An Intimate Millipede Moment
from Macro Photography in Singapore
Javan Myna confronts a monitor lizard
from Bird Ecology Study Group
Gobies of Singapore - a fabulous poster!
from wild shores of singapore
ButterflyCircle makes it to AsiaMag
from Butterflies of Singapore
The Star 4 Dec 10;
PORT KLANG: The Selangor Customs managed to foil attempts to smuggle sand worth RM144,000 into Singapore by intercepting two barges and a ship.
Both sand consignments were being transported by the same company.
The department scored its first success on Nov 30 and the second on Dec 2.
Selangor Customs director Datuk Roslan Yusof said the department’s marine unit had on Nov 30 intercepted a ship and a barge transporting sand along in the Sungai Langat waters near Jugra, Banting.
Roslan said the substance was declared as mortar mix, however, upon examination it was sand.
The state has banned the export of sand.
He said that mortar mix could be exported without restriction while silica required an approved permit beginning Nov 1.
Roslan said the sand seized that day was valued at RM72,000,
The ship’s captain and seven crew members were brought in for questioning and could be charged soon as the offence was not compoundable.
Subsequently, Roslan said on Dec 2 at a private jetty in Carey Island, Banting another barge was detained.
The barge was transporting sand but its manifest showed it was transporting mortar mix. It was valued at RM72,000.
Roslan said a man who had come to the department on Thursday claiming to be the owner of both sand shipments had been detained for further questioning.
More time needed for studies on impact of regional tremors
Christopher Tan Straits Times 4 Dec 10;
JUST how vulnerable buildings in Singapore will be to tremors from major earthquakes in the region is still being investigated.
Two studies commissioned two years ago, following the massive quakes that devastated nearby Sumatra in 2004, 2005 and 2007, have yet to be completed.
They were initially expected to be ready this year.
Among other things, the projects set out to determine whether Singapore's construction codes need to include provisions for tremors. This is a consideration that had never cropped up before because the island was long deemed quake-free.
One study is by the Building and Construction Authority (BCA), which commissioned Nanyang Technological University (NTU) to conduct an 'earthquake vulnerability' study.
The BCA told The Straits Times last month that the study will take 'at least another year' to complete.
The other study, also not completed, is by the Housing Board (HDB), which engaged the National University of Singapore (NUS) to develop 'cost-effective monitoring sensors' to be mounted on HDB blocks, said an HDB spokesman.
He said these sensors will enable the HDB to prioritise building inspections in the event of tremors, not to assess the vulnerability of buildings to tremors.
NUS researchers involved in the HDB study declined to talk about it, describing it as 'a very sensitive topic'.
One of them, Professor Koh Chan Ghee of NUS' Centre for Hazards Research, told The Straits Times two years ago that it is not uncommon for building codes to be revised, if necessary, given that a big earthquake is 'a low-probability but high-consequence event'.
Over at NTU, however, geologist Kerry Sieh, the director of the university's Earth Observatory of Singapore, predicts that a quake of 8.8 magnitude will hit north of Padang in Sumatra within the next few decades.
Such a quake, considered a 'great' quake, can affect buildings several hundred kilometres away. Singapore lies about 450km from the predicted zone.
Professor Sieh's colleague, Assistant Professor Kusnowidjaja Megawati, said a real worry for Singapore is for buildings which stand on marine clay and some reclaimed land. These soil types tend to amplify low-frequency vibrations from quakes hundreds of kilometres away.
These soft soils make up about a quarter of Singapore's land mass, mostly in the south-east, like in Kallang.
Prof Megawati explained that geologists use a measure called centimetre per second squared (cm/ss) to indicate the degree of 'shaking' felt on the ground.
Recent simulations have shown that an 8.8-magnitude quake in Sumatra will create 'ground acceleration' of plus-minus 10cm/ss in Bukit Timah - an area with underlying hard rock - and plus-minus 30 to 40cm/ss in Kallang, he said.
In the 8.4-magnitude Sumatran quake in 2007 - the most severe quake felt here in recent times - the ground acceleration was less than 1 cm/ss in Bukit Timah and 3cm/ss in Kallang, he noted.
Even at that level, buildings as far inland as Toa Payoh and Little India shook, so if Prof Megawati is right and 'the next big one' happens, the effects felt here could be 10 times that.
But the experts do not all agree on the extent of Singapore's risk exposure to quakes and how it should respond to them.
Professor Pan Tso-Chien, the dean of NTU's School of Engineering, for instance, believes Singapore should not rush to change its building codes to guard against earthquake damage.
He said: 'It's a major issue in addressing a code change. It's not only a question of science or technology any more, but economics and costs as well.'
Arguing against jumping into a code change, he said: 'Are our current codes enough protection? Will we be over-providing? Are you going to make it so safe that it's safer than crossing a street? You have other competing needs for your resources - like terrorism, road accidents and defence.'
Prof Pan, who is also director of the Institute of Catastrophe Risk Management, a research body co-funded by the Monetary Authority of Singapore, said the issue may well resolve itself over time, as buildings 'are always getting stronger because of better materials, better engineering, better accuracy in design'.
At best, he said, resources should go into strengthening buildings gradually over time, systemically, so 'there's no need to rush or worry'.
Asked about the 'next big one', Prof Pan said: 'Personally, I'm not in favour of earthquake predictions because it's very difficult - you have to involve not only a place, but also time. It's too much consequence for one to be correct or incorrect.'
He also pointed out that the majority of deaths from earthquakes have been in rural areas, not urban high-rise ones.
Meanwhile, the insurance industry has not decided to start charging for earthquake coverage, even after having mulled over it in the past few years.
General Insurance Association president Derek Teo said 'exposures are still within a tolerable range'.
He added: 'Nevertheless, tremors here will be monitored on frequency and severity before a rate charge is considered.'
Yahoo News 3 Dec 10;
HANOI, Vietnam – A local conservation group voiced opposition Friday to the planned sale of tiger paste by Vietnamese authorities, amid warnings by the international community that the animal's survival is in serious jeopardy.
Officials in Vietnam's northern Thanh Hoa province agreed last month to organize a public auction of 6 pounds (2.8 kilograms) of tiger paste seized from traffickers. An auction date has not been set.
Vietnam bans the hunting or trade of wild animals and their products, but the Ministry of Agriculture has issued a directive allowing its use in making medicines.
In Vietnam, tiger bones are used to make expensive traditional medicines purported to cure many illnesses. Two pounds (1 kilogram) of tiger paste could be sold for $10,000 on the black market.
Nguyen Thi Phuong Dung, deputy director of Hanoi-based Education for Nature Vietnam, said Thanh Hoa authorities had used a "loophole" in the law to allow the sale of the tiger paste.
"The auctions go against conservation efforts," she told The Associated Press in a phone interview, adding the move has "helped legitimize the trade of the animal."
"We had recommended that the paste be destroyed to send a clear message to the public that the authorities do not encourage the consumption of wild animals' products," she said.
Wildlife experts warned at a summit last month in St. Petersburg, Russia, that wild tigers could become extinct in 12 years if countries where they still roam fail to take quick action to protect their habitats and step up the fight against poaching.
The World Wildlife Fund and other experts say only about 3,200 tigers remain in the wild — a dramatic plunge from an estimated 100,000 a century ago.
The summit approved a wide-ranging program with the goal of doubling the world's tiger population in the wild by 2022. The program is backed by the governments of the 13 countries that still have tiger populations, including Vietnam.
Several people have been arrested in the last few months in the communist country for their involvement in the trade of wild tigers.
Gently does it: seahorses take a bath in their new home
Kelsey Munro Sydney Morning Herald 4 Dec 10;
HOW things have changed. Veteran scuba diver Dave Thomas remembers when Sydney Harbour was toxic from factory waste pumped into the Parramatta River.
These days, environmental attitudes have changed so much that he and his team were asked to move a delicate colony of seahorses out of harm's way while Woollahra Council rebuilt the century-old Watson's Bay baths this year.
The baths, which will reopen on Friday, have long provided a habitat for a small colony of White's seahorses.
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''Their natural home is seagrass, not swimming pool nets, but they prefer them because it gets them off the ground and away from predators,'' Mr Thomas said. ''And they can't chase things down, so they rely on food coming to them. They love hanging in the nets while things go past.''
Mr Thomas and divers from his volunteer group, Eco Divers, made about six dives to move the seahorses from the baths, working just ahead of the crews who were demolishing the old wharf.
''We hand-picked the seahorses off the nets or seaweed,'' Mr Thomas said. ''They hold on by their tail, so you have to hold their shoulders, you have to be very gentle. After a while they relax and you can move them.
''We carry a little mesh bag - the sort you put in a washing machine for your delicates, that's ideal - and then we just move them out of the area and put them on seagrasses on the same depth contour.''
The mayor of Woollahra, Isabelle Shapiro, said the council consulted with NSW Fisheries on how to minimise environmental disturbances during demolition and construction.
"Council was very careful in ensuring all consideration was taken to protect the marine life when designing the Watsons Bay baths renovations,'' she said.
The divers have previously moved a seahorse colony at Clifton Gardens and other vulnerable species in the harbour. The group is part of a project, with Sydney Aquarium, to release White's seahorses bred in captivity into the harbour to help boost their numbers.
The seahorses, endemic to Sydney and the NSW coast up to Port Stephens, typically grow to an uncurled length of about 20 centimetres and are a protected species.
Mr Thomas said their habitats had been greatly depleted through the loss of harbour seagrasses, but the 2006 ban on commercial trawling had improved matters.
With heavy construction finished, Mr Thomas said the seahorses were beginning to gravitate back to the new nets around the baths, which were designed with them in mind.
The council spent more than $2 million upgrading the baths, which were opened to the public in 1905.
The work includes a new 50-metre lap pool with two sunbathing pontoons, a water ramp for wheelchair users - which the council says is an Australian first - and new shark nets.
We must consider setting an explicit time frame for protecting forests and halting their rapid degradation
Jane Goodall guardian.co.uk 3 Dec 10;
The rate at which species are disappearing from Planet Earth is horrifying. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the rate is between 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than the natural rate of extinction. This is largely due to human activity. The United Nations declared 2010 the International Year of Biodiversity to raise awareness of the critical role that biological diversity plays in sustaining life.
At the same time, nations are grappling with thorny questions of how to slow climate change. The UN is currently convening its 16th climate change conference in Cancún, Mexico, where bold steps may be taken to protect forests as a means of lowering carbon emissions.
Ape conservation tackles both of these issues head on. Apes live primarily in the tropical forests of Africa and Asia. Destruction of these forests largely responsible for the fact that all species of great apes are endangered. Even the illegal commercial hunting of great apes and other animals for food – known as the bushmeat trade – would not be nearly as widespread if not for the logging and mining roads that are cut through forests, allowing access to previously remote habitat of gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans.
However, to protect the forest we must do more than curb habitat destruction, for not only do apes need forest habitat to survive, but they, in turn, play an important role in the survival of the forests. In fact, biodiversity – the whole complex mix of animal and plant species in a forest ecosystem – must be preserved if we are to ensure the health and long-term survival of the forest itself because the countless life forms found there are interdependent in ways we do not yet fully understand.
We do know that, when the balance is upset, things tend to go wrong. For example, there are fewer seedlings in forests where there has been a lot of hunting, especially where primate numbers have been greatly reduced. In Africa and southeast Asia, the great apes – along with many other mammals and birds – play a critical role in dispersing seeds. It is clear, then, that we must prevent or at least reduce threats such as the bushmeat trade and indeed the number of wild animals consumed per se.
But how do we do this in areas where so many people are living in poverty, turning to the bounty of the forests for their very survival?
I began my work in Africa 50 years ago, studying the chimpanzees of Gombe National Park in Tanzania. Back then chimpanzee habitat extended far beyond the boundaries of the park. But by the early 1990s the trees outside the park had almost entirely disappeared.
When I flew over the whole area in a small plane, it was obvious that there were more people living in the villages around the park than the land could support – the result not only of typical population growth but also an influx of refugees from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Burundi. These people, economically very poor, were struggling to survive and cutting down the last of their forests in desperate efforts to grow crops to feed their families or earn a livelihood through charcoal production. The land had been over-farmed, the soil was losing its fertility, and there was widespread soil erosion. Could we protect the chimpanzees if we helped the people?
And so 16 years ago, we – the Jane Goodall Institute – started TACARE, a community-based conservation programme. We have found that an integrated approach to poverty alleviation is what works. We introduced better ways to grow the food the local people wanted, micro-credit programmes especially for women, sustainable use of water, better health facilities, and environmental education programmes to provide information about the forest and its inhabitants.
It was difficult at first to gain the co-operation of the people, but over the years we succeeded by working with them and respecting their needs and priorities. Today these people have become better stewards of the land and, as part of the participatory village land-use planning process, set aside village forest reserves that will help restore not only their own environment, but also the habitat of the chimpanzees – the forest and woodlands.
At the climate change conference in Bali in December 2007, world attention was focused on a new idea: Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation or "Redd". Since then, "Redd+" has evolved to recognise the importance of poverty alleviation, sustainable forest management, especially by local communities, and the conservation of species, as well as forest protection for carbon sequestration.
We must now capitalise on the Redd+ efforts of the past year and take the call to end deforestation to the next level. We must make sure that Redd+ projects are located in biodiversity-rich areas where keystone species such as great apes are struggling to survive. We must consider setting an explicit time frame for protecting forests and halting their rapid degradation. We must protect the rights of forest-dependent communities who are most directly impacted by deforestation and who at the same time can play a pivotal role in their protection. We need national strategies to be developed that allow full and effective participation by all stakeholders, including local communities. And, while focusing on forests most at risk now, it is important to establish a separate mechanism for protecting forests that are not yet significantly threatened.
Finally, let us acknowledge that forests are important in their own right – for me the most magical places on Earth.
• Dr Jane Goodall, DBE is founder of the Jane Goodall Institute and a UN messenger of peace. She will be appearing at the Hope 4 Apes event on Monday 6 December
Kerry Sheridan Yahoo News 3 Dec 10;
WASHINGTON (AFP) – Crippled by drought, scorched by wildfires and dying from beetle infestations, forests in the American west are struggling and in some states they now exude more carbon than they absorb, experts say.
In an attempt to uncover what the future holds for these ancient pine forests, scientists are studying how trees recover and regrow, and what forest managers can do to help them respond to the modern stresses of climate change.
"These systems are changing, kind of underneath us. It is slower than the nightly news cycle, that is for sure, but it is changing. And so we have to keep changing our management approach," said David Cleaves, the top climate change adviser at the US Forest Service.
America's forests, the fourth largest in the world, have served as an important net carbon sink for much of the past century, absorbing more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through photosynthesis than they exude through decomposition and timber harvesting.
The carbon sink amounts to 162 teragrams of carbon per year and offsets about 10 percent of total US fossil fuel emissions, according to the US Forest Service.
But US forestlands were a major source of carbon from about 1800 until 1930, when pioneers cleared vast areas of land for settlement and timber was widely used for fuel and mass construction projects.
Some of the most iconic forests in the Interior West region -- home to towering pines, the soaring snow-topped Rocky Mountains and vast national parklands like Yellowstone -- have been hit hard in recent years by unusually dry seasons, melting ice packs, and plagues of fires and insects.
Two of those states, Arizona and Idaho, have flipped to become carbon sources rather than sinks, according to data released in April by the Environmental Protection Agency, averaging annual changes over time.
Another study in 2007, published in the journal Forest Ecology and Management, suggested Colorado and Wyoming were showing similar signs.
"The intermountain west is clearly an area of the most concern because of fire, mountain pine beetle and drought," said Richard Birdsey who heads the Climate, Fire, and Carbon Cycle Sciences project at the Forest Service.
"They have been hit by three of the main factors all around the same time. So they are under a lot of stress," he said, adding that beetles have damaged ten of millions of acres and killed many trees.
"All those dead trees are still standing. They haven't released all of their carbon yet. They take two to three decades."
A 2009 study led by the US Geological Survey suggested that the death rate in Western forests has doubled, and that forests would become sparser in the future, and be able to store less carbon.
In some cases, forest managers can help a struggling forest by thinning trees, allowing more light and water for those that remain and eliminating some stresses that can help tree-killing beetles gain the upper hand.
In other cases, Mother Nature may know best how to resprout after a fire.
Researcher Erica Smithwick has been studying the resiliency of the lodgepole pines, the thin tall trees that are the most common in Yellowstone, and which reproduce via cones that only release seeds in conditions of extreme heat.
That innate ability to regrow under harsh conditions has helped some areas bounce back from the 1988 fires that scorched 793,000 acres at Yellowstone, or more than one third of the parkland. But other areas have recovered more slowly.
Historically, most area ecosystems have been able to recover their carbon in 75-100 years, she said. But if fires occur more frequently, that could shift the landscape.
"If we expect to see fire return intervals that are much shorter, then we need to think about how we want to manage for that and look ahead to what that means for the ecosystems of this landscape," she said.
According to Mike Ryan at the Forest Service's Rocky Mountain Research Station in Colorado, it is crucial to make sure new trees can grow.
"From a carbon standpoint the best thing that a manager can do is make sure you get regeneration," said Ryan.
The US Forest Service downplayed the sink-to-source trend, saying that areas can flip back and forth over short periods but the trend is unlikely to force American forests on the whole to be net oozers of carbon in the near future.
"Our history is relatively short compared to the history of the forest so it is hard to tell," said Ryan.
"If our future holds that we are going to have more disturbances, then our forests are going to hold less carbon."
Fanny Carrier Yahoo News 3 Dec 10;
NICOSIA (AFP) – Israeli firefighters are battling a deadly forest fire as unseasonably warm weather blankets a tinder dry Middle East, and some countries are even organising prayers for rain.
Thousands of Israeli firemen and rescuers fought to put out the fire on the second day running, as international help poured in to battle the country's worst ever inferno that has killed at least 41 people.
The blaze, driven by high winds, was threatening the northern port of Haifa a day after it incinerated more than 10,000 acres (over 4,000 hectares) of land in the Carmel mountains.
Israel's Meteorological Service said temperatures would remain hot and dry well into the evening. In Haifa, the mercury was at 31 degrees Celsius (87 Fahrenheit) for the second day.
Drought has plagued Israel and the Palestinian territories for several weeks and rainfall over the past five years has been under average levels.
A mere 7 millimetres (0.27 inches) of rain fell on Jerusalem in November, compared to an average of 60 mm in the past few years.
Parched conditions in the Holy Land have prompted Christians, Jews and Muslims to join ranks to pray for divine intervention.
In the desert kingdom of Jordan, residents gathered on Thursday to recite the special prayer known as Salat al-Istisqa -- a ritual practised since the time of the Muslim Prophet Mohammed.
The ministry of religious affairs encouraged the special prayers across the kingdom -- one of the 10 most water-impoverished countries in the world.
The ministry even asked people to fast for three days ahead of Thursday prayers, and step up devotion and charity work.
Jordan, where 92 percent of the land is desert, depends mainly on rain to meet its needs.
But five successive years of below-average rainfall has created a shortfall of 500 million cubic metres (17.7 billion cubic feet) a year -- nearly a third of its water needs, according to the water ministry.
Lebanon too is suffering from drought, with only 51.2 millimetres (2.05 inches) of rain since September, drastically down from 214.8 millimetres during the same period last year, the meteorology bureau says.
The last rainfall in Lebanon was more than a month ago, leading to a severe water shortage that has forced citizens to purchase water on a daily basis.
Muslim religious leaders are also banking on divine intervention and have called on the Lebanese to pray on Friday for rain -- in a country blessed with abundant water resources that are the envy of its neighbours.
A group of young people planned on gathering in a central district of Beirut on Friday to perform a traditional rain dance; other Lebanese chose another day at the beach.
"The delayed rainfall is threatening some of our major springs, in which water is becoming increasingly scarce," said Fouad Hashweh, dean of the Faculty of Science at the Lebanese American University.
The agriculture ministry said wheat crops were at risk. "And one of our biggest concerns is that recurrent drought year after year... can lead to desertification," said the Lebanese ministry's director general, Ali Yassin.
The eastern Mediterranean island of Cyprus too is basking in unusually warm daytime temperatures for December of around 28 degrees Celsius while rainfall in November had been virtually zero.
November saw inland and coastal temperatures between five and seven degrees above normal while at higher altitudes they were up to 10 degrees higher, officials said.
"What concerns us is that the days with high temperatures are continuous," Marios Theofilou of the meteorology service told the Cyprus Mail.
A report by the European Environment Agency has predicted longer-lasting droughts that will eventually lead to the desertification of Cyprus.
Across the sea in Syria, the authorities adopted as far back as June emergency measures for the drought-hit northeast of the country.
David Fogarty Reuters 3 Dec 10;
SEMPIT, Indonesia (Reuters) - Deep in the flooded jungles of southern Borneo, muddy peat oozes underfoot like jello, threatening to consume anyone who tries to walk even a few yards into the thick, steaming forest.
Hard to imagine this brown, gooey stuff could become a new global currency worth billions a year, much less an important tool in the fight against climate change.
Yet this is a new frontier for business, says Bali-based consultant Rezal Kusumaatmadja, and a new way to pay for conservation efforts in a world facing ever more pressure on the land to grow food and extract timber, coal and other resources.
He and his fellow Indonesian business partner Dharsono Hartono are trying to preserve and replant a peat swamp forest three times the size of Singapore in Central Kalimantan province in Indonesia's part of Borneo. And in the process, draw in local communities by boosting livelihoods and curb encroachment
They are at the vanguard of a global effort to slow climate change by trying to create a new market that puts a value on preserving forests, or avoiding deforestation.
The effort brings together a diverse cast of characters: environmental entrepreneurs such as Kusumaatmadja and Hartono; investment bankers trying to create a carbon market; companies seeking to buy carbon credits in that market; activists trying to ensure some of that money flows to rainforest communities; and bureaucrats whose task will be to somehow monitor and enforce the ambitious scheme, and not divert the proceeds into their pockets.
Rainforest preservation has become central to U.N. talks on a tougher climate pact and is a focus of a major climate conference in Cancun, Mexico, that began on November 29.
The key is carbon. Forests, and particularly deep peat forests in the tropics, soak up and lock away lots of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, acting like giant filters for the atmosphere. Cut down the forests and drain the peat, and they can release even more. Deforestation and burning account for more than half Indonesia's greenhouse gas emissions, making it leading carbon polluter.
How, then, to put a price on that carbon and trade it?
That's the puzzle and the lure for many investors who want to capture the benefits forests bring, from locking away carbon, to being watersheds for rivers and storehouses of countless species.
"You can't solve the climate change issue unless you simultaneously tackle deforestation," said Abyd Karmali, global head of carbon markets for Bank of America Merrill Lynch. That means preserving what's left and driving investment in rainforests in Brazil, Democratic Republic of Congo and Indonesia, which have the three largest areas of remaining tropical forests.
But the plan pits powerful business interests in the palm oil, logging and mining sectors against public and private sector efforts to support greater forest protection and potential carbon credit payment systems. It also means reforming powerful bureaucracies and weeding out entrenched corruption, strengthening land ownership and land use rules, improving monitoring and law enforcement and enshrining the rights of local forest communities.
PEAT PRESERVATION
In some countries, including Indonesia, the reform process is under way, and daunting though the challenges may be, rich nations such as Norway have already pledged in total about $4 billion for pilot programs to drive such reforms.
Studies such as the 2006 Stern Review, and investors such as George Soros, say saving forests is a cheap way to buy mankind a little more time in the switch to less polluting economies.
The scale of the challenge -- and the potential benefits -- is vast.
Borneo, the world's third largest island, has lost half its forest cover in a matter of decades. Every year, peat swamp forests and soil storing up to 1 billion tons of CO2 are destroyed in Indonesia. U.N. data shows the annual rate of deforestation in Indonesia is about 700,000 ha a year, less than half the level from the 1990s, but still 10 times the size of Singapore.
To give a sense of scale, 12 percent of Indonesia's land area is peatland. Yet this area is a repository for more than 40 billion tons of carbon (more than 100 billion tons of CO2 if released), according to Dutch research institute Deltares.
This is more than twice mankind's annual -- and growing --greenhouse gas emissions. It highlights the threat posed by clearing peat swamp forests, and why Indonesia has become a key player in the efforts to revalue forests in poorer nations.
"Carbon credits from forestry is a new way to finance conservation efforts, such as restoration, or preservation," Kusumaatmadja told Reuters in the trading town of Sampit in Central Kalimantan during a recent trip to the 227,000 ha (570,000 acre) peat forest conservation project in Katingan regency (county).
"You also need to work with communities to build up livelihoods so they don't encroach," he said.
Ultimately, the battle will come down to forests being worth more standing than cleared for a plantation -- and then getting buy-in from local communities.
"What you need to have is proof of concept," says Kusumaatmadja, 40, the son of a former Indonesian environment minister and who trained as an urban and regional planner in the United States. "This means we deliver the emissions reductions and get compensated. Then we can start talking about the competing values for the land. Because right now there is no value. It's a frontier. It's like people take a leap of faith that this is actually making money."
Land tenure and the new science of carbon accounting, are additional challenges, he said, pointing to the need to have clear legal title to the carbon stocks in a forest and a legally enforceable process to resolve conflicts over land use.
Getting the carbon measurements right also will be crucial if investors are to trust a project's CO2 reductions.
READY FOR REDD?
At a point marked "D206" inside the Katingan forest, Kusumaatmadja, his team and this reporter gingerly make our way to a sampling site under several feet of water.
The site is to be one of about 400 planned across the Katingan project, with the aim of taking regular samples of peat depth, the amount of carbon stock above ground, such as trees, and the depth of the water that helps preserve the peat. The muddy, tiring work in mosquito-infested waters has shown the peat depth to be from one meter to about 12 meters across the project, shaped like an oval and 120 km (70 miles) end to end.
More than one billion of tons of carbon could be sitting underground, the result of millennia of carbon accumulation by the forest. But this could be undone in a matter of decades by clearing and draining the tea-colored swamps and burning the peat.
The resulting forest fires, blamed on oil palm plantation companies and local slash-and-burn agricultural practices, create a choking haze that regularly blights great swathes of Southeast Asia, much to the irritation of Indonesia's neighbors.
The Katingan project could generate about 100 million carbon credits over 30 years, depending on final carbon stock measurements. That's the same as 100 million tons of CO2 being locked away because the forest has been protected from being cleared, dry-season fires prevented and logged areas replanted.
Crucially, a portion of any credit sales would flow to local communities and central government coffers.
But to maximize the benefits, investors need a market.
"We cannot be sustainable in five years without a market for the credits," Kusumaatmadja's business partner Hartono, 36, told Reuters in Jakarta. "We're fighting a losing battle if there's no transaction," said the U.S.-trained former investment banker for J.P. Morgan, who runs private firm PT RMU. More than $2 million had already been invested in the project, he added, with another $4.5 million to be paid up front when the central government issues a special license.
Underpinning hopes for that new market is a U.N.-backed scheme called REDD, or reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation.
The idea is to reward developing nations that preserve their forests, boost the carbon stock, and have sustainable forestry management. Kusumaatmadja and Hartono's project is one of nearly 40 early REDD prototypes, the Indonesian government says.
Those rewards would ultimately take the form of an annual sale of forest carbon credits to rich nations to help them meet part of their mandatory emissions reduction targets in market that could be worth $30 billion a year, the U.N. REDD program estimates.
That's the theory.
Two years ago it seemed to be falling into place with the United States and Australia proposing domestic emissions trading schemes that would have allowed companies to use large amounts of offsets from overseas. Legislation to enact those schemes foundered in both countries, however.
Only Europe and New Zealand currently have emissions trading schemes, but the EU bars use of REDD credits and it is unclear if it will allow them to be used in the third phase of its trading scheme from 2013.
U.N. talks are far from sealing a broader climate pact to expand or replace the existing Kyoto Protocol from 2013 , in which REDD would be a central part, casting yet more uncertainty over the plan.
That leaves the newly passed California emissions trading scheme and a planned bilateral carbon offset program by Japan as the only real potential buyers at the moment.
The lack of major demand for credits comes as an irony, since over the past two years, governments and institutions, including the World Bank, have stepped in to finance pilot REDD projects in developing countries in Asia, South America and Africa.
The voluntary carbon market has also developed rigorous standards for projects to ensure the carbon reductions are real, measurable and verifiable to give investors confidence.
Yet the voluntary market remains miniscule. It shrank 47 percent in 2009 to $387 million, compared with the EU's 100 billion euro ($134 billion) emissions trading scheme. Only a fraction of the voluntary market volume covered trade in avoided deforestation offsets.
WHERE'S THE DEMAND?
"Two years ago, mainstream investors didn't want to get involved in projects that appeared to be run by cowboys with ridiculous return expectations," said Chris Knight, assistant director of PricewaterhouseCoopers' climate change, forestry and ecosystems advisory.
Now, because of much improved standards, investors are less concerned about the risk at the project level, he told Reuters last month by telephone during a REDD conference in Malaysia.
Instead, investors are looking for more certainty over demand for the carbon credits, said London-based Knight, who is working on ways to draw in private-sector financing until there are stronger REDD policies in place in developing countries.
Some banks, such as Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Australia's Macquarie, have invested in projects or bought credits once projects pass a tough auditing process. Macquarie, in a 2009 report, estimated the potential emissions reductions from reducing deforestation at two billion tons of CO2 by 2030 and 1.3 billion tons for reforestation.
Karmali of Bank of America Merrill Lynch signed an agreement in early 2008 to buy carbon credits from a 750,000 ha project in Indonesia's Aceh province that aims to cut deforestation in the Ulu Masen forest area by 85 percent.
A deal with the government of Aceh in northern Sumatra and Singapore-based firm Carbon Conservation aims to reduce 100 million tons of emissions over 30 years and boost local livelihoods to prevent logging.
The credits, though, are still some way off, with the project still to complete the carbon auditing process by the respected Voluntary Carbon Standard based in Washington. But the project has already been approved by the equally respected Climate, Community and Biodiversity Alliance standard.
Karmali said it was essential to reward early action by REDD investors. It was also essential for the public sector to leverage private capital to drive investments in the forestry sector that would ultimately prove to be a cheap way of cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
"The other thing you could do is you could have a purchaser of credits of last resort," he told Reuters from London. This was an idea raised in the 2008 Eliasch Review for the British government. That report estimated that doing nothing to halt deforestation could lead to climate change costs to the global economy of $1 trillion a year by 2100.
Karmali pointed to the need to have some sort of global public sector fund that could buy up emissions reductions.
"If such a mechanism were deployed, it would be de-risking private capital," he said.
A BRIDGE TO FINANCE
For project developers, time is running out. East of PT RMU's Katingan project in Central Kalimantan, Hong Kong-based Infinite Earth is hoping its Rimba Raya project will be the first REDD investment to be fully validated by the Voluntary Carbon Standard by the end of this year, subject to the Indonesian government granting it a special license.
The nearly 100,000 ha project on the edge of a national park has forward-sold enough credits to cover operations for the next five years, but at a substantial discount to the 5 to 7 euros per carbon credit mentioned by brokers.
"Appetite for Rimba Raya credits has been good but definitely we need a compliance (emissions trading) market to support the prices REDD needs in order to be competitive with alternate land uses, such as palm oil," Infinite Earth CEO Todd Lemons told Reuters.
Knight of PwC said some sort of bridging financing or guarantee mechanism was crucial for investors until a global market evolved. "Unless you provide some sort of bridging finance before there's regulatory certainty then the risks are just too high for the private sector," Knight said.
One possibility was to ramp up the use of environment funds to help disburse some of the billions of dollars pledged by rich nations for REDD. These are often endowment funds and therefore independent of governments. Another was revolving funds, in which a portion of any REDD credit proceeds are returned to the fund to keep it running.
In the interim, large amounts of public money from governments, foundations and conservation groups are vital.
Earlier this year, dozens of nations teamed up to create an interim REDD partnership to guide spending of about $4 billion in pledged funding, build institutions and develop pilot projects between 2010 and 2012. To date, more than 70 nations have signed up.
Billionaire investor George Soros has also stepped in.
In a letter to U.S. President Barack Obama on Aug 21 this year following a trip to Indonesia, Soros said $10 billion a year would be sufficient to put a price on avoiding and reversing carbon emissions from rainforests.
He proposed a 5 percent surcharge on airline tickets, about 40 percent of which would go to the collecting countries and the rest to setting up a global forest fund.
Soros said he was willing to take on "exceptional first-of-a-kind risk" to send a positive signal to other private investors, but only under conditions that could bring in the required scale of private capital.
"These conditions would be tailored to the individual projects, but it is estimated that the cost would be less than $5 a ton of CO2 for a limited number of years for carbon savings that would extend over many more years," he said in the letter obtained by Reuters.
THE $1 BILLION CARROT
Earlier this year, Norway and Indonesia signed a climate deal worth up to $1 billion over the next five to six years, aimed at reforming Indonesia's notorious bureaucracy and funding pilot forest and peatland projects that cut carbon emissions.
Norway would pay for emissions reductions from projects that were measurable and verifiable, but believes a market-based system that trades forest carbon credits is some way off.
Under the Norway deal, Indonesia would impose a two-year moratorium on new licenses to cut down primary forests and clear peatlands, and set out clearer definitions of forest and degraded lands to prevent loopholes that could be exploited by companies.
The Indonesian government has created a special REDD task force, and appointed veteran technocrat Kuntoro Mangkusubroto to make the Norway deal a success. But some groups, including Greenpeace, while welcoming the deal, feel the reform process is being rushed and that a market isn't necessary at present.
"We see Indonesia and countries in that position of needing to spend a lot more time on building their technical capacity, their institution frameworks," said Paul Winn, Sydney-based forest and climate campaigner for Greenpeace.
Mangkusubroto, respected for his role in managing a multi-billion dollar reconstruction agency for Aceh province after the 2004 tsunami, relishes the chance to reform the bureaucracy. "It'll be excellent for Indonesia," he said with a smile during a recent interview in his office in the presidential compound in Jakarta.
The country needed to overhaul its land licensing process, refine its land maps, create a central agency to manage REDD projects and a system to accurately measure the nation's carbon emissions and any reductions, he said.
But he voiced fears about corruption.
"The poor people are easy to buy," he said, pointing to the power of big corporations. He also said there would be "leakage" at the local official level if the money from REDD credit sales flowed through regional governments via budgets.
"How do you structure a mechanism so that the money flows to the people? That's why we have to have pilot projects to monitor the flow of money. We haven't had that experience before," he said.
SHARING THE BENEFITS
Resolving land use and ownership conflicts is also key to Indonesia and other developing nations pushing ahead with REDD. Investors ultimately want to know who owns the carbon stock.
"Some conflicts are legitimate, some are not legitimate. Some are colored by bribery, some are genuine problems of lack of legal system coherence in our regulations," said Agus Purnomo, the Indonesian president's special climate change envoy.
The key was creating a dispute resolution mechanism that was legally robust, he said during an interview in his black Toyota Prius during a drive through central Jakarta.
Fair sharing of the benefits of REDD credits was also crucial to avoid disputes and encourage investors.
"The real elephant in the room is benefit-sharing mechanisms," said Stewart Maginnis of the International Union for Conservation of Nature. "You've got countries moving ahead putting in place procedures," to build up REDD, he said from Gland, Switzerland, after just returning from a grassroots meeting on REDD in Cambodia.
"There hasn't really been a (look) at how the money will flow from the capital city down to where the REDD initiatives are taking place, and then critically also, how it will flow horizontally within that locality. Who benefits?" he asked.
Rural communities' dependency on forests was also something that governments and donors were underestimating, Maginnis, director of the IUCN's environment and development group, said.
In the village of Mentanya Seberang on the riverbank opposite Sampit in Central Kalimantan, residents supported the nearby Katingan project but they also need long-term incomes from cash crops such as rubber, rattan and tree sap used in chewing gum.
"We support rubber planting and also rattan so that our forest won't be finished. If you talk about palm oil, that means the forest will be cut down," said Murniah, 40.
Kusumaatmadja and Hartono have spent the past two years working with an Indonesian NGO to discuss villagers' needs and potential livelihood benefits.
Deep inside the project, the needs are palpable. It doesn't take long to hear the sounds of chain saws from small teams illegally cutting trees into planks.
Some of the loggers are locals trying to earn a little extra cash, and local businessmen keen to supply timber for construction are only too happy to offer them work.
Mastranhani, 50, took up illicit logging to pay debts because an unusually wet year meant he couldn't grow enough rice to feed his seven children. The $100 or so each month he gets from logging is just enough for his family.
For other illegal loggers that Reuters met, the story was the same. Kusumaatmadja said finding employing and alternative livelihoods was crucial for the project to succeed.
So, too, is long-term demand for credits.
"Long-term stable demand is what's needed to make REDD viable and for that we need REDD to be included in the European carbon trading scheme, as well as Japan and ideally in the United States," said Lemons of Infinite Earth.
Until that happens, most fund managers would sit on the sidelines, he added.
Karmali said he was willing to wait. "These are all the niches of demand that could yet come," he said, referring to Japan and Australia. "That's why that we're still very committed to making sure the early projects that we're involved in, including Ulu Masen, continue to succeed, even if it does take a bit longer. Everyone has to just recognize this is going to be a marathon and not a sprint." (Additional reporting by Lewa Pardomuan; Editing by Bill Tarrant)
Richard Ingham Yahoo News 3 Dec 10;
CANCUN, Mexico (AFP) – By 2030, climate change will indirectly cause nearly one million deaths a year and inflict 157 billion dollars in damage, according to estimates presented at UN talks on Friday.
The biggest misery will be heaped on more than 50 of the world's poorest countries, but the United States will pay the highest economic bill, it said.
"In less than 20 years, almost all countries in the world will realise high vulnerability to climate impact as the planet heats up," the report warned.
The study, compiled by a humanitarian research organisation and climate-vulnerable countries, assessed how 184 nations will be affected in four areas: health, weather disasters, the loss of human habitat through desertification and rising seas, and economic stress.
Those facing "acute" exposure are 54 poor or very poor countries, including India. They will suffer disproportionately to others, although they are least to blame for the man-made greenhouse gases that drive climate change, it said.
"Without corrective actions" a press release accompanying the study said, the world is "headed for nearly one million deaths every single year by 2030."
More than half of the 157 billion dollars in economic losses, calculated in terms of today's economy, will take place in industrialised countries, led by the United States, Japan and Germany.
But the cost to their GDP will proportionately be far lower than for poor countries.
The peer-reviewed report was issued by DARA, a Madrid-based NGO, and by the Climate Vulnerable Forum, a coalition of island nations and other countries that are most exposed to climate change.
Saleemul Huq, a researcher at a London-based thinktank, the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), said the findings spelled out the need to start shoring up defenses against climate change now, rather than later.
"We are now entering into a highly vulnerable phase of our planet's existence and humanity's existence," Huq told a press conference.
"No amount of (greenhouse-gas) mitigation will prevent at least another 0.7 degree (Celsius, 1.26 degrees Fahrenheit) of temperature rise over the next two decades," he said.
"In the last century we have already seen a 0.7 degree (1.26 F) rise. So we are headed for 1.4 (2.5 F) almost certainly.
"If emissions carry on their current pathway then we may in the longer term be headed for three or four degrees (5.4-7.2 F), which is practically impossible for everybody to adapt to.
"But at the lower level, we can do a lot by adapting to the impacts of climate change, to prepare for them."
The November 29-December 10 talks in Cancun gather the 194 parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), tasked with crafting a deal to roll back global warming and its impacts after 2010.
Among the long list of problems they face is how to muster funds to tackle climate change -- and decide how much of the money should be allocated for adapting to the threat, and how much to reduce carbon emissions.
So far, adaptation has been given far less priority than emissions mitigation, say campaigners.
"When you know your car has a brake problem, you do not sit around and talk about it. You fix it immediately before the kids get in," commented Wendel Trio of Greenpeace.
"No one escapes from the climate crisis, old or young, rich or poor, unless we all act together now."
Previous studies into climate vulnerability have been more narrowly focussed and have a longer timeframe, looking at, for instance, the risks by 2100.
By focussing on what happens in a couple of decades, the report has a better chance of swaying policymakers, as these events are likely to happen within their lifetime, said former UNFCCC chief Michael Zammit Cutajar.
Poorer nations 'need carbon cuts', urges The Maldives
Richard Black BBC News 3 Dec 10;
Poor countries as well as rich should look to cut carbon emissions, says Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed.
Continuing to equate the need to develop with the right to emit carbon dioxide is, he says, "quite silly".
Mr Nasheed was speaking to BBC News at the launch of a report on vulnerability to climate impacts, which the authors say shows no nation will be untouched.
He said The Maldives has not received any of the "fast-start" finance pledged by Western governments last year.
It is highly unusual for the leader of a developing nation to call on his or her fellows to cut carbon.
The position of the powerful G77/China bloc - which includes most of the developing world - is that Western nations should cut emissions while others should only have to reduce the rate at which their emissions grow.
However, The Maldives and some other developing nations are known to be somewhat disenchanted with the fact that they have to sit inside the same negotiating bloc as countries that want to develop on the back of expanding fossil fuel use, and some that do not want a legally-binding global agreement to constrain emissions.
"When I started hearing about this climate change issue, I started hearing developing countries say 'we have a right to emit carbon because we have to develop'," he said.
"It is true, we need to develop; but equating development to carbon emissions I thought was quite silly.
"There is new technology - fossil fuel is obsolete, it's yesterday's technology; so we [are aiming to] come up with a development strategy that's low carbon."
The Maldives is aiming to become carbon neutral by 2020; and Mr Nasheed sees the low-carbon development strategy, when it is fully developed, as something that could be picked up by larger nations such as China and India.
Mr Nasheed said that investment in clean energy technology in countries such as China should mean they can move away from fossil fuels faster than they have currently pledged - which would, in turn, change their stance towards the UN climate process.
"They have to rapidly increase their investments in renewable energy, and I think they are doing that - and once they'e done it, they're going to say 'right, we need a legally-binding agreement'," he said.
Changing trains
During last December's UN climate summit in Copenhagen, developed nations (headed by Japan, the EU and the US) promised to provide developing countries with $30bn for the period 2010-2 to help them adopt clean technologies and begin to protect themselves against climate impacts.
Continue reading the main story
“Start Quote
How much more stress do we honestly think places highly vulnerable to climate change like Afghanistan or Somalia can take?”
End Quote Ross Mountain Dara
Much of the money has been pledged to individual countries and projects. But, said Mr Nasheed, none has been delivered.
"None at all; it's a nightmare," he said.
"Governments will always drag things, even when it's pledged, even when it's cited in the budget - you can always drag the issue to the next year, and the World Bank, European Union, Asian Development Bank, the Islamic Development Bank and so on - they all have very difficult procurement procedures and it's very, very difficult."
That rich countries must help poorer ones to adapt, with finance, is enshrined in the UN climate convention (UNFCCC) dating back to 1992.
The three-year "fast-start" finance is seen as a key step in turning that concept into reality.
Athena Ballesteros from the World Resources Institute, which tracks progress on climate finance, said that understanding what has been pledged and paid is very complex; but in some places, progress has definitely been slow.
"Many funds are new, and they're still designing the investment programmes, so it's really taking a long time to release the money," she said.
"Where I think money has started to flow is through bilateral channels, because those are open for overseas development aid. But there, the question is whether the money is really new and additional."
Stressed world
If the conclusions of the new report on climate impacts, the Climate Vulnerability Monitor, are correct, much more money will need to be pledged than is currently on the table.
Written by Development Assistance Research Associates (Dara) in conjunction with the Climate Vulnerable Forum - a group of countries that consider themselves at high risk from climate impacts - it seeks to assess the threat climate change poses to individual nations in areas such as human health, economic stress and weather.
Citing World Health Organization figures, it concludes that as many as 350,000 lives are being lost each year from climate impacts now, rising to one million per year by 2030.
"The rise in temperatures over the last century will be doubled in the next 20 to 30 years alone," said Dara director-general Ross Mountain.
"Damage from weather disasters will increase by over 300%. We shouldn't underestimate what kind of effects an explosive increase like this can have, especially since only the smallest of new extremes is enough to overwhelm a whole community.
"How much more stress do we honestly think places highly vulnerable to climate change like Afghanistan or Somalia can take?"
The 50 countries judged as "acutely vulnerable" include many of the world's poorest, including Burma, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Niger and Senegal.
This, said Mr Mountain, would make achieving the Millennium Development Goals even more difficult.
But some richer nations, such as the US, are judged to have a high vulnerability to economic disturbances caused by climate change.
John Ashton, the UK's special envoy on climate change, said the report could play a valuable role in persuading people and governments to take climate change more seriously; many, he said, were "not as scared as they should be".
"We need to find ways of forcing the evidence into the political imagination.
"The vulnerabilities in some places are much more tangible and more immediate, and to have a mounting and increasingly coherent voice from those countries is extremely powerful."
* Environment ministers meeting in Cancun, Mexico
* More costs for businesses as standards proliferate
* Palm oil sales face multiple hurdles
Niki Koswanage Reuters AlertNet 3 Dec 10;
NUSA DUA, Indonesia Dec 3 (Reuters) - A deadlock between rich and poor countries over drawing up a climate change pact may spur proliferation of national standards that could increase business costs, Indonesia's Trade Minister said on Friday.
Trade Minister Mari Pangestu's comments come as the world's environment ministers struggle to hammer out the first climate treaty since 1992 amid concerns that a breakthrough in talks may still be years away. For more on the talks, see [ID:nCANCUN]
"The lack of a global climate change pact has seen governments across the world come up with their own interpretations on climate change and carbon emissions," Pangestu said at a palm oil conference on the Indonesian island of Bali.
"That means there will be many standards to follow. This will increase the cost of business."
Pangestu did not give further details but she was mostly referring to the palm oil industry that has to meet a slew of eco-friendly standards set by the European Union and a palm oil sector driven Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO).
The RSPO nearly fell apart last year as green groups and planters could not agree on how to calculate palm oil's environmental impact via carbon emissions generated through an estate's operations or expansion activities.
The industry group is still formulating these standards.
Indonesia and Malaysia, the world's largest palm oil producers, say that EU bio-energy rules hamper exports and breach free trade rules as greenhouse gas savings from palm estates were understated.[ID:nLDE6AF14C]
Frustrated with various standards on palm oil and delays in getting international certification for its estates, Indonesia plans to impose its own mandatory environment standards on the industry to meet its own targets for cutting emissions.
Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has pledged to cut emissions by 26 percent from business as usual levels by 2020 or by 41 percent by 2020 if given sufficient international support.
"We need to work together with all the stakeholders in the palm oil industry but we need to balance environment issues with developmental goals," Pangestu said.
"If an agreed climate change pact comes into place, we can be assured of some security and also meet our bottom line."
Karl Ritter, Associated Press Yahoo News 4 Dec 10;
CANCUN, Mexico – A bloc of Latin American countries issued a stern warning to rich nations Friday that unless they commit to new emissions cuts, the U.N. climate talks in Cancun will fail.
Negotiators from Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Ecuador — all members of the leftist ALBA alliance — said they would not accept the refusal by some developed countries to extend their binding emissions targets under the Kyoto Protocol, the climate pact that expires in 2012.
Venezuela and Bolivia were among a handful of countries that blocked a nonbinding climate accord with voluntary emissions pledges from being adopted at last year's U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen. The rules of the talks require consensus.
Without naming them, Venezuelan negotiator Claudia Salerno said "a handful" of developed countries had ruled out a second commitment period under Kyoto. She called their stance "unacceptable" and said it could hold back progress on other issues being discussed in Cancun.
"If there is no second period of Kyoto, it is very difficult that there can be any balanced package" of decisions in Cancun, Salerno said.
The fate of the Kyoto Protocol, or the shape of any agreement that succeeds it, is one of the most divisive issues in the negotiations.
Earlier this week Japan said it was not interested in negotiating an extension of the Kyoto targets, arguing it was pointless unless the world's largest polluters — China is No. 1, and the U.S. No. 2 — also accepted binding targets. U.N. climate chief Christiana Figueres said Russia and Canada also oppose extending their Kyoto targets.
For 13 years, since it was negotiated, the United States has rejected the Kyoto accord, partly because it made no demands on rapidly developing countries like China and India.
Venezuela and Bolivia and other members of the ALBA bloc argue that climate change is the result of a capitalist system and demand steep emissions cuts from industrialized countries deemed to have a historical responsibility for the release of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere.
Figueres said she wasn't expecting the positions of the ALBA nations and the developed countries to "dramatically change" in Cancun.
"What needs to happen here is countries need to find a compromise," she said.
She and other U.N. officials hope for agreements on secondary issues at Cancun, and expect this central dispute to extend into next year's negotiations.
Delegates at the 193-nation conference are also discussing setting up a "green fund" to disburse aid to poorer countries to reduce their emissions and adapt to climate change; to make it cheaper for developing nations to obtain climate-friendly proprietary technology; and to finalize more elements of a complex plan to pay developing countries for protecting their tropical forests.
European and U.S. negotiators said the discord over extending Kyoto targets could hinder progress on those issues.
"It may be that the problems with Kyoto could completely tie this conference up, but I am very hopeful that that doesn't happen, because I think it would be a huge mistake," U.S. climate envoy Todd Stern said.
EU negotiator Arthur Rung-Metzger urged the ALBA nations to compromise.
"If countries park on extreme positions, it's just not possible to come to a consensus, that is certainly something that is still hanging like a Sword of Damocles over this conference," he said.
As the climate talks drag on, the Earth continues to warm. On Thursday the World Meteorological Organization reported that 2010 is on track to become one of the three hottest years and 2001-2010 the warmest 10-year period on record.
Scientists say a gradually warming earth is expected to bring on droughts and floods with increasing frequency, and a report issued at the conference Friday said about 350,000 lives are at risk annually worldwide from such natural disasters.
Prepared by a group of vulnerable nations headed by the island state of the Maldives and DARA, a Madrid-based humanitarian research group, the Climate Vulnerability Monitor 2010 said the effects of climate change could contribute to the deaths of 5 million people by 2020 and cause as many as 1 million deaths per year by 2030 if global warming isn't slowed.
__
Associated Press writer Mark Stevenson contributed to this report.
Climate: LatAm bloc pushes on Kyoto Protocol
Yahoo News 3 Dec 10;
CANCUN, Mexico (AFP) – UN climate talks in Cancun ran into a fresh problem on Friday as a group of leftwing Latin American countries said a global deal had to be linked to a fresh round of commitments to the carbon-cutting Kyoto Protocol.
"If there is no second period of commitment, it would be very difficult to have a balanced package in this negotiations," said Venezuelan negotiator Claudia Salerno.
The so-called ALBA group, which comprises Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Dominica, issued the warning on the fifth day of talks taking place under the UN flag.
The 194-party talks have until December 10 to unblock an agreement for tackling climate change beyond 2012, when the Kyoto Protocol's present roster of commitments expire.
The Protocol is hugely supported by developing countries and has been championed by the European Union (EU).
But it has been rejected by the United States, and it does not include China, a developing country, in targeted emissions cuts, which only apply to rich-nation signatories.
As a result, the present roster of emissions pledges covers only 30 percent of the global output of heat-trapping greenhouse gases.
Japan on Monday said it would not support a second commitment period beyond 2012 because it made "no sense" without a wider application. Canada and Russia are also reluctant to sign up for an extension, say delegates.
"When you find that on the other side of the table they say they want to go to the beach because they say there's nothing to do and they're just wasting their time then we in the ALBA group will not allow an action where these countries get away with this and make no commitment," Salerno said.
Scientists say unbridled burning of fossil fuels has brought concentrations of carbon dioxide, a colorless, odorless and tasteless "greenhouse" gas, to record concentrations.
Without urgent action to stem these emissions, the world is on track for worsening drought, floods, storms and rising seas, spelling a threat for hundreds of millions of people, they warn.
China says some at climate talks want to "kill" Kyoto
* China says some want to end Kyoto Protocol
* Japan says won't extend carbon cuts in Kyoto
* Deepens rifts at Cancun talks on slowing global warming
Robert Campbell and Gerard Wynn Reuters AlertNet 3 Dec 10;
CANCUN, Mexico, Dec 3 (Reuters) - China accused some nations on Friday at U.N. climate talks of seeking to kill the Kyoto Protocol pact for slowing global warming after Japan said it would not agree to extend carbon cuts under the deal.
"Some countries, so far, still don't like the Kyoto Protocol," Huang Huikang, a special representative for climate change negotiations at China's foreign ministry, told a news conference at the Nov. 29-to-Dec. 10 climate talks in Mexico.
"And they even want to kill the Kyoto Protocol, to end the Kyoto Protocol," he said. "This is a very worrying movement."
He said the question of whether the 1997 Kyoto pact will survive was the main hurdle at the annual conference, which is seeking to agree to a modest package of measures to slow climate change after a 2009 summit in Copenhagen failed to work out a treaty.
Kyoto binds almost 40 developed nations to cut their greenhouse gas emissions until 2012 and commits parties to an extension.
But Japan has been adamant that other major emitters, including China and the United States have to join in a new, broader U.N. treaty to help slow what the U.N. panel of climate scientists says will be rising temperatures with desertification, droughts, floods and rising seas.
"Japan does not want to kill Kyoto. Kyoto killing is a kind of propaganda wording," said Akira Yamada, a Japanese negotiator sitting beside Huang at a news conference. "We are not killing the Kyoto Protocol."
The United States never ratified the Kyoto Protocol, so its backers account for just 27 percent of world emissions. A huge puzzle remains to design a new deal that would satisfy both rich and poor countries.
Developing countries favor the Protocol, which makes a clear distinction between industrialized and emerging economies, while many developed countries want a new agreement to include all major emitters.
Venezuela and Bolivia said it was "unacceptable" that several developed countries had told them there could be no agreement on new emissions targets at the round of U.N. climate talks. [ID:nLDE6B21XL]
"The message we heard to our surprise was the following: there is no chance whatsoever of a second period of pledges here in Cancun," said the head of the Venezuelan delegation, Claudia Salerno.
Carbon emissions trading markets want assurances of policies beyond 2012 to guide investments. The International Energy Agency says $18 trillion needs to be spent by 2030 to ensure a shift from fossil fuels towards cleaner energies. (Writing by Alister Doyle; Editing by Vicki Allen)
India expects to break logjam in climate talks
* India hopes US agrees to proposal on reporting emissions
* U.N. says 2010 to be among three warmest years
* Ocean acidification could harm fisheries
Timothy Gardner and Alister Doyle Reuters AlertNet 3 Dec 10;
CANCUN, Mexico, Dec 2 (Reuters) - An Indian proposal could break a deadlock between rich and poor countries over how to share the burdens of tackling global warming, India's environment minister said on Thursday before heading to U.N. climate talks in Mexico.
India's environment minister Jairam Ramesh said a proposal that would require countries to report what actions they are taking to fight global warming could win critical support from the United States and increase chances that representatives at the U.N. climate talks could reach a broader agreement.
"It is basically meant to break the logjam and it is basically meant to bring the U.S. in because without some progress in (transparency) the U.S. is not going to come on board," Ramesh said before traveling to the summit. [ID:nSGE6B104K]
Ramesh's hopeful assessment came on a day that the U.N. released more pessimistic climate news. It said 2010 would be one of the top three hottest years on record.
India recently released a plan that countries -- rich or rapidly developing -- that contribute more than 1 percent of global greenhouse gases should report their actions and their emissions to the United Nations every three years.
Jonathan Pershing, the deputy U.S. climate negotiator, was not immediately available to comment on Ramesh's assessment.
But on Wednesday he told reporters there was hope the United States and India could move forward on the issue of of measuring, reporting and verifying emissions.
"Coming in, it was quite clear that we were converging," Pershing said. "But we've not yet reached agreement."
The Indian proposal would not penalize poor countries if they did not meet pledges on emissions reductions.
HOT SEAT
Analysts said the Indian proposal provided a good foundation.
"India is clearly trying to be constructive," Michael Levi, a fellow on climate at the Council on Foreign Relations.
For the United States, an agreement with India could put pressure on China to come on board or risk looking like it is not doing enough to fight global warming.
India's Ramesh said an agreement on so-called transparency could lead to bigger agreements on climate, like protecting forests and financing.
But there was also risk for the United States. If it agrees on one of the key aspects of the talks in Cancun, it could put pressure on Washington to work out another one: long-term financing for poor countries to help them mitigate climate change and adapt to more storms, floods and heatwaves.
"It also puts the U.S. on the hot seat for the money," Levi said. The United States, Norway and other rich countries agreed at last year's climate talks in Copenhagen to financing of $100 billion per year by 2020.
Since then the U.S. climate bill failed. It was expected to set up a carbon market that would help raise money for the financing.
2010 COULD BE HOTTEST
Pressure on climate negotiators was also growing as evidence mounted that 2010 would be one of three hottest recorded and that human actions like burning fossil fuels and cutting down forests was to blame.
Michael Jarraud, the head of the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization, said at a news conference that 2010 could be the warmest year since 1850, the first year such records were kept. It also caps a record-warm decade. [ID:nN02236423]
"The trend is of very significant warming," Jarraud said. "If nothing is done ... (temperatures) will go up and up," he said.
And emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, threaten fish supplies. Acidification of the seas caused by carbon dioxide could threaten fisheries production and is causing the fastest shift in ocean chemistry in 65 million years, a U.N. study showed. [ID:nLDE6B12BO]
Production of shellfish, like mussels, shrimp or lobster, could be most at risk since the acidic water eats into their protective shells, according to the report.
"Ocean acidification is yet another red flag being raised, carrying planetary health warnings about the uncontrolled growth in greenhouse gas emissions," said Achim Steiner, head of the U.N. Environment Program.
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