Singapore's shores and the Focus Groups reports on Concept Plan 2011 from wild shores of singapore
Another White-throated Kingfished strangled by kite string
from Bird Ecology Study Group
Butterfly of the Month - August 2010
from Butterflies of Singapore
Sivasothi and the best of biodiversity blogs
from Celebrating Singapore's BioDiversity!
Aussie's Note On Jellies
from Natura Gig
Wanted: A green city that respects its history
Public consultation on reports sees calls for pedestrian zones in heritage-rich areas
Esther Teo & Ang Yiying Straits Times 20 Aug 10;
MORE green initiatives, more cycling and more pedestrian zones in heritage areas were some of the key points to emerge from a public consultation exercise on two reports out yesterday.
Members of the public have had their say, with 300 responses received since focus groups released draft reports of their recommendations - on sustainability and identity, and quality of life - in May.
Their final reports were presented yesterday. They in turn will be used to help devise the Urban Redevelopment Authority's Concept Plan 2011, which will set out directions for land use and transport over the next 40 to 50 years.
A draft of the concept plan - they are reviewed once every 10 years - will be released next year and a further public feedback process undertaken.
As yesterday's reports reflected, public feedback forms a vital part of the process.
The co-chairman of the sustainability focus group, Mr Ong Keng Yong, told The Straits Times that the public had helped to 'intensify' certain ideas so they became more practical.
Going green was a hot-button topic, he said, with members of the public offering 'specific, rational and well-articulated ideas' on how to take Singapore on a more ecological and greener path without being too confrontational.
Suggestions included setting up a green accreditation body and a system to establish reliable environmental standards for products and services.
'I was very impressed by the level of awareness and the strong emphasis on the goodness of green from the public and how well-researched and well-articulated their ideas were,' said Mr Ong, who is director of the Institute of Policy Studies.
There were also suggestions to make streets rich in heritage, art and culture - such as Haji Lane in Kampong Glam and the lanes in Little India - the preserve of pedestrians.
Mr Lee Tzu Yang, the co-chair of the sustainability focus group, said these ideas highlighted the support the public had for preserving Singapore's heritage and identity. Mr Lee, who chairs Shell's companies here, added it was encouraging that the public had supported many of the focus group's initial proposals, with suggestions mostly 'tinkering and tuning' their initial recommendations.
Recommendations by the focus group on quality of life also received 'quite a bit of support and endorsement', noted Professor Tan Chorh Chuan, president of the National University of Singapore and the group's co-chairman. In particular, recommendations to provide spaces for intergenerational bonding and measures to make Singapore elderly-friendly received strong support. But some issues, such as cycling, generated more debate - within the group itself and during public feedback.
Some supported the push towards a culture of cycling but others were worried that cyclists made problems for pedestrians.
Mr Ong said generational differences occasionally arose during their discussions and public feedback sessions. While middle-aged people enjoyed seeing traditional business activities in heritage areas like Little India, the younger generation said these jarred with the increasing number of pubs and restaurants.
'When we see a shop making curry powder using these antiquated machines in Little India, it's nostalgic for us and part of the sights, sounds and scent of the place. But the younger guys, sometimes they want it moved to industrial areas instead,' he said.
Going 'green'
Straits Times 20 Aug 10;
STRONG support for green initiatives emerged from the public consultation process on sustainability. Two green suggestions from those providing feedback were incorporated into the final sustainability report.
The first was to extend the Green Mark Scheme - relating to energy efficiency in buildings - to more areas here to ensure that both existing and new buildings achieve the Green Mark certification. The second was to set up a green accreditation body and system to establish reliable environmental standards for products and services.
Co-chairman of the sustainability and identity focus group Ong Keng Yong said he was impressed by the level of awareness on green issues. Those providing feedback offered thoughtful comments, and solutions as well, he said.
Pedestrian havens
Straits Times 20 Aug 10;
HAJI Lane in Kampong Glam and some small streets in Little India could be turned into a haven for pedestrians, with cars barred from using them.
The idea might soon become reality if the URA decides to adopt some of the recommendations put forward by the sustainability and identity focus group.
The proposal to 'pedestrianise' more streets in areas rich in heritage, art and culture was included in the group's final report after it received wide support from members of the public.
This would allow pedestrians to move around more easily without cars as a hazard, sustainability focus group co-chair Ong Keng Yong said.
The public has suggested that there would also be less pollution, allowing older buildings to be better maintained.
Room for cyclists
Straits Times 20 Aug 10;
CYCLING was mentioned by many people who gave feedback for the reports.
Some supported the push towards a culture of cycling, but others were worried that cyclists caused problems for pedestrians.
Said Mr Edmund Cheng, chairman of the National Arts Council and co-chairman of the focus group on quality of life: 'Many older people said they have to give way to cyclists when the footpaths are already so narrow... some have to walk outside of the footpaths.'
The final report by the focus group on quality of life reflected these views by recommending the introduction of dedicated cycling lanes to encourage more cycling within towns, and the widening of footpaths for areas where it is not feasible to set aside dedicated lanes.
Iconic spaces v heritage
Straits Times 20 Aug 10;
MORE iconic spaces like Marina Bay should be built so that the country has more distinctive areas, but there are also concerns that places of heritage could be lost.
The need to balance development with the desire to retain familiar places is reflected in the recommendations. The report noted that a possible approach would be to 'introduce iconic spaces sensitively within the larger urban nodes such as the city centre... and the regional centres and growth areas'.
Some of the regional centres and growth areas given as examples include the Jurong Lake District, Kallang Riverside and Paya Lebar Central.
Holistic approach to public transport proposed
Green transport a top priority in concept plan reports
Lynn Kan The Business Times 20 Aug 10;
(SINGAPORE) Switching to environmentally-friendly transport won't mean more pain and discomfort, if the suggestions in reports by two government-appointed focus groups are anything to go by.
In fact, frequent public transport commuters will be cheered to see suggestions that include longer operating hours for buses and trains, shorter commute times with dedicated bus lanes for express buses and reduced fares.
While some of the suggestions are not new, the final reports put forth a 'more integrated, holistic approach' so more people will choose public transport to make Singapore 'greener'.
The two reports were compiled to address issues of ageing, sustainability, quality of life and identity in Singapore, and will be taken into consideration for Concept Plan 2011, a blueprint for Singapore's land use and transportation plans over the next 40 to 50 years.
However, it's not all carrots with no sticks. One such 'stick' might draw groans from motorists. One focus group raised the issue of reviewing car parking policies, which might include raising parking fees in the city and town centres, reducing the number of parking lots.
The reports also addressed the issue that alternative modes of transport such as walking and cycling could become more commonplace if Singapore found a way to address the hot and humid climate and improve safety.
For this, dedicated cycling lane networks, increasing parking facilities for bicycles and more foliage-covered walkways to MRT stations, bus stops and taxi stands were some suggestions.
Some recommendations addressed bigger social and national identity issues as well. For instance, having pedestrian thoroughfares in heritage areas such as Kampong Glam, Haji Lane and Little India would not only allow pedestrians to soak in Singapore's heritage, art and culture but also 'green' their transportation habits.
Besides transportation, improving waste management and raising demand for green products were addressed. To promote both recycling and use of transport, recycling facilities could be placed at MRT stations and public transport rebates could be given to those who recycle.
Also making the list were ideas like community-wide composting, pegging waste disposal fees to the amount thrown away, and setting up a green accreditation body to set environmental standards for products and services.
Executive director of Singapore Environment Council, Howard Shaw welcomes the progress of the reports that were presented to the Ministry of National Development and Urban Redevelopment Authority yesterday.
'It's good to have a holistic approach,' he said.
'People's lifestyles have changed tremendously and looking into how to change Singapore's infrastructure to fit that, will raise awareness and acceptability of how to live more sustainably.'
Concept Plan 2011 Focus Groups present final recommendations to URA
URA Press Release 19 Aug 10;
The Concept Plan 2011 Focus Groups on “Quality of Life” and “Sustainability and Identity” presented their final reports on their recommendations for the Concept Plan 2011 to the Ministry of National Development and Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) today.
As part of the public consultation exercise for the Concept Plan 2011 review, two focus groups were appointed by the URA in January 2010 to discuss four key issues - Quality of Life, Ageing, Sustainability and Identity - that will shape our live, work and play environment in the coming years.
The two focus groups’ recommendations were finalised after extensive discussions and site visits by the focus groups from January 2010 to April 2010. The final report also took into consideration public feedback received on the draft recommendations at two public forums held on 6 and 10 May 2010, as well as the findings of the URA Lifestyle and Online surveys, which were announced on 30 April 2010.
Focus group on “Sustainability and Identity”
The focus group on “Sustainability and Identity” aspires for Singapore to be a Sustainable City and an Endearing Home. To achieve this, the focus group has come up with a set of recommendations categorised under two key thrusts:
(a) Building a sustainable city
(i) Strengthen green infrastructure
(ii) Foster more sharing and ownership of sustainable practices
(b) Making Singapore an endearing home
(i) Cherish and safeguard our built and natural heritage
(ii) Enhance our people’s experience of our built and natural heritage
(iii) Involve the stakeholders and community in shaping an endearing Singapore
See Annex A (pdf) for the summary of key recommendations on “Sustainability and Identity”.
Final report of Focus Group’s recommendations on “Sustainability and Identity”.
http://www.ura.gov.sg/pr/graphics/2010/pr10-97a_SDRpt%20.pdf
Focus group on “Quality of Life”
The focus group on “Quality of Life” aspires for Singapore to be an even more liveable and lively city, one which is inspiring, inclusive and vibrant, and which residents love and are proud to call home. To achieve this, the focus group proposed four key themes:
(a) Distinctiveness: An inspiring global and Asian city
(b) Proud home: Deepening the sense of community and ownership
(c) People-centricity: Catering for diversity while being ‘age-friendly’
(d) At the cutting edge: Breaking new ground as a city of tomorrow
See Annex B (pdf) for the summary of key recommendations on “Quality of Life”.
Final report of Focus Group’s recommendations on “Quality of Life”. http://www.ura.gov.sg/pr/graphics/2010/pr10-97b_QOLRpt.pdf
The focus groups’ recommendations will be taken into consideration in drawing up the Concept Plan 2011. The draft Concept Plan 2011 will be exhibited in the second half of 2011 where public feedback will be sought on the Concept Plan 2011 before it is finalised.
About the Concept Plan
The Concept Plan maps out the long term directions for Singapore’s land use and transportation plans over the next 40 to 50 years. The Concept Plan takes into consideration Singapore’s land use demands including housing, industry and commerce, community, recreation, transport and infrastructure needs. It safeguards land for key growth sectors to ensure we have enough land to meet all our development needs even in the long term. The review is carried out once every ten years and the present review is scheduled to be completed in 2011.
About the Concept Plan 2011 Focus Groups
As part of the public consultation exercise for the Concept Plan 2011 review, two focus groups were formed in January 2010.
Mr Lee Tzu Yang, Chairman, Shell Companies in Singapore and Ambassador Ong Keng Yong, Director, Institute of Policy Studies chaired a focus group which looked into Sustainability and Identity issues. The second group, co-chaired by Mr Edmund Cheng, Chairman, National Arts Council and Prof Tan Chorh Chuan, President, National University of Singapore discussed issues on Quality of Life.
The two focus groups comprised a good balance of members, from professional organisations, non-government organisations, academics, community leaders, business representatives, youths etc to represent a broad spectrum of our population.
Getting a first-hand feel of conservation work
SMU's field interns spend four weeks in Indonesia and the Philippines
Esther Ng Today Online 20 Aug 10;
SINGAPORE - They paid for their airfare and accommodation to spend four weeks in Indonesia and the Philippines, getting their hands and feet dirty planting trees and mangroves - a first-hand feel of conservation work.
Undergraduates Connie Chua, Eugene Lim, Kevin See and Ong Zi Xiang from the Singapore Management University were Conservation International's (CI) first batch of field interns.
Headquartered in the United States, the non-government organisation (NGO) opened an office in Singapore last October.
For Ms Chua and Mr Lim, the highlight of their internship was the Javan Gibbon Centre near the Gunung Gede Pangrango National Park, and Nagrak, where there is a reforestation programme.
"We saw illegal logging of 10-year-old trees ... it's tough patrolling 150 hectares, which is what we did helping two rangers and three CI workers," said Mr Lim.
"However, I learnt that you need to balance people's livelihood with the environment," he added.
Farmers who need farmland would resort to cutting down forests. At Nagrak, CI Indonesia works with farmers to plant trees every three metres on cleared land to create new forests. Farmers were also encouraged to take up livestock rearing.
For Ms Chua, a former Indonesian, roughing it out in the mountains meant sleeping on the floor and doing without air-conditioning - with the odd rat scurrying across the room.
"I learnt a lot and want to continue volunteering for NGOs when I graduate," she said.
Mr See and Mr Ong, however, wished they had more outdoor action. "The NGO had the impression Singaporeans are city people and didn't want to get their hands dirty but we wanted more field trips," said Mr Ong.
Instead, they were mainly tasked to archive the NGO's books and magazines.
So, when they headed to Batangas, a coastal area on Luzon Island, to plant mangroves, and to set up a booth at Manila Ocean Park, the two were thrilled.
CI's communications manager, Ms Lynn Tang told MediaCorp that it hoped to improve the programme and appealed for corporate sponsors.
"Having support for this programme will not only allow us to develop it further, but enable more individuals to benefit from the experience by making it more accessible to people from all financial backgrounds," she said.
Jack Wong The Star 19 Aug 10;
THE Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) is trying to track down the extremely rare Hose’s civet, which was photographed by camera traps in the Selaan-Linau Forest Management Unit (FMU) in upper Baram in the northern region.
“We are trying to find out where they are. Hose’s civets (Diplogale hosei) are found only in certain parts of Borneo and there are only two or three recordings of the species, including one in Brunei,’’ said WCS Malaysia Programme director Dr Melvin T. Gumal after the opening of a carbon offsets and forest conversation workshop at Wisma STA here yesterday.
The event was organised jointly by Sarawak Forestry Corporation and WCS Malaysia Programme.
Dr Gumal said that 10 images of Hose’s civets were recorded on cameras set in the Selaan-Linau FMU during a comprehensive wildlife survey which started six years ago.
He said that WCS could not determine the Hose’s civet population in the Selaan-Linau FMU, a logging concession managed by Samling Strategic Corporation.
A WCS publication said the Hose’s civet, which is endemic to the interior of Borneo, was one of the world’s least-known carnivores.
No protected area in Sarawak was known to hold a population of the rare species, which might be adapted to living in montane forests, it added.
“Its highly localised distribution implies it is a habitat specialist which may be under great threat. The basic factors likely to determine its long-term future are entirely unknown, making specific conservation measures impossible,’’ added the publication.
Also photographed in Selaan-Linau FMU are other small carnivores – marbled cat, binturong, banded civet and collared mongoose – all of which are threatened species under the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List.
Large carnivores caught by camera traps include the Sunda clouded leopard and Malayan sun bear, both listed as vulnerable under the ICUN Red List.
Dr Gumal said the wildlife survey was still on-going, adding that WCS’s collaboration with Samling was into the second five-year plan.
He said that WCS was helping to draw up a wildlife conservation plan for the Selaan-Linau FMU.
Results from its project have indicated that sustainably-logged forests could support wildlife as long as sound management policies, intervention measures and constant monitoring are in place.
The WCS Malaysia programme includes conservation of orang utans in the Batang Ai National Park and Lanjak Entimau Wildlife Sanctuary as well as tigers and elephants in the peninsula.
(AFP) Google News 19 Aug 10;
KUALA LUMPUR — Environmentalists have won a victory in a battle to prevent a coal-fired power plant being built in Malaysian Borneo, with a minister Thursday rejecting the plan due to environmental concerns.
Sabah state environment minister Masidi Manjun reportedly said proponents of the project now have the choice to either drop the controversial power project or launch an appeal to conduct another environmental assessment study.
"At this point of time, all quarters should respect the Department of Environment (DOE) decision," he was quoted as saying by the official Bernama news agency.
The 300-megawatt plant in Lahad Datu, in Sabah state which along with Sarawak makes up Malaysia's half of Borneo island, would face the Coral Triangle which is one of the world's most biodiverse marine environments.
The area, which spans the seas around East Timor, Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines and the Solomon Islands, is home to 75 percent of all known coral species.
Environmentalists immediately hailed the decision.
Opposition was led by Green Surf, a coalition of groups including the Malaysian Nature Society, which said the plant would displace villagers and threaten endangered species including orangutans and Bornean rhinos.
Spokesman Wong Tack said that proponents of the project, which national energy provider Tenaga Nasional has a stake, should scrap it altogether.
"We thank the DOE for carrying out their duty without fear or favour. Now that a federal agency has made such a decision, we hope that the state government too will take a stand," he said.
"Let us not waste any more time and energy. We are confident alternatives can be put in place effectively in the short term."
The plant is the latest energy project to stir controversy in Borneo. The vast Bakun dam in neighbouring Sarawak which saw swathes of rainforest cleared and thousands of indigenous people displaced also drew intense criticism.
'Respect DOE decision on coal-fired plant'
Julia Chan New Straits Times 20 Aug 10;
KOTA KINABALU: The decision by the Department of Environment (DOE) to reject the detailed environmental impact assessment (DEIA) for the proposed 300-megawatt coal-fired power plant in Lahad Datu should be respected.
Sabah Tourism, Culture and Environment Minister Datuk Masidi Manjun said the decision was made professionally based on facts and findings.
The DOE rejected the report prepared by Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia Pakarunding consultants on the ground that many important environmental parameters were not addressed.
The latest development was met with relief and approval by many non-governmental organisations and environmentalists who had been campaigning against the coal-fired plant for months.
Masidi, however, said the project manager, Lahad Datu Energy, could always appeal or prepare another report that would meet DOE's requirements.
"Existing policy and procedures give options to the proponent of the coal-fired plant project to appeal to the director-general of the DOE to do and prepare another EIA report. It's now really up to the company whether to exercise this option."
Sabah Environment Protection Department director Yabi Yangkat said that they received a fax on Wednesday informing them of the DOE's decision to reject the DEIA report, after taking into consideration the queries raised at the panel of review meeting in August.
Specially formed NGO Green SURF (Sabah Unite to Re-Power the Future) are urging the government to call off the proposed coal-fired plant entirely.
Green SURF is a coalition of five NGOs including SEPA, WWF Malaysia, Land Empowerment Animals People (LEAP), Malaysian Nature Society and Partners of Community Organisations (PACOS). It was set up in October last year after Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak announced that a power plant would be built in Lahad Datu.
"It is time for all stakeholders to work together in coming up with alternative solutions to dirty energy like coal, in solving power shortage in the state," said Wong Tack, who is Sabah Environmental Protection Association (SEPA) president, on behalf of Green SURF.
"Let us not waste any more time and energy. We are confident alternatives can be put in place effectively in the short term," he said in a statement yesterday.
Green SURF had raised concerns about failure on the part of the consultants to list marine and terrestrial species correctly, and problems in the way sampling was done, apart from issues on design and shipment of coal from Kalimantan.
In April 2008, the state rejected the DEIA for the first proposed site in Silam, also in Lahad Datu, on the ground that it would have negative environmental and health impact.
Sabah Electricity Sdn Bhd's proposal for an alternative site in Sandakan also did not meet the DEIA standard following strong objections from locals.
TRAFFIC 19 Aug 10;
Cambridge, UK, 19th August 2010—The Spoon-billed Sandpiper, one of the world's most threatened birds, is rapidly heading towards extinction because young birds are being targeted for human consumption.
Spoon-billed Sandpipers nest only in the far north-east of Russia. In 2000, around 1,000 breeding pairs were known, but by 2009, the number had plummeted to just 120–220 pairs, a decline of 88%.
During that time, adult survival appeared unchanged and breeding success was reasonable, but the recruitment of young birds back into the adult population was zero in all but one of the years studied.
Now an international team of scientists has discovered the apparent reason behind the dramatic decline and why young birds are particularly at risk.
First, the team had to find where the birds spent the winter months.
In both 2009 and 2010, the team located around 200 Spoon-billed Sandpipers—the majority of the world population—wintering in Myanmar, most of them in the Bay of Martaban where local people target wading birds for food.
“For a species with such a small known population, it is likely that hunting in the wintering area is the major cause of the species’s decline,” said Christoph Zöckler of ArcCona, a Cambridge-based Consultancy and member of the international team.
The problem is exacerbated because young immature birds are more likely to be caught and spend the whole of their first year on the wintering grounds.
During the monsoon season (May-September), when adult Spoon-billed Sandpipers are far away on their breeding grounds, birds are particularly targeted by local hunters because fishing becomes difficult.
“The unintentional targeting of young Spoon-billed Sandpipers during the summer months explains the lack of recruitment of new birds into the breeding population,” said Zöckler.
To prevent the Spoon-billed Sandpiper’s extinction urgent action is needed, both to find ways to give local people economic alternatives to hunting birds and to persuade hunters to release any sandpipers they catch.
“Without such action, the world will lose one of its most charismatic birds,” said Zöckler.
TRAFFIC and IUCN, in conjunction with BirdLife International, have been developing indicators to monitor trends in the status of species used for food and medicine and have published a factheet on this work (PDF, 300 KB)
They show that birds and mammals used for these purposes are generally more threatened than those that are not.
Overall, 12% of all bird species are globally threatened with extinction, but a much higher percentage—23%—of those used for food and medicine are under threat.
TRAFFIC's work on indicators is being showcased this week at the EcoHealth 2010 Conference, the biennial conference of the International Association for Ecology and Health (IAEH) currently underway in London, UK.
Mark Huxham BBC Green Room 9 Aug 10;
Healthy mangrove forests provide a huge range of environmental benefits and need to be protected, says Mark Huxham. In this week's Green Room, he argues that schemes such as Redd offer a vital lifeline to the important ecosystems.
Healthy mangrove forests provide a huge range of environmental benefits and need to be protected, says Mark Huxham. In this week's Green Room, he argues that schemes such as Redd offer a vital lifeline to the important ecosystems.
Like smoke from a bushfire, a pall of black pessimism permeates news from tropical forests. Every year millions of hectares are lost; usually between 1-2% of global forest coverage.
But in recent years, new units of destruction have appeared measuring mass, not area.
In 2008, we saw 12 billion tonnes of carbon disappear - this is equal to the mass of about 100 million blue whales.
This shift in measurement reflects a change in international priorities.
Whilst the negative impacts of deforestation on biodiversity and indigenous people remain as serious as ever, it is climate change, and units of carbon, that have come to dominate discussions around forestry.
Redd wedge
Approximately 17% of all global greenhouse gas emissions come from the destruction of tropical forests. This is more than the total from all forms of transport combined.
So conserving and restoring these forests must form part of a comprehensive climate change deal; reducing emissions from the developed world is essential, but is not enough.
International negotiations have developed a mechanism to achieve forest conservation, known as Redd (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation).
The idea is that tropical nations will be able to apply for funds either to slow the rate of destruction of existing forests or to increase the area of new ones.
Given that the international carbon market is worth in excess of $100bn per year - more than 100 times what is spent on international conservation - Redd holds the potential of injecting large sums into saving tropical forests and of finally reversing the decline.
Mangroves, forests that grow in intertidal areas in the tropics and sub-tropics, and the people that depend upon them could really benefit from Redd-related carbon payments.
Mangroves account for only around 0.4% of all forests; but the multiple services - such as coastal protection, nursery habitat for fish and filtration of pollution and sediments - that they provide, and the rapid rate of their destruction, make them a conservation priority.
They are also highly effective natural sinks for carbon, capturing up to six times more carbon per hectare than undisturbed rainforests.
Community credits
We have been working with conservation charities Earthwatch Institute and Plan Vivo, along with the Kenyan government, to develop a demonstration community mangrove conservation project at Gazi Bay in southern Kenya.
There are many good reasons to carry out this work, and money from carbon credits might just make it possible - not only in Kenya, but in other communities throughout the tropics.
So why don't we seize the chance?
Critics of the carbon market highlight a number of reasons.
First, the carbon accounting approach to forestry may fail to see the woods for the carbon; the best ways of maximising carbon revenue may not be the best ways of maintaining healthy ecosystems.
For example, plantations of fast growing exotic species - such as eucalypts - can rapidly capture carbon but may be a disaster for native wildlife and ecosystems.
But the temptation to do this will usually not arise for mangroves, which are highly specialised and grow in areas that other trees cannot tolerate.
Second, there is the threat that Redd and similar systems will be used by governments to evict "inefficient" local people from forests made suddenly valuable by carbon money.
The recent People's Climate Conference, held in Cochabamba, Bolivia, came out against Redd on these grounds.
But this is an argument for bottom-up projects, which are led by local people from the start. While the Redd process is still flexible and evolving, an opportunity exists to model future projects on community-based principles.
In the case of mangroves, governments already own most forests around the world, with local people having no formal rights to their use or powers to protect them. Redd presents an opportunity to design and test new systems of community tenure-ship.
The third argument heard against investing in forests for carbon is that of "permanence": how can we know that carbon locked in forests today will not be released following fires or clear-felling tomorrow?
Such an argument could be made against most low-carbon developments. There is no guarantee that the wind turbine built today will not be struck by lightning tomorrow, and anyhow it will "die" at the end of its operating life of 30 years.
However, mangroves are capable of storing carbon for many thousands of years in the form of peat in their sediments, and much of this carbon may remain in place even if the forests themselves are destroyed.
One UK newspaper columnist compares carbon offsetting to the indulgences paid by the pious in the Middle Ages - a device to absolve your conscience without changing your actions.
This is the "moral hazard" argument - that offsetting carbon is a trick that will excuse business-as-usual and will be counterproductive.
But we no longer have a choice between protecting forests and changing lifestyles. Both are necessary.
Money from offsetting can form a useful bridging mechanism as we move towards reducing emissions and enhancing and protecting sinks. But we do need to make sure that both happen, and that cash generated from offsetting is only a part, and a diminishing one, of the funding required.
And what can be said of the final argument, that pricing ecosystem services such as sequestration is a final capitulation to the market-driven, growth-obsessed logic that has got us into our current mess?
I agree that we need a revolutionary change in our ethical outlook so that ecological sustainability becomes our central concern, but I don't see it happening in time to save the forests.
(Lord) Nicholas Stern, in his landmark review into the economics of climate change, identified climate change as a massive "market failure".
By using the language of economics, his report influenced thinking from governments to tabloid newsrooms, even though it contained no new science.
We should learn from this and use the tools of economics to help correct "market failures" such as the destruction of valuable mangroves for short-term gain.
Meanwhile, the bad news from the tropics continues to drift in.
But for the first time in many years there is an emerging opportunity to clear the smoke, and community-based conservation of mangroves is a good place to start.
Dr Mark Huxham is an Earthwatch researcher based at Napier University, Scotland
The Green Room is a series of opinion articles on environmental topics running weekly on the BBC News website
Jeremy Hsu livescience.com Yahoo News 19 Aug 10;
A vast patch of garbage spanning a swath of the Atlantic Ocean has long puzzled scientists who wondered where the plastic bits came from and why there's not more of it.
Now an exhaustive study, resulting in more than 64,000 bits of plastic collected from the Atlantic Ocean over two decades, has allowed scientists to "go through the garbage" and get to the bottom of some of the mysteries.
Scientists have been particularly mystified over why the concentration of plastic in the Atlantic has not increased during the past 22 years, despite both plastic production and plastic trash increasing during that time period. Still, they have their suspicions.
"I think it's certain that the plastic is breaking down into pieces smaller than what we capture in the net," said Kara Lavender Law, an oceanographer with the Sea Education Association at Woods Hole, Mass.
As bacteria and other organisms built up on the plastic, the added weight may have dragged the debris down to lower ocean depths, according to Lavender Law and her colleagues in a study detailed in the Aug. 19 issue of the journal Science.
Sizing up the trash
Ships towing long nets found the plastic pieces floating across hundreds of miles of the North Atlantic during the past 22 years. The nets only snag objects bigger than a third of millimeter, which can include plankton, seaweed and even tarballs from oil.
The sheer scale of the affected area could rival that of the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch," although Lavender Law cautioned that both regions remain poorly defined. For instance, the exact eastern boundary of the Atlantic region remains undiscovered.
"It's entirely possible that it reaches almost all the way across the Atlantic," Lavender Law told LiveScience.
The affected region in the western North Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Ocean stretches east to west between Cuba and Virginia, where a combination of wind-forced ocean circulation and the so-called Coriolis Effect of the Earth's rotation keep the plastic circling almost endlessly.
What lies on the surface
The term "garbage patch" does not necessarily mean a visible island of trash floating on the waves, researchers said. Only 62 percent of net tows by ships have contained detectable amounts of plastic.
"What we're collecting are really small fragments of plastic from larger consumer items," Lavender Law explained. "If you're on the deck of a ship, you normally can't even see the plastic pieces."
Each half-hour net tow typically turned up just 20 plastic pieces equivalent to about 0.3 grams in all. By comparison, a U.S. nickel weighs 5 grams.
The vast majority of plastic pieces caught in the net turned out smaller than 10 millimeters, Lavendar Law said. She pointed to a companion study published in this week's issue of the journal Marine Pollution Bulletin that includes all the details on the plastic pieces.
But the unusual discovery of a five-gallon bucket harbored a special surprise - trigger fish, which normally live around ocean reefs. That suggested the fish had found both shelter and perhaps food from the accumulated plastic scum on the bucket.
The more common tiny pieces of plastic can also harbor colonies of bacteria that may not typically belong at the ocean's surface.
"We need to ask if microbes are able to use the plastic as food and degrade it, or if the plastic is acting as substrates for [microbial] communities living on them," Lavender Law said.
How trash travels
The origins of all the plastic remain largely unknown, because researchers currently cannot trace it back to the original location or even the original product that a plastic piece came from.
But ocean circulation studies that use satellite-tracked buoys have found that floating plastic can travel from Washington, D.C., or Miami, Fla., to the Atlantic garbage patch within just 40 days.
The amount of plastic reaching the oceans should have grown in recent decades, according to available data. The amount of buoyant plastics in U.S. Municipal Solid Waste increased by 24 percent between 1993 and 2008, and totaled 14.5 million tons in 2008.
That goes back to the case of the missing trash that should have boosted plastic concentrations in the Atlantic Ocean. Future ship surveys may find more of the plastic lurking in the lower ocean depths, or uncover more about how microbes break down the plastic.
"Understanding the size spectrum and the fate of the plastic is a very important direction to go," Lavender Law noted.
Much of that future research rests upon undergraduate students, who used tweezers to pick out the plastic from the goo pulled up by the plankton nets. More than 7,000 students took part in that painstaking work during the Sea Education Association's SEA Semester annual voyages, which last for a total of three months each year.
"I always want to make sure I give full credit to the undergrads," Lavender Law said. "Undergrads with or without science backgrounds can make real contributions."
Researchers wonder where extra plastic trash is
Randolph E. Schmid, Associated Press 19 Aug 10;
WASHINGTON – The amount of plastic trash in the ocean doesn't seem to be growing, and environmentalists are puzzled.
A 22-year study indicates that the amount of plastic corralled by currents into a floating junkyard in the Atlantic Ocean has not increased.
"We know that global production of plastics has increased substantially over the time period" and disposal also has increased, said Kara Lavender Law of the Sea Education Association in Woods Hole, Mass.
"If there is more plastic trash it's hard to believe more is not making it into the ocean. There is missing plastic out there," she said in a telephone interview.
Over the course of the study more than 64,000 individual plastic pieces were collected at 6,100 locations that were sampled, Law and colleagues report in Thursday's online edition of the journal Science.
Researchers worry about plastic in the oceans because it can endanger seabirds, turtles and other sea life which eat it, or become entangled. A floating trash field also has been reported in the Pacific Ocean.
While the researchers found significant year-to-year changes in the amount of plastic in the Atlantic, averaging over time they found no significant increase.
The annual trips to the Atlantic junkyard use plankton nets to skim the surface, collecting tiny pieces, and students then pick out the plastic pieces with tweezers.
The exact expanse of the Atlantic trash field has not been determined, Law said. It is located in the Atlantic at about the same latitude as Atlanta.
Law suggested that the plastic may be breaking unto smaller pieces and passing through the nets, or that biological growth on the plastic may be causing it to become more dense and sink into the ocean where the nets miss it.
Wind patterns and currents do not seem to have changed, she said, so the trash should still be collecting at the same place.
The research was funded by the National Science Foundation.
Study measures Atlantic plastic accumulation
Mark Kinver, BBC News 20 Aug 10;
A study has measured the amount of plastic debris found in a region of the Atlantic Ocean over a 22-year period.
US researchers, writing in Science, suggest the volume of plastic appeared to have peaked in recent years.
One reason could be tighter marine pollution rules that prevent vessels dumping their waste at sea.
The team said monitoring the free-floating plastic also provided an insight into the behaviour of ocean surface currents.
They found plastic, most pieces measuring no more than a few millimetres, in more than 60% of 6,136 samples collected by dragging fine-meshed nets along the ocean's surface.
The researchers - from the US-based Sea Education Association (Sea), Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the University of Hawaii - described plastic as a "major contaminant".
"Plastic marine pollution is a significant environmental concern, yet a quantitative description of the scope of this problem is the open ocean is lacking," they wrote.
"Their chemically engineered durability and slow rate of biodegradation allow these synthetic polymers to withstand the ocean environment for years to decades or longer."
The impacts caused by the debris include:
* sea animals becoming entangled
* seabirds and other marine creatures eating the plastic
* the debris being used as a "life raft" by some species to reach areas outside their normal distribution range
"While high concentrations of floating plastic debris have been found in the Pacific Ocean, only limited data exist to quantify and explain the geographical range," they said.
"In the Atlantic Ocean, the subject has been all but ignored."
Yahoo News 19 Aug 10;
WASHINGTON (AFP) – Experts said Thursday they have mapped a 35-kilometer (22 mile) long underwater plume of oil that spewed from BP's ruptured Gulf of Mexico well, seeming to challenge US government assertions that most of the oil has disappeared.
The oily underwater cloud measured two kilometers wide and 200 meters (650 feet) thick and was drifting through the Gulf at a depth of at least 900 meters, according to the paper by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) marine biologists, published in the journal Science.
The plume was seen as not dissipating as rapidly as experts had expected, despite widespread use of dispersants which the government has insisted have been vital to the breakdown of vast amounts of oil.
The observations were made in late June, several weeks before the ruptured wellhead was capped, and about two months after an explosion sank the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon rig, triggering the largest ever maritime oil spill.
Challenging US government estimates based on natural processes rapidly dissipating the toxic crude, the authors said deep-sea microbes were degrading the plume only slowly and predicted the oil would endure for some time.
"We've shown conclusively not only that a plume exists, but also defined its origin and near-field structure," said lead author Richard Camilli.
The oil already "is persisting for longer periods than we would have expected," he added.
"Many people speculated that the sub-surface oil droplets were being easily downgraded. Well, we didn't find that. We found that it was still there."
US and BP officials earlier this month proclaimed that about three-quarters of the oil which gushed into the Gulf had been cleaned up or dispersed through natural processes.
Around 4.9 million barrels of oil are believed to have spewed from the fractured wellhead before it was capped last month. US officials say that of that amount, 800,000 barrels were contained and funneled up to ships on the surface.
The leak not only threatened livelihoods of fishermen and tourism businesses along the US Gulf coast, but also stoked fears of long-term ecological damage.
On August 4, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said the "vast majority" of oil had been evaporated, removed by cleanup teams or was dispersing naturally.
The remaining 26 percent -- or about 1.3 million barrels of oil -- was classified as "residual oil" and "is either on or just below the surface as residue and weathered tar balls, has washed ashore or been collected from the shore, or is buried in sand and sediments," the report said.
The Woods Hole team used a robotic submarine equipped with an underwater mass spectrometer to detect and analyze the plume, making repeated horizontal sweeps to ascertain its size and chemical composition.
They followed the "neutrally buoyant" cloud as it migrated slowly, at 0.27 kilometers per hour, southwest of the leaking well.
The plume was then tracked for a distance of about 35 kilometers before the approach of Hurricane Alex forced the scientists to turn back.
The spectrometer found petroleum hydrocarbons at concentrations of more than 50 micrograms per liter, a level that meant the samples had no smell or oil and were clear. The impacts on biodiversity remain uncertain, though.
"The plume was not a river of Hershey's Syrup," said Christopher Reddy, a marine biochemist. "But that's not to say it isn't harmful for the environment."
The damaged well was capped on July 15. Earlier this month BP engineers plugged the site with heavy drilling fluid and then sealed it with cement.
The company aims to permanently seal the well in the second week of September, a US official said on Thursday.
Major study charts long-lasting oil plume in Gulf
Seth Borenstein, Associated Press Yahoo News 20 Aug 10;
WASHINGTON – A 22-mile-long invisible mist of oil is meandering far below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, where it will probably loiter for months or more, scientists reported Thursday in the first conclusive evidence of an underwater plume from the BP spill.
The most worrisome part is the slow pace at which the oil is breaking down in the cold, 40-degree water, making it a long-lasting but unseen threat to vulnerable marine life, experts said.
Earlier this month, top federal officials declared the oil in the spill was mostly "gone," and it is gone in the sense you can't see it. But the chemical ingredients of the oil persist more than a half-mile beneath the surface, researchers found.
And the oil is degrading at one-tenth the pace at which it breaks down at the surface. That means "the plumes could stick around for quite a while," said study co-author Ben Van Mooy of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, which led the research published online in the journal Science.
Monty Graham, a scientist at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama who was not involved in the study, said: "We absolutely should be concerned that this material is drifting around for who knows how long. They say months in the (research) paper, but more likely we'll be able to track this stuff for years."
Late Thursday, federal officials acknowledged the deepwater oil was not degrading as fast as they initially thought, but still was breaking down "relatively rapidly." Jane Lubchenco, chief of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said agency scientists and others were "working furiously" to come up with actual rates of biodegradation.
She noted a bright spot from the slow breakdown of the oil: Faster would mean a big influx of oil-eating microbes. Though they are useful, they also use up oxygen, creating "dead zones" that already plague the Gulf in the summer. Dead zones are not forming because of the oil plume, Lubchenco said.
The underwater oil was measured close to BP's blown-out well, which is about 40 miles off the Louisiana coast. The plume started three miles from the well and extended more than 20 miles to the southwest. The oil droplets are odorless and too small to be seen by the human eye. If you swam through the plume, you wouldn't notice it.
"The water samples when we were right in the plume look like spring water," study chief author Richard Camilli said. "You certainly didn't see any oil droplets and you certainly didn't smell it."
The scientists used complex instruments — including a special underwater mass spectrometer — to detect the chemical signature of the oil that spewed from the BP well after it ruptured April 20. The equipment was carried into the deep by submersible devices.
With more than 57,000 of these measurements, the scientists mapped a huge plume in late June when the well was still leaking. The components of oil were detected in a flow that measured more than a mile wide and more than 650 feet from top to bottom.
Federal officials said there are signs that the plume has started to break into smaller ones since the Woods Hole research cruise ended. But scientists said that wouldn't lessen the overall harm from the oil.
The oil is at depths of 3,000 to 4,000 feet, far below the environment of the most popular Gulf fish like red snapper, tuna and mackerel. But it is not harmless. These depths are where small fish and crustaceans live. And one of the biggest migrations on Earth involves small fish that go from deep water to more shallow areas, taking nutrients from the ocean depths up to the large fish and mammals.
Those smaller creatures could be harmed by going through the oil, said Larry McKinney, director of Texas A&M University's Gulf of Mexico research center in Corpus Christi.
Some aspects of that region are so little known that "we might lose species that we don't know now exist," said Graham of the Dauphin Island lab.
"This is a highly sensitive ecosystem," agreed Steve Murawski, chief fisheries scientist for the federal agency NOAA. "The animals down at 3,300 to 3,400 feet grow slowly." The oil not only has toxic components but could cause genetic problems even at low concentrations, he said.
Lubchenco said NOAA is "very concerned about the impact" of the oil below the surface and federal officials last week started more aggressive monitoring of it.
For much of the summer, the mere existence of underwater plumes of oil was the subject of a debate that at times pitted outside scientists against federal officials who downplayed the idea of plumes of trapped oil. Now federal officials say as much as 42 million gallons of oil may be lurking below the surface in amounts that are much smaller than the width of a human hair.
While federal officials prefer to describe the lurking oil as "an ephemeral cloud," the Woods Hole scientists use the word "plume" repeatedly.
The study conclusively shows that a plume exists, that it came from the BP well and that it probably never got close to the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, Camilli said. It is probably even larger than 22 miles long, but scientists had to stop measuring because of Hurricane Alex.
Earlier this week a University of South Florida team reported oil in amounts that were toxic to critical plant plankton deep underwater, but the crude was not necessarily in plumes. Those findings have not been reviewed by other scientists or published.
The plume is probably still around, but moving west-southwest of the BP well site at about 4 miles a day, Camilli said.
While praising the study that ended on June 28, Murawski said more recent observations show that the cloud of oil has "broken apart into a bunch of very small features, some them much farther away." Texas A&M's McKinney said marine life can suffer harm whether it is several smaller plumes or one giant one.
NOAA redirected much of its sampling for underwater oil after consulting with Woods Hole researchers. The federal agency is now using the techniques that the team pioneered with a robotic sub and an underwater mass spectrometer, Murawski said.
Previous attempts to define the plume were "like watching the Super Bowl on a 12-inch black-and-white TV and we try to bring to the table a 36-inch HD TV," said Woods Hole scientist Chris Reddy. The paper, fast-tracked for the world of peer-reviewed science, was written on a boat while still in the Gulf, he said.
Reddy said he could not yet explain why the underwater plume formed at that depth. But other experts point to three factors: cold water, the way the oil spewed from the broken well, and the use of massive amounts of dispersants to break up the oil before it gets to the surface.
The decision to use 1.8 million gallons of dispersants amounted to an environmental trade-off — it meant less oil tainting the surface, where there is noticeable and productive life, but the risk of longer-term problems down below.
Retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the government's point man on the Gulf oil spill, said it was a choice between two difficult options — with the discussions going on in front of the president. In the end, officials decided to "accept the implication of the hydrocarbons in the water column rather than Barataria Bay or the Chandeleur Islands" in Louisiana.
Given the slow rate at which the oil is degrading in the cold water, Samantha Joye of the University of Georgia, and others say it is too early to even think about closing the books on the spill: "The full environmental impacts of the spill will thus not be felt for some time."
Gulf Plume Resists Oil-Eating Microbes
Jeremy Hsu livescience.com Yahoo News 20 Aug 10;
A massive oil plume from the Deepwater Horizon blowout may survive for longer than expected against the petroleum-eating microbes in the Gulf of Mexico, according to a new study.
Researchers took a "forensic snapshot" in late June that showed higher-than-expected oxygen levels in the plume from the oil well that began gushing in April. If microbes had swarmed into the area, their feeding frenzy should have reduced oxygen levels.
But the scientists said they have only just begun to analyze all the hydrocarbon molecules found in the oil plume, which typically serve as food for the microbes. They also cautioned that the study represented just one moment in time and space, and does not show what has happened to the plume since June.
"This was two weeks in June and a relatively small area in a very large body of water," said Christopher Reddy, a marine geochemist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI) in Massachusetts, during a press conference on Thursday.
A monster of a plume
A research ship and its companion underwater robot tracked the oil plume out to at least 22 miles (35 kilometers) from the leaking oil well. Scientists aboard spent 10 days taking samples before the threat of Hurricane Alex forced them to break off.
"Unfortunately we were not able to track this out beyond 35 kilometers, although the data suggested that the plume extended for much farther than we tracked it," said Richard Camilli, a chief WHOI scientist of applied ocean physics and engineering, and lead author on the study paper detailed in the Aug. 19 issue of the journal Science.
At the time, the plume stretched 1.2 miles (2 km) in width and reached 650 feet (198 meters) deep. The researchers found the plume was located more than 3,000 feet (914 m) below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, holding stable at a depth of 1,100 (335 m) feet down.
Mass spectrometers aboard the robotic sub that were lowered from the ship allowed the team to begin fingerprinting the hydrocarbon molecules in the oil.
But the overall chemical analysis remains incomplete, and so the total amount of oil in the plume remains unknown. Questions about the possible hazards of the oil plume for marine life also remain up in the air.
"Without the complete picture of all the components of hydrocarbons, we can't say much about its bioactivity or toxicity," Camilli said.
The microbe buffet table
When the Deepwater Horizon rig first sank and unleashed an oil spill into the Gulf, experts had counted upon microbes to help break down the oil plumes. But the latest findings suggest that the microbes may feed slower than expected.
The plume also retained its massive size more than three months after the oil began gushing from the well.
Still, the results did not surprise David Valentine, a marine geochemist at the University of California, Santa Barbara who did not take part in the new study. He had participated in a separate expedition that found higher levels of microbial activity closer to the oil well.
Valentine pointed out that the new study has not yet analyzed many of the hydrocarbons in the oil plume. He added that the microbes might have quickly swarmed the leaking oil well area at first, but then slowed down in activity during the following months.
Furthermore, microbes probably break down certain hydrocarbons faster than others, Valentine said.
"I think we'll find it's a buffet [of hydrocarbons] down there," Valentine told LiveScience. "The filet mignon may go quickly, but the taco bar will stay around for a while."
The study's researchers also gave their own warnings about drawing any premature conclusions.
"Microbes are a lot like teenagers," Reddy said. "They work on their own time, their own scale, they do what they want when they want, and so it is often difficult to make predictions about microbe degradation, and in fact it may vary substantially in the Gulf in any one time."
Lost and not yet found
The WHOI team hopes to also get a sense of what hydrocarbons have evaporated, and what has remained in the oil plume.
But first, researchers must relocate the oil plume again. That task of finding the missing plume has become harder since BP managed to temporarily cap the leaking oil well on the bottom of the Gulf.
"The faucet has been shut off," Reddy acknowledged. "We don't know where these hydrocarbons are, we saw them in June."
The capping of the oil well means that researchers can no longer track the oil plume from its source, Valentine explained.
"It's a needle in a haystack problem," Valentine said. "It's a very large area, and it's not a massive feature yet. But it will expand. Somebody will find it."
Karl Malakunas (AFP) Google News 19 Aug 10;
MANILA — Climate change may be playing a part in record rains ravaging Asia but environment experts say the destruction of ecosystems is more directly to blame for the severity of killer floods.
Widespread deforestation, the conversion of wetlands to farms or urban sprawl and the clogging up of natural drainage systems with garbage are just some of the factors exacerbating the impacts of the floods, they say.
"You can't just blame nature... humans have encroached on the natural flood plains," said Ganesh Pangare, Bangkok-based regional water and wetlands coordinator with the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
Pangare said better management of flood plains would limit the human and economic costs of natural disasters, such as the recent record rains in Pakistan that killed an estimated 1,400 people.
"You have to ensure that natural infrastructure is protected. Otherwise development in Asia is not sustainable," he said.
Red Constantino, the Manila-based head of the Institute for Climate and Sustainable Cities, said climate change was becoming a convenient way for Asian leaders to excuse themselves when natural disasters struck.
"When there is any big flooding it's become commonplace for climate change to be blamed when in fact many of the problems are fixable at the local level," said Constantino.
"Whether you are in Jakarta or Bangkok or Manila you have a basic issue with bad waste management, bad land management and urban sprawl."
Constantino referred to last year's devastation in Manila when Tropical Storm Ketsana dumped the heaviest rains in four decades on the Philippine capital.
Eighty percent of the city was submerged at the height of the flooding and more than 400 people died.
But although then president Gloria Arroyo highlighted climate change as at fault for the severity of the storm, a host of more direct human factors were to blame for the massive death toll.
Millions of people who built homes along flood plains in recent decades, the destruction of upstream forests and a proliferation of garbage that clogged up waterways all magnified the disaster, according to Constantino.
"Metro Manila is having to deal with the consequences of really bad planning," he said, pointing out the disaster did not lead to any major changes in the city's urban management policies.
Bruce Dunn, an environment specialist with the Asian Development Bank's Regional and Sustainable Development Department, said the destruction of forests across Asia was one of the major magnifiers of flood disasters.
He referred to a study by Australia's Charles Darwin University and the National University of Singapore that found a 10-percent decrease in forests led to the frequency of floods rising by between four and 28 percent.
But, amid a seemingly inexorable path towards ever-worsening damage of Asia's ecosystems, Dunn said there were some examples of improvements.
He pointed to China's reforestation efforts, which began after the country was hit by massive floods in the 1980s.
"At the time there were huge levels of deforestation and almost overnight there was a very rapid policy change," Dunn said.
"Now, in terms of forest cover, Asia has had some increases because of reforestation in China."
Pangare, from the International Union for Conservation of Nature, echoed this theme, saying investment in "natural infrastructure" was the only way to protect people from the impacts of potential climate change-induced floods.
"Building concrete and walls to stop the floods is not the answer," he said.
"You have to invest in natural infrastructure -- forests, river basins, lakes, wetlands."
Alister Doyle PlanetArk 19 Aug 10;
Afghanistan and nations in sub-Saharan Africa are most at risk from shocks to food supplies such as droughts or floods while Nordic countries are least vulnerable, according to an index released on Thursday.
"Of 50 nations most at risk, 36 are located in Africa," said Fiona Place, an environmental analyst at British-based consultancy Maplecroft, which compiled the 163-nation food security risk index.
Maplecroft said that it hoped the index could help in directing food aid or to guide investments in food production.
Upheavals in 2010 include Russia's grain export ban from August 15 spurred by the country's worst drought in more than a century.
Afghanistan's food supplies were most precarious, based on factors such as rates of malnutrition, cereal production and imports, gross domestic product per capita, natural disasters, conflicts and the effectiveness of government.
It was followed by the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, Eritrea, Sudan, Ethiopia, Angola, Liberia, Chad and Zimbabwe, all of which suffer from poverty and risk ever more extreme weather because of climate change.
At the other end of the scale, the survey said that Finland had the most secure food supplies, followed by Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Canada and the United States.
Among nations with unreliable supplies, Pakistan -- which ranked 30th most at risk on the list -- is struggling with floods that have killed 1,600 people and badly damaged its agriculture-based economy.
"Pakistan and sub-Saharan Africa which are dependent on food imports are going to be all the more vulnerable," Alyson Warhurst, head of Maplecroft, told Reuters.
She said the Russian export ban would add pressure on China to supply more food to world markets at a time when its domestic wheat and meat consumption were rising.
Chicago Board of Trade wheat futures hit a 2-year in early August on worries about Russia's drought. Prices have since fallen more than 20 percent but are still well above levels before the surge.
(Editing by Maria Golovnina)
Randolph E. Schmid, Associated Press Yahoo Groups 20 Aug 10;
WASHINGTON – Plant growth that had been spurred by global warming has reversed, despite temperatures that continue to rise.
Researchers say the change could affect food security and development of biofuels.
The amount of carbon taken up by growing plants increased from 1982 through 1999 as temperatures rose and the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increased.
But a new study in Friday's edition of the journal Science found a drought-related decline in such plant growth from 2000 to 2009, even though temperatures continued to climb.
As drought caused by warming reduces the land's ability to take up carbon, the result could be more carbon dioxide left in the atmosphere, and thus more warming, Maosheng Zhao of the University of Montana explained in a telephone interview.
"This is a pretty serious warning that warmer temperatures are not going to endlessly improve plant growth," co-author Steven W. Running, also of the University of Montana, said in a statement.
"We see this as a bit of a surprise, and potentially significant on a policy level because previous interpretations suggested global warming might actually help plant growth around the world," he said.
Instead, he and Zhao found a small but measurable decline of about 1 percent, compared to a 6 percent increase in the 1980s and '90s.
Their study, based on data collected by NASA satellites, found that northerly areas continued to increase plant growth, thanks to warmer temperatures and a longer growing season.
But that was more than offset by warming-associated drought in the Southern Hemisphere.
"This past decade's net decline in terrestrial productivity illustrates that a complex interplay between temperature, rainfall, cloudiness, and carbon dioxide, probably in combination with other factors such as nutrients and land management, will determine future patterns and trends in productivity," commented Diane Wickland, program manager of the Terrestrial Ecology research program at NASA Headquarters in Washington.
The research was supported by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
World's Plants Growing Less Thanks to Warming, Drought
LiveScience.com Yahoo News 20 Aug 10;
The world's plants are growing less than they did in recent decades, thanks to the stress of droughts, a new study finds.
NASA satellites were used to measure global plant productivity over the last 10 years and found that growth was on the decline, after plants flourished under warming temperatures and a lengthened growing season in prior years.
The decrease was relatively minor - compared with a 6-percent increase spanning two earlier decades, the recent 10-year decline was just 1 percent - but it could impact food security, biofuels, and the global carbon cycle.
"We see this as a bit of a surprise, and potentially significant on a policy level because previous interpretations suggested that global warming might actually help plant growth around the world," said study researcher Steven Running, of the University of Montana in Missoula.
Conventional wisdom based on previous research held that land plant productivity was on the rise. A 2003 paper in Science led by then University of Montana scientist Ramakrishna Nemani (now at NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif.) showed that global terrestrial plant productivity increased by as much as 6 percent between 1982 and 1999. That's because for nearly two decades, temperature, solar radiation and water availability - influenced by climate change - were favorable for growth.
Setting out to update that analysis, Running and his UM colleague Maosheng Zhao expected to see similar results as global average temperatures have continued to climb. Instead, they found that the impact of regional drought overwhelmed the positive influence of a longer growing season, driving down global plant productivity between 2000 and 2009.
"This is a pretty serious warning that warmer temperatures are not going to endlessly improve plant growth," Running said.
The discovery comes from an analysis of plant productivity data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Terra satellite, combined with growing season climate variables, including temperature, solar radiation and water. The plant and climate data are factored into a formula that describes constraints on plant growth at different geographical locations.
For example, growth is generally limited in high latitudes by temperature and in deserts by water. But regional limitations can vary in their degree of impact on growth throughout the growing season.
Zhao and Running's analysis showed that since 2000, high-latitude Northern Hemisphere ecosystems have continued to benefit from warmer temperatures and a longer growing season. But that effect was offset by warming-associated drought that limited growth in the Southern Hemisphere, resulting in a net global loss of land productivity.
"This past decade's net decline in terrestrial productivity illustrates that a complex interplay between temperature, rainfall, cloudiness and carbon dioxide, probably in combination with other factors such as nutrients and land management, will determine future patterns and trends in productivity," said Diane Wickland, of NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., and manager of NASA's Terrestrial Ecology research program.
Researchers are keen on maintaining a record of the trends into the future. For one reason, plants act as a carbon dioxide "sink," and shifting plant productivity is linked to shifting levels of the greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. Also, stresses on plant growth could challenge food production.
"The potential that future warming would cause additional declines does not bode well for the ability of the biosphere to support multiple societal demands for agricultural production, fiber needs, and increasingly, biofuel production," Zhao said in a statement.
* Indonesia envoy urges solutions to climate impasse
* Fears little progress in key talks at year-end
* Worries about losing "allies" in Australia, Japan
David Fogarty, Reuters AlertNet 19 Aug 10;
SINGAPORE, Aug 19 (Reuters) - Nations face an uphill battle to reach agreement on a tougher climate pact by the end of 2011, a senior Indonesian climate change official said on Thursday, describing progress to date as bleak.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon expressed doubt last week that a major U.N. climate conference in Cancun, Mexico, at the end of the year will yield a pact that binds all major greenhouse gas emitting nations to 2020 reduction targets. [ID:nN09267588]
But Agus Purnomo, the Indonesian president's special adviser on climate change, said sealing a deal at talks scheduled for South Africa in late 2011 also looked like a real struggle.
"The progress to date is bleak because we still have no convergence on almost every important issue," Purnomo told Reuters in an interview from Jakarta.
"The developed countries are not coming to a decision of significant emissions reductions, so we don't know in Cancun whether we will be able to come up with a significant outcome."
He also voiced worries about Australia and the United States shelving plans to introduce emissions trading schemes and whether the new Japanese government would be able to convince parliament to pass laws enshrining a 25 percent cut in emissions by 2020 from 1990 levels.
A key concern, too, was the U.N. negotiation process itself, which has stalled over the size of emissions cuts pledged by rich nations, lack of progress on how to verify emissions reductions by poor nations and a general lack of trust.
The negotiations aim to reach agreement on the expansion or replacement of the existing Kyoto Protocol, whose first phase ends in 2012.
The process of reaching such an agreement involving 194 nations has been criticised as too cumbersome, open to manipulation and in need of reform.
It should be focusing on tougher emissions curbs by all big nations, including developing nations such as China, India and Brazil, green groups and negotiators say.
"DESPERATE SITUATION"
Kyoto commits about 40 industrialised nations to emissions targets between 2008-12 and governments and industry need an expanded treaty to set new reduction targets that would give businesses such as utilities certainly on investments.
"If we leave it to the domestic processes of the developed countries, it looks like we're not going to get an agreement. So we need to come up something more creative to solve this impasse," Purnomo said.
"We are in a rather desperate situation and we need solutions."
The last major talks in Copenhagen ended with a non-binding deal that agreed on limiting global warming to below 2 degrees Celsius and fast-start climate funding for poorer nations of $30 billion by 2012 and $100 billion every year from 2020.
Purnomo said there had been not much progress in handing out some of the $30 billion to poorer nations, a key benchmark of progress, negotiators say.
Indonesia, a major emitter through deforestation and fires, has pledged to cut emissions 26 percent from projected levels by 2020, increasing to 41 percent with funding from rich nations to clean up its industries and protect its forests.
Purnomo also worried about losing "climate allies".
Britain, Australia and Japan had been quite progressive, he said, in focusing on making emissions reductions in line with the U.N. climate panel's recommendations.
The panel recommends rich nations should cut emissions between 25 to 40 percent by 2020 from 1990 levels.
"Now they have changed leaders or at least Australia has an election this weekend. We're afraid that we'll lose champions of climate change among the developed countries because of their domestic political processes." (Editing by Nick Macfie)
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