded by a sea of people. The 15 miles (24 kilometers) that separate them might as well be 15,000 miles (21,000 kilometers).

"There is no possibility of gorillas [moving] back and forth; there are too many people in between," Robbins says.

With human pressure from all sides, protecting the apes' habitat has become key.

In the Congolese Virungas, habitat is disappearing to the illegal charcoal trade—a $30 million industry that requires forest clearing. (See also "Congo Gorilla Killings Fueled by Illegal Charcoal Trade" [August 16, 2007].)

"The recent upsurge in demand for charcoal, together with a recent incident of illegal tree felling, indicates that loss of mountain gorilla habitat will be one of the major conservation challenges in the years ahead," says Emmanuel de Merode, an expert on Virunga National Park and chief executive of the Africa Conservation Fund.

In Uganda's Bwindi park, where the political situation is much more stable, researchers are conducting habitat studies that explore what the gorillas eat and how far they must travel to find food.

Covering More Ground

With funding from the National Geographic Society, Robbins is trying to figure out how much the gorilla population in Bwindi could increase given the limited size of its jungle habitat—nearly 81,500 acres (33,000 hectares), or twice the size of the District of Columbia.

To ensure the survival of a species that ranks as one of our closest relatives, "it's essential that we know how many mountain gorillas their home can sustain," says Robbins, who is employed by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

Gorillas in both locations—Bwindi and Virunga—consume nearly 50 pounds (20 kilograms) of food a day each, but since they live at different elevations, they have different diets and therefore different space requirements.

Bwindi gorillas live at elevations of 5,000 to 9,000 feet (1,500 to 2,700 meters), while Virunga gorillas make their homes much higher up, at more than 10,000 feet (3,000 meters).

Both populations feed primarily on abundant and readily available herbaceous vegetation, such as wild celery, nettles, and thistles, but the diet of the Bwindi gorillas also includes a healthy portion of fruits, which don't grow at the higher, cooler elevations in the Virungas.

That important food source tends to be spread out over larger areas, a possible reason why gorillas in Bwindi travel farther to feed every day than do the apes in the Virungas—just over half a mile (0.8 kilometers) a day, versus just over a quarter mile (0.4 kilometers).

Another reason may be that other vegetation is less dense in Bwindi than in the Virungas, which encompass three parks totaling 111,200 acres (45,000 hectares).

"This may help explain why the [Bwindi] gorillas use larger areas," Robbins says.

She estimates that each Bwindi gorilla needs up to 7,400 acres (3,000 hectares), while Virunga gorillas need up to 3,700 (1,500 hectares).

The findings so far suggest that the Bwindi population may not be able to grow as large as its neighboring population in the Virungas. That said, Robbins adds: "I think it will be some time before the gorilla populations outgrow their habitat."

Rwanda's Gorillas

Gorillas in the Rwandan Virungas have had their ups and downs, but tourism and conservation are again on the rise.

Glenn Bush, interim director of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International's Karisoke Research Center in Rwanda, is doing work similar to Robbins's.

He also emphasizes the need to do more research on vegetation change. "We're seeing some alarming things," Bush says.

"There is a forest halfway between Virunga and Bwindi seeing die-offs of bamboo. We can't explain what it is. If bamboo [for example] disappears in the parks, what are the implications for gorillas? There's a lot of work that still needs to be done to understand how to conserve these animals for the future," he says.

Despite decades of gorilla research, scientists still lack some basic information about the great apes, including their life expectancy.

"The gorillas that were born when Dian Fossey came [to Rwanda] 40 years ago are only now starting to die," Bush says. "We still haven't followed enough individuals from birth to death to know with any great precision how long the mountain gorillas live."

Fragility

What researchers do know is how fragile populations are, even without the complications of war and poverty. In Bwindi, researchers do not know if the population has gotten bigger. "But we have no reason to believe that it is declining in size," Robbins says.

Today, in a relatively stable Uganda, Bwindi's gorilla tourism industry is flourishing.

Accompanied by armed park rangers, tourists in Bwindi can observe any of the four groups of gorillas that have been habituated to human contact, for a fee of U.S. $500. Two additional groups are being habituated now.

"Ecotourism has been very successful in Bwindi, as it has been in [the Rwandan] Virunga[s]," Robbins says. "Revenues generated by the gorilla permits in Bwindi cover about 65 percent of operating costs for all of Uganda's [wildlife protection]."

Promising ecological conditions and successful conservation efforts in both Bwindi and the Virungas have inspired Robbins to have hope. "We are optimistic that both populations will continue to increase," she says.

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Brazil National Parks Mismanaged and Raided - Government

PlanetArk 10 Jul 08;

BRASILIA - Brazil's nature reserves, which harbor much of the world's biodiversity, are grossly mismanaged, underfunded, and often ransacked by intruders, the environment minister said on Tuesday.

Nature reserves account for more than eight percent of Brazil's vast territory, an area equal to the US state of Texas. Brazil also claims to have the world's largest forested national park, the Tumucumac park in Amapa state with 3.8 million hectares (9.39 million acres).

But several of Brazil's parks, which harbor treasures from the Amazon forest or the Pantanal wetlands, are sanctuaries not for wildlife but illegal loggers, miners and ranchers.

Of 299 protected areas, 57 percent have no permanent law enforcement officials, 76 percent have no management plan, and nearly one-third have no manager, an internal study showed.

"We discovered a very serious problem and we called the public to show this ecological striptease," Environment Minister Carlos Minc told a news conference in Brasilia.

"The current situation is not sustainable," he added.

In the Bom Futuro or "Good Future" National Park in northwestern Rondonia state, around 1,600 wildcat miners, farmers, loggers, and ranchers are raiding natural resources.

In some years the rate of deforestation in protected areas of the Amazon was higher than in unprotected areas, Minc said.


GUARDS OUTNUMBERED

In reserves where limited hunting, fishing, or farming is permitted, people "live in misery" because there is no proper planning, management or control, said Minc, the co-founder of Brazil's Green Party.

The World Bank, Global Environmental Fund, WWF and KfW, the German development bank, together have pledged around US$200 million to a government-run project to create new parks and better manage existing ones. The Arpa project, which began in 2003, operates in 60 parks, mostly in Amazon states.

Minc, who replaced former rubber tapper Marina Silva as environment minister six weeks ago, pledged to fill vacant management posts this month, train inspectors by November, and put 4 million hectares (9.9 million acres) of forest reserves up for sustainable management by timber companies.

The government also wants to expand eco-tourism in more outlying regions. The famed Iguacu waterfalls on the border with Argentina and Rio de Janeiro's statue of Christ the Redeemer account for 95 percent of the 3.5 million visitors to national parks.

The departure of Silva, seen as a guardian of the Amazon, had raised concern among environmental groups over rising deforestation rates.

Since then, Minc has spearheaded a series of crackdowns on illegal soybean farmers, loggers and ranchers.

But experts say better conservation requires additional funds and logistics. In many reserves, park guards are far outnumbered by heavily armed and well equipped intruders. The guards often lack vehicles, gasoline, and guns.

"The problem is disorganization," said Sylvana Canuto, head of the government's Chico Mendes Foundation, charged with overseeing the reserves. (Editing by Stuart Grudgings and Sandra Maler)


Story by Raymond Colitt

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How Jungle Rot Could Power the Future

Michael Schirber, LiveScience.com Yahoo News 9 Jul 08;

Editor's Note: Each Wednesday LiveScience examines the viability of emerging energy technologies - the power of the future.

The genetics of "jungle rot" may hold the key to more economical biofuel in the near future.

Ethanol, the most common biofuel, is primarily made from grains, sugarcane and other crops. But it can also be made from cellulose - a chain-like molecule found in stems, bark and other plant parts.

To break down cellulose into fermentable sugars, however, requires special enzymes, called cellulases, which are expensive to produce.

The biofuel industry has primarily obtained cellulase from the fungi Trichoderma reesei, which became infamous during World War II as jungle rot. The green mold (molds are a type of fungus) devoured military tents and uniforms in the South Pacific.

"T. reesei is currently the champion microorganism for commercial cellulase production," said Michael Himmel of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo.

To help reduce the cost of cellulase, an international group of scientists organized by the Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute (JGI) in Walnut Creek, Calif., has now sequenced the DNA of one strain of T. reesei from the Solomon Islands.

The hope is that this genetic information could allow the engineering of fungi or bacteria that can produce enzymes more efficiently than the current approach.

Break it down

Although biofuel has lately taken a bad rap due to links to rising food prices and possible environmental damage, this largely concerns ethanol derived from corn grain and other non-cellulosic sources, which have readily fermentable sugars.

Cellulosic ethanol has less of an impact on food prices because it is made from non-food crops, such as switch grass, or waste products, such as cornstalks. Moreover, studies have shown that ethanol from these inedible plant materials has a lower carbon footprint than corn-based ethanol.

Despite these facts, most ethanol in the United States continues to be made from corn grain, partly because cellulose is very hard to break down.

A better biofuel

Only certain organisms, such as bacteria in termite guts and fungi such as T. reesei, are able to degrade cellulose for energy, and extracting enzymes from these organisms has been expensive.

In 2001, the enzymes for making one gallon of ethanol cost more than $5, regardless of how they were derived. Since then, biotechnology research has reduced this to less than 20 cents, but even greater price reductions are needed to make biofuels more economical for consumers.

"The overall conversion process must be made less costly," said Himmel, who was not part of the current study. "Research aimed at improving the performance of fungal and bacterial cellulases is critical if these processes are to be robust."

To this end, the JGI researchers sequenced the 34 million base pairs in the T. reesei genome. The group was surprised to find that the fungus had a smaller number of enzyme-producing genes than other related fungi.

"We were aware of T. reesei's reputation as a producer of massive quantities of degrading enzymes; however, we were surprised by how few enzyme types it produces, which suggested to us that its protein secretion system is exceptionally efficient," said lead author Diego Martinez from JGI.

The way its enzyme-producing genes were clustered together may also explain why T. reesei is able to degrade plant material so quickly, the authors wrote in a recent issue of Nature Biotechnology.

This new gene map will presumably give biotech companies the means for "tinkering with the genetics to make T. reesei produce more - or a better profile of - enzymes," Martinez told LiveScience.

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IEA says energy-climate crisis is opportunity for major change

Yahoo News 9 Jul 08;

Oil prices are too high and threaten the global economy but also open the way to huge energy and pollution savings by spurring new technologies and policies, the IEA said on Wednesday.

"High energy prices provide an unforeseen opportunity to set a new course," the IEA said, estimating the cumulative cost of cutting carbon emissions by half by 2050 at 45 trillion dollars or about 1.1 percent of annual production in the global economy.

Oil prices were "too high and a threat to the global economy and social welfare of millions of people, particularly in developing countries."

The IEA published 25 recommendations on energy efficiency it had submitted to the G8 summit in Japan, what it said was "a win-win strategy" in providing clean and secure energy alongside adequate stimulus to economic growth.

Welcoming calls at the G8 summit for improved energy efficiency and development of technologies to reduce carbon emissions, IEA executive director Nobuo Tanaka said in a statement: "We are very pleased that G8 leaders are so engaged in finding and implementing these policies."

Tanaka said that if the proposals were put into effect globally and immediately, savings in carbon emissions by 2030 would be equivalent to twice the emissions by European members of the OECD in 2005.

The IEA, the energy monitoring arm of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, said that although nuclear energy was an important part of the solution, "radically new approaches are needed to the ways energy is produced, transformed, processed and consumed."

It pinpointed the storage of CO2, and wind, solar and tidal power. A big contribution could be made by replacing inefficient coal-fired power stations with plants using the latest technology.

In the transport sector, medium-term carbon efficiency savings of up to 50 percent were possible.

The document was the result of three years of work since a 2005 summit at Gleneagles in Scotland when G8 leaders asked the IEA to contribute to a Plan of Action on Climate Change.

A key passage stated: "It is urgent for industrialised countries to seize today's opportunities to develop a more sustainable energy path that can enable developing countries to leapfrog the polluting phase of economic growth."

Describing the energy challenge as "daunting," the IEA warned that if annual economic growth averaged 3.3 percent to 2050, and current policies did not change, "energy-related CO2 emissions could more than double" by that year.

"Radical action is crucial" and depended on international cooperation, particularly involving China and India, it said.

Available measures, if applied immediately, could save 18-26 percent of energy used by industry globally.

A 50-percent cut in emissions by 2050, as mooted by the G8 meeting, would depend on technologies still being developed and the most expensive of these would cost 200-500 dollars per tonne of CO2 saved.

The IEA calculated that the extra investment needed to 2050 was about 1.1 trillion dollars per year, equivalent to the annual output of Canada or about 1.1 percent of global production.

The cumulative figure needed was 45 trillion dollars "but these investment needs would be balanced by lower expenditure on fossil fuels ... (and) there will be significant fuel cost savings for importing countries."

The net outcome could even be that "savings exceed investment costs."

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G8 deal on global warming inadequate: UN environment chief

Yahoo News 9 Jul 08;

The compromise on global warming struck by the leaders of the Group of Eight industrialised nations is inadequate, the head of the UN Environment Programme said Wednesday, adding his voice to other criticisms.

Asked by German NDR radio if the agreement concluded Tuesday at the G-8 summit in Japan was a success and would halt climate change, Achim Steiner replied, "No way."

At least they didn't take a step backwards but I believe we are still a long way from what we need today in terms of action," he said.

At their summit in the resort town of Toyako, G8 leaders agreed to "consider and adopt" the goal of achieving a cut of at least 50 percent in worldwide carbon emissions by 2050, but they made no targeted promise for action in the medium term.

"We are wasting time, the consequences are becoming more and more dramatic, the cost of reversing the global warming trend is greater and greater, and at the same time we are having problems -- particularly in the industrialised countries -- taking great steps forward internationally," Steiner said.

Leading scientists have also said the G8's stance on global warming was too vague and too distant to brake the oncoming juggernaut of climate change.

Experts acknowledged the usefulness of the G8 goal, but the accord did not mention a base year by which the 50-percent cut would be compared, nor did it identify what cuts would be made in the next decade, a period critical for determining whether the fight against climate change will succeed or fail.

The Group of Eight (Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States) also failed to make headway in talks with leaders of growing emerging economies on tackling global warming.

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Ships Emit More Soot Than Thought

LiveScience.com, Yahoo News 9 Jul 08;

The humble and charming tugboat emits more soot for the amount of fuel it uses than any other commercial vessel, according to a new study that also finds cargo ships emit more than twice as much as previously thought.

The findings bode ill for the Arctic, in particular, where a rapidly melting ice cap allow for more commercial ship travel. In particular, a long-sought Northwest Passage opened last summer and could become navigable again this year. In fact the very North Pole could be ice-free later this year, scientists said recently.

The researchers worry that the extra soot could exacerbate Arctic melting.

Small dark soot particles absorb sunlight, create haze, and affect how clouds form and make rain, further altering a region's heat balance, the researchers say. If commercial shipping extends new routes through Arctic waters as they become navigable, soot emissions there could increase. Previous studies have concluded that soot could hasten Arctic melting.

Dirty shipping

Commercial shipping releases roughly 130,000 metric tons of soot per year, or 1.7 percent of the global total--much of it near highly populated coastlines, the authors estimate. In the coming years global shipping is expected to grow two to six percent annually.

Oceangoing tankers and container ships emit half a gram of soot per kilogram of fuel burned when at dock and slightly less when traveling, according to scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the University of Colorado (CU) who conducted the new study. Tugs emit nearly a gram of soot per kilogram of fuel burned - twice as much as any other vessel type, the authors find.

"Tugboats are a huge source of black carbon that may be under- reported or not reported at all in emissions inventories compiled by ports," says the study lead author Daniel Lack of NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) and the NOAA-CU Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences.

The finding will be detailed in the July 11 issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union. The research was funded by NOAA.

Exceptionally high soot levels from tugboats point to their low- quality fuel - a thick, black tar left over from crude oil after the gasoline and kerosene have been removed. Engine age and maintenance also play a role. Tugboats have a disproportionate impact on air quality because they travel within ports, emitting potentially harmful particles near populous urban areas, the researchers point out.

About the study

To investigate ship emissions, the researchers observed plumes from commercial vessels in open ocean waters, channels, and ports along the southeastern United States and Texas during the summer of 2006. From the NOAA research vessel, Ronald H. Brown, the team measured black carbon emitted by tankers, cargo and container ships, large fishing boats, tug boats, and ferries, many of them in the Houston Ship Channel.

"Commercial shipping emissions have been one of the least studied areas of all combustion emissions," Lack said. "The two previous studies of soot emissions examined a total of three ships. We reviewed plumes from 96 different vessels."

A 2007 study by American and German scientists linked particle pollution from shipping to tens of thousands of premature deaths each year, most of them along coastlines in Europe, East Asia, and South Asia. Soot makes up a quarter of that pollution, Lack said.

The primary sources of soot, or small particles of black carbon, are fossil fuel combustion, wildfires, and burning vegetation for agricultural purposes. On a global scale, soot currently traps about 30 percent as much heat as does carbon dioxide, the most important greenhouse gas, according to the latest assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

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World ports tackle greenhouse gas emissions

Mariette le Roux Yahoo News 9 Jul 08;

Ports authorities from around the world gathered in Rotterdam Wednesday to adopt a plan to cut CO2 emissions from the activities of some 100,000 large ships sailing global waters.

Alongside scientists, lawmakers and businessmen, officials from more than 50 ports in 35 countries started a three-day meeting at the home of Europe's largest harbour. They are looking at regulatory and technological ways of shrinking their contribution to global warming.

But the setting of measurable common targets appeared to be a long way off as speakers differed on the maritime transport industry's contribution to global greenhouse gas emission -- put at anything from 1.4 percent to 4.5 percent.

Delegates did agree, though, that the shipping sector would grow by leaps and bounds, and that alternatives had to be found in order to save the planet.

"The climate is changing every minute, even as we sit here," said Ogunlade Davidson, co-chairman of the United Nations' Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change.

"Human beings have to solve it (global warming), because we created it. The marine environment has to take its own responsibility, as do all of us."

Davidson told the gathering that technical alterations, including the use of hydrodynamics in propellers, could reduce CO2 emissions by up to 30 percent on new ships and 20 percent on older ones.

Renewable fuels, speed reduction and fleet maintenance also had a role to play.

The potential existed to reduce the global fleet's CO2 emissions by 17.6 percent by 2010 and 28.2 percent by 2020, "but this will not be enough to offset the projected fleet growth," he said.

Efthimios Mitropoulos, secretary-general of the International Maritime Organisation, told delegates his organisation was working hard on setting greenhouse gas emission targets for the shipping industry to come into effect by February 2010.

But this could never work if developing countries were excluded from obligation, he argued. The developed world accounted for only 25 percent of the world's merchant fleet, he said.

"In my view, if reductions in CO2 emissions from ships are to benefit the environment as a whole, they must apply globally to all ships in the world fleet, regardless of their flag.

"It seems completely incongruous that two ships, carrying similar cargo, loaded in the same port, sailing at the same speed and having the same destination, should be treated differently because they are registered under two different flags."

China, a developing nation with one of the world's largest ports in Shanghai, did not attend the conference, having sent an apology and explaining that its recent killer earthquake and hosting of the Olympic games required all hands on deck back home.

Rotterdam mayor Ivo Opstelten told the gathering that port cities had a unique responsibility to combat climate change.

The port of Rotterdam planned to reduce its CO2 output by half of 1990 levels by 2025.

Dutch scientists were examining better ways of capturing and storing CO2 emissions, developing a new ship coating with lower algae growth to reduce drag, and testing new collapsable containers enabling ships to transport more empty containers to cut trips.

"For a long time, it (CO2 emissions) was something we did not pay much attention to," said Opstelten. "Now is the time for action."

About 80 ports have been invited to sign the World Ports Climate Declaration once completed.

A draft document circulated Wednesday supported CO2 reduction measures, but mentioned no caps.

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