Bunker spill 800 metres of Sentosa on 1 May 09
on the wild shores of singapore blog
Mudskipper talks at SBWR
on the Biodiversity crew @ NUS blog
Terrific time at Treasures of our 'Wastelands'
on the wild shores of singapore blog
Life History of the Tailed Jay
on the Butterflies of Singapore blog
Large-tailed Nightjar - gape
on the Bird Ecology Study Group blog
Bunker spill off Singapore cleared
Spill occurred 800 metres of Sentosa in Singapore
Siti Adawiah, PortWorld News 4 May 09;
A minor bunker spill off Singapore has been successfully cleared over the weekend, the port authority said Monday.
Singapore-registered bunker barge Global Duri was supplying bunkers to a Panama-registered vessel when 300 litres of bunker fuel was spilled on Friday.
The spill occurred at the Western Working Anchorage where the reefer cargo ship MV Meita Maru was anchored, some 800 metres from Sentosa, an island in the southern part of Singapore.
According to Maritime and Port Authority of Singapore (MPA), clean-up operations were successfully completed on Saturday.
"There are no more signs of spilled oil at the anchorage and fairway," an MPA spokesperson told Bunkerworld Monday.
MPA had dispatched five patrol and emergency response craft to the affected area, with the first craft arriving within 15 minutes after the incident were reported. Three contractor craft were also deployed.
Singapore's National Environmental Agency (NEA) and Sentosa Development Corporation (SDC) have also confirmed that the rockbunds off Labrador Park and Sentosa that were affected by some light patches of oil have been cleaned.
Sentosa’s beaches, which are popular with locals and tourists, were not affected, the SDC said.
A chance to change
Singapore can be the first country to take decisive action on storage of carbon dioxide
Andrew Palmer, Straits Times 9 May 09;
A THREAT can also be an opportunity.
One of the major threats to humanity is global warming.
Humankind dumps into the atmosphere 800 tonnes of carbon dioxide each second. That is like wrapping the Earth in a blanket.
The scientific consensus is that temperature and sea levels will rise, there will be more severe storms, and change will be much faster than most climate changes which have occurred in the past due to natural causes.
A collapse of the Antarctic or Greenland ice sheets is possible, and would create a catastrophic rise in sea levels.
Nobody wants to revert to an energy-poor society, but we need to act against climate change.
We must focus on things that can be accomplished now, using existing technology or some credible extension of it, and we have to take action on a very large scale.
The opportunity for Singapore is to take the lead in developing technology that will be needed to counter global warming.
The Republic is not too small to make a difference.
Look at Denmark, a small country with roughly the same population as Singapore.
It took the lead in the modern development of wind energy, starting in 1976 with an energy plan and strong government investment support.
The nation now generates one-fifth of its electricity from wind, with a target of 50 per cent in 2025.
Denmark has developed a wind energy industry that employs 20,000 people, and has built nearly half of the world's wind turbines.
Singapore is also hoping that going green will pay off for the economy by creating 18,000 jobs and adding $3.4 billion to gross domestic product by 2015.
It has set aside a $680 million fund for research, development and training of manpower in environment and water technologies.
It is also providing space for companies to test-bed clean energy, and has also attracted major market players to set up manufacturing and research bases here.
What else should Singapore do?
One solution to global warming is carbon capture and storage, putting the carbon dioxide somewhere else rather than in the atmosphere.
The most popular option is to put it underground.
A typical depleted gas reservoir - a folded natural rock formation that traps and holds natural gas - has held natural gas since the Jurassic period, 150 million years ago.
It ought to be able to hold carbon dioxide, as long as we do not do anything silly, like over-pressuring the reservoir and blowing it up.
That option is not feasible in many places, including Singapore, because the geology is not suitable where there is insufficient porous rock to contain the gas.
However, research into alternatives is ongoing here.
Our work at the National University of Singapore grew out of work for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on carbon capture and storage.
The IPCC, a scientific intergovernmental body, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, together with Mr Al Gore, for its efforts in spreading the message on climate change and laying the foundations for change.
We have been investigating alternatives here.
In the ocean deeper than 2,750m, liquid carbon dioxide is denser than water and sinks. We could pump liquid carbon dioxide down a pipeline into the ocean, and let it form lakes of liquid in hollows in the ocean floor.
The pipeline is straightforward: There are several long-distance carbon dioxide pipelines already.
Where are they and how much do they contribute?
Some people dislike this lake option because they worry that the carbon dioxide might diffuse back into the ocean and acidify it.
One way to solve that concern would be to isolate the carbon dioxide in a sausage-like membrane.
Making the membrane 500m wide, each kilometre length holds 16 million tonnes, so if a 10km sausage were installed every two days and installation continued forever, all the world's emissions could be stored.
The tension in the membrane is less than in the wall of a car tyre.
That is the easier part of the problem.
More demanding are the political questions, as they almost always are.
As yet there is little public support for any decisive action in the area of carbon storage.
But someone has to take the first step.
The same was true of wind energy in Denmark when its wind energy programme began.
Now there is a major export industry, a lot of power, and public support from almost everybody.
The writer is a professor at the National University of Singapore's Department of Civil Engineering
Grace Chua, Straits Times 9 May 09;
MEET Singapore's future climate negotiators.
The team of four law students from the National University of Singapore (NUS) pipped law students from Yale, Cambridge and other schools to win an international climate-negotiation competition.
In the competition in March - held in conjunction with a real- world climate science congress in Copenhagen in Denmark - teams posed as fictional countries to debate the thorny issues of carbon- emission quotas and trade.
Under the Kyoto Protocol, developed countries face limits on their greenhouse-gas emissions, but can buy carbon credits from developing countries under a scheme called the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). But how and when emissions should be reduced are often sticking points in negotiations.
NUS and the nine other members of the International Alliance of Research Universities, along with other prestigious universities, were invited to field teams for the competition, which was organised by the University of Copenhagen.
Eighteen teams submitted written proposals on their negotiating stances, of which eight were selected for the live-debate finals in Copenhagen.
The NUS team debated from the position of a fictional developing country - 'a cross between Singapore and China', according to team member and third-year law student Choo Zheng Xi, 24.
The team argued that the CDM should allow for industry- or sector-based targets.
'It was a fresh take on things, which I think is why we distinguished ourselves,' said the team's coach, assistant law professor Lim Lei Theng.
The Singapore team won based on its ability to make its ideas attractive and meet other countries' proposals, said the competition's judges, who are a group of experienced negotiators.
Team member and fourth-year student Lan Huishan, 23, said: 'We were in shock when we won.'
Other teams had much more environmental law experience, she added.
But that belies the team's hard work in the last six months or so - writing a proposal, doing research on climate policies and science, and honing its negotiation skills.
Its winning proposal was presented to Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen after the competition.
It will also be presented during the real COP-15 climate meeting, which will take place in Copenhagen in December.
The competition piqued the team's interest in climate change negotiations, Mr Choo said.
'I'm starting to understand that climate change is a moral issue that affects future generations and the lives of people in less developed countries.
'If we don't do something, we're morally culpable as well,' he added.
Antara 9 May 09;
Batam (ANTARA News) - A senior naval officer has denied allegations that with the recent signing of a border agreement with Singapore, Indonesia had lost territory.
The agreement covered the western segment of Indonesia`s maritime border with Singapore.
"Perhaps, on certain parts of the border, we did lose territory but in other parts, we gained territory, so there was no loss," said Commodore Edhi Nuswantoro, assistant for operations to the Indonesian navy`s chief of staff, here Friday.
He further stressed that the lines taken from some segments of the boundary were changed from horizontal to lopsided toward the eastern part.
"Before it was a straight line, now it is lopsided. In some parts , our territory shrank but elsewhere our territory widened," he said while showing a map of Indonesia-Singapore sea boundaries.
Indonesia succeeded in convincing Singapore to determine waters territory by measuring diameter of outer island but not from reclaimed shore in line with Convention on Sea Law of 1982.
By doing so, shore reclamation conducted by Singapore will not affect the border of the two countries.
Touching on some segments of the territory which could not yet result in an agreement, especially east segment of sea boundary which is located between Bintan island of Indonesia and Changi airport of Singapore, he said overlapping recognition is still applicable.
Under overlapping recognition, he said the government of Indonesia could take action against Singapore fishermen entering that territory and vise versa.
"It is really overlapping, but it is the case..." he said.
Singapore delayed the sea territory agreement for east segment with Indonesia, as that neighboring country has to settle their dispute on Batu Puteh with Malaysia. (*)
NIcholas Schmidle, The New York Times 8 May 09;
One recent evening at the presidential palace in Malé, the capital of the Maldives, around 100 people showed up to watch a movie. Rows of overstuffed chairs in a gaudy combination of stripes and paisleys faced a projection screen hanging on the front wall of what seemed like a grand ballroom.
At the back of the hall, journalists erected camera and microphone rigs: Mohamed Nasheed, the Maldives’ 41-year-old president, was expected to make a major announcement after the film. And ever since Nasheed declared on the eve of his inauguration last November that, because of global warming, he would try to find a new homeland for Maldivians somewhere else in the world, on higher ground, local reporters didn’t miss the chance to see their unpredictable (“erratic” and “crazy” were other adjectives I heard used) president.
Nasheed appeared when a pair of French doors opened and a gust of conversation blew into the room. It was a humid night in March. Several dozen cabinet members, Supreme Court justices, parliamentarians, presidential advisers and other dignitaries trailed the young president, who wore navy slacks and a striped white shirt, open at the neck and sleeves rolled to the elbows. He took a seat in the front row, the lights dimmed and the British feature documentary “The Age of Stupid” began.
The movie opens with hypothetical scenes of environmental catastrophe: the Sydney Opera House in flames; ski lifts creaking above snowless mountainsides; raging seas in the once-frozen Arctic. Set in 2055, the film looks back to our present through a series of environmental-destruction subplots highlighting this era’s collective lack of interest in doing anything; one character concludes that we must be living in the “age of stupid.”
The Maldives is an archipelago of 1,190 islands in the Indian Ocean, with an average elevation of four feet. Even a slight rise in global sea levels, which many scientists predict will occur by the end of this century, could submerge most of the Maldives. Last November, when Nasheed proposed moving all 300,000 Maldivians to safer territory, he named India, Sri Lanka and Australia as possible destinations and described a plan that would use tourism revenues from the present to establish a sovereign wealth fund with which he could buy a new country — or at least part of one — in the future. “We can do nothing to stop climate change on our own, and so we have to buy land elsewhere,” Nasheed said in November.
When the movie ended, Nasheed approached a microphone stand in front of a giant house palm. He has a jockey’s physique, and the fronds of the palm arched over his shoulder. His wonder-boy demeanor might seem naïve, but he spent almost 20 years opposing a dictator and enduring torture; few doubt his fortitude. The audience in the ballroom listened closely when Nasheed declared that it was time to act. “What we need to do is nothing short of decarbonizing the entire global economy,” he said, his high voice cracking. “If man can walk on the moon, we can unite to defeat our common carbon enemy.” Nasheed didn’t use notes for his speech; aides say he never does. “And so today,” he continued, “I announce that the Maldives will become the first carbon-neutral country in the world.”
Twenty-two years ago, Nasheed’s predecessor traveled to New York with a mission. Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, then only 9 years into his 30-year reign, stood before the United Nations and warned the world that rising sea levels would eventually erase his country from the map: “With a mere one-meter rise,” he said, “a storm surge would be catastrophic and possibly fatal to the nation.” At the U.N. Earth Summit in Brazil five years later, Gayoom introduced himself as “a representative of an endangered people.” When Gayoom wasn’t abroad predicting that Maldivians could become the first environmental refugees, however, he was crushing dissenters back home. His 30 years in office were punctuated by regular, uncontested elections that he won each time with at least 90 percent of the vote. One of those he jailed — at least 13 times, by the prisoner’s count — was a spunky journalist named Mohamed Nasheed.
Nasheed was born in Malé, the son of a prosperous businessman. He studied abroad — first in Sri Lanka, then in Britain — before returning to the Maldives in the late 1980s and helping found a magazine called Sangu. He wrote investigative reports implicating Gayoom’s regime in corruption and human rights abuses. After the fifth issue, the police raided the magazine’s office and arrested Nasheed. He was 23. He spent 18 months in in solitary confinement. “They wanted me to confess to trying to overthrow the state . . . and they wanted me to do this on TV,” Nasheed told me. “It was very Russian in style. They wanted me to confess for everything that I had done all my life, from my first cigarette to my first kiss.” In 1991, Amnesty International declared him a prisoner of conscience.
Ten years later, after several more stints in jail, Nasheed won a seat in Parliament. He stayed there a few months before being tried, once again, on trumped-up charges and incarcerated. After his release, Nasheed left for Sri Lanka to start the Maldivian Democratic Party. Ultimately, Gayoom’s henchmen found him. Over a span of two days in 2005, Nasheed survived a suspicious car accident and then caught people casing his home in Colombo. He fled to Britain, where, he said, “you could always talk to a Western government about democracy,” and he received political asylum. In 2005, Nasheed gave that up and returned to the Maldives for good.
Late last year, Gayoom agreed to hold the Maldives’ first multiparty presidential elections. On polling day, Gayoom ranked as Asia’s longest-serving president. Nasheed, the perennial inmate, ran against him. By the second round of voting, Nasheed secured support from a handful of smaller opposition parties and won. After three decades of strongman rule, the Maldives, a Sunni Muslim country with, at least officially, no religious minorities, exemplified how a peaceful, democratic transition of power might look in other parts of the Muslim world.
Then Nasheed proposed the mass exodus, an idea that called to mind other outlandish schemes, like one Saudi prince’s thought of supplying drinking water for the Arabian peninsula by towing icebergs from Antarctica. But in comparison, Nasheed has been taken seriously. Three months after his announcement, the president of Kiribati, an archipelagic nation in the Pacific, confessed that he, too, was searching for ways to relocate his countrymen. And in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Al Gore encouraged Congress to pass legislation reducing carbon emissions by citing Nasheed’s initiative as just one example of what could happen if they failed to act. Joe Romm, the author of the blog Climate Progress, told me: “There is no saving the Maldives. They are wise to find a new place.”
Not everyone has thought so. Paul Kench, a coastal geomorphologist at the University of Auckland, has made eight expeditions to the Maldives to research how islands form and evolve. Kench first traveled to Baa Atoll, north of Malé, in 1996, frustrated, he said, “with the perception that sea levels will go up and simply drown them. No one had established any real science.” He has discovered since then that both seasonal weather patterns and periodic wave events — like the tsunami in 2004 and, in late 2007, a highly unusual, 20-centimeter surge in sea level recorded throughout the Maldives — alter the surface, the beaches and the height of the islands in unforeseen ways. In particular, he found, “the notion that the Maldives are going to disappear is a gross overexaggeration. Both the tsunami and the sea-level rise lifted sand from the beach, spread it across the island surface and formed a natural buffer.”
Kench has followed news of Nasheed’s planned exodus with dismay. “It’s a political weapon they have,” he says. “It’s a little bit unfortunate, because they don’t know how to deal with the change. . . . If they withdrew from this notion that ‘We are going to have to jump on a plane and fly to northwest Australia’ and that kind of hyperbole, if they seriously confront the problem, they would get a lot more international assistance.” Talk of catastrophe, he continues, “hijacks all the serious work that needs to be done.” He sees it as a distraction from the careful scientific labor that could find ways to protect the islands.
Meanwhile, Nasheed’s political opponents claim that his proposition to move has cost the Maldives international respect. “We are a country so dependent on tourism,” Mohamed Hussain Shareef, Gayoom’s spokesman, told me. “The minute Nasheed says we are about to sink and that we’re moving, my phones started ringing off the hook with tour operators asking questions. We can’t go back to them and to investors now and say, ‘Everything is O.K.’ This man is so hellbent on hogging the media limelight that he is forgetting to do his job, which is to run a country.”
During the 1990s, his second decade in power, Gayoom oversaw the construction of the presidential palace. It occupies a sprawling piece of land in the middle of what ranks, in terms of people per square kilometer, as one of the world’s most crowded cities. Gayoom parked a fleet of luxury cars in the garage and equipped the master bathroom with a gold-plated toilet while, just beyond the white walls, scooters and pedestrians jostled for space on the tangled alleys that wind through Malé.
After the election, Nasheed opted not to move into the palace. He lives in the previous official residence, and he walks to and from work every day, trailed by a handful of guards wearing sunglasses and with black wires in their ears. Nasheed has talked about turning the mansion into a museum or public library. On rare occasions, such as the première of “The Age of Stupid,” he opens the doors.
The screening was followed by a reception in the garden. Dignitaries gathered under a veranda and leaned against white pillars covered with flowering vines. Nasheed meandered through the crowd, welcoming each guest, as tuxedo-clad waiters brushed past holding trays stacked with cups of orange juice. I noticed the minister of the environment deep in a discussion of water temperature and coral growth with one of his advisers. The minister and his colleague, neither much older than 40, were citing the names of scientists and journal articles at high speed.
“The question is whether coral growth can keep up with rising sea levels,” said the adviser. The Maldives consists of four reef platforms and 21 atolls, coral configurations that were produced over millenniums as dead volcanoes in the ocean receded, giving way to coral that grew vertically and formed ring-shaped reefs. The individual islands were formed as wave energy deposited shards of broken coral and shells.
“Really, the danger is an increase in temperature,” the minister countered, “because certain coral can only survive in certain temperatures.” In 1998, an El Niño influx of warm water “bleached” the coral in the Maldives, killing large portions of it. “Sea temperatures are the real culprit here.”
Though wonky, the conversation was hardly irrelevant: all islands and coastlines are formed differently, a fact sure to be explored more in years to come as planners develop more property in areas susceptible to rising sea levels. This is why Kench, the coastal geomorphologist, believes that the Maldives aren’t nearly as doomed as others think. He knew he was on to something big when he returned to the Maldives after the tsunami and found that the wave had actually raised the island surface as much as 30 centimeters, and did so as far as 60 meters inland. “This is actually building the islands vertically, building ridges that will buffer these islands from sea-level rises,” he says. “That sand is a permanent addition that is now draped among the coconut trees and is going to stay there.”
Even the idea of “sea level” as a fixed measure is somewhat flawed. Since sea levels vary around the world, sea-level rises are also likely to vary. “Intuition would tell you that sea-level rises are like a bathtub, but it’s a little more complicated than that,” William G. Thompson, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, told me. “When it comes to measuring sea-level rises,” he adds, “there are different factors in different places.” Parts of South Asia are being lifted, owing to tectonic shifts in and around the Himalayas. In regions of the Caribbean, similar phenomena are lifting some islands, like Barbados, and sinking others, like the Bahamas.
Steve Nerem, a professor in the aerospace engineering sciences department at the University of Colorado at Boulder, measures sea levels. Since 1993, when he began mapping the oceans using satellite technology, sea levels have risen an average of 3.3 millimeters a year. But around the Maldives, they have risen an average of 2.2 millimeters. There is “all kinds of local variability” in the data, Nerem says. “The bottom line is that we can’t say with any kind of certainty what’s going to happen. But there’s lots of reasons to be concerned that it is going to be a big problem. The data doesn’t rule out a meter of sea-level rise” by 2100, he explains. “The data does rule out zero.”
In 2007, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated that by 2100, sea levels could rise by anywhere between 7 and 23 inches. The I.P.C.C. represents the closest thing the scientific community has to a consensus, but nearly every scientist I spoke with placed his or her estimates slightly higher. “Is this an underestimate?” Thompson says. “No real way to tell. It is a conservative estimate. When you are trying to provide guidance to global governments, you don’t want to be alarmist.” Since the I.P.C.C. study, the journals Science, Nature Geoscience and Nature have all published articles featuring estimates that exceed two feet, some saying that rises could be as much as five feet by the end of the century. “The rise to 2100 is just the beginning of a much higher sea-level rise,” says Stefan Rahmstorf, a professor of ocean physics at the University of Potsdam. “This is a real long-term effect that we are setting into motion. It will continue.” Rahmstorf says he believes the increase could be as great as 1.4 meters, or four and a half feet, by 2100.
“When we talk about climate change . . . you aren’t talking about gradual things, sea-level rises of a millimeter a year,” Nasheed said to me, using storm surges, strong winds and tsunamis as examples of the kind of cataclysms he expects. “You are talking about the force of things that can go wrong.”
At the reception following “The Age of Stupid,” I asked Nasheed how he planned to follow up on the two blockbuster initiatives so early in his term. He had to be thinking about the practicalities, right? How would he actually implement carbon neutrality or mass exodus? What came next?
“We need to go into direct action now,” Nasheed replied, matter-of-factly. His brown eyes channeled intensity. “We haven’t seen this generation — you know, those who are 18 to 30 years old — go into action yet. It is time.” He added, “I believe change is on the horizon.”
He didn’t give details. Maybe details didn’t matter. Perhaps the symbolism of Nasheed’s pronouncements was enough, and cultivating the image of the mad-scientist president was a strategy. “We are going to attract anyone with a mad idea and an investment plan,” Nasheed told me later in his office. “They can test their things here.” Whether or not the Maldives becomes carbon neutral almost seemed beside the point. If Nasheed’s antics could goad Western countries into more aggressive policies toward curbing carbon emissions, then his mission would be accomplished.
As we stood under the veranda, I asked Nasheed: Is all this a P.R. gimmick to shame the industrial countries into action?
“Sure,” he said. “This is to tell them: ‘No. Not at this cost.’ ”
Nasheed’s plans to move and to become carbon neutral are, in many ways, contradictory. One epitomizes resignation, while the other is more optimistic. But their timing — one in November and the second in March — is not by accident and hews closely to changes in Washington. While the Bush administration’s response to climate change was markedly ambivalent, President Obama has pledged action, declaring that his team “will not deny facts; we will be guided by them.” In December, the United States will participate in the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. Expectations are high that the conference may produce a global accord to supersede the Kyoto Protocol and curtail greenhouse-gas emissions.
Obama has, moreover, made climate change a national-security issue. Just days after taking office, he described the long-term threat of climate change as one that “if left unchecked, could result in violent conflict, terrible storms, shrinking coastlines and irreversible catastrophe.” This was highly contentious in the past. When the intelligence community went to Capitol Hill last year to request resources to look closer at climate change, one Republican lawmaker exclaimed incredulously, “We are going to take analysts away from looking for Osama bin Laden, and we are going to put them on the ‘March of the Penguins’!”
Nasheed admitted to learning some things from Obama. Connecting with crowds, for instance. He told me that he considered Obama’s election “one of the most impressive things” Americans have done, up there with “the Revolution, democracy, the office of the presidency and ‘Catcher in the Rye.’ ” But he seems to have learned something else from his American counterpart that he never articulated: fatalism doesn’t sell quite like hope. “We cannot change the world,” Nasheed pronounced on the night of the screening, as he stood in the palace built by the man who once tormented him. “But we can begin the process. And if we are ahead of the game, we will win.”
The Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 resulted in more than 80 deaths in the Maldives. On the remote island of Dhiggaru, less than 100 miles south of Malé, a powerful wave washed away dozens of homes and killed one child. The destroyed homes were later rebuilt by an American relief mission headed by former presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, along with the United Nations and the New Zealand government. Construction teams outfitted the new homes with tall brick barriers facing the shoreline.
On the day I visited Dhiggaru, I met a woman named Fatima along the footpath that separated her house from a seawall — and then the ocean. The makeshift wall consisted of concrete chunks, coconut shells and scraps of rusted corrugated metal. When I asked if the water had broken through the coconut shells, Fatima gestured at the levy. “Just last week, the sea was splashing against the walls of the house,” she said. On that night, huddled inside and wondering whether the water would continue to rise, Fatima chose not to leave the house.
Fatima said that she had heard the news of Nasheed talking about moving, but that she would only go “if there was no other choice.” Besides, tsunamis and high tides were freak occurrences. Rising sea levels were another, one that she couldn’t quite conceptualize. Fatima didn’t think inching oceans posed a serious risk. At least not in her lifetime.
“What about in theirs?” I asked, pointing to two toddlers leaning against her.
“Maybe,” she said.
The plight of the Maldives poses an eschatological question as much as an environmental one. When will the world end? How can we prepare for it? In that respect, we are all Maldivians. The islanders just happen to be among the first groups to contemplate these questions seriously. But that’s not to say each and every Maldivian spends his or her day preoccupied with sea levels. Ahmed Abbas, one of Nasheed’s longtime friends and the political cartoonist for the magazine Sangu, told me that Nasheed was overreacting. “We have been here for 3,000 years,” Abbas said as we drank espressos and ate ice cream one afternoon at a cafe in Malé. “Coral is our base. If one millimeter of water comes up, then one millimeter of coral goes up, too. So don’t worry.” His response was downright flippant when the conversation turned to a looming exodus: “Why don’t we all just board a barge? Anni” — Nasheed’s nickname — “can be the captain!” Nonetheless, Abbas was flying the next day to Sri Lanka, where he said he hoped to scout a tract of hillside property for himself.
Nasheed takes the thought of migration seriously and says he is already thinking about the logistics. “No politician has rejected the idea,” he told me when we met in his offices the day after the movie première. We were sitting in a boardroom, at the end of a long, glossy conference table. “The Sri Lanka president is quite happy that the cousins can come back,” he added, referring to the fact that Dhivehi, the language of the Maldives, and Sinhala, the dominant language in Sri Lanka, are very similar. The most publicized — and surprising — response came from the mayor of Pyrenees Shire, a small Australian town. “Our community’s a very welcoming community,” Lester Harris, then the mayor, declared in a broadcast. “We’ve got relatively cheap land compared to the major cities or even to regional cities, and I’m sure that we’ve got the type of climate that would make life very agreeable for these people.” I called Pyrenees Shire in March to see if the offer still stood. Harris had left office. The new mayor declined to comment.
I heard countless Maldivians express concern that in a relocation, they would be treated as second-class citizens. Ali Rilwan, the executive director of Bluepeace, an environmental NGO in Malé, says he hopes that international laws could be amended to protect environmental refugees in the same way they protect political ones. If not, he wasn’t optimistic. “In Sri Lanka, it would be easy, because we are the same color . . . but I was once on the beach at the Sheraton in Fiji,” a country where, Rilwan said, most Indians were descended from indentured laborers. “I was with some American friends. Security guards came and pulled me to their post. They thought I was a local Indian disturbing the Americans. . . . And one day, one of the black Fijians, the natives, hit me over the head with a corncob and demanded a dollar.”
“They would rather die here,” Nasheed said when I asked how he would persuade people to leave their homes. “You can’t ask them to leave. This is almost an impossible task, unless and until you have doomsday on them. . . . Moving would have to be the very bottom line. If you think about it, in certain eventualities, there wouldn’t be a place to move. Everyone would be running around. I mean, you mention a country that wouldn’t have all sorts of problems — even India or Sri Lanka, all of these countries would have millions of people moving from place to place. We would be lost. Three hundred thousand Maldivians? Who would care about them?”
Moreover, how would they care for themselves? Putting aside for a moment the overwhelming logistical burdens of exile, what about the emotional ones? Would the loss of the country spell the loss of the nation? The Maldives are specks of dry land in the middle of the ocean, stretching over a distance equal to that from New York City to Raleigh; total landmass is less than twice the size of Washington’s. Yet Maldivians speak the same language and call the Maldives home. Would a sense of community disappear in exile? Could Maldivians survive without the Maldives?
I asked Nasheed what his own experiences living in exile told him about how Maldivians would fare in another country.
“Maldivians are fairly cosmopolitan in outlook, and we would probably adapt better, and more easily, than others would,” he said. “But leaving home is a different phenomenon. In Salman Rushdie’s ‘Imaginary Homelands,’ he says you can imagine your home, but then you imagine with words that you know. So, basically, you would always be imagining the beach, imagining the palm tree, imagining the horizon. You can’t be doing that in the middle of Rajasthan.” His voice wavered like that of a man on the verge of tears, and the normally upbeat president looked grief-stricken. “Believe me, we don’t want to go there. We are fine here. Moving will never be easy for anyone.”
Early one morning, I joined Nasheed aboard his yacht for a two-day tour of eight islands in the central Maldives. We left Malé shortly after sunrise while the cargo ships and cruise liners were still quiet in the harbor. We motored across the sea for hours before reaching the first island. A 75-foot, gunmetal gray coast-guard cutter followed in our wake.
The presidential yacht stretched 65 feet. Red, green and white stripes ran above the gunwale, and tinted windows enclosed the cabin. Inside, Nasheed huddled around a table with a handful of advisers who briefed him on the coming islands. An atlas of the Maldives lay within easy reach.
We visited the island of Magoodhoo, the third of the day, because Nasheed had recently signed a deal with the University of Milan-Bicocca that would bring Italian scientists there to study coral growth. Nasheed wanted to thank the residents in advance for their hospitality and cooperation. If there was any tension between science and Maldivians’ conservative religious values, Nasheed said he hoped to dampen it before the Italians arrived. “For your average fisherman, who feels very insignificant in front of God, they are finding it difficult to understand the connection between climate change and human activity,” he told me. “When people say changes in weather patterns are because of nature and not because of man, you really have to connect that: if humans can become carbon-neutral, then God could act in a different set of ways. But God has to be there in the conversation somewhere.”
After the 2004 tsunami, some reactionary clerics described the waves as a curse. One called the tsunami “a sign to the people brought by Allah for people to take lessons from it and correct their way of life.” Urbanites claim that the influence of archconservative Islam has grown in recent years, especially on the smaller islands. Some point to the increased number of women wearing head scarves. Others cite the bomb blast in September 2007 that injured 12 tourists. Or the incident in January 2008, when a potential assassin charged at Gayoom holding a knife and yelling, “Allahu akbar!” A teenage Boy Scout grabbed the knife and prevented the assassin from fulfilling his mission.
On Magoodhoo, hundreds of islanders were standing in the shade of palm trees, and they applauded when Nasheed stepped onto the red carpet that had been unrolled on the pier. Nasheed toured the island, took special note of the dead coral clumped along the beach and then prayed at the mosque. Next door, schoolgirls filed into the Magoodhoo social center wearing white uniforms and matching head scarves, with red and blue sashes draped over their shoulders that identified them as school captain, vice president of the Dhivehi club or members of the Islam Club. After his prayers, Nasheed followed them inside.
About 100 people assembled under the powder blue ceiling of the social center. Air fresheners emitted a faint aroma of lemongrass, and A.C. units pumped frigid air throughout the room. A young man in a prayer cap and a necktie stood at a lectern draped with sunflowers and recited a passage from the Koran. Nasheed was introduced after that. “I can see that you all are feeling sleepy after that lunch,” he said with a smile. “But you know us politicians can’t leave a mike if we see one.” Everyone chuckled.
After a few minutes describing his government’s plans to improve life in Magoodhoo, Nasheed informed residents that the team of Italian researchers was on its way to study the coral. “The safety of these islands depends on the coral,” he said. “We need to learn more about what’s happening with the earth. The world might not be that safe. We might not survive. We don’t know exactly what will happen. So we have to understand nature. It is God’s will.” Nasheed pushed his hair off his forehead and looked out across the crowd. “If these scientists are not able to save the Maldives,” he said, “then they won’t be able to save the world.”
UNEP 8 May 09;
Bonn/Nairobi, 8 May 2009 – This upcoming weekend (9-10 May 2009), thousands of people around the world will be taking part in World Migratory Bird Day (WMBD) events to draw attention to the many man-made obstacles birds face during their migration.
The central theme for this year's World Migratory Bird Day - "BARRIERS TO MIGRATION" - aims to highlight the effects man-made structures such as wind turbines, communication masts, tall buildings and windows, power lines and fences have on migratory birds.
During migration birds face a number of natural obstacles such as expanding deserts, seas, huge mountains and other natural barriers. Yet, next to these natural barriers, birds are increasingly being confronted with man-made barriers on their journeys.
These man-made structures can not only disturb the migratory movements of birds, but it is estimated that bird-strike due to collisions with man-made structures is responsible for the deaths of many millions of birds worldwide each year.
Among the affected bird species are abundant as well as rare and endangered species. Man-made barriers are believed to be a growing threat and are likely to be a significant contributor to the decline in many populations, especially those of scarcer, more vulnerable bird species.
"Hundreds and thousands of migratory birds, including many that are protected under international wildlife treaties such as the African-Eurasian Migratory Waterbird Agreement (AEWA), are killed in growing numbers by man-made barriers. Some of these cases could quite easily be avoided by introducing technical measures for reducing this often avoidable cause of destruction" said Bert Lenten, Executive Secretary of AEWA and initiator of the World Migratory Bird Day campaign.
However, each year the number of wind turbines, power lines, skyscraping radio, TV and cell phone transmission masts, reflecting plate glass windows, tall buildings and other structures continues to grow, often without consideration of avoidance and mitigation measures known to reduce avian mortality through collisions with these structures.
In addition to a number of known mitigation measures specific to each type of structure, particularly the location and placement of structures such as wind farms and power lines along major migratory routes or near areas regularly used by large numbers of feeding, breeding or roosting birds, can dramatically affect the likelihood of collisions. Placement of structures along important wetlands, river valleys and in coastal areas where large numbers of migratory birds congregate, are also likely to increase the risk to migratory birds.
"Although man-made barriers represent an increasing problem for migratory birds worldwide, so far little attention has been given to possible solutions. My strong hope is that World Migratory Bird Day will help raise awareness of these barriers and that action will be taken to reduce the impact of some of these man-made structures on migratory birds" said Bert Lenten.
Dedicated people and organisations around the world will be using World Migratory Bird Day (WMBD) this upcoming weekend to conduct events, which will help draw attention to the impact of man-made barriers on migratory birds. Over one hundred separate events in 44 countries have already been registered on the WMBD website so far: www.worldmigratorybirdday.org
World Migratory Bird Day (WMBD)
World Migratory Bird Day (WMBD) is a global initiative devoted to celebrating migratory birds and for promoting their conservation worldwide. This year WMBD will take place on the weekend of 9-10 May and its central theme will be 'Barriers to migration.'
World Migratory Bird Day is being organised by the African-Eurasian Migratory Waterbird Agreement (AEWA) and the Convention on Migratory Species (CMS) – two international wildlife treaties administered by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and other partners.
People and dedicated organisations around the world will be using the event to draw attention to man-made barriers and their impact on migratory birds. Over one hundred separate events in 44 countries have already been registered on the WMBD website so far (see: www.worldmigratorybirdday.org). Activities to mark WMBD include bird festivals and bird watching trips, public discussions, exhibitions, presentations, bird rallies and other educational and public events.
For more information please see: www.worldmigratorybirdday.org
Barriers to migration (background on this year's WMBD theme)
Windows and tall buildings
Windows of all sizes and types, even small and narrow windows, from those found on tall buildings to those used in residential houses are very dangerous for birds. Ornithologists usually call them "invisible killers" due to the large number of deaths and injuries they cause regardless of species, age, sex and the conditions in which collisions occur. Attracted by the reflection of trees or plants located near the windows, birds try to pass through them, sometimes, at top speed. This can lead to fatal or other injuries or simply exhaustion as they attempt to overcome the invisible barrier and end up falling to the ground and thus becoming easy prey. Predators such as cats often lie in wait for their victims to quickly remove them. Moreover, some studies show that about half of those birds, which manage to fly away, die later due to injuries received. These facts are often unknown to those observing bird strikes, as they tend to think collisions do not actually harm birds and that they are able to fly away without any lasting damage.
Wind turbines
Although wind turbines are a form of clean technology for renewable energy production and therefore an important tool in combating climate change, they also represent a danger to migratory birds. Wind turbines, especially when standing isolated in large-scale wind farm developments, also represent a severe potential hazard for migratory birds. Their blades rotate at speeds of up to 200 kilometres per hour and, when placed along the major migratory routes of birds, wind turbines can become extremely dangerous obstacles causing both injuries and fatalities to many species of migratory birds. In addition to causing collisions, wind turbines are also known to cause displacement of migratory birds and are considered especially detrimental in areas where there is a known high concentration of migratory birds, for example at major stop-over and feeding sites. Like other obstacles that are surrounded with lights for air traffic safety, wind turbines equipped with bright lights can also attract disorientated birds and lead to fatal injuries during the night.
Wind farms are often built along coastlines and mountaintops, usually in areas that have high wind potential, and which often lie along the flight paths of many migratory birds. Unfortunately, wind farms are still being built along coastlines, mountain ridges and wetlands, sometimes without any prior assessment of their potential environmental impact on migratory birds and in places where there is a known high concentration of many migratory bird species. It is especially a cause for concern when wind farms are constructed in areas that are frequently used by endangered and rare bird species.
Power lines
Power lines and fences are believed to pose a particular risk to migratory birds. Overhead power lines stretch for millions of kilometres globally and the resulting carpet of surface cables continues to increase. Apart from the risk of electrocution faced by birds, which results from poorly designed power poles, the cables themselves constitute objects for potential collisions. Fast-flying birds, so-called poor fliers due to their small wings, and birds lacking in agility are especially at risk; they tend to hit conductors and ground wires, frequently at night and in poor weather conditions.
Communication towers and masts
Communication towers and masts are commonly high structures located on elevated points of land and their supporting guy wires are extremely dangerous for migratory birds. Fast flying birds simply do not notice loose wires and birds that are not very agile have difficulties avoiding them. Stormy nights and bad visibility make supporting wires even more dangerous for birds and dramatically increase the risk of collision. Brightly lit towers in the similar adverse conditions make bird-strikes even more likely. Birds, especially nocturnal birds travelling in weather conditions like fog or mist, loose their navigation cues and get disoriented or dazzled by the lights of towers. Mistaking them for constellations, birds tend to circle around the lights and rarely escape fatal hits against the wires and other supporting elements. Even if they manage to avoid heavy strikes, birds are often badly injured or they waste energy they need to accomplish their migration journey.
Burdening factors
When wind turbines, power lines and other man-made structures are placed in areas where the density of birds is high or along major migratory paths, the probability of collisions significantly increases. In particular, the placement of windfarms and other structures along landscape features such as river valleys and coastal areas, used by migratory birds as navigation cues, is believed to significantly increase collisions. Collision risks are also increased or diminished by the intensity and use of lighting and size – the more lighting in place and the taller the structure is, the more dangerous the objects are for birds. Bad weather and darkness, as well as the physical characteristics of birds (acuteness of vision) or flight behaviour (flocks), also influence the collision rate.
WMBD Partners:
United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) is the voice for the environment in the United Nations system. It is an advocate, educator, catalyst and facilitator, promoting the wise use of the planet's natural assets for sustainable development. http://www.unep.org/
Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS; also known as the Bonn Convention) aims to conserve terrestrial, aquatic and avian migratory species throughout their range. It is an intergovernmental treaty concluded under the aegis of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). Since the Convention's entry into force, its membership has grown steadily to include 110 (as of 1 November 2008) parties from Africa, Central and South America, Asia, Europe and Oceania. http://www.cms.int/
African-Eurasian Migratory Waterbird Agreement (AEWA) is an intergovernmental treaty developed under the CMS dedicated to the conservation of migratory waterbirds. The Agreement covers 255 species of birds ecologically dependent on wetlands for at least part of their annual cycle. The treaty covers a large geographic area, including Europe, parts of Asia, Canada, the Middle East and Africa. So far 62 out of the 118 countries
in this area have become Contracting Parties to the International Agreement. http://www.unep-aewa.org/
BirdLife International is a global partnership of conservation organisations that strives to conserve birds, their habitats and global biodiversity. BirdLife International has long been committed to the conservation of migratory birds and the habitats upon which they depend. The BirdLife Partnership is engaged in migratory bird conservation at numerous scales, from projects focused on individual species or key sites, to broader policy and advocacy work to promote migratory species conservation, and involvement in flyway-scale projects. http://www.birdlife.org/
Wetlands International is an independent, non-profit, global organisation, dedicated to the conservation and wise use of wetlands. Wetlands International works globally, regionally and nationally to achieve the conservation and wise use of wetlands, to benefit biodiversity and human well-being. http://www.wetlands.org/
PTI
DNAIndia 8 May 09;
Kuala Lumpur: A Malaysian Buddhist high priest has said that the practice of releasing pigeons and sparrows on Wesak day (Buddha's enlightenment day) actually perpetuated inhumane trade and capture of such birds.
Buddhist chief high priest of Malaysia, venerable K Sri Dhammaratana Maha Nayaka Thera, noted that "this act of mercy" led to harm done to the defenceless creatures.
He said many pet shops inhumanely caught the birds to take advantage of the festive excitement and later unscrupulous traders caught pigeons and sparrows after they were freed.
"The birds are dazed and disoriented after being caged for some time and some are too weak or injured to fly properly and when they are released, these bird catchers wait outside temple grounds to net them," the priest said.
Meanwhile, neighbouring Singapore's National Parks Board and National Water Agency appealed to the public not to release animals into nature reserves and reservoirs, as such acts may have adverse effects on the ecological balance of the tiny island state's nature reserves and parks.
The officials said it could also affect the water quality of Singapore's reservoirs. It is a common practice in Singapore to release animals during Wesak Day, which falls on May 9.
Rebecca Morelle, BBC News 8 May 09;
The world's smallest and rarest pigs are "thriving" following their release into the wild last year, conservationists report.
Camera-trap footage and surveys suggest that the captive-bred pygmy hogs have adapted well to their new home in the grasslands of Assam in India.
The team now plans to reintroduce more of the little pigs to this habitat.
Pygmy hogs stand just 25cm-tall (10in) and weigh only 6-9kg (13-20lb). Few are thought to exist in the wild.
An 'enigmatic' pig
Professor John Fa, director of conservation science at the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, one of the partners in the Pygmy Hog Conservation Programme (PHCP), described the pigs as "enigmatic".
He told BBC News: "It is a shy creature and it's about the size of a small dog.
"It is very well adapted to living in grasslands - it is bullet shaped and has a sloping back, which is a feature of animals that live in very thick vegetation."
Scientists think the pigs' range could once have spanned the southern edge of the Himalayas in the Indian sub-continent.
But now just one population is thought to exist in the wild, and these pigs are situated in Manas National Park, in the state of Assam. However, their habitat is under threat.
William Oliver, chair of the IUCN Species Survival Commission's Pigs, Peccaries and Hippos Specialist Group, said: "The practice of indiscriminate dry-season annual burning and uncontrolled livestock grazing threatens the last surviving wild population of pygmy hogs in Manas and, if continued, will doubtless also affect many other threatened and sensitive grassland species."
Pig-cam
In 1996, conservationists began a captive-breeding programme in a bid to boost the pigs' numbers, and in May 2008, 16 of these pygmy hogs (seven males and nine females) were released into the Sonai Rupai wildlife sanctuary.
Professor Fa said: "Since the release, we have been doing very extensive surveys every month to find out how they are using their habitat. The good thing about these pigs, like all pigs, is that they build nests and you can see where they have spent the night.
"And getting the camera-trap footage was the icing on the cake."
The surveys and films suggest that up to two-thirds of the released pigs are thriving, and one of the female pigs may have given birth.
Now the PHCP plans to release another 14 captive-bred hogs into the same area. They are currently being held in a "pre-release" facility.
Dr Goutam Narayan, from Durrell, who heads the PHCP in India, explained: "Here, we don't have much contact with them, they are out on their own and we feed them very little so they have to forage - we are preparing them for the wild."
As well as bolstering the population, the conservationists say that the released animals are helping them to better understand the wild pigs, which are extremely hard to study.
Professor Fa said: "I call it 'reverse pig-ology'. From these [released] pigs, we can learn how they choose certain types of grassland, how they behave in certain areas etc. And this information can then be applied to the wild pigs."
PHCP is a collaborative project of Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, the IUCN Species Survival Commission's Pigs, Peccaries and Hippos Specialist Group (IUCN-SSC PPHSG), the forest department of the Government of Assam and the Ministry of Environment and Forests of the Government of India.
Yahoo News 8 May 09;
PEKANBARU, Indonesia – Two rare Sumatran elephants believed to have been poisoned with cyanide-laced pineapples were found dead in the jungles of northwestern Indonesia with their tusks removed, a conservationist said.
In this photo taken on May 7, 2009, conservationists and officials inspect the carcass of an elephant believed to have been poisoned near Pekanbaru, Riau province, Sumatra island. Two Sumatran elephants believed to have been poisoned by poachers were found dead in the jungle of northwest Indonesia with their tusks removed, a conservationist said. (AP Photo)
The giant males aged 16 and 23 were discovered Thursday near Pekanbaru, Sumatra, about 560 miles (900 kilometers) from the capital, Jakarta, said Muslino, a spokesman for the Conservation and Natural Resources Agency. Like many Indonesians, he uses just one name.
Four pineapples spiked with cyanide were scattered on the ground near the carcasses and two sets of bloodied tusks had been hidden in the underbrush, said Muslino.
Police were searching for poachers believed responsible, he said.
Indonesia's endangered elephants, tigers, rhinos and orangutans are increasingly threatened by shrinking jungle habitat, which is cut and burned to make way for plantations or sold as lumber.
Just 3,000 Sumatran elephants are believed to still be living in their natural surroundings.
Henrylito D. Tacio, People and Planet 8 May 09;
In 2007, the Philippines was home to almost 88 million Filipinos. By 2015, that figure will swell to around 100 million, according to World Development Indicators 2009, the latest publication released by the World Bank.
Presently, the Philippines is among the world’s top 20 most populous countries in the world. Some demographers believe that the surging population in the country is bad news as more and more Filipinos would suffer from poverty. The 2003 National Demographic and Health Survey indicated that poverty incidence in families with nine or more children is pegged at 57 per cent while families with only one child has a poverty incidence of only 10 per cent.
Too much people and poverty are the two leading factors cited by the Population Reference Bureau (PRB) why the country’s natural resources, despite being abundant, are compromised. “The interconnected problems related to population, health, and the environment are among the Philippines’ greatest challenges in achieving national development goals,” the Washington-based bureau states.
The rapid growth of population has reportedly obliterated the coastlines – estimated at 36,289 kilometres (one of the longest in the world). Twenty-five major cities, including Metro Manila, Cebu and Davao, lie on the coast. About 62 per cent of the Filipinos live in the coastal zone.
Damaged coasts and reefs
“The present status of coastal ecosystems in the Philippines is a cause for alarm,” pointed out a World Bank report on coastal and marine resource management. “More than 79 per cent of the nation’s mangrove forests have been converted to aquaculture, logged, or reclaimed for other uses. “Half of the seagrass beds have either been lost or severely degraded, and the rate of degradation is increasing. Beaches and foreshore area are under increasing pressure from rapid population growth and uncontrolled development, which leads to erosion, sedimentation, and water quality problems,” the report added.
Coral reefs, touted to be the rainforests of the sea, are not spared. “Almost all Philippine coral reefs are at risk due to the impact of human activities, and only 4 to 5 per cent remain in excellent condition,” the World Bank report said.
“The coasts are critical for the livelihood and well-being of the growing population living in coastal areas,” the PRB says. About 75% of fish caught commercially in the country spend some time in mangroves. An estimated 10-15 per cent of the total fisheries come from coral reefs.
The destruction of mangroves and coral reefs have greatly affected fish catch. “All fisheries are showing decline in total catch,” the World Bank report claimed. Estimates show that if the present rapid population growth and declining trend in fish production continue, “only 10 kilogrammes of fish will be available per Filipino per year by 2010, as opposed to 28.5 kilogrammes per year in 2003.”
The economic costs of environmental degradation of these resources are significant, according to World Bank. For instance, one square kilometre of healthy coral reef generates an average of PhP2.5 million (US$50,000) from fishing and tourism. As a whole, coral reefs contribute at least PhP70 billion (US$1.4 billion) annually to the economy.
Water shortage
Next to air, water is the element most necessary for survival. “Access to safe water is a fundamental human need and, therefore, a basic human right,” former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan. A household of five needs at least 120 litres per day to meet basic needs – for drinking, food preparation, cooking and cleaning up, washing and personal hygiene, laundry, house cleaning, said the Washington-based Worldwatch Institute.
Overpopulation, indiscriminate extraction, and pollution are the three factors cited by Ramon Alikpala of the National Water Resources Board why the country is having “lack of freshwater supply.” He noted that at an annual population rate of 2 per cent to 2.3 per cent, the country would be facing a water shortage by 2025. This is particularly true in urban areas. In 1991, a study conducted by the Japan International Cooperation Agency listed nine major cities as “water-critical areas.” These were Metro Manila, Metro Cebu, Davao, Angeles, Baguio, Bacolod, Cagayan de Oro, Iloilo, and Zamboanga.
“The rapid urbanization of the Philippines, with more than two million persons being added to the urban population annually, is having a major impact on water resources,” said a report released by the Manila-based Asian Development Bank. Compounding the problem is the deterioration of water resources due to pollution. “Water quality is poorest in urban areas, the main sources of pollution being untreated discharges of industrial and municipal wastewater,” the ADB said.
The ADB study found out that 48 per cent of water pollution arise from domestic use, 37 per cent from agricultural waste, and 15 percent from industrial waste. According to World Bank, the annual economic losses caused by water pollution are estimated at PhP67 billion (US$1.3 billion).
Disappearance of forest cover
Some environmentalists believe the shortfall of water supply in the country can be traced to the rapid disappearance of the forest cover. Of the country’s total forestland area of 15.88 million hectares, only 5.4 million hectares are covered with forests and fewer than a million hectares are left with old growth forests.
“Over-exploitation of the forest resources and inappropriate land use practices have disrupted the hydrological condition of watersheds, resulting in accelerated soil erosion, siltation of rivers and valuable reservoirs, increased incidence and severity of flooding, and decreasing water supply of potable water,” the World Bank report said.
Not only that. Forests have also provided habitat for many of the country’s biological diversity. About 76 percent of plant species are endemic (meaning they are found nowhere else in the world). The International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) has identified the Philippines as “one of the most endangered of the world’s biodiversity hotspots.”
“Widespread destruction and conversion of natural habitats, overexploitation, and pollution have led to rapid biodiversity loss,” said a World Bank report. Environmentalists are not surprised to know that the number of endangered species increased from 212 in 1990 to 284 in 1998.
The deterioration of the fragile ecosystems has made Filipinos more vulnerable to natural hazards like floods, droughts, cyclones, earthquakes, windstorms, tidal waves, and landslides. “Rapid population growth, increasing population density, and environmental degradation are accelerating vulnerability to disasters as settlements encroach into disaster-prone lands,” the PRB says. Vulnerability to natural hazards has increased in many coastal areas due to the loss of coastal habitats, which provide protection from flooding and tidal waves. In upland areas, the clearing of forests for human settlement, agriculture, and timber has contributed to the severity of flash floods and landslides.
“An awareness of population trends is critical in the formulation of effective disaster prevention and preparedness plans,” the PRB contends.
Henrylito Tacio is our Contributing Editor in South-East Asia.
Protesters descend on Australian army base as marksmen slaughter kangaroos to protect other species
Associated Press, guardian.co.uk 8 May 09;
Australia's army has started shooting 6,000 kangaroos to thin their population on an army training ground near the capital, Canberra, an official said today, outraging conservationists, who have vowed to protest.
The killings are intended to protect endangered plants and insects that share the grassy habitat with the kangaroos. A much smaller slaughter, of 400 kangaroos, on another defence department site in Canberra last year was disrupted by protesters.
Civilian marksmen contracted by the department began shooting the kangaroos on Tuesday night at the Majura training area, where an estimated 9,000 kangaroos roam, Brigadier Brian Dawson said.
"The culling is intended to reduce the kangaroo population to sustainable levels," he said, describing the action as that of a "responsible landowner".
The night-time shooting is expected to continue intermittently until August. The training ground covers more than 3,000 hectares (7,400 acres) and includes grenade and artillery firing ranges.
Bernard Brennan, president of Canberra's Animal Liberation conservation group, said protesters would gather at the site tonight and many more would arrive from around Australia next week. "We're not going to sit back and let it happen," he said.
The kangaroo slaughter follows a government environmental report that the common eastern grey kangaroos are too numerous in Canberra's parkland and grassland, eating scarce native grass, which is the habitat of endangered insects such as golden gun moths and perunga grasshoppers.
The kangaroo overpopulation was also threatening endangered reptiles, the grassland earless dragon and the striped legless lizard, the report said.
Kangaroos are slaughtered to control their population throughout Australia, but government agencies have been reluctant to kill the national symbol around Canberra in the last 20 years because of public protests.
Decision by Obama administration to uphold a Bush-era ruling that limits protection of the polar bear from global warming brings immediate protests from wildlife and environmental groups
Suzanne Goldenberg, guardian.co.uk 8 May 09;
The Obama administration today declined to protect polar bears from the single greatest threat to their survival – the melting of sea ice by global warming. The decision brought immediate protests from wildlife and environmental groups.
The interior secretary, Ken Salazar, said he would not overturn one of the most controversial last-minute rules of the George Bush era. The rule had denied protection to the polar bear because Bush did not want to be pressed into regulating the industries that emit greenhouse gases.
"To see the polar bear habitat melting and an iconic species threatened is a tragedy of the modern age," Salazar said. But he said existing wildlife legislation, which was crafted in the 1970s, was not equipped to deal with threats to the polar bear from heat-trapping pollution occurring miles away from its Arctic home. "The endangered species act is not the best mechanism for cutting down on climate change."
He said it would be far more effective to work towards a comprehensive strategy on climate change – which he said the Obama administration and Congress were pursuing as their "signature" issue. "We need a comprehensive energy and climate change strategy that curbs climate change and its impact, including the loss of sea ice," he said.
However, the rationale that it was better to drop the protections under the endangered species act rather than use an imperfect body of law will carry very little weight among environmentalists who have led a dogged campaign to press Obama to overturn the Bush rule.
Salazar's announcement also contradicts the logic of a decision last month that clean air legislation, of similar 1970s vintage to the endangered species act, compelled the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate carbon emissions as a dangerous pollutant.
In his brief remarks to reporters, Salazar acknowledged that climate change was the biggest threat to the animal. "The single greatest threat to polar bear is the melting of Arctic ice caused by climate change."
There are estimated to be 20,000-25,000 polar bears living in the wild.
The decision is easily among the most unpopular to date among environmentalists, and Salazar acknowledged that the administration could face a legal challenge. Greepeace gathered more than 80,000 signatures on a petition campaign calling for polar bear protection. Earlier this week, more than 45 law professors wrote an open letter to Salazar urging him to revoke Bush's rule on polar bears.
"The special rule is a death warrant for the polar bear," said Bill Snape, senior counsel for the Center for Biological Diversity. "With its sea-ice habitat rapidly disappearing, the polar bear needs the full protection of the Endangered Species Act."
Today's move is also at odds with the Obama administration's efforts to roll back a number of the so-called midnight regulations from the Bush era. But Salazar said the decision was in keeping with the administration's policy of letting science dictate policy on the environment. Other decisions by Salazar have been criticised by environmentalists. In March, he upheld a decision by Bush to take grey wolves off the endangered species list in Montana and other rocky states.
Congress gave an opening to Salazar to overturn the Bush rule in March, ordering him to make a decision about the polar bear within 60 days. In a sign of the extreme sensitivity of the issue, the interior secretary waited until the very end of a deadline to make the announcement, and took only two questions from reporters.
Obama won't fight global warming with bear rules
H. Josef Hebert, Associated Press Yahoo News 8 May 09;
WASHINGTON – The Obama administration, which promised a sharp break from the Bush White House on global warming, declared Friday it would stick with a Bush-era policy against expanding protection for climate-threatened polar bears and ruled out a broad new attack on greenhouse gases.
To the dismay of environmentalists, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar refused to rescind a Bush administration rule that says actions that threaten the polar bear's survival cannot be considered when safeguarding the iconic mammal if they occur outside the bear's Arctic home.
The rule was aimed at heading off the possibility that the bear's survival could be cited by opponents of power plants and other facilities that produce carbon dioxide, a leading pollutant blamed for global warming.
The Endangered Species Act requires that a threatened or endangered species must have its habitat protected. Environmentalists say that in the case of the polar bear, the biggest threat comes from pollution — mainly carbon dioxide from faraway power plants, factories and cars — that is warming the Earth and melting Arctic sea ice.
Salazar agreed that global warming was "the single greatest threat" to the bear's survival, but disagreed that the federal law protecting animals, plants and fish should be used to address climate change.
"The Endangered Species Act is not the appropriate tool for us to deal with what is a global issue, and that is the issue of global warming," said Salazar, echoing much the same view of his Republican predecessor, Dirk Kempthorne, who had declared the polar bear officially threatened and in need of protection under the federal species law.
Kempthorne at the same time issued the "special rule" that limited the scope of the bear's protection to actions within its Arctic home.
The iconic polar bear — some 25,000 of the mammals can be found across the Arctic region from Alaska to Greenland — has become a symbol of the potential ravages of climate change. Scientists say while the bear population has more than doubled since the 1960s, as many as 15,000 could be lost in the coming decades because of the loss of Arctic sea ice, a key element of its habitat.
Environmentalists and some members of Congress had strongly urged Salazar to rescind the Bush regulation, arguing the bear is not being given the full protection required under the species law.
Others, including most of the business community, argue that making the bear a reason for curtailing greenhouse gases thousands of miles from its home would cause economic chaos.
Reaction to Salazar's decision Friday was sharply divided.
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin hailed the decision as a "clear victory for Alaska" because it removes the link between bear protection and climate change and should help North Slope oil and gas development. Both of Alaska's senators and its only House member also praised the decision and rejected claims the bear won't be protected.
Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, a global warming skeptic and the ranking Republican on the Senate Environment Committee, applauded Salazar "for making the right call and applying a commonsense approach to the Endangered Species Act" and climate.
But environmentalists and some of their leading advocates in Congress were disappointed.
"The polar bear is threatened, and we need to act," said Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., who chairs the environment panel, adding that she disagreed with Salazar's decision not to revoke the Bush regulation.
Andrew Wetzler, director of wildlife conservation at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said the Endangered Species Act should be part of the government's arsenal in fighting climate change "and it shouldn't be unilaterally disarming itself for no reason."
"For Salazar to adopt Bush's polar bear extinction plan is confirming the worst fears of his tenure as secretary of interior," said Noah Greenwald, of the Center for Biological Diversity, which along with the NRDC and Greenpeace has a lawsuit pending challenging the bear rule.
Salazar noted that he has overturned a string of Bush-era regulations, including last week restoring a requirement that agencies consult with the government's most knowledgeable biologists when taking actions that could harm species. "We must do all we can to protect the polar bear," he said, but that using the species protection law "is not the right way to go."
The way to deal with climate change is a broad cap on greenhouse gases, he said.
Congress is considering cap-and-trade legislation forcing a reduction on greenhouse gases, and, separately, the Environmental Protection Agency has begun working on a climate regulation under the Clean Air Act. Last month, the EPA declared carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels and other greenhouse gases a danger to public health.
The last word is still to be heard on linking species protection and climate change.
Earlier this week, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service began a review of whether the American pika, a tiny rabbit relative living in high altitudes of 10 Western states, is threatened by climate change because the mountain areas are becoming warmer.
The American pika is no polar bear, but the arguments may be the same.
U.S. Curbs Use of Species Act in Protecting Polar Bear
Andrew C. Revkin, The New York Times 8 May 09;
The Obama administration said Friday that it would retain a wildlife rule issued in the last days of the Bush administration that says the government cannot invoke the Endangered Species Act to restrict emissions of greenhouse gases threatening the polar bear and its habitat.
In essence, the decision means that two consecutive presidents have judged that the act is not an appropriate means of curbing the emissions that scientists have linked to global warming.
The bear was listed as a threatened species under the act last May. But the special rule, adopted in December, said this designation did not give the Interior Department the authority to limit greenhouse gases outside the bears’ Arctic range.
In announcing Friday that the rule would stand, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said, “The single greatest threat to the polar bear is the melting of Arctic sea ice due to climate change.” But, Mr. Salazar said, the global risk from greenhouse gases, which are generated worldwide, requires comprehensive policies, not a patchwork of agency actions carried out for particular species.
“It would be very difficult for our scientists to be doing evaluations of a cement plant in Georgia or Florida and the impact it’s going to have on the polar bear habitat,” Mr. Salazar said. “I just don’t think the Endangered Species Act was ever set up with that contemplation in mind.”
“I do think what makes sense is for us to move forward with climate change and energy legislation,” he added. “It is a signature issue of these times.”
Environmental groups have turned in recent years to a variety of legal tools, including the endangered species law, as a strategy to force government agencies to rein in emissions that scientists say are the dominant cause of recent warming.
This year, for example, the Environmental Protection Agency, prodded by a lawsuit, agreed under the Clean Water Act to start assessing the risks posed by the main greenhouse gas emission, carbon dioxide, as it is absorbed in seawater.
And only this week, also in response to a lawsuit, the Interior Department announced that a study was being undertaken to assess whether another mammal, the diminutive American pika, should be listed as threatened because of climate change.
The administration’s decision to retain the polar bear rule appears to signal President Obama’s willingness to let such suits play out in the courts as broader policies are developed to fight global warming.
Environmentalists who had been pressing the White House to drop the Bush-era rule criticized the decision, predicting that the rule would ultimately be deemed illegal in the courts.
“The action taken by Salazar today, and the spin on that action, is every bit as cynical, abusive and antiscientific as the Bush administration,” said Kierán Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity, one of several environmental groups that have sued to challenge the rule.
Some critics of the decision said it contradicted the approach the administration took when it chose to pursue restrictions on greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. That measure, which applies to national air pollution standards, is also not a perfect fit for a globally dispersed gas like carbon dioxide, they said.
Yet Democratic lawmakers, dozens of whom had signed a letter to Mr. Salazar urging that the rule be dropped, were largely silent on Friday. They are pushing hard for climate legislation limiting greenhouse gases and are still working out details with Mr. Obama.
Republicans in Congress and industry representatives had argued that without the rule, any proposed housing development, power plant or other project requiring a government permit could face a review of how its emissions might harm not only polar bears but eventually a list of other species that could be imperiled by climate change.
Jack N. Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute, endorsed Friday’s move by the administration, saying it would provide “greater regulatory certainty not only to the oil and natural gas industry but also to all U.S. manufacturers.”
Some environmental campaigners offered a mixed view of the situation.
John Kostyack, executive director for wildlife conservation and global warming at the National Wildlife Federation, criticized the decision to retain the rule, which he said falsely asserted that there was no direct link between specific greenhouse gas emissions and the decline in the polar bear’s habitat.
But Mr. Kostyack said there was no way that the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Interior Department agency responsible for carrying out the Endangered Species Act, could handle the burden of trying to police emissions.
In addition to conventional threats, a vital focus for wildlife managers should be figuring out how to help vulnerable species adapt to climate stresses, he said.
“The last thing we want to do,” he said, “is saddle them with solving the causes of global warming, too.”
George Monbiot The Guardian 8 May 09;
The first evacuation of an entire community due to manmade global warming is happening on the Carteret Islands
Journalists – they're never around when you want one. Two weeks ago a momentous event occurred: the beginning of the world's first evacuation of an entire people as a result of manmade global warming. It has been marked so far by one blog post for the Ecologist and an article in the Solomon Times*. Where is everyone?
The Carteret Islands are off the coast of Bougainville, which, in turn, is off the coast of Papua New Guinea. They are small coral atolls on which 2,600 people live. Though not for much longer.
As the Ecologist's blogger Dan Box witnessed, the first five families have moved to Bougainville to prepare the ground for full evacuation. There are compounding factors – the removal of mangrove forests and some local volcanic activity – but the main problem appears to be rising sea levels. The highest point of the islands is 170cm above the sea. Over the past few years they have been repeatedly inundated by spring tides, wiping out the islanders' vegetable and fruit gardens, destroying their subsistence and making their lives impossible.
They are not, as the Daily Mail and the Times predicted, "the world's first climate-change refugees". People have been displaced from their homes by natural climate change for tens of thousands of years, and by manmade climate change for millennia (think of the desertification caused in North Africa by Roman grain production).
Some people ascribe the fighting in Darfur – and the consequent displacement of its people – to climate change, as people struggle over diminishing resources. But this appears to be the first time that an entire people have started leaving their homes as a result of current global warming.
Their numbers might be small, but this is the event that foreshadows the likely mass displacement of people from coastal cities and low-lying regions as a result of rising sea levels. The disaster has begun, but so far hardly anyone has noticed.
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