The Kings Have Successfully Brought Up Two Chicks
from Life's Indulgences
My Second Visit to Semakau Island Part 1
from Beauty of Fauna and Flora in Nature
乌敏岛的居民 Residents of Pulau Ubin
from PurpleMangrove and 乌敏岛风光 View of Pulau Ubin
Poser
from The annotated budak
Dato’ Dr Amar-Singh HSS – birdwatcher extraordinarie
from Bird Ecology Study Group
Teo Xuanwei, Today Online 11 Mar 10;
SINGAPORE - Green, leafy vegetables like pak choy and kangkong may become slightly costlier in coming weeks if the recent dry spell does not go away, importers say.
But a greater concern is: Could the El Nino weather pattern, which has caused droughts in the fields in northern Thailand from where Singapore gets some 60 per cent of its rice supplies, lead to skyrocketing rice prices seen here in mid-2008?
Though the price of rice remains stable for now, importers warned the full effect of the blistering heatwave will only be seen after harvests next month.
This is because Singapore's current imports are from previous harvests, they said.
"It's still too early to say for now but if the conditions degenerate and lead to worse crop failures, prices will go up inevitably," said Mr Jimmy Soh, managing director of Chye Choon Foods.
Still, it is rather unlikely prices will spiral to the record US$1,278 a tonne seen in 2008, he added.
The price of Thai fragrant rice began inching upwards last November because of smaller harvests caused by the poor weather, a stronger Thai baht and greater demand worldwide.
For now, the more immediate impact of the drier-than-usual weather conditions has been on import prices of some vegetables, which have risen 20 to 30 per cent since last week. Harvests in countries like Malaysia and China suffered.
Said Mr Vincent Li, vice-president of the Singapore Fruits and Vegetables Importers and Exporters Association: "Dry weather affects us every year but this year is slightly worse. Consumers may see some minor price adjustments for a few kinds of vegetables next week."
A spokesperson for the Agri-Food and Veterinary Authority said the Republic has diversified its supply sources, which ensures "a resilient supply as it enables our traders to quickly switch to alternative sources and at the most competitive prices".
Showers bring cool relief
Dry spell may be over as air quality improves after two straight days of rain
Amresh Gunasingham, Straits Times 11 Mar 10;
THE hot, dry spell that has baked Singapore for well over a month may finally be coming to an end.
A prolonged shower yesterday - the second in as many days - brought day-time temperatures down to a more comfortable 29 deg C in some parts of the island, the 'coolest' Singapore has been for several days.
Just as important, between 30mm and 45mm of rain fell on parts of the island - more than the 6.3mm registered for the whole of last month, which made it the driest month in recorded history.
It was the second straight day of fairly heavy showers: On Monday, up to 42mm of rain doused Mandai, cooling the area by as much as 6 deg C from a high of over 34 deg C.
More rain is expected over the next few weeks, so Singaporeans can expect cooler and wetter days, although there may be some extended periods of dry weather from time to time.
Yesterday's rainfall also cleared the air, literally.
By the time it was over, much of the acrid pall over the country caused by bush fires on Tuesday was also gone.
The Pollutant Standards Index, which measures air quality, dropped to 44 yesterday, which is in the good range, down from the four-month high of 53 on Tuesday.
The Singapore Civil Defence Force said no calls about bush fires were received yesterday.
More than 206 bush fires have been reported so far this year, with more than half of them occurring last month.
Though this is lower than the 341 cases reported in the first two months of last year, it is still higher than the norm for the early part of the year, when cooler, wetter weather generally prevails.
Wetter weather is expected in the next few weeks because of the approaching inter-monsoon season, a period during which winds are constantly shifting in direction and can bring intermittent rain, the National Environment Agency's Meteorological Services Division said yesterday.
'This will help to alleviate the dry and warm weather conditions we have been experiencing in recent weeks,' a spokesman said.
A weak monsoon surge was responsible for the rain over the past two days, he added.
Such surges occur when a sudden cold snap engulfs Central Asia, forming a high pressure system that strengthens north-easterly winds blowing across the South China Sea.
These winds pick up moisture as they reach the tropics.
Though experts say the worst may be over, they cautioned that spells of hot and dry weather could return.
Climatologist Matthias Roth, from the department of geography at the National University of Singapore, predicts that the El Nino weather phenomenon will last for at least another two months.
'We could very well go through another two-week spell without rain,' he said.
Singapore's driest month
Straits Times 11 Mar 10;
FEBRUARY 2010 has gone down as the driest month here - since weather records were first kept in 1869 - with just 6.3mm of rain.
The dry spell helped fuel the current heatwave that has resulted in extraordinary conditions:
# There were 22 days, between Feb1 and the first nine days of this month, in which the temperature soared above 33 degC.
# Just last Saturday, the mercury hit a scorching 35.5 deg C, the third highest recorded in history.
# A stretch of 13 consecutive dry days (when less than a millimetre of rain is registered over a 24-hour period) was recorded, starting Feb25.
# There were four days last month and three days this month (so far) when not a single drop of rain fell over Singapore.
# The current heatwave comes on the back of a similar dry spell last year.
Between Jan 5 and Feb 15, there were 42 consecutive dry days recorded at the National Environment Agency's weather station in the east, making it the longest dry spell recorded in history.
Morning rain provides respite from hot and dry spell
Joanne Chan Channel NewsAsia 10 Mar 10;
SINGAPORE: Heavy showers on Wednesday morning provided respite from the hot and dry spell gripping Singapore.
And the weatherman said more rain can be expected in the coming weeks as the inter-monsoon season approaches.
The Meteorological Services Division said the showers on Wednesday were due to a weak monsoon surge, which refers to a strengthening of winds over the South China Sea.
Such a monsoon surge is common during the Northeast monsoon months of December and January, but can also occur occasionally towards the end of the monsoon season in March.
Between 30 and 45 millimetres of rainfall were recorded in the southern and central parts of Singapore on Wednesday.
- CNA/ir
Alister Doyle, Reuters 10 Mar 10;
(Reuters) - A "doomsday" vault storing crop seeds in an Arctic deep freeze is surpassing 500,000 samples to become the most diverse collection of food seeds in history, managers said on Thursday.
Set up on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard two years ago, the vault aims to store seeds of all food crops deep beneath permafrost to withstand threats ranging from a cataclysmic nuclear war to a mundane power cut.
"New seeds ... are taking us over the milestone of half a million samples," Cary Fowler, head of the Global Crop Diversity Trust which runs the vault with the Norwegian government and the Nordic Genetic Resource Center in Sweden, told Reuters.
A statement said thousands of new arrivals this week made the vault "the most diverse assemblage of crop diversity ever amassed anywhere in the world." It overtakes the diversity in a U.S. national gene bank in Fort Collins, Colorado.
Among arrivals were a bean from South America that may have strong resistance to diseases, a strawberry from Russia's remote Kuril Islands in the Pacific and samples of soybeans from the United States.
Only about 150 crops are grown widely around the world but all come in a wide range of varieties -- potatoes, for instance, come in an array of sizes and colors.
The $10 million facility opened in 2008 with 268,000 varieties of seeds from more than 100 countries.
The three vault rooms will be able to house 4.5 million samples, or 2 billion seeds since samples usually comprise many seeds, such as of rice, maize, wheat, cowpea or barley.
Blasted out of icy rock 1,000 km (600 miles) from the North Pole, the air-locked vaults would stay frozen for 200 years even in the worst-case scenario of global warming and if mechanical refrigeration were to fail, designers say.
Fowler said the vault was becoming more important after a U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen in December failed to agree a binding treaty to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
He said the collection could help in work to develop new crops that may contain traits able to withstand rising temperatures, floods or droughts that may be caused by rising temperatures in the 21st century.
(Editing by Robin Pomeroy)
Arctic Seed Vault becomes world's most diverse collection of crop diversity
Inventory passes half-million mark; achievement brings mixed emotions as copenhagen failure puts climate change on collision course with food security and neglect of crop genebanks continues
Global Crop Diversity Trust, EurekAlert 10 Mar 10;
LONGYEARBYEN, NORWAY (11 March 2010)—Days after celebrating its second anniversary, the Svalbard "Doomsday" Global Seed Vault is receiving this week thousands of new seeds that will push its collection to more than half a million unique samples, making it the most diverse assemblage of crop diversity ever amassed anywhere in the world.
A wild bean from South America that could be critical for avoiding a crippling crop disease, a highly valuable strawberry species plucked by a collection team from the flanks of a volcano in Russia's remote Kuril Islands, and a treasure trove of soybeans from the United States, some of which have been cultivated domestically for over a century, were among the crops that arrived from Columbia, Peru, Mexico and the US for storage deep in an Arctic mountain on a remote island in the Norway's Svalbard Archipelago.
With these new deposits, the seed vault—built as a bulwark against any natural or manmade disaster that threatens global food production—now contains seeds of more than 500,000 varieties of the world's food crops.
"Reaching the half million mark brings mixed emotions, because while it shows that the vault at Svalbard is now the gold standard for diversity, it comes at a time when our agriculture systems are really sitting on a knife's edge," said Cary Fowler, Executive Director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which partners with the Norwegian government and the Nordic Genetic Resource Center in Sweden in operating the vault.
The array of crops protected in Svalbard and other seed banks around the world supported by the Global Crop Diversity Trust are "the keys to climate change adaptation for the world's farmers," Fowler stated. For example, he pointed to recent studies that predict maize production in Africa could drop by a quarter or more in a mere 20 years, which would destabilize much of the continent and spark a global food crisis, unless breeders quickly develop new heat and drought resistant varieties. And with recent climate talks in Copenhagen ending in stalemate over measures to slow climate change, Fowler said that we must now mobilize efforts to adapt crops to higher temperatures.
"If crops and agriculture don't adapt to climate change, neither will humanity," Fowler said. "But to help farmers adapt, plant breeders need access to as much genetic diversity as possible to keep crops vigorous and productive in shifting climates."
The shipments arriving at the vault offer timely examples of why crop experts are so eager to bank as much diversity as possible. They include a wild bean species from Costa Rica—known by its Latin name costaricensis. The bean appears resistant to white mold, a disease that is a major threat to common domesticated bean varieties that feed millions of people in Central and South America.
The mold-resistant bean was sent to the vault as part of a collection from the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) in Colombia, one of the 15 centers supported by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) that together have contributed the most crop varieties to the vault.
"The mold-resistant bean is particularly important because it shows why we need to collect and conserve not just domestic crops but also their wild relatives," said Daniel Debouck, Head of the Genetic Resources Unit at CIAT. "Plant breeders already are hard at work, exploring whether the wild bean can be crossed with domesticated bean varieties and thus avoid what could be a troubling interruption to food production."
Overall, CIAT's new shipment included 3,837 materials from 75 countries, mostly bean varieties but also seeds of important forage crops. Some of the forage varieties originated in South America but are now important to livestock in Africa, an example of the global sharing of crop diversity that has been underway for centuries.
Also coming into the vault are important crop varieties from the United States Department of Agriculture-Agricultural Research Service (USDA-ARS) National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation. These include a wild strawberry species discovered after a three-day trek through a bear-infested wilderness to the Atsonupuri volcano, which is located on a remote chain of islands in the Russian territory of Sakhalin.
In addition, the Center conveyed a soybean collection that contains almost the entire lineage of soybeans developed in the US over the last century and hundreds of wild soybeans. Among the samples are an array of disease-resistant varieties and soybeans with genetic traits that could be especially important for dealing with the stresses of climate change.
"We're seeing in several of the soybean varieties intriguing traits that could allow farmers to confront such problems as drought or extreme heat, shorter or longer growing seasons, or higher levels of CO2," said Dave Ellis, curator at the USDA-ARS National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation.
The Center also sent along samples of semi-dwarf wheat and rice from the early 1960s, varieties that helped provide the genetic foundation for the Green Revolution credited with saving millions from starvation.
Another shipment brought to the vault contains over 400 samples from the Seed Savers Exchange in the US, an Iowa-based non-profit group that is preserving rare garden species, many of them brought to North America by immigrants from Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Included in the shipment are seeds for the German Pink tomato, a rare variety transported to Iowa in 1883 by a Bavarian immigrant who is the grandfather of one of the co-founders of the Seed Savers Exchange. German Pink is a large, hardy sweet-flavored tomato.
Like all seeds coming to the vault, the samples are duplicates of seeds from other collections and are being sent to Svalbard for safekeeping, not for everyday use. Fowler noted that it is important to understand that the material directly acquired by plant breeders to develop disease-resistant and "climate-ready" crops, and to meet the challenge of rapidly growing populations, is maintained by national and regional crop genebanks. Many of these genebanks are threatened by neglect and lack of funds.
"Svalbard is a fail-safe backup to be used whenever a depositing seed bank loses part or all of its collection, but we should focus equally on averting the disasters in the first place," he said. "Crop genebanks are our first and best line of defense, yet something as mundane as a poorly functioning freezer could ruin a collection that 10 years from now could be critical to averting a food crisis."
Fowler and the Trust are eager to see the success of the vault encourage broader interest in preserving the crop diversity stored in genebanks around the world and expanding these collections to include the wild relatives of domesticated crops, which themselves are being lost to environmental degradation and climate change.
###
Svalbard Global Seed Vault (www.seedvault.no)
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is designed to store duplicates of seeds from seed collections from around the globe. If seeds are lost, e.g. as a result of natural disasters, war or simply a lack of resources, the seed collections may be reestablished using seeds from Svalbard. The seed vault is owned by the Norwegian government which has also financed the construction work, costing nearly NOK 50 million.
The Global Crop Diversity Trust (www.croptrust.org)
The mission of the Trust is to ensure the conservation and availability of crop diversity for food security worldwide. Although crop diversity is fundamental to fighting hunger and to the very future of agriculture, funding is unreliable and diversity is being lost. The Trust is the only organization working worldwide to solve this problem. The Trust is providing support for the ongoing operations of the seed vault, as well as organizing and funding the preparation and shipment of seeds from developing countries to the facility.
Hannah Devlin, Times Online 11 Mar 10;
Nearly 500 species of plants and animals have disappeared in England in the past 200 years, according to the first comprehensive audit of native wildlife.
The disappearances, which have been largely attributed to human activities, include four species that did not exist anywhere else. The great auk, a flightless seabird similar to a penguin, Ivell’s sea anemone, Mitten’s beardless-moss and York groundsel, a weed, have all become extinct since 1800.
“These species were lost on our watch. In the late 1980s the last Ivell’s anemone died out in a lagoon near Chichester,” said Dr Tom Tew, chief scientist for Natural England.
The York groundsel was discovered in 1979 by Richard Abbott, a biologist from St Andrews University, offering the first glimpse of “evolution in action” in Britain. However, the fragile existence of the species had come to an end by 2000, partly because of the use of weedkiller by York City Council.
The survey trawled records and specimens dating back 2,000 years. All but 12 of the 492 species to vanish were lost after 1800. This was attributed in part to the scarcity of records in pre-Victorian times, but also to increased hunting and fishing, loss of habitat to farming, and climate change. “Extinction rates are very high and it’s predominantly down to changes in land use,” said Professor Kathy Willis, a long-term ecologist at the University of Oxford.
Natural England, a government advisory body that carried out the study, compared the rate of disappearances now being experienced to those during severe global extinction events, such as caused disappearance of the dinosaurs.
“Extinction rates are 1,000 times higher than natural background rate indicated by the fossil record,” Dr Tew said. “This time it isn’t being driven by a meteorite hitting Earth or a natural catastrophe, but by human activities.”
Other ecologists said, however, that it was not valid to compare recent events in England with fossil evidence, which represented longer timescales and was not as geographically specific.
The report, called Lost Life: England’s Lost and Threatened Species, showed that the geographical ranges of many species were being reduced to isolated spots, meaning that children would not experience the same diversity of wildlife as their grandparents.
The white-tailed eagle and the chough were lost from the North West, the bumblebee vanished from the North East and puffins and blue stag beetles were lost from the South East.
However, the report offered encouragement, suggesting that conservation efforts, when employed, had been effective. “The red kite, which disappeared by the end of the 19th century, has now been firmly established in the hundreds,” Dr Tew said. “The corncrake, ladybird spider, sand lizard and polecat are all slowly but surely returning.”
Dr Jane Smart, director of the biodiversity group at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, said: “We need to scale up and mainstream conservation work.”
More than two extinct species a year in England, report reveals
The biggest national study of threats to biodiversity found nearly 500 species that had died out in England, nearly all in last two centuries
Juliette Jowit, guardian.co.uk 11 Mar 10;
More than two animals and plants a year are becoming extinct in England and hundreds more are severely threatened, a report published today reveals.
Natural England, the government's agency responsible for the countryside, said the biggest national study of threats to biodiversity found nearly 500 species that had died out in England, all but a dozen in the last two centuries.
The losses recorded compare with a natural rate of about one extinction every 20 years before humans dominated the planet, but are almost certainly an underestimate because of poor records of any but the "biggest, scariest" creatures before the 1800s.
The high rate at which species are being lost is set to continue. Almost 1,000 other species face "severe" threats from the same problems that drove their relatives extinct – hunting, pollution, development, poor land management, invasive species and, more recently, climate change – says the report, Lost life: England's lost and threatened species. This represents about a quarter of all species in the best-studied groups, including every reptile, dolphin and whale species, two-thirds of amphibians and one-third of butterflies and bumblebees. In total, the report records 55,000 known species in England.
"Each species has a role and, like the rivets in an aeroplane, the overall structure of our environment is weakened each time a single species is lost," said Helen Phillips, the agency's chief executive. "We seem to have endless capacity to get engaged about rainforests but this reminds us conservation begins at home."
Tom Tew, Natural England's chief scientist, called for a "step change" in conservation, including more "targeted" schemes to protect individual species, better safeguarding of protected areas and better management of land outside the protected areas, especially farmland.
"This report is not all doom and gloom, but we're losing species at an alarming rate and many of our species are seriously threatened," he said. "These species could the tip of the iceberg unless we take action."
Matt Shardlow, head of Buglife, said: "The report [confirms] we are in the midst of an extinction crisis and it is happening here in England under our very noses."
Dozens of scientists trawled records going back to the first century AD from official lists and books. They identified 492 species recorded in England that could no longer be found, all but 12 of which disappeared after 1800.
A further 943 species are listed under the UK's Biodiversity Action Plan (BAP) as plants and animals under threat. These include a number of species now extinct in many counties or regions of England. One statistic that shocked the experts was a study of nearly half of English counties, which showed one plant species going locally extinct every two years.
So widespread are the problems that some once prolific species are under threat, including the common toad, common frog, common skate and the corncrake. "They are not common any more," said Tew. "Our ancestors used to lie awake at night unable to sleep because of the noise of the corncrake."
Four of the species extinct in England also became extinct globally: the penguin-like great auk; Mitten's beardless moss; York groundsel, a weed only discovered in the 1970s; and the Ivell's sea anemone, last seen in a lagoon near Chichester.
Many more English animals and plants are also on the threatened list, including the whitebeam, a tree with young leaves like "white candles", said Tew: "That signals the start of spring; it can be found nowhere else in the world and has disappeared from much of England."
The remaining extinct and threatened species exist in other countries, though the agency warned that reintroducing species was not reliable because the threats still remained, and national or regional extinctions led to the loss of genetic diversity.
Last year Natural England also published a report highlighting the economic cost of not protecting natural ecosystem services such as clean air, clean water, productive soils for crops, carbon storage, flood defence and natural resilience to climate change.
Other benefits were beyond value, said Tew: "Lots of you, like me, feel the worse for not hearing the corncrake in the country, or the flash of a red squirrel. When we lose wildlife we lose something priceless, and that effects our quality of life."
The report calls for better conservation, especially following successful schemes to reintroduce or bolster populations such as the red kite and large blue butterfly.
Of the hundreds of species on the BAP list in the 1990s, seven have since become extinct but 45% are now stable or recovering. The government has also ordered a review of protected areas.
"Species loss is not inevitable; we can do something about it," added Tew. "But we need to think ambitiously if we're to meet the needs of this and future generations."
This week, Simon Stuart, who oversees the team of experts that declare species globally threatened and extinct, said humans were causing extinctions faster than new species could evolve for the first time since the dinosaurs disappeared.
GOING: Species facing "severe" threats in England:
Red squirrel
Northern bluefin tuna
Natterjack toad
Common skate
Alpine foxtail
Kittiwake
Grey plover
Shrill carder bumblebee
RECOVERING: Recent conservation success stories
Pole cat
Large blue butterfly
Red kite
Ladybird spider
Pink meadowcap
Sand lizard
Pool frog
Bittern
Chris Wattie, PlanetArk 11 Mar 10;
Canadian parliamentarians tucked into a meal of seal meat on Wednesday to defy both animal right activists and the European Union, which has banned imports of seal products.
Some two dozen guests, surrounded on all sides by media, crammed into a small room off the main parliamentary restaurant to hear speeches backing the annual hunt off Canada's East Coast, which the EU says is inhumane.
"This support begins on the plates of Canadians," said federal Fisheries Minister Gail Shea as she prepared to eat three small medallions of double-smoked bacon-wrapped seal loin in a port reduction.
The EU imposed its ban last year after a decades-long fight by what Shea called "misguided and mean-spirited" anti-seal-hunt activists. The seals are either shot or hit over the head with a spiked club called a hakapik, which critics say is cruel.
All of Canada's major political parties say they are in favor of the hunt, which takes place on ice floes in March and April.
"The Europeans simply don't know what they're talking about. Since time began human beings have lived with animals and they have culled animals," said Michael Ignatieff, leader of the main opposition Liberal Party.
He spoke at an earlier reception where waiters passed through the room carrying platters of seal terrine snacks. Ignatieff ate several for the benefit of photographers.
"It tastes delicious, actually. It's a meaty taste, a little gamy," he declared.
The meal was arranged by Liberal Senator Celine Hervieux-Payette, who said the hunt provided income for fishing communities in the Atlantic.
"We're sending a message to the European parliamentarians ... we want to say something so that opponents do not take to the floor with lies," she told reporters.
The EU ban has slashed demand for seal furs, meat and oil. Poor weather conditions and a lack of ice mean this year's hunt could be scrapped.
(Editing by Peter Galloway)
Srdjan Zivulovic, PlanetArk 11 Mar 10;
Slovenia will this year allow hunters to kill 75 brown bears and 12 wolves to limit the damage they do to crops and livestock and prevent numbers growing, the environment ministry said on Wednesday.
Slovenia, which has the highest density of brown bears in Europe, has seen the mammals moving closer to villages and cities in search of food.
"Our expert studies show that the population of wolves is on the rise while the population of bears would also be growing without this measure," Mladen Berginc, head of the sector for nature conservation policy, told Reuters.
Last year hunters killed 79 bears and 7 wolves, while damage caused by bears and wolves amounted to some 430,000 euros ($583,500), down from about 450,000 euros in 2008.
Euro zone member Slovenia has between 450 and 500 brown bears, among the highest population for any European country, while the number of wolves is estimated at 70 to 100.
"We want to keep both populations in steady numbers," Berginc said.
Last year a brown bear wandered into the capital Ljubljana. The police caught him and moved him to his natural environment but the same bear was later killed in Austria, close to the Slovenian border.
(Editing by Simon Falush)
Environment News Service 9 Mar 10;
NAIROBI, Kenya, March 9, 2010 - Ethiopia has become the first African country to register a large-scale forestry project under the Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol.
The Humbo Assisted Natural Regeneration Project has restored more than 2,700 hectares of degraded land in the impoverished highlands of southwestern Ethiopia since 2007.
Registration of the project by the United Nations enables the future sale of over 338,000 metric tonnes worth of carbon credits by 2017, furthering the goal of the Kyoto Protocol to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions.
The World Bank's BioCarbonFund will purchase 165,000 tonnes worth of these carbon credits.
With contributions from both public and private sectors, the BioCarbon Fund purchases emission reductions from afforestation and reforestation projects under the Clean Development Mechanism, as well as from land-use sector projects outside the CDM that reduce greenhouse gases.
The sale of carbon credits under the BioCarbon Fund will provide an income stream of more than US$700,000 to the Ethiopian local communities over at least 10 years.
Further revenue will be available to the community from the sale of carbon credits not purchased by the World Bank as well as from the sale of timber products from designated woodlots within the project area.
The Humbo Project is the largest World Bank forestry project in Africa to gain CDM registration.
"To date, Africa hosts less than two percent of all registered CDM projects. Promotion of land-use and forestry projects in this region is key to changing the status quo," says Inger Andersen, director, sustainable development, Africa Region, for the World Bank.
"Without this, it will be difficult for a post-Kyoto climate regime to gain support from African countries. In this regard, the registration of this project has a special significance," Andersen said.
The project is expected to remove an estimated 880,000 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere over the next 30 years.
The Humbo Project is the product of collaboration across organizations and continents, involving World Vision offices in Australia and Ethiopia, the World Bank, and the Ethiopian Environment Protection Agency, as well as local and regional governments and the community.
World Vision Australia CEO Tim Costello calls the project "a successful example of reforestation that alleviates poverty while also addressing climate change."
"World Vision has been working with poor communities for more than 20 years to implement environmentally sustainable projects that create jobs and reduce poverty," he said. "While the income from the carbon credits is a welcome bonus, other tangible benefits from the project come from building resilience against climate impacts."
According to World Vision project documents, the main causes of deforestation and forest degradation at Humbo have been tree cutting for fuel and construction materials to sell, especially to compensate for food shortages created by meagre rainfall over a long period of time.
World Vision Ethiopia National Director Tenagne Lemma said, "The steep slopes of the project site had been cleared since the early 1970s, and with almost no remaining trees, erosion and mudslides were common in the rainy season," she said. "This has now all changed."
While conventional approaches to reforestation require the costly replanting of trees from nursery stock, over 90 percent of the Humbo Project area has been reforested using Farmer Managed Natural Forest Regeneration, which encourages new growth from tree stumps previously felled but still living.
Using this method, indigenous biodiverse forest species, some of which are endangered, have been restored to the region, Lemma said.
"The multiplying benefits to the community through improved land management and the flow-on benefits to people's health, food security and livelihoods surpassed our most optimistic expectations," she said.
As exciting as the carbon revenue is the income generated from the sale of fodder, forest fruits and eventually the selective harvest of wood products, she said.
Once regenerated, the Humbo forest will provide habitat for birds, mammals and other native animals as well as species identified on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.
The forest will provide a strategic corridor link between the Nechisar National Park, Lake Abaya and Lake Chomo. The Nechisar National Park has some 73 species of mammals and 342 species of birds including two endemic birds.
Endangered species expected to benefit from the project include the Ethiopian banana frog, the Nechisar nightjar, the Ethiopian thicket rat, the Ethiopian large-eared roundleaf bat and the Ethiopian woolly bat.
Other species will also benefit including, the African wild dog, African lion, African sand fox, and lesser flamingo.
The strengths of the Humbo Project were publicly recognized by the Ethiopian government on World Environment Day last year. Two World Vision field officers were asked to join the nation's climate change negotiating team.
To date, 13 forestry projects have been registered under the Clean Development Mechanism and this is the fifth land use, land-use change and forestry project to be registered in the World Bank's BioCarbon Fund.
Click here for a closer look at the Humbo Ethiopia Assisted Natural Regeneration Project.
Scott Malone, PlanetArk 11 Mar 10;
Corporate America needs to track its use of energy and resources as closely as it does its hiring and cash flow if it wants to keep pace with social concern about climate change and other sustainability issues, an activist U.S. investor group argues in a new report.
Population growth and a rising standard of living across the world will bring opportunities -- but also risks of higher energy costs, scarcer water and other possible consequences of climate change, the Ceres coalition of socially concerned investors, companies and public interest groups said.
Over the next decade, investors and consumers will expect more comprehensive disclosure from businesses about what climate-related risks they face and what they are doing about them, the Boston-based group, whose members oversee some $7 billion in assets, said.
"It's time for a new generation of best practices, new expectations of what sustainability is," said Mindy Lubber, president of the group.
Leading U.S. businesses ranging from top conglomerate General Electric Co to No. 3 railroad CSX Corp to the world's largest retailer, Wal-Mart Stores Inc, have already gone public about their efforts to make their products and operations more environmentally friendly.
"The next step is moving into a comprehensive set of practices, from the board room to the copy room," Lubber said. "Companies need to take sustainability into account, just as they would other major risks and opportunities in the marketplace."
"Environmental and social issues are core to business performance in the 21st century," Anne Stausboll, chief executive officer of the California Public Employees Retirement System, the biggest U.S. public pension fund and a Ceres member, said in a statement. "We are looking for companies that are managing these risks and developing opportunities."
ROADMAP
In an 84-page report, the group spells out 20 practices it believes investors and consumers will come to expect from companies by 2020. The report is called "The 21st Century Corporation: The Ceres Roadmap for Sustainability" and is set for release on Thursday.
The practices it urges range from tying executive pay to progress on sustainability, to providing greater detail on the environmental impact of products, to setting firm targets on improving energy efficiency, such as cutting greenhouse gas emissions 25 percent from 2005 levels by 2020.
The credit crunch and financial scandals of the past two years have shown investors that businesses can make choices that are far riskier than their executives may consider them to be. That has made some more attuned to the dangers that climate change may pose to business, Lubber said.
Ceres' report also cites some examples of what it considers the new decade's standards in corporate sustainability. Among them are a McDonald's Corp drive to install energy efficiency control systems at its restaurants and Wal-Mart's adoption of a sustainability index intended to help shoppers pick environmentally sensitive products.
Further evidence of corporate America's changing thinking on climate change came last year, when companies including Apple Inc and utility PG&E Corp broke ranks with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, one of the nation's top business lobbying groups, over its opposition to pending U.S. legislation intended to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and limit climate change.
(Editing by Gary Hill)
Reuters, PlanetArk 11 Mar 10;
The natural gas shale boom in North America has more than doubled discovered gas resources and can supply more than a century of consumption at current rates, an IHS CERA study released Wednesday said.
"As recently at 2007 it was widely thought that natural gas was in tight supply and the U.S. was going to become an importer of gas," said Daniel Yergin, chairman of IHS CERA. "But this outlook has been turned on its head by the shale gale."
Shale gas is not new, but technology like hydraulic fracturing to release it from thick rock far underground has vastly improved producers' ability to tap it. Production involves injecting water and sand under high pressure into the rock to fracture it to release the gas.
The IHS CERA study said growth in power demand in the next 20 years will likely cause natural gas demand to double its current level of 19 billion cubic feet per day by 2030.
Gas-fired power generation produces half the carbon emissions of coal-fired generation, which makes gas a more attractive environmental choice as well, the study said.
But a limited pool of spare gas-fired capacity would prevent wholesale fuel switching, the study said.
Also, such switching won't reach targets of reducing emissions by 80 percent by 2050, the study said. That would require more non-carbon emitting sources, such as nuclear and renewables, as well as carbon capture and storage, or injecting and storing carbon emissions underground.
The study said uncertainties about shale gas include stringency of future carbon legislation and viability of carbon capture and storage technology.
Tom Walters, president of Exxon Mobil Corp's gas and power marketing company, said during a panel discussion that shale gas's future success depends on policies that promote and support its development.
Concerns about how hydraulic fracturing might affect underground water tables has prompted Congress to consider increased regulation.
(Editing by Walter Bagley)
Yahoo News 10 Mar 10;
UNITED NATIONS (AFP) – A respected international scientific body will review the UN's Nobel prize-winning climate panel, under fire for errors in a key report on global warming, UN chief Ban Ki-moon said Wednesday.
Ban told reporters that the Amsterdam-based InterAcademy Council (IAC), which groups presidents of 15 leading science academies, will carry out the task "completely independently of the United Nations."
Ban however defended the work of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), whose chairman Rajendra Pachauri has been criticized for his stewardship of the body.
Last month, the United Nations announced that it would launch an independent review of the IPCC's work.
Ban said Wednesday that the IAC would undertake "a comprehensive, independent review of the IPCC's procedures and processes" and would make recommendations to improve its future reports.
Robbert Dijkgraaf, an IAC co-chair, meanwhile told reporters that his panel aimed to present its report by the end of next August so that governments can consider it ahead of key climate change meetings late this year.
With Pachauri by his side, Ban defended the overall work of the IPCC, despite what he called "a very small number of errors" in its fourth assessment report.
"I have seen no credible evidence that challenges the main conclusions of that report," Ban said.
"In recent months we have seen some criticism. We are receptive and sensitive to that and we are doing something about it," Pachauri told the press.
"It is critically important that the science that we bring into our reports and that we disseminate on a large scale is accepted by communities across the globe," Pachauri added.
He pledged that an upcoming fifth assessment report by the IPCC would be "stronger and better than anything we have produced in the past."
The IPCC is made up of several thousand scientists tasked with vetting scientific knowledge on climate change and its impacts.
But its reputation was damaged by a warning in a major 2007 report that global warming could melt Himalayan glaciers by 2035, a claim that has been widely discredited and fueled skepticism in some quarters about mankind's role in climate change.
International climate negotiators are to meet on April 9 in Bonn to draw up a program for the rest of the year looking toward a ministerial-level meeting opening on November 29 in Cancun, Mexico.
The talks would follow up on December's climate summit in Copenhagen, which reached a controversial last-minute compromise.
Green groups and most scientists say the document adopted in Copenhagen, a limited pact made after China angrily ruled out binding commitments, falls far short of what is necessary to curtail global warming.
The summit set a goal of limiting warming to two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) and pledged a total of nearly 30 billion dollars in aid to poor countries by 2012.
But it did not spell out the means for achieving the warming limits, and the emissions pledges were only voluntary.
UN Launches Review Of Criticized Climate Panel
Louis Charbonneau, PlanetArk 11 Mar 10;
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said on Wednesday that a group of national science academies would review U.N. climate science to restore trust after a 2007 global warming report was found to have errors.
The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change acknowledged in January its report had exaggerated the pace of Himalayan glaciers melting, and last month said the report also had overstated how much of the Netherlands is below sea level.
"Let me be clear -- the threat posed by climate change is real," Ban told reporters alongside IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri. "Nothing that has been alleged or revealed in the media recently alters the fundamental scientific consensus on climate change."
Ban acknowledged that were "a very small number of errors" in what is known as the Fourth Assessment Report published in 2007, a document of more than 3,000 pages which cited over 10,000 scientific papers. The next such report on climate change will be published in 2013 and 2014.
Despite the errors, Pachauri told reporters he stood by the 2007 report's principle message that global warming is real and is accelerating due to so-called greenhouse gas emissions.
"We believe the conclusions of that report are really beyond any reasonable doubt," he said, adding that they were "solid and credible."
Ban said the InterAcademy Council, a grouping of the world's science academies, would lead the review, which he promised would be "conducted completely independently of the United Nations."
INDEPENDENT OF, BUT FUNDED BY, THE U.N.
The IAC is hosted by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in Amsterdam and includes Britain's Royal Society, and more than a dozen other national science academies.
Council co-chairman Robbert Dijkgraaf, a professor of mathematical physics at the University of Amsterdam, told reporters that the review would be entirely independent of the United Nations but would be funded by it. He added that the review panel would present its report by the end of August.
Ban hinted that some changes in the way the IPCC reports are compiled might be necessary to avoid future mistakes.
"We need to ensure full transparency, accuracy and objectivity, and minimize the potential for any errors going forward," he said.
Pachauri, who has been resisting pressure from critics to resign, said he expected the review "will help us in strengthening the entire process by which we carry out preparation of our reports."
Neither Pachauri nor Ban took questions from reporters.
Surveys suggest public conviction of global warming's risks may have been undermined by the errors and by the disclosure last year of hacked e-mails revealing scientists sniping at sceptics.
The IPCC shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, and produces the main scientific document driving global efforts to agree a new, more ambitious climate treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol, and switch from fossil fuels to cleaner, low-carbon supplies of energy.
But its 2007 report wrongly said Himalayan glaciers could vanish by 2035, a prediction derived from articles which had not been reviewed by scientists before publication. An original source had spoken of the world's glaciers melting by 2350.
(Editing by Jackie Frank)
Scientists to review climate body
Richard Black, BBC News 10 Mar 10;
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has asked the world's science academies to review work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Work will be co-ordinated by the Inter-Academy Council, which brings together bodies such as the UK's Royal Society.
The IPCC has been under pressure over errors in its last major assessment of climate science in 2007.
Mr Ban said the overall concept of man-made climate change was robust, and action to curb emissions badly needed.
The Inter-Academy Council will convene a panel of experts to conduct the review, and will be run independently of UN agencies.
"Let me be clear - the threat posed by climate change is real," said Mr Ban, speaking at UN headquarters in New York.
"I have seen no credible evidence that challenges the main conclusions of [the IPCC's 2007] report."
Nevertheless, he said, there had been "a few errors" in the 3,000-page report (known as AR4), and there was a need "to ensure full transparency, accuracy and objectivity".
Inside and out
Robbert Dijkgraaf, the council's co-chair, said the review panel will be chosen so that it includes both inside knowledge of the IPCC and outside perspectives.
"The panel will look forward and will definitely not go over all the vast amount of data in climate science," he said.
"It will see what are the [IPCC's] procedures, and how can they be improved, so we can avoid certain types of errors."
But Roger Pielke Jr, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado who has recently criticised the IPCC over its assessment of the costs of climate-related disasters, said the terms of reference appeared to have some significant omissions.
"How will it deal with allegations of breakdowns in procedures in the AR4?", he asked.
"The terms of reference say nothing about looking at the AR4 procedures, but it would be difficult to do a serious evaluation without actually evaluating experience," he told BBC News.
"Should it ignore the AR4 issues, then it will risk being called a whitewash."
Prof Pielke also suggested the panel might look at apparent conflicts of interest within the IPCC's staff.
Lessons learned
The conflict of interest charge has been levelled against the IPCC's chair, Rajendra Pachauri, over his business interests.
But standing alongside Mr Ban, he welcomed the review.
"The IPCC stands firmly behind the rigour and reliability of its Fourth Assessment Report from 2007, but we recognise that we can improve," he said.
"We have listened and learned from our critics, and we intend to take every action we can to ensure that our reports are as robust as possible."
The review was demanded by world governments at last month's meeting of the United Nations Environment Programme (Unep) Governing Council.
The Inter-Academy Council has been asked to finalise its conclusions by August, in time that its recommendations can be discussed and adopted at October's IPCC meeting.
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