Pacific's reefs bounce back

Fiji Times 12 Jul 08;

Coral reefs in the islands of the Pacific have been granted a clean bill of health in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where leading marine scientists have been meeting since Monday as part of the 11th International Coral Reef Symposium.

Director of the University of the South Pacific's Institute of Marine Studies Dr Ken Mackay reported data shows that corals that had suffered severe bleaching had recovered.

"It's been good news all around," Dr Mackay told islandsbusiness.com

"Our monitors around the islands of the Pacific are all reporting recovery from the bleaching coral suffered in 2000 and 2002 to 2004."

Coral recovery has been nothing short of spectacular in some areas, the university marine biologist told the international symposium.

Some corals on Beqa Island, in Fiji, for example, suffered 80 per cent bleaching in 2000, with some species inflicted 100 per cent.

"Bleaching in Beqa actually spurred the formation of the network to monitor the health of coral reefs not only around Fiji but in islands around the Pacific as well," Dr Mackay said.

"Our data for 2007 shows that coral cover is as good as before coral bleaching struck.

"In some areas, corals are much more diverse than pre-bleaching time."

Resilience in coral reefs in the Pacific is being widely discussed during the five day conference inside the sprawling Greater Fort Lauderdale-Boward County Convention Centre on Eisenhower Boulevard.

Scientists are keen to see the lessons learnt, especially as coral reefs that were stricken with bleaching in the Caribbean have yet to undergo similar recovery as seen in the Pacific.

The consensus seems to suggest that healthy corals recover much more quickly.

Signs of coral reef recovery, Dr Mackay said in his report, had been seen in Samoa, proof that the system had recovered from the effects of a cyclone it suffered three to four years ago.

"The impact of the tsunami on corals in the Solomon Islands is still to be known and we will need to continue monitoring there.

"For Tuvalu, monitoring for now is limited to the lagoons of Funafuti and figures are suggesting a somewhat reduced coral cover. This can be attributed we suspect to land degradation in the country's capital."

That the coral reefs in Fiji and around the islands of the Pacific seemed to be healthy took Dr Mackay and his team of monitors by surprise.

"With some incidence of coral bleaching reported in 2002 and again in 2004, we were actually bracing to see more cases of bleaching this year," Dr Mackay said.

"But this has not happened and I suspect that this could be the result of the two cyclones that came to Fiji in 2007."

Dr Mackay was accompanied to the international coral reef symposium by his colleagues Edward Lovell, Isoa Korovulavula, Patrick Fong and Zaidy Khan.

Through sponsorship from the Washington DC-based marine conservation NGO Seaweb, two Pacific journalists Titi Gabi of Papua New Guinea and Samisoni Pareti of Fiji-based Islands Business magazine were among a group of 16 invited from around the world to provide coverage of the five-day gathering that ends in this sea-side holiday city on Friday

Among the group was Pulitzer Prize winner, Ken Weiss of the Los Angeles Times, Tim Radford of the Guardian in London, Steve Conover of The Independent in London as well and Corriene Podger of Australia's ABC.

- Pacnews

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Best of our wild blogs: 11 Jul 08

How are corals relocated from Sentosa IR worksite doing?
link to video clip on the IR website on the wildfilms blog

Fun with horseshoe crabs
the first entry of a brand new fun with nature blog

Discovery at Cyrene Reef
starry-eyed on the discovery blog

Feet of the Common Coot
a bird with scalloped toes! on the Bird Ecology Study Group blog

What happens if you throw nothing away for six months?
on the npr website

Admiralty Park
on the Seen This Scene That blog

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A third of reef-building corals threatened with extinction: scientists

Yahoo News 10 Jul 08;

A third of reef-building corals worldwide are threatened with extinction due to climate change and water pollution, according to the first global assessment on the marine creature by 39 scientists.

Destructive fishing and the degradation of coastal habitats also posed threats, said the study published Thursday involving the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and Conservation International.

"The results of this study are very disconcerting," said Kent Carpenter, lead author of the study which examined 845 coral reef species.

"When corals die off, so do the other plants and animals that depend on coral reefs for food and shelter, and this can lead to the collapse of entire ecosystems," he added.

Roger McManus from Conservation International said that reef-building corals in particular were "most vulnerable to the effects of climate change".

Sea temperature rises bleach and weaken the algae that give the underwater sea life its vibrant colour, and make it more susceptible to diseases.

As they are home to over 25 percent of marine species -- including fish stocks -- loss of reefs could also impact coastal fishing communities.

"The loss of the corals will have profound implications for millions of people who depend on coral reefs for their livelihoods," said McManus.

According to the study, the Caribbean region has the highest number of highly threatened corals.

Due to huge human populations in the region, the Indo-Malay-Philippine archipelago also has the highest proportions of vulnerable and almost threatened species in the Indo-Pacific.

"We either reduce our CO2 emission now or many corals will be lost forever," warned Julia Marton-Lefevre, IUCN Director General.

'Alarming' plight of coral reefs
Richard Black, BBC News 10 Jul 08;

A third of the world's reef-building coral species are facing extinction.

That is the stark conclusion from the first global study to assess the extinction risks of corals.

Writing in the journal Science, researchers say climate change, coastal development, overfishing, and pollution are the major threats.

The economic value of the world's reefs has been estimated at over $30bn (£15bn) per year, through tourism, fisheries and coastal protection.

"The picture is frightening," said Alex Rogers from the Zoological Society of London, one of 39 scientists involved in the assessment.

"It's not just the fact that something like a third of all reef-forming corals are threatened, but that we could be facing the loss of large areas of these ecosystems within 50 to 100 years.

"The implications of that are absolutely staggering - not only for biodiversity, but also for economics."

The analysis shows that reef-building corals are more threatened than any group of land-dwelling animals except amphibians.

'Incredible' destruction

The most dramatic decline in recent years was caused by the 1997/8 El Nino event, which caused waters to warm across large swathes of the tropics.

When water temperatures rise, coral polyps - tiny animals that build the reefs - expel the algae that usually live with them in a symbiotic relationship.

The corals lose their colour, with reefs taking on a bleached appearance, and begin to die off because the algae are not there to provide nutrients.

The new analysis shows that before 1998, only 13 of the 704 coral species assessed would have been classified as threatened. Now, the number is 231.

"It was a devastating event in terms of the destruction of corals, with 16% of reefs irreversibly destroyed - an incredible amount," said Kent Carpenter from Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, in the US.

"The big problem is that if these bleaching events become more frequent as temperatures rise, as we suspect will happen, then we will see whole tracts of coral wiped out."

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See the effects of coral bleaching (Sea Web)

Adding to this, scientists have come to realise in recent years, is ocean acidification. The water absorbs some of the atmosphere's extra carbon dioxide, making it slightly more acid, enough to compromise the capacity of corals to build their skeletons, and snails to build their shells.

"We know that high sea surface temperatures are bad for coral, but we also have an idea that some might be able to adapt," said Professor Carpenter.

"But ocean acidification is a much more insidious thing. We don't know how bad it will be, but the evidence suggests it will be absolutely devastating, perhaps on the order of decades, perhaps on the order of years."

Complex web

But carbon dioxide is not the only culprit.

Overfishing in many regions - especially the use of dynamite to fish in East Asia and heavy trawls that reduce reefs to rubble - the excavation of building materials from reefs, coastal development, invasive species and pollution are all fingered in the new analysis.

The Caribbean shows how the threat jigsaw fits together.

Coastal development and farming produce effluent, which stimulates the growth of types of algae that smother growing coral.

Meanwhile, fishermen are catching fish that would usually graze on these algae.

In this stressed condition, coral then fall prey more easily to disease, such as white-band disease which has swept through elkhorn and staghorn corals in the region.

The line taken by many scientists and campaigners is that these problems should be easier to tackle than the rising tide of greenhouse gas emissions; so this is where attention should be concentrated.

Along Australia's Great Barrier Reef, protected areas have been established in the sea, and the use of fertilisers controlled on land to reduce pollution.

Recent research there has also shown that algae-munching fish can clean up smothered coral.

But there is another view; that these measures can only reduce and delay the inevitable impacts of rising greenhouse gas emissions.

The political response to climate change, said Alex Rogers, could be likened to "fiddling while Rome burns".

"Could you imagine if a single event wiped out 16% of the Amazon forest, or 16% of ecosystems in the UK?" he asked.

"I don't think politicians and the public are aware of the gravity of the situation we're in regarding coral reefs and other marine ecosystems."

Beyond value?

About one quarter of marine species are believed to depend on coral at some stage of their development. Many fish live their entire lives on reefs, while others use them as nurseries; presumably if the coral dies out, so do the fish.

The economic impact of losing coral is also significant.

Estimating the monetary value of natural ecosystems is far from being an exact science.

But one assessment published two years ago by the UN Environment Programme (Unep) concludes reefs provide services worth on average between $100,000 and $600,000 (£50,000 and £300,000) per square kilometre each year.

That gives a total global value between $30bn and $180bn (£15bn and £90bn) annually. In some regions, such as Sri Lanka, the value has been estimated to be 10 times the global average.

The same assessment concluded that protecting areas of reef costs about 0.2% of the value they bring.

The new assessment forms one element of a major project to measure threats to ocean ecosystems, the Global Marine Species Assessment, a joint initiative of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and Conservation International (CI).

It will form part of the new IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, due to be published in October.

The IUCN's director general, Julia Marton-Lefevre, said world leaders faced a stark choice.

"We either reduce our CO2 emissions now, or many corals will be lost forever."

Acidifying oceans pose danger to coral reefs
Michael Christie, Reuters 10 Jul 08;

FORT LAUDERDALE, Florida (Reuters) - Like a tooth dipped in a glass of Coca-Cola, coral reefs, lobsters and other marine creatures that build calcified shells around themselves could soon dissolve as climate change turns the oceans increasingly acidic.

The carbon dioxide spewed into the atmosphere by factories, cars and power plants is not just raising temperatures. It is also causing what scientists call "ocean acidification" as around 25 percent of the excess CO2 is absorbed by the seas.

The threat to hard-bodied marine organisms, such as coral reefs already struggling with warming waters, is alarming, and possibly quite imminent, marine scientists gathered this week for a coral reef conference in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, said.

"The threshold for (corals) could be approached by the middle of this century ... when they'll reach a point where they may no longer be able to reproduce themselves as fast as they're being destroyed," said Chris Langdon, am associate professor at the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science.

"It's not going to be instant. They're not going to disappear that year. It may take another 50 or 100 years."

It was only recently that scientists woke up to the fact that global warming would reduce the pH value of the oceans due to a chemical reaction of water with CO2. The pH scale is a measure of alkalinity or acidity, with 7 being neutral.

The pH value of the oceans has been around 8.2 for hundreds of thousands of years, but since the start of the industrial age in 1800, it has dropped by 0.1.

REEF COLLAPSE?

The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change projects it will drop further to 7.8 by the end of the century and some scientists fear the fall could be more precipitous.

A recent study of a natural CO2 vent in the waters off Italy suggests calcifying organisms, like coral, cannot exist in conditions where pH values go below 7.6, said Maoz Fine of Israel's Interuniversity Institute for Marine Science.

"It's like tossing a tooth into a glass of Coke," Fine told reporters at the conference in Fort Lauderdale.

Where pH values dropped to 7.6 at the vent there was a "complete shift from calcifying organisms to none," he said. "It was really quite dramatic, it was very obvious. You don't have to be a specialist to see it."

Stone-hard corals became soft as a sea anemone as their skeletons slowly dissolved in the acidic waters, he said.

Coral specimens had managed to survive without their skeletons in benign laboratory conditions for up to two years, Fine said. But in their natural environment they would be vulnerable to predators, like parrot fish, and suffer increased damage from threats like storms.

Entire reefs would eventually collapse as they lost the mortar holding them together, scientists said.

The threat of ocean acidification is not as immediate to coral as the danger posed by bleaching, which occurs when environmental stresses, like heat, break down the symbiotic relationship between coral polyps and the unicellular algae that give them color.

But it would likely be much harder for coral to adapt to, and would affect coral all over the planet, said Langdon.

Researcher Simon Donner of the University of British Colombia said it was far too late already for the world to avoid climate change.

What coral scientists needed to do was develop ways to help coral reefs adapt to a changing environment so as to buy them another 40 of 60 years of existence before hoped-for cuts in industrial pollution begin to have an impact.

"The climate is like this big ship. In our case the ship's the Titanic and we're going to hit the iceberg. It's almost impossible for us not to hit the iceberg," Donner said.

"What we need to do is everything we can to put the brakes on, to slow the ship down, and then do whatever we can -- hopefully the coral will help us with this -- to move the iceberg a little bit."

(Editing by Jane Sutton and Sandra Maler)

A Third of Reef-Building Corals at Risk of Extinction
Brian Handwerk, National Geographic News 10 Jul 08;

A third of the world's major reef-building coral species are in danger of extinction, an international team of scientists warns in a study published today.

Because coral reefs are home to more than a quarter of all marine species, their loss could be devastating for biodiversity in the world's oceans.

"If corals themselves are at risk of extinction and do in fact go extinct, that will most probably lead to a cascade effect where we will lose thousands and thousands of other species that depend on coral reefs," said the study's lead author Kent Carpenter, a zoologist at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia.

The rate at which reefs have been besieged is most troubling, the scientists say.

Of the 704 corals classified in the study, 231 were listed as "vulnerable," "endangered," or "critically endangered" according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Red List.

A decade ago just 13 species met the same criteria.

The study appears in the online journal Science Express.

On The Brink?

Studies around the globe have made the news of coral reef declines distressingly commonplace, the researchers say.

"What we did was use that information about decline to ask the question, What is the consequence of this on the potential loss of biodiversity?" Carpenter said.

"It's easy for people to understand that coral reefs are at risk, but it's gotten to the point now where the risk of extinction is a reality for the actual species that form the coral reefs. That could be devastating to biodiversity in the ocean."

Some reef locales are faring worse than others, the paper said.

"Caribbean reefs appear to be the worst off in terms of numbers of important species that have a very high risk of extinction," Carpenter reported.

By contrast the "Coral Triangle" region of the Indo-Malay Philippine Archipelago—an area of high marine biodiversity—has the highest number of species appearing on the list, but many are at a lower level of extinction risk.

"It's potentially the next big problem area," Carpenter said. "If conditions worsen, we're talking about the most important marine biodiversity area in the world potentially becoming a big problem."

Meanwhile, areas of the Pacific Ocean stood out as regions where corals are faring better. Reefs among the Pacific's tens of thousands of isolated islands are scattered and relatively unaffected by human activity.

What is Killing Coral?

Experts generally agree that large scale die-offs from bleaching and disease have increased in frequency during recent decades—due at least in part to warming sea-surface temperatures linked to global climate change.

When sea temperatures rise for a sustained period of time by even a small amount, corals may expel their symbiotic food-producing algae, which turns reefs a sickly white.

A massive bleaching event in 1998 related to the El Niño weather phenomenon was the worst coral die-off ever observed. In the succeeding years such events have occurred with increasing frequency and severity.

The impact of disease or bleaching events is even worse when corals are weakened by local impacts such as overfishing, which sometimes targets species that protect reefs. Sedimentation and pollution from coastal development also harm coral health.

Corals do show some capacity to bounce back from bleaching and other destructive events. But if their overall declines are to be reversed, people must address the threats that have landed so many species on the IUCN list, scientists stress.

Related links

One Third of Reef-Building Corals Face Extinction
IUCN Press Release on the IUCN website, 10 Jul 08;

IUCN Global Reef-Building Coral Assessments
Some assessments for the individual coral species on the Old Dominion University website soon to be uploaded on the IUCN website in Oct 08.

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Thinking beyond the basic economics of sustainability

The cost of doing too little, too late
Dr Ooi Giok Ling, Today Online 11 Jul 08;

THE debate on the greening of lifestyles and consumption, particularly in affluent societies, has taken a rather economic turn.

Questioning the costs of greening efforts has tended to cloud the picture and confuse policymakers, the media and societies about the way forward just as it seemed they were waking up to the economic and environmental changes behind the spiralling fuel and food prices and inflation rates that we have not quite seen before.

Hence, the caution that greening should not be done at all costs is puzzling — hasn’t this position been partly responsible for the environmental challenges and ecological collapses the world is facing today?

Proponents focused on the economic costs of greening juxtapose poverty and hunger against an abstract promise of an ecologically and environmentally more sustainable future. This narrow view of working toward greater sustainability lends little clarity of the way forward. What we need is to think out of the box and shift away from scaremongering economics that misses the larger picture.

Thinking out of the box about sustainability takes into consideration technological breakthroughs, which have resulted in progress ranging from pasteurisation to the World Wide Web. These innovations have been driven less by concerns about costs, in the narrow economic sense, than by their benefits. Furthermore, tools such as cost-benefit analysis provide for a wider interpretation of costs and benefits — notions of social and political costs, as well as benefits to be realised from a range of policy options.

The tendency today is to consider a very narrow definition of costs and how these are computed. Available studies, however, show that thinking and acting more sustainably, in terms of our consumption, can only add to the collective good.

Business-as-usual scenarios are, on the other hand, likely to pass the collective costs — pollution, environmental degradation, resource depletion, climate change and associated natural hazards — to everybody. The benefits, in terms of profits, accrue mainly to a few individuals.

Singapore was one of the few countries that decided to clean up as it urbanised and industrialised and has not looked back since. It was one of the earliest among countries to establish a Ministry of Environment as well as effectively implement legislation and policies to combat air and water pollution, among other issues.

Singapore realised the costs in the widest sense, that “fouling” its own nest as well as polluting its air and water would leave the island-state with few alternatives in terms of creating a city in which to live, work and play in a safe and clean environment.

At the same time, its economy did not appear to have been hugely affected by the costs of its early environmental initiatives.

Indeed, the sums that have been done suggest that costs for cleaning up or “greening” for countries might be lower as they urbanise and industrialise, that is, clean up as the economy grows rather than leaving it to be done when they can afford it.

It is sound that each country should decide its own agenda for an environmentally and ecologically more sustainable future. After all, it is futile to force countries to undertake greening efforts for which they have no capacity or resources. Policies that cannot be implemented effectively contribute virtually nothing to the objectives they are meant to achieve, be these clean air or water.

Yet the governments of countries, no matter how poor, have to realise that in a world of inter-connected eco-systems, the environmental problems of one country can become a headache for neighbouring countries. This means that myopic societies too engrossed over short-term revenue-generation to consider the bigger picture and benefits in the long term are passing on the costs of not acting more sustainably.

The agenda for a more sustainable future, however, must bear in mind that it is the poor who inevitably bear the brunt of environmental problems. The poor are most likely to be the ones exposed to life-threatening work that exposes them to toxic waste and other hazards.

They are the ones who are very likely to be living in the most polluted areas and perhaps those who are most vulnerable to natural disasters. More often than not, the poor are also the ones without access to clean drinking water or permanent types of housing with adequate sewage facilities.

In other words, the costs of neglecting the environment, of not thinking about a more sustainable future, are being borne mainly by the hapless poor in most countries.

The writer is a humanities and socialstudies professor at the National Instituteof Education, Nanyang Technological University. The views expressed are her own.

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Living gallery of trees at Yishun Park

Shobana Kesava, Straits Times 11 Jul 08;

A NATURAL museum is growing in Yishun Park, where 860 trees found only in the shrinking rainforests of the Indo-Malayan region have been planted.

The young trees are all from the Dipterocarp family - named after their winged fruit that look like shuttlecocks.

About 70 of the world's 500 or so species were planted by staff of the National Parks Board and Banyan Tree Holdings.

The latter sponsored the $160,000 Dipterocarp Arboretum, which is Singapore's first living gallery of these hardwoods. The money will also fund educational signs and programmes like guided walks for visitors, explaining the heritage of these trees.

Now scrawny and standing at a grown man's height, they could reach 30m high in a century, and still be considered short compared to their majestic cousins in natural rainforests.

The largest known specimen is the termite-resistant Chengal. It stands 80m tall in a forest in Terengganu and is estimated to be about 1,300 years old.

It takes about 13 tree-huggers to span its girth.

This species, along with others like the Shorea, Meranti and Kapur, will line the walkways of about three hectares of the 14-hectare park.

An assistant director at Streetscape, Mr S. K. Ganesan, said: 'Their special qualities have made them highly sought after for timber and they are disappearing from our forests, which makes it important for us to study, and try to preserve them.'

Dipterocarp Arboretum at Yishun Park to enhance urban biodiversity
Chan Eu Imm, Channel NewsAsia 10 Jul 08;

SINGAPORE : Yishun Park, situated in northern Singapore, has become home to an iconic family of rainforest trees called dipterocarps.

This unique collection of forest giants, which can tower up to 80 metres, is part of the National Parks Board's (NParks) initiative to enhance biodiversity within urban areas.

The trees are unique to Southeast Asia and make up the towering backbone of Indo-Malayan rainforests.

"The dipterocarps are the trees that define the forests in our region. By establishing this arboretum, we'll be in a position to see what species of dipterocarps (can be) planted in urban areas," said S K Ganesan, Assistant Director of Streetscape, National Parks Board.

The research will help the board identify hardier species that are suitable for planting along roads.

NParks began planting the saplings throughout the park in June 2007. Completed last month, the sprawling three-hectare arboretum is now home to more than 800 trees, comprising 70 species.

Hotel & resort owner and developer Banyan Tree Holdings poured in S$160,000 (US$120,000) to make this project a reality, as part of its 10-year global Greening Communities programme.

Yishun Park was chosen as the location for the Dipterocarp Arboretum because of its specific topography and soil condition. Educational tours such as guided walks and tree hunts will begin next year. - CNA /ls

Rare trees are a labour of love at Yishun Park
John Heng, Business Times 12 Jul 08;

SINGAPORE'S first Dipterocarp Arboretum at Yishun Park is the result of a win-win situation created by an organisation that knows trees and another with the means - and loves the idea of planting trees as part of a corporate social responsibility move.

In this case, National Parks, along with Banyan Tree Holdings and S$160,000 in tow, came together to develop and nurture this labour of love for education and research.

The man at the centre of it all is Mr S K Ganesan. He speaks of plants like his children and seeds, like angels of love.

This particular family of trees is known as Dipterocarp, which means 'two-winged fruit' - a name derived from the two to five-winged fruits that this family of trees produces. When they fall away from the 'mother' as Mr Ganesan fondly calls the parent tree, they float and 'fly', carried away by the wind.

Dipterocarps, also fondly known as forest giants, are iconic trees that make up the backbone of the Indo-Malayan rainforests and is unique to this region. They are very hardy trees which can live up to 1,000 years and grow up to 80 metres tall. While they are not expected to hit the full 80-m height, due to different growth conditions, they are still expected to grow to a range of 20-40 metres tall.

So the next time you take a walk around Yishun Park, do not jeer at the young and frail looking saplings, for they are very likely to tower over you in a few short years and still be around when you are not.

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New NEA chief no 'tree-hugger'

Tania Tan, Straits Times 11 Jul 08;

THE National Environment Agency's (NEA) new chairman, by her own confession, 'is definitely not a tree-hugger'. But that, Ms Chew Gek Khim reckons, is her forte.

After all, she points out: 'I represent the average, educated Singaporean. How I relate to the environment is probably how the average Singaporean relates, too.'

Looking svelte in an orange cheongsam, the well-manicured Ms Chew, 46, is perhaps best positioned to drive home the green message not just to average Singaporeans, but to companies too.

The granddaughter of banking magnate Tan Chin Tuan, better known as Mr OCBC, is one of the corporate world's elite, and has a 'wealth of experience' working in the corporate sector, said NEA chief executive officer Lee Yuen Hee.

When she stepped up to the post of NEA chairman in April, she took with her an extensive network of business connections. And Mr Lee has high hopes that her influence will help drive the green message home to companies, especially for programmes like the NEA's Energy Efficiency Improvement Assistance Scheme, which co-funds companies' energy audits on their operations. Response has been tepid since it was launched in 2005.

The biggest challenge for the six-year-old agency, she feels, will be to address big companies' fears of hurting the bottom line by going green. But it must win them over, because these firms account for more than half of Singapore's energy usage, which in turn contributes to the country's carbon emissions.

As the straight-talking chairman, who is married and a lawyer by training, puts it: 'It's about finding balance and cutting down on things we don't need.'

To smaller companies, her message will be that going green does not mean getting into the red, and that energy efficiency can help improve their bottom line.

What Ms Chew has going in her favour is an urgent situation - rising oil and energy prices are starting to eat into profits.

She wants to put at the fore of people's minds that their actions - good, bad and ugly - will ultimately have an impact on themselves.

On her part, she has stopped double-bagging her groceries, and is considering switching to a hybrid car. As it is, she already takes short showers.

Any shorter 'and I think you'd start to mind', she quipped.

Ms Chew is currently a board member of several organisations, and deputy chairman of the philanthropic Tan Chin Tuan Foundation. She is also chief executive officer of global investment firm Tecity Group.

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Utility bills: Why you’re feeling the pinch

Hotter weather, higher tariffs among the reasons
Today Online 11 Jul 08;
Letter from Koh Puay Ling (Ms)
Manager (Customer Services)
SP Services Ltd

I REFER to the feedback from your readers, Yan Dawei and Claire Elaine Jerusha Devan on their utility bills in the letters, “Why the sudden surge?” and “No lifestyle change, but bill soaring” (July 4).

We would appreciate it if they could contact us on 6823 8202 to provide us with their account numbers so that we can look into their specific bills.

There are various factors that may have an impact on utility bills. They include:

Changes in electricity tariffs

The electricity tariffs for households have increased for four consecutive quarters from 18.88 cents/kWh in April-June 2007 quarter to 23.88 cents/kWh in April-June this year and most recently to 25.07 cents/kWh for the July-September quarter due to rising oil prices. Some customers may begin to feel the cumulative impact of the increases only now.

Previous estimated bill

Bills are estimated in alternate months based on previous actual meter readings. Some customers’ meter readings in April this year may be under-estimated and when the actual readings were taken in May, the bill amount would be higher due to the adjustments for the under-billing in April.

Higher consumption

Consumption tends to be higher for the second and third quarters of the year compared to the first and last quarters due to the hotter weather. When the weather is hot, consumers tend to use more water and air-conditioning which can lead to higher energy use. Moreover, during the hotter months, air-conditioning consumes more power to maintain the same temperature compared to the cooler months.

Billing period

A typical billing cycle may vary from month to month, between 28 days and 32 days. The billing period may include five weekends, which could result in a perceived increase in the bill.

School holidays

Electricity usage can increase when there are more people and activities in the home during holidays and school vacations (for example, in May and June).

Customers can check if their consumption has increased by looking at the six-month consumption graph at the end of their bill. They can take the average of the two months April/May this year and compare it with February/March to see the change in consumption for the two periods. They can contact us at our customer service hotline 1800 222 2333 if they need any clarification regarding their utility bills.

Customers may also visit our website at www.services.spservices.sg and the National Environment Agency’s website at www.nccc.gov.sg for tips on saving electricity.

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Sun shines on organic farming as oil stays high

Nirmal Ghosh, Straits Times 11 Jul 08;

IN BANGKOK - AT DAYCHA Siripatra's organic farm in central Thailand's Suphamburi province, storks sieve the mud and water, spearing snails in a rice field being readied for planting.

Red ants are busy in the grass and wasps - insect predators that keep 'bad' bugs in check - hum through the air.

Nature is in perfect balance as a man on a tractor does dogged rounds of the muddy field, churning the surface while Mr Daycha inspects rice seedlings to be planted soon in the fertile soil.

Without the aid of chemical fertilisers or pesticides, Mr Daycha, an organic food activist, has been able to achieve an average yield of 7 tonnes per hectare.

The harvest is comparable to yields achieved with the usual heavy doses of chemicals typical of agriculture today as the world's farms struggle to feed six billion people.

Organic farming has become a real alternative thanks to high oil prices, more discerning consumers and wariness of genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

Petroleum, which forms the basis of chemical fertiliser, has seen its price soaring, thus resulting in the current high price of agricultural produce - in particular grains.

For decades, organic rice has struggled for viability in a market dominated by big agribusinesses and farmers who, since the Green Revolution in the 1960s, have been fed the alleged wonders of the chemical quick fix. But that could finally be changing.

As rice prices shot up to 150 pesos (S$4.50) per kg recently in the Philippines, many in Mindanao's Davao City turned to locally grown organic rice which sells at 35 pesos per kg.

In five days in early June, storekeeper May Fabiolas of Bios Dynamis - a venture of the Don Bosco Foundation for Sustainable Development - sold around 100 bags of organic rice, close to a whole month's sales in normal times.

'There was a significant increase because of the affordability and people are also starting to recognise the importance of eating organic rice,' she told the Philippine Daily Inquirer.

The low prices were a consequence of the low price of inputs - 195 pesos per sack of organic fertiliser compared with 1,000 pesos per sack of urea fertiliser.

And organic farmers use their own traditional seeds rather than those produced by big corporations.

Activists like Mr Daycha and India's Vandana Shiva, who tirelessly crisscrosses the globe campaigning against what she says are the false promises of companies peddling GMOs, are at the forefront of the organic movement that is now gaining ground.

Mr Daycha has trained scores of farmers and maintains some 1,000 indigenous seeds on his farm.

The hybrid seeds of the Green Revolution came packaged with chemical inputs, he explains. In the process, farmers lost touch with their own indigenous rice growing traditions as well as the fundamentals of natural ecosystems.

'The farmers have lost everything,' Mr Daycha, 60, told The Straits Times. 'They have to put in more and more fertiliser, insecticide and herbicide; it never stops.

'We are a small number trying to develop appropriate technology to compete, and with a little effort we can work with nature and compete.'

Natural adaptation is far superior to artificial manipulation, he says. 'In order to control insect pests, we essentially do nothing. Nature has its own balance.'

Snails are controlled by birds and fish rather than by chemicals which kill much more than the snails.

After the harvest, rice stalks are ploughed into the waterlogged mud and in two weeks ferment with the aid of natural micro-organisms to become part of the soil.

Dr Shiva's Navdanya Farms in the foothills of the Himalayas was once the first and only source of organic produce in select New Delhi markets.

But the market is now growing. American consumers, for instance, spent US$2.7 billion (S$3.7 billion) on organic milk in 2007, up from US$382 million a decade earlier.

Says Dr Shiva: 'The most important thing about ecological farming is it is not about single commodity farming.

'Acre to acre, a small biodiverse farm produces more than an industrial chemical-intensive farm.'

And that includes all manner of food from fish to ducks and chickens, vegetables and fruit.

For years, big agribusiness corporations have been pushing their own seeds or GMOs, which are not adapted to local site-specific conditions and force farmers to buy other inputs from them.

As such, a generation of farmers has been fed the mantra of the technological fix and is 'locked into the paradigm of chemically supported agriculture', says Mr Daycha.

And ecological farming has not been accepted wholesale, as mainstream scientists remain cautious of the movement.

In an e-mail to The Straits Times, Mr Achim Dobermann, deputy director-general of research at the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, wrote that successes in organic agriculture were difficult to scale up to millions of farmers.

'What we need is judicious use of those organic nutrient sources that are readily available and economical, and judicious use of mineral fertilisers,' he said.

Bangkok-based Sumiter Singh Broca, a policy officer with the Food and Agricultural Organisation, takes a more open but cautious view, acknowledging that natural pest management does work.

For Dr Shiva, the issue is simple: 'We need more production of food, and that is better done ecologically.'

Read more!

South China Tigers Teeter on Brink of Extinction

PlanetArk 11 Jul 08;

YIHUANG, China - Dragging on a cigarette between his wrinkled lips, Hou Fengqi fingered a dusty bamboo bow and rusty iron-tipped arrows, before recounting his days as a "tiger hunting hero" in the rugged hills of southern China.

"The first tiger was the largest, around 150kg, and when we carried it back to the village, everyone ran out and cheered," said Hou with a gap-toothed grin, casting his mind back to 1959.

Hou, now 69, is one of China's last living tiger hunters -- as rare a breed as the striped beasts he used to track in the misty, bamboo clad forests of Yihuang county in Jiangxi province.

"In the old days life was hard, so killing a tiger made me happy as it helped improve my family's livelihood," he said, sitting outside his wooden home beside verdant rice paddies.

While Hou bagged six South China tigers in his youth; hunting and deforestation have driven this keystone Chinese species close to extinction -- with none seen or captured in the past 20 years.

Historically revered as an archetypal Chinese cultural symbol, the tiger's decline was accelerated by poaching for traditional Chinese medicine and "anti-pest" campaigns instigated by Chairman Mao Zedong from the 1950's, to rid the countryside of the cattle-raiding "vermin".

Thousands of tigers were killed off with hunters praised by the Communist Party and paid a 30 yuan bounty per tiger pelt.

Now one of the world's rarest and most elusive of mammals, the South China tiger is fully protected by the Chinese government, with no more than 10-20 wild individuals estimated to remain along the remote border areas of China's rapidly developing provinces of Guangdong, Jiangxi, Fujian and Hunan.


CAPTIVE TIGERS

While the wild status of Chinese tigers remains uncertain, there remain around 70 captive individuals, derived from just six wild-caught founders in the 1950's.

The last of their kind -- these tigers have nevertheless suffered inbreeding, dismal caged conditions, low birth rates and a tainted lineage from hybridisation with other tiger subspecies.

In 2003, the sluggish, ill-funded and fragmented tiger conservation scene took an unexpected twist, with a scheme to "rewild" South China tigers in a South African game reserve.

The radical concept of transplanting Chinese tigers to the African bush drew fire at first from experts, but its aim of rehabilitating tigers to hunt wild prey in a secure, fenced off wilderness -- has led to the birth of five cubs, three of which have survived -- giving the species vital new impetus.

The tigers will eventually be reintroduced back to the wild in China, with a site already earmarked in Zixi county in Jiangxi province.

"We want to release the tigers back into areas where they've been roaring for millions of years," said Quan Li, the head of Save China's Tigers, the conservation body behind the project.

Tiger conservation initiatives in China however, have never enjoyed much state support, a far cry from the abundance of funding and nature reserves devoted to China's other flagship indigenous mammalian species -- the Giant Panda.

The tiger's fearsome reputation and its need for extensive territory in which to roam has made reintroduction of the species a major challenge in China's highly populated south.

"The panda and man can exist peacefully together, but an element of danger separates the relationship between tiger and man," said Xu Guoyi, the mayor of Zixi who is seeking financing of around US$24 million to build a 20 square kilometre fenced eco-tourism reserve for "rewilded" South China tigers.

"This project is of course more difficult than the panda project, because pandas are a national conservation priority," Xu added, saying he was now lobbying the government for funding, without which the project might not get off the ground.

"If the (South China) tiger can help preserve wild habitat as opposed to being simply a source of conflict right now ... that's going to be positive for tigers and biodiversity," said Philip Nyhus, a tiger expert from Colby college in the US who advises the Chinese government on tiger conservation.


PAPER TIGERS?

Unlike the cuddly Giant Panda, an icon for the upcoming Olympics, the Chinese tiger's plight had been far less prominent in the public eye, garnering few headlines or attention.

Last October however, public sentiment flared when a poor farmer took what he claimed were the first photos of a wild tiger in decades, his story backed by local forestry officials.

The photos sparked an Internet and public frenzy, as euphoria at the rediscovery turned to anger, with bloggers and citizens dissecting the images to expose them as digitally altered fakes.

Public outrage at the "Tigergate" scandal led to the eventual sacking of 13 provincial officials in a rare show of people power in communist China.

Another recent video of a purported wild tiger in Hunan was exposed as a scam of a domesticated tiger plucked from a circus.

"It's so gratifying to see so many people paid attention and wanted to contribute money to our fund," said Quan, who has battled public indifference and bureaucratic redtape for years.

"China needs a tiger, a national symbol to resurrect its cultural value and its biological values," she added.

Despite the hoaxes, villagers in some of the remoter areas of south China, still believe tigers still exist against the odds.

Hou Fengwen, a teacher in a Jiangxi village, says he heard a growl on a mountain trek with his family two years ago.

"We heard a tiger calling, the sound wasn't loud, but the three of us felt the ground trembling slightly," he said, adding a subsequent search of the surrounding hills showed up nothing.

"There are tigers here, we just can't find them."

(Writing by James Pomfret; Editing by Megan Goldin)

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Flamingos under threat from pollution

Paul Eccleston, The Telegraph 10 Jul 08;

A key nesting site for one of Africa's emblematic birds is under threat from development and pollution.

Kamfers Dam near Kimberley, South Africa, is the only nesting site for lesser flamingos in the country and one of only six breeding areas for the birds in the world.

South Africa has nominated the wetlands as a Natural Heritage Site because it supports an important population of Lesser flamingos as well as many other waterbird species.

More than 50,000 lesser flamingos - about 50 per cent of the South African population - nested at Kamfers Dam and produced 9,000 chicks on an s-shaped island specially created for the birds, this year.

The flamingo has become a symbol for the city of Kimberley and an important revenue earner as their spectacular flying displays brings tourists from all over the continent.

The city has a Flamingo School, a Flamingo Real Estate, a Flamingo Race Course and a Flamingo Casino. Flamingos are also included in the emblems of the Sol Plaatje Municipality and the Frances Baard District Municipality.

But the 400-hectare site on the northern outskirts of Kimberley, in Northern Cape Province is facing a twin threat caused by urban sprawl.

The flamingos already have to cope with deteriorating water quality believed to be caused by pollution from a nearby sewage plant which may be causing visible deformities in their offspring.

Scientists are concerned about young birds seen with swollen joints and open sores and tests are under way to discover the causes.

Campaigners say rapid growth and development in Kimberley and a rise in the population has led to raw sewage flowing into Kamfers Dam as the sewage works cannot cope and needs upgrading.

Now a plan to build new homes in a buffer zone set up to protects the birds' island may lead to them deserting the site because lesser flamingos are notoriously vulnerable to disturbance and human encroachment.

The artificial island where they breed was built in late 2006 by Ekapa Mining company which won the Nedbank Capital Green Mining Award as a result.

It is S-shaped to provide two sheltered bays for lesser flamingos with the long axis of the island facing into the wind to limit wind and water erosion.

It has four large ponds, fed by a solar-powered pump. Flamingos use wet clay from the ponds to construct their nest turrets, or mounds, which resemble sandcastles. Kimberley's guides, scouts and other schoolchildren helped build 1,000 artificial turrets.

Now a campaign (www.savetheflamingo.co.za) has been launched by local conservationists in an attempt to protect the bird.

They want the infrastructure at the Homevale Sewerage Works to be upgraded and an independent management agent brought in to run it.

The campaign is also calling for leaking water pipes - resulting in 40 per cent of water being lost and increasing the volume of sewage - to be repaired.

And Duncan Pritchard, Acting Executive Director of BirdLife South Africa, said: "Creating the breeding island at Kamfers Dam was a huge investment and its future should not be jeopardised by development or pollution.

"If tests prove the birds' deformities are being caused by poor water quality, many other species and possibly the entire aquatic system of the dam could be at risk.

"Without urgent action the dam will become a polluted cesspool devoid of birdlife and a hazard to the people of Kimberley. If nothing is done and the housing development is allowed, our political leaders will have failed us."

The lesser flamingo is also threatened at an important site in Tanzania in east Africa.

Between 1.5m and 2.5m birds - 75 per cent of the world's population - have nested on Lake Natron which for years has been the species' most important breeding site in the world but the Tanzanian government is backing the plans of the Indian multinational company TATA to develop the site. TATA wants to take saltwater and freshwater from the area for the export of soda ash.

Paul Buckley, an Africa specialist with the RSPB, said: "Lesser flamingos are facing enormous threats most of which are being caused by man. South and East Africa are incredibly important areas for these birds and the loss of lesser flamingos from Kamfers Dam and Lake Natron would together be a very serious blow to an already gravely threatened species.

"Lesser flamingos have declined throughout Africa and Kamfers Dam should be allowed to become an important sanctuary for these birds."

More details of Kamfers Dam and an online petition to save Kamfers Dam's lesser flamingos are available at www.savetheflamingo.co.za and more on Lake Natron can be found at www.rspb.org.uk/news.

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As planet swelters, are algae unlikely saviour?

Pierre-Henry Deshayes, Yahoo News 10 Jul 08;

As the world mulls over the conundrum of how to satisfy a seemingly endless appetite for energy and still slash greenhouse gas emissions, researchers have stumbled upon an unexpected hero: algae.

So-called microalgae hold enormous potential when it comes to reining in both climate change, since they naturally absorb large amounts of carbon dioxide, as well as energy production, since they can easily be converted to a range of different fuel types.

"This is certainly one of the most promising and revolutionary leads in the fight against climate change and the quest to satisfy energy needs," Frederic Hauge, who heads up the Norwegian environmental group Bellona, told AFP.

The idea is to divert exhaust spewed from carbon burning plants and other factories into so-called "photobioreactors", or large transparent tubes filled with algae.

When the gas is mixed with water and injected into the tubes, the algae soak up much of the carbon dioxide, or CO2, in accordance with the principle of photosynthesis.

The pioneering technique, called solar biofuels, is one of a panoply of novel methods aiming to crack the problem of providing energy but without the carbon pollution of costly fossil fuels -- with oil pushing 140 dollars a barrel and supplies dwindling -- or the waste and danger of nuclear power.

Studies are underway worldwide, from academia in Australia, Germany and the US, to the US Department of Energy, oil giant Royal Dutch Shell and US aircraft maker Boeing. This week alone, Japanese auto parts maker Denso Corp., a key supplier to the Toyota group, said it too would start investigating, to see if algae could absorb CO2 from its factories.

The prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), for one, has successfully tested the system, finding that once filtered through the algae broth, fumes from a cogeneration plant came out 50-85 percent lighter on CO2 and contained 85 percent less of another potent greenhouse gas, nitrogen oxide.

Once the microalgae are removed from the tubes they can easily be buried or injected into the seabed, and thus hold captive the climate changing gases they ingest indefinitely.

And when algae grown out in the open are used in biomass plants, the method can actually produce "carbon negative" energy, meaning the energy production actually drains CO2 from the atmosphere.

This is possible since the microalgae first absorbs CO2 as it grows and, although the gas is released again when the biomass burns, the capturing system keeps it from re-entering the air.

"Whether you are watching TV, vacuuming the house, or driving your electric car to visit friends and family, you would be removing CO2 from the atmosphere," Hauge said.

Instead of being stored away, the algae can also be crushed and used as feedstock for biodiesel fuel -- something that could help the airline industry among others to improve its environmental credentials. In fact, even the algae residue remaining after the plants are pressed into biodiesel could be put to good use as mineral-rich fertiliser, Hauge said

"You kill three birds with one stone. The algae serves at once to filter out CO2 at industrial sites, to produce energy and for agriculture," he pointed out.

Compared with the increasingly controversial first-generation biofuels made from food crops like sunflowers, rapeseed, wheat and corn, microalgae have the huge advantage of not encroaching on agricultural land or affecting farm prices, and can be grown whenever there's sunlight.

They also can yield far more oil than other oleaginous plants grown on land.

"To cover US fuel needs with biodiesel extracted from the most efficient terrestrial plant, palm oil, it would be necessary to use 48 percent of the country's farmland," according to a recent study by the Oslo-based Centre for International Climate and Environmental Research.

"The United States could potentially replace all of its petrol-based automobile fuel by farming microalgae on a surface corresponding to five percent of the country's farmland," the study added.

As attractive as it may seem however, the algae solution remains squarely in the conception phase, with researchers scrambling to figure out how to scale up the system to an industrial level.

Shell, for one, acknowledged on its website some "significant hurdles must be overcome before algae-based biofuel can be produced cost-effectively," especially the large amounts of water needed for the process. In addition, further work is needed to identify which species of algae is the most effective.

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Australia Food-Bowl Drought Worsens, Rains Spare Wheat

Rob Taylor, PlanetArk 11 Jul 08;

CANBERRA - The prolonged drought in Australia's Murray-Darling river system is worsening and the country's main food bowl may forever be changed by accelerating climate warming, government officials said on Thursday.

Despite good autumn rains, June inflows into the river basin were the lowest in more than a century on record and climate experts are tipping a 60-70 percent chance of below average rain in the next decade, with the year ahead likely to be a "shocker".

The drought will hit irrigated crops like rice, grapes and horticulture the hardest, but would have less impact on output of wheat, which depends largely on rainfall during specific periods and is on track to double after two years of shrunken crops.

"Regrettably, the drought is getting worse," said Wendy Craik, chief executive of the government's overseeing Murray-Darling Basin Commission, revealing June inflows were only 95 gigalitres against a long-term average of 680gl.

"If the sort of climatic regime we've had in the past couple of years becomes a feature of the future, it's pretty clear we don't have the volume of water available that we've had in the past. Clearly the basin is not going to be the same," Craik said.

After good early rains, which briefly eased Australia's worst dry spell in 100 years, dry weather has set in again in the past three months, plunging more rural areas back into drought.

The Murray-Darling, an area the size of France and Germany, produces 41 percent of Australia's agriculture and provides A$21 billion (US$20 billion) worth of farm exports to Asia and the Middle East. Some 70 percent of all irrigated agriculture comes from the sprawling region.

Wheat is grown throughout areas surrounding the basin and the brief wet spell prompted many growers to "bet the farm" on a good season, hoping another brief break in the long dry will come at the right time for a bumper harvest.

Although the June dry spell forced analysts to revise down their initial forecasts for a near-record crop, current expectations for a harvest of about 23 million tonnes would be well up from 10-13 million tonnes over the past two years.

Neil Plummer, Senior Climatologist at Australia's National Climate Centre, said rains barely dented the drought, or the one-in-two chance of a dry year ahead. As well, long-term trends now pointed to 6-7 years of below average rain each decade.

"Autumn can only be described as an absolute shocker in terms of climate conditions for the basin," Plummer said.

Craik said while the basin was expected to have enough water for critical needs in the coming year, many irrigators would face zero or near-zero water allocations and environmental river flows would be slashed to a bare minimum.

The warming outlook for what is already the world's driest inhabited continent would also force hard decisions on river use, with the water needed to save threatened lakes more than the total extracted last year by basin irrigators, she said.

The government's top climate adviser, economist Ross Garnaut, last week said the Murray-Darling could be devastated by climate change without global action, with irrigated agriculture slashed by 92 percent.

The current drought has already wiped more than A$20 billion from the economy since 2002.

But Craik said growers were proving surprisingly resilient, pointing to barely changed grape harvests last year, which dropped from 1.9 to 1.8 mln tonnes as farmers introduced more water-efficient cropping systems.

"Farmers can be incredibly adaptable," she said. (Additional reporting by Michael Byrnes; Editing by Jonathan Leff)

Read more!

In search of the perfect cash crop

Wycliffe Muga, BBC News 10 Jul 08;

If I were asked what our great national goal is in Kenya, I would say that it is the search for the perfect cash crop.

And I suppose this would also be the goal for many African countries:

If most of your national population live in rural areas and you are realistic enough to appreciate that dreams of creating enough jobs through industrialization are not likely to come true then you will sooner or later arrive at this question:

What is there that a small scale farmer can grow on approximately five acres of land that would enable him to provide for his family?

And at different times, we have seen a variety of cash crops offer the promise of an answer to this question.

Memories of coffee

Most spectacular was coffee in the mid-1970s.

Owing to a sudden frost in Brazil in 1975 which damaged millions of coffee trees in the plantations of the world's largest coffee producer, there was a monumental rise in coffee prices which lasted for years.

During that period, being a small scale coffee farmer ensured a better income than employment in most professions in Kenya.

Farmers who could barely afford shoes for their children a few years earlier were suddenly able to afford small cars.

Those who owned large coffee plantations became outright millionaires. Coffee was referred to locally as black gold.

But as production went up, prices went down

It was not only Kenyan coffee farmers who had overestimated the value of owning coffee trees. Vietnam increased its coffee production tenfold between 1980 and 2000.

Although it was plain enough that this windfall was purely accidental - and the result of climatic factors many thousands of miles away - the sudden prosperity of coffee farmers was seen as proof that small scale agriculture could indeed be a highly profitable venture, provided you had the right cash crop at the right time.

Kenyans have since then been devoutly searching for the next big thing in small scale agriculture.

We have had cashew nuts, macadamia nuts, vanilla, silk worms, eucalyptus trees for export to the treeless Middle East and many others - promoted at one time or another as the salvation of the Kenyan small scale farmer.

Domestic focus

Right now, the focus is on various crops said to have oil-bearing seeds which can be used to produce bio-diesel.

But so far, none of these have led to the sort of incomes witnessed in the glory days of the coffee boom.

And with the recent increase in global food prices having made groceries more expensive, farmers are now more concerned with growing indigenous food crops to feed their families, than with exotic export crops which cannot be eaten if the international demand for these should collapse.

Indeed, the only small scale farmers in Kenya who have been able to regain the prosperity of the 1970s are coffee growers whose land happened to be near some urban centre.

Those living around Central Province, which is the most densely populated part of Kenya, benefited most from the pressure for new homes and demand for land.

In recent years, coffee trees have been uprooted in such areas and the farms subdivided and converted to residential plots which are then sold off at a huge profit.

So while the romance of the perfect crop lives on, the reality of economic survival - and the pragmatism it engenders - is never far away.

Read more!

The biofuels report they didn't want you to read

Exclusive: we publish the biofuels report they didn't want you to read
The implication of the report is that crop-derived fuels have been the ultimate cause of food riots, starvation and high prices around the world
The Guardian 10 Jul 08;

Seventeen pages of graphs, footnotes and economic modelling; oh, and another couple of pages of bibliography. Hardly the stuff to get the pulse racing, you might think.

But in the week since the Guardian exclusively revealed the contents of the World Bank's draft internal report on the link between biofuels and food prices, its findings have been reported in newspapers, blog and broadcast media from Durban to Delhi.

What's caused all the fuss? Well, the World Bank report argues that the drive for biofuels by American and European governments has pushed up food prices by 75%. That is in stark contrast with the White House's claims that using crops for fuel, rather than food, has only pushed prices up by 2-3%.

All the other factors discussed - rising demand for food from China and India, back-to-back droughts in Australia - are, the report says, marginal:

Without the increase in biofuels, global wheat and maize stocks would not have declined appreciably and price increases due to other factors would have been moderate.

The implication of this report, then, is that crop-derived fuels have been the ultimate cause of food riots, starvation and high prices around the world. And it is not an anti-biofuels campaigner who arrived at that conclusion, but an internationally respected World Bank economist with three decades' experience in tracking commodity markets.

This is controversial stuff. It was certainly too controversial for the World Bank to publish when the report was completed back in April.

One source told me the study had gone all the way up to Robert Zoellick, the head of the World Bank, but was not published because "it was too hot for the Bank to handle".

Prompted by the Guardian's report, the Bank may now push the report out - although it may not be in quite this form. We'd rather you saw the original, which is why
we're publishing it today, here: PDF of World Bank biofuels report.

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Old idea of using bioplastics gets a new lease of life

Researchers are following Henry Ford's footsteps by developing food-based plastics as oil prices rise
Lee Bruno, The Guardian 10 Jul 08;

Landfills and plastics don't mix well. It takes several hundred years for an oil-based plastic bottle to breakdown in a landfill. And plastics can consume as much as 25% of the landfill space, according to the US government's Energy Information Administration.

Those two problems are helping drive innovation into new bioplastic packaging material at research institutions including Missouri University Science and Technology. There, researchers are cooking up recipes for super-biodegradable plastics that decompose in a few months.

These bioplastics are welcome improvements for US cities running out of landfill capacity over the next two decades.

In several states - such as Alaska, Connecticut, Delaware, North Carolina, New Hampshire and Rhode Island - capacity is expected to run out in just five years.

Dr KB Lee, professor of chemical engineering at Missouri S&T, and his team are investigating super-biodegradable plastic recipes made up of fillers, such as starch and fibres. Those natural building blocks make it possible for living organisms to break down waste material. Not only do these fillers accelerate the decomposition, but they also reduce the cost in a variety of commercial applications.

Wear, tear and weather

Lee's team is experimenting with renewable polymers such as glycerol, a byproduct of biodiesel manufacturing, and polyactic acid, a byproduct of ethanol fermentation. By combining and creating blends of polymers, the researchers believe the formulations will be suitable for applications such as agricultural films, bottles, biomedical and drug delivery devices.

Researchers agree that bio-based plastics have shortcomings, including being more expensive than petroleum plastics to produce and having limited mechanical strength properties. "It would be hard to expect a plastic product with excellent resistance against wearing, tearing, and weathering during its service life to also have biodegradability after usable service life," says Lee.

The challenges of higher prices are not new. Early in the 20th century, American inventors Henry Ford and George Carver tested formulations of plastics derived from foodstuffs in their labs. But they found the material wasn't cost-competitive with cheap oil-based plastics.

Today, the rising price of oil, coupled with innovative bio-plastic formulations, has improved the commercial outlook for these products. For example, bioplastics are considered good fits for different types of single-use products, such as low-grade stuffing materials, agricultural product containers and bags and packaging for materials with short expiration dates.

US-based market research body Freedonia Group estimates that demand in the $330m (£161m) US market in degradable plastic will grow 13.7% each year as prices and properties become more competitive with conventional polymers.

Other research efforts are focused on improving the strength of these bioplastic materials. Dr David Grewell, assistant professor of agriculture and biosystems engineering at Iowa State University and colleagues are tackling the mechanical weakness by reinforcing bioplastics with nanoclays. These tiny pieces of clay are between just 10- and 20-billionths of a metre in thickness.

The Iowa State researchers are using zein - natural proteins derived from corn and soy plants - which have stronger mechanical properties. One application for bioplastic formulations, says Grewell, is for garden plant pots. The bioplastic pots can be placed in the ground with the plant, thus supplying nutrients to the plant as it breaks down. Other potential applications for bioplastics made from crop proteins include disposable wraps for hay bales and packaging for the food industry. Another application is making green, biodegradable lubrication sticks from soy grease: Grewell and the Cornell researchers are working with prototypes as part of a 20-month pilot project.

Another research effort, 1,000 miles to the east of Iowa State, is based at Dr Emmanuel Giannelis' lab at Cornell University. The researchers there are also using nanotechnology techniques to build composite materials with properties that permit them to decompose faster, yet have mechanical strength and durability. "What we're trying to do is make biodegradable plastics far more attractive," says Giannelis.

Giannelis and his team have used a natural polymer called poly 3-hydroxybutyrate (PHB) to make a bin bag. The microbes produce the material as a way to store energy in the same way the human body produces fat to store energy.

Mad munching microbes

The Cornell team's composite material behaved as a clear plastic polymer but broke down almost completely in compost at room temperature within seven weeks. The rapid breakdown is enhanced by small spaces between the particles, which make the material more vulnerable to chemical attack and consumption by microbes. What's more, the material can also tolerate higher temperatures, thus making it suitable for a broader range of applications.

The outlook for bioplastics research is encouraging. The two most promising areas of research are in the use of polymer-clay nanocomposites (PCNs) and using nanoparticles or nanostructured materials as modifiers, compatibilisers and fillers. With new legislation under consideration across the US for raising landfill prices, plus the increasing cost of oil, the market opportunity for bioplastics may have its day, long after Ford and Carver tinkered with recyclable plastics.

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Researchers develop efficient solar power devices

Will Dunham, Reuters 10 Jul 08;

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Using sheets of glass covered with organic dyes, scientists have devised an efficient and practical solar power device that they believe can help make this clean, renewable energy source more affordable.

Experts eager for energy sources that do not involve the burning of fossil fuels often point to the promise of solar energy -- harnessing sunlight to make electricity. But solar power so far has proven costlier than standard energy sources.

Writing on Thursday in the journal Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers describe the development of a new type of "solar concentrator" that may provide a better way to extract energy from the sun.

They used glass sheets coated in organic dyes to concentrate light hitting the panes. The dyes absorbed the light, then emitted it into the glass, which carried the light to the edges of the pane much as fiber-optic cables transport light over distances, the researchers said.

At the edges of the glass are located small solar cells that then transform the light into electricity.

"It consists of just a piece of glass with a layer of paint on top of it," MIT electrical engineering professor Marc Baldo, who led the research, said in a telephone interview.

"The idea is the light comes in and hits the paint. The paint then bounces the light out to the edges of the glass. All you need is the solar cells on the edges. So we think we can use this to reduce the cost of solar electricity," added said.

MIT researcher Jonathan Mapel, who also worked on the study, said the hope is that the use of this sort of technology can help bring the cost of solar power closer to the cost of conventional fossil fuel power sources such as coal.

"One of the challenges with solar (energy) in general is that it's just too high in cost. And what you'd like to do is reduce the price of solar electricity," Mapel said.

Solar concentrators collect sunlight over a large area -- in this case the panes of glass -- and concentrate it into a small solar cell that turns the light into electricity.

Existing solar concentrators use mirrors or lenses to concentrate the light. The sheets used in this research are flat and light, thus can be utilized in solar panels placed on roofs or even used as windows that could generate power.

The new system, unlike some concentrators, does not have to move to track the progression of the sun across the sky in order to provide a continuous power source, Baldo said.

The researchers think their system could be available within three years and even could be added onto existing solar-panel systems to increase their efficiency.

"This accomplishment demonstrates the critical importance of innovative basic research in bringing about revolutionary advances in solar energy utilization in a cost-effective manner," Aravinda Kini of the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science, a sponsor of the work, said in a statement.

Some of the MIT researchers are forming a company, Covalent Solar, based in Boston to develop and market the technology.

(Editing by Anthony Boadle)

More Efficient Solar Energy Collectors Attach to Windows
Andrea Thompson, LiveScience.com Yahoo News 10 Jul 08;

A new, compact way to collect sunlight from windows and focus it to generate more electricity could make those multiple expensive rooftop solar panels a thing of the past.

The solar panels that cover the tops of some buildings today contain photovoltaic cells that convert sunlight into electricity. Unlike burning coal, collecting and converting solar energy releases no greenhouse gases, which warm the atmosphere. Limited efficiency and high construction costs have kept solar from producing more than about 0.07 percent of U.S. energy needs in 2007, according to figures from the U.S. Department of Energy.

Solar concentrators can be used to increase the electrical power obtained from the photovoltaic cells. But most concentrators in use today "track the sun to generate high optical intensities, often by using large mobile mirrors that are expensive to deploy and maintain," said MIT's Marc A. Baldo, who led the team that created the new type of solar concentrator.

New approach

Instead of covering a large area with solar cells, the new method only requires locating cells around the edges of a flat glass panel.

The MIT solar concentrator involves a mixture of two or more dyes painted onto a pane of glass or plastic. The dyes absorb light across a range of wavelengths, reemit it at a different wavelength and transport it across the pane to the solar cells at the edges.

"Light is collected over a large area [like a window] and gathered, or concentrated, at the edges," Baldo said.

Focusing the light like this increases the electrical power generated by each solar cell "by a factor of 40," he added.

The work was funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science.

Old idea

Scientists had tried using similar solar concentrators in the 1970s, but abandoned the idea when not enough of the collected light reached the edges of the concentrator. The MIT engineers revamped the idea by using a mixture of dyes in specific ratios, which allows some level of control over how the light is transmitted.

"We made it so the light can travel a much longer distance," said study team member Jon Mapel, an MIT graduate student. "We were able to substantially reduce light transport losses, resulting in a tenfold increase in the amount of power converted by the solar cells."

Because the system, detailed in the July 11 issue of the journal Science, is simple to manufacture, the team thinks that it can be implemented within three years. It could also be added on to existing solar-panel systems, increasing their efficiency and reducing the cost of solar energy.

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Antarctic ice shelf 'hanging by thread': European scientists

Yahoo News 10 Jul 08;

New evidence has emerged that a large plate of floating ice shelf attached to Antarctica is breaking up, in a troubling sign of global warming, the European Space Agency (ESA) said on Thursday.

Images taken by its Envisat remote-sensing satellite show that Wilkins Ice Shelf is "hanging by its last thread" to Charcot Island, one of the plate's key anchors to the Antarctic peninsula, ESA said in a press release.

"Since the connection to the island... helps stabilise the ice shelf, it is likely the breakup of the bridge will put the remainder of the ice shelf at risk," it said.

Wilkins Ice Shelf had been stable for most of the last century, covering around 16,000 square kilometres (6,000 square miles), or about the size of Northern Ireland, before it began to retreat in the 1990s.

Since then several large areas have broken away, and two big breakoffs this year left only a narrow ice bridge about 2.7 kilometres (1.7 miles) wide to connect the shelf to Charcot and nearby Latady Island.

The latest images, taken by Envisat's radar, say fractures have now opened up in this bridge and adjacent areas of the plate are disintegrating, creating large icebergs.

Scientists are puzzled and concerned by the event, ESA added.

The Antarctic peninsula -- the tongue of land that juts northward from the white continent towards South America -- has had one of the highest rates of warming anywhere in the world in recent decades.

But this latest stage of the breakup occurred during the Southern Hemisphere's winter, when atmospheric temperatures are at their lowest.

One idea is that warmer water from the Southern Ocean is reaching the underside of the ice shelf and thinning it rapidly from underneath.

"Wilkins Ice Shelf is the most recent in a long, and growing, list of ice shelves on the Antarctic Peninsula that are responding to the rapid warming that has occurred in this area over the last fifty years," researcher David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) said.

"Current events are showing that we were being too conservative, when we made the prediction in the early 1990s that Wilkins Ice Shelf would be lost within 30 years. The truth is, it is going more quickly than we guessed."

In the past three decades, six Antarctic ice shelves have collapsed completely -- Prince Gustav Channel, Larsen Inlet, Larsen A, Larsen B, Wordie, Muller and the Jones Ice Shelf.

Antarctic Ice Shelf All But Lost
LiveScience.comT, Yahoo News 10 Jul 08;

A vast shelf of ice in Antarctica is hanging on to the continent by a thread and is not expected to survive, scientists announced today.

The Wilkins Ice Shelf is experiencing further disintegration that could collapse an ice bridge connecting the shelf to Charcot Island. Since the connection to the island helps to stabilize the ice shelf, it is likely the breakup of the bridge will put the remainder of the ice shelf at risk, the researchers said.

The disintegration is evident in images from the European Space Agency's Envisat satellite.

The Wilkins Ice Shelf, a broad plate of floating ice south of South America on the Antarctic Peninsula that is connected to Charcot and Latady Islands, had been stable for most of the last century before it began retreating in the 1990s. A major breakup was spotted in May, the second this year.

This third significant breakup is puzzling because it occurred in the Southern Hemispheric winter. It's also behaving differently than previous breakups.

"The scale of rifting in the newly-removed areas seems larger, and the pieces are moving out as large bergs and not toppled, finely-divided ice melange," said Ted Scambos from the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center.

The Antarctic Peninsula's atmosphere has experienced more warming than any other part of the southern-most continent; in the past 50 years, it has experienced 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit (2.5 degrees Celsius) of warming. The warming has been so drastic because the peninsula is sandwiched between a region with substantially rising air temperatures and a warming ocean.

But warm water seems to be at least partly to blame for the recent disintegration, Scambos said.

In the past 20 years, seven ice shelves along the peninsula have retreated or come apart, including the spectacular 2002 breakup of the Larsen B Ice Shelf. The entire Wilkins shelf, before the recent breakups, covered about 6,180 square miles (16,000 square kilometers - about the size of Northern Ireland).

"Wilkins Ice Shelf is the most recent in a long, and growing, list of ice shelves on the Antarctic Peninsula that are responding to the rapid warming that has occurred in this area over the last fifty years," said David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey. "Current events are showing that we were being too conservative when we made the prediction in the early 1990s that Wilkins Ice Shelf would be lost within thirty years - the truth is it is going more quickly than we guessed."

Meanwhile at the top of the world, melting has become so rapid that scientists say the North Pole could be ice-free this summer.

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Argentine Glacier Sheds Ice in Rare Winter Breakup

PlanetArk 11 Jul 08;

BUENOS AIRES - Part of Argentina's Perito Moreno glacier collapsed on Wednesday, the first time large chunks of ice have broken off during the southern hemisphere winter.

Park wardens said global warming might be responsible.

The Patagonian glacier known as the "White Giant" is one of Argentina's biggest attractions. The river of ice 18 miles (30 km) long ends in a sheer wall blocking Lago Argentino where large pieces tumble into the water from time to time.

Tourists and locals visited the site in recent days, hoping to catch a glimpse of the rare spectacle, but only a few were on the observation deck when the roof of an ice tunnel caved in early on Wednesday, a National Glaciers Park official said.

"It's the first time the glacier's broken in winter (since records began)," park warden Carlos Corvalan said earlier this week, when the glacier started to crack.

Wednesday's rupture occurred after several days of partial break-ups, according to the provincial government's Perito Moreno Web site, http://www.lupacorp.com/glaciar/us/.

The glacier sheds ice roughly every four years, and the last time big ice chunks fell off was March 2006.

Argentina's Glaciers Park is home to more than 200 glaciers and is the biggest continental ice extension in the world after Antarctica, according to the park's Web site. (Reporting by Helen Popper and Walter Bianchi, Editing by Anthony Boadle)

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