Best of our wild blogs: 17 Aug 10

Biodiversity for kids during the September holidays!
from Celebrating Singapore's BioDiversity!

Terumbu Pempang Tengah - TPT
from ashira

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Massive coral mortality following bleaching in Indonesia

Wildlife Conservation Society EurekAlert 16 Aug 10;

Wildlife Conservation Society and partners document large-scale coral bleaching and death in wake of sea surface temperature rise

The Wildlife Conservation Society today released initial field observations that indicate that a dramatic rise in the surface temperature in Indonesian waters has resulted in a large-scale bleaching event that has devastated coral populations.
WCS's Indonesia Program "Rapid Response Unit" of marine biologists was dispatched to investigate coral bleaching reported in May in Aceh – a province of Indonesia – located on the northern tip of the island of Sumatra. The initial survey carried out by the team revealed that over 60 percent of corals were bleached.

"Bleaching"– a whitening of corals that occurs when algae living within coral tissues are expelled – is an indication of stress caused by environmental triggers such as sea surface temperature fluctuations. Depending on many factors, bleached coral may recover over time or die.

Subsequent monitoring conducted by marine ecologists from WCS, James Cook University (Australia), and Syiah Kuala University (Indonesia) were completed in early August and revealed one of the most rapid and severe coral mortality events ever recorded. The scientists found that 80 percent of some species have died since the initial assessment and more colonies are expected to die within the next few months.

The event is the result of a rise in sea surface temperatures in the Andaman Sea – an area that includes the coasts of Myanmar, Thailand, the Andaman and Nicobar Island, and northwestern Indonesia. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Coral Hotspots website, temperatures in the region peaked in late May of 2010, when the temperature reached 34 degrees Celsius—4 degrees Celsius higher than long term averages for the area.

"It's a disappointing development particularly in light of the fact that these same corals proved resilient to other disruptions to this ecosystem, including the Indian Ocean Tsunami of 2004," said WCS Indonesia Marine Program Director Dr. Stuart Campbell.

WCS and JCU have been working in the region since March 2005. Surveys conducted in the wake of the Indian Ocean Tsunami in 2004 revealed that the many reefs of Aceh were largely unaffected by this massive disturbance. Indeed, reefs severely damaged by poor land use and destructive fishing prior to the tsunami had recovered dramatically in the intervening years due to improved management. Government and community-managed areas in the region have been remarkably successful at maintaining fish biomass despite ongoing access to the reefs. But the bleaching and mortality in 2010 have rapidly reversed this recovery and will have a profound effect on reef fisheries.

Of particular concern is the scale of the sea surface temperature anomaly which the NOAA website indicates has affected the entire Andaman Sea and beyond. Similar mass bleaching events in 2010 have now been recorded in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Malaysia and many parts of Indonesia.

"If a similar degree of mortality is apparent at other sites in the Andaman Sea this will be the worst bleaching event ever recorded in the region," according to Dr. Andrew Baird of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at JCU. "The destruction of these upstream reefs means recovery is likely to take much longer than before".

"This is a tragedy not only for some of the world's most biodiverse coral reefs, but also for people in the region, many of whom are extremely impoverished and depend on these reefs for their food and livelihoods," said WCS Marine Program Director Dr. Caleb McClennen. "Immediate and intensive management will be required to try and help these reefs, their fisheries and the entire ecosystem recover and adapt. However, coral reefs cannot be protected from the warming ocean temperatures brought on by a changing climate by local actions alone. This is another unfortunate reminder that international efforts to curb the causes and effects of climate change must be made if these sensitive ecosystems and the vulnerable human communities around the world that depend on them are to adapt and endure."

Corals Bleached and Dying in Overheated South Asian Waters
Environmental News Service 16 Aug 10;

BANDA ACEH, Indonesia, August 16, 2010 (ENS) - The rapidly rising temperature of south Asia's Andaman Sea has triggered coral bleaching and die-off that scientists working in Indonesia are calling one of the most rapid and severe coral mortality events ever recorded.

The coral die-off was indentified though monitoring by marine ecologists from the Wildlife Conservation Society based at New York's Bronx Zoo, Australia's James Cook University and Indonesia's Syiah Kuala University in Banda Aceh.

Following up on local reports of coral bleaching in the waters off the northern tip of the Indonesian island of Sumatra, the scientists determined from field studies completed in early August that 80 percent of some species have bleached and died since the initial assessment in May and more colonies are expected to die within the next few months.

Bleaching is a whitening of corals that occurs when colorful algae living within coral tissues are expelled. It is an indication of stress caused by environmental triggers such as sea surface temperature fluctuations.

The scientists say this event is the result of a rise in sea surface temperatures in the Andaman Sea - an area that includes the coasts of Myanmar, Thailand, the Andaman and Nicobar islands, and northwestern Indonesia.

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Coral Hotspots website shows temperatures in the region peaked in late May, when the temperature reached 34 degrees Celsius (93 degrees Fahrenheit) - four degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees F.) higher than long term averages for the area.

"This is a tragedy not only for some of the world's most biodiverse coral reefs, but also for people in the region, many of whom are extremely impoverished and depend on these reefs for their food and livelihoods," said WCS Marine Program Director Dr. Caleb McClennen.

"Immediate and intensive management will be required to try and help these reefs, their fisheries and the entire ecosystem recover and adapt. However, coral reefs cannot be protected from the warming ocean temperatures brought on by a changing climate by local actions alone," said Dr. McClennen.

On Friday NOAA reported that global sea surface temperatures are still climbing. The combined global land and ocean surface temperature made this July the second warmest on record, behind 1998, and the warmest averaged January - July on record, the U.S. agency said.

The worldwide ocean surface temperature was 0.54 degrees C (0.97 degrees F) above the 20th century average of 61.5 degrees F (16.4 degrees C) and the fifth warmest July on record. Although the warmth was most pronounced in the Atlantic Ocean, the general trend affects the corals of the Andaman Sea.

"It's a disappointing development particularly in light of the fact that these same corals proved resilient to other disruptions to this ecosystem, including the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004," said WCS Indonesia Marine Program Director Dr. Stuart Campbell.

Surveys conducted in the wake of the Indian Ocean tsunami revealed that the many reefs surrounding Aceh were largely unaffected by this massive disturbance.

Scientists found that reefs damaged by poor land use and destructive fishing prior to the tsunami had recovered due to improved management. Government and community-managed areas in the region have been remarkably successful at maintaining fish biomass despite ongoing access to the reefs.

But the bleaching and mortality this year have reversed this recovery and will have a profound effect on reef fisheries, the researchers say.

NOAA indicates warming has affected the entire Andaman Sea and beyond. Similar mass bleaching events in 2010 have now been recorded in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Malaysia and many parts of Indonesia.

"If a similar degree of mortality is apparent at other sites in the Andaman Sea this will be the worst bleaching event ever recorded in the region," said Dr. Andrew Baird of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University. "The destruction of these upstream reefs means recovery is likely to take much longer than before."

NOAA reported Friday that the combined global land and ocean surface temperature made this July the second warmest on record, behind 1998, and the warmest averaged January-July on record.

The global average land surface temperature for July and January - July was warmest on record.

The global ocean surface temperature for July was the fifth warmest, and for January - July 2010 was the second warmest on record, behind 1998.

Dr. McClennan warned, "This is another unfortunate reminder that international efforts to curb the causes and effects of climate change must be made if these sensitive ecosystems and the vulnerable human communities around the world that depend on them are to adapt and endure."

Soaring temps cause mass coral killing in Indonesia-study
* Scientists stunned by scale, speed of Aceh coral bleaching
* Coral die-off blow to locals dependent on reefs for income
* Global warming might have played a role -- researcher
David Fogarty, Reuters AlertNet 17 Aug 10;

SINGAPORE, Aug 17 (Reuters) - A dramatic spike in ocean temperatures off Indonesia's Aceh province has killed large areas of coral and scientists fear the event could be much larger than first thought and one of the worst in the region's history.

The coral bleaching -- whitening due to heat driving out the algae living within the coral tissues -- was first reported in May after a surge in temperatures across the Andaman Sea from the northern tip of Sumatra island to Thailand and Myanmar.

An international team of scientists studying the bleaching event found that 80 percent of some species have died since the initial assessment in May.

More coral colonies were expected to die within the next few months and that could spell disaster for local communities reliant on the reefs for food and money from tourism.

"I would predict that what we're seeing in Aceh, which is extraordinary, that similar mortality rates are occurring right the way through the Andaman Sea," said Andrew Baird of James Cook University in Townsville, in the Australian state of Queensland.

If so, that would make it the worst bleaching recorded in the region, said Baird.

Scientists from the Wildlife Conservation Society and Syiah Kuala University in Aceh have also been assessing the damage.

"This one of the most rapid and severe coral mortality events ever recorded," the U.S.-based WCS said in a statement.

It also fits a pattern of climate extremes, from heatwaves to flooding, that have hit many areas of the globe this year.

Between April and late May, sea surface temperatures in the Andaman Sea rose to 34 degrees Celsius or about 4 degrees C above the long-term average, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Coral Hotspots website. (See: http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/ml/ocean/cb/hotspots.html )

SLOW RECOVERY

"Similar mass bleaching events in 2010 have now been recorded in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Malaysia and many parts of Indonesia," the WCS statement said.

Baird, of James Cook University's ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, told Reuters that climate change could have played a role in the extreme ocean temperatures around Aceh.

"There might be one of these cyclic climate phenomena driving it but it's much more severe than you would predict unless there was something else forcing it, which is almost certainly global warming," he told Reuters on Tuesday.

The bleaching is a blow to local communities in Aceh still recovering from the 2004 tsunami. That disaster caused relatively little damage to reefs and Baird said some areas had showed a dramatic recovery.

Baird said reefs in Indonesia would normally take 5 to 10 years to recover from localised bleaching. But if the event was spread across a much wider area, recovery would take longer.

"I suspect the scale of this event is so large there is unlikely to be many healthy reefs in the rest of Aceh." (Editing by Nick Macfie)

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Phuket Dugongs Die in Netting Nightmare

Phuketwan 17 Aug 10;

THIS baby dugong was one of two found dead on Sunday at Ko Yao Noi, off Phuket. Marine biologists said the female dugong was 2.7 metres while the baby was over a metre in length and about two years old.

The mother probably died first then the baby followed five days or so later, the marine biologists believe.

At Phuket Marine Biology Centre, an autopsy revealed sea grass food in their stomachs. It is believed the two dugongs were caught in a net and blinded.

Dr Kongkiat Kittiwattanawong said the two were the seventh and eights dugongs to die because of netting in the Andaman region this year.

It is hoped that the new plan for a conservation zone off Phuket will keep more dugongs alive. Their sea grass feeding beds have been affected by property development and damaging waste water run-offs.

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World's population in 1,000 Singapores

Venice Biennale exhibit illustrates Singapore's compact housing model
Grace Chua Straits Times 17 Aug 10;

IF THE world were built like Singapore, its entire population could be housed on a plot a little larger than Texas.

That is the premise behind an exhibit at the upcoming Venice Biennale's architectural section, demonstrating the viability of Singapore's compact, high-density housing model.

Of course, the designers are not really proposing this. But the model, commissioned by the DesignSingapore Council and the Singapore Institute of Architects, argues that Singapore's example is a possibility and the urban sprawl of many world cities is unsustainable.

While Singapore is dense, it is not all that crowded. Just a third of its land is built-up. The rest of it comprises water catchment areas and land for defence, parks, transport, industry and so on.

People here may think the island-state is cramped, but that may not be the case, contends Mr Khoo Peng Beng, lead curator of the project and founder of architecture firm Arc Studio.

'It's the rapid pace of life they are reacting to,' he said, noting that congestion is relative. A Hong Kong city resident might find Singapore spacious.

The exhibit aims to highlight urban-sustainability issues, which will loom large in the future. By 2050, a total of 70 per cent of the world's population could live in cities, particularly in the developing world.

The 35m-long model depicts a 'slice of Singapore' from Tuas to Pulau Ubin, representing the various proportions of land use here. It also has snapshots of buildings and life here, such as of senior citizens at the void decks of HDB blocks.

If Singapore can house its projected 6.5 million people in just 710 sq km of land, Mr Khoo and his team say, the world population of 6.5 billion could fit into a thousand times that area.

That 710,000 sq km is less than 0.5 per cent of the globe's land area, and is a little larger than Texas in the United States.

The exhibit, entitled 1,000 Singapores - A Model Of The Compact City, will officially open in Italy on Aug 26.

After the Biennale ends on Nov 21, it will be brought back to Singapore.

But while the thousand-Singapores equation works mathematically, its architects themselves admit it is not perfect.

Singapore's food and energy still have to be imported, they say, and only in the past couple of decades has access to clean water not been a problem.

Curator and National University of Singapore architecture don Erik L'Heureux also notes that the constant rebuilding is ultimately not sustainable.

'Too much energy is consumed in the production of buildings and then they become irrelevant too quickly,' he said.

Sustainability advocate Tay Lai Hock, 46, who runs the environmental and social non-profit group Ground-Up Initiative, pointed out that social and financial equality must be part of urban sustainability.

'You can't just talk about recycling chutes, solar panels and clean water. Where is the human factor?' he asked.

In response, Mr Khoo said the exhibit aims to raise these sorts of questions about sustainable consumption.

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NParks ups tree inspection during recent bad weather

S Ramesh Channel NewsAsia 16 Aug 10;

SINGAPORE: Singapore's NParks has intensified its tree inspection and pruning efforts, given the recent bad weather.

In his written replies to a question in Parliament, National Development Minister Mah Bow Tan said since May this year, over and above a monthly inspection of 15,000 trees, NParks has inspected another 3,200 large mature trees in areas with high vehicular traffic.

It has also carried out pruning and crown reduction to reduce the weight of the foliage and enhance the stability of these trees during rainstorms.

He said NParks will continue with this intensified tree inspection and pruning regime.

"Even with these efforts, it is not possible to guard against all tree failures, as healthy trees can also be affected by gusty winds and heavy rainfall. NParks will continue to do its best to minimise risks of tree failures. It is currently reviewing its tree management programme in response to increasingly unpredictable weather conditions. This includes exploring new technology to better assess the condition of trees," he said.

A 32-year-old man, Chua Loong Wai, was killed on the July 20 when a tree fell onto his car during a thunderstorm along Yio Chu Kang Road.

-CNA/wk

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Mankind is using up global resources faster than ever

The growing world population and increasing consumption has pushed the world into ‘eco-debt’ a month earlier this year, according to the latest statistics on global resources.
Louise Gray, The Telegraph 16 Aug 10;

Think tank the New Economics Foundation (NEF) look at how much food, fuel and other resources are consumed by humans every year. They then compare it to how much the world can provide without threatening the ability of important ecosystems like oceans and rainforests to recover.

This year the moment we start eating into nature's capital or ‘Earth Overshoot Day’ will fall on 21st August, a full month earlier than last year, when resources were used up by 23rd September.

Andrew Simms, Policy Director at NEF, blamed increased consumption.

He said people in developing countries like China are consuming more meat and demanding cars and other energy-intensive goods. Even with green developments and energy efficiency, rich countries are also consuming more as individuals demand the latest technology, food fad or car.

He explained that the earlier humans use up Earth’s resources, the more strain is put on resources, forcing up fuel prices and driving climate change. Ultimately ecosystems like fisheries and even the Earth’s climate system will suffer and future generations will experience food shortages and rising global temperatures.

Mr Simms called for a transition to a more sustainable way of living to prevent poverty and starvation in the future.

"The banking crisis taught us the danger of a system that goads us to live beyond our means financially,” he said. “A greater danger comes from a consumer culture and economic policy that pushes us to live beyond our means ecologically."


Earth's Overdraft Notice: On August 21st, we exceed nature's budget
WWF 18 Aug 10;

(OAKLAND, CA, USA) – It has taken humanity less than nine months to exhaust its ecological budget for the year, according to data from Global Footprint Network, a California-based environmental research organization.

Global Footprint Network calculates nature's supply in the form of biocapacity, the amount of resources the planet regenerates each year, and compares that to human demand: the amount it takes to produce all the living resources we consume and absorb our carbon dioxide emissions. Its data reveal that, as of August 21, humanity will have demanded all the ecological services – from filtering CO2 to producing the raw materials for food – that nature can provide this year.

From now until the end of the year, we will meet our ecological demand by depleting resource stocks and accumulating greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

"If you spent your entire annual income in nine months, you would probably be extremely concerned," said Global Footprint Network President Mathis Wackernagel. "The situation is no less dire when it comes to our ecological budget. Climate change, biodiversity loss, deforestation, water and food shortages -- these are all clear signs that we can no longer finance our consumption on credit. Nature is foreclosing."

Learn more: http://www.footprintnetwork.org/earthovershootday

What is Overshoot?

For most of human history, humanity has been able to live off of nature's interest -- consuming resources and producing carbon dioxide at a rate lower than what the planet was able to regenerate and reabsorb each year.

But approximately three decades ago, we crossed a critical threshold, and the rate of human demand for ecological services began to outpace the rate at which nature could provide them. This gap between demand and supply -- known as ecological overshoot -- has grown steadily each year. It now takes one year and six months to regenerate the resources that humanity requires in one year.

Addressing Carbon Key to Balancing the Budget

Climate change is perhaps the most prominent sign of our ecological overspending. Our carbon Footprint (as calculated by Global Footprint Network, the amount of land and sea area it would take to absorb all the CO2 we emit) is the biggest part of humanity's Ecological Footprint, and is by far the fastest-growing. Our carbon Footprint has more than doubled since 1970. During that time, it has increased at a rate more than three-times faster than the next-fastest growing portion of humanity's Footprint, built-up land. Carbon dioxide emissions now account for over half of human demand on nature. We are now emitting much more carbon dioxide than the natural ecosystems of the planet can absorb; thus it is building up in the atmosphere and contributing to climate change.

How Earth Overshoot Day is Calculated

Every year, Global Footprint Network calculates humanity’s Ecological Footprint – the amount of productive land and sea area required to produce the resources we consume and absorb our waste, including CO2 emissions – and compares that with biocapacity, the ability of ecosystems to regenerate resources. Earth Overshoot Day, a concept devised by U.K.-based new economics foundation, is calculated from 2007 data (the most recent year for which data are available) and projections based on historical rates of growth in population and consumption, as well as the historical link between world GDP and resource demand.

Last year, Earth Overshoot Day was observed on September 25, 2009. This year, overshoot day is estimated to come more than a month earlier in the year. This is not due to a sudden change in human demand, but rather to improvements in the calculation methodology that enable us to more adequately capture the extent of overshoot. (For example, our latest data show the world has less biocapacity available, primarily in the area of grazing land, than previously estimated.)

"We would expect our estimates of overshoot to be, if anything, conservative." Wackernagel said. "We know we are far from living within the means of one planet. The good news is, much of the technology we have to begin to address this problem is available and it is open source: things like compact urban design, energy-efficient housing, ecological tax reform, removal of resource subsidies, safe and affordable family planning, bicycles, low-meat diets, and life-cycle costing."

To calculate your own personal Ecological Footprint, and learn what you can do to reduce it, go to www.footprintnetwork.org/calculator.


About Global Footprint Network

Global Footprint Network (www.footprintnetwork.org) is an environmental research organization working to advance sustainability through use of the Ecological Footprint, a resource accounting tool that measures how much nature we have, how much we use and who uses what. Global Footprint Network and its international partner network is focused on solving the problem of overshoot, working with businesses and government leaders around the world to make ecological limits a central part of decision-making everywhere.

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Tropical Glaciers in Indonesia May Disappear by the End of the Decade

Glaciers in one of the world's last tropical ice caps will be gone within a matter of years
Douglas Fischer, Scientific American 16 Aug 10;

Glaciers in one of the world's last tropical ice caps will be gone within a matter of years, rather than the decades thought previously, according to an Ohio State University researcher who has spent his career probing the world's ice fields. When they go, a unique record of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation phenomenon that drives climate patterns in the tropics could disappear, too, glaciologist Lonnie Thompson said.

The cap, perched on a 16,000-foot-high mountain ridge in Indonesia, "was riddled with crevasses and lacked any substantial snowfall," Thompson said of his most recent trip, earlier this summer.

During that trip a research team pulled three cores from the cap. They were shorter than other cores from some of Thompson's previous 57 expeditions to 16 countries from China to Peru. But a similarly short core from Africa's Mount Kilimanjaro helped the team reconstruct 11,700 years of climate history.

That history is melting away.

Radioactivity from atomic bomb tests in the 1950s and 1960s provide time markers that help date ice. Cores recently collected from Himalayan ice fields lacked these radioactive layers, indicating the glaciers are losing mass from the surface down, destroying key time markers.

The Indonesian ice fields near Punkak Jaya are tiny. Together they total barely 1.7 square kilometers (0.6 square miles), an area very similar to the current 1.8 square kilometers (0.7 square miles) on the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa.
But this is the region, on the fringe of the world's warmest ocean, that generates El Niño and drives weather from India's monsoons to Sierra Nevada droughts. The Punkak Jaya glaciers may store an archive of that climate history.

The expedition almost returned empty-handed, through no fault of global warming: Near the trip's end, local tribe members broke into the freezer where they thought the cores were stored, intent on destruction, according to the university.

"They believe that the ice is their god's skull, that the mountains are its arms and legs and that we were drilling into the skull to steal their memories," Thompson said in a statement. "In their religion they are a part of nature, and by extension they are a part of the ice, so if it disappears, a part of their souls will also be lost."

But team members, preparing for the worst, had moved the ice to a different facility hours before the attack. The team later hosted a public forum to address concerns, and after more than four hours of discussion tribes conceded and let researchers ship the cores to Ohio State.

An analysis of the first of the cores is expected by December, the researchers said.

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Chinese soil experts warn of massive threat to food security

Ding Jie SciDev.Net Reuters AlertNet 16 Aug 10;

[BEIJING] If China's current rate of soil loss continues, a layer the size of Puerto Rico will be washed away in the next 50 years - resulting in a 40 per cent decrease in food production, according to a study led by the country's Ministry of Water Resources, and science and engineering academies.

The two-year Soil Erosion and Ecological Safety expedition took place from 2005 to 2007 and was followed by three years of data analysis. Around 200 scientists surveyed 27 provinces in China, focusing on seven regions with different soil types, such as north-eastern black soil, northern Rocky Mountain soil, red soil and Karst.

Scientists found that the total area of soil erosion has reached nearly 17 per cent of total land cover. According to the study, many parts of the black soil in northeastern China - the country's breadbasket - have disappeared already, a trend that, if it continues, could put at risk food security for one million people.

"The most serious soil erosion exists in the slope land, especially in farmland," Lu Zongfan, a researcher at China's Institute of Soil and Water Conservation and consultant for the expedition, told SciDev.Net.

Liu Xingtu, a geographer at the Chinese Academy of Engineering, said that soil erosion can degrade soil surface, deteriorate soil structure and reduce soil fertility. Scientists estimate that more than 30 per cent of counties are currently experiencing land erosion.

According to the Ministry of Land and Resources, China has 239,000 hectares of slope land in China. This accounts for almost 20 per cent of arable land and 13.3 per cent of soil erosion areas. And at the same time, the quantity of soil erosion from slope land makes up a third of the total soil loss.

"During the heavy rain, the outflow of soil reaches up to one centimetre, resulting in soil fertility decline [as rain washes away fertile soil on the surface layer, exposing poor soil below] inevitably decreasing food production," said Lu.

The report suggests some solutions for protecting China from further land erosion.

"The key to solving these problems is to transfer slope lands into terraces, to build terraced fields and small water storage projects," said Sun Honglie, a geologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a member of the expedition.

The results of the survey were presented at a press briefing in Beijing last month (19 July).

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Pakistan Flooding Because of Farms?

Mason Inman National Geographic News 16 Aug 10;

Pakistan’s extreme floods, which have displaced 20 million people and swamped a fifth of the country, have been made far worse by decades of river mismanagement, experts say.

In Pakistan’s wide plains where the bulk of the population lives, the rivers swelled by monsoons have been confined by levees, dams, and canals, in much the same way the Mississippi River has in the United States.

On Pakistan’s glacial-fed Indus River, the British started to build a system of canals and small dams for diverting water onto fields, when Pakistan was part of their Indian colony.

Since Pakistani independence in 1947, river managers have expanded the canal system. Now, instead of the natural flow from the Himalaya in the north to the Arabian Sea in the south, the Indus is diverted, piecemeal, east or west, wherever it is needed to support farming. Such river diversion is a common sight around the world as populations and food production boom.

These contrived river boundaries and tributaries in essence prevent the Indus River Basin from holding as much water as it once did during heavy and prolonged rains.

Farmland a Blessing and a Curse

The Indus and its canals are "the largest irrigation system in the world," says Tahir Qureshi, a forestry expert with the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and a former government forest officer and game warden.

Pakistan's irrigation system has turned this arid country into an agricultural powerhouse, but it has had its downside as well, experts say.

"The major river engineering is basically a Faustian bargain," says Daanish Mustafa of King's College London, recalling the fable in which a man sells his soul to the devil in exchange for a life of luxury. Mustafa is a geographer who has studied the history of Pakistan's river management.

Until a few decades ago, there were typically mild floods each summer—the time when the monsoon rainfall hits, and the melt from the snowpack in the Himalaya and Karakoram Mountains is at its peak.

But now, because humans have sculpted the river and the surrounding natural floodplain and wetlands for farming and other needs, there are fewer floods, but when they hit, they are far worse, said Mustafa.

"There's not very much space [in the river channel] to absorb all the rainfall," says Asad Sarwar Qureshi, a water resources expert at the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) branch in Lahore, Pakistan. "We need to get it back into shape, so that it can carry its original capacity."

Wetlands along the river’s course used to take up some floodwaters, and the government also used to divert excess water into "no man's land" during the monsoon season, he says. But those areas have been converted to farmland, he says.

"There was absolutely a mad rush to settle in these floodplains," says Mustafa.

Another part of the problem is that the Indus River and its tributaries carry some of the highest levels of silt of any river system. More silt equals less room for water as monsoons and snowmelt inundate the now-confined riverbed and canals.

"Most of our rivers and canals are already silted up," says IWMI’s Qureshi.

The Solution

Allowing the river to flood more regularly, and naturally, could help temper the floods and make them more tolerable, say Mustafa and other experts.

"They need to give the rivers room to expand," Mustafa says. "Not along the whole way, but they should restore some of the wetlands along the way."

At the same time, many of the levees should be kept in place, but maintained better, Tahir Qureshi says.

One way of doing this, he says, is to plant trees along the riverbanks.

"When I was in the forestry department in the 1970s and ’80s," Tahir Qureshi says, "we used to broadcast seeds of Acacia nilotica," a native tree species.

"They are soil binders, and a physical barrier to the flood flow. They are the flood guards, a biological means of protection."

In the past couple of decades, however, many of the embankment forests and trees have died or been chopped down, Tahir Qureshi says.

Managing Pakistan's floods is a delicate balance between giving the river more room, and building barriers to protect people and their land.

There’s little sign of this situation turning around soon, as it involves major landscape changes, experts say. “It pains me to see my country going in the wrong direction,” Mustafa says.

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Russia Wildfires Not Due to Climate Change, Scientists Say

Brett Israel LiveScience.com 17 Aug 10;

Russia's heat wave, drought and wildfires, by themselves, are not signs of global warming, according several leading climatologists - despite widely reported claims this week by a Russian scientist.

But experts agree that overall, the climate indeed shows signs of human-induced warming.

Alexander Bedritsky, the Krelim's weather adviser and president of the World Meteorological Organization, said that Russia's recent spate of extreme weather, along with other natural disasters, including the recent flooding in Pakistan and France's 2003 heat wave, taken together, "are signs of global warming," according to the Associated Press.

"I don't think they got it quite right," said climatologist Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. "I believe the correct interpretation is that nowadays everything has a component of natural variability and also global warming."

The difference comes up often when global warming's proponents - or detractors - try to base an argument one way or the other on a single event.

"We can't say for sure that each event was due to human-caused climate change," said climatologist Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University. "But the fact that the events are occurring more often, we can attribute to human-caused climate change." [Top 10 Surprising Results of Global Warming]

So for instance, climate scientists could say a stretch of time with more intense or more frequent hurricanes is attributed to global warming, but couldn't decipher whether one of these intense hurricanes can be linked with the warming temperatures. "We are at the point where we can detect global warming in statistics, but not in individual events," Ken Caldeira, global ecologist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, Calif., told LiveScience today.

Mann said to think of the occurrence of these extreme events as rolling a loaded die. Rolling a six is like having a record-setting high temperature. With global warming, the die is loaded so that sixes come up increasingly more often - as if the numbers one, two and three were slowly being replaced with sixes.

Rolling a six, or having an extreme weather event, will become more common as the climate changes, Mann said. But rolling back-to-back sixes by chance alone will always be possible, regardless of global warming.

These double sixes, however, will come up far more often than would be expected in the absence of human-caused climate change - a trend that scientists are already seeing.

The number of daily heat records, for example, is already outpacing the number of daily cold records by double the amount expected in the absence of climate change, Mann said.

"The key observation is that these events are becoming increasingly more common," Mann told LiveScience. "The Russian heat wave was by some estimates a one-in-a-thousand-year event, but with global warming perhaps it's only a one-in-10-year event now."

But when trying to link multiple events to global warming, the picture is much more complicated.

"It is difficult to establish all these links well, and even more difficult to quantify them." Trenberth said. "But the evidence strongly suggests that global warming is playing a role.

"The way to think of it, though, is that global warming exacerbates the other conditions that would be occurring anyway: The droughts are more intense, last longer and thus elevate wildfire risk."

Russia beats back fires as weather changes
Stuart Williams Yahoo News 16 Aug 10;

MOSCOW (AFP) – Russia on Monday said it was beating back the country's worst ever wildfires, including one close to a secret nuclear site, as thunderstorms and torrential rain drenched parts of the parched country.

The peat and forest fires in the countryside of central Russia have killed more than 50 people and raised concerns about the security of potentially dangerous strategic sites located in the vicinity of the blazes.

A huge worry has been fires in a nature reserve close to Russia's main nuclear research centre in Sarov -- a town closed to foreigners as in Soviet times -- but the authorities said they had taken a major step to resolving the crisis.

"The situation is stable and controllable. There are no fires on the territory of Sarov," said the head of the emergencies ministry's branch for the Volga region, Igor Panshin.

"If the positive dynamic continues then a withdrawal of the contingent in Sarov will begin in the coming week."

The emergencies ministry said that the fire, in the district of the village of Popovka, 17 kilometres (10 miles) southeast of Sarov, which had extended to 1,000 hectares (2,470 acres) at the weekend, had been "localised and ringed-in".

Nationwide the area affected by wildfires had been reduced by another 8,000 hectares to 45,800 hectares, the ministry said. At the peak of the crisis, an area of almost 200,000 hectares was in flames.

Officials also said the situation around Moscow was under control but Russia's tough-talking Prime Minister Vladimir Putin took issue with that line of thought.

"The problem is that such control does not suit anyone," the Interfax news agency quoted Putin as saying at a meeting in the town of Kolomna outside Moscow.

"Such a situation is unacceptable," he said.

Earlier officials showed Putin a technique for flooding peat bogs that have dried out over the years polluting the air, the government said, adding the works to fill up the peat bogs had started a week ago.

Officials over the past days sought to downplay the true scale of the disaster and the federal government has yet to confirm that daily mortality rates in Moscow doubled as a result of the heatwave and smog.

Temperatures in Moscow were 29 degrees Celsius (84 degress Fahrenheit), well down on the highs of almost 40 degrees seen over the last days, with little sign of the smog from the wildfires that had blanketed the city for days.

Moscow was braced for torrential rain and high winds later after tens of thousands in northwest Russia were left without electricity overnight when a storm ripped through the region.

The emergencies ministry in the Leningrad region around Russia's second city of Saint Petersburg said almost 100,000 people in 1,500 towns and villages in northwest Russia were left without electricity.

The storm, which was also felt in Saint Petersburg, saw high winds and driving rain and felled several trees and even a crane. Train traffic was also affected.

But as the fires eased, a new controversy blazed as allegations emerged that Emergencies Minister Sergei Shoigu had personally ordered the blocking of an official website which warned of radioactive dangers from the wildfires.

The Roslesozashchita state forest watchdog had warned that hundreds of hectares of land had burned in the Bryansk region of western Russia, an area still contaminated by the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

Deputy director of the watchdog, Alexei Bobrinksy, told AFP the website has not been working since Friday afternoon.

The Kommersant daily said the company hosting the site, Multikhost, had been telephoned at the weekend by the authorities and ordered to block the website. However the company insisted it had not blocked the site.

The paper said that Shoigu had personally ordered that the site was "sorted out" as it had published "false information about the fires in the Bryansk region."

The fires and heatwave have triggered a major crisis in Russia affecting nearly all areas of life, in particular the agriculture industry which has seen one quarter of Russian crops destroyed.

Russia at the weekend implemented a ban on the export of grain which has proved highly controversial and forced up world wheat prices to two-year highs.

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