Best of our wild blogs: 9 Oct 09

Tanah Merah
Add stingray to the list from Singapore Nature, Moray eel in action! and more critters from wild shores of singapore.

Thought coral reefs were the “rainforests of the sea”?
from Pulau Hantu

“How cities drive plants extinct”
from The Biodiversity crew @ NUS

The one with two pairs of legs per segment
from Life's Indulgences

Dusky Broadbill builds a nest
from Bird Ecology Study Group

Pacific Swallow starting a nest
from Bird Ecology Study Group

Check out this beautiful mould!
from The Lazy Lizard's Tales

That's Gross (but cool)
What if you had a penis ten times your body length? from Aristotle's Lantern

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Singapore's sand shortage

The hourglass effect
The Economist 8 Oct 09;

Seven maids with seven mops might fail, but Singapore gets close

“LOOKING for sea-sand for reclamation project in Singapore. Prompt reply is greatly appreciated.” Many such pleas can be found on Alibaba.com, a popular Chinese trading-website. Malaysia banned sand exports as long ago as 1997. Indonesia followed suit in 2007 on environmental and, some say, political grounds. Ever since, it has become harder for Singapore to secure supplies for its booming construction industry and sea-fill plans.

The ban by Indonesia, its biggest supplier, led to a surge in the price of sand, used in both concrete and land-reclamation. The government averted a short-term crisis by releasing sand from its stockpile and helping contractors find new sources. However, Indonesia’s embargo, followed swiftly by a Chinese ban on sales of sand to Taiwan, set in train a domino effect.

Environmentalists argue that large-scale sand-dredging can deplete fish stocks and cause erosion, risking landslides and flooding. So Singaporean contractors turned to Cambodia, where prices are low and environmental standards almost non-existent. But this May Hun Sen, Cambodia’s prime minister, outlawed exports of sand. Again, environmental pressures were cited, but there may also have been a political motive.

After the Cambodian ban Vietnam’s sand exports surged, achieving volumes seven times as big as last year, with Singapore the main customer. Then last month Vietnam’s construction ministry called for a temporary halt to the trade, to assess its impact on the environment and the local building industry. NGOs in Thailand and Bangladesh have also pressed their governments to reject recent requests to allow sales of sand to Singapore.

Sand prices, which peaked at over S$60 ($43) a tonne in 2007, have fallen during the slowdown. Simon Lee, of the Singapore Contractors’ Association, believes a new regulation requiring sand importers to have alternative back-up supplies will help insulate his members from further turbulence. A spokesman for Singapore’s national-development ministry adds that construction companies have been importing sand from “various” regional countries and claims that “recent restrictions on sand exports have not affected the supply of construction sand to Singapore.” But global demand for dwindling supplies of sand and other materials is mounting. Critics say that Singapore needs to shift faster from building cheap but resource-intensive concrete structures towards more expensive construction techniques that use, say, more steel and glass.

Relying as it does on low-wage, low-skilled migrant workers from South Asia, Singapore’s construction industry is not yet ready for such a high-tech transformation. And in the short term there are still plenty of willing suppliers. Tim Sintop, an American whose trading company wants to export sand from Myanmar and has already secured several contracts in Singapore, is upbeat: “The more bans there are elsewhere, the better for us.”

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How cities drive plants extinct: in Singapore and elsewhere

Matt Walker, BBC News 8 Oct 09;

How towns and cities cause the extinction of local plants has been revealed for the first time.

An international team of botanists has compared extinction rates of plants within 22 cities around the world.

Both Singapore and New York City in the US now contain less than one-tenth of their original vegetation, reveals the analysis published in Ecology Letters.

However, San Diego, US and Durban, South Africa still retain over two-thirds of their original flora.

Both the pace of urban change and how many plants remain in a city are good predictors of whether plant species will survive there in the future, says the report.

"The rapid and ongoing growth of cities and towns significantly threatens global biodiversity," says Dr Amy Hahs, a scientist working at the Australian Research Centre for Urban Ecology at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Melbourne, Australia.

So Hahs and colleagues from universities in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, the UK and US came together to try to understand how this process occurs, in order to find ways to prevent it happening.

For the first time, the team compiled raw data on plant extinctions within 22 urban areas, organised into three categories.

First, they examined cities in which the native flora started to be transformed more than 400 years ago.

Almost all are European cities, including Glasgow in the UK, Vienna in Austria, and Zurich in Switzerland. Hong Kong is also included as it experienced extensive landscape transformation prior to 1600AD, before urbanisation.

They also categorised cities in which the native flora started to be transformed after 1600AD, but before any floral surveys could be completed. Such cities include New York City and Chicago in the US and Auckland, New Zealand and Singapore.

The third category included cities that had large areas of native flora at the time they were surveyed, but subsequently were transformed by urban development. Los Angeles and San Diego in the US, Melbourne and Adelaide in Australia and Capetown and Durban in South Africa were included here.

By doing this, the researchers were able to unpick how the history of a town or city influenced how many plants became extinct as a consequence.

Future threats

Cities belonging to the first two categories had by far the highest extinction rates.

"For example, Singapore and New York City have both lost 600 species of plants from an initial species richness of 2179 and 1361 species respectively," says Dr Hahs.

However, in general, cities with more than 30% vegetation cover had much lower extinction rates.

For example, San Diego and Durban both retain over 60% of their native vegetation cover, and have both only lost only 11 species each from an initial floral diversity of 926 and 2218 species respectively.

"Under current planning and design practices, it is very hard to maintain 30% native vegetation within an urban area, but finding ways around this problem either through innovative design or restoration will help preserve local biodiversity," says Dr Hahs.

The analysis also revealed that more recently built cities can expect to lose a significant proportion of their native plants over the coming decades.

"The cities we expect to lose the most plant species over the next 100 to 150 years are Melbourne and Adelaide," says Dr Hahs.

Indeed, unless more is done to intervene, the researchers expect Melbourne to lose more than half its 1200 original plant species over the next 100 years.

"If we want to keep plant diversity in our cities, we need to protect and restore areas of native vegetation," says Dr Hahs.

"Plants and people can coexist in urban areas. We just need to consider vegetation as a long-term investment rather than as a disposable asset."

See also “How cities drive plants extinct” from The Biodiversity crew @ NUS blogn

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Should conservation groups focus on cuddly, popular animals?

David Nussbaum and Robert May decide the polar bears' fate
From Eureka, Times Online 8 Oct 09;

YES says David Nussbaum, chief executive of WWF-UK

At WWF, we’ve always placed protection of the world’s species and their habitats at the very heart of our mission. But with the world experiencing a serious economic downturn, and with climate change dominating the environmental agenda, should working to save well-known animals such as tigers and whales remain a conservation priority?

For us the answer is unequivocally yes. For a start, the animals we campaign for require large, well-connected habitats and healthy ecological systems to survive, so protecting them in turn benefits other species that share their living space, including people. While this in itself is a good reason for working with popular species our motives run somewhat deeper. Having worked in conservation for almost 50 years, we have seen how wildlife, the environment and human activity are interlinked, and it has become clear that any effort to safeguard the natural world must be a package deal. There’s little point saving the orang-utan if in the future there’s no rainforest for it to live in because of deforestation and climate change.

Without question further management is required to maintain populations of species, including less well-known ones, and this is generally supported by large-scale landscape conservation. We’ve made it a priority to work across the globe to halt — or even reverse where we can — dramatic declines in wildlife species and their habitats.

It’s an uphill struggle. Over the past 40 years 1,700 species have declined by nearly a third and almost a quarter of all mammal species and a third of amphibians are threatened with extinction. Much of this is caused by the effects of human consumption; our demand for natural resources exceeds the planet’s capacity to replenish itself by almost a third. In future there will be even more of us sharing these limited resources, which is why we are trying to encourage people to move towards a more sustainable way of life.

To make a lasting impact on the way we live we must feel strongly connected to the environment. “Flagship” species can help us to make that connection. We can see them on television, in books, on the internet and sometimes even in the flesh, and there are few people who don’t relate to these animals on some level.

So a threatened species such as the Amur leopard — a creature hunted to the point of extinction by Man so that there are fewer than 35 left in the wild — can be a key tool in helping us to tell the story of a fragile planet. A world without tigers, elephants or polar bears would be an impoverished one. Sadly, we are far too close to this possibility becoming a reality and the decline of such icons can only signal a greater problem in the ecosystem as a whole.

Thankfully it’s not too late to act and, in the words of Sir Peter Scott, one of the founders of WWF: “We shall not save everything, but we shall save a great deal more than if we never tried.”

NO says Robert May, former President of the Royal Society

It is extraordinary how little we know about the diversity of animal and plant species with which we share the world. Vertebrates, and particularly birds and mammals, are relatively well known and total around 50,000 species. The roughly 300,000 known species of plants probably represent about 90 per cent of their true total, but for the vastly greater number of invertebrate species our knowledge is woeful. Yet many believe that invertebrates — with more than a million species known to science, and a true total between three million and ten million or more — are the small things that run the world, playing the central part in the delivery of ecosystem services (decomposers, pollinators and much else) upon which human beings, like all other species, depend.

Given our ignorance of how many insect and other invertebrate species there are on Earth today, we cannot make direct counts of numbers of species threatened with extinction. But we can make indirect estimates. For bird and mammal species, at least one became extinct each year over the past century. This may sound reassuringly low, but it corresponds to an extinction rate 100 to 1,000 times higher than the average over the half-billion-year sweep of the fossil record.

This puts us on the tip of a sixth great wave of mass extinctions, similar to the “Big Five” in the fossil record (such as the one that did for the dinosaurs). The sixth differs from the previous five in that it is the direct result of the activities of a single other species, namely us.

Our pattern of differential knowledge reflects the distribution of the labour force of taxonomists and systematists, which is distributed roughly one third each to vertebrates, plants and invertebrates. In terms of the under-lying workload of species numbers, the distribution should be more like 1 per cent on vertebrates, 9 per cent on plants, and 90 per cent on invertebrates. Things get worse when we look at the conservation research literature: of some 3,000 papers in the two major journals, 70 per cent deal with vertebrates, 20 per cent with plants, and 10 per cent with invertebrates (and of these, one half were butterflies, a kind of honorary bird).

Our disproportionate focus on birds and mammals, along with a neglect of most invertebrates, reflects deep-rooted and unthinking attitudes. The megafauna are charismatic; invertebrates are creepy-crawlies. These same prejudices are reflected in most conservation activities. The worthy NGOs are not to be blamed for this.

Campaigns based on attractive mammals and colourful, interesting birds work. It is hard to imagine a successful fundraising campaign for a threatened slug species, never mind the important role that it might play in ecosystem function.

The real challenge is to deflect more funds into understanding and preserving endangered but uncharismatic invertebrates. Ultimately, our aim must be to save as much as we can of the evolutionary history and heritage present in today’s biodiversity, and to recognise that this requires us to use the emotional resonance that the charismatic megafauna engenders. This calls for a tricky blend of dispassionate appraisal of species’ roles in keeping ecosystems functioning, along with passionate motivation: a meld of head and heart.

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Malaysia's Palm Oil Launches Campaign To Fight Misinformation

Salmy Hashim, Bernama 9 Oct 09;

WASHINGTON, Oct 9 (Bernama) -- Malaysia is turning up its campaign to fight misinformation against palm oil and timber products in the United States in a series of forums from New Orleans, Louisiana to Washington DC from October 3-11 led by Minister of Plantation Industries and Commodities, Tan Sri Bernard Dompok.

"We are greatly concerned by the campaigns targeting the palm oil industry. These ... can be biased leading to distorted conclusions about the environmental damage due to palm oil cultivation.

"There is definitely a concerted non-governmental organisation flavour to these accusations that paint a bleak scenario on the sustainability of the palm oil industry," he said in his keynote address at the Roundtable Forum on Sustainable Development of Palm Oil here on Thursday.

He pointed out to the unfair calculation of carbon emissions for palm oil based on comparisons with carbon stocks of the pristine rain forests as the starting point.

Dompak said voluntary measures have been taken by the palm oil industry to obtain certification under the watchful eye of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO).

"What is most disconcerting is that when the first Certified Sustainable Palm Oil hit the markets, our critics made a complete turn and criticised the very RSPO process that they advocated in the first place," he added

In an interview, Dompok said 157,000 hectares of land was planted with oil palm that met with the criteria set by the roundtable, which was expected to increase to 2 million hectares over the next few years.

He added, his ministry through Malaysian Palm Oil Council (MPOC) initiated the Malaysian Palm Oil Wildlife Conservation Fund dedicated towards studies, efforts and initiatives in conserving wildlife and the environment.

"We have established that there is a highly viable population of orang utan in the wild, despite the palm oil industry," said Dompak, referring to a survey conducted in his home state of Sabah.

Malaysia, one of the biggest producers and exporters of palm oil in the world, produced 17.7 million tonnes of palm oil last year.

Of this, 15 million tonnes were exported to more than 150 countries around the world, he said, which reflected buyers' recognition of Malaysia as a reliable supplier of palm oil.

MPOC Chairman Lee Yeow Chor, in addressing the criticisms made against the the palm oil industry, said the Malaysian government and private sector were serious about protecting the environment while mindful of the 3 P's - People, Planet and Profit.

Saying that one of the worst enemies of the environment is poverty, he added that the oil palm industry has provided employment to at least 800,000 people in Malaysia.

The industry has emerged as a signifiant foreign exchange earner raking in an average of RM 30 billion for the past 3 years, Lee said.

The minister and his delegation comprising the Malaysian Palm Oil Board, MPOC and the private sector, are scheduled to meet the US Trade Representative, US Department of Agriculture, United Soybean Board and International Wood Products Association before departing for home on Sunday.

-- BERNAMA

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Tropics face fish famine due to climate change, report warns

The first study to look at how climate change will affect food supplies offshore warns of severe declines in fish stocks in some of the world's poorest regions

Suzanne Goldenberg, guardian.co.uk 8 Oct 09;

Fish populations in the tropics could fall by as much as 40% over the next half century because of global warming, jeopardising a vital food source for the developing world, a new study published today has found.

The waters off Indonesia - which rank among the most plentiful areas for fish today - could see supplies fall by well over 20% by 2055 because of changes in ocean conditions. Fishermen operating in US coastal waters (excluding Alaska and Hawaii) could also face large declines in fish stocks, as would those working off Chile and China.

"Fish are very sensitive to temperatures, and when the temperatures warm because of climate change, the fish will move away. And some of the species - those that can't swim that far - may locally go extinct," said William Cheung, lead author of the study.

The study, conducted by the Sea Around Us project at the University of British Columbia, is the first to look at how climate change will affect food supplies offshore. It is published in the journal, Global Change Biology.

But not all regions would be losers. Cooler climates would see their catch potential rise by between 30% and 70% by 2055, with Norway, Greenland, Alaska and the east coast of Russia seeing the biggest increases. This is because fish will migrate northwards as the oceans warm to seek out suitable cooler waters.

But while the overall productivity of the world's oceans will remain roughly the same, the sharp declines in fish stocks in Asia, the Caribbean, and semi-enclosed seas like the Mediterranean could cause severe shortfalls in some of the poorest regions of the world.

Sub-saharan Africa and south Asia are already threatened with food shortages because of climate change. A study last week by the International Food Policy Research Institute projected sharp declines in rice and wheat crops by mid-century because of global warming, which could see more than 25 million malnourished children around the world.

In many parts of Africa and south-east Asia, people depend on fish and seafood for half of their animal protein.

"It is devastating," said Daniel Pauly, a marine biologist at the University of British Columbia who worked on the study. "Basically you have lots of people living at the edge of the sea. They depend on fisheries, not in the way we do in northern countries. So income-wise and consumption-wise they are affected directly by the decline in catch."

The study used computer modelling to gauge the effects of climate change on more than 1,000 species of fish, from krill to shark, across the 20 largest fishing zones.

It did not take into account the effects of ocean acidification - caused by more carbon dioxide dissolving in seawater and which scientists expect will reinforce the effects of warming on the oceans. "We think that our estimates should be considered conservative because adding ocean acidification into the equation would further decrease future fishery potential," said Cheung. He said a follow-up study would look at the effects of acidification.

The scientists found that the warming seas were driving fish from their current habitats, with for example, tropical mainstays like snapper moving north. Some will successfully migrate to colder waters - reflected in the projected increase in fish populations in more northern waters. But others will not survive the changes. "Not all of them will make it. They can handle it only by shifting more energy to resisting the higher temperatures, which means less growth and less potential for harvesting," said Pauly.

The study did not focus on individual species. However, scientists said the changes brought by warming seas would see the decline and possible disappearance of familiar fish even in colder waters, like those off Britain. Cod stocks will flee British waters for Iceland, Norway and Greenland.

Tropical Regions To Be Hardest Hit By Fisheries Shifts Caused By Climate Change
ScienceDaily 8 Oct 09;

Major shifts in fisheries distribution due to climate change will affect food security in tropical regions most adversely, according to a study led by the Sea Around Us Project at The University of British Columbia.

In the first major study to examine the effects of climate change on ocean fisheries, a team of researchers from UBC and Princeton University finds that climate change will produce major shifts in productivity of the world's fisheries, affecting ocean food supply throughout the world. The study is published October 7 in the journal Global Change Biology.

"Our projections show that climate change may lead to a 30 to 70 per cent increase in catch potential in high-latitude regions and a drop of up to 40 per cent in the tropics," says lead author William Cheung, a researcher at the University of East Anglia in the UK who conducted the study while at UBC.

"Many tropical island residents rely heavily on the oceans for their daily meals. These new findings suggest there's a good chance this important food source will be greatly diminished due to climate change."

Previous studies have looked at how climate change affects global food supply but were limited to land-based food sources. These studies have also predicted that tropical areas will see a decline in land productivity.

The team, led by UBC Fisheries professor Daniel Pauly, also found that regions with the highest increase in catch potential by 2055 include Norway, Greenland, Alaska and the east coast of Russia. Meanwhile, regions with the biggest loss in catch potential include Indonesia, the United States (excluding Alaska and Hawaii), Chile and China.

While greater catch potential in colder regions might appear beneficial, the authors caution that more research is needed to account for the multitude of dynamic factors that affect every ecosystem.

"We need to keep the big picture in mind when looking at the 'winners' and 'losers' of climate change," says Pauly. "Major shifts in fish populations will create a host of changes in ocean ecosystems likely resulting in species loss and problems for the people who now catch them."

"While warmer waters might attract new species to colder regions, the rise in temperature might make the environment inhospitable to current species in the region that cannot move to even higher latitudes. Often these species are important to the diets and culture of native subsistence fishermen."

The team's projections also show that Canada's overall catch potential will remain approximately the same. The west coast may see a decrease of almost 20 per cent from 2005 to 2055 while the east coast may get a 10 per cent boost.

The study analyzed 1,066 species ranging from krill to sharks that constitute roughly 70 per cent of the world's catch. The authors used models that include a large number of environmental and biological factors that affect fisheries. They ran these models through two climate change scenarios, one more conservative than the other, and measured the impact of the scenarios on fish distribution from the years 2005 to 2055. The authors did not include the highest emission level scenario considered by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which would have produced even more dramatic results.
Adapted from materials provided by University of British Columbia, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

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Kupang fishermen complain over fish-killing oil spill

Yemris Fointuna, The Jakarta Post 8 Oct 09;

Traditional fishermen in Kupang regency, East Nusa Tenggara (NTT) province have flung complaints over the crude oil spill polluting Timor Sea off Kolbano beach.

The fish catchers said the oil, which allegedly comes from the Montara oil well belonging to PTTEP Australasia, was only 20 miles away from the coast.

Gab Oma, a fisherman, said Thursday that he found thousands of floating dead fish when he went fishing on Tuesday.

"So many different kinds of fish died, namely red kakaps, tunas, and even dolphins. They smell very bad," he said.

The fishermen predicted the oil spill would reach the shore in a week.

Oma said that his financial earnings had dropped drastically in the last few weeks.

"I used to catch at least 100 red kakaps in one night. But last night, I only got four," he said.

Oma as well as other fishermen grabbed two jerrycans of polluted sea water and took pictures using cell-phones of the floating dead fish to be shown to the authorites.

"We need the government to take action as soon as possible regarding this issue," said Mustada, another fisherman, who headed a group of fishermen called the Timor Sea Traditional Fishermen Alliance.

The chief of the Indonesian Navy base in Kupang, Commodore Amri Husein, said that he had sent two teams to patrol around the reported spill site but found no floating oil.

As many as 500,000 liters of crude oil were leaked from the Montara offshore drilling rig off northwestern Australia. PTTEP Australasia has admitted that the rig has been leaking oil and gas into the sea since August 21.

The drilling rig is located about 150 miles (250 kilometers) to the northwest of the Kimberley coast in the Western Australia state.

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Hawksbill turtles returning to nest in Malacca, study finds

Chen Pelf Yeen, The Star 9 Oct 09;

ALOR GAJAH: A study to track hawksbill turtles in waters off the west coast of the peninsula has revealed that the critically-endangered species is returning to Malacca to nest.

The findings emerged from an ongoing research involving eight turtles that were tagged with transmitters and released after nesting in Pulau Upeh and Padang Kemunting.

The research was initiated by WWF Malaysia and the State Fisheries Department three years ago.

WWF’s Conservation of Hawksbill Turtles officer Lau Min Min said the turtles were tracked as far as the Riau Archipelago in Indonesia and Singapore.

The turtles would swim to the Riau islands and Singapore to feed but they would return to Pulau Upeh and Padang Kemunting to nest between April and September, she said in an interview.

Lau said the research was also to determine the feeding habits of the turtles along the Malacca coastline and their migration patterns in the Straits of Malacca.

“The study will also enable scientists and planners to better understand the habitat use in the coastal waters off Malacca which is crucial due to future mega coastal development,” she said.

Lau said the wildlife authorities together with the Malacca state government should take steps to preserve and protect the nesting sites on Pulau Upeh and Padang Kemunting.

On Aug 29, 2006, a hawksbill nesting on Pulau Upeh and named Puteri Pulau Upeh, became the first such turtle in the Straits of Malacca to be fitted with the satellite transmitter.

Seven more turtles were subsequently tagged over the last three years.

Six of the turtles were tracked to the Riau Archipelago while two others were last located in waters south of Singapore.

Last year, 189 hawksbill nesting sites with a total of 23,619 eggs were recorded on Pulau Upeh and Padang Kemunting, representing almost 40% of the estimated 450 turtles nesting sites found in Peninsular Malaysia.

In July this year, the Malacca state government deferred plans to allow a private developer to revive an abandoned resort on Pulau Upeh pending the outcome of environmental and fisheries impact assessment reports.

Tracking Hawksbills in Melaka 2009
WWF 9 Oct 09;

Padang Kemunting, Melaka - WWF-Malaysia, in partnership with the Department of Fisheries Melaka, has successfully deployed a satellite transmitter on a female hawksbill turtle (Eretmochelys imbricata) in the wee hours of 5th September 2009 after she successfully nested. She was released at approximately 0600 hrs.

This is the second and final deployment of satellite transmitters in the State of Melaka for this year by WWF-Malaysia; the other had been deployed on a hawksbill nesting at Pulau Upeh on 25th August 2009.

WWF-Malaysia Conservation of Hawksbill Turtles & Painted Terrapins of Melaka, Team Leader, Lau Min Min said "This research, now in its fourth year, is being conducted to determine the feeding habitats of the hawksbills nesting along the Melaka coastline and their migration patterns in the Strait of Malacca. This study will also enable scientists and planners to better understand their habitat use in the coastal waters of Melaka which is crucial in a state with mega coastal development plans. These hawksbills undertake their long journey every few years to Melaka beaches solely to complete their reproductive cycle".

Until 2008, eight hawksbills have been tracked by WWF-Malaysia in co-operation with the State Department of Fisheries using this satellite telemetry technology. Six of the turtles were tracked to the waters of Riau Archipelago in Indonesia whereas two others were last located in southern Singaporean waters. The hawksbills’ journey was mapped in www.wwf.org.my

Pulau Upeh and Padang Kemunting were specially chosen as deployment sites this year, since these nesting grounds support two of the largest nesting populations of hawksbills in Melaka. The state is home to the largest nesting population in Malaysia, second only to Sabah’s Turtle Islands. Each year approximately 300-400 nestings are recorded by the State Department of Fisheries. The statistics of the two hawksbills tagged this year are as below.

Click on image to enlarge.

As the hawksbills’ marine home extends beyond Malaysian territorial waters, regional co-operation and partnership are important factors in saving these ancient mariners. Guided by the satellite telemetry, WWF-Malaysia will be able to track their journey back to their feeding grounds. Hawksbill turtles are only dependent on the beach for egg incubation and spend most of their lifetime in coastal waters, feeding in coral reefs. Results from this research are crucial for a better understanding of their post-nesting movement and habitat use.

Notes to the Editor:
WWF-Malaysia and the Department of Fisheries Melaka are tracking hawksbills to:

• establish the migration routes and feeding grounds of the hawksbills to facilitate the protection of their marine habitat
• communicate migration routes and distant foraging grounds of hawksbills to relevant regional Memoranda of Understanding (MoUs) and Agreements to enhance regional marine turtle conservation strategies and partnerships (e.g. Indian Ocean-Southeast Asia Marine Turtle MoU and MoU on ASEAN Sea Turtle Conservation and Protection)

Satellite telemetry allows researchers to track turtles in the open ocean by attaching a Platform Transmitter Terminal (PTT) onto the shell of a turtle. The PTT transmits signals to orbiting satellites each time the turtle surfaces for air. The satellites then send the data to receiving stations on earth that researchers can access on their computers.

Sign up at wwf.org.my and help save turtles:

WWF-Malaysia’s “Egg=Life” campaign, launched on Earth Day 22nd April 2009 and to run until 30th September 2009, targets to gain pledges from 40,000 members of the public. People who sign up in support of the campaign either at ground events or at wwf.org.my will pledge to:

• support laws that will ban the sale and consumption of all turtle eggs throughout Malaysia
• support the call for comprehensive and holistic Federal legislation to conserve marine turtles
• never consume turtle eggs, or trade in turtles or their parts

Each signature in support of WWF-Malaysia’s “Egg=Life” campaign will lend weight to efforts aimed at improving turtle protection legislation in Malaysia. We need to take action to save our endangered turtles today because turtles play a critical role in keeping marine ecosystems healthy; the same ecosystems which sustain our fisheries and tourism industries that provide food and livelihoods for millions of people.

Students Help Save Turtles With Signatures
WWF 9 Oct 09;

Petaling Jaya – Environmental awareness seems to be growing among Malaysian youths, if the enthusiastic support shown by students for WWF-Malaysia’s “Egg=Life” turtle conservation campaign is an indicator. By mid-September, students had helped to collect more than 15,000 signatures in support of the campaign, towards the target of 40,000 by 30th September 2009.

The following institutions collected more than 1,000 signatures each:
• City Harvest Church
• Fairview International School
• SMK Majakir Papar in Sabah
• Multimedia University (Melaka campus)
• Olympia College Kuantan
• Sunway University College
• Taylor’s College (Sri Hartamas campus)
• Taylor’s University College Environmental Club (Subang Jaya campus)
• Tunku Abdul Rahman College, Kuala Lumpur

In addition to helping collect signatures in support of turtle conservation, Olympia College Kuantan also hosted the “Telur Rangers”, three young ladies who collected signatures in support of the “Egg=Life” campaign during a Peninsular Malaysia-wide road trip from 26th July to 8th August 2009.

With such strong support for environmental causes from today’s Malaysian youth, there is hope for a bright future for our living planet. To find out more about the “Egg=Life” campaign supporters and the Telur Rangers, log on to www.wwf.org.my and click on the “Egg=Life” banner.

WWF-Malaysia’s “Egg=Life” campaign, launched on Earth Day 22nd April 2009 and to run until 30th September 2009, targets to gain pledges from 40,000 members of the public. People who sign up in support of the campaign either at ground events or at www.wwf.org.my will pledge to:

• support laws that will ban the sale and consumption of all turtle eggs throughout Malaysia
• support the call for comprehensive and holistic Federal legislation to conserve marine turtles
• never consume turtle eggs, or trade in turtles or their parts

ts

Each signature in support of WWF-Malaysia’s “Egg=Life” campaign will lend weight to efforts aimed at improving turtle protection legislation in Malaysia. We need to take action to save our endangered turtles today because turtles play a critical role in keeping marine ecosystems healthy; the same ecosystems which sustain our fisheries and tourism industries that provide food and livelihoods for millions of people.

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Dolphin is India's national aquatic animal

Union government chalks out major strategy to fix Ganga mess
Vibha Sharma, Tribune India 5 Oct 09;

New Delhi, October 5
Dolphin is now India’s national aquatic animal. The decision was taken today following a suggestion by Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar at a meeting of the National Ganga River Basin Authority (NGRBA), chaired by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, to initiate steps to rejuvenate the holy river. Another important decision was an approval to Mission Clean Ganga.

The NGRBA, an empowered legal authority, decided that by 2020 no untreated municipal sewage and industrial effluents will flow into Ganga. An estimated Rs 15,000 crore will be spent over the next 10 years to create necessary treatment and sewage infrastructure.

Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh said the new status for the dolphin would help save the rare freshwater species from disappearing from the country’s aqua map. “The way tiger represents the health of our forests, dolphin represents the health of the Ganga. Till dolphins come back to the Ganga, the river will not be considered clean,” the minister said after the meeting, which also discussed ways for cleaning the river in a systematic manner.

As per the Environment Minister, there are less than 2,000 dolphins in the river. He said a NREGA-type concurrent social audit would ensure that funds do not literally go down the drain this time. “The country has been spending extensively to clean up rivers. Between 1985 and 2009, Rs 916 crore were pumped in to help the Ganga Action Plan I and II take off. Where has the money gone? There’s an urgent need for a concurrent social audit,” he said, adding that the town-centric approach of GAP I and II has been replaced by basin-centric approach in Mission Clean Ganga.

“Also, the GAP concentrated largely on sewage treatment plants. Under the new plan, the catchment area development and riverfront development will be given more importance,” he said, adding that action has been initiated for third party evaluation of the scheme. Independent institutions will be appointed by December 2009. It was agreed that required resources will be provided by the Centre and states over 10-year period to be shared suitably between the parties after Planning Commission consultations.

Currently, only 20 per cent of municipal sewage flowing into Ganga is treated as there is a sewage treatment capacity of only around 1,000 million litre per day (MLD) against 3,000 mld sewage being generated in towns along the river.

The WWF last year said the river was among the 10 most endangered ones in the world. However, the river is dirtier now than in 1985, when GAP-I was initiated. It has much more bacteria because of increasing discharge of untreated domestic and industrial effluents. Also, the flow of the river has become sluggish at several locations due to dams and growing habitat pressure.

While the comprehensive river basin management plan will be ready by December 2010, the on-going sewage treatment projects will be put on fast-track.

The Environment Ministry will work with states to prepare specific action plans for dealing with problem of industrial pollution in Ganga Basin by January 31, 2010.

A Standing Committee of NGRBA, to be headed by the Union Finance Minister, will meet more frequently and review implementation. An empowered steering committee, headed by the Environment Secretary, will be set up for fast-track clearance of projects on JNNURM lines.

The World Bank has been engaged for a long-term support to the Ganga plan. In the first phase, an assistance of $1 billion is expected. The proposal of $3 million project has been already approved by the World Bank.

A proposal has also been submitted to the Finance Commission for a one-time allocation of Rs 1,320 crore for meeting operational and maintenance needs of STPs for five years.

Pilot projects of Sankat Mochan Foundation at Varanasi (pond based treatment) and National Botanical Research Institute (plant based wastewater management) at Hardwar have been approved, in order to encourage innovative approaches to river cleaning.

The three-hour-long meeting was attended by Uttarakhand Chief Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal, his Bihar counterpart besides representatives of West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh at the Prime Minister’s residence. The Centre was represented by Urban Development Minister Jaipal Reddy and Water Resources Minister Pawan Bansal, Evironment Minister Jairam Ramesh and deputy Chairman of Planning Commission Montek Singh Ahluwalia.

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Feud over lions puts a nation's pride at stake

Indian politicians argue over how best to protect the endangered big cats of Gujarat
Andrew Buncombe, The Independent 9 Oct 09;

The Asiatic lion is one of India's most treasured and majestic wild creatures, taking pride of place on the nation's national emblem. The animal is found in a tiny part of the western state of Gujarat and nowhere else in the world, and is now at the centre of an increasingly bitter struggle over how best to protect it from extinction.

India's federal government insists that to protect the rare lion population from the threat of an epidemic, some of the animals should be moved to a neighbouring state so the population is not concentrated in a single area and vulnerable to total wipeout. A location for this breakaway community has already been identified and millions of pounds has been spent to establish an appropriate habitat.

However, officials in Gujarat, headed by the fiery and controversial nationalist politician Narendra Modi, have defiantly refused to give up any of the creatures, insisting that the Indian government's appalling record at trying to save the tiger – whose total number now stands at little more than 3,500 – means it cannot be trusted with the fate of the lion as well. The disagreement between state and federal authorities has been going on for some time, but in recent weeks it has become increasingly vitriolic. Mr Modi clashed publicly with the Environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, and accusing him of blocking grants for other environmental projects in the state to try to pressure Gujarat over the lions.

"Lions are the pride of Gujarat," Mr Modi told a meeting in Delhi of the national planning commission. "All other states have received money for wildlife conservation; we haven't received a penny for lions. Despite this, we have been able to save the lion from poachers, unlike other states where tigers are regularly hunted down illegally."

Mr Ramesh insisted there was no attempt to discriminate against the state but admitted there was a large, unresolved problem. "There are wildlife issues with Gujarat, which are being sorted out through dialogue," he said.

The domain of the Asiatic lion once stretched across a band of territory from Greece to the north-east of the Indian sub-continent.Excessive hunting and a decline in habitat pushed the animal to the brink of extinction; experts say that 100 years ago there may have been only 50 surviving in the wild. An extensive protection programme centred on the Gir forests has seen the population rise to about 360. The story of the lion is considered a national success, with 180 bred in captivity. But zoologists have long warned that other populations should be established to protect the species against annihilation by disease.

Dr Yadvendradev Jhala, a biologist at the Wildlife Institute of India, a government-sponsored organisation that supports relocating some Gujurat lions, said: "Gujarat has done a very good job of preserving the lion. It says a lot for the efforts of the state government and they have pride in it. But the problem is that if there is a disease epidemic you [will] threaten the entire population."

Mr Jhala said authorities in Gujarat were in the process of establishing a second population about 30 miles from Gir but that to be safe, it needed to be further away. "It is a good start but 30 miles is not enough of a barrier to stop the spread of disease when there are feral dogs and such."

The central government's frustration is compounded by the fact that millions of pounds have already been spent preparing a habitat area for a second lion population in the Kuno-Palpur Sanctuary in Madhya Pradesh, 200 miles to the south-west.

Many observers believe Mr Modi's reluctance to part with some of Gujurat's lions is not just about his concerns – however real – that they might again be threatened by poachers in their new home, but because he does not want to lose the tourist revenue the animals bring in. Gir Forest National Park attracts upwards of 60,000 visitors a year. In 2008, tourists were given the chance to pay the equivalent of about £100 to watch lions devour live cattle tethered to a tree. The "attraction" was condemned by activists.

Belinda Wright, head of the Wildlife Protection Society of India, said the row between Gujarat and the federal government had come to a head because the recently-appointed Environment Minister was determined to confront the issue. "All the experts say there has to be a second lion population," she said. "But Gujarat does not want to get rid of them."

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U.S. gives sea otters habitat protection in Alaska

Mary Pemberton, Associated Press Yahoo News 7 Oct 09;

ANCHORAGE, Alaska – Four years after being placed on the Endangered Species List, the dwindling sea otters of southwest Alaska on Wednesday were given an important recovery tool.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service designated nearly 5,900 square miles as critical habitat for sea otters in the Aleutian Islands, Bering Sea and Alaska Peninsula. The designated area includes all nearshore waters.

"Critical habitat has a proven record of aiding the recovery of endangered species," said Rebecca Noblin, a lawyer for the Center for Biological Diversity, which filed two lawsuits and engaged in years of litigation to get the animals protected under the federal Endangered Species Act. The otters in southwest Alaska were listed as threatened in 2005.

"This has been a long time coming," she said.

Critical habitat gives the sea otters — the smallest of marine mammals — a "fighting chance of recovery," she said.

Nearshore areas were chosen because most of the creatures that sea otters eat — sea urchins, crabs, octopuses and some bottom fish — are found in shallow waters. Areas close to shore also provide the best protection from marine predators, especially killer whales, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service.

Federal law requires that critical habitat be designated at the time of listing. But when that didn't happen under the Bush administration, the Center for Biological Diversity filed a federal lawsuit in 2006. The following year an agreement was reached that critical habitat would be designated by this October.

Fish and Wildlife said it needed time to conduct an economic impact analysis on what the designation could mean to southwest Alaska. The agency found that designation would not have a large impact and should not result in any commercial fishing closures.

About 90 percent of the world's sea otters are in Alaska waters. There were more than 100,000 sea otters in southwest Alaska waters in the 1970s but there are fewer than 40,000 now. Some areas have seen numbers plummet 90 percent.

The reason for the decline is not known but one credible theory is that killer whales are preying on more sea otters, perhaps because other larger marine mammals such as sea lions are also in decline.

Noblin said there isn't much that can be done about killer whales but there are other stressors than can be addressed such as overfishing, the potential for oil development in Bristol Bay and climate change in the Bering Sea.

Critical habitat gives the animals an extra layer of scrutiny when entities are applying for federal permits in the designated area. However, it does not mean that development will stop, Noblin said.

"It just means the developer has to go through an additional process to determine how what they are doing will impact sea otters," she said.

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Trade in rhino horn fuels massive poaching surge in South Africa

David Smith, guardian.co.uk 7 Oct 09;

South Africa is witnessing a massive surge in rhino poaching, an activity blamed on criminal syndicates striving to meet an "insatiable appetite" for rhinoceros horn in east Asia.

Eighty-four rhinos have been killed by poachers in the country so far this year, a jump from the 13 deaths in 2007.

Kruger Park, a worldwide tourist attraction, has been hardest hit, suffering the loss of 33 rhinos since January. Nineteen have been killed in KwaZulu-Natal province, and some privately owned reserves have lost seven animals.

Conservationists say it is the biggest spike in poaching for 15 years and blame the smuggling trade connected to countries, such as China and Vietnam, where rhino horn can fetch thousands of pounds for its perceived medicinal value.

They say that Asian countries' strengthening trade links with Africa have shortened the illegal supply chain. They also say more sophisticated poaching methods are being used, with organised criminal gangs flying in to game reserves by helicopter to kill rhinos, hack off their horns and make a quick getaway.

South Africa has about 1,490 black rhinos, more than a third of the world population of this critically endangered species. There are about 16,275 southern white rhinos, 93% of the global total.

Yolan Friedmann, chief executive of the Endangered Wildlife Trust, said the number of rhinos lost to poaching had altered from an average of 10 a year to 100. "There has been a rampant increase in South Africa," she said. "Poaching figures for this year have already surpassed the whole of last year. It's probably the worst it's been for 15 years. There's a lot more money going into poaching and it's becoming more hi-tech. It's no longer just a man with a bow and arrow wading through the bush. These guys are using helicopters and AK-47 rifles."

She warned that initiatives used previously could not meet the new threat. "Despite the once successful Save the Rhino project, rhinos are under siege. South Africa is facing a crisis. We've done extremely well in rhino conservation, but something has changed in the past 18 months, there's an insatiable appetite for rhino horn in the far east."

Ground up and added to liquids, rhino horn has been used for millennia in traditional Asian medicine to treat fevers and other ailments.

Rumours have recently been circulating on the internet that a Vietnamese government official claimed rhino horn cured his cancer, potentially fuelling demand.

Last year a Vietnamese diplomat was caught on camera taking delivery of contraband rhino horn outside the Vietnamese embassy in Pretoria.

There is also a lucrative market in Yemen and Oman for daggers with rhino-horn handles‚ frequently given to boys during rites of passage.

Poaching gangs, often from nearby countries, are believed to earn about $200 (£125) a horn but once the material has been transported, ground and mixed with other substances it can sell for thousands of pounds on the black market. Poachers' sentences and fines are usually negligible.

Friedmann said that seemingly legitimate parties also exploited loopholes. "Their hunting permits say they are only allowed to mount the rhino horns on the wall but we're finding they use the byproducts to sell illegally. Price is not an issue. A hunt was sold last year to Vietnamese hunters for more than R1m [£84,000]. That's a record price for white rhino."

Luxury private game reserves seem to have been caught out by the upsurge; many employ guards but the men tend to lack training in wildlife protection.

In July a meeting in Geneva of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species warned that rhino poaching around the world was set to reach a 15-year high, and there was growing evidence of Vietnamese, Chinese and Thai nationals' involvement in the illegal procurement and transport of horn out of Africa.

The South African government has been criticised for disbanding the police's endangered species protection unit in 2003. But Buyelwa Sonjica, the environmental affairs minister, recently announced the formation of a special investigations team to tackle poaching.

South African National Parks has said it will spend R2m (£165,000) to provide an additional 57 game rangers in Kruger Park and equip them with motorbikes. Patrols along the park's 280-mile South Africa and Mozambique border, where all 33 poached rhinos were killed, are also set to resume after being suspended three years ago.

At least 14 poachers, all Mozambican, have been arrested and several illegal firearms seized in Kruger this year. Nationwide, 22 poachers were caught. In January an international rhino-smuggling ring was smashed and 11 people were arrested.

Rhino numbers have been increasing worldwide thanks to various governments and NGOs. But Cathy Dean, director of the UK-based Save the Rhino International, warned: "The gains of the last decade are in real jeopardy. The underlying concern is that this upsurge in rhino poaching – a major issue in Zimbabwe as well as South Africa – is no longer opportunistic poaching by individuals but carried out by … highly sophisticated criminal gangs."

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Back to Traditional Farming to Beat Climate Change

Anil Netto, IPS News 9 Oct 09;

PENANG, Malaysia, Oct 9 (IPS/IFEJ) - When organisers of an international conference on climate change and the food crisis first scheduled the event here for late September, little did they realise the event would be sandwiched by two typhoons buffeting the region. Ironically, the first typhoon, ‘Ketsana’, delayed the arrival of conference delegates from the Philippines.

A week after Ketsana struck the Philippines on Sep. 26 and then Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, it was the turn of Typhoon Parma to wreak havoc in the Philippines on Oct. 3. Now downgraded to a tropical storm, ‘Parma’ is still lingering over the region and initially entangled with another Pacific super typhoon, ‘Melor’, which then headed towards Japan.

Ketsana left a devastating trail after it dumped the equivalent of one month's rainfall over Manila within six hours. Although Parma largely spared the country, it flooded large tracts of rice fields in northern Philippines and destroyed crops ready for harvest.

The typhoons in the region brought into sharp relief the issue of climate change as farmers struggle to cope with changing weather patterns. It is not just the sudden storms and heavy rainfalls that are disrupting farming but also the blurring of the seasons.

"If it rains, it rains heavily. In the past, there was less rainfall in September and October, but now there are heavy rains and strong winds," says Che Ani Mat Zain, a rice farmer in Kedah in northern Malaysia.

"Our yield is fine if the weather is okay, but not if it is unpredictable," he observes, adding that December and January used to be fairly dry months in Kedah, but now farmers experience more rain.

That is a pattern of disorientation that is being felt across the region. "The dry season and wet seasons are now blurred," concurs Dr Charito Medina, national coordinator for the Farmer-Scientist Partnership for Development (or ‘MASIPAG’, its Filipino acronym), a Philippine-based organisation bringing together 642 farmer organisations, representing 35,000 farmers, 60 non- governmental organisations and 15 scientists.

"Farmers can't rely on a dependable rainfall. For planting you need the soil to be wet, so that when you sow seeds, it will germinate," he noted at the sidelines of the conference organised by the Pesticide Action Network's Asia Pacific office on Sep. 27 to 29 in Penang.

Droughts and rainy periods seem to be longer and more intense now. "Typhoons are becoming stronger and more frequent, and strong winds may damage crops, which could cause 100 percent damage," he told IPS days before Typhoon Parma struck.

Unpredictable rainfall can disrupt the rice-planting season. If the rain stops for two weeks, there is crop failure and farmers have to replant. But they may not have any more seeds and may need to buy more from agricultural suppliers, which they may not be able to afford, points out Medina.

In Indonesia, Erpan Faryadie, secretary-general of the Alliance of Agrarian Reform Movement (or AGRA), a national peasants' organisation representing 40,000 landless peasants, farmers and agricultural workers, sees a similar dismal pattern.

Droughts and floods have become more noticeable in the last decade, after swathes of Sumatra, Kalimantan and Sulawesi were heavily deforested and converted to monoculture farming. More floods have been seen in these provinces, which rarely happened before, notes Faryadie.

The situation in Java, which accounts for more than half of national rice production and where forests were lost much earlier, is more pronounced. During the rainy season, rice fields and agricultural lands in north Java are sometimes flooded. "The Green Revolution rice strains couldn’t withstand the flooding, and the farmers couldn't get their harvests after the flooding," he says.

The Green Revolution, a program begun in 1960s to avert a global food crisis, is based on the use of high-yielding seed varieties using modern inputs of fertilizers and pesticides.

"The biggest problem was the destruction of traditional farming, which was enough for farmers’ subsistence and national sufficiency if they used traditional varieties," he laments, pointing out that some of the traditional rice seeds are more resistant to drought and heavy rains, with stalks still standing after floods.

The blurring of seasons has also hit farmers in the mountains of the Central Himalayas, where the predictable climate previously ensured food security. But summer this year produced record temperatures, as the Henwal stream dried up over a two-kilometre stretch for the first time in living memory. The droughts persisted even during the monsoon season, disrupting the planting cycle.

Meanwhile, the Gangroti Glacier, the source of the Ganga River in Uttarkashi district of Garhwal Himalaya, continues to retreat by 15 to 20 metres a year. Some farmers are now trying to adapt to climate change by taking another look at traditional seeds and farming practices.

MASIPAG in the Philippines adopts a "farmers’ empowerment" approach: it encourages farmers to collect, breed and select such traditional varieties of seeds to produce organic food.

Farmers carry out experiments themselves, with up to 50 varieties planted side-by-side in trial farms, measuring 600 to 800 square metres. Traditional seed varieties are selected as they are the most adaptable, the products of selection over time. These are then collected and improved through breeding and selection.

Some traditional varieties can survive dry spells better; others are more resistant to pest and diseases, which are themselves influenced by climate change. For instance, greater humidity and moisture result in more microorganisms, which can cause diseases, whereas a prolonged dry season could lead to more insect pests.

Each organisation comprising the farmers’ network then selects the top 10 varieties for the locality under organic conditions — with zero chemical inputs — and these are distributed by the members among themselves.

"(These trials determine) the survival of the fittest (among traditional varieties)," says Medina. "In contrast, conventional agriculture creates the ideal environment by using expensive chemical inputs."

MASIPAG also promotes a diversified and integrated farming system. Farmers are encouraged to plant other crops such as tubers, which are more resistant to environmental changes because the edible portion lies below the surface of the soil. Cassava, sweet potato and cooking banana are also planted as "survival crops to fill the stomach". Biomass is composted for use as organic fertilizers.

Native chickens are reared, and these are regarded as "ATMs in the backyard": if there is a typhoon, chickens can be sold in the market to raise emergency funds to buy supplies. "You can withdraw (from these ‘ATMs’ when you need it," quips Medina. Similarly, goats and cows, which convert weed into food and produce manure for the farm, can be sold during emergencies.

Such initiatives are precisely what may be needed. A new report published by GRAIN , an international group working to support community-controlled and biodiversity-based food systems, shows that more sustainable agriculture can put much of the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere back into the soil.

Evidence in the report shows that industrial agriculture, and the global food system of which it is part, has sent large amounts of this carbon from the soil into the atmosphere, the group said in a press release.

And calculations reveal that policies supporting small farmer-centred agriculture, which also focuses on restoring soil fertility, would play a big role in resolving the worsening climate crisis. "In 50 years the soils could capture about 450 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide, which is more than two thirds of the current excess in the atmosphere," says the report.

But that is only if agricultural sovereignty is returned to millions of small farmers and farming communities, and policies are formulated to support their livelihoods.

"The evidence is irrefutable. If we can change the way we farm and the way we produce and distribute food, then we have a powerful solution for combating the climate crisis. There are no technical hurdles to achieving these results, it is only a matter of political will, says GRAIN coordinator Henk Hobbelink.

*This story is part of a series of features on sustainable development by IPS – Inter Press Service and IFEJ – International Federation of Environmental Journalists, for the Alliance of Communicators for Sustainable Development (www.complusalliance.org).

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Calif. citrus farmers fear tree-killing disease

Jacob Adelman, Associated Press Yahoo News 8 Oct 09;

ORANGE COVE, Calif. – Tom Mulholland is girding for battle against a tiny enemy that could devastate the orange grove he has spent his life cultivating. His adversary: the Asian citrus psyllid, a fruit-fly-sized insect with red eyes and a long, leaf-penetrating beak.

The psyllid, which can carry an incurable disease fatal to citrus trees, was spotted in August in Los Angeles, closer than ever before to the ribbon of central California where the state's $1.6 billion citrus-growing industry is concentrated.

The feared infestation has prompted Mulholland and other citrus-belt farmers to put screens around their young seedlings, vigorously inspect their mature trees and tax themselves to fund research to stop the psyllid.

"It's like a war," Mulholland said in his tidy office set amid some 400 acres of radiantly healthy Clementine and Satsuma trees on his farm some 200 miles north of Los Angeles in the San Joaquin Valley at the base of the foothills beneath Sequoia National Park. "We're sitting here trying to stop this thing, and it wants to keep pushing in."

California growers and agricultural officials are worried the state's citrus industry will be crippled by the disease carried by the psyllid, which devastated Florida's crops. The two states produced about 97 percent of the nation's 12 million tons of citrus during the fiscal year ending in June.

The huanglongbing disease, which spoils the flavor of the fruit and ultimately kills the tree, has been found in all of Florida's 32 citrus-producing counties since its discovery there in 2005, causing about $100 million in damages, said Andrew Meadows, a spokesman for Florida Citrus Mutual, the state's grower trade association.

Florida officials have warned that their $9 billion citrus industry could be wiped out in a decade if a solution isn't found to the disease, also known as citrus greening because of the sickly green cast it lends to infected fruit.

"That's why California is so alarmed," said David Hall, an entomologist with the USDA's agricultural research service in Florida who worked on a team that sequenced the genome of the bacteria that causes citrus greening.

Huanglongbing has been found in Louisiana, Mexico, Brazil and China as well.

In California, the insect has so far been found among planted citrus trees in four southern counties, prompting quarantines that prohibit nurseries from shipping seedlings to other areas. Fruit grown in those counties also must be washed before it can be sold outside the quarantine zone.

Dogs trained to sniff out the pest found packages of curry leaves with psyllids in FedEx packages this summer in Fresno and Sacramento. Only the Fresno psyllids tested positive for huanglongbing.

The psyllid is not the only pest that could threaten California citrus. The state is also home to the glassy-winged sharpshooter, a threat to grapes but also capable of carrying a debilitating disease called citrus variegated chlorosis that has been spotted in Brazil.

California agriculture officials have also been locked in a decades-long struggle with the crop-eating Mediterranean fruit fly, which can harm citrus plants and hundreds of other fruits and vegetables.

But the potential devastation that could accompany a psyllid infestation is especially troubling for Mulholland and other citrus farmers, who have started building screens around the currently open-air nurseries where vulnerable seedlings are cultivated in rows of inverted plastic cones.

Allan Lombardi, who helps oversee 2,100 acres of pink-fleshed Cara Cara oranges, deep-red Fukumoto oranges and other high-value citrus as a manager with Central Valley grower Griffith Farms, said his company is scrambling to enclose its nurseries before the pest reaches the area, but that it's about two years from completion.

"If the disease shows up sooner than that, we'll have to have a Plan B, and I'm not sure what that will be," said Lombardi as he looked down a mountain slope and into a lush valley planted thickly with rows of oranges.

Citrus farmers have also started instructing workers to watch for signs of psyllid infestation, such as wilted-looking leaves or leaves covered in soot-like mold and white waxy deposits.

California's Citrus Research Board, which raises its $5.5 million operating budget by assessing citrus growers a nickel for every 55-pound box of fruit they sell, plans to contribute to the field checks with a team of up to 25 inspectors, operations chief MaryLou Polek said.

She said she hopes to poach trained inspectors from the state agriculture department whose hours or pay have been reduced due to budget cuts.

The board has also embarked on an effort to lay traps for the insect throughout the state that will be monitored by researchers carrying camera-equipped handheld devices that record the map coordinates where insects are found and take pictures of the damage.

That information, along with other data, will be beamed to a database so researchers can better track the insect's movement and deploy insecticides and other resources where they'll be most effective, she said.

Mulholland said he doesn't expect a cure to the disease any time soon, so those efforts to keep the disease-carrying insect from moving any farther north represent growers' best hope against the illness.

"It's like the AIDS of citrus. It's the very worst disease you can have," he said. "The question is, how do we keep the disease from spreading?"

___

Associated Press writer Greg Risling in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

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Agriculture needs billions of dollars by 2050: UN agency

Yahoo News 8 Oct 09;

ROME (AFP) – Developing countries need investments of 83 billion dollars a year if there is to be enough food to feed the world's expected 9.1 billion people by 2050, the UN food agency said Thursday.

"Required investments include crops and livestock production as well as downstream support services such as cold chains, storage facilities, market facilities and first-stage processing," the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said in a report.

"The projected investment needs to 2050 include some 20 billion dollars going to crops production and 13 billion dollars going to livestock production, it said.

"Mechanisation would account for the single biggest investment area followed by expansion and improvement of irrigation."

"A further 50 billion dollars would be needed for downstream services to help achieve a global 70 percent expansion in agricultural production by 2050."

The report said that most of this investment, in both primary agriculture and downstream services, "will come from private investors, including farmers purchasing implements and machinery and businesses investing in processing facilities".

But public funds would also be needed to achieve a better functioning of the agricultural system and food security.

"Priority areas for such public investments include: 1) agricultural research and development; 2) large-scale infrastructure such as roads, ports and power, and agricultural institutions and extension services; and 3) education, particularly of women, sanitation, clean water supply and healthcare."

Of the projected new net investments in agriculture, as much as 29 billion dollars would need to be spent in the two countries with the largest populations, India and China, said the FAO.

As far as regions are concerned, sub-Saharan Africa would need about 11 billion dollars invested, Latin America and the Caribbean 20 billion dollars, the Near East and North Africa 10 billion, South Asia 20 billion and East Asia 24 billion dollars.

The FAO said that the projections point to wide regional differences in the impact of new investments when translated into per capita terms.

Given different population growth rates, Latin America, for instance, is expected to almost halve its agricultural labour force while sub-Saharan Africa will double its own.

"This means that by 2050 an agricultural worker in Latin America would have 28 times the capital stock or physical assets such as equipment, land and livestock available as his or her colleague in sub-Saharan Africa.

Foreign direct investment in agriculture in developing countries could make a significant contribution to bridging the investment gap, the FAO said.

But it cautioned that political and economic concerns had been raised about so-called land grab investments in poor, food-insecure countries.

"Such deals should be designed in such a way as to maximize benefits to host populations, effectively increasing their food security and reducing poverty."

On horizon 2050 - billions needed for agriculture
FAO 8 Oct 09;

High-level forum to weigh investment needs

8 October 2009, Rome –Net investments of $83 billion a year must be made in agriculture in developing countries if there is to be enough food to feed 9.1 billion people in 2050, according to an FAO discussion paper published today.

Agricultural investment thus needs to increase by about 50 percent, according to the paper prepared for the High Level Experts’ Forum on How to Feed the World in 2050, Rome 12-13 October 2009. Some 300 top international specialists will attend the meeting.

Required investments include crops and livestock production as well as downstream support services such as cold chains, storage facilities, market facilities and first-stage processing.

Private investment essential

The projected investment needs to 2050 include some $20 billion going to crops production and $13 billion going to livestock production, the paper said. Mechanization would account for the single biggest investment area followed by expansion and improvement of irrigation.

A further $50 billion would be needed for downstream services to help achieve a global 70 percent expansion in agricultural production by 2050.

Most of this investment, in both primary agriculture and downstream services, will come from private investors, including farmers purchasing implements and machinery and businesses investing in processing facilities.

Public investment also necessary

In addition, public funds will also be needed to achieve a better functioning of the agricultural system and food security, the paper said. Priority areas for such public investments include: i) agricultural research and development; ii) large-scale infrastructure such as roads, ports and power, and agricultural institutions and extension services; and iii) education, particularly of women, sanitation, clean water supply and healthcare.

But in 2000 total global public spending on agricultural research and development totalled only some $23 billion and has been highly uneven. Official Development Assistance (ODA) to agriculture decreased by some 58 percent in real terms between 1980 and 2005, dropping from a 17 percent share of aid to 3.8 percent over the period. Presently it stands at around five percent.

Of the projected new net investments in agriculture, as much as $29 billion would need to be spent in the two countries with the largest populations – India and China. As far as regions are concerned, sub-Saharan Africa would need about $11 billion invested, Latin America and the Caribbean $20 billion, the Near East and North Africa $10 billion, South Asia $20 billion and East Asia $24 billion.

Regional differences

The projections point to wide regional differences in the impact of new investments when translated into per capita terms. Given different population growth rates, Latin America, for instance, is expected to almost halve its agricultural labour force while sub-Saharan Africa will double its own. This means that by 2050 an agricultural worker in Latin America would have 28 times the capital stock – or physical assets such as equipment, land and livestock – available as his or her colleague in sub-Saharan Africa.

Foreign direct investment in agriculture in developing countries could make a significant contribution to bridging the investment gap, the paper said.

But political and economic concerns have been raised about so-called “land grab” investments in poor, food-insecure countries. Such deals should be designed in such a way as to maximize benefits to host populations, effectively increasing their food security and reducing poverty.

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Staples and Home Depot join effort to save U.S. forests

Yahoo News 8 Oct 09;

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Staples Inc and Home Depot Inc are collaborating with environmental groups in a pilot program aimed at conserving fast-disappearing Southern U.S. forests, organizers said on Thursday.

Staples, the office products company, and Home Depot, the home products retailer and one of the leading sellers of wood, will provide funding to pay private landowners in Tennessee, Virginia and North Carolina to conserve and manage their forested land.

The amount of money contributed to the project has yet to be determined, but negotiations with landowners are under way, said Danna Smith, executive director of the environmental group Dogwood Alliance of Asheville, North Carolina.

Private landowners, who collectively own roughly 90 percent of forested land across the U.S. Southeast, will be required to place their land into conservation easements and manage it in a way that boosts carbon sequestration, Smith said.

Sequestration in this case refers to the carbon stored in unharvested trees as well as any added trees that absorb carbon dioxide -- the leading greenhouse gas -- from the atmosphere.

The two companies will retire any carbon credits reaped in the transactions, she said. Such credits can be used to offset greenhouse gas emissions to meet regulatory standards.

Smith said native trees are fast disappearing across the U.S. Southeast, which has 2 percent of the world's forests but provides 20 percent of the lumber and pulp for the wood and paper product industries.

Clear-cut forests are often replaced by pine tree farms.

"Demand for wood and paper are having a devastating impact on Southern forests," Smith said. "Carbon is released and it degrades watersheds and wildlife habitat."

(Reporting by Andrew Stern, editing by Gerald E. McCormick)

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Peak oil could hit soon, report says

A new report says worldwide production of conventionally extracted oil could peak in the next decade
Press Association, guardian.co.uk 8 Oct 09;

There is a "significant risk" that global oil production could begin to decline in the next decade, researchers said today.

A report by the UK Energy Research Council (UKERC) said worldwide production of conventionally extracted oil could "peak" and go into terminal decline before 2020 – but that the government was not facing up to the risk.

Falls in production will lead to higher and more volatile prices, and could encourage investment in even more polluting fossil fuels, such as tar sands, which "need to stay in the ground" to avoid dangerous climate change as a result of carbon emissions, the researchers said.

The new report said there was too much geological, political and economic uncertainty to predict an exact date for peak oil, which would not lead to a sudden decline but a "bumpy plateau" with a downward trend in extraction.

But Steve Sorrell, chief author of the report, said while those who forecasted an imminent decline had underestimated oil reserves, more positive forecasts suggesting oil production will not peak before 2030 were "at best optimistic and at worst implausible".

The world has used less than half of the planet's conventionally extracted oil, but the remaining resources will be more difficult and expensive to get out of the ground, slowing production and increasing prices of crude.

With exploitation of the world's reserves running at more than 80m barrels a day, even major new discoveries such as the oil fields recently found in the Gulf of Mexico by BP would only delay a peak by a few days or weeks, the report said.

Robert Gross of UKERC said: "The age of easy and cheap oil is coming to an end. It doesn't suddenly come to an end; obviously it's a gradual change. But we're moving away from easy and cheap oil to increasingly difficult and expensive oil."

The public should expect to see more higher and more volatile petrol costs in the future, with long-distance travel becoming pricier.

Britons should invest in the most energy-efficient vehicles and put pressure on the government to take the issue seriously, the researchers urged. With long time-scales and large investment needed to move away from a reliance on crude oil – particularly in the transport sector, which uses the lion's share of fossil fuel – the report said governments needed to take action now.

Sorrell said the UK government had no contingency plans for oil peaking before 2020, but officials needed to increase and speed up measures already being taken to cut climate emissions, such as improving vehicle fuel efficiency, shifting to electric cars and investing more in public transport.

Though high oil prices could encourage investment in renewables and technological changes, they could also do the same for more polluting and energy-intensive forms of oil. These include tar sands, where extraction of fuel becomes viable when the oil price hits around $70/barrel – its current level – and converting coal to a liquid, which requires a great deal of energy.

"Most of these unconventional resources need to stay in the ground, but [there are] such strong incentives to exploit them," he said.

The consequences in terms of carbon emissions of unconventional sources of oil could be "catastrophic", Gross said.

"The danger is, high oil prices push us into high carbon resources just as much as they might help push us towards renewables. The challenge for policymakers is to make sure, on a global scale, that that isn't the response to more difficult and expensive oil."

A spokesman for the Energy and Climate Change Department said: "Already, our climate change, energy efficiency and energy security policies outlined in the UK low carbon transition plan are not only reducing the UK's carbon emissions, but are consistent with the need to reduce our use of fossil fuels.

"This will help to ease demand for oil in the UK and internationally. In addition, the UK government is investing and supporting research on renewable and clean transport technologies – which is the UK sector that consumes most fossil fuels."

Warning over global oil 'decline'
Sarah Mukherjee, BBC News 8 Oct 09;

There is a "significant risk" that global production of conventional oil could "peak" and decline by 2020, a report has warned.

The UK Energy Research Centre study says there is a consensus that the era of cheap oil is at an end.

But it warns that most governments, including the UK's, exhibit little concern about oil depletion.

The report's authors also state that the 10 largest oil producing fields in the world are all in decline.

Reliable gauge

As this report points out, the debate about peak oil is a polarised one.

On one side, there are those who say that global supplies have already reached their zenith, and we are unprepared for the crisis that will hit world economies in the years to come.

On the other, there are oil companies and many energy analysts who dismiss the notion that supplies are running out.

The report's authors admit it is hard to tell who is right, as the world lacks a reliable gauge with which to measure oil depletion.

Problems are created by "inconsistent definitions", it says, noting the "paucity of reliable data, the frequent absence of third-party auditing of that data and the corresponding uncertainty surrounding the data that is available".

It goes on: "The difficulties are greatest where they matter most, namely the oil reserves of Opec countries.

"But they also apply at a much more basic level, such as uncertainties over the amount of oil produced by a given country in a given year.

"The resulting confusion both fuels the peak oil debate and creates substantial risk in relying on any particular set of numbers."

Part of the difficulty in estimating the amount of oil left is that those with the reserves are often unwilling to divulge what can be commercially very sensitive information.

Countries and companies are notoriously reticent about their oil reserves.

But the report suggests the easy oil has already been found, and new reserves will become increasingly difficult and expensive to extract, and will not make up for the current major oil fields as they decline.

It says: "More than two-thirds of current crude oil production capacity may need to be replaced by 2030, simply to keep production constant.

"At best, this is likely to prove extremely challenging."

More attention urged

This report does not contain new research, but is a review of data already available.

But the authors say the risk presented by global oil depletion deserves much more serious attention by the research and policy communities.

"Much existing research focuses upon the economic and political threats to oil supply security and fails to either assess or to effectively integrate the risks presented by physical depletion," they argue.

"This has meant that the probability and consequences of different outcomes has not been adequately assessed."

Despite the evidence, the report notes with some surprise that the UK government rarely mentions the issue in official publications.

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Why the 'peak oil' debate is irrelevant

Shanta Barley, New Scientist 8 Oct 09;

The debate over exactly when we will reach "peak oil" is irrelevant. No matter what new oil fields we discover, global oil production will start declining in 2030 at the very latest.

That's the conclusion of the most comprehensive report to date on global oil production, published on 7 October by the UK Energy Research Centre.

The report, which reviewed over 500 research studies, suggests that global oil production could peak any time from right now to as late as 2030.

"Either way, our research shows that the difference between even the most pessimistic and optimistic claims is just 15 to 20 years," says Steve Sorrell, the report's lead author, who is based at Sussex University in the UK.

This is a problem, says Sorrell, because 20 years isn't long enough for governments to prepare well-thought-out policies that would tackle the economic chaos likely to occur when oil production begins to decline. Research in 2005 by the US Department of Energy suggests that policies to reduce the demand for oil while developing large-scale alternatives will take at least two decades to bear fruit, he says.
New for old

Global production of oil is declining at a rate of 4 per cent per year in existing oil fields and we have very little to replace it with, says Sorrell: "If we want to maintain global oil production at today's level we would need to discover the equivalent of a new Saudi Arabia every 3 years."

Yet discoveries of new oil fields are in decline. Even the "giant" Tiber field recently found by BP in the Gulf of Mexico "will only serve to delay peak oil by a matter of days", he says.

"Of the 70,000 oil fields on Earth, just 100 giant fields account for 50 per cent of the oil we use," says Sorrell. "Most of these giant fields are quite old and past their peak of production, and we're not going to find many new ones."

The International Energy Agency's latest estimate is that that oil production will not peak until after 2030, but that "is conservative to say the least", Sorrell warns.

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Commercial Green Fuel From Algae Still Years Away

Laura Isensee, PlanetArk 9 Oct 09;

SAN DIEGO - Filling your vehicle's tank with fuel made from algae is still as much as a decade away, as the emerging industry faces a series of hurdles to find an economical way to make the biofuel commercially.

Estimates on a timeline for a commercial product, and profits, vary from two to 10 years or more.

Executives and industry players who gathered at the Algae Biomass Summit this week in San Diego said they need to push for breakthroughs along the entire chain -- from identifying the best organisms to developing efficient harvesting methods.

"This is not a slam dunk. There are a lot of technologies that need to be developed," said Paul Roessler, vice president of renewable fuels and chemicals at Synthetic Genomics.

So far on the list: finding the right strain of algae among thousands of species that will produce high yields; designing systems where the desired algae can multiply and other species don't invade and disrupt the process; and extracting its oils without degrading other parts of the algae that can be made into side products and sold as well.

GROWING INTEREST

Oil giants Exxon Mobil Corp, Chevron Corp and BP Plc, as well as investors and the U.S. military, are sinking millions into the emerging industry.

Scientists and investors are lured by the pond scum's natural oils that can be extracted and refined into fuel.

Algae grows fast and absorbs greenhouse gases along the way. Plus, the lowly life form uses less land, water and other resources than the corn or soybeans used in first generation biofuels, alleviating concerns that those renewable fuels would cause food shortages.

Privately held companies like Sapphire Energy and Synthetic Genomics, which linked up with Exxon Mobil, are betting on gene-based methods to develop a super bug.

"You can only go so far with classical methods of strain development," Roessler said.

Synthetic Genomics is working on cells that will directly secrete the oils and lipids that scientists want, eliminating some of the costs to harvest the algae and extract its oils.

OPEN VS. CLOSED

Taking algae from carefully controlled laboratories and growing it on commercial scale is another major hurdle, and has divided the industry into two camps: open ponds versus enclosed containers called bioreactors.

Martek Biosciences Corp, which in August struck a development deal with BP, is eyeing a third solution to mass-produce algae's "green crude": fermenters that are 12 feet in diameter and five stories tall.

Ponds and bioreactors are still immature technologies, said Martek's Bill Barclay, who spent 11 years developing nutritional supplements from algae.

"We need to have the learnings along the way. We need to focus on more intermediate technology development," Barclay said at the summit.

Valero Energy Corp-backed Solix Biofuels is striking a hybrid approach on the system front. The company recently finished the first part of its plant in Colorado, where it put flat panels in open basins to pump in carbon dioxide from a nearby natural gas refinery.

Even as Solix Biofuels focuses on infrastructure, the company's technology officer Joel Butler said that the industry needs help from all sides to cash in on algae's promise.

"It's going to take the right engineering solution with the right species to make it commercially viable," Butler said.

HELPING HAND

Bill Glover, who chairs the industry group Algal Biomass Organization and directs Boeing Co's environmental strategy, said the industry needs to have more federal support so that algae has the same incentives that other biofuel feedstocks, like corn, enjoy.

"It's never going to get off the ground without a helping hand," Glover said.

Glover said his best estimate for a commercial timeline is seven to 10 years.

(Reporting by Laura Isensee, editing by Marguerita Choy)

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Buildings that eat carbon dioxide?

Living in the city
Buildings that eat carbon dioxide? Fish bacteria that light the streets? Meet the architects rebuilding our future
Times Online 8 Oct 09;

From Eureka, our new science and
environment magazine

As temperatures rise and ice melts, it has become clear that Man’s attempt to impose his will on Nature has gone awry. A new breed of scientists is beginning to approach our myriad problems from a new, humbler perspective; how, they ask, can we learn from Nature and borrow some of its extraordinary inventiveness in the fight against climate change.

The deep ocean is an unlikely source of inspiration for one project, which aims to make our cities alive and glowing. The plan sounds almost biblical; the lighting of the world from a multitude of fish.

Dr Rachel Armstrong, an architectural researcher from University College London, wants to transform buildings from being sterile, inert objects into entities that interact and evolve with the natural environment. She sees this as the fulfilment of what architects have always seen as the purpose of their work. “We’ve likened the city to an organism, but so far it has been a symbolic description. In the future, architecture will be literally alive,” she said.

Imagine the cityscape of the future. Forget skyscrapers studded with undimmed lights. Instead, think of crystal whites and luminous blues forging the city’s silhouette. Picture a city that sucks in carbon and uses bacteria harvested from dead fish to light the darkness. The city as a living character will no longer be a literary conceit, but a reality. From metaphor to concrete in one generation.

One of her projects starts with a simple premise. Leave a fish rotting in a bowl of water for long enough and it will begin to glow. The light comes from bacteria in the fish. In certain species, such as the flashlight fish and the anglerfish, a symbiotic relationship with this bacteria, Vibrio phosphoreum, allows the fish to glow and flicker in the deep ocean. The flashlight fish carries the bacteria in pouches beneath its eyes, which it opens to show off the glimmering organisms or closes to hide them, depending on whether it wishes to lure in prey or evade predators. But how have scientists leapt from flashes of light in the sea to a new vision for our cities? Welcome to the world of nanoarchitecture.

With her colleagues at the Bartlett School of Architecture, Armstrong is focusing on “grunge” solutions to global warming: technologies that are cheap and relatively simple. We’ve already seen a sliver of this idea. Steven Chu, the United States Secretary of Energy, is an advocate of the use of whitewash on our houses. “If you take all the buildings in the world and make their roofs white and you do this uniformly . . . it’s the equivalent of reducing the carbon emissions due to all the cars on the road for 11 years,” he told a meeting in London earlier this year.

But Armstrong and her peers have ideas that reach far beyond whitewash. One intriguing possibility is the use of bioluminescent bacteria, organisms that give off a blue-green glow, as low-energy urban lighting. In the US, urban lighting accounts for more than 8 per cent of the country’s total electricity consumption. The sides of buildings and billboards could be covered in sparkling bacteria, such as Vibrio phosphoreum — the fish bacteria. This produces light automatically when a pigment contained in the bacteria called luciferin, from the Latin meaning light bringer, reacts with oxygen in air or water. At present, the light emitted is not strong enough to illuminate a street, but scientists believe that it could be engineered to do so. Another possibility is using bacteria to metabolise carbon dioxide through photosynthesis so that the bacterial coating would effectively eat up carbon dioxide by turning sunlight into energy.

“When dealing with climate change we don’t always have to invent something new, we have to think very cleverly about what we already have,” Armstrong said. “It doesn’t take a massive leap of imagination to envisage how much more useful the surfaces of our buildings could become if covered in bacteria that glow in the dark or remove pollutants from the atmosphere.”

Choosing which bacteria to use would be the easy part, according to Armstrong, as scientists have already identified numerous common species that carry out these functions. She is now looking at the possibility of using cyanobacteria, also known as blue-green algae, to capture carbon dioxide.

What remains to be addressed, however, is how best to cultivate such organisms on the surfaces of our houses, offices and schools. Armstrong views this challenge as a form of gardening. “Bacterial gardens don’t really exist and that’s what we need to create,” she says.

Simon Park, a microbiologist at the University of Surrey, already has some experience of bacterial gardening. He has been exploring the use of naturally bioluminescent bacteria in art, using Vibrio phosphoreum to make dazzling blue abstract displays. Park cultivates the bacteria by placing them in agar gel in petri dishes and providing them with salty water, which replicates a marine environment, and glycerol, on which they feed. Park’s art installations normally last for a few days before the bacteria run out of food and gradually fade to darkness, but if fed continually the displays could be permanent, he said.

Transferring the concept to urban design would mean ingraining the necessary nutrients in the fabric of the building. Armstrong says that this could be achieved by using porous materials, such as chalk and sandstone, seeded with bacteria-friendly substances.

Again looking to nature for inspiration, scientists are trying to artificially recreate the process of limestone formation, in which atmospheric carbon dioxide is transformed into a solid carbonate form. In nature this happens over thousands of years, with atmospheric carbon dioxide first being dissolved in acidic rain water, and then combining with calcium to form calcium carbonate. Nanoarchitects are aiming to speed the process up to a matter of days. They believe it could be done simply by coating the walls of buildings with tiny droplets of engine grease. The grease would be laced with a common salt such as magnesium chloride. When the magnesium reacts with carbon dioxide in the air, a solid magnesium carbonate pearl begins to form. This serves as the seed for the growth of white, wheatsheaf-shaped carbonate crystals. The large surface area of a droplet of grease maximises the interface between the magnesium and the atmospheric carbon, speeding up the rate of the reaction. Within days, the grease would be transformed into a sparkly crystalline coating similar in appearance to heavy frost or snowfall.

What is done with the carbonate deposit would be as much an aesthetic as a scientific decision. One option would be to scrape off the carbonate and dispose of it or reuse it as a building material. Armstrong likes the idea of making a feature of it. “We could bring back the façade,” she said. A green city as envisaged by Armstrong would look like Narnia under the White Witch, crystal white and beautiful. The carbon choking our planet could become a harmless decorative feature.

Having demonstrated that the technology to create carbon-eating walls works in principle, Armstrong and her colleagues are now conducting experiments to speed up crystal growth and vary the size of the crystals by changing the size of oil droplets and testing different salts. They are also calculating how much carbon can be absorbed per hour per square metre of surface covered.

Despite the research being at a relatively early stage, it has already come to the attention of commercial practitioners such as the Canadian architect Philip Beesley. He said: “Traditionally, the architecture industry is tremendously conservative but there’s a hunger for this technology. We could be seeing these buildings on our streets eight years from now.” Beesley is presenting a joint exhibition about the technology with Armstrong at the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen in December.

The low-tech approach has the advantage of being easy to implement and cheap. However, one potential drawback of using simple oil droplets is that once all the magnesium has been turned into carbonate and the oil has evaporated, no more carbon will be captured — at least until another oily coating is added. Armstrong believes that the solution to this problem could lie in the development of “protocells”: artificial cells that, while lacking DNA, can divide and replicate in a similar manner to living cells. If scientists can create such cells, Armstrong says that they could carry out the same function as the oil droplets, but be programmed to run on salty water, making them more self-sufficient. She is in early discussions about this with synthetic biologists at the University of Southern Denmark. Professor Steen Rasmussen, the director of the university’s Centre for Fundamental Living Technology, predicts that functioning protocells will be a reality within a few years. “Certainly within the next ten years someone will have done it,” he said. “To be specific and say that these cells will be capable of carbon capture at this point would be speculation. But it is already clear to me that they’ll have a huge impact in environmental sciences.”

Oil droplets, bacteria and protocells are the cornerstone technologies of this new grunge architecture, which has the power to be the dominant aesthetic of 21st-century landscapes. As Beesley says: “Until now, the sustainability movement has been quite separate from cultural expression in architecture. Sustainable architects have tended to follow an anti-fashion trajectory closing up windows, not using glass — basically making hair-shirt buildings. The concept of living architecture combines the two.”

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