Registration for 18 Oct ReefWalk @ Kusu is now open!
on the ashira blog
Asian Toad
on the Creatures Big & Small blog
Bukit Timah Hill in the failing light of day
on the Places in Singapore blog
Tuas Power vs Senoko Power
which is greener on AsiaIsGreen
‘Grow Things’ Program
on the Cicada Tree Eco-Place blog and their Jungle Friends events
Maps, Online Communities and Games for the Environment
on the Reuters Environment blog
Power Points
Letters to the Straits Times Forum 1 Oct 08;
'Is this about the relentless pursuit of profit?'
MR HARVEY NEO: 'Instead of using the price of oil as the reason for the increase, we should first ask whether a monopolistic energy company has been accumulating losses in providing electricity. If it continues to be profitable, why increase the burden of citizens? Is this about the relentless pursuit of profit in privatised enterprises? There is a limit on how much electricity households can cut down. Perhaps there's merit in nationalising energy providers. One common argument against nationalisation is that service standards may drop and the company may become inefficient. But there is little scope for standards to deteriorate in providing electricity, or, for that matter, improve. How does one measure service standards in providing electricity anyway?'
'In retrospect, the glare of the Singapore GP's high-powered lighting seems ironic.'
MR CHUA SHENG YANG: 'As I watched the splendour of the first-ever Formula One night race and read the accompanying plaudits the next day, I could not help but notice the news that electricity tariffs would increase by more than 20 per cent. In retrospect, the glare of the Singapore GP's high-powered lighting seems ironic. Shouldn't power and water remain nationalised and made available to Singaporeans at the lowest cost?'
'Why peg the rate to the oil price, when 80 per cent of our electricity is generated by natural gas?'
MR WILLIAM WEE: 'The Energy Marketing Authority (EMA) stated that the main reason for the increase is the rise in the price of oil. However, 80 per cent of our domestic electricity generation is from natural gas piped in from Malaysia and Indonesia. And the price of natural gas is about 20 per cent of the oil price. Furthermore, the price of natural gas we get from West Natuna was part of a 22-year deal at a price much less than the current price. Why does the EMA peg the electricity rate to the oil price, when 80 per cent of our electricity is generated by natural gas?'
Robin Chan, Straits Times 1 Oct 08;
SENOKO Power's electricity generation plants at Sembawang will soon be cleaner, greener and more efficient.
The company, recently acquired by a Japanese-French consortium, announced yesterday it has awarded a $750 million contract to convert three plants so they will be fired by natural gas rather than oil.
Senoko is one of the three largest power generators in Singapore, contributing about 3,300MW of electricity, or 30 per cent, of power here.
The plants, expected to be operational by the end of 2011, will run partly on liquefied natural gas (LNG), in addition to the piped gas from its two suppliers in Indonesia and Malaysia, said Mr Roy Adair, Senoko's president and chief executive.
This will help provide critical mass for Singapore's $1 billion LNG terminal, to be completed by April 2012, he added.
The converted plants will also be able to produce more electricity while at the same time cut carbon emissions.
The project will see Senoko's three 30-year-old plants of 250MW each converted to two 430MW gas-fired plants.
To power the plants, an additional 1.7 million cubic metres of gas a day will be needed in excess of its current 6.5 million cubic metres of gas a day requirement.
These new plants will also emit 40 per cent less carbon than oil-fired plants and 60 per cent less than coal-fired plants on a unit basis, Mr Adair said.
Senoko is therefore seeking to secure carbon credits from Singapore's National Environment Agency and the United Nations, which are critical to the overall viability of the project, he added.
Citing a report on global carbon emissions, he said that Singapore's carbon emission intensity had been reduced by 30 per cent between 2000 and last year.
Singapore's power generation has also become greener and more efficient from being 60 per cent oil-fired five to six years ago to 80 per cent gas-fired now, he added.
Through the conversion project, Senoko will save 40 per cent in costs compared to building a new plant from scratch. This will ultimately benefit the customers, Mr Adair said.
Bidding for the project began in May 2006, and was awarded to a consortium consisting of Mitsubishi Corp, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Hitachi Asia. Construction of the plants will commence next year, Mr Adair said.
The project is also the first for Senoko since it was acquired by the Japanese-French group Lion Power from Temasek Holdings last month in a $4 billion deal. It follows on the heels of Tuas Power's announcement on Thursday that it was building Singapore's first clean coal and biomass cogeneration plant on Jurong Island for $2 billion.
Lion Power announces $750m 'repowering'
Ronnie Lim, Business Times 1 Oct 08;
JAPANESE-FRENCH consortium Lion Power, Senoko Power's new owner, intends to make Singapore's largest generating company (genco) a fully integrated energy outfit, with strategic plans to go into LNG trading longer term, on top of trading of just electricity and carbon credits.
It announced yesterday a $750 million 'repowering' or redevelopment of three 30-year-old oil-fired plants into two 'greener' and more efficient gas-firing units which, when operational at end-2011, will buy gas from the $1 billion liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal to be built on Jurong Island.
Senoko, near the Causeway, currently buys about 230 million standard cubic feet per day (mscfd) of piped gas from Malaysia and Indonesia, and will need another 60 mscfd, including for its new combined cycle gas turbines (CCGT), Roy Adair, Senoko's president and CEO told media. The company believes in energy security, and the project 'provides critical mass' for the vital Singapore initiative to build the LNG terminal, he said.
Brendan Wauters, executive vice-president of Suez Energy Middle East-Asia, and representing GDF-Suez - which has a 30 per cent stake in both Lion Power as well as the Singapore LNG terminal - confirmed that Senoko will go into LNG trading here once a Singapore moratorium given to the sole LNG aggregator, the UK's BG Group, expires.
BG has the monopoly to buy LNG starting second quarter 2012 when the LNG terminal starts up, until LNG imports here build up to three million tonnes per annum or 2018, whichever comes earlier.
LNG trading by Lion is a strategic fit given that consortium leader Marubeni Corp and GDF-Suez are both big LNG buyers and traders, while its other members like Kansai Electric and Kyushu Electric are also LNG consumers. With access to piped Malaysian and Indonesian gas - and later, its own LNG, which can be sourced globally, Senoko can easily arbitrage LNG, Mr Adair said.
With the two new CCGTs, Senoko will have seven such environment- friendly and efficient units with total generating capacity of 2,805MW. Five of these will be the most efficient such units in Singapore.
Senoko had considered using coal, which is a cheaper fuel, Mr Adair said, but was very conscious of its carbon footprint which is two-and-a-half times that of natural gas. On the other hand, the carbon footprint of gas is also only 60 per cent that of oil. The genco will be seeking carbon credits for the project, he added.
Lion officials said they had no problems securing debt and equity to close its $4 billion purchase of Senoko from Temasek Holdings last month, and it has secured bank financing for its latest $750 million repowering project.
Singapore's electricity demand is growing at 4 per cent annually, or about 200MW of generating capacity per annum, Mr Adair said. This means that its conversion of the three 250MW oil-fired plants into two new 430MW CCGT 'will take four years to be consumed'.
His projection is that, come 2011, when Senoko's two new plants start up, 'there will be more than sufficient commercial (that is, economically viable) plants here to meet Singapore electricity demand, although there will be overcapacity in total supply, counting the less commercial plants'.
Senoko steps on the gas to convert its old plants
Today Online 1 Oct 08;
SENOKO Power, which was sold to a Japanese-led consortium last month, will invest $750 million to convert three of its old oil-fired power plants into two that burn natural gas.
The power generation company yesterday said it had awarded the contract to a consortium comprising Mitsubishi Corp, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Hitachi Asia.
The Stage 2 repowering project comes four years after Senoko Power, Singapore’s largest power generator, completed its Stage 1 programme where it invested$600 million to convert three oil-fired units into gas generators.
The Stage 1 conversion helped the company boost generation efficiency to more than 40 per cent from 36 per cent previously, and to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by about 2.5 million tons a year.
Senoko’s president and chief executive, Mr Roy Adair, said the new project will refresh three of its 30-year-old oil-fired power plants. “Oil-fired generation is far more carbon-intensive and also more expensive than gas-fired generation.”
The new plants will emit40 per cent less emissions than oil-fired plants and 60 per cent less than coal fired plants.
The plants are scheduled to be in full commercial operation by the end of 2011. They will use natural gas from existing gas-supply agreements and the country’s future Liquefied Natural Gas terminal. 938 LIVE
Alister Doyle, PlanetArk 1 Oct 08;
OSLO - The number of polluted "dead zones" in the world's oceans is rising fast and coastal fish stocks are more vulnerable to collapse than previously feared, scientists said on Monday.
The spread of "dead zones" -- areas of oxygen-starved water -- "is emerging as a major threat to coastal ecosystems globally," the scientists wrote in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Such zones are found from the Gulf of Mexico to the Baltic Sea in areas where algae bloom and suck oxygen from the water, feeding on fertilisers washed from fields, sewage, animal wastes and pollutants from the burning of fossil fuels.
"Marine organisms are more vulnerable to low oxygen content than currently recognised, with fish and crustaceans being the most vulnerable," said Raquel Vaquer Suner of the Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Studies in Spain.
"The number of reported hypoxic (low oxygen) zones is growing globally at a rate of 5 percent a year," she told Reuters.
Her study with a colleague showed that the number of "dead zones" had risen to more than 140 in 2004 from almost none until the late 1970s.
Hundreds of millions of people depend on coastal fisheries for food. Crustaceans such as crabs, lobsters and shrimps are less able to escape from low-oxygen waters than fish.
WARMING
Higher temperatures tied to global warming, blamed by the UN Climate Panel on human use of fossil fuels, may aggravate the problem of "dead zones", partly because oxygen dissolves less readily in warmer water, the study said.
The first "dead zones" were found in northern latitudes such as Chesapeake Bay on the US east coast and Scandinavian fjords. Others have been appearing off South America, Ghana, China, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Portugal and Britain.
The study said that most scientists had until now reckoned that oxygen levels could fall to 2 milligrams per litre of sea water before the water was considered starved of oxygen.
But many creatures were far more sensitive. Larvae of one type of crab found off eastern Canada and the United States started suffering at oxygen levels of 8.6 mg per litre, just below normal levels.
"Currently used thresholds ... are not conservative enough to avoid widespread mortality losses," the scientists wrote. They urged a revised minimum of 4.6 mg of oxygen per litre as the lowest before water was considered hostile to life. -- For Reuters latest environment blogs click on: http://blogs.reuters.com/environment/ (Editing by Tim Pearce)
Jason Lange, PlanetArk 1 Oct 08;
CANCUN, Mexico - Dainty blue fish dart around coral shaped like moose antlers near the Mexican resort of Cancun, but sickly brown spots are appearing where pollution threatens one of the world's largest reefs.
Parts of the reef, nestled in turquoise waters, have died and algae -- which feed on sewage residues flowing out of the fast-growing resort city -- has taken over.
Coral reefs like Chitales, near the northern tip of a Caribbean reef chain stretching from Mexico to Honduras, are dying around the world as people and cities put more stress on the environment.
Climate change alone could trigger a global coral die-off by 2100 because carbon emissions warm oceans and make them more acidic, according to a study published in December.
But local environmental problems like sewage, farm runoff and overfishing could kill off much of the world's reefs decades before global warming does, said Roberto Iglesias, a biologist from UNAM university's marine sciences station near Cancun.
"The net effect of pollution is as bad or maybe worse than the effects of global warming," said Iglesias, a co-author of the study in the journal Science on how climate change affects reefs.
Human waste like that from Cancun's hotels and night spots aggravates threats to coral worldwide like overzealous fishing which hurts stocks of fish that eat reef-damaging algae.
Coral reefs, underwater structures that look like rocky gardens, are covered with tiny animals called coral polyps.
The polyps build the reefs by slowly secreting calcium carbonate over thousands of years, creating structures that can dull the blow hurricanes deal to coastal cities and are vital nurseries for fish.
The polyps also give the reefs their dazzling shades of pink and purple that delight scuba divers and boost tourism from the Great Barrier Reef of Australia to the Florida Keys.
Economically, reefs generate billions of dollars a year worldwide in tourism and fishing, the Nature Conservancy environmental group says.
Across the Caribbean, the amount of reef surface covered by live coral has fallen about 80 percent in the last three decades, the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network says.
In the Pacific between Hawaii and Indonesia, reefs have been losing about 1 percent of their coral coverage annually over the last 25 years.
It is hard to tell how much of that damage was caused by global warming and how much by local factors like pollution.
Some scuba diving instructors around Cancun are worried about the future of their trade. Jorge Olivieri, who has been taking tourists out diving in the area for the last 16 years, says some reefs are so damaged he would not take an experienced diver to see them.
"There are still fish and coral, but it isn't like it used to be," Olivieri said.
With the fight against global warming largely outside of the reach of local officials, fixing problems like poor sewage treatment and overfishing are among the few things that countries and cities can do to help their reefs.
"The local factors are the only things we can manage at this point and they are absolutely critical," said Drew Harvell, a biologist at Cornell University.
TOURIST TRAP
In the late 1960s, Cancun was a barely inhabited strip of sand just off Mexico's Yucatan peninsula. Separated from the mainland by narrow straits on either end, just a handful of families tended coconut groves there.
Then Mexican bureaucrats, hungry for foreign currency and armed with statistics on sunshine, hatched a plan to turn the area into a tourist area.
Today, millions of people each year pack into hotels running the length of the strip, including American "spring breakers" drawn to bawdy bars and wet T-shirt contests.
In Cancun's urban sprawl on the mainland, where hotel and bar workers live, infrastructure has failed to keep up with a ballooning population of around half a million.
The lagoon next to the hotel strip is murky and gives off a foul odor in parts. Only crocodiles swim there now.
"It's kind of gross," said US college student Leah, 19.
Away from the lagoon, seawater samples from around Cancun show the levels of chemicals from human waste have increased steadily over the last decade, said Jorge Herrera, a marine biologist at the Cinvestav research center in the nearby city of Merida.
Rising phosphate levels are disrupting a delicate chemical balance needed for coral to thrive, scientists say. Phosphates help algae grow so that it crowds out coral colonies on reef surfaces, making it harder for them to recover from storms or disease.
Rodrigo Hernandez, Cancun's top environmental official, says the city treats the majority of its sewage, unlike most other Mexican cities. "It is really under control," he said.
But Cancun's waste treatment plants do not clean sewage enough to make it safe for coral, marine biologists say. The treatment plants kill bacteria that can be harmful to people but do not remove chemicals like phosphates.
The treated sewage is deposited underground but seeps through the porous soil into the lagoon and the ocean, scientists say. "Little by little, this causes the coral to die," said Herrera. (Editing by Doina Chiacu)
Raymond Colitt, PlanetArk 1 Oct 08;
BRASILIA - The Brazilian government tops the list of the 100 largest illegal loggers in the Amazon rain forest and will face criminal charges, the Environment Ministry said on Monday.
The six largest deforested areas since 2005 all belong to the government Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform, or Incra, which distributes land to the poor. Together 223,000 hectares (550,000 acres) of the world's largest rain forest were destroyed on those six properties, as settlers chopped down trees to sell and plant crops.
"We're going to blow all 100 of them out of the water and then some," an irate Environment Minister Carlos Minc told a news conference, referring to plans to sue them.
Releasing the list of illegal loggers, he said the environment ministry will bring criminal charges against all of them.
Official data showed on Monday a renewed increase in the rate of deforestation. Some 756 square kilometers (292 square miles) were chopped down in August, twice the rate in July, the National Institute of Space Studies (Inpe) said.
"It was a terrible result," Minc said, blaming expanding cattle and farm activity, as well as land theft through the falsificaiton of property titles.
Minc had been celebrating a decline in deforestation rates in previous months as evidence that the government's conservation policies were working.
News that Incra topped the list of violators is likely to fuel the argument of large landowners that poor peasants are also to blame for the destruction of the Amazon.
Thousands of settlers live on the Incra properties, which for years have been part of a government policy to redistribute land to the poor. There was no immediate comment from Incra.
Other figures released by Minc on Monday showed that private land holders deforested more than three times as much as the Incra did between January and August of this year.
Farmers and cattle ranchers pushing deeper into the forest in search of cheap land are mostly to blame for deforestation, experts say.
The government will create an environmental police force with 3,000 heavily armed and specially trained officers to help combat deforestion, Minc said.
In the 12 months through July, deforestation totalled an estimated 12,000 square km (4,633 square miles), up from 11,224 square km (4,332 square miles) but down from a peak of 27,379 square km (10,570 square miles) in 2004.
(Reporting by Raymond Colitt; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)
Brazilian government faces criminal charges over Amazon deforestation
Illegal logging increases sharply as rising food prices push soy farmers and cattle ranchers to clear more land
Angela Balakrishnan and agencies, guardian.co.uk 30 Sep 08;
The Brazilian government faces criminal charges after a report found that the Amazon rainforest is being deforested three times faster than last year as rising food prices encourages more illegal logging.
A study by Brazil's National Institute for Space Research found that destruction of the Amazon had increased 228% in August compared with the same month a year ago.
Carlos Minc, the Brazilian environment minister, said the upcoming national elections were partly to blame, with mayors in the Amazon region ignoring illegal loggers in the hope of gaining votes locally.
Environmental campaigners blamed the global spike in food prices for pushing soy farmers and cattle ranchers to clear more land for crops and grazing.
"The tendency of deforestation rising is deeply related to the fact that food prices are going up," said Paulo Adario, who coordinates Greenpeace's Amazon campaign. "When you have elections, the appetite of authorities to enforce laws is reduced. But the federal government has to step in and do its job."
The steep rise in deforestation is a sharp reversal after three years of decline in the rate of destruction.
Official data showed that some 300 square miles (756 square kilometres) were chopped down last month, twice the rate of July.
The minister released a list of the 100 worst individuals or companies responsible for most of the deforestation since 2005.
The Brazilian government's land and agrarian reform agency, Incra, was accused of being the worst.
Minc said the environment ministry will bring criminal charges against all of them. The government will also create an environmental police force with 3,000 heavily armed and specially trained officers to help combat illegal deforestion.
The institute, which uses satellite imagery to track down illegal logging, said the destruction was likely to be worse than figures show since no information was available for 26% of the Amazon because of cloud cover in August.
Greenpeace has accused Incra officials of illegally handing over rainforest to logging companies and creating fake settlements to skirt environmental regulations.
Minc said Incra was responsible for destroying 220,150 hectares (544,000 acres) of the world's largest rainforest in the past three years.
The news that Incra topped the list of violators is likely to fuel the argument of large landowners that poor peasants are to blame for the destruction of the Amazon. One of Incra's duties is to distribute land to the poor.
There was no immediate comment from Incra.
Most of the remainder of Minc's list comprises Brazilian farmers and ranchers.
Lorne Matalon, National Geographic News 30 Sep 08;
Israel Ritchie, known as Tolon, is a 37-year-old shark fisher from López Mateos, Mexico. His family has hunted sharks off the Pacific side of the Baja California peninsula for generations, selling the meat these days for around U.S. 70 cents a kilogram (2.2 pounds) and the shark fins for 50 to 100 U.S. dollars a kilogram.
But relying on shark for an income puts Tolon in a precarious place.
"Our situation is drastic," Tolon said. "The shark population has fallen sharply in the last ten years. Now I must travel farther offshore to find them."
Tolon has been forced to think of ways to make his craft—and career—more sustainable, increasingly relying on organizations such as Iemanya Oceanica, a U.S.-Mexican nonprofit that is working with 12 Mexican fishing communities to help them find long-term economic security.
Iemanya Oceanica is advising Tolon and other fishers to partially transform their fish-based economies and to start thinking of shark-based ecotourism as a way to make money and preserve stocks for limited fishing.
Many fishers are already making plans to convert their 22-foot (6.7-meter) boats, known as pangas, into sport-fishing vessels that tourists will board for catch-and-release fishing trips or diving expeditions to observe sharks firsthand, Tolon said.
Sharp Declines
Some researchers believe shark stocks have declined worldwide by 75 percent since the late 1980s, triggered, in part, by Asia's appetite for shark fin soup.
An increased demand for fins—combined with the depletion of other commercially fished species, such as cod, tuna, and swordfish—has changed sharks from an unwanted bycatch into a valuable target species, according to experts.
Tolon's catch is sent to Mexico City, where wholesalers sell the meat to food vendors, who in turn sell shark burritos for about a dollar each.
The highly prized fins usually end up in soup that can sell for as much as a hundred dollars a bowl in China, the U.S., and elsewhere.
Understanding the System
Groups like Iemanya Oceanica say education is key to protecting Mexico's sharks.
They emphasize that sharks play a critical role in marine ecosystems, ensuring the long-term health and stability of fisheries and, in turn, economies.
Sharks are top predators, which means they maintain checks and balances on other species by feeding on sick or weak fish, seals, and other marine life. But sharks are slow to breed and are being overfished.
In the absence of sharks, populations of certain other species can mushroom, depleting some marine regions of resources needed to sustain ecosystem balance.
Tolon and 30 other fishers in his community are helping Iemanya Oceanica track the size and species of sharks in the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of California, the two bodies of water divided by the Baja California peninsula.
They continue to hunt Galápagos, hammerhead, blue, and whale sharks, but make sure to release pregnant and young animals, Tolon said.
Iemanya Oceanica's executive director Laleh Mohajerani said involving fishing communities in research is an important conservation tool.
"What we want to do is give the fishers ownership over the management of their resources," said Mohajerani, whose work is funded in part by the National Geographic Society's Conservation Trust. (The National Geographic Society owns National Geographic News.)
"By logging their catches, they see in an even more direct way how far the shark stocks have fallen."
"It has not been easy," she added. Some fishers are resistant to ending their harvest of sharks now for a possible payoff later.
Sustainable Economies
Peter Klimley, a shark expert based at the University of California, Davis, believes groups like Iemanya Oceanica can succeed if indigenous fishers start to see sharks as a renewable resource, and if certain areas become off-limits to fishing.
"What makes the decline so poignant is that there's so much interest in ecotourism to dive with them," Klimley said. "We're in a transition where people are beginning to see these animals as something beautiful."
The economic transformation has worked in several Mexican seaside communities that used to rely on hunting sea turtles but have now switched to ecotourism.
Local shark fisher Tolon is hoping to set an example by diversifying his business.
"We hope to preserve our communities by doing this," Tolon added. "But we need help from our government to build an infrastructure for tourists—to convert our boats, build campgrounds, motels, and restaurants."
He'd also like to sell his catch directly to people in Mexico City.
"We'd make more money that way. But we haven't yet organized to do that."
Patrolling the Seas
Some species would benefit from being on government lists of protected species.
In 2007, for example, the Mexican government placed the great white shark on a list of protected species. It is now illegal to reel in the great white, once one of the fishers' prized catches because of its size.
But Klimley and Tolon agree that classification won't change the situation without patrols, similar to the way Mexico assigns patrols to protect sea turtles.
They recognize that patrolling beaches where female turtles spawn is a far easier task than sending naval patrols to protect the shark habitat in the waters that flank the Baja California peninsula.
Even so, Tolon said, "within five years, we'll have a disaster in the coastal communities without vigilance. We need those patrols. Without them, we'll soon be lost, in spite of the best efforts of those who are helping us."
WWF 30 Sep 08;
Xingzikou, China: The Chinese government, which has done quite a lot for the Yangtze river’s endangered freshwater dolphins, last week decided it needed to do more.
The key initiative of the new Yangtze Dolphin Network is to connect existing reserves established for the Baiji dolphin, the world's most endangered member of the whale family, and the finless porpoise.
The network was initiated by the aquatic and wildlife protection office of the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture and is funded by donors including WWF-China.
“WWF started working on Yangtze dolphin conservation as early as 2002 and I am very happy to join the Yangtze Dolphin Network today,” said Dr. Wang Limin, WWF-China’s deputy director of conservation operations. “It is of big significance to dolphin protection efforts in China and around the world.”
Human activities such as illegal fishing, pollution and shipping have hit the Baiji dolphin and finless porpoise hard, causing their numbers to dramatically decline over the last few years.
During a Yangtze Freshwater dolphin expedition in 2006 no Baiji dolphins were found, while the population of the finless porpoise has dropped to an estimated 1,800, half the number found in the 1990s.
“It is necessary to integrate each nature reserve to effectively protect the Baiji dolphin and finless porpoise,” said Fan Xiangguo, director of aquatic wildlife protection at the Ministry of Agriculture.
Over the past few decades the Chinese government has made considerable efforts to protect the freshwater dolphin by setting up nature reserves. The Yangtze Dolphin Network includes six nature reserves and two monitoring sites.
“Dolphins are the indicator species of river health,” said Li Lifeng, Freshwater Programme Director, WWF International.
“If they are gone, the river will not be able to support human development. The Yangtze Dolphin Network is a great step towards protecting the river for both species and people.”
The network was established in Xingzikou, Jiangxi province, on September 24, with the launch ceremony followed by two days of dolphin monitoring and rescue training, as well as one day of field monitoring practice.
Apart from the Yangtze, river dolphins are found in South America's Amazon, India's Ganges and Pakistan's Indus rivers as well as a few locations in south and south-east Asia.
Beaked whales: Sounding off
Richard Black, BBC News website 30 Sep 08;
As a scientist, you know your world is about to change when your boss, the government and the international media are all suddenly on the phone asking for answers.
That was the lot of whale biologists and veterinary scientists in the Canary Islands on 24 September 2002 - a date that may go down as one of the most significant in humankind's long history of interactions with whales.
"There was already some news that many animals were stranding along the beaches of Fuerteventura and Lanzarote," recalls Antonella Servidio.
"Most of them were still alive and people on the beach were taking care of them with towels, trying to make them comfortable; but they were already in a very bad condition.
"On the beach were many tourists, the press were already there, we were receiving phone calls every five minutes to know what was going on; it was a really tense situation."
What made it especially tense - and the tensions have not fully subsided, six years on - was that over the bodies of dying whales, the tourists and the locals and the press could all see the flotilla of warships assembled for the Spanish navy's Neotapon 02 exercise.
Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play.
Inside a whale post mortem lab
The Society for the Study of Cetaceans in the Canary Archipelago (Secac), for which Ms Servidio works, scrambled to co-ordinate the collection and study of the dead and dying animals.
Beaked whales - for they, and only they, were stranding - are big creatures, up to seven metres (23ft) long and three tonnes in weight.
And yet speed of collection was vital, otherwise decomposition could overwhelm indications of what killed the animals.
So for the most part, scientists cut off the heads and other bits of tissue likely to be of interest and brought them to local laboratories for autopsy.
Six of them ended up in the Veterinary School of the University of Las Palmas in Gran Canaria, which had already made a specialism of studying marine mammals - hardly surprising when the school is just 300m (1,000ft) from the sea.
What Antonio Fernandez's team found when they dissected the whale heads would eventually transform the use of military sonar in Europe and the US.
"What we found in the micro-vasculature (capillary blood vessels) was that gas bubbles and fat were working there as foreign bodies, blocking the cardiovascular system," he says.
"Obviously these foreign bodies were blocking the small vessels, breaking them and inducing haemorrhage."
Not only was this seen in the six whale heads, but the same signs turned up in the liver, kidney, spleen, lungs, pancreas and lymph nodes of the whales examined intact.
Environmental groups said it proved that military sonar used during the exercise was driving the animals to their death. The military said there was no proven link.
Global picture
The Canaries are a popular venue for naval exercises, partly because the seabed slopes quickly downwards from the islands, with deep canyons that enemy submarines might presumably use for concealment.
Nato was back in the region for Majestic Eagle in 2004. Within days, Dr Fernandez received four dead beaked whales, all showing the same signs of fat embolism and haemorrhage.
Further naval manoeuvres two years later in the Mediterranean coincided with beaked whale strandings along the coast of southern Spain.
Evidence was also coming in from other areas of the world, such as US Navy testing grounds around the Bahamas and California.
For the environmental movement, the case was proven beyond doubt. But for scientists, key questions remained.
If military sonar was driving beaked whales to strand, why was it happening?
Why did it only happen to these reclusive species, while others such as sperm whales, pilot whales and orcas appeared to swim through unaffected?
And if sonar needed to be restricted, what areas should those restrictions cover?
Animal magic
Knowledge gleaned from animal studies is these days routinely used to inform human medical science.
The reverse is less common. But here, researchers realised that what they knew about a human condition could be very relevant to what they were seeing in whales.
"We think it's a syndrome of decompression sickness, rather like human divers contracting 'the bends'," says Paul Jepson from the Institute of Zoology in London, who co-ordinates the study of strandings around the UK.
Divers contract "the bends" when they surface too quickly. Pressure on the body reduces as they ascend, allowing gases dissolved in the blood - mainly nitrogen - to come out of solution and form bubbles.
But is it conceivable that species that have evolved over millennia to be deep divers - and species that do not inhale as they go down, unlike human divers who must - could suffer from such a condition?
Computer models built to allow human divers to operate safely were adapted for what people knew of beaked whale physiology and behaviour.
Meanwhile, data on how whales dive was coming in from a new variety of tags that US scientists had developed. Attached to the whales' bodies, they showed a complete "dive profile" - descent time, dive duration, ascent time.
Putting all this together showed, says Antonio Fernandez, that beaked whales might indeed contract their version of the bends.
"The dive profile is different from the sperm whale and the pilot whale, other deep-diving species," he relates.
"They go down just as fast, but they come up much slower; and when they reach the surface they go into this pattern of shallower dives - 400m, 300m, 200m - and our interpretation is that they need this, and if they break this dive profile they can enter in a risky situation, into a decompression-like sickness."
No-one knows why beaked whales need these shallow dives, but presumably it has evolved for a reason.
There is a rival theory - that sonar acts directly to cause bubble formation in fat and blood - but the theory also suggests that whales would need to be really close to the sound-generating ships for this to happen, which makes Paul Jepson believe the behaviour modification link is probably correct.
"Military sonar systems tend to use frequencies around 1kHz to 5kHz," he says.
"And that may be close enough to the sound of a killer whale to disturb the animals and make them change their diving behaviour - particularly in young animals that haven't learned how to distinguish ocean sounds so well."
Local solution?
In August, after a lengthy legal and political wrangle, the US Navy - which runs its own research programme on marine mammals - struck a deal with conservation organisations that restricts its use of low-frequency sonar to certain regions and certain seasons.
Those same conservation groups are still pursuing restrictions on the mid-frequency systems identified by Paul Jepson as likely to be causing beaked whales the greatest distress.
And here?
"Now, in the Canary islands, they cannot do any kind of naval manoeuvres, they have to do it outside," says Antonella Servidio, who is sailing this week with the Song of the Whale research vessel for a programme designed to study beaked whales more closely.
She says it is not a perfect solution; whales could be damaged in other areas close by and drift, dead, to the islands.
A bigger issue, though, is that unless we know much more about beaked whales' habitats and behaviour, it is impossible to know for sure where it is safe to deploy these military sonar systems and where it is not.
And an even bigger one is that sonar systems can account for only a tiny proportion of the world's total number of whale strandings.
The latest evidence suggests, for example, is that it was not involved in the recent dolphin stranding in Cornwall, which Dr Jepson is shortly to investigate; and it cannot explain what some researchers term "normal" strandings, where big groups of apparently healthy cetaceans beach themselves.
It may be something that the animals have always been prone to, perhaps unwanted consequences of their familial ties or vigorous vocalisations.
Do other forms of ocean noise, from shipping or mineral exploration, make it worse?
And how serious is ocean noise as an issue compared with climatic shifts, entanglement in fishing gear or disruption of habitat?
Despite the answers from the laboratories of Gran Canaria and the US courts, big questions remain, as they do over many factors affecting the world's whales.
www.stuff.co.nz 30 Sep 08;
A High Court ruling putting a hold on some government-enforced fishing bans will cost the lives of at least 30 Hector's dolphins within three months, World Wildlife Fund (WWF) claims.
Proposed bans have temporarily been lifted for fishers off some areas of the west coast of the North Island, the Marlborough Sounds, and at Te Waewae Bay in Southland.
Released last Friday, the court decision granting an interim injunction on the measures came after the commercial fishing industry took legal action.
The bans, put forward in May this year and due to be enforced this week, were an attempt to help protect Hector's and Maui's dolphins.
WWF said today the decision was a sad day for New Zealand.
"The new protection measures are essential to stopping the serious decline of Hector's and Maui's dolphins," said WWF-New Zealand's marine programme manager Rebecca Bird.
She said the past three decades of fishing with nets had been killing the dolphins faster than they could breed.
"As a consequence, there is now a struggling population threatened with extinction -- from over 30,000 Hector's dolphins in the 1970s to just 7270 today."
Ms Bird said WWF would now advise its international contacts that wild-caught New Zealand seafood product from in-shore net fisheries should not be viewed as sustainable.
The Federation of Commercial Fishermen and a number of fishing companies who challenged the restrictions said they would cost jobs in areas where the dolphins were never seen.
The federation argued it did not want to harm the dolphins but only wanted secured seasonal relief where jobs were under immediate threat.
LiveScience.com Yahoo News 30 Sep 08;
As bears spend more time near cities, the animals gain weight, get pregnant at a younger age and die young, violent deaths.
A new study of black bears near the populated Lake Tahoe, Nev., area found an alarming percentage are hit by cars.
"Urban areas are becoming the ultimate bear traps," said Wildlife Conservation Society researcher Jon Beckmann, the study's lead author. "Because of an abundant food source - namely garbage - bears are being drawn in from backcountry areas into urbanized landscapes where they meet their demise."
The study, published in the Fall 2008 issue of the journal Human-Wildlife Conflicts, tracked 12 bears over a 10-year period living in urban areas around Lake Tahoe, and compared them to 10 other bears that lived in outlying wild areas.
The urbanized bears weighed an average of 30 percent more. They gave birth between the ages of 2 and 5 instead of at age 7 or 8 as is normal.
All 12 of the tracked urban bears were dead by age 10 due to vehicle collisions, while six of the wildland bears still survived. Bear cubs in urban areas also had dramatically higher mortality rates due mainly to vehicle collisions, the researchers said today.
The result: Urbanized areas are functioning as "sinks" for black bear populations, drawing in doomed bears from outlying wild areas, while bears are failing to recolonize outlying wild areas.
For now, bear populations in Nevada remain steady due to bears immigrating from neighboring California, the researchers said.
Matthew Weaver, guardian.co.uk 30 Sep 08;
British birdwatchers trying to stop the illegal killing of some of Europe's rarest birds in Malta have become embroiled in an increasingly tense standoff with local hunters and say they have recovered unprecedented numbers of carcasses of protected birds.
Thirty British volunteers and a delegation of five staff from the RSPB have spent the last two weeks documenting the shooting of birds of prey such as osprey, honey buzzards, and marsh harriers as they fly over over the Mediterranean island on annual migratory routes. The volunteers estimate scores of rare birds protected by EU laws have been killed this year and claim the shootings have reached a new high.
The carcasses of dead raptors are not usually recovered as hunters tend to take them as prizes and are anxious to hide the evidence. But in just eight days the camp recovered 17 shot raptors this year - more than double the total number recovered by similar-sized groups of volunteers in the previous two years put together.
This year the birdwatchers, who say the hunting is threatening British conservation projects, also claim they have faced increasing verbal abuse, intimidation and sabotage. Their camps have been vandalised, tyres on their vehicles have been punctured and they are regularly told to "fuck off back to England".
The standoff threatens to escalate into a minor diplomatic incident after the hunters, who claim they are merely exercising an ancestral tradition, complained to the RSPB's patron, the Queen. They also plan to complain to the European commission about invasion of privacy.
They accuse the RSPB of "dishonest" campaigning designed to "undermine Maltese culture". And they say there is no proof that hunting on the island threatens endangered species.
Malta and the neighbouring island of Gozo are a key stopover point for hundreds of thousands of migratory birds as they make the journey from Europe to spend winter in Africa.
But Malta is also home to the highest concentration of registered hunters anywhere in Europe. And at this time of year thousands engage in the island's popular pastime of bird shooting.
They say they are only hunting turtle dove and quail, which is legal during autumn. But each year local conservationists estimate that thousands of birds, from species protected under European laws, are also shot, in many cases deliberately.
Grahame Madge, an RSPB spokesman, said: "It's like a war zone, the smell of death is everywhere."
"The scale of the slaughter is unimaginable and it's a race against hunters every moment."
Few of the hunters are ever caught for illegal killings, and if they are, they typically escape with a €100 fine.
The RSPB has recruited volunteers to attend so called Raptor Camps over the island to monitoring migration and reporting illegal hunting. The camps are organised by the RSPB sister organisation Birdlife Malta and include volunteers from all over Europe. The camp's methods, which include filming illegal killing and posting the footage to YouTube, have enraged local hunters.
The more the group has recorded illegal hunting, the uglier the standoff with the hunters has become.
"We have had regular drive-by abuse from hunters shouting 'fuck off back' to England," said Nick Unwin, a teacher from Surrey.
"Every time we get into cars we have to look for nails, and in most places we have to have security guards with us," he said. Over the last week cars have been attacked and punctured, abusive graffiti has been sprayed on nature reserve signs and used car oil was poured over an observation tower.
"Intimidation and hostility is constant here," says Steve Bentall, a wildlife management masters graduate from Hampshire.
"We were at the side of a road and hunters in cars came down the road at about 70mph and started intentionally swerving into us to scare the life out us."
But Bentall's passion for birds of prey means he won't be put off. "Two mornings ago we saw a rare Eleonora's falcon. It was a fantastic spectacle and then it got shot. It breaks your heart."
He adds: "Some of these birds are down to there last few hundred pairs in Europe. If we don't tackle illegal shooting, we are going to lose more species."
"These are legally protected species and they have been for 30 years, and yet they are still slaughtering them. I just can't get my head round it."
Steph Charlton, a zoo keeper from the Isle of Wight, witnessed a honey buzzard and osprey being shot.
"In the UK we spend thousands of pounds on high profile osprey projects. Then they fly over here and are shot down. It's crazy. I didn't realize how blatantly they do it."
Dr Andre Raine, BirdLife Malta's conservation manager said: "This is the worst season that many local birdwatchers can remember. "If we can recieve 17 birds of prey with confirmed gunshot injuries in eight days, then the actual number of protected birds being shot must be very high."
The organisation's spokesman claims the abuse from hunters over the last two years has included drive by shootings, bird watchers being spat at, and car tyres being slashed. But he claimed the attacks over the last fortnight are "worse than usual".
He claimed backlash by hunters is being whipped up by "threatening and xenophobic" statements by islands' hunting lobby the Federation for Hunting and Conservation, or FKNK.
The federation condemns illegal hunting but it has taken a combative attitude to RSPB and its volunteers.
It claims the RSPB and Birdlife Malta exaggerates the extent of illegal shooting there is no hard evidence of a bird massacre.
It accuses the RSPB of conducting a "despicable and fictitious crusades against tiny Malta" and claims their conservationists are "foreign mercenaries".
It warns the RSPB against getting involved in "social hatred campaigns" aimed at destroying hunting which it describes as a "Maltese ancestral tradition".
The federation secretary Lino Farrugia refused to speak to the Guardian. But in a press statement he denied the federation had encouraged intimidation.
He said: "The RSPB have far better things to do than organise visits to the Maltese islands solely to pester, interfere and further antagonise Maltese law-abiding nationals."
He added: "Out of the odd 260 reports of illegal hunting that BirdLife alleged to have received, the police to date have only arraigned seven persons with hunting related offences, out of which only three refer to illegal hunting."
Birdlife Malta claims convictions are rare because there are so few police dealing with the problem as the Maltese government refuses to take it seriously.
Birdlife's president, Joseph Mangion, said: "As long as the police fail to take action and the government remain silent, the situation is likely to get worse."
The government of Malta has yet to respond.
Malta: Illegal slaughter of birds of prey continues defying EU laws
Paul Eccleston, The Telegraph 1 Oct 08;
The illegal slaughter of migrating birds over Malta has brought renewed demands for tougher action against hunters.
Conservationists have watched the hunters indiscriminately blasting birds from the sky as they make their annual migration journeys to Africa.
Targets have included protected raptor species such as Honey buzzard, Merlin and Marsh harrier.
Hunters on Malta have continued to defy EU laws and the Maltese government faces legal action in the European Court of Justice over its failure to curb the Spring hunting and trapping of wild birds.
The George Cross island is an important staging point for birds as they make their long migratory flights from Europe across the Mediterranean and into north Africa.
Thousands of birds, many of them exhausted by lengthy flights, fall prey to the hunters who lie in wait. Although the hunting of some birds is permitted - such as Turtle dove and Quail - may other species fall victim to the guns.
Over the past two weeks, birdwatchers from all over Europe have made their way to the island to assess the population of migrating birds and to witness and record the slaughter for themselves.
The two-week programme, known as the 'Raptor Camp', was organised by BirdLife Malta - the RSPB's partner in the Maltese islands.
Dr Andre Raine, BirdLife Malta's conservation manager, said: "Many observers have commented this is the worst season in recent years."
The RSPB's Grahame Madge, who attended the Raptor Camp, said: "To anyone who hasn't seen it for themselves, the scale of the slaughter beggars belief.
"A rogue element of the island's 12,000 hunters will blast at anything that flies, and casualties from the two weeks included a black stork, herons, bee-eaters and many birds of prey.
"Lying on a major migration route across the Mediterranean, birds pass over the islands in extremely large numbers. On good days for migration, when several hundred birds of prey pass through, the hunters are stirred into a frenzy - desperate to shoot as many as possible, even within protected areas.
"On one day, I witnessed a large movement of honey buzzards and other birds of prey. The hunters could clearly be seen identifying the best vantage points in a bid to shoot them. Sadly, I also watched the death throes of a mortally wounded honey buzzard that had to be put down by a vet.
"Visiting Malta this month has been the only occasion in my three decades of watching birds when I've not wanted to see great views of birds of prey; when I saw a marsh harrier or a honey buzzard flying low, I was just praying that it climbed higher to soar beyond the reach of the hunters' guns."
Seventeen birds of prey with gunshot injuries were taken in by BirdLife Malta during the Raptor Camp. On two separate days, four were received each day.
Dr Andre Raine, added: "If BirdLife Malta can receive 17 birds of prey with confirmed gunshot injuries in eight days, then the actual number of protected birds that are being shot throughout the country must be very high.
"The chances of a shot bird being brought to the BirdLife Malta offices are low since the birds we receive have to escape the hunter who shot them and then be found by someone willing to hand them over to us. Therefore, this really is only the tip of the iceberg."
Dr Raine said the hunters were a law unto themselves and added: "The government must crack down on illegal hunters, otherwise the slaughter will continue over the coming weeks."
Earlier this year the EU won a court order compelling the Maltese government to impose a ban on Spring hunting as an interim measure until a full hearing can take place. It is likely that a similar ban will be imposed next Spring.
Geoffrey Saliba, BirdLife Malta's campaign co-ordinator, said: "If our government does not stop seeing the hunting issue as an argument between two sides, the slaughter will continue. Illegal hunting across Malta is a national and international problem and a criminal act that defies national and international law and it must be stopped now."
"The only way to put a stop to the killing is to make sure that those who are found guilty of these crimes are punished to the fullest extent of the law.
"The fines for those caught hunting illegally must be increased and the hunting licenses of repeat offenders must be cancelled. If the government is serious about curbing illegal hunting, the police should be given the resources needed to counter the unacceptable level of hunting."
PlanetArk 1 Oct 08;
LONDON - Wind turbines do not drive birds from surrounding areas, British researchers said on Wednesday, in findings which could make it easier to build more wind farms.
Conservation groups have raised fears that large birds could get caught in the turbines and that the structures could disturb other species.
But scientists found only one of the 23 species studied, the pheasant, was affected during their survey of two wind farms in eastern England.
The findings published in the Journal of Applied Ecology could help government and business efforts to boost the number of wind farms as a way to increase production of renewable energy.
"This is the first evidence suggesting that the present and future location of large numbers of wind turbines on European farmland is unlikely to have detrimental effects on farmland birds," Mark Whittingham, whose team from Newcastle University carried out the research, said in a statement.
"This should be welcome news for nature conservationists, wind energy companies and policy makers."
The survey studied the impact of two wind farms on about 3,000 birds in the area, including five species of conservation concern -- the yellowhammer, the Eurasian tree sparrow, the corn bunting, the Eurasian skylark and the common reed bunting.
The researchers recorded the density of birds at different distances from the turbines and found that aside from the pheasant, the structures posed no problems.
The new findings are important because the European Union is committed to generating 20 percent of its energy from renewable resources by 2020 and is also seeking to boost biodiversity.
The study did not look at the danger of the birds colliding with the turbines, which has been a worry of conservationists, Whittingham said.
Spanish utility Iberdrola, Germany's E.ON and Scottish & Southern Energy all operate wind farms.
In August, Czech power group CEZ announced plans to build the biggest onshore wind park in Europe. (Reporting by Michael Kahn; Editing by Avril Ormsby)
Farmland birds not bothered by wind turbines, study finds
Paul Eccleston, The Telegraph 1 Oct 08
Farmland birds aren't bothered by wind turbines being built in the countryside, a new study has found.
The sight and sound of ranks of whirling 100-metre high turbines had little effect on the numbers of birds in the area, scientists found.
The results will disappoint conservation groups, who claim turbines pose a threat to birds but will provide a boost for wind energy groups who want to erect hundreds of wind farms around Britain.
The study, published in the British Ecological Society's Journal of Applied Ecology, concludes that wind farms can help meet tough sustainable energy targets without threatening biodiversity on European farmland.
A study by a team from Newcastle University conducted bird surveys on arable farmland around two wind farms in the East Anglian fens during the winter time.
They recorded almost 3,000 birds from 33 different species, including five red-listed species of high conservation concern - the yellowhammer, the Eurasian tree sparrow, the corn bunting, Eurasian skylark and the common reed bunting.
They found the wind turbines had no effect on the distribution of seed-eating birds, corvids (the crow family), gamebirds and Eurasian skylarks. Common pheasants - the largest and least manoeuvrable species - were the only birds whose distribution was affected by the turbines.
Dr Mark Whittingham, who led the team, said: "This is the first evidence suggesting that the present and future location of large numbers of wind turbines on European farmland is unlikely to have detrimental effects on farmland birds.
"This should be welcome news for nature conservationists, wind energy companies and policy makers. With large numbers of wind farms needing to be built on lowland areas, the cumulative impacts on farmland bird species has the potential to be a significant constraint to development."
The study didn't look at the risk of birds colliding with the turbines but whether birds might be disturbed by their size and the noise they produce and erect 'no fly zones' around them.
But even when they looked at areas within 0-75 m of the turbines they found no evidence of farmland birds avoiding them.
Wind power is being increasingly used across Europe as a key component in meeting the EU's target of getting 20 per cent of energy from renewable sources by 2020 to help reduce the threats from global warming.
In the UK it is predicted that approximately 10 per cent of electricity production will come from onshore wind power sites by 2020 which will mean approximately 4,400 new turbines.
But this has to be balanced against a dramatic fall in farmland bird populations - a 40 per cent decline between 1980 and 2005 across 20 EU countries - caused by more intensive farming methods.
The study seems to suggest that there is no conflict between Agri Environment Schemes (AES), where farmers receive subsidies for environmentally friendly farming schemes to protect wildlife, and the siting of wind turbines on lowland farmland in the UK.
Dr Whittingham said previous studies had concentrated on the impact of wind turbines on waterbirds and birds of prey rather than birds in the countryside.
He added: "Much terrestrial research into the effects of wind turbines on birds has focused on geese, waders and raptors, whose populations are highest in upland and coastal areas.
"There is increasing conservation concern about the impact of wind farms on these species in these areas, so applications to build new turbines are increasingly focusing on other sites, especially lowland farmland in central and eastern England."
Alison Benjamin, The Guardian 29 Sep 08;
The Soil Association has urged the government to ban pesticides linked to honeybee deaths around the world.
The chemicals are widely used in UK agriculture but have been banned as a precaution in four other European countries. Last week the Italian government issued an immediate suspension after it accepted that the pesticides were implicated in killing honeybees, joining France, Germany and Slovenia.
Peter Melchett, the Soil Association's policy director, said: "It is typical of the lax approach to pesticide regulation in the UK that we look like being one of the last of the major farming countries in the EU to wake up to the threat to our honeybees."
The pesticides, known as neonicotinoids, are approved to kill insects on a range of crops in the UK including oilseed rape, barley and sugar beet. Their use on oilseed rape is of particular concern to beekeepers as the crop's yellow flower is very attractive to honeybees.
Germany suspended sales of the pesticides in May after 700 beekeepers along the Rhine reported that two-thirds of their bees had died following the application of clothianidin. In France, imidacloprid has been banned on sunflowers since 1999 and as a sweetcorn treatment since 2003, after a third of honeybees were wiped out. The Soil Association is calling on the environment secretary, Hilary Benn, to ban the pesticides in a letter sent today.
Imidacloprid and clothianidin are produced by a division of the chemical manufacturer Bayer. Imidacloprid is its bestselling pesticide and is used in 120 countries. Bayer has always maintained that neonicotinoids are safe for bees if correctly applied. "Extensive internal and international scientific studies have confirmed that neonicotinoids do not present a hazard to bees," Utz Klages, a spokesman for Bayer CropScience, said recently.
The National Farmers' Union said it was opposed to any ban on pesticides. Paul Chambers, NFU plant health adviser, said: "Banning pesticides using the precautionary principle is not based on good science. Pests and disease are the problems facing honeybees in the UK. The government needs to put more money into researching honeybee health."
The Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs also attributed the decline in honeybee populations to a variety of factors. A Defra spokesman said: "There are no plans to ban pesticides."
Beekeepers worldwide have reported catastrophic losses of from 30% to 90% of their honeybee colonies during the last two years. Two-thirds of all major crops rely on pollination, mainly by honeybees.
Mike Hulme, BBC Green Room 30 Sep 08;
Moves to adapt our society for a changing climate may have focused rather too much on long-term scenarios and not enough on how to cope with weather and short-term variability, argues Mike Hulme. He says the past two British summers show the dangers of this overemphasis on laudable long-sightedness.
This year's British summer has again failed to meet many of our expectations.
As reported by the Daily Telegraph at the end of August: "Summer is all but over. We are entitled to ask: what summer? For the second year running we have been denied anything worthy of the name."
Rainfall was more than 50 percent above average; sunshine levels were well below average, with August being particularly gloomy.
The average temperature was a fraction above the 1961-90 mean, although this was disguised by cooler days offsetting warmer nights.
Is this the British summer climate to which we are being told we need to adapt?
The Mayor of London's office has just published its first ever climate change adaptation strategy in which the risks of increasing summer heatwaves and droughts compete with those of more frequent winter flooding. Both scenarios demand the attention of Boris Johnson and his urban planners.
In a couple of months time, the government - through the UK Climate Impacts Programme - will launch (with much publicity and scientific acclaim) a new set of climate scenarios called UKCIP08 for the nation until the year 2100.
They will be the first national scenarios that offer probabilities about how future climate may change.
'Eye off the storm'
As we think more carefully about how we live with our climate and how we can improve our preparedness for future weather, are we over-emphasising long-term prospects over shorter-term realities?
Are we paying too much attention to uncertain long-term climate predictions - dominated by greenhouse gas-driven global warming - whilst taking our eye off the more immediate weather futures which will determine the significance of climate for society over the next years and decades?
Using the jargon of climate science, are we giving too much weight to the anthropogenic "signal" of global warming whilst ignoring the natural "noise" of climate?
Individuals, communities and societies have always wanted to know what the future weather will be; whether for managing the cultivation of land or the building of homes through to preparing for social rituals or communal celebrations.
Since the middle of the 19th Century, scientific weather forecasting has been evolving. Current forecasts are able to predict weather three days ahead. These forecasts are as skilful, and contain more detail, as next-day forecasts 40 years ago.
We are better prepared and better adapted to avoid weather risks, such as storms at sea, and to grasp opportunities (eg transport management) than any previous generation.
Paralleling these developments, we have in the last 10 to 15 years also been urged to start bringing long-term climate predictions - scenarios for 2050 and 2100 linked to global warming and derived from climate models - into our adaptation planning.
This is particularly needed for infrastructure projects which have a long life-span.
Balancing act
But are these long-term climate scenarios alone what we most urgently need to improve society's adaptation to weather and climate - to avoid risks and to grasp opportunities?
Weather forecasts offer easily demonstrable and quantified skill. But climate scenarios for the year 2050 cannot be tested against observations; we have to rely on our faith in the underlying climate models.
This faith is tested when we endure summers like those of 2007 and 2008. All long-term climate scenarios suggest British summers will become drier; if we now start adapting for drier summers what happens to farmers, businesses and tourists when we have two successive very wet summers?
All long-term scenarios also suggest heatwaves, such as the one in August 2003, will become more frequent, even the norm, by 2050. How does adapting to this prospect improve our ability to survive cool, gloomy weeks like those we had in 2008?
We will never know empirically on any useful timescale whether or not we have accurate climate predictions for 2050. Yet even if they do prove accurate, if our shorter-term forewarning of daily weather to decadal climate is poor, we may end up just as maladapted and just as exposed to weather risks as if we had ignored global warming entirely.
Two extremes
Scientists have recently begun to tackle seasonal to decadal climate forecasting, time-scales in which natural variability ("noise") is more important than global warming ("signal"). Yet for now, these forecasts remain primitive and of limited skill.
So we remain caught between the two extremes of what science can foretell of future weather: daily forecasts with known skill and value, and centennial scenarios of unknown skill based on (good) faith.
We do need to consider the latter in guiding long-term infrastructure design, but an over-reliance on such scenarios to dominate our adaptation thinking and planning carries three dangers.
Long-term climate scenarios may prove to be inaccurate (we have poor means of knowing for sure).
Second, even if they do prove accurate on the time-scale of 50 to 100 years, they may be all but useless for foretelling the climate of the next one to 10 years.
This is linked to the third danger, which is about the social psychology of weather expectations.
Constant public talk of presaged late-century climate will alter public expectations of near-term climate, which - as we have seen these last two years - will continue to yield weather of very different character to that offered by our 2050s scenarios.
To use a specific example: how do we prepare the 2012 London Olympics to be well adapted to British summer climate?
Do we take a 2050 climate change scenario - heatwaves, droughts and all - and assume this will best describe the summer of 2012?
Do we use one of the new experimental decadal forecasts that suggests we may see little warming and maybe wetter summers over the next decade?
Or do we make sure that the Olympics are prepared to cope with whatever the summer of 2012 turns out like - whether the blazing heat of 1995 or the gloom of 2008?
There is an irony here. At the same time as the new national UKCIP08 scenarios offer us more detailed information than ever before about the climate of 2050 - for example, probabilities of hourly rainfall at 1km resolution - so climate science is increasingly emphasising that our weather from months to a decade or two ahead will be dominated by natural variability which we poorly understand and struggle to predict.
The coming decade will yield the familiar mixture of British weather: heat, cold, wind, rain and drought.
Yes, let us use such foresight as science can offer us about the longer term; but effective adaptation to weather and climate variability and management of public expectations of future weather demand more than merely this.
Premature locking of our infrastructure and our social psychology into the dimly presaged but overly precise climate of the late 21st Century maybe as risky as pretending we are still living with the climate of the 20th Century.
Mike Hulme is a professor in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia (UEA), and was the founding director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research
The Green Room is a series of opinion article on environmental topics running weekly on the BBC News website
Yahoo News 30 Sep 08;
Failure to curb global warming would "haunt humanity" forever, Australia's top climate adviser said Tuesday as he urged the country to cut greenhouse gas emissions by at least 60 percent by 2050.
Ross Garnaut, presenting his long-awaited report on climate change, said Australia was more vulnerable to rising temperatures than any other developed country because of its hot, dry climate and faced environmental destruction and a major decline in farming in nothing was done.
"If we fail, on a balance of probabilities, the failure of our generation will haunt humanity until the end of time," Garnaut told reporters in Canberra.
The economist and former diplomat said there would be no solution to the problem of man-made global warming, caused by the build-up of greenhouse gases created by burning fossil fuels, unless it was a global solution.
He said under the best case scenario, an international agreement bringing in developing countries such as China and India would cap global greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at a concentration of 450 parts per million (ppm).
"Its (Australia's) fair share of a 450 ppm agreement would be to reduce emissions by 25 percent from 2000 levels by 2020 and by 90 percent by 2050," the professor said.
Garnaut said Australia should aim for this ambitious target but acknowledged that forging such an agreement would be difficult.
A global pact on keeping carbon pollution to 550 ppm had a "reasonable chance" of succeeding and "Australia should offer to play its full part in such an agreement", he said.
Under such an deal, Australia's contribution would be to reduce emissions by 10 percent from 2000 levels by 2020 and by 80 percent by 2050.
Garnaut said Australia should cut its emissions regardless of an international agreement.
"In the absence of a comprehensive global agreement that adds up and in the context of another limited, Kyoto-style agreement, the report recommends that Australia's first step between 2013-2020 should be along the linear path to a 60 percent cut in emissions by 2050," he said.
"This would be a five percent reduction by 2020."
Paul Eccleston, The Telegraph 30 Sep 08;
Prince Charles has warned that the world is not reacting quickly enough to combat climate change.
He said the clock of climate change was ticking faster towards midnight."We are simply not reacting quickly enough and we cannot be anything less than courageous and revolutionary in our approach to tackling climate change.
"If we are not, the result will be catastrophic for all of us, but with the poorest in our world hit the hardest," he said in an interview in Weather, the magazine of the Royal Meteorological Society of which he is the patron.
"There are some difficult questions that we must ask ourselves. Do we really understand the dynamics of a world in which energy and food security will become real issues for everyone?
"Can we say, hand on heart, that we are really doing enough to improve energy efficiency?
"Can we possibly allow 20 years of business-as-usual before coal power generation becomes clean, especially with the rapid increase in the number of coal power plants being built in China alone?
"Are we truly investing enough in renewable energy technologies? How can we build a really effective dialogue with China and India, and indeed the United States, which recognizes the real security implications of climate change?
"How do we maximise the role of the private sector in achieving a low carbon economy"?
The Prince said the most urgent, but neglected, cause of climate change was the appalling loss of the world's tropical rainforests where emissions through burning were comparable to those generated by the production of electricity and heat.
The world had to accept that the forests were a giant global public utility which helped clean the atmosphere of pollutants, fed it with moisture and acted as a natural thermostat in helping regulate the climate.
"Everyone accepts the necessity of paying for water, gas or electricity - so now we must start to pay for the ecosystem services these great forests provide to us. It is by no means easy to sort out exactly how this can be done, but it is absolutely essential that we do it," he said.
The Prince has established his own Rainforest Project supported by 12 major companies, NGOs as well as international institutions and organisations, such as the World Bank, to campaign for the preservation of the rainforests.
"My objective is to create the largest ever public-private-NGO partnership - and if by working together we can make forests more alive than dead and stop their global destruction, then perhaps we can use this same approach to tackle the other global climate challenges," he said.
The Prince also spoke of the aftermath of extreme weather events that he had witnessed for himself including Hurricane Katrina which devastated New Orleans and the Boscastle flood in Cornwall four years ago.
"Like many people Hurricane Katrina will stay in my mind for a long time. I saw the aftermath myself when I visited the area shortly after it had happened and the sheer scale of the devastation and the immense human suffering it caused were almost unimaginable," he said.
"And then in this country, I will never forget the flood at Boscastle in Cornwall four years ago. It was such a freak event. A normal summer's day turned into a disaster. How no-one was killed, I will never know."
Prince Charles praised the work of the IPCC and said it had helped to galvanize public opinion. He singled out former US Vice President Al Gore and said in his opinion he had made the single most important contribution to the climate debate with his film An Inconvenient Truth.
PlanetArk 1 Oct 08;
ROME - Assuring farm animals are reared in humane conditions must be an integral part of efforts to fight world hunger, animal welfare campaigners said this week.
"It's often seen as a luxury, Western-driven concept, but increased and improved animal welfare can lead to more productive animals," Justine Holmes, of the World Society for the Protection of Animals, said.
The society is one of the groups attending a four-day Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) conference on animal welfare.
A coalition of animal campaigners handed the FAO a 10-point plan for protecting animals as the United Nations agency tries to help the developing world meet a surging demand for meat.
The groups want the UN agency -- which has an annual budget of some US$500 million to promote food production -- to make the protection of farm animals an integral part of its work. They also want it to stop encouraging intensive agriculture such as factory farming of chickens and pigs.
The campaigners want World Trade Organisation rules to explicitly allow subsidies to improve animal welfare.
Simon Mack of the FAO's animal production section said on Tuesday the agency takes animal welfare seriously, as it had proven by hosting this week's meeting, but that intensive farming was likely to increase to supply global demand.
"I would hope everything we do throughout the livestock sector is pro-welfare," Mack told Reuters.
"Prevention of diseases, improving animal feed, housing, the use of indigenous breeds, it's all pro-welfare."
"There is a growing demand for animal products and the livestock sector is having to respond to that demand and some sort of intensification of livestock production is inevitable," he said.
That did not necessarily mean animal welfare standards would decline, he said, adding that small-scale farming did not necessarily guarantee better conditions for animals. (Reporting by Robin Pomeroy; editing by Michael Roddy)
Juliette Jowit, The Guardian 30 Sep 08;
People will have to be rationed to four modest portions of meat and one litre of milk a week if the world is to avoid run-away climate change, a major new report warns.
The report, by the Food Climate Research Network, based at the University of Surrey, also says total food consumption should be reduced, especially "low nutritional value" treats such as alcohol, sweets and chocolates.
It urges people to return to habits their mothers or grandmothers would have been familiar with: buying locally in-season products, cooking in bulk and in pots with lids or pressure cookers, avoiding waste and walking to the shops - alongside more modern tips such as using the microwave and internet shopping.
The report goes much further than any previous advice after mounting concern about the impact of the livestock industry on greenhouse gases and rising food prices. It follows a four-year study of the impact of food on climate change and is thought to be the most thorough study of its kind.
Tara Garnett, the report's author, warned that campaigns encouraging people to change their habits voluntarily were doomed to fail and urged the government to use caps on greenhouse gas emissions and carbon pricing to ensure changes were made. "Food is important to us in a great many cultural and symbolic ways, and our food choices are affected by cost, time, habit and other influences," the report says. "Study upon study has shown that awareness-raising campaigns alone are unlikely to work, particularly when it comes to more difficult changes."
The report's findings are in line with an investigation by the October edition of the Ecologist magazine, which found that arguments for people to go vegetarian or vegan to stop climate change and reduce pressure on rising food prices were exaggerated and would damage the developing world in particular, where many people depend on animals for essential food, other products such as leather and wool, and for manure and help in tilling fields to grow other crops.
Instead, it recommended cutting meat consumption by at least half and making sure animals were fed as much as possible on grass and food waste which could not be eaten by humans.
"The notion that cows and sheep are four-legged weapons of mass destruction has become something of a distraction from the real issues in both climate change and food production," said Pat Thomas, the Ecologist's editor.
The head of the United Nations intergovernmental panel on climate change, Rajendra Pachauri, also sparked global debate this month when he urged people to have at least one meat-free day a week.
The Food Climate Research Network found that measured by production, the UK food sector produces greenhouse gases equivalent to 33m tonnes of carbon. Measured by consumption - including imports - the total rises to 43.3m tonnes. Both figures work out at under one fifth of UK emissions, but they exclude the indirect impacts of actions such as clearing rainforest for cattle and crops, which other studies estimate would add up to 5% to 20% of global emissions.
The report found the meat and dairy sectors together accounted for just over half of those emissions; potatoes, fruit and vegetables for 15%; drinks and other products with sugar for another 15%; and bread, pastry and flour for 13%.
It also revealed which parts of the food chain were the most polluting. Although packaging has had a lot of media and political attention, it only ranked fifth in importance behind agriculture - especially the methane produced by livestock burping - manufacturing, transport, and cooking and refrigeration at home.
The report calls for meat and dairy consumption to be cut in developed countries so that global production remains stable as the population grows to an estimated 9bn by 2050.
At the same time emissions from farms, transport, manufacturing and retail could be cut, with improvements including more efficient use of fertilisers, feed and energy, changed diets for livestock, and more renewable fuels - leading to a total reduction in emissions from the sector of 50% to 67%, it says.
The UN and other bodies recommend that developed countries should reduce total emissions by 80% by 2050.
However, the National Farmers' Union warned that its own study, with other industry players, published last year, found net emissions from agriculture could only be cut by up to 50% if the carbon savings from building renewable energy sources on farms were taken into account.
The NFU also called for government incentives to help farmers make the changes. "Farmers aren't going to do this out of the goodness of their hearts, because farmers don't have that luxury; many of our members are very hard pressed at the moment," said Jonathan Scurlock, the NFU's chief adviser on renewable energy and climate change.
Terry Macalister, The Guardian 30 Sep 08;
The government's renewable power strategy is "ineffective and very expensive", according to a damning review by the International Energy Agency.
A study of 35 countries, including all the major industrial nations such as the US, Germany and China, puts the UK near the bottom of the class on green energy.
While ministers like to boast that the Britain leads the field, Paolo Frankl, author of the IEA report and head of renewables, believes its overall record is poor.
"We estimate that, in 2005 terms, it [British green power] costs around 13.5 US cents per kilowatt hour over 20 years and registers 3% on our effectiveness indicator. This compares with costs below 10 cents and effectiveness of almost 12% in Germany," said Frankl, author of Deploying Renewables: Principles for Effective Policies.
Frankl said the UK had not improved in relative terms since then. "Things may have changed but I would not say drastically, especially compared with countries which have changed and become very efficient such as Spain and Portugal."
In overall terms, the renewable power sector in the UK was "ineffective and very expensive". That could be attributed to administrative problems such as getting connections to the National Grid and winning over communities to support windfarms and other schemes.
Britain ranked 31st in the cost league of 35 countries, prompting criticism from environmental group Greenpeace.
"Our renewables industry has been left to wither on the vine while our European neighbours have raced ahead, creating new jobs as well as fighting climate change and securing their energy supplies," said Jim Footner, senior climate campaigner at Greenpeace. "The Department for Business must urgently ditch its obsession with coal and nuclear, and focus properly on the true technologies of the 21st century."
The Department for Business said it had not seen the report but could take comfort at not being the only one singled out for criticism. Too few countries had implemented effective support policies for green energy to be in a position to meet G8 goals of providing 50% of global energy supplies and helping halve carbon output by 2050, said Nobuo Tanaka, executive director of the IEA.
"Governments need to take urgent action ... Setting a carbon price is not enough. To foster a smooth and efficient transition of renewables towards mass market integration, renewable energy policies should be designed around a set of fundamental policies, inserted into predictable, transparent and stable policy frameworks and implemented in an integrated approach."
Frankl's report argues that there are "significant barriers" to swift expansion and which increase the costs of accelerating renewables into the mainstream.
Posts
visitors since Nov 07