Best of our wild blogs: 16 Oct 09

Life History of the Five Bar Swordtail
from Butterflies of Singapore

Black-throated Sunbird feeding on nectar
from Bird Ecology Study Group

Adult Tiger Shrike does arrive in Singapore
from Bird Ecology Study Group

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Kelongs can be a Singapore attraction

Straits Times Forum 16 Oct 09;

I REFER to Tuesday's report ("Know how to woo more tourists? Tell STB") on the Singapore Tourism Board needing ideas to boost tourism.

We have some treasures in our back yard just waiting for the authorities to give the green light to show to the world. Three weeks ago, The Straits Times carried a report on kelongs vanishing fast. A venture I have in mind could certainly prove to be a new lease of life for the kelongs.

I am a neighbour of Mrs Maureen Wong, the kelong owner named in the report.

Many people do not know that we have kelongs (fish farms included) in Singapore. When news of the plight of kelongs was reported, we received a lot of inquiries from people wanting to visit them.

We can tap the potential of the humble kelongs and extend it to the world. I have friends from China, Malaysia, Indonesia, Korea and Japan who want to visit a kelong.

Kelongs have a natural charm: One is out at sea, immersed in a breezy atmosphere, with the unmistakable salty air.

If the place is set up for a romantic sunset dinner, featuring fresh catch from the sea, it would be a mind-blowing experience.

Best of all, it does not have to cost an arm and a leg to enjoy this.

Naturally, there are challenges and issues to consider, like public safety, but with resolve and determination, we can overcome them.

Industry players in the food and beverage, hospitality and travel trade could partner kelong operators in this new venture.

Granted, we will have the world-class Integrated Resorts very soon, but we can also offer the humble kelongs which are worthy of a heritage status.

Lee Van Voon

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NUS team makes cloning breakthrough

Straits Times 16 Oct 09;

The manipulation of cells took five years to complete and cost $1.5 million

SCIENTISTS in Singapore have become the first to 'semi-clone' an animal by fertilising an egg with an embryonic stem cell that mimics sperm.
Holly, a 4cm-long medaka fish, is now 15 months old and a great-grandmother, with a family of more than 100 fish which are able to reproduce normally and healthily.

The success by the scientists from the National University of Singapore may spell promise in future for infertile couples.

The key to the discovery is that scientists managed to generate a haploid DNA cell which mimics sperm. The isolation and manipulation of these cells took five years to complete, and cost $1.5 million.

The work by Associate Professor Hong Yunhan of the National University of Singapore's Department of Biological Sciences came through persistence - he continued his work to create haploid cells even when Nobel Prize winners had given up.

In essence, what the scientists did was to take eggs from one fish, and sperm from another.

The sperm cells were then zapped with UV rays to strip them of their DNA code, and these were then used to 'fertilise' the eggs.

As only one set of DNA was contained in the eggs, the resulting division created haploid cells. These cells were then combined with eggs from another fish, and Holly was born.

This method opens up the possibility of obtaining a haploid cell from a man, enabling him to pass on his DNA even if he is infertile.

That will be some time in the future, however, as further tests will still need to be carried out.

There will also be ethical hurdles to cross: Scientists and others have long debated the issue of whether it is right to clone humans.

For now, though, scientists here are celebrating what they say is akin to turning science fiction into reality.

'Eight years ago, semi-cloning was science fiction. Our work with the fish as a first model has revealed the possibility of carrying it out on vertebrates, to which humans belong,' said Prof Hong.

Holly is quite different from animals like Dolly, the world's first cloned sheep, and the myriad of others that came after her.

Instead of a clone, which is an exact genetic replica of an organism, Holly is a semi-clone with a unpredictable genetic code - similar to how it occurs in nature.

Dr Alan Colman, a principal investigator at the Agency for Science, Technology and Research's Institute of Medical Biology, executive director of the Singapore Stem Cell Consortium, as well as one of the creators of Dolly, said the isolation of a haploid cell was interesting and valuable to science.

He said: 'The reason haploid cells are desirable is that all of us have two copies of each gene.'

He explained that being able to look at a human haploid cell, if one day possible, will allow scientists to study and treat genes that cause diseases such as cancer, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

The next step for Prof Hong's team is to seek international collaboration to try and carry out its work on mice. Such a study will take about five years and, if successful, will proceed to trials with monkeys and, finally, humans.

Dr Benjamin Capps of the Centre for Biomedical Ethics at NUS' Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine said: 'The results of this study are closer to IVF - replacing the role of sperm with that of an artificially created haploid cell - and so raise little immediate ethical concern as a technique.'

Prof Hong, however, noted: 'It will be interesting to see whether human society would accept these semi-cloned children once the technology is established in humans.'

A fish called Holly
Singapore the birthplace of the world's first semi-cloned animal
Ong Dai Lin, Today Online 16 Oct 09;

SINGAPORE - A fish named Holly may have placed Singapore on the world map for being the birthplace of the very first semi-cloned animal.

By combining the stem cell of an embryo - one which is created to contain only one set of chromosomes - with an egg which provides the other set, three National University of Singapore (NUS) researchers were able to create a fish that is not an exact clone.

In traditional cloning, a baby is formed from a stem cell with two sets of chromosomes from one parent, making it an exact duplicate - and spawning great debate about the ethics of cloning since the world's first animal, Dolly the sheep, was cloned from an adult stem cell in 1996.

Now, the successful birth of the first semi-cloned animal, Holly the fish, means researchers can possibly use semi-cloning as a method to treat infertile couples.

Associate professor Hong Yunhan, who led the research team from the National University of Singapore Department of Biological Sciences, said semi-cloning is better than cloning, as it produces babies in an "unpredictable" way.

"We can't even predict whether the offspring is a male or female," said assoc prof Hong.

What is needed, for instance, could be for a man without mature sperm to use stem cells - which can later develop into all other kinds of cells - from another part of his body, to fuse with his wife's egg.

But it may take as long as 10 years to get to the stage where the technique can be researched in humans, said assoc prof Hong, who added that the semi-cloning technique can also be used to study diseases by analysing gene mutations.

His five-year research programme, funded by NUS, the Agency for Science, Technology & Research (A*Star) and the Ministry of Education, has so far cost $1.5 million. Assoc prof Hong estimates he needs between $5 and $10 million more to further the work.

She's a mother of 308, grandmother of 977
Ong Dai Lin, Today Online 16 Oct 09;

SINGAPORE - She is 15 months old and she already has 308 children and 977 grandchildren.

Holly, the world's first semi-cloned fish, has a friendly nature and likes to play with other fish.

Every day, Professor Hong Yunhan presents a male medaka fish to Holly as her playmate to encourage the fish to breed.

The history-making fish has quirky eating habits, too. As a baby, Holly's favourite food was green algae and pet fish food. Now that she is an adult, Holly prefers to eat living brine shrimp embryos.

Contrary to the perception that cloned specimens have health problems, Professor Hong says that Holly is very healthy.

The team of researchers from the National University of Singapore practically treats Holly like family, celebrating each stage of her growth with a meal.

When Holly was born and started swimming, the team went for a meal at a restaurant in West Coast. When Holly produced eggs after mating, the team celebrated over a seafood Chinese dinner.

Holly belongs to a species of fish called the medaka fish or Japanese rice fish. They are a freshwater species and are indigenous to Japan, Korea, China and Vietnam where they inhabit slow-moving waters.

They are reared as aquarium fish and are also used extensively for scientific research.

A medaka fish can live for up to two years and grow to 4cm.

The making of Holly, a semi-cloned fish
Breakthrough by NUS team spells promise for infertile couples
Victoria Vaughan, Straits Times 17 Oct 09;

FOR 15 years, molecular biologist Hong Yunhan dreamt of making a breakthrough in a new technology that could help infertile couples have children.

Now, he and his team have come a step closer to doing so.

They have worked on isolating and maintaining haploid cells for five years. These are cells containing half the DNA of a normal cell and are found in eggs and sperm before fertilisation.

It did not matter to the team that 2007 Nobel Prize winner in medicine Martin Evans, with Dr Matthew Kaufman, had closed the door on isolating these cells 26 years ago, after their mouse study found them to be unstable and prone to mutation.

Associate Professor Hong and his team at the National University of Singapore's Department of Biological Sciences pressed on and have made remarkable inroads.

To prove the viability of their haploid cells, the team went on to harness them to create Holly, a medaka fish, the world's first semi-cloned vertebrate.

Holly is healthy and so are her offspring, numbering more than 600. And it has over 1,000 grandchildren.

Created from two haploid reproductive cells - one an egg cell, the other an embryonic stem cell manipulated to mimic sperm - Holly could hold promise for infertile couples much further down the road if scientists learn how to obtain stable human haploid cells.

Prof Hong, 53, said he was doing this research for two reasons: First, fewer people are having babies and, second, couples are having them later, a factor that is accompanied by a decline in the quality of the human genome.

'Child production is not only a medical problem, it's a social problem and has an impact on daily life as well as the country,' said the Chinese national, who moved here eight years ago with his wife and two daughters, and is applying for permanent residency.

'With medical technology, there is a greater possibility of people with ill health surviving and having children. But by doing so humans are passing on bad genes. Consequently, the human gene pool will become worse.'

The technique can theoretically allow scientists to study the genetic makeup of a haploid cell and correct any disease mutations - or discard non-viable cells - before it is used in fertilisation.

During fertilisation, two haploid cells are joined together. This process can allow weaker genes, which cause diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and cancer, to hide making it difficult for scientists to study and 'correct' them.

Prof Hong was helped by molecular biologist Yi Meisheng and PhD student Hong Ni.

Dr Yi, 41, took seven months to create a batch of stable haploid cells. He did this by zapping the fish sperm cells with UV rays to kill their DNA but without destroying their ability to swim.

A sperm is then used to 'fertilise' a fish egg. This sparked the 'embryo' into cell division, but with only the DNA of the egg cell, making it a haploid cell.

'When I had a medaka haploid cell, I kept it very carefully. When the cells were still growing well 20 days later, I told Prof Hong and he was happy. After 59 days, he bought me a beer,' said Dr Yi. The cells were cultured for 400 days to confirm they were stable.

Molecular biologist Hong, 29, was bought in to validate that the cells were good, while Dr Yi took a month to train his hands to be steady enough to inject a haploid cell into a 1mm egg.

After many attempts over two months, three embryos began to grow.

One became Holly, created in 2007. It was named by Prof Hong in tribute to Dolly the sheep, the world's first cloned animal, but with an 'h' for haploid.

Previous efforts
Straits Times 17 Oct 09;

# 1996, Edinburgh, Scotland: Dolly the sheep is created in the first successful cloning of a mammal from an adult cell.

# 2003: Dolly is euthanised because of an incurable lung disease. It is only six years old, while the average lifespan of a sheep is 12 years.

# February 2004, Seoul National University, South Korea: Professor Hwang Woo Suk's team claims it has created 30 cloned human embryos.

# May 2005: Prof Hwang's team says it has made stem cell lines from the skin cells of 11 people.

# August 2005: Prof Hwang announces the creation of the world's first cloned dog, an Afghan hound named Snuppy.

# November 2005: Prof Hwang apologises for using eggs from his own researchers.

# December 2005: A university panel finds Prof Hwang's cloning research to be fabricated and he steps down as a professor at the university.

# 2008, South Korea: RNL Bio arranges for the re-creation of Booger the pit bull terrier through its refrigerated ear tissue. Ms Bernann McKinney pays US$50,000 for the five puppies that are born.

# November 2008: Dr Teruhiko Wakayama of the Riken research institute in Yokohama, Japan, clones mice whose bodies had been frozen for as long as 16 years.

# April 2009, South Korea: Cloned pig Xeno is created by a team of scientists doing research on making pigs suitable for human transplants.

# June 2009, Harayana, India: Scientists clone buffalo Garima at the National Dairy Research Institute in Karnal, northern India. The institute had cloned the world's first buffalo four months earlier, but it died five days after its birth.

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The Non-Tragedy of the Commons

John Tierney, TierneyLab The New York Times 15 Oct 09

The 2009 Nobel Prize for economics is a useful reminder of how easy it is for scientists to go wrong, especially when their mistake jibes with popular beliefs or political agendas.

Elinor Ostrom of Indiana University shared the prize for her research into the management of “commons,” which has been a buzzword among ecologists since Garrett Hardin’s 1968 article Science, “The Tragedy of the Commons.” His fable about a common pasture that is ruined by overgrazing became one of the most-quoted articles ever published by that journal, and it served as a fundamental rationale for the expansion of national and international regulation of the environment.

His fable was a useful illustration of a genuine public-policy problem — how do you manage a resource that doesn’t belong to anyone? — but there were a couple of big problems with the essay and its application.

First, Dr. Hardin himself misapplied the fable. Declaring that “overpopulation” was a tragedy of the commons, he warned that “freedom to breed will bring ruin to all.” He and others advocated a “lifeboat ethic” of denying food aid, even during emergencies, to poor countries with rapidly growing populations. But “overpopulation” was not even a theoretical example of the tragedy of the commons. Parents are not like the cattle owners who profit individually by adding cows to the pasture (while collectively destroying it). Parents, unlike the cattle owners, have to pay to feed and house and educate their children, and the high economic costs of children are one reason that birth rates have declined around the world — without any of the coercion discussed by Dr. Hardin and some other ecologists (like Paul Ehrlich).

The second problem arising from Dr. Hardin’s fable was the presumption that a commons needed to be regulated by national and international agencies. Dr. Hardin didn’t explicitly make that generalization in the essay — he noted that the tragedy could be avoided either by regulating the commons or by converting it to private property — but others in the environmental movement essentially drew that conclusion. Although some greens talked about the virtue of “acting locally,” major environmental groups lobbied in Washington for expanded federal authority, and they urged the rest of the world to follow the American and European example by creating national rules governing commons like forests and fisheries.

But too often those commons ended up in worse shape once they were put under the control of distant bureaucrats who lacked the expertise or the incentives to do the job properly. Dr. Hardin and his disciples had failed to appreciate how often the tragedy of the commons had been averted thanks to ingenious local institutions and customs. Dr. Ostrom won the Nobel for her work analyzing those local institutions. In an interview at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, Dr. Ostrom discussed the damage that had been done by those who had supplanted the local institutions:

International donors and nongovernmental organizations, as well as national governments and charities, have often acted, under the banner of environmental conservation, in a way that has unwittingly destroyed the very social capital — shared relationship, norms, knowledge and understanding — that has been used by resource users to sustain the productivity of natural capital over the ages. The effort to preserve biodiversity should not lead to the destruction of institutional diversity. . . . These institutions are most in jeopardy when central government officials assume that they do not exist (or are not effective) simply because the government has not put them in place.

Another Nobel laureate economist, Vernon Smith, described her work in an interview with Ivan Osorio for the Competitive Enterprise Institute:

She’s looked at a huge number of commons problems in fisheries, grazing, water, fishing water rights, and stuff like that. She finds that the commons problem is solved by many of these institutions, but not all of them. Some of them cannot make it work. She’s interested in why some of them work and some of them don’t.

One example is the Swiss alpine cheese makers. They had a commons problem. They live very high, and they have a grazing commons for their cattle. They solved that problem in the year 1200 A.D. For about 800 years, these guys have had that problem solved. They have a simple rule: If you’ve got three cows, you can pasture those three cows in the commons if you carried them over from last winter. But you can’t bring new cows in just for the summer. It’s very costly to carry cows over to the winter—they need to be in barns and be heated, they have to be fed. [The cheese makers] tie the right to the commons to a private property right with the cows.

Letting cheese makers set their own rules is an example of what Dr. Ostrom calls polycentric governance. In the interview at the Mercatus Center, she explained the advantages of trusting locals:

The strength of polycentric governance systems is each of the subunits has considerable autonomy to experiment with diverse rules for a particular type of resource system and with different response capabilities to external shock. In experimenting with rule combinations within the smaller-scale units of a polycentric system, citizens and officials have access to local knowledge, obtain rapid feedback from their own policy changes, and can learn from the experience of other parallel units.

Here’s a paper by Dr. Ostrom on fisheries. Here’s a a report for PERC by Donald Leal that summarizes Dr. Ostrom’s research: “Her studies of well-managed, commonly-owned property show that well-defined boundaries, a strong community tradition, and absence of government interference can preserve resources.”

You read more about Dr. Ostrom’s work in these posts from David Bollier at Forbes.com, J.P. Freire at the Washington Examiner, Daniel and my colleague Catherine Rampell.

As Catherine notes, the comedian Larry David explains one way to avoid the tragedy of the commons in an episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” Mr. David discusses the tradition requiring guests at a party to refrain from eating too many hors d’oeuvres at once. After your first helping, he says, you have to wait 20 minutes and make sure that the food isn’t disappearing too quickly before you go back for seconds. Does that qualify as polycentric governance?

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Urban residents living near parks are healthier and less depressed

Hannah Devlin, Times Online 16 Oct 09;

City dwellers living near parks are healthier and suffer fewer bouts of depression, a study has revealed.

The study was adjusted to take into account socio-economic background and found that the effect of green surroundings was greatest for people with low levels of education and income.

The study, published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, found that in urban zones where 90 per cent of the area was green space the incidence of anxiety disorders or depression was 18 people per thousand. In areas with only 10 per cent greenery the incidence was 26 per thousand.

The annual rates of more than a dozen disease types, including cardiovascular, respiratory, neurological, digestive and mental disorders, were also lower for those living near parks.

The impact on health was most marked in people who spent a lot of time in their green surroundings, especially children and people aged 45 to 65.

The findings are based on health records in the Netherlands for nearly 350,000 people registered with 195 family doctors in 95 practices across the country.

“The role of green space in the living environment should not be underestimated,” the study concludes.

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Timor Sea oil spill monitoring could last years

WA Today 15 Oct 09;

The operators of an oil well leaking into the Timor Sea for more than seven weeks could be monitoring the site for years, a scientist says.

Oil has been leaking into the ocean near PTTEP Australasia's West Atlas rig since August 21, at a rate initially estimated to be up to 400 barrels a day.

Federal Environment Minister Peter Garrett on Thursday announced a deal had been struck with the Thai-based company for it to pay for environmental monitoring in the Timor Sea for at least two years.

Two attempts to plug the well in the last week have been unsuccessful and another bid is planned for Saturday.

PTTEP has appointed Australian environmental scientist John Wardrop to manage the immediate and long-term monitoring programs.

Mr Wardrop said the monitoring program was one of the biggest in Australia in response to an oil spill.

"It really depends on how the studies go, some of them may last for one year," Mr Wardrop told AAP.

"For example, if we find with our water quality sampling, there is no simply no residual oil ... there's probably little chance of that being required in subsequent years.

"Some of these studies I'm sure will go for a number of years."

The leaking facility at PTTEP's Montara oilfield is more than 200 kilometres off Western Australia's Kimberley coast.

Conservationists have been critical of the company and the federal government's response to the oil spill, which occurred in an area that's home to a number of endangered species.

West Australian Greens senator Scott Ludlum said on Thursday PTTEP had been keen to downplay the impact of the spill.

Senator Ludlum said a two-year monitoring program was not long enough to monitor the life cycles of some fish species.

"It needs to be at least six years," Senator Ludlum told AAP.

Reports of dead fish and dolphins in Indonesian waters were concerning, Senator Ludlum said.

"This pollution does not respect international marine boundaries," he said.

Mr Wardrop said issues surrounding the monitoring of Indonesian waters would be dealt with by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority and the Department of Foreign Affairs.

He said he would be surprised if fish stocks in the Timor Sea were adversely affected by the oil spill.

"I would be surprised if there was an impact on the fisheries as such, that tends not to be that case when you have spills, even very large spills in open bodies of water," Mr Wardrop said.

"Where we've seen damage it's been very large spills in shore, in shallow waters."

Mr Wardrop said there was minimal risk of the oil, which he describes as "relatively light", leaving any residual on the seabed.

But it was possible it could leave a residual on reefs in the area, which were being monitored.

PTTEP said it was on track to make a third pass on Saturday to intercept the leaking well, which it plans to plug with mud.

The company is utilising electro-magnetic equipment that it says has never failed in similar relief efforts.

The company is paying for the costs of clean-up efforts and spill control by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority, which has been spraying dispersant to break up the oil slick and monitoring it on a daily basis.

AAP

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Lake Chad facing humanitarian disaster

FAO 14 Oct 09;

Shrinking water resources are threatening people and livelihoods - FAO calls for urgent interventions

15 October 2009, Rome - The humanitarian disaster looming at the shrinking Lake Chad in central Africa should be urgently addressed, FAO said today.

The lake, which is surrounded by Cameroon, Chad, Niger and Nigeria, was once one of the world's largest water bodies. Due to climatic variability, climate change and population pressure over recent decades, the lake has shrunk by 90 percent, from 25 000 square kilometers in 1963 to less than 1500 square kilometers in 2001.

If water continues to recede at the current rate, Lake Chad could disappear in about twenty years from now, according to NASA climate forecasts.

Together with the Lake Chad Basin Commission (LCBC), FAO will organize a special event ("Saving Lake Chad: A System under Threat") in Rome during World Food Day on October 16, 2009. The event is aimed at raising awareness about the disastrous situation of Lake Chad and mobilizing funds to replenish the lake and improve overall food security in the region.

The 30 million people living in the Lake Chad region are being forced into sharper competition for water. The drying-up of the lake and deterioration of the production capacity of its basin have affected all the socio-economic activities. Overuse of water and land resources is also a major cause of migration and conflicts.

In addition to an approximately 60 percent decline in fish production, there has been degradation of pasturelands, leading to a shortage of animal feed estimated at 45 percent in certain places in 2006, reduction in livestock and biodiversity.


"The humanitarian disaster that could follow the ecological catastrophe needs urgent interventions," said Parviz Koohafkan, Director of Land and Water Division of FAO. "The tragic disappearance of Lake Chad has to be stopped and the livelihoods of millions of people living in this vast area should be safeguarded."

FAO closely collaborates with the Lake Chad Basin Commission (LCBC), founded in 1964. Lake Chad Basin countries are meeting regularly to regulate and control the utilization of water and other natural resources in the Basin. They are actively seeking new models of Adaptive Water Management that take account of traditional agricultural techniques as well as the need to ensure food security for the people of the region.

According to the Lake Chad Basin Commission, the diminished flow of water into the lake requires a radical change in water management techniques and a scheme to replenish Lake Chad.

The flow of the two main sources of replenishment for the lake, the Chari and Logone rivers have decreased significantly in the last 40 years. The feasibility study for an ambitious programme to divert water flow from the Oubangui, the major tributary of the Congo River, into the Chari river system will be presented at the meeting in Rome.

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Carbon emissions must peak by 2015: UN climate scientist

Richard Ingham Yahoo News 15 Oct 09;

PARIS (AFP) – The UN's top climate scientist on Thursday urged a key conference on global warming to set tough mid-term goals and warned carbon emissions had to peak by 2015 to meet a widely-shared vision.

Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Nobel-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said the talks in Copenhagen in December must focus on 2020, a far more important target than mid-century.

"Strong, urgent and effective action" is needed, Pachauri told a meeting of ministers of the International Energy Agency (IEA) in Paris.

"It is not enough to set any aspirational goal for 2050, it is critically important that we bring about a commitment to reduce emissions effectively by 2020," he said.

Pachauri added that over the last two years he had witnessed "a massive explosion of awareness and therefore willingness to take action" in climate change.

But, he said, the deal in Copenhagen had to be consistent with the findings of scientists, who say greenhouse gases that trap heat from the Sun are already affecting the climate system, and grave potential problems lie ahead.

The Group of Eight (G8) and other countries have endorsed the target of pegging warming to no more than two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times.

Pachauri said this target "is not without some fairly serious impact."

"If this path of mitigation is to be embarked on, to ensure stabilisation of temperatures at the level that I mentioned (2 C, 3.6 F), then global emissions must peak by 2015," he said.

The December 7-18 Copenhagen talks are taking place under the 192-nation UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

The objective is a treaty that will tackle carbon emissions and their impacts, and encourage a switch to cleaner energy after 2012, when the current Kyoto Protocol pledges expire.

But UN talks have been bogged down by what is largely a divide between rich and poor countries, complicated by the US position.

President Barack Obama is sweeping away many of George W. Bush's legacy climate policies but has been unable to satisfy demands for deep, swift cuts in US carbon emissions.

He also faces a race against the clock to steer cap-and-trade legislation through Congress before the Copenhagen conference opens.

Pachauri told a press conference that it might take until next year for Washington to formulate its commitments on 2020.

"A reasonably good agreement" could emerge in Copenhagen, Pachauri said, adding though that he would not be dismayed by a delay if this provided a better outcome.

"If we are not getting a good agreement, then the global community really has the option of meeting again six months later or three months later or whatever," he said.

"I think we really have to keep at it until we can hammer out an agreement that meets the requirements of what science has clearly placed before us. It means a delay, it means some degree of disappointment all around, but who knows in the end you might get a much better agreement six months later."

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