Best of our wild blogs: 24 Aug 09

Owl and heron strangled
from Bird Ecology Study Group

NBGY is Still Safe @ Punggol
from Beauty of Fauna and Flora in Nature

Visit by the Department of Wildlife and Nature Parks, Peninsular Malaysia from Raffles Museum News

Sentosa's last resort
from teamseagrass and You Run, We Geog

Chek Jawa (23 Aug 09)
from teamseagrass and isn't it a wonder, how life came to be

How's Chek Jawa so far?
from Chek Jawa Mortality and Recruitment Project

Mangroves of Chek Jawa: where is the silt?
from wild shores of singapore

Splendours of Small Sister's Island
from Nature's Wonders

Semakau Walk
from Manta Blog and where discovery begins

Pleasantly Surprised
from Life's Indulgences

A rare coastal fern: new on Nature in Singapore
from wild shores of singapore

Monday Morgue: 24th August 2009
from The Lazy Lizard's Tales

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More years for landfill with more recycling

Semakau dumping ground can last another 5 years if 70% target met
Amresh Gunasingham, Straits Times 24 Aug 09;

THE initial 40-year lifespan of Semakau Landfill, the sole dumping ground for Singapore's waste, will be extended by five years if new recycling targets are met.

The National Environment Agency (NEA) revealed this in response to queries, following calls by Minister for the Environment and Water Resources Yaacob Ibrahim for efforts to be stepped up so that 70 per cent of all rubbish generated here will be recycled by 2030.

The overall recycling rate of 40 per cent, which has been stagnant since the mid-90s, increased to 56 per cent last year. The new 70 per cent target was a benchmark set as part of a sustainability report announced earlier this year, which aims to make Singapore greener and more energy-efficient over the next 20 years.

The $610 million Semakau Landfill, situated among the southern islands of Pulau Semakau and Pulau Sakeng, is built over an area of 350ha, with a capacity of 63 million cubic metres. Opened in 1999, it had been estimated to last till 2040. To date, 12 per cent has already been filled.

Speaking at a ceremony earlier this month to mark the official closure of the Ulu Pandan Incineration Plant, Dr Yaacob said the 70 per cent recycling target was needed to stem the amount of rubbish being disposed here. 'It has to come because if we continue at this rate...we are going to have a big problem.'

Refuse disposal has increased six-fold since the 1970s due to factors such as population and economic expansion. At this rate, Singapore will need a new 350-ha landfill every 25 to 30 years, an NEA study noted.

'But there is simply no more suitable land left,' said Mr Low Fong Hon, director of the NEA's waste management department. With a population density of 6,520 per square metre, Singapore is one of the most densely populated countries in the world.

To alleviate the issue, measures such as ramping up recycling and waste-to-energy incineration, which is the burning of waste into ash, have kept the amount of rubbish dumped at Semakau within 'manageable levels', said Dr Yaacob.

In 2007, just 7 per cent - comprising non-incinerable waste and ash - of the 2.57 million tonnes of waste generated ended up at Semakau.

And the 'throw-away' mentality shows little sign of abating, said Mr Low.

Last year, more than 7,200 tonnes of rubbish were tossed here every day - enough to fill almost 2-1/2 football fields to a height of 1.7m. This roughly equates to each individual throwing almost 1kg of rubbish a day - a 25 per cent increase since 1971.

Dr Yaacob said that to meet the new recycling target, a solution has to be found to improve the present low recycling rates for food waste and plastics. Last year, they accounted for more than 40 per cent of the 2.63 million tonnes of rubbish disposed.

The authorities are studying proposals to adopt new technology that allows for the sorting of different types of waste at source, from both households and industry, to boost these targets.

This will at least delay the inevitable conundrum of where to find a site to store the Republic's rubbish.

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NEA says heavy showers not uncommon in Singapore

Cheryl Lim, Channel NewsAsia 23 Aug 09;

SINGAPORE: Heavy showers with thunder and gusty winds were reported over many parts of Singapore on Sunday morning.

Singapore's Meteorological Services had issued a heavy rain warning on Saturday.

The Public Utilities Board had also warned flash floods might occur in low-lying areas.

Several areas in Singapore were affected by the storm, including Upper Paya Lebar Road.

Residents in the area told Channel NewsAsia they had experienced floods of up to 0.6 metres, while some residents had some damage to their property like broken flower pots. Other residents said their rubbish bins had floated away.

The National Environment Agency (NEA) said it is not uncommon for Singapore to experience heavy rainfall from a Sumatra squall.

It also said some 70.6 mm of rainfall was collected in Jurong at about midnight with about 69 mm collected at Toa Payoh at about 2.30 am.

- CNA/yt

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Prevention of Forest Fires a Regional Issue, Minister Says

Fidelis E. Satriastanti, The Jakarta Globe 23 Aug 09;

Despite the huge amount of money needed to prevent forest fires from spreading in Indonesia, the government has refrained from asking for financial assistance from other countries, State Minister for the Environment Rachmat Witoelar said on Saturday.

On Aug. 18, ministers and senior officials from Indonesia, Singapore, Brunei, Thailand and Malaysia held a one-day conference in Singapore to discuss joint efforts in handling forest fires in the region, particularly those in Indonesia. The region is expected to be hit by a prolonged drought brought about by El Nino, a climate phenomena that is expected to start in December.

“We will be grateful if there are offers [from other countries] to help us finance efforts to prevent forest fires. However, we won’t ask for money from other countries in order to deal with this issue. We weren’t [at the meeting] to beg for money,” Rachmat said, adding that the other countries had offered help without elaborating on the form of the aid.

Rachmat said the meeting had produced some outlines about how to prevent forest fires from spreading and how to deal with the current fires.

“In principle, all countries agreed that the problems are a collective issue, which means one country cannot deal with the problem single-handedly. [The five countries] have to join together to battle the forest fires,” he said.

“There were also no protests against Indonesia [concerning its forest fires and haze] at the meeting because each country has the same issues, except Singapore.”

He said that Indonesia’s forest fires are difficult to put out because most of them started in peatland forests, which were more flammable. Forest fires in Riau and several provinces in Kalimantan have spread rapidly, forcing provincial authorities to suspend airport operations. The resultant smoke has spread to neighboring countries, including Singapore, Malaysia and Brunei.

The meeting, however, was heavily criticized by local media because all five countries involved have weak track records in combating fires and the widespread haze, despite the fact that they have all agreed to ban the use of open burning methods to clear land and to suspend permits for burning in fire-prone areas.

Meanwhile, Bustar Maistar, a forest campaigner for Greenpeace, said Indonesia did not need help from other countries to deal with the fires as long as there was a strong commitment from the government to upholds regulations already put in place.

“Indonesia can solve this issue by itself if the government strictly enforces the use of fires to open up land for plantations, stops burning in peatlands and applies a moratorium on forest clearing,” Bustar said.

He said agreements on combatting forest fires have already been ratified by countries in the region, however, Indonesia must play a key role.

“Because most of the fires are in Indonesia, the new administration must stay committed to all of the agreements it has made in the past,” he said.

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Asian Agriculture: Water down the drain

Michael Richardson, Straits Times 24 Aug 09;

SINGAPORE has done an excellent job in stretching its limited fresh water supplies by recycling. But improved urban water management can for now contribute in only a small way to alleviating Asia's looming water crisis, although the advanced techniques being pioneered here for distributing water and controlling its consumption in cities will become more important as the continent urbanises.

In terms of water consumption, the dominant force in Asia is agriculture. Of the estimated 319 billion cubic metres of water used in South-east Asia each year, 86 per cent goes to agriculture, 8 per cent to industry and just 6 per cent to towns and cities. Agriculture's share is even higher in South Asia (90 per cent) and Central Asia (95 per cent). It is a bit lower (69 per cent) in North-east Asia.

The world's demand for water, chiefly to grow food, has been rising sharply for over a century as the population increases and material living standards improve. In 2000, half a billion people lived in countries that were chronically short of water, out of a global population of around six billion. By 2050, the number of people living in conditions of water shortage is projected to grow to four billion, in a population of about nine billion.

To continue to thrive - or perhaps just to survive - as the demand for water intensifies while climate change brings erratic rainfall, Asia and its farmers will have to use less water to produce more food. This is a major challenge.

Irrigated agriculture and other improvements in farm productivity since the Green Revolution of the 1960s have boosted food output and cut poverty, providing a basis for political order and economic modernisation. Indeed, rural resilience has been the foundation of Asia's growth. This is often forgotten today. Instead, there is massive under-investment in agriculture.

Though only 17 per cent of the world's arable land is irrigated, it produces over one-third of the world's food supply. A reliable supply of water allows farmers to grow two or even three crops a year.

As a recent report by the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) shows, Asia is the heartland of global irrigation. It contains 70 per cent of the world's 277 million hectares of irrigated land. While accounting for only 34 per cent of Asian arable land, the irrigated zone produces 60 per cent of the continent's rice, wheat and other staple food grains.

However, there is a dangerous downside. As currently practised, irrigated farming is water-intensive, especially for growing rice. Asia uses some 73 per cent of the 2,664 cubic kilometres of water the world uses annually for agriculture.

There is massive wastage of water. Many of the canals, channels and other parts of the irrigation system are old and inefficient. So millions of small-holders have bought pumps and drilled bore holes to extract water from rivers, lakes, underground aquifers and their own storage ponds whenever they choose.

Surface water is being sucked dry in major river basins in India, China and Indonesia. Recent surveys show that water tables and aquifer levels below ground are also falling, as water is being withdrawn faster than it can be replenished.

Yet the demand for food, and the water to grow it, is rising as more and more Asians migrate from the countryside to cities. By 2025, 52 per cent of South-east and North-east Asians are predicted to be living in urban centres. For South and Central Asia, the ratio is expected to be 45 per cent.

As people join the urban middle classes and become richer, they tend to eat less cereal. Instead, they will consume more fruit, vegetables, milk and meat. Meat consumption in China has more than doubled in the past 20 years and is expected to double again by 2030.

For Asian farmers on irrigated land, these trends have generally been good. However, growing more profitable niche crops (including food for animals) to satisfy urban consumers, especially those on increasingly meat-based diets, often takes much more water.

A kilogram of potatoes requires just 500 litres of water to produce. The same amount of rice needs 1,900 litres. But 1kg of poultry absorbs 3,500 litres, while beef gulps 15,000 litres.

An estimated five billion people will live in Asia by 2050, 1.5 billion more than now. The continent has three broad options to meet its food needs: Import large quantities of cereals from abroad, improve and expand rain-fed agriculture, or focus on irrigated farmlands.

Many governments attach a high priority to food security. So there is an understandable reluctance to rely on foreign supplies. Of course, small countries like Singapore will continue to depend on imports for the bulk of their food.

However, South-east Asia as a whole is better placed than other parts of Asia to expand irrigated land. There is a large gap between the potential area of 44 million hectares of land considered suitable for irrigation and the currently irrigated area of 17 million hectares.

For the rest of Asia, the IWMI-FAO report suggests that the main thrust of future investment in agriculture should be directed towards improving irrigation systems.

The writer is a visiting senior research fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.

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Water project adds to Ma's typhoon woes

Angry survivors blame tunnel works for killer mudslides
Straits Times 24 Aug 09;

TAIPEI: As Taiwan began its three-day mourning for victims of Typhoon Morakot, a new front in the political storm facing the island's leader has emerged.

When President Ma Ying-jeou visited the southern village of Hsiao Lin - a symbol of Morakot's devastation - to comfort survivors, he was confronted by angry villagers who blamed a massive government water project for mudslides which killed hundreds of people.

Mr Ma vowed to investigate claims that dynamite blasting carried out to build a 15km channel from the Laonung River to the Tsengwen Dam had led to soil erosion that endangered the village.

An official probe into the project was launched almost two weeks after the typhoon hit on Aug 8, and the head of the Water Resources Agency has offered to resign in response to the villagers' outcry.

'The rocks had come loose after the mountains were bombed for years, day and night. Previously, we had never had such a disaster. Therefore we've good reason to believe that is to blame,' Mr Aliao, chief of the nearby Mintzu village, said.

'We had protested from the very beginning, but they just didn't listen.'

Television footage showed survivors confronting Mr Ma last week when he visited Hsiao Lin, where about 400 people are missing and feared dead. The pictu-resque village is now buried in mud five storeys deep.

'Wrong policies are even more terrible than corruption,' one villager shouted at Mr Ma, in an apparent reference to Mr Ma's predecessor Chen Shui-bian, who has been detained on graft charges.

On Saturday, the first day of the mourning period, flags across the country were flown at half-mast.

Mr Ma revisited the hardest-hit area in Kaohsiung to attend memorial services. He was accompanied by Premier Liu Chao-shiuan, Parliamentary Speaker Wang Jin-pyng and other Cabinet ministers.

'We will thoroughly investigate the matter even though the project didn't start in my term,' the President told a group of protesters outside a memorial service in Hsiao Lin.

'President Ma, you must stop the project,' a protester pleaded, while others held banners that read: 'Water project ruins homeland.'

Public prosecutors last Thursday began examining the site at Hsiao Lin, interviewing local government and river affairs officials and collecting before-and-after aerial photos of the area.

'After such a grave disaster, it's our duty to find out the truth and return due justice to the dead,' prosecutor Chuang Jung-sung told reporters.

But observers say it will not be easy to determine who was at fault.

'The project was initiated by previous governments but Mr Ma's government was accused of speeding it up, so it is more complicated...to determine who's responsible,' said Professor Hsu Yung-ming, a political analyst at Soochow University.

Work on the NT$21.2 billion (S$930 million) project started in 2005 under Chen's Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and is scheduled to be completed by 2012. The objective of the project is to divert water from the Laonung River into the Tsengwen reservoir before it flows into the ocean.

Mr Chen Shen-hsien, head of the Water Resources Agency, has insisted that work on the channel had nothing to do with the deadly mudslides triggered by Typhoon Morakot.

'The allegation that the project is responsible for the huge loss of hundreds of lives is too much for us,' he said, adding that the project, a tunnel cutting through several mountains, was 11km away from Hsiao Lin.

Mr Ma, whose approval rating has sunk to a record low amid widespread anger over his government's slow response to the typhoon crisis, has promised to have the disaster areas rebuilt in three years.

At least three senior officials - Vice- Foreign Minister Andrew Hsia, Defence Minister Chen Chao-min and Cabinet Secretary-General Hsieh Hsiang-chuan - have offered to resign, but Premier Liu has said he will consider the resignations in a Cabinet reshuffle early next month.

There have been mounting calls by ruling Kuomintang (KMT) lawmakers for a thorough reshuffle of the Cabinet with the appointment of a new premier.

Leaving Premier Liu in place despite his abysmal poll ratings would harm the KMT in local elections scheduled for December, legislators said.

The main opposition DPP has threatened a motion of no confidence against the Cabinet and even an impeachment campaign against President Ma.

But DPP chairman Tsai Ing-wen herself faced criticism for allegedly staying at Kaohsiung's top luxury hotel during her recent tour of the disaster area, according to a report yesterday on the Taiwan News website.

The death toll from Typhoon Morakot was raised to at least 650 yesterday, with 160 confirmed dead and another 490 listed as missing and presumed dead.

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, ASSOCIATED PRESS

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Encyclopedia of Life grows; clues on ageing, pests

Alister Doyle, Reuters 23 Aug 09;

OSLO (Reuters) - An online encyclopedia aiming to describe every type of animal and plant on the planet has reached 170,000 entries and is helping research into aging, climate change and even the spread of insect pests.

The "Encyclopedia of Life" (www.eol.org), a project likely to cost $100 million launched in 2007, says it wants to describe all the 1.8 million known species from apples to zebras within a decade.

"We're picking up speed," James Edwards, EOL Executive Director based at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, said Sunday of the 170,000 entries with content in a common format vetted by experts. A year ago, it had 30,000 entries.

He said everyone from scientists to schoolchildren could use the EOL as a "field guide" or contribute a photograph or an observation of an animal in an area where it was not found before, in some cases a sign of a changing climate.

The Encyclopedia was aiding scientists who look at human aging, for instance, by examining the widely differing lifespans of related species.

A Latin American bat, Tadarida brasiliensis, lives far longer than mice relatives of a similar size, perhaps because its body has a mechanism that limits damage to protein in its cells. And some butterflies that feed on fruit live longer than related species.

"It's working really nicely, the community of scientists working on aging have adopted the EOL," Edwards told Reuters.

And the Encyclopedia was seeking to help combat pests such as moth from the Balkans that has spread fast across Europe in the past two decades. It attacks the leaves of horse chestnut trees and makes them brown by mid-summer.

MOTH PEST

The moth, Cameraria ohridella, "is now more or less throughout Europe and poses a threat to ecosystems in Southeast Asia, North America and elsewhere - wherever the beautiful horse chestnut trees occur," said David Lees of the Natural History Museum in London and French agricultural research group INRA.

The EOL said it would help "public recognition and awareness of such invasive species through detailed descriptions and maps, helping to slow their global spread and enable more rapid and effective remedial measures."

And the EOL was trying to help researchers find out how global warming may affect species, such as by making them move to cooler habitats.

A problem for many biologists is that they often study just one species so do not know if their findings apply more widely, said James Hanken, director of the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology and chair of the EOL Steering Committee.

"There are often studies of individual species -- insects or frogs or bird -- but people don't have access to information about other species in the same area," he told Reuters. "This holds back studies of climate change on biodiversity."

Among other projects, the encyclopedia was aiming to expand with fossil species. And it was working on regional versions focused on life in Australia, the Netherlands or China.

The EOL said it won extra funding of $12.5 million from two private foundations that have contributed in the past. Edwards said the project still needed more funds.

One problem is that 20,000 new species are described every year -- and estimates of the number of species on the planet range up to 100 million.

(Editing by Matthew Jones)

Cool new tools let public contribute to massive interactive online biodiversity encyclopedia
EurekAlert 23 Aug 09;

Growing community of citizen scientists donate over 30,000 images; Now 150,000+ pages with expert-vetted content

Over 30,000 still images and video, as well as local information about changing biodiversity, have been uploaded to the Encyclopedia of Life via new tools that let the public contribute as never before to a global online science collaboration of unprecedented scale.

Experts and citizen scientists alike have fuelled explosive growth of the interactive encyclopedia, which dedicates a Web page to each known species and will eventually contain 1.8 million pages.

More than 150,000 species pages populated with expert-verified text and/or images are now available at EOL.org, a fast-growing inventory expected to shed new light on everything from conservation strategies for endangered species to climate change and the movements of disease-bearing or invasive pests. Some experts believe it may one day even help advance human longevity.

As the 10-year project marks its 2nd anniversary, EOL officials say pages with vetted information cover 150,000 species likely to be of greatest public interest. They also announced completion of over 75% of the encyclopedia's architecture, with 1.4 million placeholder pages now in place.

To build on the progress to date, an additional grant of $10 million was announced today by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which was one of the project's earliest supporters, providing an initial grant of $10 million in 2007.

And the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, also a founding sponsor, announced $2.5 million in additional funding.

EOL is an online environment for presenting authoritative, well-organized species information, including DNA barcodes and other genetic sequences, from diverse global sources (content providers are listed at www.eol.org/content/partners), dramatically expanding its free availability to users everywhere.

To better serve non-English speaking users, EOL partners are creating regional versions, with information and digitized literature in local languages about local plants, animals and microorganisms. The first regional EOLs have been initiated in the Netherlands, Australia and China, with discussions underway in Central America, the Arab world, Indonesia and South Africa;

Contributors and users of what will be the ultimate online field guide are professional and citizen scientists, teachers, students, media, environmental managers, families and artists. Since its unveiling in early 2008, the site has attracted 1.8 million unique visitors from more than 200 countries.

With EOL now fully open to receive information from both specialists and the public, some 250 experts, including taxonomists, conservation biologists, graduate students and others, along with more than 1,200 citizen scientists, have already stepped forward to volunteer images, share data, or to write or curate pages.

EOL accounts are freely available and registered users can add comments or observations to a page or tag a species and search for its relatives.

Information submitted by the public, as well as images (via the photo sharing site Flickr www.flickr.com/groups/encyclopedia_of_life), appear with a yellow background until authenticated by experts. Almost 40% of the 31,000 images so far have come from five photographers - from Portugal, Australia (2), Spain and Austria. The best of the lot, including winners of regular EOL photo contests, are showcased at http://www.flickr.com/groups/1056008@N20.

Among other newly-added interactive features: an online widget that automatically inserts links to EOL species pages into a digitized document. EOL's "NameLink" tool (http://labs.eol.org/?q=node/10/) identifies species names in a document and inserts an icon next to each that will take the reader to the relevant EOL species page.

EOL's Biodiversity Informatics Group, meanwhile, is beta testing "LifeDesks" (http://lifedesks.org) - independent online environments to facilitate communication and collaboration between scientists or organized groups of amateurs as they assemble and edit images, text, source references and other species information for EOL pages.

Under an initiative of the EOL Education Group, undergraduates at four universities - Harvard, Oregon State, the University of California-Berkeley, and the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse - are creating species pages. Under their professors' supervision, students at these institutions have prepared more than 100 fungi species pages, vetted by experts at MushroomObserver.org. Undergraduate student contributions to content partners Amphibia Web and Animal Diversity Web are also being served on EOL.

EOL has also launched a Fellows Program, oriented to postdoctoral students, graduate students and others who will contribute content from their own research and catalyze contributions from others in their scientific communities.

And at WhyReef (www.whyville.net/smmk/top/gates?source=reef), students can discover the marine life that lives in a virtual coral reef. Each species is linked to an EOL page with photos and descriptions of, for example, what eats what and other threats each may face. Students can also interact with scientists to ask questions.

"Creating a single portal to access a web page for each of the 1.8 million known species will provide a powerful tool to assist researchers and policymakers in better understanding biodiversity and discerning patterns of plant and animal behavior," says Arthur Sussman, MacArthur Vice President. "By integrating and consolidating information on species, EOL also has the potential to accelerate scientific discovery and serve as an infrastructure for life sciences research."

Says Jesse Ausubel, Vice-President, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation: "The idea of an Encyclopedia of Life now seems so natural that people cannot believe that the EOL does not already fully exist. Even with the magic of the Internet, lots of blood, sweat and tears stand between the more than 150,000 well-represented species and the future when 1.8 million species will gaze out at us from www.eol.org. The work of growing EOL is gratifying, and the progress is visible week to week."

"With new content and tools in place, EOL is open for business as never before. And we intend to harness the eyes and collective brainpower of hundreds of thousands of users to spot intriguing new information, share observations, and enhance EOL's role as a leading provider of accurate and relevant biodiversity information," says EOL Executive Director James Edwards, based at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.

"Collecting all of Earth's species together in one place is an extremely ambitious undertaking, as only Noah knows," adds Dr. Edwards. There are literally thousands of websites dedicated to individual aspects of biodiversity - to amphibians, plants or ants, for example, or to specific geographic areas. This unique collaboration between more than 100 leading international organizations is making vast amounts of information available in a common format, allowing users to more readily identify new species across different taxa and regions."

Milestones in recent months:


* EOL partner The Biodiversity Heritage Library has now digitized more than 15 million pages of world biodiversity literature. Links let users access these references directly from an EOL species page. The BHL is also developing search algorithms to automatically find and extract information from digitized pages;

* In celebration of the 10-year Census of Marine Life project, which concludes in 2010, EOL is focusing on building up marine content with the goal of completing pages for 90% of known marine biodiversity - 215,000 species - by 2013;

* On May 15-16, EOL co-sponsored the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore "BioBlitz" with the National Geographic Society and the U.S. National Park service. Over 2,000 students, along with teachers and volunteers, combed the area to record all the plants and animals observed (more than 1,700 species), with EOL-sponsored experts on hand to help participants identify, organize and catalogue their findings via LifeDesks and upload them to the online encyclopedia;

* EOL's Biodiversity Synthesis Group has conducted 18 meetings involving hundreds of scientists from 35 countries in an effort to broaden the EOL's international reach and develop tools tailored to specific scientific interests and needs;

* A brilliant new "Preferences" feature in development will let users filter the entire EOL into a smaller version for any domain for which an index exists, such as all marine species or all the flora of Britain. This will be extremely powerful for personalizing EOL - simply paste in an index filter and with one click the user has a customized EOL with the subset of species of interest.

Early warnings of invasive species

The latest species page, published to mark the 25th anniversary of its arrival in Macedonia from the Balkans, describes an invasive moth, Cameraria ohridella (see http://eol.org/pages/306084), which devastates the white-flowering ornamental horse chestnut trees popular in parks and gardens throughout Europe, leaving their leaves brown by midsummer.

Generations of children in many countries, especially Britain, associate the tree with "conkers," a game in which stringed chestnuts are hit by those of competitors to determine whose is toughest.

Though the damage to leaves does not kill the tree, the moths' dramatically quick migration through Europe is touching off alarms in North America and Asia, where the insect could easily thrive once introduced.

Experts say the moth may also be evolving, in some places now infesting sycamore as well as horse chestnut trees.

"Like the opening of Pandora's box, this moth, first discovered in Macedonia in 1984, has spread like wildfire after a probable accidental release near Vienna in 1989," says page author and curator David Lees of the Natural History Museum, London and INRA, Paris. "It is now more or less throughout Europe and poses a threat to ecosystems in Southeast Asia, North America and elsewhere - wherever the beautiful horse chestnut trees occur."

"An important ornamental tree is being devastated, one all too obvious in parks at this time of year," says Dr. Lees.

Like the "most wanted" posters in post offices, EOL will facilitate public recognition and awareness of such invasive species through detailed descriptions and maps, helping to slow their global spread and enable more rapid and effective remedial measures.

It is also expected to help map the present locations and movements of human disease vectors such as crows and mosquitoes and the shifting ranges of species due to climate change.

Unraveling secrets of long life

Scientists are equipping EOL for use in finding patterns within biodiversity lifespan and other life history data that could help explain, for example, why certain species, even those within the same family, live longer than others, opening promising new avenues of research into human aging.

Holly Miller, who leads the Biology of Aging Portal (www.biologyofaging.org) informatics research group in the Library at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, Massachusetts, says work is underway to relate EOL species information to medically relevant concepts – eventually allowing researchers to cluster and extract valuable aging-related insights.

Funded by the Ellison Medical Foundation, the effort will dramatically expand the number and kinds of organisms traditionally examined in aging research.

The benefit of using diverse species for such research can be seen in a recent report that certain butterflies that feed on fruit live longer than related species, leading to new investigations into the role played by genes, amino acids and food sources in the aging process.

Meanwhile, the lifespan of a Latin American bat (Tadarida brasiliensis, www.eol.org/pages/327954), curiously long compared to mice relatives of a similar size, may be the result of its body's ability to maintain a more stable physiological condition that mitigates cellular protein damage (see report at www.fasebj.org/cgi/content/abstract/23/7/2317).

"Most species have not been studied in a medically-relevant way," Dr. Miller says. "EOL is simplifying such research by creating a handy reference for the scientific and common names of species, body size, age of reproduction, habitat, geographic location and temperature and more, all of which could be relevant to unraveling longevity's secrets."

Says James Hanken, Director, Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology and chair of the EOL Steering Committee: "The Encyclopedia of Life is one of the most vital and ambitious human endeavors ever undertaken. By enabling researchers from around the world to communicate and share research data, the EOL will make a lasting contribution to our fundamental understanding of life on earth."

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Background

The EOL Steering Committee is comprised of senior authorities from Harvard University, Smithsonian Institution, the Field Museum of Chicago, the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, the Biodiversity Heritage Library consortium, the Missouri Botanical Garden, and the MacArthur and Sloan Foundations.

The EOL Institutional Council contains more than 25 institutions from around the world and provides EOL with global perspectives and outreach capabilities. The Distinguished Advisory Board consists of 13 global leaders from the scientific and policy communities.

Technology giants, including Adobe, Microsoft and the Wikimedia Foundation, are providing active support.

Says Dr. Edwards: "EOL works with hundreds of content partners, all of which rely on the world's taxonomists, the scientists who study and name species. It is only through their heroic efforts that a resource like the EOL could even be contemplated."

John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (www.macfound.org)

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation supports creative people and effective institutions committed to building a more just, verdant and peaceful world. In 2007, MacArthur was one of the earliest supporters of EOL, providing an initial grant of $10 million.

Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (www.sloan.org)

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation makes grants in science, technology and the quality of American life. Sloan's support for the Encyclopedia of Life melds its interests in environmental science with its interest in universal access to recorded knowledge.

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Oil slick not threatening Australian coast: minister

Reuters 23 Aug 09;

SYDNEY (AFP) – An oil and gas leak that forced the evacuation of a drilling rig off Australia's northwest coast was evaporating naturally and not threatening the coast, Resources Minister Martin Ferguson said Sunday.

Ferguson said the spill was not as big as first feared and international experts are working out how to cap the leaking oil well as quickly as possible.

"There's no threat to the Australian coast," he told Channel Ten television.

"It is evaporating naturally and the work of the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) will merely assist in that evaporation."

The spill, about eight nautical miles long and 30 metres wide, began just before dawn Friday at the West Atlas drilling rig, 250 kilometres (155 miles) from the Australian mainland.

The 69 workers on board the rig were evacuated to Darwin soon after the leak was detected.

AMSA spokeswoman Tracey Jiggins said a Hercules military aircraft flew over the slick on Sunday morning to drop a chemical dispersant.

"The application of dispersant this morning appears to have been successful," Jiggins told national news agency AAP.

"We've been able to visually see the oil dispersing into the water, which is very positive."

Jiggins said the Bangkok-based company that operates the rig, PTTEP Australasia, had promised to pay for the clean-up operation.

"It's impossible to gauge at this stage," she said of the cost of the clean-up, before adding: "But it will run into the millions."

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A Farm on Every Floor

Dickson D. Despommier, The New York Times 23 Aug 09;

IF climate change and population growth progress at their current pace, in roughly 50 years farming as we know it will no longer exist. This means that the majority of people could soon be without enough food or water. But there is a solution that is surprisingly within reach: Move most farming into cities, and grow crops in tall, specially constructed buildings. It’s called vertical farming.

The floods and droughts that have come with climate change are wreaking havoc on traditional farmland. Three recent floods (in 1993, 2007 and 2008) cost the United States billions of dollars in lost crops, with even more devastating losses in topsoil. Changes in rain patterns and temperature could diminish India’s agricultural output by 30 percent by the end of the century.

What’s more, population increases will soon cause our farmers to run out of land. The amount of arable land per person decreased from about an acre in 1970 to roughly half an acre in 2000 and is projected to decline to about a third of an acre by 2050, according to the United Nations. With billions more people on the way, before we know it the traditional soil-based farming model developed over the last 12,000 years will no longer be a sustainable option.

Irrigation now claims some 70 percent of the fresh water that we use. After applying this water to crops, the excess agricultural runoff, contaminated with silt, pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers, is unfit for reuse. The developed world must find new agricultural approaches before the world’s hungriest come knocking on its door for a glass of clean water and a plate of disease-free rice and beans.

Imagine a farm right in the middle of a major city. Food production would take advantage of hydroponic and aeroponic technologies. Both methods are soil-free. Hydroponics allows us to grow plants in a water-and-nutrient solution, while aeroponics grows them in a nutrient-laden mist. These methods use far less water than conventional cultivation techniques, in some cases as much as 90 percent less.

Now apply the vertical farm concept to countries that are water-challenged — the Middle East readily comes to mind — and suddenly things look less hopeless. For this reason the world’s very first vertical farm may be established there, although the idea has garnered considerable interest from architects and governments all over the world.

Vertical farms are now feasible, in large part because of a robust global greenhouse initiative that has enjoyed considerable commercial success over the last 10 years. (Disclosure: I’ve started a business to build vertical farms.) There is a rising consumer demand for locally grown vegetables and fruits, as well as intense urban-farming activity in cities throughout the United States. Vertical farms would not only revolutionize and improve urban life but also revitalize land that was damaged by traditional farming. For every indoor acre farmed, some 10 to 20 outdoor acres of farmland could be allowed to return to their original ecological state (mostly hardwood forest). Abandoned farms do this free of charge, with no human help required.

A vertical farm would behave like a functional ecosystem, in which waste was recycled and the water used in hydroponics and aeroponics was recaptured by dehumidification and used over and over again. The technologies needed to create a vertical farm are currently being used in controlled-environment agriculture facilities but have not been integrated into a seamless source of food production in urban high-rise buildings.

Such buildings, by the way, are not the only structures that could house vertical farms. Farms of various dimensions and crop yields could be built into a variety of urban settings — from schools, restaurants and hospitals to the upper floors of apartment complexes. By supplying a continuous quantity of fresh vegetables and fruits to city dwellers, these farms would help combat health problems, like Type II diabetes and obesity, that arise in part from the lack of quality produce in our diet.

The list of benefits is long. Vertical farms would produce crops year-round that contain no agro-chemicals. Fish and poultry could also be raised indoors. The farms would greatly reduce fossil-fuel use and greenhouse-gas emissions, since they would eliminate the need for heavy farm machinery and trucks that deliver food from farm to fork. (Wouldn’t it be great if everything on your plate came from around the corner, rather than from hundreds to thousands of miles away?)

Vertical farming could finally put an end to agricultural runoff, a major source of water pollution. Crops would never again be destroyed by floods or droughts. New employment opportunities for vertical farm managers and workers would abound, and abandoned city properties would become productive once again.

Vertical farms would also make cities more pleasant places to live. The structures themselves would be things of beauty and grace. In order to allow plants to capture passive sunlight, walls and ceilings would be completely transparent. So from a distance, it would look as if there were gardens suspended in space.

City dwellers would also be able to breathe easier — quite literally. Vertical farms would bring a great concentration of plants into cities. These plants would absorb carbon dioxide produced by automobile emissions and give off oxygen in return. So imagine you wanted to build the first vertical farm and put it in New York City. What would it take? We have the technology — now we need money, political will and, of course, proof that this concept can work. That’s why a prototype would be a good place to start. I estimate that constructing a five-story farm, taking up one-eighth of a square city block, would cost $20 million to $30 million. Part of the financing should come from the city government, as a vertical farm would go a long way toward achieving Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s goal of a green New York City by 2030. Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer has already expressed interest in having a vertical farm in the city. City officials should be interested. If a farm is located where the public can easily visit it, the iconic building could generate significant tourist dollars, on top of revenue from the sales of its produce.

But most of the financing should come from private sources, including groups controlling venture-capital funds. The real money would flow once entrepreneurs and clean-tech investors realize how much profit there is to be made in urban farming. Imagine a farm in which crop production is not limited by seasons or adverse weather events. Sales could be made in advance because crop-production levels could be guaranteed, thanks to the predictable nature of indoor agriculture. An actual indoor farm developed at Cornell University growing hydroponic lettuce was able to produce as many as 68 heads per square foot per year. At a retail price in New York of up to $2.50 a head for hydroponic lettuce, you can easily do the math and project profitability for other similar crops.

When people ask me why the world still does not have a single vertical farm, I just raise my eyebrows and shrug my shoulders. Perhaps people just need to see proof that farms can grow several stories high. As soon as the first city takes that leap of faith, the world’s first vertical farm could be less than a year away from coming to the aid of a hungry, thirsty world. Not a moment too soon.

Dickson D. Despommier, a professor of public health at Columbia University, is writing a book about vertical farms.

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Tree cover far bigger than expected on farms: study

Alister Doyle, Reuters 23 Aug 09;

OSLO (Reuters) - Almost half of the world's farmland has at least 10 percent tree cover, according to a study on Monday indicating that farmers are far less destructive to carbon-storing forests than previously believed.

"The area revealed in this study is twice the size of the Amazon, and shows that farmers are protecting and planting trees spontaneously," Dennis Garrity, Director General of the World Agroforestry Center in Nairobi, said in a statement.

The Centre's report, based on satellite images and the first to estimate tree cover on the world's farms, showed tree canopies exceeded 10 percent on farmland of 10 million square kms (3.9 million sq miles) -- 46 percent of all agricultural land and an area the size of Canada or China.

By one yardstick used by the U.N.'s Food and Agricultural Organization, a "forest" is an area in which tree canopies cover at least 10 percent of an area. The definition excludes, however, farmland or urban areas.

The report said that farmers keep or plant trees for uses such as production of fruit, nuts, medicines, fuel, building materials, gums or resins. Trees also provide shade for crops, work as windbreaks, boundary markers or to help avert erosion.

And trees are often hardier than crops or livestock so can be a backup for farmers on marginal land in hard times.

Previous estimates of the area of farmland used in agroforestry had ranged up to only about 3 million sq kms.

Farms are often portrayed as enemies of forests -- homes to a wide diversity of animals and plants. Forests are also giant stores of heat-trapping carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas.

SURPRISE

"We're pleasantly surprised -- it quantifies an under-appreciated resource," Tony Simons, deputy director general of the World Agroforestry Center, told Reuters.

The report found that trees were integral to agricultural landscapes in all parts of the world, with the exceptions of arid North Africa and West Asia.

Simons said the report indicated a new front for fighting climate change. Farmers would do more to preserve trees if they got credits under a new U.N. climate pact due to be agreed at a meeting in Copenhagen in December.

Negotiators are looking at ways to slow deforestation in developing nations -- deforestation accounts for 20 percent of all emissions of greenhouse gases from human sources.

"This study offers convincing evidence that farms and forests are in now way mutually exclusive," said Wangari Maathai, a Kenyan environmentalist who won the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize for a tree-planting campaign across Africa.

At the end of the last Ice Age about 10,000 years ago, natural forests covered about 70 percent of the world's land area. They now cover only about 26 percent.

Net deforestation rates, according to the FAO, slowed to 7.3 million hectares per year from 2000-05, an area the size of Sierra Leone or Panama, from 8.9 million in 1990-2000.

(Editing by Angus MacSwan)

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Beetles, wildfire: Double threat in warming world

Charles J. Hanley, Associated Press Yahoo News 23 Aug 09;

HAINES JUNCTION, Yukon Territory – A veil of smoke settled over the forest in the shadow of the St. Elias Mountains, in a wilderness whose spruce trees stood tall and gray, a deathly gray even in the greenest heart of a Yukon summer.

"As far as the eye can see, it's all infested," forester Rob Legare said, looking out over the thick woods of the Alsek River valley.

Beetles and fire, twin plagues, are consuming northern forests in what scientists say is a preview of the future, in a century growing warmer, as the land grows drier, trees grow weaker and pests, abetted by milder winters, grow stronger.

Dying, burning forests would then only add to the warming.

It's here in the sub-Arctic and Arctic — in Alaska, across Siberia, in northernmost Europe, and in the Yukon and elsewhere in northern Canada — that Earth's climate is changing most rapidly. While average temperatures globally rose 0.74 degrees Celsius (1.3 degrees Fahrenheit) in the past century, the far north experienced warming at twice that rate or greater.

In Russia's frigid east, some average temperatures have risen more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), with midwinter mercury spiking even higher. And "eight of the last 10 summers have been extreme wildfire seasons in Siberia," American researcher Amber J. Soja pointed out by telephone from central Siberia.

Along with shrinking the polar ice cap and thawing permafrost, scientists say, the warming of the Arctic threatens to turn boreal forest — the vast cover of spruce, pine and other conifers blanketing these high latitudes — into less of a crucial "sink" absorbing carbon dioxide and more of a source, as megatons of that greenhouse gas rise from dead, burning and decaying wood.

American forest ecologist Scott Green worries about a "domino effect."

"These things may occur simultaneously," said the researcher from the University of Northern British Columbia. "If the bark beetles kill the trees, you'll have lots of dead, dry wood that will create a really, really hot fire, and then sometimes you don't get trees regenerating on the site."

Dominoes may already be falling in western North America.

From Colorado to Washington state, an unprecedented, years-long epidemic of mountain pine beetle has killed 2.6 million hectares (6.5 million acres) of forest. The insect has struck even more devastatingly to the north, in British Columbia, where clouds of beetles have laid waste to 14 million hectares (35 million acres) — twice the area of Ireland. It is expected to kill 80 percent of the Canadian province's lodgepole pines before it's finished.

Farther north, in the Yukon, the pine beetle isn't endemic — yet. Here it's the spruce bark beetle that has eaten its way through 400,000 hectares (1 million acres) of woodland, and even more in neighboring Alaska, in a 15-year-old epidemic unmatched in its longevity and extent.

"It's a fingerprint of climate change," Aynslie Ogden, senior researcher for the Yukon Forest Management Branch, said in Whitehorse, the territorial capital. "The intensity and severity and magnitude of the infestation is outside the normal."

Hiking through the wild and beetle-ravaged Alsek valley, Legare, the Yukon agency's forest health expert, explained how the 6-millimeter (quarter-inch) insect does its damage.

"Usually the female bores into the tree first, followed by the male, and then they mate and they both excavate a main egg gallery which runs parallel to the wood grain," he said.

The hatched larvae, just beneath the outer bark, then feed via perpendicular galleries they bore around the tree, cutting off nutrients moving through the phloem and killing the plant. Its needles turn reddish, later gray, and eventually wind topples the dead wood.

Winter spells of minus-40-Celsius (minus-40-Fahrenheit) temperatures once killed off larvae, but those deep freezes now occur less often. And warmer summers enable some beetles to complete their reproductive cycle in one year instead of two, speeding up population growth.

Years of summer drought, meanwhile, weakened the spruces' ability to extrude sticky pitch, to trap and expel beetles. Because the snow-streaked peaks of the 5,000-meter-high (15,000-foot-high) St. Elias range block moisture from the Pacific, a mere 250 millimeters (10 inches) of precipitation falls each year. Even a slight shortfall stresses the trees.

The Yukon has experienced smaller, briefer beetle outbreaks in the past, fed by patches of fallen trees left by road construction. But "what makes this infestation different" is that climate change is a primary cause, said Legare.

As he spoke, smoke from dozens of fires, some nearby in the Yukon, some in distant Alaska, wafted over a landscape already bleak with dead forest.

In an authoritative 2007 assessment, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the U.N.-sponsored scientific network, cited multiple studies linking the spread of wildfires to warmer, drier conditions.

This June, in the latest such study, as early flames flared in California's wildfire season, Harvard scientists said the area burned in the western United States could increase by 50 percent by the 2050s, even under the best-case warming scenario projected by the IPCC.

In Siberia, "fire has been increasing, and there's an earlier fire season," Soja, of the U.S. National Institute of Aerospace, reported from the Sukachev Institute of Forestry in Krasnoyarsk. Her research this summer found that a warmer, drier climate appears to be stifling regrowth of burned-out areas on the Siberian forest's southern edge, turning them to grasslands.

In Canada, area burned is double what it was in the 1970s, despite greater firefighting capacity and some recent favorable weather, said Mike Flannigan, a fire researcher for the Canadian Forest Service.

He cited three key reasons: warmer temperatures are drying the forests, lengthening the fire season and generating more lightning, cause of the worst wilderness fires.

Flannigan worries, too, that future fires smoldering through the carbon-heavy peatlands that undergird much of the boreal region would pour unparalleled amounts of carbon dioxide, the main global-warming gas, into the skies, feeding an unstoppable cycle.

"The bottom line is if you get more fire, you get more emissions, which contributes to further warming, which contributes to more fires," he said in an interview from Ontario.

"The concern is that things may happen more rapidly than we anticipate. Even our most pessimistic scenarios may not be pessimistic enough."

Back here in smoky gray southwest Yukon, where things are happening, the 1,400 native Champagne-Aishihik people feel it most. The stricken forest's fallen trees are keeping them from traditional fur-trapping rounds, the streams seem warmer without thick cover overhead, and the fishing is off.

Their oral tradition tells of great change in the past, said the group's land manager, Graham Boyd. "They're now wondering what changed to have had this happen."

What's changed extends beyond Champagne-Aishihik lands to the rest of the Yukon, where forester Legare in his travels finds other insects — the northern spruce engraver, the aspen leaf miner, the willow miner — gaining an upper hand in unusual places in unexpected ways.

"Weird things, unprecedented things are happening," he said.

Over the top of the world in Siberia, they're girding for a surge in the highly destructive Siberian moth, a caterpillar that devours forests of pine, spruce, fir and larch.

"The moth loves warm and dry, and that's what's happening," said Nadezda M. Tchebakova, Soja's Siberian research partner. At the same time, she said from Krasnoyarsk, "the frequency and severity of fires should increase."

As the Yukon warms and burns, its foresters hope for at least an early warning on one immediate threat, the mountain pine beetle. They have set traps at the British Columbia border to alert them if the non-native insect moves northward.

"The Yukon pines probably don't have natural defenses. They may be uniquely susceptible to this pest," said ecologist Green. "Then you'll have the potential for fires in large areas of dead trees. With the needles still on them, they literally explode with fire."

Of her Yukon woodlands, Ogden said, "It's the right forest, the right climate type, and we expect the climate to warm. My sense is it" — the pine beetle — "is almost inevitable."

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Thousands flee raging wildfires in Greece

Nicholas Paphitis, Associated Press Google News 24 Aug 09;

ATHENS, Greece — A partial drop in gale-force winds early Monday offered hard-pressed Greek firefighters a brief respite after wildfires raged unchecked for two days north of Athens, burning houses and swathes of forest while forcing thousands to flee their homes.

But Fire Brigade officials cautioned that the fires still threatened inhabited areas on the capital's northern fringes, the eastern coastal town of Nea Makri and nearby Marathon — site of one of history's most famous battlegrounds.

"There are fewer hazardous points," Fire Brigade spokesman Yiannis Kappakis said. "But the blaze is still developing."

Several houses were gutted but there were no reports of deaths or injuries. There was huge damage to the countryside, however, with thousands of hectares of the area's rapidly dwindling forests gone.

Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis said the fire — one of more than 90 that broke out across Greece over the weekend — was hard to tame.

"The situation remains very difficult," he said after a fire brigade briefing. "The enormous (firefighting) effort will continue on all fronts throughout the night."

In Nea Makri, south of Marathon, local authorities said blaze stretching for 2.5-miles (four-kilometers) was tearing down a hillside towards some houses, and a dozen nuns were evacuated from a nearby Christian Orthodox convent.

"The situation is tragic right now, there's a huge fire coming our way" Nea Makri mayor Iordanis Loizos said. "There is nothing we can do ... but wait for the (water-dropping) planes at dawn."

Water-dropping aircraft were to resume operations at first light Monday, assisted by aircraft from France, Italy and Cyprus. More than 2,000 firefighters, soldiers and volunteers are fighting the blaze on the ground.

Officials have not said what started the fire. Hundreds of forest blazes plague Greece every summer and many are set intentionally — often by unscrupulous land developers or animal farmers seeking to expand their grazing land.

In many afflicted areas, despairing residents pleaded for firefighters and equipment that were nowhere to be seen.

On Sunday, thousands of residents of Athens' northern outskirts evacuated their homes, fleeing in cars or on foot. The fire destroyed several houses as it advanced across an area more than 30 miles (50 kilometers) in circumference.

Six major fires were burning early Monday across Greece. The Athens blaze started north of Marathon plain, and spread over Mount Penteli — on the city's limit to the north — threatening outlying suburbs.

Driven by gale-force winds, the blaze grew fastest near Marathon, from which the long-distance foot race takes its name, born from a legendary run after the 490 B.C Athenian victory over an invading Persian army.

A guard at the nearby Museum of Marathon said the fire at one point came within 50 yards (meters) of the building, whose exhibits include weapons and skeletons from the battle. However, its main front was moving south toward Nea Makri.

The fire also threatened the ancient fortress town of Rhamnus, home to two 2,500-year-old temples.

The mayor of Marathon said he had been "begging the government to send over planes and helicopters" to no avail.

"There are only two fire engines here; three houses are already on fire and we are just watching helplessly," mayor Spyros Zagaris told Greek TV.

Zagaris was among several local leaders who accused the government of having no plan to fight the fire.

Finance Minister Yiannis Papathanassiou responded: "This is not the time for criticism under these tragic conditions. We are fighting a difficult fight."

Another official said emergency workers were exhausted.

"The firefighters, soldiers and volunteers fighting the fire are tired and their equipment is being used constantly and there is fatigue there too," said deputy Interior Minister Christos Markoyiannakis.

Opposition politicians have been restrained in their criticism so far.

But both Communist Party leader Aleka Papariga and Giorgos Karatzaferis, head of populist right-wing Popular Orthodox Rally, said the government had learned nothing from the catastrophic summer fires of 2007, when 76 people died and several villages were totally destroyed in southern Greece.

A shift in wind helped halt the flames in the town of Agios Stefanos, a township on the fringes of Athens on the opposite side of Mount Penteli from Marathon. Most of its 10,000 inhabitants had evacuated Sunday afternoon. By nightfall, the town was empty, authorities said.

About 58 square miles (37,000 acres or 15,000 hectares) of forest, brush and olive groves have burned, according to Athens prefect Yiannis Sgouros. The highly flammable pine forests around Athens' northern suburbs helped the fire spread.

Sgouros said the full extent of the damage would take days to estimate.

Authorities evacuated two large children's hospitals, as well as campsites and homes in villages and outlying suburbs threatened by blazes that scattered ash across Athens. The flames also threatened a large monastery on Mount Penteli.

Elsewhere in Greece, serious fires were reported on the islands of Evia and Skyros in the Aegean Sea and Zakynthos in the west. Another large fire that started Saturday near the town of Plataea, 40 miles (60 kilometers) northwest of Athens, was spreading unchecked toward a coastal resort in western Attica.

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Study examines real consequences of carbon farming

Monash University, ScienceAlert 24 Aug 09;

Monash University's Australian Centre for Biodiversity (ACB) has launched a major research project into the benefits of 'carbon farming' -- the planting of trees to offset carbon emissions.

The five-year $4.9 million project will assess how effective and efficient carbon farming is at providing environmental benefits when compared to traditional farming, particularly during times of drought. Researchers will use the 2.4 million hectare Goulburn Broken catchment near Shepparton as an environmental case study.

Project Leader Dr Ross Thompson said the introduction of carbon farming was a positive step toward a more sustainable environment, but there are important knowledge gaps about its effects.

"There is concern that the carbon accrual and biodiversity benefits of revegetation may be counteracted by reductions in water yield. The project will forecast the effects of increasing reforestation on the Goulburn Broken catchment, by quantifying the water use, carbon storage and biodiversity values of different land uses, and understanding how increases in native vegetation affect those processes," Dr Thompson said.

"We will measure the exchange of carbon and water fluxes among soil, water, plants and the atmosphere and the impact this exchange will have on biodiversity values. Our sites will be situated within an agricultural zone which is most likely to be converted to carbon farming," Dr Thompson said.

Our sites will be selected within the Goulburn and Broken River valleys, considered to be Victoria's food bowl and one of the catchment's most at risk to ongoing drought and a drying climate. The research will focus on land uses including dry land agriculture, tree plantings of a range of ages and remnant woodland, and assesses terrestrial, aquatic and soil biodiversity.

The research results will be applicable to other catchment areas and act as a 'model' for future land-use planning.

"Carbon farming is looming as an important new land use both in Australia and internationally. Our research will identify both the costs and benefits of tree planting for carbon accrual. It essential information to allow land managers and landholders to make informed decisions, particularly in the face of the economic and social forces occurring as a result of the current drought " Dr Thompson said.

The research project assembles an expert team from Monash University including scientists who specialise in forest ecology, soil processes, terrestrial and freshwater ecology, and landscape modelling. Victorian Department of Sustainability and Environment and, Environmental Protection Authority Victoria will also provide scientists to take part in the research.

The research is funded by an ARC Linkage grant with substantial contributions from the Victorian Department of Sustainability and Environment, Catchment Management Authorities (Goulburn Broken, North Central), EPA Victoria and the investment company Kilter Pty Ltd.

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Young People Step Up Pressure on World Leaders to Clinch a Crucial Climate Deal in Copenhagen

UNEP 23 Aug 09;

Daejeon/Nairobi, 23 August 2009 - Rallies in 100 cities will be organized by young people across the world as part of a major push to persuade governments to Seal a meaningful Deal at the crucial UN climate convention meeting in Copenhagen in just under 110 days time.

Youth delegates pledged to keep global warming high on the international agenda as the Tunza International Youth Conference on Climate Change ended today in Daejeon, Republic of Korea.

"Climate change is the greatest threat we are facing in the 21st century, and many countries are vulnerable. If we the children and youth don't act now, we cannot be sure there will be a future for us, for future generations. We want to make sure that future generations will inherit a better place to live in," outgoing Tunza Youth Advisory Board member, 22-year old Jessie James Marcellones from the Philippines, said.

Regional Action Plans, agreed during the conference and covering Asia and the Pacific, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, North America, and West Asia include:

* Mobilizing youth for the upcoming UN climate change meeting that opens on 7 December in the Danish capital;

* Reaching out to other environmental groups, especially during the September 21-25 Climate Week;

* Educating others about the Copenhagen meeting on campuses, in school and among churches, sports teams and more;

* Letter-writing, phone banking, visiting officials to 'Seal the Deal';

* Social Networking through the Unite for Climate, Facebook, Twitter and other e-fora;

* College campaigns and tree planting initiatives.

The 220 youths, aged 15-24, were joined by 580 children in Daejeon City in South Korea. It has been the largest conference of young people on climate change ever.

Seventeen-year-old Yaiguili Alvarado Garcia, from the Kuna indigenous group in Panama, expressed the need for adults to hear and listen and understand why the young need their support.

"There are a lot of indigenous cultures that are losing, because nobody wants to hear what we want to say, what we know about Mother Earth, and it is frustrating for us because we have so many things to share and the world doesn't listen to us," she said. "There are many things we asked the governments to do and we know it is hard, but we want to work with them, we just want to make a better place for the children, for the animals and plants. It is about time we stop thinking just for us and think also for other beings that cannot speak for themselves. It is time to stop being selfish."

Yaiguili Alvarado Garcia is among the 13 newly elected Tunza Youth Advisory Council members. The Tunza Youth Advisory Council has two Youth Advisors for each of the six regions, and two representing indigenous groups. The Council advises UNEP on better ways of engaging young people in its work and represents youth in international environmental negotiations.

"This global Youth and Children gathering under Seal the Deal Campaign is the largest international gathering of young people this year advocating for climate change action. Their voices will and must be heard because they will inherit the outcomes of our actions," said the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon.

"The young people of the world are the generation that will inherit the transformational decisions governments need to take in less than 110 days time. If their passion, commitment and ideas can be embraced by world leaders and governments over the coming days and weeks, then a climate agreement that can put the world on track to a low carbon, resource efficient Green Economy can be secured," said Achim Steiner, Under-Secretary General and Executive Director of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP).

UNEP organized the conference with the support of the UNEP National Committee for Korea, the Daejeon Metropolitan Government, and Tunza global programme partner, Bayer AG, as well as UNICEF, UNFPA, FAO, WMO, the World Organization of the Scout Movement, the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts and 350.org. Other private sector sponsors include Hyundai-Kia Automotive group and Samsung Engineering. Nickelodeon TV Asia is the media partner for the event.

About Tunza

The Tunza Youth Strategy, adopted in February this year by UNEP's Governing Council, is a long-term strategy to engage young people in environmental activities and in the work of UNEP. The word 'Tunza' means 'to treat with care or affection' in Kiswahili. The Tunza initiative aims to develop activities in the areas of environmental awareness and information exchange on the environment for children and youth. For more information, please visit www.unep.org/Tunza/

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Clunker Program's Environmental Merits Questioned

NPR 23 Aug 09;

The Cash for Clunkers program was touted as a way to stimulate the flat-lining auto industry and to improve the environment. President Obama celebrated the program as a triumph. But while dealers could barely keep up with demand, questions remain about the plan's effect on Mother Earth.

"The program has been wonderful for the economy, but it's been only a middling success for greenhouse gas emissions," Michael Gerrard, director of Columbia Law School's new Center for Climate Change Law tells Weekend Edition host Liane Hansen.

To start, Gerrard says, "there was a provision in the law that automobiles over 25 years old could not be traded in. And that made no sense from an environmental standpoint. It was put there to help the dealers in used auto parts, but it really didn't help the environment at all."

Additionally, "the minimum required difference in the mileage for the old vehicles that were traded in and the new vehicles that were bought was just 4 miles per gallon — which is not much of a difference at all."

To make a bigger impact, the government could have required a greater mileage differential, Gerrard says. "You could have had a minimum of 15 mpg differential, which would have made a big difference."

People did buy cars with better average gas mileage, Gerrard says, "but it is still not a cost-effective way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions."

"There are some calculations that it cost somewhere between $200 and $400 per ton of carbon dioxide reduced, depending on what assumptions are used," he says. "That's way above the market price of carbon and way above many, many other methods of reducing greenhouse gas emissions."

At the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative — an American cap-and-trade system that trades in carbon — carbon dioxide is selling for about $3 a ton, Gerrard says. In Europe, it's around $18 or $20. "So the market price of carbon dioxide trading is much, much lower than the cost of reducing a ton of carbon dioxide under the Cash for Clunkers program."

More cost-effective ways to reduce greenhouse gases would include increasing energy efficiency in the industrial sector or in commercial and residential lighting, Gerrard suggests. Or providing combined heat and power systems in commercial and industrial settings. "All would be several orders of magnitude more cost-effective from a fuel-saving and greenhouse perspective than Cash for Clunkers was."

Successful or not, the government is putting the brakes on the popular program. After 8 p.m. Monday, car buyers will no longer be able to trade in their gas-guzzling vehicles for rebates of up to $4,500.

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