Best of our wild blogs: 26 Dec 09

Striated Swallow collecting mud
from Bird Ecology Study Group

Pacific Swallow building nest
from Bird Ecology Study Group

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Singapore introduces key measures to fight climate change

Hoe Yeen Nie, Channel NewsAsia 26 Dec 09;

SINGAPORE : 2009 has been called the Year of Climate Change by the United Nations.

And in Singapore, major initiatives were introduced to tackle global warming.

Blame the heavy monsoon rains on climate change, according to the weatherman.

A warmer climate traps moisture in the atmosphere, bringing more intense rain and a higher likelihood of floods.

For residents of Bukit Timah, the problem of climate change hit home - literally - in November, when a freak downpour caused a canal to spill over, resulting in severe floods in the area.

One resident said: "The water does not go through, so the water has come all the way up, going into the restaurant. There is no solution."

But there may be a way out.

In April, authorities unveiled a billion-dollar blueprint to map out how Singapore can develop in a sustainable manner. By 2030 for example, 80 per cent of buildings here will be energy efficient, and energy consumption will be cut by one third.

In December, the government announced a more ambitious plan to cut carbon emissions growth by 16 per cent, based on levels projected for 2020.

Professor S Jayakumar, Senior Minister and Chairman of the Inter-Ministerial Committee on Climate Change, said: "The measures which we will take to reduce our emissions growth will entail both economic and social costs and will require considerable domestic adjustments."

And at the UN Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong called on developed nations to take the lead in reducing carbon emissions.

He said: "They must also ensure adequate means to help developing countries to implement urgently needed adaptation measures without compromising sustainable economic growth."

But some observers said Singapore should do more.

Associate Professor Shreekant Gupta, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore, said: "Its total emissions are small, but in per capita terms, its ecological footprint is actually quite heavy. Singapore emits on average 10 tonnes per person, which is as high as the EU.

"It should be focused on promoting carbon markets and in general reducing the ecological footprint of the country, more of reduce, recycle and re-use."

Professor Gupta wants to see bigger investments in green technologies, like solar power.

City planners have begun a S$31 million pilot programme to install solar panels in 28 public housing estates.

And they too hope that it could shine further light into how the sun's energy can be better tapped to power up our homes. - CNA/ms

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Remembering the Boxing Day Tsunami

Owe it to the mangrove trees
Andrea Filmer, The Star 25 Dec 09;

LIKE the previous four Boxing Days, tomorrow will be a day of reflection for the Penang Inshore Fishermen Welfare Association (Pifwa) in remembrance of the fifth anniversary of the Asian tsunami tragedy.

The fishing community in Pulau Betong, Balik Pulau in Penang owes much to the mangrove trees which broke the force of the giant waves that time, thus saving many homes and belongings from the destruction.

Fishermen returning from sea had also grabbed hold of the sturdy plants which saved them from being swept away.

Pifwa chairman Ilias Shafie said to date, the association had planted over 114,000 mangrove trees and there was no slowing down for them.

“The support is strong for the planting of mangroves, but what we are lacking is combined, sustainable support to oversee the growth of the trees,’ he said.

“People want us to plant mangroves in many areas, but we have to look at the neighbouring communities before we start.

“We need the support of the Village Development and Security Committees or community heads to monitor the development of the trees as Pifwa does not have enough manpower to do so, especially on the shores around Penang island,” Ilias said in an interview.

He said monitoring was important to ensure the trees grew healthily and were not trampled on.

“There would be no point in planting them if there was no one to maintain them,” Ilias said, adding that Pifwa had received suggestions to plant mangroves along Gurney Drive, among other places.

Next year, he said, Pifwa would focus on diversifying the mangrove species they planted as this would make the planting areas fertile spawning grounds for fish, prawns, crabs and other wildlife.

“The main species we grow now are Bakau Kurap and Bakau Minyak but we find that the more species there are in one area, the more fertile the place is for wildlife.

“We are also in discussions with the south Seberang Prai District Office to set up an eco-education centre in Sungai Chenaam where visitors, tourists and researchers can see different mangrove species at one site.

“We already have saplings of about eight mangrove species that were collected by hand from places in Penang, Kedah and Perak,” he said.

Ilias added that much of Pifwa’s current focus was planting mangroves along Sg Acheh and Nibong Tebal and they now planned to move to north and central Seberang Prai next year.

Members of Pifwa, along with their counterparts from Sahabat Alam Malaysia, will gather at Kuala Sungai Haji Ibrahim in Sungai Acheh tomorrow to plant 600 mangrove saplings.

“An important lesson to learn from the (2004) tsunami is not to wait until things go wrong.

“After some time goes by, people become less afraid of what might happen, but we should always plan for the future,” Ilias said.

Tsunami early warning must start at community level
Katherine Baldwin, Reuters 25 Dec 09;

LONDON (Reuters) - Five years on from the Indian Ocean tsunami, the region has its own early warning system but experts say the new technology will not save lives unless local communities are more involved in planning how to respond.

The 230,000 people killed in Africa and Asia by the 2004 tsunami received no formal warning of the approaching waves.

Since then, millions of dollars have gone into building a vast network of seismic and tsunami information centers, setting up sea and coastal instruments and erecting warning towers.

But studies show that the closer the warning gets to those it is designed to help, the more it fades out, and much more needs to be done to connect the technology to the people.

"The weakest link remains at the interface between the early warning system and the public, and in ensuring there's enough preparedness at the local level to react appropriately," said Bhupinder Tomar, senior officer for disaster preparedness at the International Federation for the Red Cross (IFRC) in Geneva.

In terms of technology, the region has made great strides since December 26, 2004, and is much better prepared, experts say.

Warning centers in Japan and Hawaii receive seismological and tidal data and send out alerts to national agencies in Indian Ocean countries. These agencies then warn the population, via SMS, radio, television, watch towers and loud speakers.

By 2010, regional centers in Australia, India, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand are set to take over primary responsibility from Hawaii and Japan for issuing the warnings.

START WITH COMMUNITIES

Many relief workers, however, believe the system's design is too top-down and that local communities should be the starting point, not the end point, in any early warning network.

Local people should be the 'first mile' in early warning, rather than the 'last mile' as they are often called, the workers say.

"You need to start with the people and move outwards," said Ilan Kelman, a senior research fellow at CICERO, the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo.

In a June 2009 report, the Global Network of Civil Society Organisations for Disaster Reduction found community participation in the decision-making process was insufficient.

It said the emphasis must shift from international and national policy-making to policy execution on the ground.

Similarly, Oxfam found in a recent report, "Collaboration in Crises," that disaster-affected communities wanted the chance to play a more decisive role in programs designed to help them.

Evacuation routes and drills need to be integrated into communities' day-to-day activities, experts say.

"In a heavily vegetated area, people need paths to get from the coast to inland ... and there's no reason why those paths should be different from an evacuation route," said Kelman.

"Having a development project to create more paths and maintain them is actually useful for the communities every day, as well as every decade when there's a tsunami warning."

Other community-based measures that need to be developed further include the teaching in some schools of "Shake, Drop, Run" -- when the earth shakes, drop everything and run.

Teachers and children must be taught what most fishermen know, that when the sea recedes you should run, said Kelman.

Thailand has put tsunami education on its national curriculum and more countries should do this, the experts say.

MULTI-HAZARD APPROACH

Communities must also design their own warning messages.

"We don't want to see panic, we don't want to see people taking the wrong action. So getting the words right, getting the message right and getting it delivered are key components," said Al Panico, head of the tsunami unit at the IFRC.

In order to maintain the tsunami early warning system, at the community, national and international level, it is vital to extend it to other hazards like cyclones and storm surges.

"Any warning system you don't notice is a dormant system, and treasuries don't like anything that they cannot justify," said Peter Koltermann, head of the Tsunami Coordination Unit for the United Nations' Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC), which began coordinating the Indian Ocean system in 2005.

The best approach to saving lives, however, is better urban and coastal planning to move people away from high risk areas. But experts agree this is the hardest thing to accomplish when communities and livelihoods are established.

"That is by far the best approach," said Panico. But "it's the individual who decides where to live."

(Additional reporting by Thin Lei Win in Bangkok; Editing by Jerry Norton)

FACTBOX: How the Indian Ocean gets tsunami warnings
Reuters 25 Dec 09;

LONDON (Reuters) - For more than 40 years, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center (PTWC) has been alerting countries in the Pacific region to the dangers of killer waves.

Following the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that killed almost 230,000 people, the United Nation's Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) began coordinating efforts to create an Indian Ocean tsunami early warning system.

Before 2004, there were no sea-level monitoring instruments in the Indian Ocean and many countries did not have agencies responsible for tsunami warnings or points of contact to receive messages from international warning centers.

Five years on, a vast network of seismographic centers, national warning centers or agencies, coastal and deep-ocean stations is in place across the Indian Ocean to detect potential tsunamis and pass on warnings to communities.

Here's how the system works:

WARNING CENTRES

When an earthquake strikes in the Indian Ocean region, data from a variety of sources is transmitted to the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center (PTWC) based in Hawaii and the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) in Tokyo.

The two centers currently have responsibility for providing the Indian Ocean with what are known as tsunami "watches."

By 2011, a number of so-called Regional Tsunami Watch Providers (RTWPs) in Indian Ocean countries are set to take over this function. Australia, India, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Asian Disaster Preparedness Center in Bangkok are on track to become regional watch providers.

Countries able to invest more in technology will share data with smaller states that cannot, such as the Maldives or the Seychelles.

In addition, the ADPC has been coordinating its own efforts since 2005 to have a multi-hazard early warning system, known as the Regional Integrated Multi-Hazard Early Warning System(RIMES).

RIMES will work alongside the national and regional watch providers and will also share information with Hawaii and Japan. RIMES is expected to be operable early next year.

Hawaii and Japan receive earthquake information and data from tidal gauges and Deep-ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunamis (DART) sensors or buoys.

They also receive news bulletins, telegrams, and information over the telephone. The Commission for the Nuclear-Test Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) also contributes data from seismographic stations.

The centers locate and determine the size of earthquakes, determine whether they have the potential to produce tsunamis and predict tsunami wave arrival times wherever possible.

It takes about 15 to 20 minutes for earthquake data to be deciphered and a tsunami watch to be issued.

SENDING TO THE COUNTRIES

The two centers issue watches, if necessary, to national bodies in the Indian Ocean and it is the responsibility of each national agency to alert its population, by whatever means.

Many national agencies will have also received their own information, from local or regional seismic centers, buoys, news bulletins and so on, and all this information will be fed back and forth between Hawaii, Japan and the region.

WARNING THE POPULATION

Warnings to the population are delivered over the airwaves -- radio, television, SMS, email -- and manually, using bells, megaphones or loud-speakers attached to mosques.

In some countries, well-rehearsed drills will kick in and local agencies will coordinate an evacuation.

On the ground in many Indian Ocean nations, NGOs and community groups are involved in educating and coordinating local populations to know what to do when they hear a tsunami warning or when they feel or see signs of an earthquake or tsunami - when the earth shakes or the sea recedes.

Technology does not reach all areas and even if it does, warnings can be confused or not in the right language for all the affected people to understand. In other areas, there are no escape routes as transport infrastructure is poor.

(Reporting by Katherine Baldwin; Editing by Jerry Norton)

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Adapting to disasters is our only option

Our naturally volatile region demands better measures to save lives.
Robert Tickner, Sydney Morning Herald 26 Dec 09;

THE past five years have been bracketed by the most devastating natural disasters in our region's history: the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, which killed 226,000 people in 14 countries, and the unprecedented triple punch of an earthquake, tsunami and typhoon three months ago. These disasters understandably received blanket media coverage, outlining the unfolding catastrophe, the mounting human toll, and then the extensive humanitarian relief effort. This neat, closed account, however, has created the perception that they are one-off events, with a clear end point. It overlooks the increasingly frequent nature of disasters, often linked to climate change, that the Asia-Pacific region has experienced in the past five years.

Straddling the ''Ring of Fire'' - the meeting point of Pacific and Indo-Australian tectonic plates - Indonesia registers an average of 400 earthquakes with a magnitude of 4.0 or above annually. Since 2004, major earthquakes have hit Sumatra, Yogyakarta and West Java, claiming thousands of lives. Deadly tsunami waves have also struck Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands in recent years. In one Solomon Islands community, not realising the danger, people walked down to the sea to watch in awe as it receded several kilometres before being swept away with the incoming tidal surge. Earlier this year, Fiji was hit with massive flooding, affecting 10,000 people. These major catastrophes are compounded by an increasing number of localised, smaller-scale events, increasing the average number of disasters per month in the Asia-Pacific from 21 in 2004 to 51 in 2008.

Disasters such as these are often stereotyped as ''acts of God'' or of ''mother nature''. Instead, in many recent ''natural'' disasters, there is a distinctly man-made dimension. They are more often the permanent condition of many of the world's poorest. Economic patterns have ensured the concentration of poor communities in high-risk areas, such as during Hurricane Katrina, or in terms of structural social inequalities that render particular groups such as women or the elderly especially vulnerable. As a result, developing countries account for 95 per cent of deaths from physical disasters and experience economic losses up to 20 times greater, as a percentage of GDP, than developed countries.

All the evidence indicates that the risks to these vulnerable communities are set to intensify in line with the frequency and severity of physical disasters due to global warming. Rising sea levels are already a growing problem for the sprawling archipelago to our north, with coastal towns and even the capital, Jakarta, increasingly vulnerable to tidal surges and waves. The future is possibly even more dire to our east, where the mainly low-lying Pacific island communities face intensifying climatic and geological dangers. In Papua New Guinea, a remote community on the Carteret Islands in Bougainville is among the first recorded people to have lost their ancestral lands to rising sea levels.

For these communities, some of the world's poorest, effective disaster management and adaption measures are becoming increasingly urgent. A properly resourced regional strategy is needed, which is fully supported by governments and decision makers, and implemented at the community level.

At a local level, disaster preparedness has already proved to be successful and cost-effective, with early warning and early action, as well as preparedness measures, saving more lives and livelihoods per dollar spent than traditional disaster response.

Its effectiveness was demonstrated recently in Samoa, where church bells rang out as a tsunami warning. Red Cross volunteers - well trained in tsunami preparedness drills - helped villagers evacuate to pre-identified sites on higher ground. When the latest quake struck the city of Padang in West Sumatra, a trained network of radio operators swung into action, keeping vital lines of communication open between Indonesian Red Cross in Jakarta and its field offices in the quake zone. Pre-positioned emergency relief items in the area meant that help was at hand for survivors and 200 disaster response volunteers immediately fanned out into affected areas to assess urgent needs.

At a global level, the international community now needs to step up risk-reduction measures significantly in the face of ever more extreme and frequent disaster. The incredible generosity after the 2004 Asia quake and tsunami, repeated this year, must be harnessed to help communities adapt to known weather and seismic events and new disasters emerging from changing climate patterns. At the same time, international donors must honour their commitments to increase funding towards risk reduction initiatives.

Responding effectively to disasters will always be essential but nothing is more effective than preparing for disasters and preventing them. Indeed, is this not our moral obligation to the thousands who have lost their lives in natural disasters in the past five years?

Robert Tickner is chief executive of the Australian Red Cross.

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Fuel spill at same Alaska reef as Exxon Valdez

Yahoo News 25 Dec 09;

LOS ANGELES (AFP) – A tugboat struck the same reef as the Exxon Valdez tanker 20 years ago, spilling diesel into Alaska's Prince William Sound and creating a three-mile-long slick, the US Coast Guard said on Friday.

An unknown quantity of the fuel leaked from the Pathfinder tug after it ran aground Wednesday on Bligh Reef. The boat's owners were pumping the remaining diesel from the original 33,500 gallons (127,000 liters) in its tanks.

Flyovers by a C-130 cargo plane and helicopters revealed "a light grey or silver diesel sheen spanning an area approximately three miles (five kilometers) long and 30 yards (meters) wide approximately one mile east of Glacier Island," the Coast Guard said on its website.

The tug had been scouting shipping lanes for ice when it struck the same rock that did for the Exxon Valdez on March 24, 1989, spilling 11 million gallons of crude into the sea in the worst US oil disaster.

Wednesday's accident was nothing like on the same scale and the Coast Guard said the slick was "rapidly dissipating" and not expected to hit the shoreline of Glacier Island for some time.

Experts surrounded the boat with containment booms to prevent the slick from spreading, while a recovery vessel, the Valdez Star, was using oil skimmers to try and recover spilled fuel.

"There's no recoverable sheen," Jim Butler, a spokesman for Crowley Maritime Service which owns the tug, told the Anchorage Daily News (ADN).

When the remaining fuel is removed, officials will be able to estimate how much spilled into the sound, the Coast Guard said.

Butler said it was not clear how the tug ran aground, ADN reported, but a navigational error at such a well-known spot left some people dumbstruck.

"Like most Alaskans, we at the Prince William Sound Regional Citizens Advisory Council are baffled as to how the Pathfinder managed to hit perhaps the most famous navigational hazard in the world -- Bligh Reef -- in conditions of relatively mild weather," council president Steve Lewis wrote in a blog posting.

The accident raises questions "about how well the painful lessons of the Exxon Valdez spill of 1989 have been learned by today's mariners," he said.

The Coast Guard said tests administered to the Pathfinder crew late Wednesday found no alcohol, ADN reported.

The captain of the Exxon Valdez, Joe Hazelwood, had been drinking on board the tanker before the 1989 wreck.

Alaska tanker-escort grounds at notorious wreck site
Yereth Rosen, Reuters 24 Dec 09;

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) - A tugboat used to help oil tankers travel safely through Alaska's Prince William Sound has run aground at the site of the Exxon Valdez disaster and is leaking diesel fuel, the U.S. Coast Guard said on Thursday.

The tug, called the Pathfinder and owned by Crowley Maritime Corp, hit Bligh Reef on Wednesday evening. The submerged reef, a notorious navigation hazard, is where the Exxon Valdez ran aground in 1989, leaking 11 million gallons (42 million liters) of crude oil in the country's worst oil-tanker spill.

Fuel tanks holding up to 33,500 gallons (127,000 liters) of diesel were breached in the grounding, and aerial surveys show that a sheen about three miles long and 30 yards (meters) wide has formed, Coast Guard Chief Petty Officer Dana Ware said.

Tanker traffic out of Valdez, site of the marine terminal for the Trans Alaska Pipeline System, was temporarily interrupted but resumed Thursday morning, Ware said.

The 136-foot (41-meter) tug, part of the tanker-escort system set up after the Exxon Valdez disaster, had been scouting the tanker route for ice buildup, the Coast Guard said. It was not escorting a tanker at the time.

It is unclear what caused the grounding. All six crew members passed the alcohol test that was administered, the Coast Guard said.

(Reporting by Yereth Rosen; editing by Bill Rigby and Eric Beech)

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Cultivated coral reefs now also exported from Indonesia

Antara 25 Dec 09;

Denpasar (ANTARA News) - The coral reefs cultivated by coastal fishermen in Serangan village, Denpasar, have found their way to the export market.

"We have been applying the technique of transplantation in coral reef cultivation and the result is that the products are now exported to Europe," Chairman of the Association of Serangan Fishermen Wayan Patut said here Thursday.

He also said that trading coral reefs is actually against the law, as it harms natural conservation.

However, by applying the transplantation technique in coral reef cultivation, the farmers produced the reefs in such a way that they could be locally marketed and even exported.

"We have been cultivating coral reefs in this way for many years including for natural conservation, in the Serangan waters," one of the farmers said.

"Besides saving nature, the technique also has its economic value, so that the farmers became enthusiastic in both cultivating and rehabilitating coral reefs," he added.

He said he could tell the difference between observed coral reefs from the saleable cultivated ones, by monitoring the reefs and rehabilitating them.

"We have succeeded in cultivating coral reefs of different colors like brown, green, yellow, and other shades," he added.

He said the coral reefs had already been exported to various countries, like the United States, and are also marketed at local markets. Coral reefs are normally used to decorate sea water and fresh water aquariums. (*)

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