Best of our wild blogs: 21 Apr 09

Some Flying Jewels In Our Nature Reserves
on the Beauty of Fauna and Flora in Nature blog

Fighting or mating?
on the Biodiversity Singapore blog

Feasting on a dead Common Flameback
on the Bird Ecology Study Group blog

Granite Island
on Ubin.sgkopi

Upcoming seminars at ISEAS
One about Rice and another about the Marina Barrage on the Midnight Monkey Monitor blog

Don't look
on the annotated budak blog

IYOR Singapore closes at ADEX, 23-26 Apr
on the Singapore Celebrates our Reefs blog

Massive marine works
reclamation at Tuas and more works next to Cyrene Reef on the wild shores of singapore blog.

'EXPRESS!' on line launch by ECO Singapore
on the wild shores of singapore blog

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Habitat loss in Kuala Selangor's firefly colony

Hilary Chiew The Star 21 Apr 09;

The firefly colony of Kuala Selangor faces constant threats – from the construction of the Sungai Selangor Dam to waste pollution and now, destruction of its breeding habitat.

SEVERAL nibong stems straddle the creek that drains the intertidal zone at Kampung Beluntas into Sungai Selangor. Valued as a sturdy material for make-shift bridges in rural areas, nibong trees are among the floodplain vegetation cleared recently to make way for oil palm cultivation.
Clear and present danger: Clearing of riverine vegetation at Kuala Selangor for banana and oil palm plantation has destroyed the habitat of the synchronous flashing firefly Pteroptyx tener that is the source of a thriving eco-tourism activity in the otherwise sleepy hollow. In the background is a thin line of berembang trees left standing. – ONG SOON HIN/The Star

The land clearing detected in Kuala Selangor is situated opposite the jetty where tourists board a fleet of 31 wooden boats to view the spectacular light show – the famous synchronised flashing of fireflies on berembang trees along the riverbank at Kampung Kuantan.

It is learnt that 52ha of the riverine area belonging to an unknown number of private landowners are being developed for the cash crop by a local from nearby Kampung Belimbing. So far, 32ha have been stripped of riparian vegetation consisting of nibong, rumbia, nipah and fig trees, leaving only a narrow strip of berembang trees lining the bank. In some parts, the clearing is right up to the river edges.

“The clearing work started last May and is scheduled to be completed by June. Work is slow because the soil is very soggy especially after a rainy spell and this can sink the excavator,” says a source at the site.

“Some parts of this land has been left idle for the last 80 years and this is a good source of income for landowners. It costs the developer RM1,500 to clear one acre (0.4ha). This is not an illegal activity,” he says. He claims that the developer has obtained the agreement of 24 landowners for a 15-year lease.

It is unclear if the berembang trees were spared in keeping with the guideline of 50m river buffer or as a convenient screen for the destruction.

Drastic changes

News of the destruction at Kampung Beluntas follow a spate of clearing along the riverbank highlighted by various media in March. In fact, periodic clearing has been occurring since 2007, according to researchers at the Forest Research Institute of Malaysia (FRIM).

Funded by the Department of Irrigation and Drainage, a team from FRIM was given RM200,000 to monitor the habitat for a two-year period from 2006 under the Integrated River Basin Management project to develop a systematic monitoring method for the firefly population.

Although fireflies aggregate along a 10km stretch downstream of the 110km Sungai Selangor, nine sites along a 1.6m stretch of riverbank was surveyed on a monthly basis. Tree lines on the opposite banks were photographed for comparison over the months.

“As we observed more and more clearing at the monitoring sites between Kampung Kuantan and Bukit Belimbing last November, we wrote to the Kuala Selangor District Council,” says the team leader Dr Laurence Kirton.

However, the entomologist from FRIM acknowledges that human modification of the riverine habitat along Sungai Selangor is not a recent development. In 2005, he analysed satellite images of a 5sqkm area around Kampung Kuantan and found that almost 70% of the land has been modified or developed.

Drastic changes to vegetation along the river can result in decline of firefly and snail populations because the firefly larvae and their prey snails depend on natural riverine vegetation for survival.

“A lot of people think the berembang tree is enough (for the fireflies) but that’s not true as they need the natural habitat to survive,” says Kirton.

Female fireflies lay eggs in inland moist soil. Firefly larvae spend a substantial period of their seven-month life cycle in the floodplain before morphing into adults. The common mangrove snail is their main source of sustenance.

Besides habitat loss, Kirton warns that increased utilisation of land for agriculture also poses a threat to the firefly population as pesticide usage in plantations and orchards can harm the fireflies. He points to a survey between 2002 and 2003 that recorded downstream pesticide levels in Sungai Selangor to have exceeded the US Environmental Protection Agency limits for freshwater aquatic organisms.

Paper sanctuary

At the height of the opposition against the construction of the Sungai Selangor Dam (completed in 2002), the survival of the firefly colony at the river mouth was one of the major concerns. It was feared that extraction of water would reduce freshwater flow downstream and cause salt water intrusion into the estuarine, thus adversely affecting the downstream ecosystem.

The Selangor Government provided a RM1mil grant to the Malaysian Nature Society to assess the environmental impacts of the dam and draft recommendations to mitigate the adverse impacts.

The 16-month study suggested continuous monitoring of the water level downstream, release of sufficient water from the dam during dry periods, establishment of a buffer zone along the river and continuous environmental monitoring. While the impact from the dam has yet to be fully ascertained, it appears that indiscriminate land clearing is threatening the firefly colony of Kuala Selangor.

The socio-economic importance of the fireflies’ touristic value had prompted the state to designate the site as a sanctuary and to undergo rehabilitation. The Kuala Selangor Local Plan (2007-2015) notes the need for a 50m river buffer and controlled development within a 400m radius from the river edge.

Securing private land has been highlighted as a vital step towards ensuring the wellbeing of the fireflies but until today, this critical aspect has yet to be resolved. Kirton says the state could acquire the land or provide incentives to land owners to prevent conversion of the land to other uses.

“Currently, land owners who are not direct beneficiaries of the firefly ecotourism do not bother about the effect of leasing or selling their land to oil palm or banana growers. The Govern­ment has to channel revenue from firefly watching activities into conservation of the habitat and there must be recognition of the importance of the firefly colony at the community level,” he adds.

Bukit Gasing state assemblyman Edward Lee says the district council and land office are currently determining the land status. He agrees that a comprehensive land management scheme is needed to resolve the problem. He says the state is looking into legal provisions for issuing stop-work orders as the affected areas are private land.

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How Somalia's Fishermen Became Pirates

Ishaan Tharoor Time Magazine 18 Apr 09;

Amid the current media frenzy about Somali pirates, it's hard not to imagine them as characters in some dystopian Horn of Africa version of Waterworld. We see wily corsairs in ragged clothing swarming out of their elusive mother ships, chewing narcotic khat while thumbing GPS phones and grappling hooks. They are not desperate bandits, experts say, rather savvy opportunists in the most lawless corner of the planet. But the pirates have never been the only ones exploiting the vulnerabilities of this troubled failed state — and are, in part, a product of the rest of the world's neglect.

Ever since a civil war brought down Somalia's last functional government in 1991, the country's 3,330 km (2,000 miles) of coastline — the longest in continental Africa — has been pillaged by foreign vessels. A United Nations report in 2006 said that, in the absence of the country's at one time serviceable coastguard, Somali waters have become the site of an international "free for all," with fishing fleets from around the world illegally plundering Somali stocks and freezing out the country's own rudimentarily-equipped fishermen. According to another U.N. report, an estimated $300 million worth of seafood is stolen from the country's coastline each year. "In any context," says Gustavo Carvalho, a London-based researcher with Global Witness, an environmental NGO, "that is a staggering sum."

In the face of this, impoverished Somalis living by the sea have been forced over the years to defend their own fishing expeditions out of ports such as Eyl, Kismayo and Harardhere — all now considered to be pirate dens. Somali fishermen, whose industry was always small-scale, lacked the advanced boats and technologies of their interloping competitors, and also complained of being shot at by foreign fishermen with water cannons and firearms. "The first pirate gangs emerged in the '90s to protect against foreign trawlers," says Peter Lehr, lecturer in terrorism studies at Scotland's University of St. Andrews and editor of Violence at Sea: Piracy in the Age of Global Terrorism. The names of existing pirate fleets, such as the National Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia or Somali Marines, are testament to the pirates' initial motivations.

The waters they sought to protect, says Lehr, were "an El Dorado for fishing fleets of many nations." A 2006 study published in the journal Science predicted that the current rate of commercial fishing would virtually empty the world's oceanic stocks by 2050. Yet, Somalia's seas still offer a particularly fertile patch for tuna, sardines and mackerel, and other lucrative species of seafood, including lobsters and sharks. In other parts of the Indian Ocean region, such as the Persian Gulf, fishermen resort to dynamite and other extreme measures to pull in the kinds of catches that are still in abundance off the Horn of Africa.

High-seas trawlers from countries as far flung as South Korea, Japan and Spain have operated down the Somali coast, often illegally and without licenses, for the better part of two decades, the U.N. says. They often fly flags of convenience from sea-faring friendly nations like Belize and Bahrain, which further helps the ships skirt international regulations and evade censure from their home countries. Tsuma Charo of the Nairobi-based East African Seafarers Assistance Programme, which monitors Somali pirate attacks and liaises with the hostage takers and the captured crews, says "illegal trawling has fed the piracy problem." In the early days of Somali piracy, those who seized trawlers without licenses could count on a quick ransom payment, since the boat owners and companies backing those vessels didn't want to draw attention to their violation of international maritime law. This, Charo reckons, allowed the pirates to build up their tactical networks and whetted their appetite for bigger spoils.

Beyond illegal fishing, foreign ships have also long been accused by local fishermen of dumping toxic and nuclear waste off Somalia's shores. A 2005 United Nations Environmental Program report cited uranium radioactive and other hazardous deposits leading to a rash of respiratory ailments and skin diseases breaking out in villages along the Somali coast. According to the U.N., at the time of the report, it cost $2.50 per ton for a European company to dump these types of materials off the Horn of Africa, as opposed to $250 per ton to dispose of them cleanly in Europe.

Monitoring and combating any of these misdeeds is next to impossible — Somalia's current government can barely find its feet in the wake of the 2006 U.S.-backed Ethiopian invasion. And many Somalis, along with outside observers, suspect local officials in Mogadishu and in ports in semi-autonomous Puntland further north of accepting bribes from foreign fishermen as well as from pirate elders. U.N. monitors in 2005 and 2006 suggested an embargo on fish taken from Somali waters, but their proposals were shot down by members of the Security Council.

In the meantime, Somali piracy has metastasized into the country's only boom industry. Most of the pirates, observers say, are not former fishermen, but just poor folk seeking their fortune. Right now, they hold 18 cargo ships and some 300 sailors hostage — the work of a sophisticated and well-funded operation. A few pirates have offered testimony to the international press — a headline in Thursday's Times of London read, "They stole our lobsters: A Somali pirate tells his side of the story" — but Lehr and other Somali experts express their doubts. "Nowadays," Lehr says, "this sort of thing is just a cheap excuse." The legacy of nearly twenty years of inaction and abuse, though, is far more costly.

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Injured green sea turtle treated at Phuket, Thailand

PMBC treats injured 120kg green sea turtle
Phuket Gazette 20 Apr 09;

CAPE PANWA, PHUKET: Veterinarians at the Phuket Marine Biological Center (PMBC) are treating an enormous green sea turtle whose carapace was cracked open by fishermen operating illegally in the waters off Rawai Beach.
PMBC biologist Kanjana Adulyankosol, who heads the PMBC’s endangered species unit, said a team of officers from the Marine and Coastal Resources Department Region 5 office in Phuket found the turtle tied to an anchor and trapped underwater a few kilometers offshore.

The patrol team had sped out to the area to intercept the fishermen, who were probably in the area under the cover of darkness to fill orders for aquarium fish that are protected from fishing under Thai law, Miss Kanjana said.

As the patrol boat was arriving, the fisherman must have used rope to tie the turtle tightly to the anchor line by one if its flippers and then tossed it overboard before making their escape, she said.

The turtle, a male weighing about 120 kilograms and with a carapace 97 centimeters long, was the largest of its kind seen in Phuket waters in at least 10 years.

Its age was probably between 50 and 60 years, she said.

Although the fishermen managed to escape, officials have already filed a complaint against them and provided police with good evidence – including photos of all the suspects – that should lead to their arrest.

As for the green turtle (Chelonia mydas), it was taken to the PMBC, where it is now being treated with antibiotics for a wound 11 centimeters long, six centimeters across and 1.5 centimeter deep, she said.

“We have already dressed the wound. The turtle is not in a stable condition and has not been active today, but if there is no infection he will probably be alright. After a few days or maybe a week we will be able to say more about his chances of survival,” she said.

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Big fish are ‘tortured’ in Asian seafood restaurants

Taipei Times 21 Apr 09;

The waiter serves up a generous helping of hyperbole with his sales patter as he points to a giant garoupa gawping out of the glass of a neon-lit fish tank on the pavement outside a seafront restaurant in Hong Kong.

“This is a very special fish. It is more than 100 years old,” he says, gesturing to the fish struggling to turn its 1m-long body in the confines of the tank.

“If you want to eat it, it will cost you around HK$500,000 [US$64,500]. You will need a very big party,” he said.

For months now, this magnificent creature has been on show to passers-by, working its way onto hundreds of snapshots as it tries to circle in the tank that suddenly became its home after decades cruising the inky, limitless depths of the Indian Ocean.

Capture brought no quick death for this and dozens of other large exotic fish crammed into tanks lining the pavement in seafood restaurants across Hong Kong and Asia.

The taste among Asian diners for exotic fish appears defiantly recession-proof. Falling fish stocks and rising prices have if anything, it seems, sharpened people’s appetite for luxury seafood.

However, the increasingly popular practice of enticing customers to restaurants with the display of huge fish in small tanks is troubling animal welfare experts.

The Society for the Protection of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) in Hong Kong has likened it to the way caged leopards or shackled elephants were displayed in the region’s colonial days.

SPCA executive director Sandy Macalister said of the display of garoupa in Hong Kong’s restaurants: “These wonderful animals, which since the 1940s have lived and bred in the coral depths, now lie behind thick distorting glass in a narrow tank on the footpath.”

“If a passerby or a restaurant patron knew that these magnificent creatures were more than 65 years old, would that make a difference?” she said.

Macalister said laws should be changed to stop big fish being put on public display in cramped conditions by restaurants.

“The problem is that until very recently, no one has really understood fish in the same way that no one understands lobsters and crabs,” she said.

“In fact they have sophisticated brains, and animal welfare science shows that they are feeling things we never knew they felt,” she said. “Some of those fish you see outside restaurants have probably been around since the 1940s. They are used to swimming around freely in the depths. The next thing they know, they are in a tank on a footpath. It’s cruel and it must be terrifying for them.”

Expert research suggests that in spite of common misconceptions, fish have memories and feelings similar to other animals, according to Macalister, meaning that being kept for months or years in a hugely restricted space amounts to a sublime form of torture for a mature adult fish.

“The only thing with a fish is it can’t express it,” he said. “They learn and they have memories, and they can identify people. They feel stress and they feel pain. People used to believe fish couldn’t remember anything for longer than three seconds, but we know now that isn’t true.”

Macalister said that as the law currently stood, it was very difficult for prosecutions to be brought.

“The issue is defining what is too small in terms of a tank,” he said. “If the fish has clean water and he has got the space to move around, then it’s not prosecutable under law.”

Marine biologist Yvonne Sadovy of the University of Hong Kong said the notion that fish feel pain and stress was increasingly accepted in academic circles.

“There has been a big question over whether fish feel pain and how they respond,” she said. “Fish are vertebrates like us. They have a backbone and a lot of the biology and physiology have some similarities to us. The nervous system and hormonal system in some ways are very similar.”

“I think most biologists would say there is absolutely no reason to believe they would not feel pain. How they perceive it is obviously incredibly difficult to know, but you pick up a fish and take it out of water and put a hook in its mouth and it struggles,” he said. “There is something clearly uncomfortable and not right and that fish is perceiving stress in some way.

“There have been studies of fish in mariculture environments where stress levels are measured by hormones when they are crowded and not fed properly, and chemicals associated with stress are very high,” he said.

“There is no reason to think that they don’t feel pain,” he said.

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NUS students launch first Singapore-designed eco car

Lynda Hong, Channel NewsAsia 20 Apr 09;

SINGAPORE: 10 final year engineering students from the National University of Singapore have designed and built a green car, said to be the first of its kind in Singapore.
Affectionately known as Kruce, the eco-friendly car was built from scratch over a 10-month period.

The S$40,000 car is powered by hydrogen fuel cells and emits no carbon dioxide. Its only by-product is water.

Environmentally friendly vehicles like Kruce have already been launched in countries like the US. Its creators are in the learning process of making Kruce more energy efficient rather than environmentally friendly.

There is still some way to go before Kruce can be road ready.

Associate Professor Ian Gibson, co-supervisor, Kent Ridge Urban Concept Ecocar (KRUCE), said: "You will probably realise that itself will not be a fully fledged road vehicle. But certainly some of the ideas that we have explored within this vehicle will become useful in developing an actual road vehicle."

Kruce is made with lightweight materials such as aluminium and carbon fibre reinforced polymers and has aerodynamic features to help it move faster and further with less fuel.

The environmentally-friendly vehicle will compete against 66 cars at the Shell Eco-marathon Europe competition from May 7 to 9 in Germany.

The challenge is to complete 22 kilometres within 53 minutes. The car that uses the least amount of fuel to complete the circuit wins. - CNA/vm

This car’s carbon emission: 0
Zul Othman, Today Online 21 Apr 09;

IT IS by no means the first urban concept car to be powered by hydrogen fuel cells — an electrochemical “device” that converts chemical energy into electrical energy.

But their car can travel longer and faster, claim the 10-member team from the Faculty of Engineering, National University of Singapore, who developed it as part of their final year project (picture).

Dubbed the Kruce or the Kent Ridge Urban Concept Ecocar, it can travel up to 300km on a litre of fuel, said leader Zhang Wei Sheng, 24.

It is being entered for the Eco-Marathon, a race for fuel-efficient cars in Germany from May 7 to 9.

“Other teams have used hydrogen fuel cells before ... but we (have) codeveloped the customised fuel cells so our fuel cell is smaller and lighter,” he said.

The car will have a zero carbon emission rating and be almost noiseless when driven. The codevelopment was with Gashub Technology, a local renewable energy technology company.

The team will compete in the Urban Concept category against 66 teams from 37 countries. The winner will be determined by the least amount of fuel used to travel seven laps of a 22-km circuit in 53minutes.

The 2.7m-long single seater has a top speed of 40kmh, but has twice the efficiency of a conventional combustible engine, due to its in-built hydrogen circulation.

Made from lightweight material, it weighs 130 kg, and took 10 months to build. Last year the team ranked 18th at the race in France.

First Singapore-made eco-car to run on hydrogen
Straits Times 21 Apr 09;

THE first made-in-Singapore eco-car to run on hydrogen was launched yesterday at the National University of Singapore (NUS).

Powered by a 1.2kilowatt hydrogen fuel cell, the $40,000 vehicle named KRUCE, or Kent Ridge Urban Concept Ecocar, expels water as exhaust and is twice as energy-efficient as internal combustion engine vehicles, according to fuel-cell technology data.

It will compete against 66 teams from 37 countries at the Shell Eco-marathon to be held from May 7 to 9 at the EuroSpeeday Lausitz, a race track located near Klettwitz in eastern Germany.

The annual contest will see cars perform seven laps - or 22km - around a circuit within 53 minutes. The winner, who stands to win a cash prize of ¥1,000, is determined by the car which consumes the least amount of fuel over the distance covered.

It is a technological showcase to encourage innovative solutions among youth for the energy challenges of the future.

The NUS team's project, which started nine months ago, is a collaboration among 10 students from the university's engineering faculty, the Design Incubation Centre at the NUS School of Design and Environment, and local technology company Gashub Technology.

Built using lightweight materials such as aluminium and carbon fibre, the car weighs 130kg and can hit a top speed of 40 kmh.

NUS president, Professor Tan Chorh Chuan, told The Straits Times: 'The project is really about the training of students as engineers...It teaches them to identify and define problems as opposed to just solving them within a defined model.'

Team leader Zhang Wei Sheng, 24, is looking forward to pitting his wits against the other car designers. Said the final-year mechanical engineering student: 'It will be a good learning experience because we get to interact very closely with the other teams and also see their innovations.'

AMRESH GUNASINGHAM

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Singapore Botanic Gardens develops orchid seed bank

Neil Chatterjee, Reuters 20 Apr 09;

SINGAPORE, April 20 (Reuters) - Singapore's Botanic Gardens is developing an orchid seed bank and a section devoted to healing plants, as it looks to help conserve Southeast Asian species threatened by development and climate change. The seed bank, in its early stages and part of a global project, will keep alive dust-like orchid seeds by chilling them in liquid nitrogen.

"It's a race against time to document botanical treasures in this part of the world," said Chin See Chung, director of the Botanic Gardens, in an interview. "Habitat loss is going on at a rapid rate."

The Orchid Seed Stores for Sustainable Use project aims to collect and store seeds from orchid hot spots in Asia and Latin America, hoping to have 1,000 species stored by 2015. This is still a fraction of around 25,000 known orchid species.

There is a multi-billion-dollar global trade in orchids, the largest flowering plant species. Most commercially sold orchids are grown in nurseries but wild species are threatened by habitat loss and smuggling.

Singapore's Botanic Gardens pioneered orchid hybridisation in the 19th century. The tropical city-state exports over S$20 million worth ($13 million) of orchids a year, and in 2006 had around 15 percent of the world market for cut flowers.

The Gardens, 150 years old, started off focusing on commercial crops, leading to the spread of rubber across Southeast Asia, before switching to botanical research.

"The problem with research is it's slow and time consuming ... it's daunting," Chin said, adding there were not enough botanists, with biologists now going into more high-profile fields such as molecular biology and genetics.

Chin, who has a Ph.D from Yale in the traditional use of forests on the island of Borneo, saw future commercial growth potential for health food or medicinal plant products, as scientists look for cures to diseases such as cancer and AIDS.

But he said medicinal plants and information about them are at risk of being lost, leading the Gardens to start work on a "healing garden" that will hold 700 regional species by 2011.

Collectively, botanic gardens around the world hold around 100,000 plant species, a third of the total, Chin said.

But the financial crisis is threatening the Millenium Seed Bank Project, which aims to house all species to ensure future biodiversity [ID:nLT460399]. ($1 = 1.500 Singapore dollar) (Editing by Sugita Katyal)

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This for that: Singapore embraces barter in recession

Puja Bharwani, Reuters 20 Apr 09;

SINGAPORE (Reuters Life!) - Hair styling in exchange for printing jobs. Feng shui services for marketing expertise.

It isn't your typical mode of business, but as the recession bites, many people and enterprises in Singapore are turning to the age-old practice of barter to pay bills and cut costs.

But gone are the days of the simple one-to-one direct barter. Currently, there are two online barter exchanges -- Barter Vista and BarterXchange -- and they are attracting hundreds of people seeking innovative ways to stretch their dollars.

"Barter Vista is where business owners, especially small and medium enterprises, come together to barter trade their excessive inventory or their slow time, in return for things that they will otherwise use cash to buy," said Chew Chee Yong, managing director of Barter Vista, which has about 400 members.

"For example, my printer, one of my members, barter-traded his spare capacity in return for staff benefits, or even dining vouchers and insurance," he added.

From business to beauty, there's something for everyone on the barter websites.

Daisy Leng gets her hair styled at Tranzform Hair Studio, also a barter website member, which in turn gets printing and web publishing services from another member.

Users of the site pay a one-time joining fee of $520. Members who offer their services earn a barter currency which can be traded for products or services. For every transaction conducted, Barter Vista takes a cash commission.

These days, the services most traded are printing, marketing, public relations and advertising, according to Chew.

Angela Sim, a senior marketing executive, has been a member of Barter Vista for three years and says bartering benefits everybody involved.

She has been doing marketing for Geek Terminal, a restaurant, and in return for her expertise, she got advice on feng shui, or the ancient Chinese belief of geomancy, to arrange her home and office, which would have otherwise cost her thousands of dollars.

"Any business that has spare capacity or down-time will find bartering useful. Or even during these tough economic times, where they find cash is hard to come by," Sim said.

For the owners of Geek Terminal, Danny Pang and Christopher Lee, bartering enabled them to obtain a sophisticated marketing campaign that cost them up to 70 percent less than what they would have paid if they had gone the traditional way.

Although bartering is relatively new in Singapore, Barter Vista's Chew expects the site's trade volume and membership to double in 2009, largely due to the global economic crisis.

In 2007, trade volume was worth around $800,000.

According to the International Reciprocal Trade Association, the modern trade and barter industry facilitates 12 billion dollars in business-to-business barter transactions worldwide annually.

(Editing by Miral Fahmy)

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The nature-loving boss

Agatha Koh Brazil, Today Online 21 Apr 09;

IF YOU want to emerge stronger and fitter from this downturn, take your cue from nature, says Tan Tong Hai.

“We cannot go wrong following the flow of it,” says the IT veteran. “We have to accept that there are certain things that cannot be changed, just like the seasons.

“Birds undergo a period of moulting every year (when they) will usually eat more, sleep more and sing less. One wonders why birds have to undergo this painful period of renewal of feathers.”

But if we apply the understanding that birds cannot sing all year to people and businesses, we can appreciate ups and downs better, he says.

Nature has its “own way of telling us that we need to take time off to renew ourselves so that we can drop our old thinking and replace them with new thinking”.

StarHub’s chief operating officer maintains that “we have to leverage this downturn period to renew ourselves and come out stronger when the upturn happens”.

He jogs on weekend evenings with his parrot Uno perching, untethered, on his forearm. The half-hour run is as much for the three-year-old bird as it is for him.

“It gives Uno a chance to view the ‘world’ and at the same time simulate the same flight sensation that he would never get at home,” says Tong Hai, who ruled out the parrot accompanying him on his 6am runs as the bird may catch a cold.

The family pet, which took him a year to teach how to talk, embodies his management beliefs.

“If you look at any parrot, you will not be able to tell whether the parrot can sing (or) talk. It will take time for you to engage with it before it can accept you as the owner and sing (or) talk for you.”

So, for staff: “We must spend sufficient time to engage with them before they are willing to run the extra mile. Often bosses fail to understand this and expect staff to adapt to them. For true engagement to happen, it must be both ways.”

Not all parrots take to different owners — the African Grey parrot is loyal to one owner but an Amazon Green Parrot (like Uno) can adapt to different ones. Ditto with employees.

Some can adapt to different bosses, some do better if they stay in the same department under the same boss.

Tong Hai keeps seven birds, and his three sharmas won eight prizes, including a first, last year at bird-singing competitions. “You can either buy a baby bird and groom from scratch (start-up) or buy an ‘older’ bird and groom from there.

“The best approach is to buy ‘fallen champions’ — birds that have won championships before but fail to perform under the care of current owners. So long as the birds are healthy, given the right grooming, engagement and competitive environment, they can be groomed to regain their former glory.”

Pretty much the strategy he adopted at Nasdaq-listed Pacific Internet and SGX-listed Singapore Computer Systems, turning them around in a short period of time. “They were former champions and given the right employee engagement and right happy environment, they were able to deliver profitable results.”

The best way for senior management to find out more about company morale Tong Hai believes, is to “run with your people”. “Your staff will know that senior management are not super-beings ... not afraid to try, and expose their weaknesses in running. If you are older but can run faster than your staff, it will inspire them to work harder.”

Last Thursday, he ran in the 5.6 km JPMorgan Corporate Challenge with 440 staff, completing it at 29.15 mins. His target was under 30 minutes.

“Our mental power increases as we grow older. That is why we are able to run longer distances and participate in marathon races,” says the 45-year-old father of two, drawing a parallel with his return to StarHub. (He was general manager of StarHub Internet a decade ago).

This time, as the COO of a 2,700- strong multi-service infocomm provider, his main challenge is “not just about hubbing strategies” but also about “hubbing execution both externally and internally”.

Birds must be healthy to be happy, and comfortable where you put them. They must also have sufficient competition from other birds to prompt them to sing better. So “we cannot simply provide ... a good office environment and employment benefits,” he says.

“We need to create a happy culture. You will know whether staff are happy or not by observing their pre-meeting or corridor conversations. If they are smiling, talking more openly ... you have happy employees.”

He believes in doing “the toughest thing” first. “It is not natural for a person to wake up in the morning and feel like running as it defies Newton’s Law of Inertia,” he says.

But he pushes himself to run, pumping his heartbeat as fast as he can. That way, no amount of work or surprises during the day can raise his heartbeat any faster.

“There are no shortcuts in life. Do the toughest things now so that you need not do them when you are older.”

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How green is that bottle?

Daniel Goleman & Gregory Norris, Straits Times 21 Apr 09;

EARTH Day is tomorrow, and all things 'green' will be celebrated. But how environmentally friendly are 'green' products, really?

Consider that paragon of eco-virtue: the stainless steel water bottle that lets us hydrate without discarding endless plastic bottles. Using a method called life cycle assessment, we have evaluated the environmental and health impact of a stainless steel thermos - from the extraction and processing of its ingredients to its manufacture, distribution, use and final disposal. There were some surprises. What we think of as 'green' turns out to be less so (and, yes, sometimes more so) than we assume.

# Extraction, processing: Producing stainless steel requires a global supply chain involving more than 1,400 steps. For example, the mining of chromium ore, an essential component of stainless steel, can expose workers to a heightened risk of cancer. Next, the ores have to be processed to extract useful metal. This usually involves energy-intensive heating, a process that not only requires enormous amounts of fossil fuel but also releases greenhouse gases, carcinogens, particulates and toxic material.

# Manufacture: Making stainless steel results in about 10 times more pollution than regular steel. But if the steel mills use recycled iron, instead of newly mined pig iron, the environmental and health impact can be reduced by 10 per cent to 15 per cent. In addition, simple innovations like a lighter single-wall design - rather than the double walls typically found in insulated bottles - can reduce the ecological impact by about 35 per cent.

# Distribution: The bottle's journey from factory to distribution centre to you uses up energy and results in particulates, greenhouse gases and other emissions. The good news: shipping the bottle from a factory in Asia in a tightly packed cargo container, plus a few hundred kilometres by truck, adds only 1 per cent to 5 per cent to the environmental burden. The bad news: the heating, cooling, lighting and ventilation of the store where you buy the bottle could have nearly as much of a negative effect on the environment as producing the bottle itself.

# Use: Obviously, one danger of any reusable water bottle is bacteria build-up, so you have to keep it clean. If you wash your stainless steel water bottle in a dishwasher that uses a half-litre of electrically heated water, 50 to 100 washes can result in the same amount of pollution that was caused by making the bottle in the first place. Washing it in cold water still demands electricity to pump the water and chemicals to treat it - but the impact is tiny by comparison.

# Disposal: Steel lasts forever. Try to ensure that the discarded bottle finds its way to a steel recycler - not just to a landfill, where it could sit for centuries. By recycling, you return not only steel but also nickel and chromium alloys to the production chain, reducing the need to mine and process more of these ingredients. These benefits are well worth the impact of transporting the steel back to the mill for recycling.

So, is stainless steel really better than plastic?

One stainless steel bottle is obviously much worse than one plastic bottle. Producing that 300gm stainless steel bottle requires seven times as much fossil fuel, releases 14 times more greenhouse gases, demands the extraction of hundreds of times more metal resources as well as causes hundreds of times more toxic risk to people and ecosystems than making a 32gm plastic bottle. So if you're planning on only one water bottle in your life, buy plastic.

But chances are that buying that stainless steel bottle will prevent you from using countless plastic bottles. And think of the harm done to the environment by making more and more plastic - the electricity needed to form polyethylene terephthalate resin into bottles, the fossil fuels burned to produce this electricity, the energy used and emissions released from mining the coal and converting crude oil to fuel, and on and on.

What it comes down to is this: If your stainless steel bottle takes the place of 50 plastic bottles, the climate is better off; if it gets used 500 times, it beats plastic in all the environment-impact categories studied in a life cycle assessment.

But before stainless steel thermoses, before bottled water, we already had an eco-friendly method of getting water: drinking fountains.

Daniel Goleman is the author of Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing The Hidden Impacts Of What We Buy Can Change Everything. Gregory Norris is a lecturer at Harvard University and a professor at the University of Arkansas.

THE NEW YORK TIMES SYNDICATE

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Use Energy, Get Rich and Save the Planet

John Tierney, The New York Times 20 Apr 09;

When the first Earth Day took place in 1970, American environmentalists had good reason to feel guilty. The nation’s affluence and advanced technology seemed so obviously bad for the planet that they were featured in a famous equation developed by the ecologist Paul Ehrlich and the physicist John P. Holdren, who is now President Obama’s science adviser.

Their equation was I=PAT, which means that environmental impact is equal to population multiplied by affluence multiplied by technology. Protecting the planet seemed to require fewer people, less wealth and simpler technology — the same sort of social transformation and energy revolution that will be advocated at many Earth Day rallies on Wednesday.

But among researchers who analyze environmental data, a lot has changed since the 1970s. With the benefit of their hindsight and improved equations, I’ll make a couple of predictions:

1. There will be no green revolution in energy or anything else. No leader or law or treaty will radically change the energy sources for people and industries in the United States or other countries. No recession or depression will make a lasting change in consumers’ passions to use energy, make money and buy new technology — and that, believe it or not, is good news, because...

2. The richer everyone gets, the greener the planet will be in the long run.

I realize this second prediction seems hard to believe when you consider the carbon being dumped into the atmosphere today by Americans, and the projections for increasing emissions from India and China as they get richer.

Those projections make it easy to assume that affluence and technology inflict more harm on the environment. But while pollution can increase when a country starts industrializing, as people get wealthier they can afford cleaner water and air. They start using sources of energy that are less carbon-intensive — and not just because they’re worried about global warming. The process of “decarbonization” started long before Al Gore was born.

The old wealth-is-bad IPAT theory may have made intuitive sense, but it didn’t jibe with the data that has been analyzed since that first Earth Day. By the 1990s, researchers realized that graphs of environmental impact didn’t produce a simple upward-sloping line as countries got richer. The line more often rose, flattened out and then reversed so that it sloped downward, forming the shape of a dome or an inverted U — what’s called a Kuznets curve. (See nytimes.com/tierneylab for an example.)

In dozens of studies, researchers identified Kuznets curves for a variety of environmental problems. There are exceptions to the trend, especially in countries with inept governments and poor systems of property rights, but in general, richer is eventually greener. As incomes go up, people often focus first on cleaning up their drinking water, and then later on air pollutants like sulfur dioxide.

As their wealth grows, people consume more energy, but they move to more efficient and cleaner sources — from wood to coal and oil, and then to natural gas and nuclear power, progressively emitting less carbon per unit of energy. This global decarbonization trend has been proceeding at a remarkably steady rate since 1850, according to Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller University and Paul Waggoner of the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station.

“Once you have lots of high-rises filled with computers operating all the time, the energy delivered has to be very clean and compact,” said Mr. Ausubel, the director of the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller. “The long-term trend is toward natural gas and nuclear power, or conceivably solar power. If the energy system is left to its own devices, most of the carbon will be out of it by 2060 or 2070.”

But what about all the carbon dioxide being spewed out today by Americans commuting to McMansions? Well, it’s true that American suburbanites do emit more greenhouse gases than most other people in the world (although New Yorkers aren’t much different from other affluent urbanites).

But the United States and other Western countries seem to be near the top of a Kuznets curve for carbon emissions and ready to start the happy downward slope. The amount of carbon emitted by the average American has remained fairly flat for the past couple of decades, and per capita carbon emissions have started declining in some countries, like France. Some researchers estimate that the turning point might come when a country’s per capita income reaches $30,000, but it can vary widely, depending on what fuels are available. Meanwhile, more carbon is being taken out of the atmosphere by the expanding forests in America and other affluent countries. Deforestation follows a Kuznets curve, too. In poor countries, forests are cleared to provide fuel and farmland, but as people gain wealth and better agricultural technology, the farm fields start reverting to forestland.

Of course, even if rich countries’ greenhouse impact declines, there will still be an increase in carbon emissions from China, India and other countries ascending the Kuznets curve. While that prospect has environmentalists lobbying for global restrictions on greenhouse gases, some economists fear that a global treaty could ultimately hurt the atmosphere by slowing economic growth, thereby lengthening the time it takes for poor countries to reach the turning point on the curve.

But then, is there much reason to think that countries at different stages of the Kuznets curve could even agree to enforce tough restrictions? The Kyoto treaty didn’t transform Europe’s industries or consumers. While some American environmentalists hope that the combination of the economic crisis and a new president can start an era of energy austerity and green power, Mr. Ausubel says they’re hoping against history.

Over the past century, he says, nothing has drastically altered the long-term trends in the way Americans produce or use energy — not the Great Depression, not the world wars, not the energy crisis of the 1970s or the grand programs to produce alternative energy.

“Energy systems evolve with a particular logic, gradually, and they don’t suddenly morph into something different,” Mr. Ausubel says. That doesn’t make for a rousing speech on Earth Day. But in the long run, a Kuznets curve is more reliable than a revolution.

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Proof: eating roo is eco-friendly

Science Alert 20 Apr 09;
University of Sydney "Researcher shows it makes ecological sense to eat roo"

A comparative study of the energy requirements of kangaroos and sheep has given new weight to calls for the increased use of roos for everything from eco-tourism to human and pet food consumption.

Dr Adam Munn from the University's School of Veterinary Science spent weeks tracking kangaroos and recording their energy requirements, concluding that kangaroos have far less of an impact on the environment than once thought.

"We found that the kangaroos were consuming only around 13 per cent as much water per day as sheep," said Dr Munn. "A sheep's diet consists mainly of saltbush. Sheep feeding on saltbush will drink around 12 litres of water a day, as opposed to kangaroos, which drink around 1.5 litres per day," said Dr Munn.

The study also shows that kangaroos consume around one-third of the energy of sheep and therefore have much less of an impact on the environment.

The researchers used isotopes to compare the animal's energy requirements which were introduced into the animals, with a blood sample taken after 10 days. The animal's energy levels were then calculated by comparing the quantity of remaining.

"This showed that the kangaroo will turn over around 5000 kilojoules per day, with sheep turning over around 15,000," said Dr Munn.

As kangaroos have significantly lower energy requirements than sheep, this indicates that they need less food than sheep, thus their environmental impact is lower.

"With climate change, most rangelands are going to need to look at diverse options for land management for sustainability," said Dr Munn. "It is conceivable that we could drought proof the environment more efficiently by using kangaroos for eco-tourism without the environmental impact once thought, or increase the use of kangaroo human or pet food consumption."

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Norway threatens action if EU bans seal products

Pete Harrison, Reuters 20 Apr 09;

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Norway has threatened to challenge the European Union over plans to ban imports of furs and other products from seals.

The executive European Commission last year proposed banning the import of pelts from seals that have endured excessive suffering while being killed.
"In our view, the proposal cannot be justified under the WTO (World Trade Organization)," Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere wrote in a letter to EU trade Commissioner Catherine Ashton, a copy of which was seen by Reuters on Monday.

"A ban on trade in seal products will set a dangerous precedent in the matter of sustainable harvesting of renewable resources," Stoere wrote.

Canada has also threatened to challenge the EU's proposed ban.

Canada, Greenland and Namibia account for around 60 percent of the 900,000 seals hunted each year. The rest are killed in Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Britain and the United States.

The proposed ban is being discussed by the EU's 27 member states and the European Parliament before it becomes law. Norway, which is not an EU member state, said the drafts being discussed were unacceptable.

"The Norwegian government has decided to initiate consultations under the WTO Dispute Settlement Understanding, should the EU take a decision along the lines that now seems to be developing," Stoere wrote.

The WTO's dispute settlement understanding is intended to settle trade disputes when one country says another's action or trade policies violate WTO agreements.

The 15 seal species now hunted are not endangered but European politicians demanded action after finding what they said was evidence that many are skinned while still conscious.

The animals are usually first shot or bludgeoned over the head with a spiked club known as a hakapik.

Russia banned the hunting of baby harp seals last month, and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin called it a "bloody industry."

A European Food Safety Authority report last year highlighted various causes of unnecessary suffering, such as trapping seals underwater where they drown.

It recommended that seals first be shot or clubbed and then monitored to check they are dead before being bled and skinned, to ensure they never regain consciousness during the process.

(Reporting by Pete Harrison; Editing by Farah Master)

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Skin of rare Amur leopard discovered in car

WWF 21 Apr 09;

Ussuriisk, Russia – Police are investigating the killing of an Amur Leopard – one of the rarest animals on earth with only a few dozen left in the wild – after officers discovered the skin of an adult leopard in a private car.

Internal Police Service officers found the dead animal’s pelt on 3 April while inspecting a car and the skin was then sent to the Institute of Animal Husbandry and Veterinary Medicine of the Primorsky State Agricultural Academy for examination.

Specialists from the academy and experts from the Primorsky province Hunting Department and WWF-Russia identified the skin as belonging to an adult Amur leopard, most likely male. The experts concluded that the leopard, also known as the Far East leopard, likely died of a gunshot wound.

“This finding is another tragic loss for the Far Eastern Leopard population,” said Sergey Aramilev, WWF Russia Amur branch biodiversity conservation coordinator, who participated in the examination. “The animal was evidently killed on purpose most probably in order to make money on his skin. From the point of view of ordinary person this killing of the most peaceful predator in Russia is an act of outspoken barbarism, because even in the crisis period there are other easier ways to make one’s living.”

The skin showed that the leopard most likely died last year, in the spring or autumn of 2008, Aramilev said.

“We took pictures that will allow us to compare the skin’s spots pattern with an available database of Far Eastern Leopards skins,” Aramilev said. “This will help to identify the individual and the place of his death.”

The Amur leopard (Panthera pardus orientalis) is the most northern-living leopard subspecies with only 30-40 individuals left in the world, according to Natalia Pervushina, co-ordinator of TRAFFIC’s Russian Far East programme. The animal is listed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and the Russian Red data book as critically endangered, as well as in Appendix I of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, meaning all commercial trade is totally prohibited.

According to the Russian Federation Criminal Code, killing of a Red listed leopard is punishable by up to two years in prison and a fine up to 500, 000 rubles (approx. 15,100 USD).

“WWF Russia and TRAFFIC hope that the Internal Police Service will succeed in tracing the criminals and identifying the animal’s killer,” Pervushina said.

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Saluting the unsung local heroes

Richard Goldman, BBC Green Room 20 Apr 09;

Richard Goldman, founder of the "green Nobel prize", says it is vital to recognise the efforts of grassroots activists. In this week's Green Room, he explains why he believes some of the world's most powerful people could learn a lesson or two from the winners of the Goldman Environmental Prize.

As governments around the world struggle with the crushing economic downturn and increasingly scarce natural resources, leaders at the grassroots level are continuing the critical work that often goes unnoticed, promoting environmental health, civil society, and reform in the face of great hardship.

The Goldman Environmental Prize, an award created by my family 20 years ago, honours fledgling leaders who exemplify unwavering commitment to their struggles; a quality that is more relevant now than ever.

In the past months, I have watched the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world scramble to solve problems that, in all likelihood, could have been prevented if leaders had exhibited more foresight and less greed.

The downturn has served to shine a light on the irresponsible tactics used for short-term gains over the course of many years. Inevitably, business as usual will no longer suffice.

'Local leaders'

With this shift comes the opportunity to rethink the way progress is made.

By looking to the grassroots, where small-scale community and economic development is flourishing and networks of like-minded organisations are building real infrastructure, we may be able to find a new way forward built on community involvement and stability instead of a financial house of cards.

We started the Goldman Environmental Prize in 1989, before the save-the-Earth mantra of the 1990s had taken root.

My late wife, Rhoda, and I had long supported land conservation efforts in California and felt a deep connection to the environment.

One morning in 1989, as I sat with my daily breakfast and newspaper, I read about the most recent Nobel laureates and wondered if there was a comparable award for environmental work.

We asked a staff member at our foundation to do some research and he found that nothing yet existed to recognise environmental work on an international stage, thus the Goldman Prize was born.

Our choice to focus specifically on grassroots environmental leaders was unique at the time.

Unsung heroes

In developing the prize, we reached out to organisations working in the field on each of the world's inhabited continental regions for help in identifying worthy candidates. The response was overwhelming.



Reading through the nominations, it became clear to us that much of the critical advocacy for the environment around the world was being taken on by small groups with little or no financial support.

Unsung heroes continue to risk their lives and livelihoods every day to protect the environment and speak out against corruption on behalf of their communities.

We were awestruck by these plights and committed to focusing our prize on these fledgling leaders.

Twenty years later, this mission continues. Each year, we honour a total of six grassroots leaders, one from each of the world's inhabited continental regions.

Each of the winners receives a $150,000 (£100,000) cash award and undertakes a US media tour to San Francisco and Washington, DC.

The group is always diverse, with indigenous leaders, scientists, lawyers, and community organisers.

Yet there are ties that bind every recipient: they are ordinary citizens taking on extraordinary struggles and they do so with little expectation of fame or wealth.

August alumni

In the ensuing years, we have found that the Goldman Prize has served to elevate many up-and-coming leaders within their own countries and on the international level.

Wangari Maathai, who won the Goldman Prize in 1992, went on to serve in Kenya's parliament and win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004.

Her international Green Belt Movement, which empowers women to plant trees and participate in environmental stewardship, continues growing across continents.

She has emerged as a force within the global sustainability movement, yet continues to engage the grassroots.

Recognising the importance of continuing to grow a vibrant and committed citizenry, Ms Maathai is helping to shift attitudes and personal actions around sustainability from the bottom up.

As governments develop economic recovery plans in the wake of the global financial meltdown, I strongly urge leaders to look to the grassroots for help in forging a new way forward.

Given a voice, financial support, and recognition, grassroots groups can help to enact lasting change through on-the-ground campaigning and advocacy.

Around the globe, grassroots groups are connecting via the internet and developing vast international networks that efficiently work together for common goals. The cross-cultural co-operation is astounding.

Leaders from seemingly disparate movements are coming together and recognising that environmental health is directly related to economic development and social justice.

As these previously separate movements merge into a potent force advocating on behalf of the world's future, we should take notice and find ways to bring them into the process of developing a new, more secure future.

Richard N Goldman is the founder and president of the Goldman Environmental Prize

The Green Room is a series of opinion articles on environmental topics running weekly on the BBC News website

Six Global Campaigners Win "Environmental Nobels"
Peter Griffiths, PlanetArk 21 Apr 09;

LONDON - From the rainforests of Africa to the mountain-top coal mines of West Virginia, six campaigners who have fought governments and industry to protect the planet won prestigious Goldman Environmental Prizes on Sunday.

The awards, often referred to as the Nobel Prizes of the environmental world, went to activists in six continents who took on everything from toxic chemical dumps in the former Soviet Union to ship-breaking in Asia.

Previous winners of the award, established in 1990 by two US philanthropists, include the writer Ken Saro-Wiwa, hanged in 1995 after leading protests against oil companies in Nigeria.

This year's African winner is Marc Ona Essangui, who campaigned against plans by a Chinese state-owned company to open an iron ore mine in the rainforests of Gabon, west Africa.

Ona, who uses a wheelchair due to childhood polio, has been repeatedly threatened, and arrested and evicted from his home.

"Threats shouldn't prevent you from carrying on your fight," he told Reuters by phone from Gabon. "It could destroy the most beautiful forests in central Africa."

His campaign helped lead to a review of the project, which is currently on hold, the prize's organisers said.

DEATH THREATS

The North America winner was Maria Gunnoe, a former waitress who campaigns against the environmental impact of mountain-top coal-mining in the Appalachian hills of West Virginia.

The method involves blasting the tops of mountains, removing the coal and pushing the rubble into valleys. Critics say it pollutes land, destroys streams and causes flooding.

In an area where coal is the backbone of the economy, Gunnoe has divided the community and received death threats.

"There's a lot of people here who support what I do. But there's others who drive in here every day for their jobs, and given a choice, they would run over me in a heartbeat," she said in a message on her website.

In Europe, the prize went to Olga Speranskaya, a Russian scientist whose Moscow-based campaign group Eco-Accord aims to rid former Soviet republics of old toxic chemicals once used in agriculture or industry.

"They are among the most toxic and dangerous substances and cause birth defects ... and even cancer," she told Reuters.

The other winners, who receive their $150,000 prizes at a ceremony in San Francisco on Monday, are:

* Asia: Rizwana Hasan, from Bangladesh, who has raised public awareness of the dangers of ship-breaking.

* South & Central America: Hugo Jabini and Wanze Eduards, from Suriname, who organised local people to campaign against logging on their land.

* Islands: Yuyun Ismawati, who campaigned for better waste management in Indonesia.
(Editing by Kevin Liffey)

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Tree planting in the driest place on Earth

John Walton, BBC News 20 Apr 09;

The southern coast of Peru is one of the driest places on Earth. Why would anyone choose this parched location to re-plant a forest?

The strip of desert between the Andean mountains and the Pacific Ocean has an annual average rainfall as low as 1.5mm. By way of comparison, London enjoys around 650mm a year.

It's not an obvious place to choose if you're looking for somewhere to plant trees, but for restoration ecologist Oliver Whaley the harsh environment of the northern fringes of the Atacama desert is part of the point.

By helping to restore the shrinking native forests, the aim is to benefit local people and wildlife, prevent soil erosion, and help alleviate climate change.

"If we can get trees established here, and learn how to do it with as little water as possible, then it is a model for the rest of the world," he says.

While the plight of the world's rainforests are well known, the same cannot be said of tropical dry forests. These less biodiverse, but equally remarkable forests, face threats every bit as severe as their better known cousins.

The Atacama dry forest "is really an ecosystem on its last legs," says Mr Whaley, of London's Kew Gardens - an internationally renowned botanical research institution.

The tree under threat is the huarango, Prosopis limensis, found only in the Ica region of Peru.

In this parched landscape, the hardy huarango is no stranger to thirst. Although rain seldom falls, it is able to capture moisture from other sources - trapping fog on its leaves, directing the water downwards towards its roots. The roots themselves are among the longest of any plant - 50m to 80m - and seek out underground water sources that flow from the Andes.

Burning bush

The huarango is also a valuable source of food and fuel, and a keystone of the local ecosystem. Whaley estimates that when he arrived in Peru, just 1% of the original local forest habitat remained - much of it consumed in charcoal production.

The problems facing dry forest habitat are not unique to Peru. Restoration expert James Aronson says, in general, these are more critically endangered than wet tropical forests, in respect of the total percentage already lost.

Mr Aronson, who heads the Restoration Ecology Group in the Centre for Functional and Evolutionary Ecology in Montpellier, France, adds there are more than 1,000 species of tree that grow in desert areas.

"In many desert areas of the world there used to be enough trees to constitute to a real canopy - not in the sense of an English forest, where the forest is everywhere you look - [in deserts] they were restricted to areas where there was sufficient water."

With so little forest in existence (see
) conservation, on its own, would not be enough to preserve the trees, leaving restoration as the only option.

Hard times

It's a situation made more complicated by the global recession.

Some local agro-industries growing asparagus, grapes and oranges for foreign markets are laying off workers. With hard times on the way, Mr Whaley worries that what little vegetation remains may be used for firewood.

Whatever his project's success, Mr Whaley is certain that the future of the tree rests firmly in the hands of the local people. They are encouraged to help with planting, and tree nurseries and seedbanks have been sent up in communities and schools.

"We are not going to Peru saying we are going to reforest the whole of the coast. We are developing a model that we can replicate and hopefully we can get that to be so interesting, or fun, or useful that it's contagious."

Hence the idea of an annual huarango festival, started in 2006 and held in April. The festival is a chance to celebrate the tree and the ecosystem it helps support. But it is also about food. The fruit of the tree can be used to make syrup, similar to molasses.

"Fill people's tummies," says Mr Whaley. "Where do you get social science and biodiversity overlapping? In the stomach. That is the best place to do it."

The project has already had some successes, with a reserve set up in Tunga (see map, below), and more planned.

"We are at the beginning of habitat restoration - it's only a science that's been around for a couple of decades. Particularly in arid areas, we are only just learning how to do it.

"If I am able to come back in 500 years, then I would know if it has been a success. I will never know in my lifetime if its been a success."

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Indigenous groups hold Alaska climate change talks

Yahoo News 20 Apr 09;

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Indigenous peoples, who have been hard hit by the ravages of global warming, were gathering in Alaska Monday for talks on the impact of climate change on native communities.

"Indigenous peoples are on the front lines of this global problem, at a time when their cultures and livelihoods in traditional lands are already threatened," said Patricia Cochran, chairwoman of the Indigenous Peoples' Global Summit on Climate Change, one of the groups sponsoring the meeting.

"The indigenous community worldwide really wanted to have an opportunity to come together to discuss issues about climate change, and all the problems that they are facing in their communities and how we've tried to resolve those issues," she added.

Organizers said indigenous peoples from every region of the world will be represented at the meeting, sharing their observations and experiences of early impacts in their part of the planet, as well as traditional practices that could help ease the impact of climate change.

Cochran said the meeting plans not only to highlight the negative impact of global warming on native peoples, but to propose potential solutions "to address the climate impact being felt in our community."

The gathering in Anchorage is being held some 800 kilometers (500 miles) east of the Alaskan village of Newtok, where intensifying river flow and melting permafrost have forced 320 residents to relocate to higher ground.

The destruction of Newtok and nearby communities, as well as the relocation of inhabitants, has cost of tens of millions of dollars, native officials said.

Recommendations from the climate change meeting, which concludes on Friday with a declaration and an action plan, will be submitted to a United Nations climate change conference to be held in Copenhagen in December.

The indigenous groups, including representatives from Papua New Guinea, Borneo, Mexico, Kenya and Nepal among others, were to issue "recommendations for actions that we will take from here," Cochran said.

That included calls for greater representation by indigenous groups in drafting whatever international treaty ultimately succeeds the Kyoto accord on global warming.

The 190 countries which are party to the UN Convention on Climate Change are trying to negotiate a replacement to the Kyoto Protocol on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, which expires in 2012.

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Africa says poor need billions to fight climate fight

Alister Doyle, Reuters 20 Apr 09;

OSLO (Reuters) - Developing nations will need at least $267 billion a year by 2020 to fight climate change and adapt to droughts, heat waves and rising seas, according to African nations.

The figure, part of a new African text for negotiations on a U.N. climate treaty, is more than double current development aid from recession-hit rich nations which totaled a record $120 billion in 2008.

"Africa is one of the most vulnerable continents to climate change, with major development and poverty eradication challenges and limited capacity for adaptation," according to the text submitted to the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat.

It set a 2020 goal of $200 billion in investments to help all developing nations curb their rising greenhouse gas emissions -- for instance via energy efficiency or shifting from use of coal or oil toward renewable wind or solar power.

The African Group, comprising more than 50 nations, said those flows totaled about 0.5 percent of the gross domestic product of developed nations. Cash needed to help developing nations adapt to climate change, such as building stronger defenses against rising sea levels or developing drought-resistant crops, needs to be at least $67 billion a year by 2020.

The numbers are above levels of aid discussed by rich nations to curb greenhouse gas emissions, mainly from burning fossil fuels.

A report by the European Commission in January said the worldwide costs of fighting climate change would be around 175 billion euros ($227.1 billion) a year by 2020.

"It shows the scale of what's needed," Kathrin Gutmann, head of policy of the WWF environmental group's global climate initiative, said of the African text. "We're not talking about tens of billions of dollars -- it's far more."

CHICKEN AND EGG

"There's a very strange chicken and egg situation," Gutmann said. Rich nations want the poor to lay out their plans for fighting climate change before promising cash. The poor want funds pledged first before deciding what is achievable.

The next U.N. climate talks, part of a series meant to end in Copenhagen in December with a new pact to succeed the U.N.'s Kyoto Protocol, are set for June 1-12 in Bonn, Germany.

The African group also said developed nations should cut emissions by at least 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 and by 80-95 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. The numbers are beyond goals by almost all developed countries.

"At lower stabilization levels, the additional climate impacts are unacceptable to Africa," it said.

The U.N. Climate Panel projects that up to 250 million people in Africa could face greater stress on water supplies by 2020 and that yields from rain-fed agriculture could fall by up to 50 percent by 2020 in some African nations.

-- For Reuters latest environment blogs click on: blogs.reuters.com/environment/

(Editing by Farah Master)

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China nuclear safety chief warns of over-rapid growth

Reuters 20 Apr 09;

BEIJING (Reuters) - China will face safety issues and environmental hazards involving nuclear waste disposal if the nuclear power sector is expanded too fast, the country's nuclear safety chief said on Monday.

China, the world's second-largest user of fuel and electricity after the United States, plans to quadruple its nuclear power capacity in the next decade to about 40 gigawatts, fast-tracking from an embryonic stage in the last three decades when a total of less than 10 GW was built.

"At the current stage, if we are not fully aware of the sector's over-rapid expansions, it will threaten construction quality and operation safety of nuclear power plants," Li Ganjie, director of National Nuclear Safety Administration, told the International Ministerial Conference on Nuclear Energy.

It would also undermine the country's plan to use more domestic technology and pose problems in the disposal of nuclear waste, said Li, who is also a vice minister of Ministry of Environmental Protection.

China is adding 24 reactors totaling 25.4 gigawatts of installed capacity, including five plants set to kick off constructions this year, a top planning official said earlier on Friday.

Firms like Westinghouse, owned by Japan's Toshiba and France's Areva, are among the latest suppliers of nuclear technology.

(Reporting by Jim Bai and Chen Aizhu; Editing by Nick Macfie)

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