NUS Museums Exhibition: I Polunin (8 Aug-22 Nov 09)
from Otterman speaks
Silent Running: Illegal Fishing In Nature Reserves
from Life's Indulgences
Who Love Mikania micrantha @ LT?
from Beauty of Fauna and Flora in Nature
Behind-the-scenes look at sea anemones!
from wild shores of singapore
Dusky Broadbill nesting
from Bird Ecology Study Group
SBG exhibition on the Theory of Evolution, 1st - 31st Aug 2009
from Habitatnews
weather.gov.sg – NEA’s weather portal revamped
from Otterman speaks
Sijie, the scouts and sea turtles at Setia
from wild shores of singapore
Best of our wild blogs: 1 Aug 09
Government to set up two funds to improve food security in S'pore
Desmond Wong, Channel NewsAsia 31 Jul 09;
SINGAPORE: The government plans to set up two funds which will help improve Singapore's food supply resilience.
National Development Minister Mah Bow Tan announced this at the Agri-Food and Veterinary Authority (AVA) of Singapore Food Safety Awards Night on Friday.
Last year's rice supply crunch might be a thing of the past, but with Singapore importing 90 per cent of its food, the government isn't taking any chances.
The two funds will help ensure Singapore has a stable food supply.
The Food Diversification Fund will secure diverse sources of food through food production, or food zones overseas.
Mr Mah said: "Such food zones will provide safe, quality food to both the population of the host country as well as Singapore. However, these have to be commercially-viable to be sustainable and we encourage the private sector to seriously explore and spearhead investments into food zones."
The fund will also explore the possibility of seeking out partners for food production on a contract basis, while the Food Capability Development Fund will help support local farms and research.
Mr Mah said: "To give confidence for our farmers to invest in farms for maximum food production, the government will support local agriculture by setting aside land for these types of farms for the next 20 years.”
The government has set a target of being self-sufficient for 30 per cent of Singapore's eggs, 15 per cent of its fish and 10 per cent of its leafy vegetables.
The minister also said that consumers have a part to play in food security, such as understanding the benefits of substitutes such as frozen meat, liquid or powdered eggs. Knowing this will help the public react better to future shocks in the food supply.
The two funds are expected to be up and running within a year.
- CNA/yt
More land for growing food
More farm area, funds to be set aside to guard against global shortages
Jessica Lim, Straits Times 1 Aug 09;
MORE land will be set aside for growing food while companies will be encouraged to work with farms overseas to ensure that Singapore has a ready and stable supply of produce.
With the turbulence in food prices in recent years exposing the island state's vulnerability, these moves should mitigate supply shortages and sharp price increases in the long term.
'Local farming can serve as a strategic stockpile, like Newater,' said National Development Minister Mah Bow Tan in a speech at the Agri-Food and Veterinary Authority's food safety awards last night.
More space for farms will be obtained by expanding existing farms or setting aside unused land parcels.
It has been projected that over the next five years, the local supply of eggs should rise from 23 per cent to 30 per cent, fish from 4 per cent to 15 per cent and leafy vegetables from 7 per cent to 10 per cent.
A fund, the amount of which is not yet known, will be available for farmers to tap for upgrading and expansion. It can also be used by companies, such as those involved in import and distribution, to explore if food zones identified overseas are suitable for investment of capital.
Singapore now imports more than 90 per cent of its food, and the zones will be identified for six key imports - chicken, pork, fish, eggs, leafy vegetables and rice.
Companies will be encouraged to work with growers to farm specifically for Singapore, in addition to their local communities. 'We want to encourage our companies to increase their participation in the entire value chain from food production to distribution, to better secure supplies,' said Mr Mah.
Importers now cast a wide net, working with suppliers from over 30 countries. But these growers also supply to the rest of the world, so when there is a shortage, such as that just last year, a bidding war ensues. Singapore hopes to bypass such a scrap with its own assured supply.
'As Singapore imports most of its food, we are vulnerable to sharp changes in food supply and prices,' added Mr Mah. 'More needs to be done as we prepare ourselves to face the longer-term challenges affecting global food supply and demand.'
The situation is still volatile, he said, citing factors such as: the world population is still increasing and supply will be affected by rapid urbanisation on top of years of underinvestment in agricultural development.
It is hoped that these new measures will prevent a repeat of the price inflation for food items that hit Singapore around this time last year. The situation sent the authorities scrambling to secure new lines of supply. An inter-agency committee was set up to study and review food supply policies. The new recommendations have sprung from that.
Manufacturers have welcomed the proposals. Mr Thomas Pek, managing director of home-grown soya sauce manufacturer Tai Hua, which imports up to 2,000 tonnes of soybeans a year, said his product went up in price last year following a shortage of the main ingredient.
'There was a shortage of soybeans the whole of last year and everyone rushed to secure supplies from Canada, which is the main supplier of soybeans here,' said Mr Pek. 'If we have a stable supply just for Singapore, prices will stay low and I don't have to worry.'
Some importers have already expressed interest in working with the Government to create overseas food zones.
Mr Lim Hock Chee, Sheng Siong's managing director, said his company - which imports rice and seafood - is 'seriously looking into it' and is assessing its capability to implement such a concept.
'We believe such a concept may add to the stability and consistency of food supply,' he said.
To plough a foreign farm
Govt mulls kitty to help firms invest in food zones overseas
Ong Dai Lin, Today Online 1 Aug 09;
FOREIGN farmland in Singapore hands, contracts with overseas farmers that lock in prices for supermarket shoppers, more locally-caught seafood in markets here.
This could be the future of Singaporeans' food supply - with more buffers against supply volatility - should certain plans continue to unfold.
In the face of global warning, disease and a growing world population threatening to drive food prices up, National Development Minister Mah Bow Tan on Friday revealed the Republic's steps to get a firmer grip on its supply of rice, chicken, pork, fish, eggs and leafy vegetables.
The key change? Going beyond merely scouting for more diverse sources to "creating" them.
To this end, a Food Diversification Fund could be set up to encourage the private sector to invest, with foreign partners, in "overseas food zones" where quality food could be produced for Singaporeans and the host country.
Some - including former Agri-Food & Veterinary Authority of Singapore (AVA) chief Ngiam Tong Tau - have previously argued the case for land-scarce Singapore to buy farmland overseas, within the region or even as far afield as Latin America.
The precedent has been set by countries such as South Korea, which has farmland in Sudan, and Saudi Arabia (in Tanzania).
Another purpose of the fund - the key recommendation of the inter-agency committee tasked last year to draw up strategies for food supply resilience - would be to help local companies go into contract farming.
This is where an agreement is made with overseas farms to supply food for a fixed price for a specific period. NTUC FairPrice gets its supply of organic vegetables from Thailand this way.
In this, AVA will help match-make firms with foreign suppliers that meet Singapore's food safety standards.
And such support is vital, industry players told Today. "For contract farming to work, it must require a credible grower who has integrity. It's not that straightforward," said vegetable wholesaler Philip Seow.
On more than one occasion, he has had to throw away a few tones of capsicums imported from Indonesia, because of higher pesticide levels than was allowed in Singapore.
He had told the suppliers about such requirements, "but the farmers tried to gamble", he said.
The stubborn mindset is a challenge. Some weeks ago, he went to Central Java with AVA officials. One grower-exporter asked why he could not use the same pesticide that he used on produce for Taiwan.
Sheng Siong supermarket's assistant managing director, Mr Lim Hock Leng, said government support could protect local companies if the supplier breaks the contract.
"If the foreign suppliers' country is peaceful, supply is not a problem. But if anything happens in the country, the suppliers can just cut off the food supply and there's nothing we can do."
For now, the supermarket has not thought about contract farming or investing in overseas food zones.
AVA WILL 'Push the envelope' on risk management, says Mah
Speaking at the AVA's Food Safety Awards Night at Orchard Hotel, Mr Mah said that International Enterprise Singapore will conduct a feasibility study on how the Republic can be "an effective node in the food distribution network across Asia".
Not only will being a hub for the food trade add value to the economy, it could mean an edge in access should there be a supply disruption.
AVA will also "push the envelope on risk management approaches", said Mr Mah - meaning that Singapore will keep existing supply ones open even if there is disease or food contamination in the source countries.
Wouldn't consumers fret over safety? AVA's CEO Tan Poh Hong said the worry was "psychological" and risk education was key in allaying their fears.
It was also recommended that the food industry beef up its business continuity plans, such as by maintaining links with non-traditional sources. Thygrace's Mr Lim, for instance, said that when the monsoon season wiped out capsicum supplies, they turned to Saudi Arabia and Taiwan.
The inter-agency committee consulted 41 parties including food retailers and importers before drawing up its recommendations. ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY LEONG WEE KEAT
More local fish, eggs and veggies ...
Ong Dai Lin, Today Online 1 Aug 09;
In five years' time, 30 per cent of the eggs that Singaporeans eat may be locally farmed, up from the current 23 per cent.
So that Singapore has a bigger buffer in case of a disruption to food imports, the Government is setting aside land for the next 20 years to produce more food locally.
Acting chairman of Singapore's Eggs Import and Export Trading Association, Mr Yeo Liu Cheeh, said that Singapore's current stockpile of eggs can last a week. The production boost would up that buffer to one-and-a-half weeks.
Local supply of fish will also be bumped up from 4 to 15 per cent of overall supply, and leafy vegetable from 7 to 10 per cent.
The AVA said Singapore's leading research and techniques in the rearing of marine fish could be tapped.
How much extra land will be allocated for farming is not confirmed, as the Government is also looking at how to improve production efficiency, said AVA. Such technology research will be funded by a Food Capability Development Fund.
It is likely, though, that the land will be in areas like Lim Chu Kang, AVA added.
President of the Kranji Countryside Association, Mrs Ivy Singh-Lim (picture), welcomed the move towards "self-sustainability" and suggested the Government also encourage Singaporeans to grow more vegetables in their HDB estates.
"Town councils can plant vegetables and make use of the energy of the old people to take care of the crop," said Mrs Lim.
Before land is farmed
Letter from Teo Kueh Liang, Today Online 4 Aug 09;
I REFER to "More local fish, eggs and veggies" (Aug 1 and 2).
Although it is gratifying to know that the Government is taking the lead and encouraging the private sector to explore ways in managing supply shortages of identified foods, the following need to be addressed beforehand.
First, would there be tax incentives for prospective farmers?
Second, would they get financial assistance and agri-food technology transfers?
Third, would long-term investments be affected by the land lease?
Finally, how will the authorities ensure that the price mechanism to be adopted is fair to both farmers and consumers?
SINGAPORE: The government plans to set up two funds which will help improve Singapore's food supply resilience.
National Development Minister Mah Bow Tan announced this at the Agri-Food and Veterinary Authority (AVA) of Singapore Food Safety Awards Night on Friday.
Last year's rice supply crunch might be a thing of the past, but with Singapore importing 90 per cent of its food, the government isn't taking any chances.
The two funds will help ensure Singapore has a stable food supply.
The Food Diversification Fund will secure diverse sources of food through food production, or food zones overseas.
Mr Mah said: "Such food zones will provide safe, quality food to both the population of the host country as well as Singapore. However, these have to be commercially-viable to be sustainable and we encourage the private sector to seriously explore and spearhead investments into food zones."
The fund will also explore the possibility of seeking out partners for food production on a contract basis, while the Food Capability Development Fund will help support local farms and research.
Mr Mah said: "To give confidence for our farmers to invest in farms for maximum food production, the government will support local agriculture by setting aside land for these types of farms for the next 20 years.”
The government has set a target of being self-sufficient for 30 per cent of Singapore's eggs, 15 per cent of its fish and 10 per cent of its leafy vegetables.
The minister also said that consumers have a part to play in food security, such as understanding the benefits of substitutes such as frozen meat, liquid or powdered eggs. Knowing this will help the public react better to future shocks in the food supply.
The two funds are expected to be up and running within a year.
- CNA/yt
More land for growing food
More farm area, funds to be set aside to guard against global shortages
Jessica Lim, Straits Times 1 Aug 09;
MORE land will be set aside for growing food while companies will be encouraged to work with farms overseas to ensure that Singapore has a ready and stable supply of produce.
With the turbulence in food prices in recent years exposing the island state's vulnerability, these moves should mitigate supply shortages and sharp price increases in the long term.
'Local farming can serve as a strategic stockpile, like Newater,' said National Development Minister Mah Bow Tan in a speech at the Agri-Food and Veterinary Authority's food safety awards last night.
More space for farms will be obtained by expanding existing farms or setting aside unused land parcels.
It has been projected that over the next five years, the local supply of eggs should rise from 23 per cent to 30 per cent, fish from 4 per cent to 15 per cent and leafy vegetables from 7 per cent to 10 per cent.
A fund, the amount of which is not yet known, will be available for farmers to tap for upgrading and expansion. It can also be used by companies, such as those involved in import and distribution, to explore if food zones identified overseas are suitable for investment of capital.
Singapore now imports more than 90 per cent of its food, and the zones will be identified for six key imports - chicken, pork, fish, eggs, leafy vegetables and rice.
Companies will be encouraged to work with growers to farm specifically for Singapore, in addition to their local communities. 'We want to encourage our companies to increase their participation in the entire value chain from food production to distribution, to better secure supplies,' said Mr Mah.
Importers now cast a wide net, working with suppliers from over 30 countries. But these growers also supply to the rest of the world, so when there is a shortage, such as that just last year, a bidding war ensues. Singapore hopes to bypass such a scrap with its own assured supply.
'As Singapore imports most of its food, we are vulnerable to sharp changes in food supply and prices,' added Mr Mah. 'More needs to be done as we prepare ourselves to face the longer-term challenges affecting global food supply and demand.'
The situation is still volatile, he said, citing factors such as: the world population is still increasing and supply will be affected by rapid urbanisation on top of years of underinvestment in agricultural development.
It is hoped that these new measures will prevent a repeat of the price inflation for food items that hit Singapore around this time last year. The situation sent the authorities scrambling to secure new lines of supply. An inter-agency committee was set up to study and review food supply policies. The new recommendations have sprung from that.
Manufacturers have welcomed the proposals. Mr Thomas Pek, managing director of home-grown soya sauce manufacturer Tai Hua, which imports up to 2,000 tonnes of soybeans a year, said his product went up in price last year following a shortage of the main ingredient.
'There was a shortage of soybeans the whole of last year and everyone rushed to secure supplies from Canada, which is the main supplier of soybeans here,' said Mr Pek. 'If we have a stable supply just for Singapore, prices will stay low and I don't have to worry.'
Some importers have already expressed interest in working with the Government to create overseas food zones.
Mr Lim Hock Chee, Sheng Siong's managing director, said his company - which imports rice and seafood - is 'seriously looking into it' and is assessing its capability to implement such a concept.
'We believe such a concept may add to the stability and consistency of food supply,' he said.
To plough a foreign farm
Govt mulls kitty to help firms invest in food zones overseas
Ong Dai Lin, Today Online 1 Aug 09;
FOREIGN farmland in Singapore hands, contracts with overseas farmers that lock in prices for supermarket shoppers, more locally-caught seafood in markets here.
This could be the future of Singaporeans' food supply - with more buffers against supply volatility - should certain plans continue to unfold.
In the face of global warning, disease and a growing world population threatening to drive food prices up, National Development Minister Mah Bow Tan on Friday revealed the Republic's steps to get a firmer grip on its supply of rice, chicken, pork, fish, eggs and leafy vegetables.
The key change? Going beyond merely scouting for more diverse sources to "creating" them.
To this end, a Food Diversification Fund could be set up to encourage the private sector to invest, with foreign partners, in "overseas food zones" where quality food could be produced for Singaporeans and the host country.
Some - including former Agri-Food & Veterinary Authority of Singapore (AVA) chief Ngiam Tong Tau - have previously argued the case for land-scarce Singapore to buy farmland overseas, within the region or even as far afield as Latin America.
The precedent has been set by countries such as South Korea, which has farmland in Sudan, and Saudi Arabia (in Tanzania).
Another purpose of the fund - the key recommendation of the inter-agency committee tasked last year to draw up strategies for food supply resilience - would be to help local companies go into contract farming.
This is where an agreement is made with overseas farms to supply food for a fixed price for a specific period. NTUC FairPrice gets its supply of organic vegetables from Thailand this way.
In this, AVA will help match-make firms with foreign suppliers that meet Singapore's food safety standards.
And such support is vital, industry players told Today. "For contract farming to work, it must require a credible grower who has integrity. It's not that straightforward," said vegetable wholesaler Philip Seow.
On more than one occasion, he has had to throw away a few tones of capsicums imported from Indonesia, because of higher pesticide levels than was allowed in Singapore.
He had told the suppliers about such requirements, "but the farmers tried to gamble", he said.
The stubborn mindset is a challenge. Some weeks ago, he went to Central Java with AVA officials. One grower-exporter asked why he could not use the same pesticide that he used on produce for Taiwan.
Sheng Siong supermarket's assistant managing director, Mr Lim Hock Leng, said government support could protect local companies if the supplier breaks the contract.
"If the foreign suppliers' country is peaceful, supply is not a problem. But if anything happens in the country, the suppliers can just cut off the food supply and there's nothing we can do."
For now, the supermarket has not thought about contract farming or investing in overseas food zones.
AVA WILL 'Push the envelope' on risk management, says Mah
Speaking at the AVA's Food Safety Awards Night at Orchard Hotel, Mr Mah said that International Enterprise Singapore will conduct a feasibility study on how the Republic can be "an effective node in the food distribution network across Asia".
Not only will being a hub for the food trade add value to the economy, it could mean an edge in access should there be a supply disruption.
AVA will also "push the envelope on risk management approaches", said Mr Mah - meaning that Singapore will keep existing supply ones open even if there is disease or food contamination in the source countries.
Wouldn't consumers fret over safety? AVA's CEO Tan Poh Hong said the worry was "psychological" and risk education was key in allaying their fears.
It was also recommended that the food industry beef up its business continuity plans, such as by maintaining links with non-traditional sources. Thygrace's Mr Lim, for instance, said that when the monsoon season wiped out capsicum supplies, they turned to Saudi Arabia and Taiwan.
The inter-agency committee consulted 41 parties including food retailers and importers before drawing up its recommendations. ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY LEONG WEE KEAT
More local fish, eggs and veggies ...
Ong Dai Lin, Today Online 1 Aug 09;
In five years' time, 30 per cent of the eggs that Singaporeans eat may be locally farmed, up from the current 23 per cent.
So that Singapore has a bigger buffer in case of a disruption to food imports, the Government is setting aside land for the next 20 years to produce more food locally.
Acting chairman of Singapore's Eggs Import and Export Trading Association, Mr Yeo Liu Cheeh, said that Singapore's current stockpile of eggs can last a week. The production boost would up that buffer to one-and-a-half weeks.
Local supply of fish will also be bumped up from 4 to 15 per cent of overall supply, and leafy vegetable from 7 to 10 per cent.
The AVA said Singapore's leading research and techniques in the rearing of marine fish could be tapped.
How much extra land will be allocated for farming is not confirmed, as the Government is also looking at how to improve production efficiency, said AVA. Such technology research will be funded by a Food Capability Development Fund.
It is likely, though, that the land will be in areas like Lim Chu Kang, AVA added.
President of the Kranji Countryside Association, Mrs Ivy Singh-Lim (picture), welcomed the move towards "self-sustainability" and suggested the Government also encourage Singaporeans to grow more vegetables in their HDB estates.
"Town councils can plant vegetables and make use of the energy of the old people to take care of the crop," said Mrs Lim.
Before land is farmed
Letter from Teo Kueh Liang, Today Online 4 Aug 09;
I REFER to "More local fish, eggs and veggies" (Aug 1 and 2).
Although it is gratifying to know that the Government is taking the lead and encouraging the private sector to explore ways in managing supply shortages of identified foods, the following need to be addressed beforehand.
First, would there be tax incentives for prospective farmers?
Second, would they get financial assistance and agri-food technology transfers?
Third, would long-term investments be affected by the land lease?
Finally, how will the authorities ensure that the price mechanism to be adopted is fair to both farmers and consumers?
Getting novices hooked on rearing fish
Lim Jun Yi, Straits Times 1 Aug 09;
FISH are friends, not fads - you do not dump them into reservoirs once you get tired of them.
For example, a good number of luohan fish were released into 'the wild' when the 2002 craze died down two years later, and it is episodes like that which one company is hoping to prevent.
Pet food and accessories supplier Tetra Aquatic Asia wants new hobbyists to think of fish-rearing as a long-term investment, no different from keeping a dog, cat or parrot.
'There are those who just use tap water and wonder why their fish are dying!' said Mr Prem Kumar, who handles the company's marketing, advertising and promotions.
To disseminate the right information - including finer details like the water pH level and the type of filtration systems needed - the company has a fail-proof package for novices.
AquaArt, designed especially for new fish owners, is a tank which comes with a book and CD containing step-by-step instructions on the upkeep of an aquarium.
Items such as fish food, water conditioner and a filtration system are included. In fact, it comes with everything except the fish themselves.
Mr Edwin Lim, a member of fish group Betta Club, bought an AquaArt tank for his three sons aged seven, nine and 11, and said they now know how to wash the tank and change the filter. He said: 'It's all-in-one - simple. They can handle it themselves so I just let them do it.'
Hoping to promote interest among more people, Tetra regularly organises tours and teaching sessions which are family-centric.
On its tours to the Rainbow Aquarium fish farm at Sungei Tengah Road, hobbyists can watch the live spawning of some arowana fish - otherwise kept a trade secret by breeders.
Tetra also sponsors shows and competitions organised by Singapore's fish clubs, including the Guppy Club, the Discus Club and two goldfish clubs.
Families get to take part in aquascaping (landscaping in an aquarium) competitions at roadshows. How-to tutorials on making balcony ponds or caring for ornamental fishes are also conducted free.
The group is now considering visiting schools to teach students and teachers how to set up aquariums and keep healthy fish, and even explain fish anatomy.
Tetra's manager of Far East Markets, Ms Clarissa Then, said: 'Our objective is to get people excited over the hobby of keeping fish...We want to start them young.'
FISH are friends, not fads - you do not dump them into reservoirs once you get tired of them.
For example, a good number of luohan fish were released into 'the wild' when the 2002 craze died down two years later, and it is episodes like that which one company is hoping to prevent.
Pet food and accessories supplier Tetra Aquatic Asia wants new hobbyists to think of fish-rearing as a long-term investment, no different from keeping a dog, cat or parrot.
'There are those who just use tap water and wonder why their fish are dying!' said Mr Prem Kumar, who handles the company's marketing, advertising and promotions.
To disseminate the right information - including finer details like the water pH level and the type of filtration systems needed - the company has a fail-proof package for novices.
AquaArt, designed especially for new fish owners, is a tank which comes with a book and CD containing step-by-step instructions on the upkeep of an aquarium.
Items such as fish food, water conditioner and a filtration system are included. In fact, it comes with everything except the fish themselves.
Mr Edwin Lim, a member of fish group Betta Club, bought an AquaArt tank for his three sons aged seven, nine and 11, and said they now know how to wash the tank and change the filter. He said: 'It's all-in-one - simple. They can handle it themselves so I just let them do it.'
Hoping to promote interest among more people, Tetra regularly organises tours and teaching sessions which are family-centric.
On its tours to the Rainbow Aquarium fish farm at Sungei Tengah Road, hobbyists can watch the live spawning of some arowana fish - otherwise kept a trade secret by breeders.
Tetra also sponsors shows and competitions organised by Singapore's fish clubs, including the Guppy Club, the Discus Club and two goldfish clubs.
Families get to take part in aquascaping (landscaping in an aquarium) competitions at roadshows. How-to tutorials on making balcony ponds or caring for ornamental fishes are also conducted free.
The group is now considering visiting schools to teach students and teachers how to set up aquariums and keep healthy fish, and even explain fish anatomy.
Tetra's manager of Far East Markets, Ms Clarissa Then, said: 'Our objective is to get people excited over the hobby of keeping fish...We want to start them young.'
Scouts pitch in to save turtles
Group earns high marks for volunteer work in poor district
Victoria Vaughan, Straits Times 1 Aug 09;
REPAIRING houses, planting trees and conserving turtle eggs were just a few of the accomplishments of a group of Singapore scouts in Setiu, Terengganu - and they have now set the standard for future projects there.
Eight rover scouts - that is, the senior section for those aged 17 to 26 - assisted WWF conservationists in their turtle and community projects in the Malaysian east coast state and impressed them with their pro-active approach.
(Clockwise from bottom) Rover scouts Muhammad Isa, Ashok Kumar, Oliver Lim, Melissa Heng, Ong May Lwin, Tan Sijie and Nicholas Koh Yong Zhi saved turtle eggs, repaired homes and planted mangrove trees in Terengganu. Team member Parry Lim is not in the picture. -- ST PHOTO: ALBERT SIM
Team adviser Tan Sijie, 26, led the group to Setiu, one of Terengganu state's poorest districts in terms of revenue generation, for their first Orion Turtle Project that they hope to turn into an annual event.
Mr Tan came to know about the project after a friend volunteered to join it three years ago. But it took many e-mail exchanges and two visits for him to convince the WWF in Setiu to give the green light for the trip as the organisation was not equipped to take on such a large group.
'As scouts, we leave the place a little better than when we first found it, and that's what we aimed to do in Setiu,' said Mr Tan, who has been a scout for 15 years.
WWF's Mr River Foo, the Setiu community project liaison officer, said: 'The amount this group did was immense. The standard of these kids is a benchmark for other volunteers that come out.
'We do not really take on volunteer groups as we are too busy with our day-to-day jobs, but we did not have to babysit them. They were so independent and got around on their bikes cycling to areas up to 8km away. They were really passionate about everything they did.'
The group, consisting mostly of students, organised its activities, including patrolling the beaches at night to spot turtles laying eggs. The eggs were then dug up and reburied in the WWF hatchery to protect them from predators and people who believe the leathery-shell eggs are aphrodisiacs.
After talking with a women's group in Setiu that the WWF helps to educate, the scouts identified two building projects in the town: constructing a toilet for a man on kidney dialysis and replacing the crumbling wall of a home in the village. The divorcee who lived in the home was so grateful she cried when they left at the end of their two-week trip.
The group also planted 1,000 mangrove trees from the WWF nursery in four areas along the banks of the Setiu River over two days.
All the hard work has earned the group a Scouts of the World Award - a badge currently held by only seven scouts in Singapore. It requires the scouts to go on a community project for 14 days.
There are 20 registered rover crews and about 250 rover scouts in Singapore. Next year will mark 100 years of scout presence in Singapore.
See also their Project Orion blog.
Victoria Vaughan, Straits Times 1 Aug 09;
REPAIRING houses, planting trees and conserving turtle eggs were just a few of the accomplishments of a group of Singapore scouts in Setiu, Terengganu - and they have now set the standard for future projects there.
Eight rover scouts - that is, the senior section for those aged 17 to 26 - assisted WWF conservationists in their turtle and community projects in the Malaysian east coast state and impressed them with their pro-active approach.
(Clockwise from bottom) Rover scouts Muhammad Isa, Ashok Kumar, Oliver Lim, Melissa Heng, Ong May Lwin, Tan Sijie and Nicholas Koh Yong Zhi saved turtle eggs, repaired homes and planted mangrove trees in Terengganu. Team member Parry Lim is not in the picture. -- ST PHOTO: ALBERT SIMTeam adviser Tan Sijie, 26, led the group to Setiu, one of Terengganu state's poorest districts in terms of revenue generation, for their first Orion Turtle Project that they hope to turn into an annual event.
Mr Tan came to know about the project after a friend volunteered to join it three years ago. But it took many e-mail exchanges and two visits for him to convince the WWF in Setiu to give the green light for the trip as the organisation was not equipped to take on such a large group.
'As scouts, we leave the place a little better than when we first found it, and that's what we aimed to do in Setiu,' said Mr Tan, who has been a scout for 15 years.
WWF's Mr River Foo, the Setiu community project liaison officer, said: 'The amount this group did was immense. The standard of these kids is a benchmark for other volunteers that come out.
'We do not really take on volunteer groups as we are too busy with our day-to-day jobs, but we did not have to babysit them. They were so independent and got around on their bikes cycling to areas up to 8km away. They were really passionate about everything they did.'
The group, consisting mostly of students, organised its activities, including patrolling the beaches at night to spot turtles laying eggs. The eggs were then dug up and reburied in the WWF hatchery to protect them from predators and people who believe the leathery-shell eggs are aphrodisiacs.
After talking with a women's group in Setiu that the WWF helps to educate, the scouts identified two building projects in the town: constructing a toilet for a man on kidney dialysis and replacing the crumbling wall of a home in the village. The divorcee who lived in the home was so grateful she cried when they left at the end of their two-week trip.
The group also planted 1,000 mangrove trees from the WWF nursery in four areas along the banks of the Setiu River over two days.
All the hard work has earned the group a Scouts of the World Award - a badge currently held by only seven scouts in Singapore. It requires the scouts to go on a community project for 14 days.
There are 20 registered rover crews and about 250 rover scouts in Singapore. Next year will mark 100 years of scout presence in Singapore.
See also their Project Orion blog.
Magnificent MacRitchie
With its gorgeous landscapes and better amenities, Singapore's oldest reservoir is wowing visitors after a makeover
janice heng, Straits Times 1 Aug 09;
After a gruelling training session, kayaker Raine Chian, 25, used to have to head home without a shower.
At the time, MacRitchie Reservoir Park, where she kayaks four times a week, was devoid of shower facilities. It did have a toilet block but it was old and dingy.
However, the days of uncomfortable bus rides are over for Ms Chian. The park has opened a new amenities centre complete with 23 showers.
Fourteen of these are trendy open-air showers, lacking cubicle walls. Pull a large metal ring and water rains down from an overhead sprinkler.
Kayaker Carina Teo, 22, who found the indoor showers cramped, says: 'I find the outdoor ones pretty interesting. I think I'll use them the next time.'
The new amenities centre is part of an overall revamp for Singapore's oldest reservoir, formed in 1867, taking place under the Public Utilities Board's (PUB) Active, Beautiful, Clean Waters programme. A completion ceremony for the $12-million Phase 1 was held last Saturday.
Visitors used to enter via a drab, grey carpark. Now they are welcomed by palm trees, a landscaped pond and boardwalk, and even a row of bubbling fountains.
Mr Yap Kheng Guan, director of the PUB's 3P network department, reveals that no pumps are used for the reservoir-fed fountains - just pipes and water pressure from differing water levels.
'It's very nice, very open,' said Mr K.S. Yong, 69, who was enjoying a break at the amenities centre's food-and-beverage kiosk with a dozen old schoolmates.
The group of retirees and semi-retirees visits MacRitchie once a week. All are impressed by the revamp but hope that parking will remain free at the new two-storey carpark, open since late May.
The carpark's 310 parking spaces mean 110 more lots are available. Access has also improved, as drivers heading west along Lornie Road can now turn directly into the park instead of having to make a U-turn.
Reservoir Road, which used to be clogged with traffic and parked cars, has become serene and pedestrian-friendly.
Visitors can also enjoy an uninterrupted stroll along the reservoir's edge. The path along the top of the dam, long closed to the public, is now open.
Meanwhile, kayakers enjoy a larger launch pontoon, which can take six kayaks at once compared to just one before.
'It's more extensive,' says Mr Sidney Wong, 23, who kayaks twice a week.
He, too, welcomes the replacement of the former single-block toilets: 'The new one is much better for those doing water sports and joggers, since they can have a shower.'
Previously, he could rinse off only at a public tap.
Work on the revamp's second and final phase starts in the fourth quarter of this year and is set to end in mid-2011. Focusing on the area west of the entrance, it involves landscaping, an improved food-and-beverage outlet and upgrading MacRitchie's iconic bandstand.
Even as the park is spruced up, care is taken to retain its heritage. Photographs from the reservoir's past are on show and the PUB is asking the public to send in more to add to the display.
Admiring both past and present was exhibition visitor 50-year-old Mr Shaw, who did not want to give his full name. Of the amenities centre where the exhibition is held, he says: 'It's something new, something for the family.'
janice heng, Straits Times 1 Aug 09;
After a gruelling training session, kayaker Raine Chian, 25, used to have to head home without a shower.
At the time, MacRitchie Reservoir Park, where she kayaks four times a week, was devoid of shower facilities. It did have a toilet block but it was old and dingy.
However, the days of uncomfortable bus rides are over for Ms Chian. The park has opened a new amenities centre complete with 23 showers.Fourteen of these are trendy open-air showers, lacking cubicle walls. Pull a large metal ring and water rains down from an overhead sprinkler.
Kayaker Carina Teo, 22, who found the indoor showers cramped, says: 'I find the outdoor ones pretty interesting. I think I'll use them the next time.'
The new amenities centre is part of an overall revamp for Singapore's oldest reservoir, formed in 1867, taking place under the Public Utilities Board's (PUB) Active, Beautiful, Clean Waters programme. A completion ceremony for the $12-million Phase 1 was held last Saturday.
Visitors used to enter via a drab, grey carpark. Now they are welcomed by palm trees, a landscaped pond and boardwalk, and even a row of bubbling fountains.
Mr Yap Kheng Guan, director of the PUB's 3P network department, reveals that no pumps are used for the reservoir-fed fountains - just pipes and water pressure from differing water levels.
'It's very nice, very open,' said Mr K.S. Yong, 69, who was enjoying a break at the amenities centre's food-and-beverage kiosk with a dozen old schoolmates.
The group of retirees and semi-retirees visits MacRitchie once a week. All are impressed by the revamp but hope that parking will remain free at the new two-storey carpark, open since late May.
The carpark's 310 parking spaces mean 110 more lots are available. Access has also improved, as drivers heading west along Lornie Road can now turn directly into the park instead of having to make a U-turn.
Reservoir Road, which used to be clogged with traffic and parked cars, has become serene and pedestrian-friendly.
Visitors can also enjoy an uninterrupted stroll along the reservoir's edge. The path along the top of the dam, long closed to the public, is now open.
Meanwhile, kayakers enjoy a larger launch pontoon, which can take six kayaks at once compared to just one before.
'It's more extensive,' says Mr Sidney Wong, 23, who kayaks twice a week.
He, too, welcomes the replacement of the former single-block toilets: 'The new one is much better for those doing water sports and joggers, since they can have a shower.'
Previously, he could rinse off only at a public tap.
Work on the revamp's second and final phase starts in the fourth quarter of this year and is set to end in mid-2011. Focusing on the area west of the entrance, it involves landscaping, an improved food-and-beverage outlet and upgrading MacRitchie's iconic bandstand.
Even as the park is spruced up, care is taken to retain its heritage. Photographs from the reservoir's past are on show and the PUB is asking the public to send in more to add to the display.
Admiring both past and present was exhibition visitor 50-year-old Mr Shaw, who did not want to give his full name. Of the amenities centre where the exhibition is held, he says: 'It's something new, something for the family.'
Malaysia's Penan mount anti-logging blockade: activists
Yahoo News 31 Jul 09;
KUALA LUMPUR (AFP) – Dozens of indigenous Penan tribespeople armed with spears and blowpipes have set up roadblocks in Malaysian Borneo to stop logging firms from encroaching on their territory, activists said Friday.
The Penan people, some of whom are nomadic hunter-gatherers, have been resisting deforestation of their ancestral land since the 1980s when Swiss environmentalist Bruno Manser championed their cause.
Indigenous rights group Survival International said a group of Penan were making a new stand by mounting roadblocks across tracks cut by Malaysian timber firms that intrude deep into the forest.
The group said once the valuable trees have been felled the companies clear the land completely for oil palm plantations, leading to water pollution and loss of wildlife.
"The logging and oil palm companies are robbing the Penan not just of their forests but of their food and water," Survival International's director Stephen Corry said in a statement.
"It is essential that the Malaysian government recognizes the Penan's rights to their land and stops allowing the companies to take everything in sight."
Jok Jau Evong, field officer for Friends of the Earth in Sarawak state, said two blockades had been erected in recent months, including one in the remote Long Daloh region that is still being manned by some 120 tribespeople.
"They are armed with blowpipes, their traditional hunting weapon. They do not want logging to be carried out in their forest reserve," he told AFP.
"The Penans put up the blockade as a last resort after talks with the logging company failed," he said, adding that the firms had suspended their activities but that there were doubts that agreement would hold.
"If the Penans lose their forest reserve, there is no way they can survive," said the campaigner, who recently returned from the region.
"When I visited the two Penan areas, I felt very sad. There is a lack of food, especially for the children. Their lives are getting worse due to the increased logging activities," Jok said.
The Penan people are among Malaysia's poorest and number just 12,000 out of the two million people in Sarawak, on Borneo island.
Jok said only around 400 Penan were still living a fully nomadic lifestyle, while many others have settled in villages and towns.
The plight of the Penan was made famous in the 1990s by Manser, who waged a crusade to protect their way of life and fend off the loggers, before vanishing in mysterious circumstances in 2000.
KUALA LUMPUR (AFP) – Dozens of indigenous Penan tribespeople armed with spears and blowpipes have set up roadblocks in Malaysian Borneo to stop logging firms from encroaching on their territory, activists said Friday.
The Penan people, some of whom are nomadic hunter-gatherers, have been resisting deforestation of their ancestral land since the 1980s when Swiss environmentalist Bruno Manser championed their cause.
Indigenous rights group Survival International said a group of Penan were making a new stand by mounting roadblocks across tracks cut by Malaysian timber firms that intrude deep into the forest.
The group said once the valuable trees have been felled the companies clear the land completely for oil palm plantations, leading to water pollution and loss of wildlife.
"The logging and oil palm companies are robbing the Penan not just of their forests but of their food and water," Survival International's director Stephen Corry said in a statement.
"It is essential that the Malaysian government recognizes the Penan's rights to their land and stops allowing the companies to take everything in sight."
Jok Jau Evong, field officer for Friends of the Earth in Sarawak state, said two blockades had been erected in recent months, including one in the remote Long Daloh region that is still being manned by some 120 tribespeople.
"They are armed with blowpipes, their traditional hunting weapon. They do not want logging to be carried out in their forest reserve," he told AFP.
"The Penans put up the blockade as a last resort after talks with the logging company failed," he said, adding that the firms had suspended their activities but that there were doubts that agreement would hold.
"If the Penans lose their forest reserve, there is no way they can survive," said the campaigner, who recently returned from the region.
"When I visited the two Penan areas, I felt very sad. There is a lack of food, especially for the children. Their lives are getting worse due to the increased logging activities," Jok said.
The Penan people are among Malaysia's poorest and number just 12,000 out of the two million people in Sarawak, on Borneo island.
Jok said only around 400 Penan were still living a fully nomadic lifestyle, while many others have settled in villages and towns.
The plight of the Penan was made famous in the 1990s by Manser, who waged a crusade to protect their way of life and fend off the loggers, before vanishing in mysterious circumstances in 2000.
Study begins to look at impact of Mekong hydropower plans
Yahoo News 31 Jul 09;
HANOI (AFP) – A watchdog has kicked off a study to look at proposed hydropower developments on the Mekong River and their impact on the tens of millions of people living along it, officials said Friday.
The probe has been launched to help countries affected by the projects decide whether they want to go ahead with them.
The results are expected by July or August next year, Damian Kean, spokesman for the Mekong River Commission (MRC) secretariat in Laos, told AFP.
While hydropower is already used to generate electricity on the river's tributaries, the private sector has not in the past seriously considered using the mainstream, the MRC said in a press release.
Eleven schemes are being studied by Cambodia, Laos and Thailand but in China, where the Mekong is known as the Lancang River, there are already eight existing or planned mainstream dams, the MRC said.
The Commission is an intergovernmental body that deals with all river-related activities including fisheries, agriculture and flood management.
Increased interest in building hydropower dams in the mainstream lower Mekong River basin means the MRC is now "faced with perhaps its most important strategic challenge" since its founding in 1995, Jeremy Bird, chief executive officer of the MRC secretariat, said in the statement.
China is not a member of the MRC but attended annual meetings with its four MRC neighbours this week in Laos and the Commission said it had expressed a willingness to provide experts for the study.
"I think it's very significant," Kean said. "They're a dialogue partner and I think that signifies that they're taking the concerns of the downstream countries reasonably seriously."
More than 60 million people in the lower Mekong basin depend on the river system for food, transport and economic activity, the MRC said, adding that it is home to the world's most valuable inland fishery.
HANOI (AFP) – A watchdog has kicked off a study to look at proposed hydropower developments on the Mekong River and their impact on the tens of millions of people living along it, officials said Friday.
The probe has been launched to help countries affected by the projects decide whether they want to go ahead with them.
The results are expected by July or August next year, Damian Kean, spokesman for the Mekong River Commission (MRC) secretariat in Laos, told AFP.
While hydropower is already used to generate electricity on the river's tributaries, the private sector has not in the past seriously considered using the mainstream, the MRC said in a press release.
Eleven schemes are being studied by Cambodia, Laos and Thailand but in China, where the Mekong is known as the Lancang River, there are already eight existing or planned mainstream dams, the MRC said.
The Commission is an intergovernmental body that deals with all river-related activities including fisheries, agriculture and flood management.
Increased interest in building hydropower dams in the mainstream lower Mekong River basin means the MRC is now "faced with perhaps its most important strategic challenge" since its founding in 1995, Jeremy Bird, chief executive officer of the MRC secretariat, said in the statement.
China is not a member of the MRC but attended annual meetings with its four MRC neighbours this week in Laos and the Commission said it had expressed a willingness to provide experts for the study.
"I think it's very significant," Kean said. "They're a dialogue partner and I think that signifies that they're taking the concerns of the downstream countries reasonably seriously."
More than 60 million people in the lower Mekong basin depend on the river system for food, transport and economic activity, the MRC said, adding that it is home to the world's most valuable inland fishery.
Giant Ocean-Trash Vortex Attracts Explorers
Brian Handwerk, National Geographic News 31 Jul 09;
It may lack the allure of the North Pole or Mount Everest, but a Pacific Ocean trash dump twice the size of Texas is this summer's hot destination for explorers.
The Eastern Pacific Garbage Patch, situated in remote waters between California and Hawaii, is created by ocean currents that pick up millions of tons of the world's discarded plastic.
As much as 10 percent of the 260 million tons of plastic produced annually ends up in the oceans, much of it in trash vortices like the Pacific garbage patch.
This summer, two separate expeditions will set sail for the patch to document the scope of the problem and call global attention to disastrous ocean pollution.
"Every single person who has ever been to a beach anywhere has seen plastic, even in the remotest of places," said Doug Woodring, head of the ocean-health nonprofit Project Kaisei that will launch two boats next week.
The 174-foot (53-meter) New Horizon, owned by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, leaves San Diego with Kaisei team members on August 2. The expedition's flagship 150-foot (46-meter) Kaisei pushes off from San Francisco on August 4.
Toxic Morsels
Though the garbage patch provides a visible reminder of how humans can trash the environment, the vortex isn't carpeted with a surface layer of plastic.
Perhaps 70 percent of plastic at the site has sunk—out of sight, but not out of the ecosystem.
Much of the plastic has broken down into tiny pieces that saturate the water and become a toxic part of the marine ecosystem.
Enormous numbers of fish and birds die after eating tiny plastic morsels mistaken for prey.
Scripps' Jim Dufour is advising Project Kaisei and its efforts to quantify the amount and condition of trash in the little-studied region.
"We need to do the chemistry and see how much plastic is reaching the water and the ocean sediments, how much is being broken into [these] tiny particles and ingested by marine life at rates we can't imagine," Dufour said.
The project will also explore clean up options, which aren't as easy as simply scooping up waste.
"It's a tough job. [Open-ocean] fish live under things like Styrofoam cups. If you simply drag a net you'll end up killing off a lot of the resources that you want to protect," Dufour said.
Close to Home
Kaisei's Woodring stressed that preventing more plastics from reaching the ocean has far less to do with illegal ocean dumping than choices made closer to home.
Eighty percent of the waste stream is land-based, explained Woodring, also a Hong Kong-based environment-and-technology entrepreneur.
"It's coming from rivers, streams, drains, gutters, and beaches within a mile or so of the shoreline."
In many parts of the world, particularly in developing nations, people have no means of disposing of the plastic bottles and packaging that have become ubiquitous parts of daily life.
Project Kaisei hopes to somehow assign value to that plastic, particularly the overwhelming majority that is never recycled.
Technologies that convert plastic to fuel, clothing, or simply more profitable plastic could give people a good reason to pick up all that plastic and make a profit from it.
"It's controllable," Woodring said. "We have to let people know that enough is enough, but it's not just a negative story about toxicity and wrecking our oceans. There is a huge amount of opportunity for innovation."
Plastiki
Innovation is a hallmark of David de Rothschild's expedition.
The environmentalist and Adventure Ecology founder will sail a boat made of recycled plastic—mainly discarded water bottles—from San Francisco to the garbage patch and beyond to Sydney, Australia, in coming months.
His craft, dubbed the Plastiki, is a nod to famed explorer Thor Heyerdahl, who led a 1947 voyage on the Kon-Tiki to test theories of Polynesian settlement by South Americans.
De Rothschild's voyage hopes to show people what can be accomplished by rethinking current uses of plastic.
"Plastic is not the enemy," said de Rothschild, also a National Geographic Emerging Explorer. (National Geographic News is owned by the National Geographic Society.)
"But it's our understanding of disposal and reuse that's to blame."
De Rothschild explained that Plastiki's construction has already jump-started research into a future "smart plastics" industry—before ever leaving port.
For instance, studies are underway on glues that could someday replace common marine epoxies and plastics that could replace non-recyclable fiberglass.
"The Plastiki [voyage] will be a great adventure, but I think more exciting is the ability to create a conversation on the issue of smarter plastics."
Voyage to study plastic 'island'
Judith Burns, BBC News 4 Aug 09;
The second of two research ships bound for a huge "island" of plastic debris in the Pacific Ocean leaves San Francisco today.
Ocean currents have pushed the refuse together in an area estimated to be larger than the State of Texas.
The expedition, named Project Kaisei, will study the impact of the waste on marine life.
Ultimately the organisers hope to clear the plastic and recycle it for use as fuel and new products.
Speaking from the quayside in San Francisco, waiting for the second ship to leave, Ryan Yerkey, the project's chief of operations, told BBC News: "Every piece of trash that is left on a beach or ends up in our rivers or estuaries and washes out to the sea is an addition to the problem, so we need people to be the solution."
"Twenty years from now we can't be harvesting the ocean for trash. We need to get it out but we need to also have people make those changes in their lives to stop the problem from growing and hopefully reverse the course."
Five-day journey
The two ships, Kaisei - which left today - and New Horizon from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography - which left on 2 August - will take five days to reach the debris.
They will return at the end of the month.
The vortex of currents which pushes the debris together is known as the North Pacific Gyre.
Ryan Yerkey has sailed across the Pacific twice and has watched the problem build up since the 1980s. He blames our increased use of disposable products.
He said: "You are talking about quite a bit of marine debris but it's not a solid mass. A lot of the items have broken down. Of course there are larger items out there. But the items, depending on the density and the state they're in, can be anything from the surface down to 20ft to 30ft (6m to 9m) deep."
It may lack the allure of the North Pole or Mount Everest, but a Pacific Ocean trash dump twice the size of Texas is this summer's hot destination for explorers.
The Eastern Pacific Garbage Patch, situated in remote waters between California and Hawaii, is created by ocean currents that pick up millions of tons of the world's discarded plastic.
As much as 10 percent of the 260 million tons of plastic produced annually ends up in the oceans, much of it in trash vortices like the Pacific garbage patch.
This summer, two separate expeditions will set sail for the patch to document the scope of the problem and call global attention to disastrous ocean pollution.
"Every single person who has ever been to a beach anywhere has seen plastic, even in the remotest of places," said Doug Woodring, head of the ocean-health nonprofit Project Kaisei that will launch two boats next week.
The 174-foot (53-meter) New Horizon, owned by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, leaves San Diego with Kaisei team members on August 2. The expedition's flagship 150-foot (46-meter) Kaisei pushes off from San Francisco on August 4.
Toxic Morsels
Though the garbage patch provides a visible reminder of how humans can trash the environment, the vortex isn't carpeted with a surface layer of plastic.
Perhaps 70 percent of plastic at the site has sunk—out of sight, but not out of the ecosystem.
Much of the plastic has broken down into tiny pieces that saturate the water and become a toxic part of the marine ecosystem.
Enormous numbers of fish and birds die after eating tiny plastic morsels mistaken for prey.
Scripps' Jim Dufour is advising Project Kaisei and its efforts to quantify the amount and condition of trash in the little-studied region.
"We need to do the chemistry and see how much plastic is reaching the water and the ocean sediments, how much is being broken into [these] tiny particles and ingested by marine life at rates we can't imagine," Dufour said.
The project will also explore clean up options, which aren't as easy as simply scooping up waste.
"It's a tough job. [Open-ocean] fish live under things like Styrofoam cups. If you simply drag a net you'll end up killing off a lot of the resources that you want to protect," Dufour said.
Close to Home
Kaisei's Woodring stressed that preventing more plastics from reaching the ocean has far less to do with illegal ocean dumping than choices made closer to home.
Eighty percent of the waste stream is land-based, explained Woodring, also a Hong Kong-based environment-and-technology entrepreneur.
"It's coming from rivers, streams, drains, gutters, and beaches within a mile or so of the shoreline."
In many parts of the world, particularly in developing nations, people have no means of disposing of the plastic bottles and packaging that have become ubiquitous parts of daily life.
Project Kaisei hopes to somehow assign value to that plastic, particularly the overwhelming majority that is never recycled.
Technologies that convert plastic to fuel, clothing, or simply more profitable plastic could give people a good reason to pick up all that plastic and make a profit from it.
"It's controllable," Woodring said. "We have to let people know that enough is enough, but it's not just a negative story about toxicity and wrecking our oceans. There is a huge amount of opportunity for innovation."
Plastiki
Innovation is a hallmark of David de Rothschild's expedition.
The environmentalist and Adventure Ecology founder will sail a boat made of recycled plastic—mainly discarded water bottles—from San Francisco to the garbage patch and beyond to Sydney, Australia, in coming months.
His craft, dubbed the Plastiki, is a nod to famed explorer Thor Heyerdahl, who led a 1947 voyage on the Kon-Tiki to test theories of Polynesian settlement by South Americans.
De Rothschild's voyage hopes to show people what can be accomplished by rethinking current uses of plastic.
"Plastic is not the enemy," said de Rothschild, also a National Geographic Emerging Explorer. (National Geographic News is owned by the National Geographic Society.)
"But it's our understanding of disposal and reuse that's to blame."
De Rothschild explained that Plastiki's construction has already jump-started research into a future "smart plastics" industry—before ever leaving port.
For instance, studies are underway on glues that could someday replace common marine epoxies and plastics that could replace non-recyclable fiberglass.
"The Plastiki [voyage] will be a great adventure, but I think more exciting is the ability to create a conversation on the issue of smarter plastics."
Voyage to study plastic 'island'
Judith Burns, BBC News 4 Aug 09;
The second of two research ships bound for a huge "island" of plastic debris in the Pacific Ocean leaves San Francisco today.
Ocean currents have pushed the refuse together in an area estimated to be larger than the State of Texas.
The expedition, named Project Kaisei, will study the impact of the waste on marine life.
Ultimately the organisers hope to clear the plastic and recycle it for use as fuel and new products.
Speaking from the quayside in San Francisco, waiting for the second ship to leave, Ryan Yerkey, the project's chief of operations, told BBC News: "Every piece of trash that is left on a beach or ends up in our rivers or estuaries and washes out to the sea is an addition to the problem, so we need people to be the solution."
"Twenty years from now we can't be harvesting the ocean for trash. We need to get it out but we need to also have people make those changes in their lives to stop the problem from growing and hopefully reverse the course."
Five-day journey
The two ships, Kaisei - which left today - and New Horizon from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography - which left on 2 August - will take five days to reach the debris.
They will return at the end of the month.
The vortex of currents which pushes the debris together is known as the North Pacific Gyre.
Ryan Yerkey has sailed across the Pacific twice and has watched the problem build up since the 1980s. He blames our increased use of disposable products.
He said: "You are talking about quite a bit of marine debris but it's not a solid mass. A lot of the items have broken down. Of course there are larger items out there. But the items, depending on the density and the state they're in, can be anything from the surface down to 20ft to 30ft (6m to 9m) deep."
Dolphin slaughter in Japan subject of new film
Christine Kearney, Reuters 31 Jul 09;
NEW YORK (Reuters) - A tense new film shows Japanese fishermen luring thousands of wild dolphins into a hidden secret cove in Japan where activists say they are captured for marine amusement parks or slaughtered for food.
"The Cove" follows a team of activists including former dolphin trainer from the "Flipper" television series Ric O'Barry.
They battle Japanese police and fisherman to gain access to a cove in Taiji, Japan, where barbed wire blocks people from filming dolphin killings that begin in September each year.
The documentary opens in the United States on Friday but has yet to receive distribution in Japan, where O'Barry says 23,000 dolphins and porpoises are legally killed each year.
The Japanese government said it has done nothing wrong and cites cultural differences in response to the film.
Dolphin meat is eaten by a very small percentage of Japanese people.
The film has already been praised by critics and won the audience award at this year's Sundance Film Festival. "Eco-activist documentaries don't get much more compelling than 'The Cove'," said Variety's review.
O'Barry, who has been visiting Taiji several times a year for the past eight years and now wears disguises in the town to avoid the attention of fisherman and the police, predicted the film would have a big impact.
"When the film is seen in Japan, it will shut 'the cove' down permanently," he said in a recent interview.
The 69-year-old says he began fighting against the captivity of dolphins when one of the dolphins he trained for the hit 1960s television show "Flipper" voluntarily stopped breathing until it died.
"Ric is a hero," said the film's director, Louie Psihoyos, who has photographed for National Geographic magazine. "He had success, he had fame, he had money and he turned his back on all of that to follow his conscience."
TOXIC OCEANS
The film turns into a gripping action-adventure using hi-tech cameras to film the efforts of Psihoyos and a team including underwater sound and camera experts as well as champion free divers to film inside the cove.
"The film is about leading an 'Ocean's Eleven' kind of team into this secret cove to try to reveal its dark secrets," said Psihoyos, referring to the popular Hollywood film about a top notch team who break into impossible places. "It was extremely scary."
But it largely examines environmental issues, including Japan's efforts to persuade the International Whaling Commission (IWC) to lift a ban on commercial whaling introduced in 1986. The ban does not apply to smaller cetaceans including dolphins.
It argues that toxic waste dumped into the ocean has caused higher levels of mercury poisoning found in larger species of ocean life, including dolphins.
A spokeswoman for the Japanese embassy in Washington, Izumi Yamanaka, said in an e-mail the area surrounding Taiji had traditional dietary habits of eating dolphin meat and that Japan adhered to IWC rules.
"The Japanese government believes that it is most important to recognize national and cultural differences," she said.
She added Japan complied with laws that advise pregnant women against eating seafood, including dolphin meat, with high levels of mercury, and would investigate assertions in the film that dolphin meat is sold in Japan disguised as whale meat.
Dolphin hunts are largely driven by a multibillion dollar marine amusement park industry located in the United States and around the world, who pay up to $150,000 per dolphin, according to O'Barry.
"People who see this movie are going to think twice before they buy a ticket to a dolphin show," he said.
Ultimately the film is part of a larger story of the destruction of the oceans and planet, the filmmakers said.
"'The cove' is a microcosm for the poisoning of the oceans," said Psihoyos. "A hundred years from now they are going to say this is the generation that could have turned things around."
(Editing by Sandra Maler)
'The Cove' was covert, dangerous filmmaking
Rachel Abramowitz Los Angeles Times 1 Aug 09;
How does one expose the secret systematic slaughter of 23,000 dolphins?
It helps to have a billionaire, plus a dedicated activist, a neophyte filmmaker, two of the world's best free-divers, a former avionics specialist from the Canadian Air Force, a logistics whiz trained in transporting pop-music stars around the world, a maritime technician, a military infrared camera for night cinematography, unmanned aerial drones, a blimp and fake rocks specially designed by George Lucas' Industrial Light & Magic to hold secret cameras.
Also required? A willingness to risk arrest, police harassment and potentially much worse.
That was the "Ocean's Eleven"-style team assembled to make this year's Sundance sensation "The Cove," the unconventional true-life environmental thriller that brings to light the mass killings of dolphins, specifically those exterminated in the Japanese port village of Taiji, just south of Osaka. The footage in the film, which opened in L.A. theaters Friday, is shocking -- a tranquilly beautiful Japanese bay turned red with the blood of dolphins, as well as graphic images of fishermen spearing the gentle, highly intelligent sea mammals.
Unlike their larger cetacean brethren whales, dolphins are not protected by the worldwide ban on commercial whaling that has been in effect since the 1980s. Taiji, a bucolic town filled with boats bearing the images of happy dolphins, is, as shown in the film, essentially a dolphin bazaar for marine theme parks hunting for their next attraction, and they are willing to pay $150,000 per dolphin. Unselected dolphins are herded into a heavily protected secret cove where they're slaughtered for food, never mind the fact that, as the film makes clear, dolphin meat is chock-full of mercury -- or as one on-screen scientist states: The creatures are essentially swimming toxic waste dumps.
The $2.5-million film, three years in the making, was born of the friendship between National Geographic photographer Louie Psihoyos and Netscape founder Jim Clark, old dive buddies who spent the last 10 years traveling the world searching for the best reefs, which they soon realized were dramatically deteriorating each time they returned.
Psihoyos recalls being in the Galapagos Islands and watching "long-line fisherman fishing in a marine sanctuary" and seeing "bombed out reefs in Indonesia." In response to the devastation, Clark launched the nonprofit environmental group the Oceanic Preservation Society, and Psihoyos began working on what initially was going to be four TV documentaries about the endangered oceans and their species.
Psihoyos started attending mammal conferences and stumbled upon the hero of his documentary, Ric O'Barry, in 2005. The 68-year old O'Barry, an endearing and obsessed activist, was the original trainer of the five dolphins who played "Flipper" on TV and blames himself for the worldwide popularity of commercial sea parks with their live dolphin acts, a practice he now decries. "A lot of the dolphins in the third world are in people's swimming pools. It's a copycat syndrome," says O'Barry, now a marine mammal specialist for the Earth Island Institute, and leader of the Save Japan Dolphins coalition. "People go to Sea World, and say, 'Wow I can do that.' There're dolphins all over the Caribbean, and Mexico -- the whole area is like a dolphin theme park with deplorable conditions. When I see them there, I feel directly responsible. I know the TV series helped to contribute to this mess. There are $2 billion in profits that come from the captive dolphins."
Filmmaking 101
At the time, O'Barry was on his way to Taiji, where he's been going several times a year in an effort to stop the slaughter, often with journalists in tow, and he invited Psihoyos to join him. Seeing the filmic potential in the trip, Psihoyos signed on, although the acclaimed photographer first decided to take a three-day filmmaking course.
"We're all professionals, just not at this," says Psihoyos, with a laugh. "I don't know if this movie could have been made by a professional crew. A professional crew would have turned around and ran. A producer would say 'This is nuts. How long is it going to take? How much is it going to cost?' There were just too many unknowns. The risk of getting hurt or jailed was daily. It didn't take filmmakers to make this film. It took pirates."
Indeed, the film depicts two commando missions into the cove, which is surrounded by razor-wire fences and policed by vigilant fisherman, desperate to keep their business out of the spotlight. There were actually 14 cloak-and-dagger operations into the protected cove to accumulate enough footage, and a dedicated runner who every day personally and craftily spirited the film out of town. "The reality was a lot scarier than the film shows," Psihoyos says. "We got ran out of town by the police twice." These days, when O'Barry makes his still frequent pilgrimages to Taiji, he always goes in full-blown disguise.
Clark brought in another diver buddy, actor-filmmaker Fisher Stevens ("Short Circuit"), to produce and comb through the nearly 600 hours of film. Stevens in turn brought in other professionals, including editor Geoffrey Richman ("Murderball" and "Sicko") and writer Mark Monroe.
Stevens insisted that Psihoyos actually become the on-screen narrator of the story, providing a charismatic and handsome figure through which to tell the story. "He didn't want to do it at first," recalls Stevens, who eventually convinced him. "The idea was this is not a just a documentary -- it's more like a thriller."
Psihoyos says that many of his stories for National Geographic had "an activist bent," but he also had maintained the belief that "a journalist is supposed to be a fly on the wall, he's not supposed to be part of the story. Still I realized if nobody gets active, then nothing would get resolved. I felt it was time to stand up."
Psihoyos and O'Barry hope the film will generate awareness and help bring change to the situation in Taiji. As a country, Japan has also opposed extending the international whaling ban to dolphins. Speaking before the film's commercial release, O'Barry noted, "[The Japanese] don't know this tsunami of bad publicity is coming their way. In Japan, they call it 'giatsu,' which translates into external pressure. . . .[This] movie is giatsu on a massive scale."
From Flipper’s Trainer to Dolphin Defender
Jeannette Catsoulis, The New York Times 31 Jul 09;
When the director Louie Psihoyos slipped into the little coastal town of Taiji, Japan, it was under cover of documenting the degradation of ocean reefs. Once there, however, he proceeded to mount one of the most audacious and perilous operations in the history of the conservation movement.
“The Cove” is much more than just a record of that adventure. Like the director’s cover story, the movie is a Trojan horse: an exceptionally well-made documentary that unfolds like a spy thriller, complete with bugged hotel rooms, clandestine derring-do and mysterious men in gray flannel suits. Those men — perhaps cops, perhaps worse — tail Mr. Psihoyos and his crew unrelentingly, determined to prevent anyone from filming the enormously lucrative dolphin capture and slaughter that support the town’s economy and employ its fishermen.
This killing may be legal — dolphins and other small marine mammals are not protected by the ban on commercial whaling — but, as we shall see, the methods used are so nonchalantly brutal and gut-churningly primitive that Taiji officials are understandably publicity-shy. (And, we learn later, there are other secrets lurking beneath the town’s thriving tourist industry and cute, dolphin-shape pleasure boats.) Consequently, anyone straying too close to the kill zone — a secluded lagoon protected by steep cliffs, manned tunnels and razor-wire gates — is violently harassed by videocam-wielding fishermen hoping to record an imprisonable offense.
None of which fazes Mr. Psihoyos, an urbane eco-warrior who pops up periodically to provide context and clarification. His soothing tones, however, can’t disguise a relish for the fray: beneath the silver-fox exterior beats a rabble-rousing heart. (“You try to do the story legally,” he insists, eyes twinkling in remembrance of every cloak-and-dagger move.) That heart invigorates every frame of “The Cove,” as does Mr. Psihoyos’s eye for a powerful image (his photographs have graced many an issue of National Geographic) and savvy narrative style: this is no angry enviro-rant but a living, breathing movie whose horrifying disclosures feel fully earned.
Seduced by the familiar rhythms of the heist thriller, we watch as Mr. Psihoyos recruits his dream team — including a former avionics engineer with the Canadian Air Force and a pair of champion free divers — and turns it loose. Planting ingeniously camouflaged, state-of-the-art equipment in and around their target, they capture sights and sounds of uncommon beauty and quiet revelation: a group of fishermen reminiscing about blue-whale pods as dense as “a clump of bamboo” and a ghostly, thermal handprint clinging to a gatepost like arcane spoor. Viewed from below, the hypnotically graceful progress of a free diver resembles nothing so much as an undulating mermaid with a giant can opener for a tail — an inadvertent clue to the movie’s intentions.
Adroitly assembled by the award-winning editor Geoffrey Richman, the movie’s many interviews and interests (ranging from dolphin-human relations to the mystery of where all that slaughtered meat ends up) interweave seamlessly. And if the film’s villains are sometimes difficult to untangle, it could be because one of them, the worldwide marine-park industry, is not formally represented; it could also be because without our patronage, that industry would not exist.
Heroes, however, are instantly identifiable, like the shy Japanese councilmen who risk their jobs to protect schoolchildren from mercury-tainted dolphin meat. But “The Cove,” like the dolphins, would be lost without Richard O’Barry, who captured and trained all five of the animals who made Flipper a television star and a household name and sparked the craze for performing sea mammals. His drooping eyes and sagging shoulders testify to the bone-deep exhaustion of someone who has spent the last 35 years atoning, and when he gate-crashes a meeting of the International Whaling Commission, the video screen strapped to his chest is like a physical manifestation of decades of guilt.
“If a dolphin is in trouble anywhere in the world, my phone rings,” he says. (We don’t need to be told that his heart breaks.) You may not give a fig for dolphins, but Mr. O’Barry is giving enough for us all.
“The Cove” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Blood in the water and tears in the eyes.
THE COVE
Opens on Friday in Manhattan.
Directed by Louie Psihoyos; written by Mark Monroe; edited by Geoffrey Richman; music by J. Ralph; produced by Fisher Stevens and Paula DuPré Pesmen; released by Roadside Attractions. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.
The Cove movie website
The Cove trailer on YouTube
NEW YORK (Reuters) - A tense new film shows Japanese fishermen luring thousands of wild dolphins into a hidden secret cove in Japan where activists say they are captured for marine amusement parks or slaughtered for food.
"The Cove" follows a team of activists including former dolphin trainer from the "Flipper" television series Ric O'Barry.
They battle Japanese police and fisherman to gain access to a cove in Taiji, Japan, where barbed wire blocks people from filming dolphin killings that begin in September each year.
The documentary opens in the United States on Friday but has yet to receive distribution in Japan, where O'Barry says 23,000 dolphins and porpoises are legally killed each year.
The Japanese government said it has done nothing wrong and cites cultural differences in response to the film.
Dolphin meat is eaten by a very small percentage of Japanese people.
The film has already been praised by critics and won the audience award at this year's Sundance Film Festival. "Eco-activist documentaries don't get much more compelling than 'The Cove'," said Variety's review.
O'Barry, who has been visiting Taiji several times a year for the past eight years and now wears disguises in the town to avoid the attention of fisherman and the police, predicted the film would have a big impact.
"When the film is seen in Japan, it will shut 'the cove' down permanently," he said in a recent interview.
The 69-year-old says he began fighting against the captivity of dolphins when one of the dolphins he trained for the hit 1960s television show "Flipper" voluntarily stopped breathing until it died.
"Ric is a hero," said the film's director, Louie Psihoyos, who has photographed for National Geographic magazine. "He had success, he had fame, he had money and he turned his back on all of that to follow his conscience."
TOXIC OCEANS
The film turns into a gripping action-adventure using hi-tech cameras to film the efforts of Psihoyos and a team including underwater sound and camera experts as well as champion free divers to film inside the cove.
"The film is about leading an 'Ocean's Eleven' kind of team into this secret cove to try to reveal its dark secrets," said Psihoyos, referring to the popular Hollywood film about a top notch team who break into impossible places. "It was extremely scary."
But it largely examines environmental issues, including Japan's efforts to persuade the International Whaling Commission (IWC) to lift a ban on commercial whaling introduced in 1986. The ban does not apply to smaller cetaceans including dolphins.
It argues that toxic waste dumped into the ocean has caused higher levels of mercury poisoning found in larger species of ocean life, including dolphins.
A spokeswoman for the Japanese embassy in Washington, Izumi Yamanaka, said in an e-mail the area surrounding Taiji had traditional dietary habits of eating dolphin meat and that Japan adhered to IWC rules.
"The Japanese government believes that it is most important to recognize national and cultural differences," she said.
She added Japan complied with laws that advise pregnant women against eating seafood, including dolphin meat, with high levels of mercury, and would investigate assertions in the film that dolphin meat is sold in Japan disguised as whale meat.
Dolphin hunts are largely driven by a multibillion dollar marine amusement park industry located in the United States and around the world, who pay up to $150,000 per dolphin, according to O'Barry.
"People who see this movie are going to think twice before they buy a ticket to a dolphin show," he said.
Ultimately the film is part of a larger story of the destruction of the oceans and planet, the filmmakers said.
"'The cove' is a microcosm for the poisoning of the oceans," said Psihoyos. "A hundred years from now they are going to say this is the generation that could have turned things around."
(Editing by Sandra Maler)
'The Cove' was covert, dangerous filmmaking
Rachel Abramowitz Los Angeles Times 1 Aug 09;
How does one expose the secret systematic slaughter of 23,000 dolphins?
It helps to have a billionaire, plus a dedicated activist, a neophyte filmmaker, two of the world's best free-divers, a former avionics specialist from the Canadian Air Force, a logistics whiz trained in transporting pop-music stars around the world, a maritime technician, a military infrared camera for night cinematography, unmanned aerial drones, a blimp and fake rocks specially designed by George Lucas' Industrial Light & Magic to hold secret cameras.
Also required? A willingness to risk arrest, police harassment and potentially much worse.
That was the "Ocean's Eleven"-style team assembled to make this year's Sundance sensation "The Cove," the unconventional true-life environmental thriller that brings to light the mass killings of dolphins, specifically those exterminated in the Japanese port village of Taiji, just south of Osaka. The footage in the film, which opened in L.A. theaters Friday, is shocking -- a tranquilly beautiful Japanese bay turned red with the blood of dolphins, as well as graphic images of fishermen spearing the gentle, highly intelligent sea mammals.
Unlike their larger cetacean brethren whales, dolphins are not protected by the worldwide ban on commercial whaling that has been in effect since the 1980s. Taiji, a bucolic town filled with boats bearing the images of happy dolphins, is, as shown in the film, essentially a dolphin bazaar for marine theme parks hunting for their next attraction, and they are willing to pay $150,000 per dolphin. Unselected dolphins are herded into a heavily protected secret cove where they're slaughtered for food, never mind the fact that, as the film makes clear, dolphin meat is chock-full of mercury -- or as one on-screen scientist states: The creatures are essentially swimming toxic waste dumps.
The $2.5-million film, three years in the making, was born of the friendship between National Geographic photographer Louie Psihoyos and Netscape founder Jim Clark, old dive buddies who spent the last 10 years traveling the world searching for the best reefs, which they soon realized were dramatically deteriorating each time they returned.
Psihoyos recalls being in the Galapagos Islands and watching "long-line fisherman fishing in a marine sanctuary" and seeing "bombed out reefs in Indonesia." In response to the devastation, Clark launched the nonprofit environmental group the Oceanic Preservation Society, and Psihoyos began working on what initially was going to be four TV documentaries about the endangered oceans and their species.
Psihoyos started attending mammal conferences and stumbled upon the hero of his documentary, Ric O'Barry, in 2005. The 68-year old O'Barry, an endearing and obsessed activist, was the original trainer of the five dolphins who played "Flipper" on TV and blames himself for the worldwide popularity of commercial sea parks with their live dolphin acts, a practice he now decries. "A lot of the dolphins in the third world are in people's swimming pools. It's a copycat syndrome," says O'Barry, now a marine mammal specialist for the Earth Island Institute, and leader of the Save Japan Dolphins coalition. "People go to Sea World, and say, 'Wow I can do that.' There're dolphins all over the Caribbean, and Mexico -- the whole area is like a dolphin theme park with deplorable conditions. When I see them there, I feel directly responsible. I know the TV series helped to contribute to this mess. There are $2 billion in profits that come from the captive dolphins."
Filmmaking 101
At the time, O'Barry was on his way to Taiji, where he's been going several times a year in an effort to stop the slaughter, often with journalists in tow, and he invited Psihoyos to join him. Seeing the filmic potential in the trip, Psihoyos signed on, although the acclaimed photographer first decided to take a three-day filmmaking course.
"We're all professionals, just not at this," says Psihoyos, with a laugh. "I don't know if this movie could have been made by a professional crew. A professional crew would have turned around and ran. A producer would say 'This is nuts. How long is it going to take? How much is it going to cost?' There were just too many unknowns. The risk of getting hurt or jailed was daily. It didn't take filmmakers to make this film. It took pirates."
Indeed, the film depicts two commando missions into the cove, which is surrounded by razor-wire fences and policed by vigilant fisherman, desperate to keep their business out of the spotlight. There were actually 14 cloak-and-dagger operations into the protected cove to accumulate enough footage, and a dedicated runner who every day personally and craftily spirited the film out of town. "The reality was a lot scarier than the film shows," Psihoyos says. "We got ran out of town by the police twice." These days, when O'Barry makes his still frequent pilgrimages to Taiji, he always goes in full-blown disguise.
Clark brought in another diver buddy, actor-filmmaker Fisher Stevens ("Short Circuit"), to produce and comb through the nearly 600 hours of film. Stevens in turn brought in other professionals, including editor Geoffrey Richman ("Murderball" and "Sicko") and writer Mark Monroe.
Stevens insisted that Psihoyos actually become the on-screen narrator of the story, providing a charismatic and handsome figure through which to tell the story. "He didn't want to do it at first," recalls Stevens, who eventually convinced him. "The idea was this is not a just a documentary -- it's more like a thriller."
Psihoyos says that many of his stories for National Geographic had "an activist bent," but he also had maintained the belief that "a journalist is supposed to be a fly on the wall, he's not supposed to be part of the story. Still I realized if nobody gets active, then nothing would get resolved. I felt it was time to stand up."
Psihoyos and O'Barry hope the film will generate awareness and help bring change to the situation in Taiji. As a country, Japan has also opposed extending the international whaling ban to dolphins. Speaking before the film's commercial release, O'Barry noted, "[The Japanese] don't know this tsunami of bad publicity is coming their way. In Japan, they call it 'giatsu,' which translates into external pressure. . . .[This] movie is giatsu on a massive scale."
From Flipper’s Trainer to Dolphin Defender
Jeannette Catsoulis, The New York Times 31 Jul 09;
When the director Louie Psihoyos slipped into the little coastal town of Taiji, Japan, it was under cover of documenting the degradation of ocean reefs. Once there, however, he proceeded to mount one of the most audacious and perilous operations in the history of the conservation movement.
“The Cove” is much more than just a record of that adventure. Like the director’s cover story, the movie is a Trojan horse: an exceptionally well-made documentary that unfolds like a spy thriller, complete with bugged hotel rooms, clandestine derring-do and mysterious men in gray flannel suits. Those men — perhaps cops, perhaps worse — tail Mr. Psihoyos and his crew unrelentingly, determined to prevent anyone from filming the enormously lucrative dolphin capture and slaughter that support the town’s economy and employ its fishermen.
This killing may be legal — dolphins and other small marine mammals are not protected by the ban on commercial whaling — but, as we shall see, the methods used are so nonchalantly brutal and gut-churningly primitive that Taiji officials are understandably publicity-shy. (And, we learn later, there are other secrets lurking beneath the town’s thriving tourist industry and cute, dolphin-shape pleasure boats.) Consequently, anyone straying too close to the kill zone — a secluded lagoon protected by steep cliffs, manned tunnels and razor-wire gates — is violently harassed by videocam-wielding fishermen hoping to record an imprisonable offense.
None of which fazes Mr. Psihoyos, an urbane eco-warrior who pops up periodically to provide context and clarification. His soothing tones, however, can’t disguise a relish for the fray: beneath the silver-fox exterior beats a rabble-rousing heart. (“You try to do the story legally,” he insists, eyes twinkling in remembrance of every cloak-and-dagger move.) That heart invigorates every frame of “The Cove,” as does Mr. Psihoyos’s eye for a powerful image (his photographs have graced many an issue of National Geographic) and savvy narrative style: this is no angry enviro-rant but a living, breathing movie whose horrifying disclosures feel fully earned.
Seduced by the familiar rhythms of the heist thriller, we watch as Mr. Psihoyos recruits his dream team — including a former avionics engineer with the Canadian Air Force and a pair of champion free divers — and turns it loose. Planting ingeniously camouflaged, state-of-the-art equipment in and around their target, they capture sights and sounds of uncommon beauty and quiet revelation: a group of fishermen reminiscing about blue-whale pods as dense as “a clump of bamboo” and a ghostly, thermal handprint clinging to a gatepost like arcane spoor. Viewed from below, the hypnotically graceful progress of a free diver resembles nothing so much as an undulating mermaid with a giant can opener for a tail — an inadvertent clue to the movie’s intentions.
Adroitly assembled by the award-winning editor Geoffrey Richman, the movie’s many interviews and interests (ranging from dolphin-human relations to the mystery of where all that slaughtered meat ends up) interweave seamlessly. And if the film’s villains are sometimes difficult to untangle, it could be because one of them, the worldwide marine-park industry, is not formally represented; it could also be because without our patronage, that industry would not exist.
Heroes, however, are instantly identifiable, like the shy Japanese councilmen who risk their jobs to protect schoolchildren from mercury-tainted dolphin meat. But “The Cove,” like the dolphins, would be lost without Richard O’Barry, who captured and trained all five of the animals who made Flipper a television star and a household name and sparked the craze for performing sea mammals. His drooping eyes and sagging shoulders testify to the bone-deep exhaustion of someone who has spent the last 35 years atoning, and when he gate-crashes a meeting of the International Whaling Commission, the video screen strapped to his chest is like a physical manifestation of decades of guilt.
“If a dolphin is in trouble anywhere in the world, my phone rings,” he says. (We don’t need to be told that his heart breaks.) You may not give a fig for dolphins, but Mr. O’Barry is giving enough for us all.
“The Cove” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Blood in the water and tears in the eyes.
THE COVE
Opens on Friday in Manhattan.
Directed by Louie Psihoyos; written by Mark Monroe; edited by Geoffrey Richman; music by J. Ralph; produced by Fisher Stevens and Paula DuPré Pesmen; released by Roadside Attractions. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.
The Cove movie website
The Cove trailer on YouTube
Watchers track butterflies for environment signs
Greg Bluestein, Associated Press Yahoo News 30 Jul 09;
HILLSBORO, Ga. – The rusty van creaks to a halt and two men jump out, binoculars in hand, heads pivoting. Quickly, questioningly, they call out evocative names: Is that a Pearl Crescent? A Carolina Satyr? A Sleepy Orange? A Swarthy Skipper?
It's butterfly counting time at a central Georgia wildlife refuge. That means a sweaty but fun outing for these two men, one a retired entomologist, the other the abbot of a Roman Catholic monastery. But it has a serious side: Some researchers worry butterfly populations may be in decline, possibly signaling a worsening environment.
The flying insects are often viewed as canaries in a coal mine because they are sensitive to changes in their habitats.
"When you see the absence of butterflies, you know something is wrong," says Jerry Payne, the entomologist on the recent counting expedition to Piedmont National Wildlife Refuge, about 70 miles south of Atlanta. Payne has tracked butterfly habitats for years.
"Unfortunately, we have met the enemy — and he is us," Payne says. "Man is the biggest reason for declining butterfly populations. We're taking away their land."
Butterflies play a key environmental role as a pollinator, fertilizing wild and cultivated plants by carrying pollen from one flower to another. In human eyes, butterflies are also a powerful symbol because of their transformation from caterpillar to graceful flight. That makes them a good standard-bearer for raising public awareness about habitat decline and species preservation, says Jaret Daniels of the Butterfly Conservation Initiative.
"They are that very visible, charismatic organism that can really rally the troops behind the importance of insects overall," Daniels says.
Roughly two dozen of the nation's hundreds of butterfly species are listed as endangered or threatened. The initiative is setting up workshops this year to train zoos, museums and others in butterfly conservation.
Some enthusiasts aren't sounding the alarm yet. Jeffrey Glassberg, president of the North American Butterfly Association, cautions that only a handful of species are in danger.
"You have to look at the big picture here," says Glassberg, a retired molecular geneticist who wrote the authoritative field guide, "Butterflies of North America." "There is still plenty of habitat."
But other researchers say there are clear signs that butterfly populations are under increasing threat, due either to climate change or human sprawl. A 2006 report by the National Academy of Sciences found evidence that some butterfly species key to pollination are on the decline.
"If you look at the numbers overall, they are declining slowly," says Daniels, an assistant entomology professor at the University of Florida in Gainesville. "There's no overriding trend of alarm, but within individual pockets there is."
To get a better idea of what's happening, various state and federal agencies with environmental missions team up annually with butterfly groups to plan hundreds of counts — including a handful of new sites that sprout up each year.
The counts aren't exactly scientific, as they largely depend on the talents and know-how of the volunteers. And it depends on how many enthusiasts show up to scout a park. But they help give researchers an idea of the diversity and relative numbers of butterflies in a given area.
They also help bring together enthusiasts like Payne and Francis Michael Stiteler, the abbot, who have been counting butterflies for years.
Stiteler started out following dragonflies, but turned to butterflies soon after arriving at the Monastery of the Holy Spirit in Conyers, Ga., in the 1970s.
He says he was "like a kid in a candy shop" roaming the monastery's 2,000 acres with binoculars and a camera to log the area's butterfly tenants. It's become a handy way to relieve the stress that comes with running the 40-monk Trappist monastery which, like other nonprofits, is facing financial woes amid the recession.
Payne has long been a bug buff — obsessed with insects since he was a hard-luck teen who couldn't get many dates. Compared to dating, he says now, "Insects were much cheaper to work with."
The two "butterflyers" were among about a dozen who descended on the Georgia refuge on a sweltering morning in late June, bringing the two most important elements of the hunt: Sharp eyes and keen peripheral vision.
"I get rid of all the other stuff," says Payne, "and I just see the butterfly."
The refuge's gravel roads were empty as they roamed in Payne's van, but sometimes it felt like they were in an invisible traffic jam: Every few feet, Payne slammed on the brakes to catch some real or imagined flicker of movement outside the dusty windows.
The two men eventually made their way to a grassy field, where they were overjoyed to find the Holy Grail of butterflying: A buttonbush, a magnet for the insects. The duo headed straight for it, plunging into chest-high grass with no regard for ticks or snakes.
"Zarucco Duskywing! Horace's Duskywing! Byssus Skipper!" yells Stiteler, excited to cross three more species off the list.
There are many keys to a good butterfly count. Fortunately for these two, being quiet isn't one of them.
___
On the Net:
http://www.butterflyrecovery.org/
HILLSBORO, Ga. – The rusty van creaks to a halt and two men jump out, binoculars in hand, heads pivoting. Quickly, questioningly, they call out evocative names: Is that a Pearl Crescent? A Carolina Satyr? A Sleepy Orange? A Swarthy Skipper?
It's butterfly counting time at a central Georgia wildlife refuge. That means a sweaty but fun outing for these two men, one a retired entomologist, the other the abbot of a Roman Catholic monastery. But it has a serious side: Some researchers worry butterfly populations may be in decline, possibly signaling a worsening environment.
The flying insects are often viewed as canaries in a coal mine because they are sensitive to changes in their habitats.
"When you see the absence of butterflies, you know something is wrong," says Jerry Payne, the entomologist on the recent counting expedition to Piedmont National Wildlife Refuge, about 70 miles south of Atlanta. Payne has tracked butterfly habitats for years.
"Unfortunately, we have met the enemy — and he is us," Payne says. "Man is the biggest reason for declining butterfly populations. We're taking away their land."
Butterflies play a key environmental role as a pollinator, fertilizing wild and cultivated plants by carrying pollen from one flower to another. In human eyes, butterflies are also a powerful symbol because of their transformation from caterpillar to graceful flight. That makes them a good standard-bearer for raising public awareness about habitat decline and species preservation, says Jaret Daniels of the Butterfly Conservation Initiative.
"They are that very visible, charismatic organism that can really rally the troops behind the importance of insects overall," Daniels says.
Roughly two dozen of the nation's hundreds of butterfly species are listed as endangered or threatened. The initiative is setting up workshops this year to train zoos, museums and others in butterfly conservation.
Some enthusiasts aren't sounding the alarm yet. Jeffrey Glassberg, president of the North American Butterfly Association, cautions that only a handful of species are in danger.
"You have to look at the big picture here," says Glassberg, a retired molecular geneticist who wrote the authoritative field guide, "Butterflies of North America." "There is still plenty of habitat."
But other researchers say there are clear signs that butterfly populations are under increasing threat, due either to climate change or human sprawl. A 2006 report by the National Academy of Sciences found evidence that some butterfly species key to pollination are on the decline.
"If you look at the numbers overall, they are declining slowly," says Daniels, an assistant entomology professor at the University of Florida in Gainesville. "There's no overriding trend of alarm, but within individual pockets there is."
To get a better idea of what's happening, various state and federal agencies with environmental missions team up annually with butterfly groups to plan hundreds of counts — including a handful of new sites that sprout up each year.
The counts aren't exactly scientific, as they largely depend on the talents and know-how of the volunteers. And it depends on how many enthusiasts show up to scout a park. But they help give researchers an idea of the diversity and relative numbers of butterflies in a given area.
They also help bring together enthusiasts like Payne and Francis Michael Stiteler, the abbot, who have been counting butterflies for years.
Stiteler started out following dragonflies, but turned to butterflies soon after arriving at the Monastery of the Holy Spirit in Conyers, Ga., in the 1970s.
He says he was "like a kid in a candy shop" roaming the monastery's 2,000 acres with binoculars and a camera to log the area's butterfly tenants. It's become a handy way to relieve the stress that comes with running the 40-monk Trappist monastery which, like other nonprofits, is facing financial woes amid the recession.
Payne has long been a bug buff — obsessed with insects since he was a hard-luck teen who couldn't get many dates. Compared to dating, he says now, "Insects were much cheaper to work with."
The two "butterflyers" were among about a dozen who descended on the Georgia refuge on a sweltering morning in late June, bringing the two most important elements of the hunt: Sharp eyes and keen peripheral vision.
"I get rid of all the other stuff," says Payne, "and I just see the butterfly."
The refuge's gravel roads were empty as they roamed in Payne's van, but sometimes it felt like they were in an invisible traffic jam: Every few feet, Payne slammed on the brakes to catch some real or imagined flicker of movement outside the dusty windows.
The two men eventually made their way to a grassy field, where they were overjoyed to find the Holy Grail of butterflying: A buttonbush, a magnet for the insects. The duo headed straight for it, plunging into chest-high grass with no regard for ticks or snakes.
"Zarucco Duskywing! Horace's Duskywing! Byssus Skipper!" yells Stiteler, excited to cross three more species off the list.
There are many keys to a good butterfly count. Fortunately for these two, being quiet isn't one of them.
___
On the Net:
http://www.butterflyrecovery.org/
People treat environmental choices like financial decisions
Journal Watch Online 31 Jul 09;
When it comes to weighing quick benefits against long-term gains, people make environmental trade-offs in much the same way as financial ones, according to a new psychology study.
It’s well-known that people prefer to grab money now rather than wait for a larger amount later. For instance, most would rather get $250 right away instead of $300 in 10 years – a process known as “discounting” future events.
Researchers presented similar choices to people but included scenarios that focused on environmental issues. They found that participants preferred to get, for example, 22 days of good air quality now rather than 31 good days a year later. This “discount” rate was roughly the same for money-related decisions, suggesting that extensive research on financial discounting can also be applied to environmental policy, the authors report in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
Participants were less short-sighted when faced with unpleasant scenarios. For instance, they said they would rather deal with a small trash-collection problem now than suffer through a much more severe problem later. So environmental policies might be more effective if they focus on what people will lose, rather than what they stand to gain, says co-author Elke Weber at Columbia University. – Roberta Kwok
Source: Hardisty, D.J. and E.U. Weber. 2009. Discounting future green: money versus the environment. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General DOI: 10.1037/a0016433
When it comes to weighing quick benefits against long-term gains, people make environmental trade-offs in much the same way as financial ones, according to a new psychology study.
It’s well-known that people prefer to grab money now rather than wait for a larger amount later. For instance, most would rather get $250 right away instead of $300 in 10 years – a process known as “discounting” future events.
Researchers presented similar choices to people but included scenarios that focused on environmental issues. They found that participants preferred to get, for example, 22 days of good air quality now rather than 31 good days a year later. This “discount” rate was roughly the same for money-related decisions, suggesting that extensive research on financial discounting can also be applied to environmental policy, the authors report in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
Participants were less short-sighted when faced with unpleasant scenarios. For instance, they said they would rather deal with a small trash-collection problem now than suffer through a much more severe problem later. So environmental policies might be more effective if they focus on what people will lose, rather than what they stand to gain, says co-author Elke Weber at Columbia University. – Roberta Kwok
Source: Hardisty, D.J. and E.U. Weber. 2009. Discounting future green: money versus the environment. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General DOI: 10.1037/a0016433
Sahara Desert Greening Due to Climate Change?
James Owen, National Geographic News 31 Jul 09;
Desertification, drought, and despair—that's what global warming has in store for much of Africa. Or so we hear.
Emerging evidence is painting a very different scenario, one in which rising temperatures could benefit millions of Africans in the driest parts of the continent.
Scientists are now seeing signals that the Sahara desert and surrounding regions are greening due to increasing rainfall.
If sustained, these rains could revitalize drought-ravaged regions, reclaiming them for farming communities.
This desert-shrinking trend is supported by climate models, which predict a return to conditions that turned the Sahara into a lush savanna some 12,000 years ago.
Green Shoots
The green shoots of recovery are showing up on satellite images of regions including the Sahel, a semi-desert zone bordering the Sahara to the south that stretches some 2,400 miles (3,860 kilometers).
Images taken between 1982 and 2002 revealed extensive regreening throughout the Sahel, according to a new study in the journal Biogeosciences.
The study suggests huge increases in vegetation in areas including central Chad and western Sudan.
The transition may be occurring because hotter air has more capacity to hold moisture, which in turn creates more rain, said Martin Claussen of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany, who was not involved in the new study.
"The water-holding capacity of the air is the main driving force," Claussen said.
He added that the greening trend is supported by other satellite data.
Not a Single Scorpion
While satellite images can't distinguish temporary plants like grasses that come and go with the rains, ground surveys suggest recent vegetation change is firmly rooted.
Throughout North Africa, new trees, such as acacias, are flourishing, according to Stefan Kröpelin, a climate scientist at the University of Cologne's Africa Research Unit in Germany.
"Shrubs are coming up and growing into big shrubs. This is completely different from having a bit more tiny grass."
In 2008 Kröpelin—not involved in the new satellite research—visited Western Sahara, a disputed territory controlled by Morocco.
"The nomads there told me there was never as much rainfall as in the past few years," Kröpelin said. "They have never seen so much grazing land."
He explained it's a similar story in the eastern Sahara area of southwestern Egypt and northern Sudan, a remote desert region that he has studied for two decades.
"Before, there was not a single scorpion, not a single blade of grass," he said.
"Now you have people grazing their camels in areas which may not have been used for hundreds or even thousands of years. You see birds, ostriches, gazelles coming back, even sorts of amphibians coming back," he said.
"The trend has continued for more than 20 years. It is indisputable."
Uncertain Future
An explosion in plant growth has been predicted by some climate models.
For instance, in 2005 a team led by Reindert Haarsma of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute in De Bilt, the Netherlands, forecast significantly more future rainfall in the Sahel.
The study in Geophysical Research Letters predicted that rainfall in the July to September wet season would rise by up to two millimeters a day by 2080.
Satellite data shows "that indeed during the last decade, the Sahel is becoming more green," Haarsma said.
Even so, climate scientists don't agree on how future climate change will affect the Sahel: Some studies simulate a decrease in rainfall.
"This issue is still rather uncertain," Haarsma said.
Max Planck's Claussen said North Africa is the area of greatest disagreement among climate change modelers.
Forecasting how global warming will affect the region is complicated by its vast size and the unpredictable influence of high-altitude winds that disperse monsoon rains, Claussen added.
"Half the models follow a wetter trend, and half a drier trend."
Desertification, drought, and despair—that's what global warming has in store for much of Africa. Or so we hear.
Emerging evidence is painting a very different scenario, one in which rising temperatures could benefit millions of Africans in the driest parts of the continent.
Scientists are now seeing signals that the Sahara desert and surrounding regions are greening due to increasing rainfall.
If sustained, these rains could revitalize drought-ravaged regions, reclaiming them for farming communities.
This desert-shrinking trend is supported by climate models, which predict a return to conditions that turned the Sahara into a lush savanna some 12,000 years ago.
Green Shoots
The green shoots of recovery are showing up on satellite images of regions including the Sahel, a semi-desert zone bordering the Sahara to the south that stretches some 2,400 miles (3,860 kilometers).
Images taken between 1982 and 2002 revealed extensive regreening throughout the Sahel, according to a new study in the journal Biogeosciences.
The study suggests huge increases in vegetation in areas including central Chad and western Sudan.
The transition may be occurring because hotter air has more capacity to hold moisture, which in turn creates more rain, said Martin Claussen of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany, who was not involved in the new study.
"The water-holding capacity of the air is the main driving force," Claussen said.
He added that the greening trend is supported by other satellite data.
Not a Single Scorpion
While satellite images can't distinguish temporary plants like grasses that come and go with the rains, ground surveys suggest recent vegetation change is firmly rooted.
Throughout North Africa, new trees, such as acacias, are flourishing, according to Stefan Kröpelin, a climate scientist at the University of Cologne's Africa Research Unit in Germany.
"Shrubs are coming up and growing into big shrubs. This is completely different from having a bit more tiny grass."
In 2008 Kröpelin—not involved in the new satellite research—visited Western Sahara, a disputed territory controlled by Morocco.
"The nomads there told me there was never as much rainfall as in the past few years," Kröpelin said. "They have never seen so much grazing land."
He explained it's a similar story in the eastern Sahara area of southwestern Egypt and northern Sudan, a remote desert region that he has studied for two decades.
"Before, there was not a single scorpion, not a single blade of grass," he said.
"Now you have people grazing their camels in areas which may not have been used for hundreds or even thousands of years. You see birds, ostriches, gazelles coming back, even sorts of amphibians coming back," he said.
"The trend has continued for more than 20 years. It is indisputable."
Uncertain Future
An explosion in plant growth has been predicted by some climate models.
For instance, in 2005 a team led by Reindert Haarsma of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute in De Bilt, the Netherlands, forecast significantly more future rainfall in the Sahel.
The study in Geophysical Research Letters predicted that rainfall in the July to September wet season would rise by up to two millimeters a day by 2080.
Satellite data shows "that indeed during the last decade, the Sahel is becoming more green," Haarsma said.
Even so, climate scientists don't agree on how future climate change will affect the Sahel: Some studies simulate a decrease in rainfall.
"This issue is still rather uncertain," Haarsma said.
Max Planck's Claussen said North Africa is the area of greatest disagreement among climate change modelers.
Forecasting how global warming will affect the region is complicated by its vast size and the unpredictable influence of high-altitude winds that disperse monsoon rains, Claussen added.
"Half the models follow a wetter trend, and half a drier trend."
Uncertainties surround future monsoons
Navin Singh Khadka, BBC News 31 Jul 09;
It is almost halfway through the rainy season, and the monsoon in many parts of South Asia continues to remain unreliable.
In some places it has been crippling weak, while in others it has been devastatingly intense.
There are places reeling from drought, yet at the same time there are areas that have been hit by torrential rains, triggering floods and landslides in a very short span of time.
This has made the lives of millions of people difficult and has left them increasingly worried for the future.
Very little of the arable land is irrigated, and local populations depend on monsoon rainfall for agriculture.
The monsoon clouds have weakened in several parts of the region and the variable and erratic rains have left weather forecasters scratching their heads.
This failure of the monsoons to behave as expected has led to the question of whether climate change is to blame.
Experts differ on whether these changes are directly linked to climate.
"This year's monsoon behaviour cannot yet be attributed to climate change as it is still within the observed natural variability of the monsoon," said Krishna Kumar Kanikicharla, a scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology.
"Our assessment of climate model simulations for the current and the next century indicate no significant deviation until the middle of the 21st Century. Thereafter, the monsoon rainfall will continue to increase by 8-10% from current levels."
A regional research centre in Bangladesh found what it called "cyclic changes", but has identified no effects so far that can be attributed to climate change.
A gloomy forecast
The South Asian monsoon normally begins in June and lasts around four months. The Indian Meteorological Department in April had forecast an optimistic 96% of long-term average rainfall.
But in the last week of June, by which time the monsoon clouds should normally have moved northward from the Indian ocean, they were hardly moving.
With farmers in Northern India postponing their crop plantations and authorities cutting the supply of stored water for irrigation, the government had to scale down its rainfall forecast to 93% of the long-term average rainfall.
In neighbouring Bangladesh, the situation was even worse; it saw 80% lower rainfall than what would normally be the case.
An unusually long dry spell fanned several wildfires earlier this year. Nepal too saw delays in the arrival of its precious monsoon clouds.
When they reached northern areas of the region by the third week of July, many places began to see heavy precipitation.
Bangladesh's capital, Dhaka, saw more than 33cm of rainfall in about 24 hours - the greatest amount for many years.
Floods have wreaked havoc in many parts of north-east India, and nearly three dozen people have died in Nepal as a result of monsoon-triggered landslides.
At least another dozen are missing from remote Nepalese mountain areas.
Yet many areas in this region still remain parched.
Until the middle of this week, northern and south-western parts of Bangladesh have had about 40% lower rainfall than the average.
Some parts of northern India have been declared drought-hit by local governments.
Almost the same is the case in eastern Nepal, where rainfall is around 50% lower than normal.
Meteorological officials in Pakistan say most parts of the country have remained more or less dry, with average rainfall limited to only 50% of normal precipitation.
"Even where it has rained, the rainfall is around 30% lower than normal," said Qamar Zaman Chaudhary, director-general of Pakistan's met office.
"Figures [from recent years] show that monsoon rainfall is gradually decreasing - year on year."
Patchy cloud
Over the past five years, even though total rainfall has not deviated far from the average in these countries, the distribution has been quite uneven.
Some places have experienced heavy rainfall while others have seen far smaller amounts of rain and have been hit by drought.
And dangerously unpredictable rainfall such as that which claimed hundreds of lives in Mumbai in 2005 is on the rise.
In yet another unusual development, places that received smaller amounts of rainfall have begun to receive more rain. While what used to be relatively wet areas are now becoming drier.
Some researchers suggest that this is a natural "shift" in the pattern of rainfall.
"We studied three 30-year window periods from 1951 to 2000 and found that there was a slow shift in the rainfall scenarios," said Sujit Kumar Deb Sarma, a researcher with the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) Meteorological Research Centre in Bangladesh.
"Places that got more rain are receiving lower rainfall and vice versa.
"But we also found that after some time the rainfall patterns go back to what they were before and slowly start changing again. It's a cyclic change that has been happening [for] years."
But authorities in Pakistan believe the falling monsoon rainfall may have been the result of climate change.
"There may have been some impacts of climate change," said Mr Chaudhry of the Pakistan Met Office.
"We know that the El Nino events have been affecting our rainfall all these years, but climate change could be aggravating the situation even more."
Meteorologists in Nepal too think global warming may have some role in the changing monsoon pattern the country has been experiencing.
"There are so many factors including the El Nino effect that have been affecting the monsoon but we cannot say that these changes are not because of global warming," said Mani Ratna Shakya, head of the weather forecasting division.
International studies have also pointed at the relationship between the monsoon and climate change.
A study by researchers at Purdue University, US, found that the South Asian monsoon could be weakened and delayed as a result of rising temperatures in the future.
"Climate change could influence monsoon dynamics and cause lower summer precipitation, a delay to the start of the monsoon season and longer breaks between the rainy periods."
Another report recently prepared for the Australian government has shown that potentially greater threats could be abrupt changes to the oceans and atmosphere that lead to irreversible switches in weather or ocean patterns - so-called tipping points.
"An example is the Indian monsoon. According to some models that could switch into a drier mode in a matter of years," the report's author Will Steffen, executive director of the Climate Change Institute at the Australian National University, told Reuters.
The fourth assessment report of the IPCC had this to say about the monsoon: "It is likely that warming associated with increasing greenhouse gas concentrations will cause an increase of Asian summer monsoon precipitation variability.
"Changes in the monsoon mean duration and strength depend on the details of the (greenhouse gases) emission scenario."
Do the changes mean weather forecasters will have a tough time ahead predicting the monsoon as they have had this year?
Indian Meteorological Department chief BP Yadav admitted that could be the case: "There are already some indications of increase in the variability of weather parameters, so when you have a high variability in any events like rainfall or temperature, definitely the work of predicting them becomes more difficult," he said.
It is almost halfway through the rainy season, and the monsoon in many parts of South Asia continues to remain unreliable.
In some places it has been crippling weak, while in others it has been devastatingly intense.
There are places reeling from drought, yet at the same time there are areas that have been hit by torrential rains, triggering floods and landslides in a very short span of time.
This has made the lives of millions of people difficult and has left them increasingly worried for the future.
Very little of the arable land is irrigated, and local populations depend on monsoon rainfall for agriculture.
The monsoon clouds have weakened in several parts of the region and the variable and erratic rains have left weather forecasters scratching their heads.
This failure of the monsoons to behave as expected has led to the question of whether climate change is to blame.
Experts differ on whether these changes are directly linked to climate.
"This year's monsoon behaviour cannot yet be attributed to climate change as it is still within the observed natural variability of the monsoon," said Krishna Kumar Kanikicharla, a scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology.
"Our assessment of climate model simulations for the current and the next century indicate no significant deviation until the middle of the 21st Century. Thereafter, the monsoon rainfall will continue to increase by 8-10% from current levels."
A regional research centre in Bangladesh found what it called "cyclic changes", but has identified no effects so far that can be attributed to climate change.
A gloomy forecast
The South Asian monsoon normally begins in June and lasts around four months. The Indian Meteorological Department in April had forecast an optimistic 96% of long-term average rainfall.
But in the last week of June, by which time the monsoon clouds should normally have moved northward from the Indian ocean, they were hardly moving.
With farmers in Northern India postponing their crop plantations and authorities cutting the supply of stored water for irrigation, the government had to scale down its rainfall forecast to 93% of the long-term average rainfall.
In neighbouring Bangladesh, the situation was even worse; it saw 80% lower rainfall than what would normally be the case.
An unusually long dry spell fanned several wildfires earlier this year. Nepal too saw delays in the arrival of its precious monsoon clouds.
When they reached northern areas of the region by the third week of July, many places began to see heavy precipitation.
Bangladesh's capital, Dhaka, saw more than 33cm of rainfall in about 24 hours - the greatest amount for many years.
Floods have wreaked havoc in many parts of north-east India, and nearly three dozen people have died in Nepal as a result of monsoon-triggered landslides.
At least another dozen are missing from remote Nepalese mountain areas.
Yet many areas in this region still remain parched.
Until the middle of this week, northern and south-western parts of Bangladesh have had about 40% lower rainfall than the average.
Some parts of northern India have been declared drought-hit by local governments.
Almost the same is the case in eastern Nepal, where rainfall is around 50% lower than normal.
Meteorological officials in Pakistan say most parts of the country have remained more or less dry, with average rainfall limited to only 50% of normal precipitation.
"Even where it has rained, the rainfall is around 30% lower than normal," said Qamar Zaman Chaudhary, director-general of Pakistan's met office.
"Figures [from recent years] show that monsoon rainfall is gradually decreasing - year on year."
Patchy cloud
Over the past five years, even though total rainfall has not deviated far from the average in these countries, the distribution has been quite uneven.
Some places have experienced heavy rainfall while others have seen far smaller amounts of rain and have been hit by drought.
And dangerously unpredictable rainfall such as that which claimed hundreds of lives in Mumbai in 2005 is on the rise.
In yet another unusual development, places that received smaller amounts of rainfall have begun to receive more rain. While what used to be relatively wet areas are now becoming drier.
Some researchers suggest that this is a natural "shift" in the pattern of rainfall.
"We studied three 30-year window periods from 1951 to 2000 and found that there was a slow shift in the rainfall scenarios," said Sujit Kumar Deb Sarma, a researcher with the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) Meteorological Research Centre in Bangladesh.
"Places that got more rain are receiving lower rainfall and vice versa.
"But we also found that after some time the rainfall patterns go back to what they were before and slowly start changing again. It's a cyclic change that has been happening [for] years."
But authorities in Pakistan believe the falling monsoon rainfall may have been the result of climate change.
"There may have been some impacts of climate change," said Mr Chaudhry of the Pakistan Met Office.
"We know that the El Nino events have been affecting our rainfall all these years, but climate change could be aggravating the situation even more."
Meteorologists in Nepal too think global warming may have some role in the changing monsoon pattern the country has been experiencing.
"There are so many factors including the El Nino effect that have been affecting the monsoon but we cannot say that these changes are not because of global warming," said Mani Ratna Shakya, head of the weather forecasting division.
International studies have also pointed at the relationship between the monsoon and climate change.
A study by researchers at Purdue University, US, found that the South Asian monsoon could be weakened and delayed as a result of rising temperatures in the future.
"Climate change could influence monsoon dynamics and cause lower summer precipitation, a delay to the start of the monsoon season and longer breaks between the rainy periods."
Another report recently prepared for the Australian government has shown that potentially greater threats could be abrupt changes to the oceans and atmosphere that lead to irreversible switches in weather or ocean patterns - so-called tipping points.
"An example is the Indian monsoon. According to some models that could switch into a drier mode in a matter of years," the report's author Will Steffen, executive director of the Climate Change Institute at the Australian National University, told Reuters.
The fourth assessment report of the IPCC had this to say about the monsoon: "It is likely that warming associated with increasing greenhouse gas concentrations will cause an increase of Asian summer monsoon precipitation variability.
"Changes in the monsoon mean duration and strength depend on the details of the (greenhouse gases) emission scenario."
Do the changes mean weather forecasters will have a tough time ahead predicting the monsoon as they have had this year?
Indian Meteorological Department chief BP Yadav admitted that could be the case: "There are already some indications of increase in the variability of weather parameters, so when you have a high variability in any events like rainfall or temperature, definitely the work of predicting them becomes more difficult," he said.
Australian weather bureau sees El Nino by Sept-Nov
Reuters 31 Jul 09;
SYDNEY (Reuters) - Australia's Bureau of Meteorology on Friday predicted that an El Nino weather system in the Pacific Ocean would be established by September-November at the latest.
The bureau said there was now agreement between international weather models that an El Nino, which can bring drought conditions to Australia and weaken Asian monsoons, would be established by the southern hemisphere spring.
"The same six models...predict established El Nino conditions (across a range of climate indices) by the southern spring at the latest," said the bureau in its latest ENSO report.
"Given the high level of persistence (and hence predictability) in ENSO during the second half of the year, the probability of an El Nino event continuing to develop and maturing late in 2009 is high," it said.
El Nino, meaning "little boy" in Spanish, is driven by an abnormal warming of the eastern Pacific Ocean, and creates havoc in weather patterns across the Asia-Pacific region.
For the latest report: http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/ahead/ENSO-summary.shtml
(Reporting by Michael Perry; Editing by James Thornhill)
Australian weather bureau says El Nino developing
Reuters 5 Aug 09;
SYDNEY (Reuters) - Australia's official weather bureau reported more evidence of a developing El Nino weather pattern, saying its Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) for the 30 days to August 3 was at plus 0.5, down from plus 12 on July 19.
The SOI, an indicator of an El Nino, has been falling rapidly for the past two weeks, the bureau said on Wednesday.
A consistently negative SOI would point to the development of an El Nino, which can bring drought to Australia and weaken Asian monsoons, hurting crop and livestock production.
The SOI measures the pressure difference between the Pacific island of Tahiti and the Australian city of Darwin.
The bureau said that if warm conditions in the Pacific persisted, 2009 was likely to be considered an El Nino year.
For the bureau's report see: www.bom.gov.au/climate/enso/
(Reporting by James Thornhill; Editing by Mark Bendeich)
SYDNEY (Reuters) - Australia's Bureau of Meteorology on Friday predicted that an El Nino weather system in the Pacific Ocean would be established by September-November at the latest.
The bureau said there was now agreement between international weather models that an El Nino, which can bring drought conditions to Australia and weaken Asian monsoons, would be established by the southern hemisphere spring.
"The same six models...predict established El Nino conditions (across a range of climate indices) by the southern spring at the latest," said the bureau in its latest ENSO report.
"Given the high level of persistence (and hence predictability) in ENSO during the second half of the year, the probability of an El Nino event continuing to develop and maturing late in 2009 is high," it said.
El Nino, meaning "little boy" in Spanish, is driven by an abnormal warming of the eastern Pacific Ocean, and creates havoc in weather patterns across the Asia-Pacific region.
For the latest report: http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/ahead/ENSO-summary.shtml
(Reporting by Michael Perry; Editing by James Thornhill)
Australian weather bureau says El Nino developing
Reuters 5 Aug 09;
SYDNEY (Reuters) - Australia's official weather bureau reported more evidence of a developing El Nino weather pattern, saying its Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) for the 30 days to August 3 was at plus 0.5, down from plus 12 on July 19.
The SOI, an indicator of an El Nino, has been falling rapidly for the past two weeks, the bureau said on Wednesday.
A consistently negative SOI would point to the development of an El Nino, which can bring drought to Australia and weaken Asian monsoons, hurting crop and livestock production.
The SOI measures the pressure difference between the Pacific island of Tahiti and the Australian city of Darwin.
The bureau said that if warm conditions in the Pacific persisted, 2009 was likely to be considered an El Nino year.
For the bureau's report see: www.bom.gov.au/climate/enso/
(Reporting by James Thornhill; Editing by Mark Bendeich)
Chinese to launch first ever green lawsuit against government
'Breakthrough' hailed as Chinese judge says residents may prosecute government over pollution claims
Tania Branigan, guardian.co.uk 31 Jul 09;
China should see its first lawsuit by an environmental group against authorities within weeks, state media reported today.
A member of the All-China Environmental Federation - which is backed by the central government - said a judge in Guizhou province had accepted its claim on behalf of residents who complain they have suffered from pollution.
Residents allege that the Qingzhen land resources bureau leased land to a drinks factory in 1994, but construction of the factory has not been completed and they believe the site is damaging two adjacent lakes from which they draw drinking water. They want the government to take back the land and remove construction materials.
Ma Yong, director of the legal service centre at the federation, told the Associated Press the case would open in early September.
"The case will serve as a warning for government departments and companies that damage the environment, as we're stepping up efforts to play a supervisory role," Ma Yong said. He added that he hoped it would pave the way for other organisations to file public-interest lawsuits.
Liu Haiying, deputy head of the environmental protection tribunal at Qingzhen municipal people's court, told China Daily: "We are established to safeguard public interest and hope to encourage other courts to step forward to handle similar cases."
She added: "No matter what the conclusion is, we hope it will serve as a warning to government departments such as environment, forestry and other agencies, that they should always fulfill their duty to protect the environment.
"They need to gradually realise that they are not only under the supervision of the party and other administrative departments, but also under the watch of all citizens."
Environmental activists complain that courts usually turn away such cases.
"If this leads to more non-governmental organisations bringing public interest litigation I think this is a very important breakthrough. It means China is going to open the door to more public involvement in environmental enforcement," said Alex Wang, a senior lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council, a US environmental group.
In a separate development, China is to shift a planned £3bn oil refinery and petrochemical plant in the south after years of public outcry.
Wang Yang, the Communist Party chief of Guangdong, said the province would move the plant - a joint venture between China's Sinopec and the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation - because of opposition from the community and officials.
"We only have one planet to live on, so whatever we do on this end will affect others on the other end," Wang told reporters at a news conference on Thursday.
"The decision by the government shows that they do consider the opinions from different stakeholders across the region, which is a positive sign," said Edward Chan, a Greenpeace campaign manager based in Hong Kong.
"Our worries now are that the residents [in the new area] are not as well-educated or informed, or may be more eager to look for economic development.
"The story has not ended. It's really important for green groups to pay attention to where the project is moving to."
It is thought the factory will be relocated away from Nansha to Zhanjiang in western Guangdong, a less ecologically sensitive area.
Tania Branigan, guardian.co.uk 31 Jul 09;
China should see its first lawsuit by an environmental group against authorities within weeks, state media reported today.
A member of the All-China Environmental Federation - which is backed by the central government - said a judge in Guizhou province had accepted its claim on behalf of residents who complain they have suffered from pollution.
Residents allege that the Qingzhen land resources bureau leased land to a drinks factory in 1994, but construction of the factory has not been completed and they believe the site is damaging two adjacent lakes from which they draw drinking water. They want the government to take back the land and remove construction materials.
Ma Yong, director of the legal service centre at the federation, told the Associated Press the case would open in early September.
"The case will serve as a warning for government departments and companies that damage the environment, as we're stepping up efforts to play a supervisory role," Ma Yong said. He added that he hoped it would pave the way for other organisations to file public-interest lawsuits.
Liu Haiying, deputy head of the environmental protection tribunal at Qingzhen municipal people's court, told China Daily: "We are established to safeguard public interest and hope to encourage other courts to step forward to handle similar cases."
She added: "No matter what the conclusion is, we hope it will serve as a warning to government departments such as environment, forestry and other agencies, that they should always fulfill their duty to protect the environment.
"They need to gradually realise that they are not only under the supervision of the party and other administrative departments, but also under the watch of all citizens."
Environmental activists complain that courts usually turn away such cases.
"If this leads to more non-governmental organisations bringing public interest litigation I think this is a very important breakthrough. It means China is going to open the door to more public involvement in environmental enforcement," said Alex Wang, a senior lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council, a US environmental group.
In a separate development, China is to shift a planned £3bn oil refinery and petrochemical plant in the south after years of public outcry.
Wang Yang, the Communist Party chief of Guangdong, said the province would move the plant - a joint venture between China's Sinopec and the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation - because of opposition from the community and officials.
"We only have one planet to live on, so whatever we do on this end will affect others on the other end," Wang told reporters at a news conference on Thursday.
"The decision by the government shows that they do consider the opinions from different stakeholders across the region, which is a positive sign," said Edward Chan, a Greenpeace campaign manager based in Hong Kong.
"Our worries now are that the residents [in the new area] are not as well-educated or informed, or may be more eager to look for economic development.
"The story has not ended. It's really important for green groups to pay attention to where the project is moving to."
It is thought the factory will be relocated away from Nansha to Zhanjiang in western Guangdong, a less ecologically sensitive area.
Activists cheer China's plan to move refinery
Reuters 31 Jul 09;
HONG KONG (Reuters) - China's decision to shift the location of a planned $5 billion oil refinery and petrochemical plant in the south after years of public outcry is a sign that environmental concerns can shape policy.
Wang Yang, the Communist Party chief of Guangdong, said the province would move the plant to an unnamed location because of opposition from the community and lawmakers. The project is a joint venture between China's Sinopec Corp. and Kuwait Petroleum Corporation.
"We only have one planet to live on, so whatever we do on this end will affect others on the other end," Wang told reporters at a news conference on Thursday.
Some environmental activists applauded the move, saying it reflected Beijing's commitment to tackling climate change after years of sacrificing the environment for economic growth.
"The decision by the government shows that they do consider the opinions from different stakeholders across the region, which is a positive sign," said Edward Chan, a Greenpeace campaign manager based in Hong Kong.
In recent years, Chinese citizens have scored some victories over local governments, which have shelved or delayed projects after vocal opposition about pollution and environmental worries.
These include a paraxylene chemical plant in the city of Xiamen that was scrapped on toxicity concerns and a delay over a planned hydroelectric power dam on the Nu river in Yunnan province.
Already the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, China has come under pressure from the international community to curb emissions.
But other experts stopped short of calling the decision a landmark victory for China's green activists, saying environmental practices and requirements were still unevenly enforced and in flux.
"Guangdong is a special province --- it is rich and the local community is very strong, that's not the same for other cities in China," said Ma Zhong, executive vice-dean of the School of Environment and Natural Resources at Beijing's Renmin University.
"I don't believe there's a real environment movement across the country. They (the local governments) are mainly concerned about their own interests."
RESIDENTS COMPLAIN
The Sinopec-Kuwait Petroleum refinery was to have been built in Nansha at the tip of the Pearl River Delta in South China's economic powerhouse of Guangdong.
Residents in Nansha, home to fish and shrimp farmers, have complained about the project, saying a smaller refinery in the area pollutes the air with a strong chemical stench on bad days.
"We have spent much effort in considering Nansha's fragile ecology and also (the refinery's) impact on neighboring provinces, in deciding to relocate," Wang said.
He declined to say where the plant would go, but a source with knowledge of the plans said it was most likely in Zhanjiang in western Guangdong, a less ecologically sensitive area.
"The environment is a significant factor, but I don't think we can yet say that it's the exclusive factor motivating these decisions to relocate these projects," said Beatrice Schaffrath, a Beijing-based lawyer who focuses on environmental regulation.
Other issues were concerns about feasibility, construction and foreign investment in general, she said.
Guangdong, which accounts for about 12 percent of China's economic output, is trying to upgrade its manufacturing sector and has pledged to relocate small and dirty factories away from the Pearl River Delta.
Despite Guangdong's decision, non-governmental groups said they still needed to keep polluters under surveillance.
"Our worries now are that the residents (in the new area) are not as well-educated or informed, or may be more eager to look for economic development," Chan said.
"The story has not ended. It's really important for green groups to pay attention to where the project is moving to."
(Additional reporting by James Pomfret in Guangdong and Chen Aizhu in Beijing, Editing by Dean Yates)
HONG KONG (Reuters) - China's decision to shift the location of a planned $5 billion oil refinery and petrochemical plant in the south after years of public outcry is a sign that environmental concerns can shape policy.
Wang Yang, the Communist Party chief of Guangdong, said the province would move the plant to an unnamed location because of opposition from the community and lawmakers. The project is a joint venture between China's Sinopec Corp. and Kuwait Petroleum Corporation.
"We only have one planet to live on, so whatever we do on this end will affect others on the other end," Wang told reporters at a news conference on Thursday.
Some environmental activists applauded the move, saying it reflected Beijing's commitment to tackling climate change after years of sacrificing the environment for economic growth.
"The decision by the government shows that they do consider the opinions from different stakeholders across the region, which is a positive sign," said Edward Chan, a Greenpeace campaign manager based in Hong Kong.
In recent years, Chinese citizens have scored some victories over local governments, which have shelved or delayed projects after vocal opposition about pollution and environmental worries.
These include a paraxylene chemical plant in the city of Xiamen that was scrapped on toxicity concerns and a delay over a planned hydroelectric power dam on the Nu river in Yunnan province.
Already the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, China has come under pressure from the international community to curb emissions.
But other experts stopped short of calling the decision a landmark victory for China's green activists, saying environmental practices and requirements were still unevenly enforced and in flux.
"Guangdong is a special province --- it is rich and the local community is very strong, that's not the same for other cities in China," said Ma Zhong, executive vice-dean of the School of Environment and Natural Resources at Beijing's Renmin University.
"I don't believe there's a real environment movement across the country. They (the local governments) are mainly concerned about their own interests."
RESIDENTS COMPLAIN
The Sinopec-Kuwait Petroleum refinery was to have been built in Nansha at the tip of the Pearl River Delta in South China's economic powerhouse of Guangdong.
Residents in Nansha, home to fish and shrimp farmers, have complained about the project, saying a smaller refinery in the area pollutes the air with a strong chemical stench on bad days.
"We have spent much effort in considering Nansha's fragile ecology and also (the refinery's) impact on neighboring provinces, in deciding to relocate," Wang said.
He declined to say where the plant would go, but a source with knowledge of the plans said it was most likely in Zhanjiang in western Guangdong, a less ecologically sensitive area.
"The environment is a significant factor, but I don't think we can yet say that it's the exclusive factor motivating these decisions to relocate these projects," said Beatrice Schaffrath, a Beijing-based lawyer who focuses on environmental regulation.
Other issues were concerns about feasibility, construction and foreign investment in general, she said.
Guangdong, which accounts for about 12 percent of China's economic output, is trying to upgrade its manufacturing sector and has pledged to relocate small and dirty factories away from the Pearl River Delta.
Despite Guangdong's decision, non-governmental groups said they still needed to keep polluters under surveillance.
"Our worries now are that the residents (in the new area) are not as well-educated or informed, or may be more eager to look for economic development," Chan said.
"The story has not ended. It's really important for green groups to pay attention to where the project is moving to."
(Additional reporting by James Pomfret in Guangdong and Chen Aizhu in Beijing, Editing by Dean Yates)
Ship leaking fuel off Norway after running aground
Reuters 31 Jul 09;
OSLO (Reuters) - A Chinese-owned dry-bulk vessel is leaking fuel after running aground near Langesund on the Norwegian coast during stormy conditions overnight, rescue authorities said on Friday.
The Joint Rescue Coordination Center said 16 sailors had been evacuated from the vessel and seven remained on the ship. The entire crew are Chinese nationals.
"We have put a request to the company (operating the ship) to put pressure on the captain (to abandon the vessel) because Norwegian coast guard reports indicate the ship may not survive," rescue mission spokesman Stein Solberg told Reuters.
He said a helicopter was standing by to evacuate the rest of the crew from the Panama-registered "Full City" vessel, which ran aground without cargo but with up to 1,120 tons of fuel on board. It is operated by Hong Kong-based Cosco.
Television channel TV2 showed pictures of oil coming ashore along the North Sea coastline in southern Norway -- a popular summer holiday area west of the Oslo fjord.
A Norwegian representative of the World Wildlife Fund said the spill could affect a large number of birds from a nearby sanctuary and called on volunteers to help with the clean-up.
(Reporting by Wojciech Moskwa and Terje Solsvik)
Norway police charge ship captain after fuel spill
Wojciech Moskwa, Reuters 3 Aug 09;
OSLO (Reuters) - Norwegian police on Monday charged the Chinese captain of a dry bulk vessel for not warning the coastal authorities that his ship was in danger during a storm last week that led to one of Norway's biggest fuel spills.
The Chinese-owned "Full City" ship has remained grounded near Langesund since early Friday morning, when it was blown off course during a heavy storm and started leaking fuel.
The spill has affected a 150-kilometer (93 mile) stretch of coastline in southern Norway and occurred near a bird sanctuary and a popular summer resort about 170 km south-west of Oslo.
"The captain of the vessel has been charged for not reporting that his ship was in a dangerous situation," police attorney Siri Karlsen told a news conference. The charge carries a maximum two-year jail sentence, Norway's TV2 television said.
The clean up efforts have involved some 25 ships helping to contain the fuel, which has now stopped leaking from the vessel's hull. Onshore workers are also working to clear the syrupy dark fuel from the mostly rocky coastline.
"The situation is very sad both for the residents and the entire environment affected by the spill," said Helga Pedersen, Norway's fisheries and coastal affairs minister.
Sveinung Nedregotten, a spokesman for the Norwegian coastal administration, said wind and waves were pushing the spill southwest along Norway's coast, although the damage to areas further away from the accident was smaller.
It was not yet clear how much of the vessel's 1,120 tons of fuel had leaked out. The ship is operated by Hong Kong-based Cosco. Its 23-strong crew are all Chinese nationals.
"This is one of Norway's worst spills, particularly because it happened in this pristine area near bird sanctuaries," Nedregotten said.
"If the weather stays like this, the ship should be quite stable ... allowing us to empty all its fuel."
(Editing by Jon Hemming)
OSLO (Reuters) - A Chinese-owned dry-bulk vessel is leaking fuel after running aground near Langesund on the Norwegian coast during stormy conditions overnight, rescue authorities said on Friday.
The Joint Rescue Coordination Center said 16 sailors had been evacuated from the vessel and seven remained on the ship. The entire crew are Chinese nationals.
"We have put a request to the company (operating the ship) to put pressure on the captain (to abandon the vessel) because Norwegian coast guard reports indicate the ship may not survive," rescue mission spokesman Stein Solberg told Reuters.
He said a helicopter was standing by to evacuate the rest of the crew from the Panama-registered "Full City" vessel, which ran aground without cargo but with up to 1,120 tons of fuel on board. It is operated by Hong Kong-based Cosco.
Television channel TV2 showed pictures of oil coming ashore along the North Sea coastline in southern Norway -- a popular summer holiday area west of the Oslo fjord.
A Norwegian representative of the World Wildlife Fund said the spill could affect a large number of birds from a nearby sanctuary and called on volunteers to help with the clean-up.
(Reporting by Wojciech Moskwa and Terje Solsvik)
Norway police charge ship captain after fuel spill
Wojciech Moskwa, Reuters 3 Aug 09;
OSLO (Reuters) - Norwegian police on Monday charged the Chinese captain of a dry bulk vessel for not warning the coastal authorities that his ship was in danger during a storm last week that led to one of Norway's biggest fuel spills.
The Chinese-owned "Full City" ship has remained grounded near Langesund since early Friday morning, when it was blown off course during a heavy storm and started leaking fuel.
The spill has affected a 150-kilometer (93 mile) stretch of coastline in southern Norway and occurred near a bird sanctuary and a popular summer resort about 170 km south-west of Oslo.
"The captain of the vessel has been charged for not reporting that his ship was in a dangerous situation," police attorney Siri Karlsen told a news conference. The charge carries a maximum two-year jail sentence, Norway's TV2 television said.
The clean up efforts have involved some 25 ships helping to contain the fuel, which has now stopped leaking from the vessel's hull. Onshore workers are also working to clear the syrupy dark fuel from the mostly rocky coastline.
"The situation is very sad both for the residents and the entire environment affected by the spill," said Helga Pedersen, Norway's fisheries and coastal affairs minister.
Sveinung Nedregotten, a spokesman for the Norwegian coastal administration, said wind and waves were pushing the spill southwest along Norway's coast, although the damage to areas further away from the accident was smaller.
It was not yet clear how much of the vessel's 1,120 tons of fuel had leaked out. The ship is operated by Hong Kong-based Cosco. Its 23-strong crew are all Chinese nationals.
"This is one of Norway's worst spills, particularly because it happened in this pristine area near bird sanctuaries," Nedregotten said.
"If the weather stays like this, the ship should be quite stable ... allowing us to empty all its fuel."
(Editing by Jon Hemming)
U.S. ready to issue grants for renewable energy
Reuters 31 Jul 09;
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. government on Friday said it is now accepting applications for some $3 billion in government grants to boost development of renewable energy projects around the country.
The money, from the economic stimulus package, will provide direct payments to companies in lieu of tax credits to support an estimated 5,000 biomass, solar, wind and other renewable energy production facilities. Projects must begin construction this year or in 2010 to get the grants.
The Treasury and Energy Departments announced the funding guidelines earlier this month. Each project is expected to receive an average of $600,000, but there is no cap on how much a company can get or a limit on the total funds that will be available.
"This program will play a major role in encouraging private sector capital to invest in clean energy development, creating new jobs that can't be outsourced," Energy Secretary Steven Chu said in a statement.
"It is an investment that will continue to help our economy grow and ensure advancement in clean and renewable energy development," he added.
President Barack Obama has promoted development of clean energy as a way to jump start the lagging economy. He has pledged to double renewable energy production in three years.
Previously energy companies could file for a tax credit to cover a portion of the costs of a renewable energy project. Under the new program, companies would forgo the tax credits in favor of an immediate reimbursement of 30 percent of certain project expenses, making funds available quickly.
The government plans to have checks deposited into a company's bank account within 60 days after receiving an eligible application.
(Reporting by Ayesha Rascoe; Editing by Marguerita Choy)
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. government on Friday said it is now accepting applications for some $3 billion in government grants to boost development of renewable energy projects around the country.
The money, from the economic stimulus package, will provide direct payments to companies in lieu of tax credits to support an estimated 5,000 biomass, solar, wind and other renewable energy production facilities. Projects must begin construction this year or in 2010 to get the grants.
The Treasury and Energy Departments announced the funding guidelines earlier this month. Each project is expected to receive an average of $600,000, but there is no cap on how much a company can get or a limit on the total funds that will be available.
"This program will play a major role in encouraging private sector capital to invest in clean energy development, creating new jobs that can't be outsourced," Energy Secretary Steven Chu said in a statement.
"It is an investment that will continue to help our economy grow and ensure advancement in clean and renewable energy development," he added.
President Barack Obama has promoted development of clean energy as a way to jump start the lagging economy. He has pledged to double renewable energy production in three years.
Previously energy companies could file for a tax credit to cover a portion of the costs of a renewable energy project. Under the new program, companies would forgo the tax credits in favor of an immediate reimbursement of 30 percent of certain project expenses, making funds available quickly.
The government plans to have checks deposited into a company's bank account within 60 days after receiving an eligible application.
(Reporting by Ayesha Rascoe; Editing by Marguerita Choy)
India to assess climate gain; pump millions in forests
Krittivas Mukherjee, Reuters 31 Jul 09;
NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India will spend some $200 million to protect its forests and will announce how much carbon emission is being captured by its green cover, the environment minister said on Friday.
Jairam Ramesh said the money would go into conserving and restoring unique vegetation, controlling forest fires and strengthening forestry infrastructure, among other goals.
"This reflects the high priority that the prime minister accords to the renewal of our forestry establishment which is critical in our climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts," he said.
Forestry forms an important part of international negotiations for a new U.N. climate change deal in December, and India says efforts to conserve and increase forest cover should be considered as vital as reducing deforestation.
Forests soak up vast amounts of planet-warming CO2 and can act as a brake on climate change.
Under an emerging U.N. scheme called reduced emissions from deforestation and degradation, or REDD, developing nations could potentially earn billions of dollars by setting aside and rehabilitating their forests.
The valuable carbon offsets they earn could be sold to rich nations to help them meet their emissions goals under the scheme that is likely to be part of a broader climate pact from 2013.
Ramesh said India would announce on August 10 the results of a study into how much emissions were being captured by India's forests. The quantification could bolster India's demand for money for afforestation efforts under REDD.
"We have for the first time estimated how much of our emission is being captured by the forest cover," he said.
About 65 million hectares, or 20 percent of India's land, is under forest cover. Ramesh said the cover would be extended by another six million hectares over the next six years.
(Editing by Alistair Scrutton)
NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India will spend some $200 million to protect its forests and will announce how much carbon emission is being captured by its green cover, the environment minister said on Friday.
Jairam Ramesh said the money would go into conserving and restoring unique vegetation, controlling forest fires and strengthening forestry infrastructure, among other goals.
"This reflects the high priority that the prime minister accords to the renewal of our forestry establishment which is critical in our climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts," he said.
Forestry forms an important part of international negotiations for a new U.N. climate change deal in December, and India says efforts to conserve and increase forest cover should be considered as vital as reducing deforestation.
Forests soak up vast amounts of planet-warming CO2 and can act as a brake on climate change.
Under an emerging U.N. scheme called reduced emissions from deforestation and degradation, or REDD, developing nations could potentially earn billions of dollars by setting aside and rehabilitating their forests.
The valuable carbon offsets they earn could be sold to rich nations to help them meet their emissions goals under the scheme that is likely to be part of a broader climate pact from 2013.
Ramesh said India would announce on August 10 the results of a study into how much emissions were being captured by India's forests. The quantification could bolster India's demand for money for afforestation efforts under REDD.
"We have for the first time estimated how much of our emission is being captured by the forest cover," he said.
About 65 million hectares, or 20 percent of India's land, is under forest cover. Ramesh said the cover would be extended by another six million hectares over the next six years.
(Editing by Alistair Scrutton)