Glove maintenance
from Otterman speaks
Butterfly of the Month - August 2009
from Butterflies of Singapore
A Quiet Day in Central Catchment Area
from Beauty of Fauna and Flora in Nature
Pasir Ris - Stuck in the mud
from Singapore Nature
Foray with moray at Tanah Merah
from wild shores of singapore
Black-capped White-eye
from Bird Ecology Study Group
Ocean plastic study--watch it as it happens
from blogfish
Cheryl Lim, Channel NewsAsia 8 Aug 09;
SINGAPORE: Developing a country's industry may sometimes pose a threat to its environment. Fortunately, Singapore's landfill island of Pulau Semakau has managed to balance both elements.
The world's first offshore landfill was developed at a cost of more than S$600 million. Other than its industrial purpose, Semakau also has a rich diversity of wildlife and a thriving eco-system.
Since July 2005, the landfill has been opened to the public for various recreational activities. This project has garnered international recognition for its efforts in striking a harmonious balance between industry and nature.
To mark this unique island's 10th anniversary, the National Environment Agency (NEA) launched a book on Saturday tracing its history and development.
Andrew Tan, CEO of NEA, said: "We thought that it was appropriate that we produce this publication that showcases the various species of animals and birds, and insects of the island."
The annual Semakau Run, which aims to raise funds for environmental and charity groups, was also held on Saturday. A record number of 43 companies took part in the event, including co-organiser MediaCorp.
Chang Long Jong, deputy CEO, Television, MediaCorp, said: "MediaCorp has been very, very supportive of the green movement. Our own Saving Gaia and this event are all in line with our efforts to help create a lot more awareness among the community on the need to protect the environment."
Some 150 participants took part in the run, raising S$359,000 in all.
- CNA/so
Semakau not just a landfill but home to species
New book highlights how careful planning of island has led to its amazing biodiversity
Shuli Sudderuddin, Straits Times 9 Aug 09;
Imagine a tropical island dotted with coral reefs, and lush greenery and wildlife on it.
Semakau fits the bill. It is also the world's first offshore landfill and, in fact, is Singapore's only landfill now.
But what is remarkable is that careful design and construction have ensured that the 350ha island, one of Singapore's southern islands, stays pristine and free of the foul smells associated with landfills elsewhere.
It was even praised in the respected science magazine New Scientist in 2007.
Celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, the Semakau landfill is part of Singapore's sustainable solid waste management system as well as represents a wealth of natural habitats.
To commemorate this 10th anniversary, the National Environment Agency (NEA) launched a book yesterday, along with the Semakau Run, a 5km event organised with Media- Corp on the island itself.
A total of 43 corporations pledged $359,000 in this year's run in support of environmental and charitable groups.
At the launch of the book, Habitats In Harmony - The Story Of Semakau Landfill, NEA chief executive Andrew Tan said: 'This book showcases the various species of birds, sea animals and insects on Semakau. It is a landfill, but no normal landfill - its diversity has been preserved.'
Construction on the landfill started in 1995 and the project cost $610 million.
The landfill project has been divided into two phases, with 11 cells in Phase One.
Each cell is separated from the other with a plastic membrane and clay and is filled with both incinerated waste and non-incinerable waste.
About six such cells, amounting to 90 ha of sea space, have been filled so far.
As the waste is already incinerated to ash, the smell is minimal.
The waste is sent to the island on large barges and some 2,000 tonnes of ash and non-incinerable waste arrive there every day.
Said the landfill's general manager, Mr Ong Chong Peng: 'Lots of careful planning went into it. It's a mix of maintaining a waste management system and nature, right down to sampling the seawater every month to ensure that the water is not contaminated.'
Consultants who contributed to the book agree that the Semakau landfill's biodiversity is amazing for such a small island.
Dr Jean Yong, a mangrove specialist at Nanyang Technological University, said the mangroves on Semakau are becoming naturalised despite some of them being artificially planted.
'A very endangered plant, the Api-api Jambu has been found in the Semakau mangroves. Good mangroves should contain certain species of plants and this is one of them,' he said.
Coral reef specialist Karenne Tun said Semakau's coral cover almost matches that of healthier areas in Singapore.
Veteran butterfly watcher Khew Sin Khoon, who did four half-day surveys there, said: 'Semakau landfill's diversity is impressive. It's small but we found 33 butterfly species there.'
Ms Siti Maryam Yaakub, a doctoral student at the National University of Singapore, who works on seagrass, said Semakau's seagrass meadow is the largest in Singapore and boasts some endangered marine species like the knobbly sea star.
Added Dr Ho Hua Chew, bird specialist and member of the executive committee of the Nature Society: 'Biodiversity has increased a great deal since we started monitoring it in 2004. Then, there were only 66 bird species. Now, there are about 88.'
Said Mr Marcus Ng, 35, the freelance writer who put the book together: 'In the 1980s, the Government had the foresight to preserve the nature areas of the landfill even while a huge civil and marine engineering project was taking place.
'Semakau is what it is today because of this foresight.'
Spot these creatures
Straits Times 9 Aug 09;
Pulau Semakau is host to five significant species:
Great-billed heron - The tallest bird found in Singapore, it can reach a height of 1.2m with a wingspan of 2m.
Despite being rare elsewhere in Singapore, this species is frequently spotted along the coastline of Semakau.
Yellow-lipped sea krait - The locally endangered marine snake's habitat ranges from mangroves to coral reefs. Highly venomous, sea kraits are placid unless roughly handled.
Tomato Anemone fish - This fish lives only in the Bulb-tentacle Sea Anemone and grows to about 14cm.
Indo-Pacific Hump-backed Dolphin - Also known as Pink Dolphins, these mammals are occasionally spotted in the waters around Semakau. They may be seen playing close to the shore or leaping out of the water.
Pale Palm Dart - While this small butterfly is not rare worldwide, it was not known locally until it was sighted in Semakau last year. It feeds on the common coconut palm.
Information from Habitats In Harmony - The Story Of Semakau Landfill 
Click on image to enlarge.
More links
More about the making of the Semakau Anniversary book on the wild shores of singapore
Farmers hail promise of funding and land, but worry about labour shortages, land prices and environmental constraints
Irene Tham, Straits Times 9 Aug 09;
Grow more locally, eat more locally.
That call to increase local produce was made by a minister recently, and Singapore's farming community is keen to take up the idea.
National Development Minister Mah Bow Tan, in a speech at the Agri-Food and Veterinary Authority's (AVA's) food safety awards on July31, said local farming, like Newater, can serve as a 'strategic stockpile'.
He pledged to set aside more land and set up a fund - the sum has yet to be announced - to increase output so that Singapore will have a stable supply of produce.
This will help mitigate supply shortfalls and price hikes. A case in point is last year's rice shortage.
Mr Tay Khiam Back, 53, managing director of 17-year-old fruit and vegetable trader Hupco, wants to commercially grow premium tropical fruits like guavas, papayas and bananas here.
Most of these fruits are now imported, and they are harvested unripe to minimise spoilage while being shipped here and to ensure a longer shelf-life.
'Isn't it better if local markets sell fruits that are harvested just a few hours earlier from a local farmer? They'll taste and smell better, and may even be safer as we can control the use of pesticides,' said Mr Tay, who is also chairman of the Singapore Fruits and Vegetables Importers and Exporters Association.
For major local egg producer Seng Choon Farm, the Government's promise of financial aid could not have come at a better time. The farm, which sells 100million eggs a year to local supermarkets and wet markets, is expanding, with a 14.7ha facility being built in Lim Chu Kang.
'Depending on the size of the funding, we could double our production,' said farm manager Koh Chern Peng, 35.
Over the next five years, the Government wants to increase supply of local produce: from 23 per cent to 30 per cent for eggs; from 4 per cent to 15 per cent for fish; and from 7 per cent to 10 per cent for leafy vegetables.
But farmers, while enthusiastic, say the ambitious plan faces some challenges. They cite issues such as manpower shortages, the high price of land and limited coastline for seafood farming.
'Singaporeans are not keen to take up farming jobs, so we have to hire foreigners,' said Mr Chew Eng Hoe, 44, managing director of egg farm Chew's Agriculture. 'But we have to meet the 1:1 local versus foreign worker ratio, which is tough.'
Like Hupco's Mr Tay, Mr Chew hopes the Manpower Ministry will relax restrictions on the use of foreign labour.
Farmers also hope to get special prices for land set aside for farming, as well as an instalment payment scheme instead of upfront payment.
'The current bidding system inflates prices,' said Mr Tay, adding that upfront payment could amount to $1million, depending on land size.
Fish farmers, on the other hand, are facing not only space scarcity but also environmental challenges.
'Our high water temperature and water quality do not allow us to rear a great variety of fish,' said Mr Lee Boon Cheow, 70, president of the Singapore Fish Merchants' General Association. The wholesaler handles 80per cent of Singapore's daily seafood imports.
'Our fish farmers rear a lot of milk fish, which locals do not appreciate. So we ended up exporting the fish to Malaysia,' Mr Lee said.
He mooted the idea of tapping the waterways of countries like China and Indonesia.
An AVA spokesman said the authority 'will be looking into ways to harness regional waters for contract farming that will help to bring more food fish back to Singapore'.
The AVA said it will also invest in research and development for genetic selection to, say, reduce crop cycle and speed up the growth of fish.
Insurance against bird flu is an issue for Mr Chew from Chew's Agriculture. He has not been able to buy a policy this year to cover bird flu for his chicken livestock and he hopes the Government will look into the matter. The most recent policy he obtained from NTUC Income expired last year, but he could not renew it.
'They do not sell it any more,' he said. 'If we increase our production and buy more chickens, who will share my losses if bird flu strikes?'
When contacted, an NTUC Income spokesman said: 'Like many other insurance companies, NTUC Income works with reinsurers to cover various risks.
'As our reinsurers have ceased avian flu cover for livestock, we are no longer able to continue providing such cover for farmers.'
Cheryl Lim, Channel NewsAsia 8 Aug 09;
SINGAPORE: Singapore's Environment and Water Resources Minister Yaacob Ibrahim said on Saturday Indonesia needs to do more to tackle the haze problem.
Speaking at a charity event, Dr Yaacob said he is disappointed with some of Indonesia's responses to the recent haze.
He added that while the haze is not a new problem, it is something to be concerned about and more needs to be done to improve the situation.
Singapore has been shrouded in haze since Thursday as hotspots from the Sumatran provinces of Riau, Jambi and South Sumatra sent smoke haze blowing into Singapore. Saturday's PSI reading at 4pm was 54, which is in the moderate range.
Dr Yaacob said Singapore is not trying to pinpoint faults in Indonesia's system.
While Singapore is taking a proactive approach in working with Indonesia to tackle the problem, cooperation from Indonesia is necessary to ensure success in fighting haze.
"I think the international community will continue to play their part, but if Indonesia doesn't take the lead and tackle this, then it will not solve the problem. That being said, we on our part are always ready to help them," the minister said.
- CNA/so
Indonesia must take lead over haze, says Yaacob
Straits Times 9 Aug 09;
Indonesia must take the lead in dealing with the regional haze problem, and Singapore will continue to extend its help to Jakarta, Dr Yaacob Ibrahim, Minister for the Environment and Water Resources, said yesterday.
He was speaking at the Semakau Run 2009, jointly organised by the National Environment Agency and Mediacorp, and held on the island.
The haze, caused by fires in Sumatra, has returned to Singapore this month.
The almost annual haze episodes have led to complaints to the Indonesian government by its Asean neighbours.
Dr Yaacob was responding to recent comments made by Jakarta's Forestry Minister that the Indonesian government would take firm action against those setting fires in Sumatra only if flights were disrupted and protests erupted in neighbouring countries.
'We have taken a proactive approach where we have basically organised the ministerial steering committee for us to come together between the five countries.
'On Singapore's part, we will continue to assist them where we can,' said Dr Yaacob.
'If Indonesia does not take the lead and tackle this, then I think it will not solve the problem.'
He said he was a bit disappointed at the comments made, and reiterated that Singapore will continue to play its part and work together with the region to evaluate the situation.
Dr Yaacob pointed to a recent project in Jambi province in Indonesia: Air quality monitoring stations there feed information about what is going on.
He hoped 'more such efforts can be duplicated on the ground'.
He said: 'We have done our part in Jambi. It has proven that it can work. Perhaps one thing that Indonesia can do is replicate what we have done in Jambi in other provinces.
'Let's take a long-term positive approach,' he said, adding that the Asean Ministerial Steering Committee (MSC) on Transboundary Haze Pollution has brought forward its meeting to this week.
'This will allow us to evaluate the Indonesian plan of action and give us a chance to see whether or not progress has been made and what more can be done,' he said.
The committee's five members are Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei.
Meanwhile, the Pollutant Standards Index for Singapore overall was 54 as at 4pm yesterday. The reading indicates moderate air quality.
Shuli Sudderuddin
Air quality poorer in Malaysia's Borneo
Yahoo News 9 Aug 09;
KUALA LUMPUR (AFP) – Air quality in Malaysia's Sarawak state on Borneo island edged towards "very unhealthy" levels of pollution Sunday as wildfires raged in forests and peat-growing land in the state.
The Air Pollutant Index (API) recorded unhealthy levels of between 122 and 197 in four areas on Sunday morning, three in Sarawak and one in southern Johor state, the Environment Department said on its website.
The API considers a score of 101-200 to be unhealthy, while 201-300 is very unhealthy.
According to the Star newspaper, wildfires were raging in more than 1,000 hectares (around 2,500 acres) near the Sarawak-Brunei border, causing thick smoke.
Malaysia was hit with the worst haze levels recorded this year on Wednesday and Thursday, when the API recorded six "unhealthy" areas.
Officials said the haze was caused by hundreds of forest fires that were blazing in the Indonesian provinces of Kalimantan and Sumatra, and in Sarawak.
Farmers in Indonesia and Malaysia's half of Borneo island burn forests every year to clear land for agriculture, sending plumes of smoke across neighbouring countries.
The haze hit its worst level in 1997-1998, costing the Southeast Asian region an estimated nine billion dollars by disrupting air travel and other business activities.
1,000ha ablaze in Sarawak
The Star 9 Aug 09;
MIRI: Wildfires are raging in more than 1,000ha of forests and peat land near the Sarawak-Brunei border, resulting in a heavy concentration of thick smoke and ash which is choking the people living in the Kuala Baram area.
According to the Miri Fire and Rescue Department and local politicians, some 3,000ha have been burnt.
Miri Division Fire Chief Christian Olas said the fires were most intense near the bridge linking Sarawak to Brunei.
“More than 1,000ha in Kuala Baram district are still on fire.
“We have doused many fires over the past few days but they keep spreading due to the strong wind. New fires keep on appearing.
“Our firefighters are already on 24-hour duty. We only have 37 firefighters on the ground because we are short of manpower,” said Olas.
Checks by The Star Saturday showed that the area was choked with thick smoke and burnt smell.
Visibility was still at dangerously-low levels, with some stretches of the Pan-Borneo Highway blanketed with smoke.
At some stretches, visibility was between 100m to 200m. The thick haze has also blotted out the sun.
State authorities have called for more measures to contain the fires.
Assistant state Infrastructure Development and Communication minister Datuk Lee Kim Shin said the fires in his Senadin constituency, which is located in the Kuala Baram district, had burned more than 3,000ha of land.
“The fire department will build a watchtower to detect the fires swiftly and to enable better and more effective enforcement against open-burning activities,” he said.
The Air Pollution Index (API) in four locations in Sarawak - Bintulu, Miri, Samarahan and Sibu - were in unhealthy levels, with Sibu having a high API reading.
Kapit, Limbang and Sarikei had moderate air quality readings. There were no readings for Kuching.
The other three locations with unhealthy air quality were Bukit Rambai (in Malacca) and Muar.
Projects to battle haze to be expanded
New Straits Times 9 Aug 09;
PEKAN BARU: Malaysia hopes its two pilot projects implemented in Bagan Siapi-api in Riau to tackle the haze will succeed and be expanded to other areas.
Natural Resources and Environment Minister Datuk Douglas Uggah Embas said the two projects were an air quality monitoring station and canal-blocking which would prevent the forest from drying to the extent of catching fire during drought.
"It is hoped that the projects would tackle the haze which has been enveloping Malaysia and Singapore annually," he said after 'handing over' the two projects to Indonesian Environment Minister Rahmat Witoelar here yesterday.
Uggah said the projects would also be expanded to Kalimantan, which shared a border with Sabah and Sarawak.
Several other efforts would be discussed at the Cabinet Committee Meeting on Transboundary Haze Pollution on Aug 18.
Rahmat, in welcoming the Malaysia-funded projects, said it was a sign of true friendship, especially when the technology had the potential to be developed to put out the fires raging in forests in Indonesia.
He said Indonesia had also carried out haze prevention projects with Singapore which was affected by the haze from forest fires in Riau. -- Bernama
Muguntan Vanar, The Star 9 Aug 09;
KOTA KINABALU: A young male tarsier named Jamil perched on a sapling at the Danau Girang Field Centre at the Lower Kinabatangan Wildlife Sanctuary, not knowing it was becoming part of conservation history.
The tarsier, a primate species, became the first of its kind to be radio collared in efforts by scientist to carry out a detailed study of the nocturnal activities of the animal.
Tarsiers are characterised by eyes larger than their brain, teeth so sharp that they can pierce the bones of a frog or snake, and long legs like rubber bands allowing for spectacular three-metre leaps.
Unlike macaques and orang utans, however, no systematic study of these charismatic nocturnal creature has been undertaken in Malaysia for more than 20 years.
The project is aided by participants in an Oxford Brookes University field course in Primate Conservation and Ecology.
The small collar, weighing less than 3% of the tarsier’s body weight, will not hinder the animal as it goes about its rapid nocturnal forays searching for insects, lizards and other prey.
It will allow field assistant and student Ridzwan Ali and his team to track it throughout the night. Being a wholly nocturnal animal, it is almost impossible to keep track of its movement.
The centre’s director, Dr Benoit Goossens, said there was a need for better understanding of habitat needs, diet and social organisation of tarsiers that would be key to conservation policies for these unique little creatures.
Sabah Wildlife Department director Laurentius Ambu said the study on tarsiers was part of a bio-diversity assessment and monitoring in ongoing efforts to develop an adaptive management strategy for the Lower Kinabatangan Wildlife San-ctuary.
Margot Marsh Biodiversity Foundation and Primate Action Fund of Conservation International, Pri-mate Conservation Inc, and Primate Society of Great Britain are supporting the research project.
Getting to know primate tarsier
Jaswinder Kaur, The New Straits Times 11 Aug 09;
KOTA KINABALU: It is only slightly bigger than an adult's palm and can hardly be seen in the wild, but scientists here are making sure that the tarsier is not left out of management plans to better protect wildlife areas in Sabah.
Researchers are studying the nocturnal primate, which has eyes bigger than its brain, at the Kinabatangan floodplain in the eastern part of the state, hoping to find out its home range, movement patterns and population genetics.
As a start, the Danau Girang Field Centre fixed a radio collar on a young male tarsier last week, to kick off a project that will take four to five years.
Centre director Dr Benoit Goossens said: "We don't know much about the tarsier as it is elusive and is only active at night. We don't know how many tarsiers there are. But it is part of the biodiversity and we need to know about it when we develop management plans."
The centre, which is a joint effort of the Sabah Wildlife Department and Cardiff University, is getting support from a number of international conservation foundations to study the tarsier.
The centre's field assistant, Ridzwan Ali, is getting help from students at the Oxford Brookes University who are doing a course in primate conservation and ecology.
Goossens said it was good to focus on the tarsier since much attention had been given to orang utans and Borneo pygmy elephants.
Sabah Wildlife Department director Laurentius Ambu said the collared tarsier was named Jalil in memory of Universiti Malaysia Sabah Primate Studies Centre head Dr Fairus Jalil, who died two weeks ago.
Phuah Ken Lin, New Straits Times 9 Aug 09;
GEORGE TOWN: Penang took a giant leap in the rehabilitation of polluted rivers and beaches with the launch of a campaign using 1.2 million environment-friendly mud balls yesterday.
Known as effective microorganism (EM), the material will improve the water quality and revive aquatic life.
State Drainage and Irrigation Department director Hanapi Mohamad Noor said the priority was to resuscitate Sungai Pinang and Sungai Juru, the two most polluted rivers here.
"Our aim is to make the rivers clean enough for people to use the water.
"We will throw mud balls into the rivers in stages over a six-month period," Hanapi said yesterday.
He said this would be done until the water quality of Sungai Pinang and Sungai Juru improved to Class 2 from Class 3.
Hanapi said EM would also be deployed in Sungai Bayan Lepas and two highly polluted drains in Seberang Prai Utara and Selatan.
Hanapi said the department would throw mud balls into the rivers and selected sewage on a weekly basis.
Among the benefits of the mud balls are a stimulation of mangrove growth and breaking down the sludge deposited in the rivers and seabed.
He said the bacteria and yeast content in EM would stop algae growth which made the water murky.
Thousands of people flocked to Gurney Drive and hurled about 100,000 mud balls into the filthy promenade's beach front during the launching ceremony.
The EM is widely used to enhance water quality and solve sanitary problems in agriculture and food industries.
Rebecca Kessler, livescience.com 8 Aug 09;
In 1998, with much fanfare, a 20-year-old orca named Keiko took a one-way trip on an Air Force cargo plane from Oregon to Iceland. There, attended by dozens of biologists and trainers, and at a cost reportedly topping $20 million, the orca was gradually reintroduced to his native waters.
Keiko, of course, had starred in three "Free Willy" movies, which sparked a public campaign to free him after nineteen years in captivity.
But things didn't quite turn out as planned.
A team of his former caretakers, led by Malene J. Simon of the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources in Nuuk, has analyzed logs of Keiko's behavior and data from satellite tags recording his travels and dives. They point out that Keiko never managed to integrate with Icelandic orca pods and didn't seem to do much diving or fishing. He spent two several-week-long stretches on his own at sea, but ultimately chose to return to human care.
Perhaps it was his affinity for frozen fish and human companionship that drew him back. He died of pneumonia in 2003, inside an open-access pen in a Norwegian inlet.
Simon's team concludes that Keiko was never a good candidate for reintroduction in the first place. Unlike the few captive marine mammals that have been successfully freed, Keiko had spent too long in captivity from too young an age, and was too strongly bonded with people, to have much chance at re-entry. Even the best intentions, and plenty of cash, can't necessarily undo the taming of a giant, it seems.
The findings were detailed in the journal Marine Mammal Science.
The brown tree snake invasion has wiped out birds on Guam and left a forest to survive on its own
Brendan Borrell, Scientific American 8 Aug 09;
The forest on Guam is silent.
Sometime after World War II the brown tree snake arrived as a stowaway on this U.S. Pacific island territory 6,100 kilometers west of Hawaii. It has since extirpated 10 of the island's 12 native forest bird species. The remaining forest birds have been relegated to small populations on military bases, where the snakes are kept in check. In the first study of its kind, a rugby-playing researcher named Haldre Rogers is documenting how the forest itself is changing.
"There's nothing in the forest on Guam," Rogers says, "and when you hear anything you have to stop and say, 'What was that?'"
Rogers is a doctoral student at the University of Washington in Seattle who once had a cell phone with the number 777-HISS during the three years she worked for the U.S. Geological Survey's brown tree snake rapid response team. From 2002 to 2005, she estimates she nabbed about 100 snakes out of a population estimated in the hundreds of thousands.
These days, between tournaments in Hong Kong and Thailand with the Guam national rugby team, she has been busy collecting data on the movements of seeds and their ability to survive and grow in the forest. "People knew that the birds had disappeared, but nobody had taken the next step to see what impact that had," she explains, "which is why it seemed like enticing research."
Of the approximately 40 species of trees on Guam, about 60 to 70 percent once depended on birds to eat their fruits and disperse their seeds. The birds may have just nicked and dropped seeds somewhere along a flight path, or they could have swallowed the seeds, digested their tough coats, and pooped them out with a splatter of high-nitrogen urea.
Rogers went to neighboring islands that still have birds along with many of the same trees, collected seeds from the tree Premna obtusifolia, and brought them back to grow in a greenhouse on Guam. She found that seeds handled by birds are twice as likely to germinate as seeds that simply land on the forest floor. They also germinate about 10 days more quickly, giving them a better shot at evading seed-destroying rodents or fungi.
In another experiment, Rogers has found that seeds on Guam now always land directly in the shade of the mother tree and always have an intact seed coat. But seeds from neighboring islands that still have birds can sometimes end up 10 to 20 meters away from the mother tree, where they are more likely to find a sunny niche with fewer enemies. About 80 percent of these have had their seed coat removed, meaning they can germinate more quickly. Rogers presented this research at the Ecological Society of America meeting in Albuquerque this week. "It's inevitable that there will be changes in the composition of the forest and in the spatial patterns of where trees are located," she says.
These results, which are just the beginning of a larger study funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, have wider implications for the dispersal of seeds and botanical life. Some 25 percent of U.S. birds are facing extinction, and many common U.S. bird species have declined by 50 to 80 percent since 1967. On islands, the situation is particularly dire, with 28 to 56 percent of species expected to be extinct by 2100, many due to introduced species. Hawaiians are dreading the day when the brown tree snake inevitably establishes itself there, despite careful monitoring of airports and shipping facilities.
Rogers is now looking for similar trends in a dozen other tree species on Pacific islands, and investigating how the absence of birds has affected populations of agricultural pests and spiders, which are 40 times more abundant on Guam than on neighboring islands. She says it is still too early to know if the brown tree snakes are just altering the distribution of trees in the forest, or if they could lead to a collapse of the island's entire ecosystem.
"The brown tree snake is held up as textbook example of how a destructive invasive species can eradicate birds," she says. "This shows that the effects of introduced predators reverberate through the ecosystem."
Yahoo News 8 Aug 09;
STOCKHOLM (AFP) – Greenpeace said Saturday it will press ahead with plans to sink nearly 180 boulders into cod fishing grounds off Sweden to impede bottom-trawling, despite criticism from the Swedish government.
From Monday, the global environmental group will drop the boulders -- each weighing one to three tonnes -- into two protected areas in the Kattegat sound that separates the Swedish and Danish mainlands.
"The actions foreseen by Greenpeace rest on confrontation and unilateralism, which risks threatening necessary cooperation," the Swedish agriculture and fisheries minister Eskil Erlandsson wrote in the Dagens Nyheter newspaper.
"My hope is that Greenpeace will renounce such action and that instead we solve problems together," he said.
But, speaking to AFP, Greenpeace spokesman Staffan Danielsson said the Swedish government was taking cod "hostage" by not looking at the wider implications of bottom trawling on the environment.
"The cod in the Kattegat is severely depleted, it's in very bad shape, but there are other things in the oceans as well," he said.
"We have marine biodiversity (at the seabed) such as reeds, sandbanks, seabirds, corals, algae forests" that need protection from bottom trawling, which critics say disturbs the sea bottom and harms the maritime environment.
The boulders are to be sunk in zones classified as Natura 2000 in the Lilla Middelgrund (179 square kilometres, 70 square miles) and Flauden (104 square kilometres, 40 square miles) areas.
Both sites lie about 20 kilometres (15 miles) from Varberg port, off Sweden's southwest coast.
Natura 2000 is a network of sites around the European Union protected by EU directives aimed at protecting wildlife and their habitats.
Carrying out Monday's mission will be two Greenpeace vessels -- the Beluga II and the Fehn Coast -- with about 30 people on board.
"This is a conservation measure in order to protect habitats, which is what governments are supposed to do," Danielsson said.
A similiar initiative was taken last year off Germany, and according to Greenepace it has proven effective in discouraging fishing.
Yahoo News 8 Aug 09;
SYDNEY (AFP) – A Hong Kong-based shipping company will pay Australia 25 million dollars (21 million US) in compensation for a massive toxic oil spill during a wild storm, officials said Saturday.
Swire Shipping's cargo liner Pacific Adventurer released about 200,000 litres (53,000 US gallons) of heavy fuel oil off the coast of Queensland state as it travelled through cyclonic weather on March 11.
Vast stretches of popular tourist beaches were blackened by the sludge, which spilled from the hull after it was pierced by fertiliser containers as they fell overboard in heavy seas.
It was one of Australia's worst-ever oil spills.
Swire said the compensation figure far exceeded its legal obligation of between 14.5 and 17.5 million dollars.
"We very much regret the accident, caused by Cyclone Hamish, that resulted in the oil spill - and also the effect of the spill on the Queensland coastal environment and the people of Queensland," said Bill Rothery, head of Swire's Australian operations.
Queensland Premier Anna Bligh welcomed the settlement, which she said had taken five months of "hard work and a lot of public outcry".
"Frankly, I wish they'd done it a lot earlier and I wish we hadn't had an argument about it," Bligh said.
"Ultimately they've gone further than they've wanted to and that's a good thing."
The ship's Filipino captain, Bernardino Gonzalos Santos, 47, has been charged with illegally discharging oil, and faces fines of up to 350,000 dollars.
A preliminary transport bureau investigation into the accident found Santos set course toward Queensland despite knowing extreme weather lay ahead.
If successfully prosecuted for environmental or maritime breaches, Swire faces 1.5 million dollars in fines.
Both the national and Queensland governments have said they were seeking legal advice on further court action.
The Independent 9 Aug 09;
A new breed of colonialism is rampaging across the world, with rich nations buying up the natural resources of developing countries that can ill afford to sell. Some staggering deals have already been done, says Paul Vallely, but angry locals are now trying to stop the landgrabs
Thousand of protesters took to the streets, waving the orange flags of the opposition. Before long, looting began. Buildings were set on fire. But the turning point came when a crowd moved from the main square towards the presidential palace. Amid the confusion, someone panicked and gave the order to the troops guarding the palace to open fire. Scores died. The leaders of the army decided they'd had enough and stormed the palace, causing the president to flee.
A typical African coup d'état? Not quite. Certainly there were allegations of corruption in high places. The president had bought a private jet – from a member of the Disney family – for his own personal use. He was accused of unnecessary extravagance, of mismanaging public funds and confusing the interests of the state with his own. But something else had whipped up the protesters in Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar, earlier this year, when the government of Marc Ravalomanana was overthrown in the former French colony.
The urban poor were angry at the price of food, which had been high since the massive rise in global prices of wheat and rice the year before. Food-price rises hit the poor worse than the rest of us because they spend up to two-thirds of their income on food. But what whipped them into action was news of a deal the government had recently signed with a giant Korean multinational, Daewoo, leasing 1.3 million hectares of farmland – an area almost half the size of Belgium and about half of all arable land on the island – to the foreign company for 99 years. Daewoo had announced plans to grow maize and palm oil there – and send all the harvests back to South Korea.
Terms of the deal had not originally been made public. But then the news leaked, via the Financial Times in London, that the firm had paid nothing for the lease. Daewoo had promised to improve the island's infrastructure in support of its investment. "We will provide jobs for them by farming it, which is good for Madagascar," a Daewoo spokesman said. But the direct cash benefit to Madagascar would be zero – in a country which can barely produce enough food to feed itself: nearly half of the island's children under the age of five are malnourished.
The government of President Ravalomanana became the first in the world to be toppled because of what the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization recently described as "landgrabbing". The Daewoo deal is only one of more than 100 land deals which have, over the past 12 months, seen massive tracts of cultivable farmland across the globe bought up by wealthy countries and international corporations. The phenomenon is accelerating at an alarming rate, with an area half the size of Europe's farmland targeted in just the past six months.
To understand the impotent fury that provokes in impoverished farmers, consider the reaction if something similar happened in Britain. The international development policy consultant Mark Weston has a vivid image to help: "Imagine if China, following a brief negotiation with a British government desperate for foreign cash after the collapse of the economy, bought up the whole of Wales, replaced most of its inhabitants with Chinese workers, turned the entire country into an enormous rice field, and sent all the rice produced there for the next 99 years back to China," he suggests.
"Imagine that neither the evicted Welsh nor the rest of the British public knew what they were getting in return for this, having to content themselves with vague promises that the new landlords would upgrade a few ports and roads and create jobs for local people.
"Then, imagine that, after a few years – and bearing in mind that recession and the plummeting pound have already made it difficult for Britain to buy food from abroad – an oil-price spike or an environmental disaster in one of the world's big grain-producing nations drives global food prices sharply upwards, and beyond the reach of many Britons. While the Chinese next door in Wales continue sending rice back to China, the starving British look helplessly on, ruing the day their government sold off half their arable land. Some of them plot the violent recapture of the Welsh valleys."
Change the place names to Africa and the scenario is much less far-fetched. It is happening already, which is why many, including Jacques Diouf, head of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, has warned that the world may be slipping into a "neo-colonial" system. Even that great champion of the free market, the FT, described the Daewoo deal as "rapacious" and warned it is but the most "brazen example of a wider phenomenon" as rich nations seek to buy up the natural resources of poor countries.
The extent of this new colonialism is vast. The buyers are wealthy countries that are unable to grow their own food. The Gulf states are at the forefront of new investments. Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar – which between them control nearly 45 per cent of the world's oil – are snapping up agricultural land in fertile countries such as Brazil, Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Egypt. But they are ' also targeting the world's poorest countries, such as Ethiopia, Cameroon, Uganda, Zambia and Cambodia.
The amounts of land involved are staggering. South Korean companies have bought 690,000 hectares in Sudan, where at least six other countries are known to have secured large land-holdings – and where food supplies for the local population are among the least secure anywhere in the world. The Saudis are negotiating 500,000 hectares in Tanzania. Firms from the United Arab Emirates have landed 324,000 hectares in Pakistan.
But they are not the only buyers. Countries with large populations such as China, South Korea and even India are acquiring swathes of African farmland to produce food for export. The Indian government has lent money to 80 companies to buy 350,000 hectares in Africa and recently lowered the tariffs under which Ethiopian agri-products can enter India. One of the biggest holdings of agriculture land in the world is a Bangalore-based company, Karuturi Global, which has recently bought huge areas in Ethiopia and Kenya.
Food is not all the new colonialists are after. About a fifth of the massive new deals are for land on which to grow biofuels. British, US and German companies with names such as Flora Ecopower have bought land in Tanzania and Ethiopia. The country whose name became a byword for famine at the time of the Live Aid concerts has had more than 50 investors sign deals or register an interest in the cultivation of biofuel crops on its soil.
From Ethiopia's point of view, the economic logic is straightforward: the country is an importer of oil and is therefore vulnerable to price fluctuations on the world market; if it can produce biofuels it will lessen that dependency. But at a cost. To keep the foreign biofuel investors happy, the government doesn't force any companies to carry out environmental impact assessments. Local activists claim that 75 per cent of the land allocated to foreign biofuel firms are covered in forests that will be cut down.
More worrying is the plan by a Norwegian biofuel company to create "the largest jatropha plantation in the world" by deforesting large tracts of land in northern Ghana. Jatropha, which can be cultivated in poor soil, produces oily seeds that can produce biodiesel. A local activist, Bakari Nyari, of the African Biodiversity Network, has accused the company of "using methods that hark back to the darkest days of colonialism... by deceiving an illiterate chief to sign away 38,000 hectares with his thumbprint". The company claims the scheme will bring jobs, but the extensive deforestation which would result would deprive local people of their traditional income from gathering forest products such as shea nuts.
The failed Daewoo land deal in Madagascar may have been intended to be the biggest landgrab planned to date, but it is far from the only one.
So what is the cause of this sudden explosion of land acquisition across the globe? It has its roots in the food crisis of 2007/8, when prices of rice, wheat and other cereals skyrocketed across the world, triggering riots from Haiti to Senegal. The price spike also led food-growing countries to slap export tariffs on staple crops to minimise the amounts that left their countries. That tightened the supply still further, meaning food prices were driven up more by a situation of policy-created scarcity than by supply and demand.
This situation also made many rich countries that are reliant on massive food imports question one of the fundamentals of the global economy: the idea that every country should concentrate on its best products and then trade. Suddenly having unimaginable quantities of cash from oil was not enough to guarantee you all the food you needed. The oil sheikhs of the Gulf states found that food imports had doubled in cost over less than five years. In the future it might get even worse. You could no longer rely on regional and global markets, they concluded. The rush to grab land began.
The logic was clear. The highly populous South Korea is the world's fourth-biggest importer of maize; the Madagascar deal would replace about half of Korea's maize imports, a Daewoo spokesman boasted. The Gulf states were equally open: control of foreign farmland would not only secure food supplies, it would eliminate the cut taken by middlemen and reduce its food-import bills by more than 20 per cent.
And the benefits could only increase. The fundamental conditions that had led to the global food crisis were unchanged, and might easily worsen. The UN predicts that by 2050, the world population will have grown by 50 per cent. Growing the food to feed nine billion people will place enormous pressure on the Earth, eroding soils, denuding forests and draining rivers. Climate change will make all that worse. Oil prices will continue to rise, and with them the cost of fertiliser and tractor fuel. Demand for biofuels would further cut land available for food crops. The 2007/8 price crunch might just be a foretaste of something worse. The times of plenty are already over. Next, there might not be enough food to go round, even for those with lots of money.
We have not really noticed it here, because the UK, like the US, still instinctively seems to place unlimited faith in the ability of the market to provide. But other countries have begun to devise a long-term strategic response.
The clearest public sign of that came in June when, just before the meeting of world leaders at the G8 in Italy, the Japanese prime minister, Taro Aso, asked: "Is the current food crisis just another market vagary?" He replied to his own question: "Evidence suggests not; we are undergoing a transition to a new equilibrium, reflecting a new economic, climatic, demographic and ecological reality."
But the market is having its say, too: the cost of land is rising. Prices have jumped 16 per cent in Brazil, 31 per cent in Poland, and 15 per cent in the midwestern United States. Veteran speculators such as George Soros, Jim Rogers and Lord Jacob Rothschild are snapping up farmland right now. Rogers – who between 1970 and 1980 increased the value of his equities portfolio by 4,200 per cent, and who made another fortune predicting the commodities rally in 1999 – last month said: "I'm convinced that farmland is going to be one of the best investments of our time."
After the disastrous involvement of financial speculators in housing – the global recession had its roots in the development of mortgage-based derivatives – it is hardly reassuring that the same financial whiz-kids are turning to land as a new source of profit. "The food and financial crises combined," says the Philippines-based food lobby group Grain, "have turned agricultural land into a new strategic asset."
In one way, that ought to be a good thing for poor countries. Land is what they have in plenty. And the agricultural sector in developing countries is in urgent need of capital. Aid once provided this, but the share of that which goes to farming fell from $20bn a year in the 1980s to just $5bn a year in 2007, according to Oxfam. A mere 5 per cent of aid now goes to rural-development agriculture, even though in the poorest places such as Africa, more than 70 per cent of the population rely on farming for their income. Decades of low investment have meant stagnating production and productivity.
Landgrab deals ought, at least, to rectify that by injecting much-needed investment into agriculture in these countries. That ought to bring new jobs and a steady income to the rural poor. It should bring new technology and know-how to local farmers. It should develop rural infrastructure, such as roads and grain-storage systems, to the good of the entire community. It should build new schools and health posts that will benefit all. It should give African governments much-needed taxes to invest in developing their countries. All of which should lessen dependency of food aid. Landgrabs should produce a win-win situation.
That was the kind of big billing which the government in Kenya gave to the deal it did recently with the state of Qatar. Just one per cent of land in the Arab emirate is cultivable, so Qatar is heavily reliant on food imports. The deal was that Qatar would get 40,000 hectares of land to grow food in return for building a $2.5bn deep-water port at Lamu in Kenya.
Unfortunately, even as the negotiations with Qatar proceeded, the Kenyan government was forced to announce a state of emergency because a third of Kenya's population of 34 million was facing food shortages. President Mwai Kibaki declared the situation a national disaster and appealed for international food relief. Hungry voters often fail to understand the long-term attractions of the economic advantages which could be brought to Kenya by creating what would be only its second deep-water port and opening up a third of the country – in the arid and neglected north-east – to development. This is a country, after all, where people kill for land, as was shown after the botched elections in 2007.
If the world food crisis tightens, as everyone seems to predict, it will become ever more unpalatable politically for a government such as Kenya's to countenance the massive export of food at a time of shortage. That is even more true in a continent as politically unstable as Africa.
There is, in any case, already fierce opposition from many to projects like this. The land offered to Qatar is in the Tana River delta. It is fertile with abundant fresh water but it is home to 150,000 farming and pastoralist families who regard the land as communal and graze 60,000 cattle there. They have threatened armed resistance. They are supported by opposition activists, who object less to the land being developed, but want it to grow food for hungry Kenyans. Then there are the environmentalists, who say a pristine ecosystem of mangrove swamps, savannah and forests will be destroyed.
The environment is another major worry in many of the great rash of land deals. Growing food crops in huge plantations is dominated by large-scale intensive monoculture production using large quantities of fertiliser and pesticides. The results are spectacular at first – which might satisfy the yen of the outside investors for short-term profit. But it risks damaging the long-term sustainability of tropical soils unsuited for intensive cultivation and can do serious damage to the local water table. It reduces the diversity of plants, animals and insect life and threatens the long-term fertility of the land through soil erosion, waterlogging or increased salinity. The intensive use of agrochemicals could lead to water-quality problems, and irrigating the land-holdings of foreign investors may take water away from other users.
Water is a key issue. In a sense, these aren't landgrabs so much as water grabs, suggests the chief executive of Nestlé, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe. With the land comes the right to draw the water beneath it, which could be the most valuable part of the deal. "Water withdrawals for agriculture continue to increase rapidly. In some of the most fertile regions of the world (America, southern Europe, northern India, north-eastern China), over-use of water, mainly for agriculture, is leading to sinking water tables. Groundwater is being withdrawn, no longer as a buffer over the year, but in a structural way, mainly because water is seen as a free good."
The world needs to begin to think more urgently about water. The average person in the world uses between 3,000 and 6,000 litres a day. Barely a tenth of that is used for hygiene or manufacturing. The rest is used in farming. And the world's lifestyle, with factors such as increased meat-eating, is exacerbating the problem. Meat requires 10 times more water per calorie than plants. Biofuels are one of the most thirsty products on the planet; it takes up to 9,100 litres of water to grow the soya for one litre of biodiesel, and up to 4,000 litres for the corn to be transformed into bioethanol. "Under present conditions, and with the way water is being managed," the Nestlé chief says, "we will run out of water long before we run out of fuel".
Indeed, in many places underground, aquifers are falling; in some regions by several metres a year. Rivers are running dry due to over-use. And the worst problems are in some of the world's most important agricultural areas. If current trends hold, Frank Rijsberman of the International Water Management Institute has warned, soon "we could be facing annual losses equivalent to the entire grain crops of India and the US combined". Between them, they produce a third of all the world's cereals.
Is there a way forward? The Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute believes so. It has recently produced a report containing recommendations for a binding code of conduct to promote what Japan, the world's largest food importer, called for at the G8 in Italy – responsible foreign investment in agriculture in the face of the current pandemic of landgrabs.
It wants a code "with teeth" to ensure that smallholders being displaced from their land can negotiate mutually beneficial terms with foreign governments and multinationals. It wants measures to enforce any agreement, if promised jobs, wage levels or local facilities fail to materialise. It wants transparency, and it wants legal action in their home countries against firms that use bribes, rather than relying on prosecutions in the Third World. It wants respect for existing land rights – not just those which are written, but those which exist through custom and practice. It wants compulsory sharing of benefits, so that schools and hospitals get built and those living in areas around landgrabs get properly fed. It suggests shorter-term leases to provide a regular income to farmers whose land is taken away for other uses. Or, better still, it would like to see contract farming that leaves smallholders in control of their land but under contract to provide to the outside investor. It demands proper environmental impact assessments. And it says foreign investors should not have a right to export during an acute national food crisis.
No one is fooled that this will be easy. The local elites in developing countries have a vested interest in the lucrative deals on offer. The government in Cambodia has massively promoted landgrabbing, taking advantage of the fact that many land titles were destroyed under the terror of the Khmer Rouge. Mozambique has signed a $2bn deal that will involve 10,000 Chinese "settlers" on its land in return for $3m in military aid from Beijing. The strategic considerations are clear. "Food can be a weapon in this world," as Hong Jong-wan, a manager at Daewoo, put it.
But things are ratcheting up on the other side, too. Landgrabs are "a grave violation of the human right to food", in the words of Constanze von Oppeln of the big German development agency Welthungerhilfe, one of the most prominent campaigners in the field. She speaks for many who have no voice internationally – although they are making their presence felt well enough in their own countries. A huge public outcry erupted in Uganda when its government began talking to Egypt's ministry of agriculture about leasing nearly a million hectares to Egyptian firms for the production of wheat and maize destined for Cairo. Mozambicans have similarly resisted the settlement of the thousands of Chinese agricultural workers on its leased lands. Earlier this year, angry Filipinos successfully blocked a deal by the Philippines government with China which involved an astounding 1,240,000 hectares. And last month the same activists exposed what they call a "secret agricultural pact" between their government and Bahrain. With 80 per cent of the 90 million population landless, the deal is "unlawful and immoral", activists there say.
Food touches something very deep in the human psyche. Do not expect either side to give up without a fight.
John M. Broder, The New York Times 8 Aug 09;
WASHINGTON — The changing global climate will pose profound strategic challenges to the United States in coming decades, raising the prospect of military intervention to deal with the effects of violent storms, drought, mass migration and pandemics, military and intelligence analysts say.
Such climate-induced crises could topple governments, feed terrorist movements or destabilize entire regions, say the analysts, experts at the Pentagon and intelligence agencies who for the first time are taking a serious look at the national security implications of climate change.
Recent war games and intelligence studies conclude that over the next 20 to 30 years, vulnerable regions, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and South and Southeast Asia, will face the prospect of food shortages, water crises and catastrophic flooding driven by climate change that could demand an American humanitarian relief or military response.
An exercise last December at the National Defense University, an educational institute that is overseen by the military, explored the potential impact of a destructive flood in Bangladesh that sent hundreds of thousands of refugees streaming into neighboring India, touching off religious conflict, the spread of contagious diseases and vast damage to infrastructure. “It gets real complicated real quickly,” said Amanda J. Dory, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy, who is working with a Pentagon group assigned to incorporate climate change into national security strategy planning.
Much of the public and political debate on global warming has focused on finding substitutes for fossil fuels, reducing emissions that contribute to greenhouse gases and furthering negotiations toward an international climate treaty — not potential security challenges.
But a growing number of policy makers say that the world’s rising temperatures, surging seas and melting glaciers are a direct threat to the national interest.
If the United States does not lead the world in reducing fossil-fuel consumption and thus emissions of global warming gases, proponents of this view say, a series of global environmental, social, political and possibly military crises loom that the nation will urgently have to address.
This argument could prove a fulcrum for debate in the Senate next month when it takes up climate and energy legislation passed in June by the House.
Lawmakers leading the debate before Congress are only now beginning to make the national security argument for approving the legislation.
Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who is the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and a leading advocate for the climate legislation, said he hoped to sway Senate skeptics by pressing that issue to pass a meaningful bill.
Mr. Kerry said he did not know whether he would succeed but had spoken with 30 undecided senators on the matter.
He did not identify those senators, but the list of undecided includes many from coal and manufacturing states and from the South and Southeast, which will face the sharpest energy price increases from any carbon emissions control program.
“I’ve been making this argument for a number of years,” Mr. Kerry said, “but it has not been a focus because a lot of people had not connected the dots.” He said he had urged President Obama to make the case, too.
Mr. Kerry said the continuing conflict in southern Sudan, which has killed and displaced tens of thousands of people, is a result of drought and expansion of deserts in the north. “That is going to be repeated many times over and on a much larger scale,” he said.
The Department of Defense’s assessment of the security issue came about after prodding by Congress to include climate issues in its strategic plans — specifically, in 2008 budget authorizations by Hillary Rodham Clinton and John W. Warner, then senators. The department’s climate modeling is based on sophisticated Navy and Air Force weather programs and other government climate research programs at NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The Pentagon and the State Department have studied issues arising from dependence on foreign sources of energy for years but are only now considering the effects of global warming in their long-term planning documents. The Pentagon will include a climate section in the Quadrennial Defense Review, due in February; the State Department will address the issue in its new Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review.
“The sense that climate change poses security and geopolitical challenges is central to the thinking of the State Department and the climate office,” said Peter Ogden, chief of staff to Todd Stern, the State Department’s top climate negotiator.
Although military and intelligence planners have been aware of the challenge posed by climate changes for some years, the Obama administration has made it a central policy focus.
A changing climate presents a range of challenges for the military. Many of its critical installations are vulnerable to rising seas and storm surges. In Florida, Homestead Air Force Base was essentially destroyed by Hurricane Andrew in 1992, and Hurricane Ivan badly damaged Naval Air Station Pensacola in 2004. Military planners are studying ways to protect the major naval stations in Norfolk, Va., and San Diego from climate-induced rising seas and severe storms.
Another vulnerable installation is Diego Garcia, an atoll in the Indian Ocean that serves as a logistics hub for American and British forces in the Middle East and sits a few feet above sea level.
Arctic melting also presents new problems for the military. The shrinking of the ice cap, which is proceeding faster than anticipated only a few years ago, opens a shipping channel that must be defended and undersea resources that are already the focus of international competition.
Ms. Dory, who has held senior Pentagon posts since the Clinton administration, said she had seen a “sea change” in the military’s thinking about climate change in the past year. “These issues now have to be included and wrestled with” in drafting national security strategy, she said.
The National Intelligence Council, which produces government-wide intelligence analyses, finished the first assessment of the national security implications of climate change just last year.
It concluded that climate change by itself would have significant geopolitical impacts around the world and would contribute to a host of problems, including poverty, environmental degradation and the weakening of national governments.
The assessment warned that the storms, droughts and food shortages that might result from a warming planet in coming decades would create numerous relief emergencies.
“The demands of these potential humanitarian responses may significantly tax U.S. military transportation and support force structures, resulting in a strained readiness posture and decreased strategic depth for combat operations,” the report said.
The intelligence community is preparing a series of reports on the impacts of climate change on individual countries like China and India, a study of alternative fuels and a look at how major power relations could be strained by a changing climate.
“We will pay for this one way or another,” Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, a retired Marine and the former head of the Central Command, wrote recently in a report he prepared as a member of a military advisory board on energy and climate at CNA, a private group that does research for the Navy. “We will pay to reduce greenhouse gas emissions today, and we’ll have to take an economic hit of some kind.
“Or we will pay the price later in military terms,” he warned. “And that will involve human lives.”
Climate change to challenge US military: report
Yahoo News 8 Aug 09;
WASHINGTON (AFP) – Climate change will pose profound strategic challenges to the United States in coming decades, raising the prospect of military intervention to deal with the effects of violent storms, drought, mass migration and pandemics, The New York Times reported.
Citing military and intelligence analysts, the newspaper said climate-induced crises could topple governments, feed terrorist movements or destabilize entire regions.
Analysts, experts at the Pentagon and intelligence agencies for the first time are taking a serious look at the national security implications of climate change, the report said.
Recent war games and intelligence studies conclude that over the next 20 to 30 years, vulnerable regions, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and South and Southeast Asia, will face the prospect of food shortages, water crises and catastrophic flooding driven by climate change that could demand an US humanitarian relief or military response, the paper noted.
An exercise at the National Defense University last December explored the potential impact of a flood in Bangladesh that sent hundreds of thousands of refugees streaming into neighboring India, touching off religious conflict, the spread of contagious diseases and vast damage to infrastructure, according to The Times.
"It gets real complicated real quickly," the report quoted as saying Amanda Dory, deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy, who is working with a Pentagon group assigned to incorporate climate change into national security strategy planning.
A changing climate presents a range of challenges for the military, the paper pointed out, because many of its critical installations are vulnerable to rising seas and storm surges.
In Florida, Homestead Air Force Base was essentially destroyed by Hurricane Andrew in 1992, and Hurricane Ivan badly damaged Naval Air Station Pensacola in 2004, The Times noted.
Military planners are studying ways to protect the major naval stations in Norfolk, Virginia, and San Diego, California, from climate-induced rising seas and severe storms.
Another vulnerable installation is Diego Garcia, an atoll in the Indian Ocean, that serves as a logistics hub for US and British forces and sits a few feet above sea level.
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