Very fishy day at oil-slicked Tanah Merah
from wild shores of singapore
Back at Ubin's other shores
from wonderful creation
泰坦魔芋花（titan arum）盛开还是凋零will fully open or close?(9am, 9th, Dec)
from PurpleMangrove
Feral populations of Javan and Common Mynas appearing in Sarawak
from Bird Ecology Study Group
Now in its 10th year, parks group has seen business shift with tie-ups and funding projects
Grace Chua & Irene Tham Straits Times 9 Dec 10;
CONSERVATION is not just a matter of principle: It also makes for good business at Wildlife Reserves Singapore (WRS).
That is because visitors are 'more sophisticated and enlightened', said WRS chairman Claire Chiang, and are now demanding more.
All that, Ms Chiang said, makes for a better visitor experience. 'We're showing Generation X and Y and idealists that we are commercially viable, yet we are able to focus on the non-financials like caring for animals and the environment, reducing carbon footprint, being family friendly, and encouraging education and entertainment.'
As the wildlife parks group - which manages the Singapore Zoo, Night Safari, Jurong Bird Park and the upcoming River Safari - celebrates its 10th anniversary this year, it has also seen its business shift.
It ramped up its efforts in the past few years, signing tie-ups with the United States-based Wildlife Conservation Society, which runs several New York zoos, and with the Singapore National Parks Board to study and reintroduce hornbills into the wild here.
Last year, WRS set up its $1 million conservation fund for field projects in Singapore. Twenty cents from the sale of each park ticket goes to the fund.
It also receives sponsorship - Thai Beverage recently contributed $50,000. The company has given $400,000 since 2006, with the money going to help Asian elephants.
However, Ms Chiang said the fund has more money than grant applications; it is giving $500,000 over five years to the National University of Singapore's (NUS) Ah Meng Memorial Conservation Fund, which supports student and faculty research on endangered native wildlife.
The first study to benefit from the Ah Meng fund was one on the banded leaf monkey. It was found that the population was triple what was previously recorded. More importantly, there are few genetic differences between the monkeys found in Johor and Singapore, suggesting that there could be breeding or reintroduction opportunities to increase the local population.
Said Associate Professor Rudolf Meier, an evolutionary biologist at NUS: 'Such studies would not have been possible if not for the funding from Wildlife Reserves Singapore.'
Funding in the past had been ad hoc before Ms Fanny Lai took over as WRS' group chief executive officer. 'Now, there's more integrated and sustainable efforts to fund conservation research in Singapore and the region,' said Prof Meier.
Professor Peter Ng, director of the Raffles Museum of Biodiversity Research, also believes that WRS is taking a step in the right direction with its conservation efforts. 'It will substantially increase our knowledge base as well as help encourage a new generation of young naturalists,' he said.
But he added that WRS can do more to spread its business model and beliefs across Asia. 'At the end of the day, long-term research and conservation efforts need a good business base,' he said.
And this business base is expanding. WRS is aggressively pursuing opportunities in the wedding and speciality meetings, incentives, conventions and exhibitions, or Mice, industry. Specifically, it is targeting the huge tourist markets of China and India. WRS has hosted themed weddings since 2004, and organises about 30 weddings a year.
But even as the number of foreign visitors grows, WRS wants to keep its parks affordable for all Singaporeans and visitors to compete with the integrated resorts and new attractions. The approach has kept visitor numbers up: In the past financial year, the Singapore Zoo had 1.6 million visitors, the Night Safari 1.1 million and Jurong BirdPark 900,000.
But as WRS' parks age, so do their stable of keepers and veterinarians. Its core team of stalwarts are retiring, and must pass on their institutional know-ledge. And the parks' breeding and conservation achievements must be archived and recorded.
WRS has about 1,000 staff across three parks, and is looking to recruit some 200 more for the River Safari, which will be Asia's first and only river-themed wildlife park when it opens in 2012.
A programme in animal management with Ngee Ann Polytechnic that WRS launched last year, with a diploma in veterinary bioscience, could help plug the problem of a vet supply crunch, as qualified specialists have always been hard to find.
Zoos have helped save endangered species that have lost their habitats with captive breeding and other programs, but are they only saving the poster-species that zoo-goers find aesthetically pleasing?
Rose Eveleth Scientific American 8 Dec 10;
Zoos are like fancy hotels, albeit without the fluffy pillows and individually packaged soaps, or so says Daniel Frynta, an ecologist at Charles University in Prague. Only the "richest" animals get to check in. And if an endangered species gets a room, he says, it might just survive.
Frynta defines a rich animal as one that we humans find appealing. And, he says, we have very specific taste: It's got to be big. It's got to be cute. It's got to behave or look humanlike. If a critter is colorful, we like it. We also like it when zoo denizens play and speak and travel in family groups. Those animals, he says, get to stay in zoos. "Poor" animals—that is ugly ones—stay outside where their habitats are quickly being destroyed.
Species in zoos are often protected from total extinction because they are commonly the subjects of captive breeding programs in which staffers entice animals to mate and reproduce offspring that can then be released into the wild or shared with other zoos. Although it's hit or miss, captive breeding represents the last hope for survival for many species. The Hawaiian crow and the Seychelles giant tortoise only exist in zoos, for example. The Arabian oryx was once extinct in the wild, but captive breeding programs allowed for the release of individuals back into their native habitat. And zoos often fund conservation programs that happen outside their walls. "The record is imperfect," says Nate Flessness, science director at the International Species Information System, "but zoos are the only ones doing anything."
David Stokes, an ecologist at the University of Washington Bothell, agrees, noting that a biodiversity crisis is at hand. The current rate of extinction is up to 1,000 times faster than it would be without humans, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN). The surviving species will "be the ones we decide to save," Stokes says. If zoos decide not to save "ugly" animals, they could go extinct. Snails and insects, for example, almost never make it into zoos.
The ugly truth: Zoos are businesses
Still, zoos have their drawbacks: Studies comparing the life spans of animals in zoological parks with their wild counterparts have found that captive animals tend to live shorter lives. Elephants, for example, live an average of 36 years in the wild, but only 17 in zoos. For many species, however, zoos can be a vital refuge from poaching, habitat loss and disease.
Yet, Frynta's research shows that zoos may not be entirely living up to their conservation promises. In a September 7 PLoS ONE paper his team asked Czech citizens to rank pictures of endangered and non-endangered parrots from most to least beautiful. The researchers then compared the rankings with worldwide zoo holdings and species' conservation needs as defined by the IUCN. Overwhelmingly, zoos are keeping pretty birds rather than endangered ones.
That's because zoos have another kind of survival to worry about—their own. "We have to deliver what our visitors want," says Greg Bockheim, director of the Virginia Zoo in Norfolk. Visitors want to see animals they like and recognize. Frynta agrees: "Zoos full of endangered but ugly animals will never make money."
And although gorillas and lions would not have to empty their bank accounts—if they had them—to check in at these so-called hotels, such popular mammals can certainly entice visitors to empty their own pockets. A white tiger, Bockheim says, can triple zoo attendance—And directors could put that money toward conservation for less beloved animals, he says.
Many zoos, however, are reluctant to discuss their efforts to balance conservation priorities and profit. Calls to more than a dozen zoological organizations were not returned, including the Wildlife Conservation Society, a conservation organization that also manages five zoos in the New York City area.
Universal animal aesthetics
A solution may lie in the fact that unlike ideas about human beauty, our love for some animals and ambivalence toward others may beuniversal, Frynta says. In a cross-cultural study comparing students in Prague with tribespeople in Papua New Guinea, Frynta's team found that the two groups think the very same snake species are beautiful.
By knowing what people do like, zoos could enhance the public's support of species we don't want to cuddle with, Frynta says. Want the public to connect with a snail or a bat? Give it a human name, like George or Sally; tell people about its family; design an exhibit that allows visitors to understand the animal's daily life, Bockheim says.
And, if directors can't get everyone to love a homely beastie, pick a prettier but still threatened one. In every group of animals, Frynta says, "we can find some species which are highly preferred and also endangered." By protecting the panda, zoos can encourage the conservation of the entire forest in which it lives—including the charismatically challenged animals that also call it home.
Others are less optimistic about the fate of creatures that have a dearth of animal magnetism. "Of course they are doomed. Why wouldn't they be doomed?" asks Anna Gunnthorsdottir, an economist at the University of New South Wales Australian School of Business in Sydney who studies how human preference changes conservation behavior. Even if zoos follow all of Bockheim's suggestions, there are just some animals we may never love.
Last year, for example, the United Nations Convention on Migratory Species declared 2011–12 the Year of the Bat. Their Web site does all the things Bockheim suggested; it says bats are "exceptional, delightful, fascinating and likeable." The Year of the Bat follows the Year of Biodiversity, the Year of the Gorilla, and the Year of the Frog, each of which the World Association of Zoos and Aquariums (WAZA) celebrated with activities at zoos all over the world. This year, however, they will not be planning anything big. Bats are simply "not a topic that will attract that much attention," says Markus Gusset, WAZA conservation officer.
And even if zoos wanted to breed every endangered species in the world, there just isn't room in zoos, Bockheim says. "You can't save everything, that's just how it is."
Frynta, however, is not ready to give up just yet. He has faith in the conservation community. "We have just one goal," he says, "the survival of endangered species." And their survival, he adds, may have little to do with the animals themselves. It could simply depend on how we manage our guest list.
This article is provided by Scienceline, a project of New York University's Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program.
Yahoo News 9 Dec 10;
BANDA ACEH, Indonesia (AFP) – Three endangered Sumatran elephants have been found dead after their herd rampaged through a village in western Indonesia, a conservationist and officials said Thursday.
The cause of the animals' deaths is being investigated but a local conservationist said they might have died after eating poison intended for wild boars as they scavenged for food at village stores.
"Three elephants have been killed. We don't know the cause but we have sent a team to the location to find out," Aceh province conservation agency chief Abubakar Chek Mat said.
"Conflict between elephants and residents happens often in this location and we're trying to find a solution to drive the elephants back to their habitat."
Bakhtiar, an activist with local environmental group Leuser International Foundation, said a herd of elephants had sent villagers fleeing.
"For the past week, dozens of Sumatran elephants have gone to the village in east Aceh district and destroyed houses and crops, forcing 50 villagers to seek refuge elsewhere," he said.
"When the people returned home yesterday, they found three elephants dead. They said the elephants might have consumed poison meant for wild boars."
Human-animal conflicts are a rising problem as people encroach on wildlife habitats in Indonesia, an archipelago with some of the world's largest remaining tropical forests.
Bakhtiar said his group and the local authorities are planning to bring tame elephants to the area to help chase any straying herd back into the forest.
"These tame elephants have been specially trained to do so. This is a more effective method than the present one used by the residents which is to fire homemade bamboo cannons in the hope that the sounds would scare the elephants away," he added.
There are up to 3,350 Sumatran elephants remaining in the wild, according to the environmental group WWF.
Fidelis E. Satriastanti Jakarta Globe 7 Dec 10;
Cancun, Mexico. Though Indonesia is not at high risk of extreme weather events, an expert said on Tuesday that the country’s vulnerability to environment disaster magnified the potential risk.
Armi Susandi, an Indonesian meteorological expert, said that while Indonesia did not experience extreme weather events that other countries suffered, such as typhoons and cyclones, it did not mean the government could sit back and relax.
He added the severity of the weather events that Indonesia faced was “nothing compared to other countries.”
“However, it doesn’t mean that we’re not affected by them,” said Armi, a member of the Indonesian delegation at the United Nations’ climate conference in Cancun.
“Just from the tail [of a storm], we can get very dry weather if it comes from the north or very wet weather if it comes from the south. And if it gets very dry, then the potential for forest fires also increases, which was exactly happened two years ago.”
Furthermore, the country’s vulnerability to storms magnifies the resulting damage, he said.
“It’s not the extreme weather that matters for Indonesia, but how prone we are,” Armi said.
“We have very low levels of resistance, so even if only a small part of the country is hit, the impact is tremendous.”
His warnings came as the World Climate Research Program released their report on increasing extreme weather events globally, such as tropical cyclones and hurricanes, as well as heat waves and cold snaps.
“When we observed these extreme events in the past, they were different in magnitude and frequency from what is happening now,” said Ghaseem R. Asrard, director of the WCRP.
Asrard gave the example of Russia, which has been experiencing heat waves from 2003 to 2010 the likes of which have not been seen since the 1500s.
He also quoted the 4th Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment from 2007, which said heat waves had become more frequent and widespread. The evidence also showed there were more warm nights and fewer cold days.
However, Asrard said these extreme events were largely regional in nature, meaning their manifestations tended to be varied and could not be generalized at the global level.
But a separate study, also released to coincide with the talks in Cancun, says risks to Indonesia, specifically, are on the rise.
Titled “Climate Vulnerability Monitoring: The State of the Climate Crisis,” the report, put together by DARA, an international NGO focusing on aid to areas suffering from conflict and natural disasters, said the negative effects of climate change on Indonesia would “slightly increase” over the next 20 years, with consequences including higher disease rates, habitat loss and economic stresses.
International experts said the important issue now was how to adapt to these changes.
“Some vulnerable countries are becoming much more proactive in their actions, such as the Maldives, which is aiming to be carbon neutral by 2020, and Bangladesh, which has already put $100 billion of its own money into implementing a climate change action plan,” said Saleemul Huq, a senior fellow at the London-based International Institute for Environment and Development.
These countries cannot afford to wait for the world to save them, so they are taking matters into their own hands, he said.
Michael Zammit Cutajar, a former chief of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, said countries could not deal with climate change without also addressing poverty, as there was a strong correlation between poverty and environmental vulnerability.
He also said countries needed to avoid the trap of defining which nations were the most vulnerable to climate change.
“Vulnerability and adaptation are [challenges] for all countries,” he said.
Eric Bellman The Wall Street Journal 8 Dec 10;
JAKARTA—Indonesia's ambitious plan to restrict clearing in some of the world's last remaining virgin forests is on track despite skepticism from international environmental groups, say government officials in Indonesia and Norway, which is backing the project with a $1 billion pledge.
While many details of the plan have yet to be hammered out, Indonesia is set to start a two-year moratorium on new land-clearing permits next month and has taken other first steps to help save its dwindling forests, the officials say.
It is expected to announce additional elements of its plan, which aims to protect more than 100 million hectares of pristine jungle, during the United Nations climate conference under way in Cancún, Mexico, these officials said.
First unveiled in Oslo in May, Indonesia's forest-protection project is aimed at reducing the country's greenhouse-gas emissions by slowing deforestation. Norway said it was willing to invest as much as $1 billion in Indonesian conservation projects and Indonesia agreed to boost forest-monitoring efforts and take other steps, including the moratorium on new clearing permits.
The project is widely viewed as an important test of whether international incentives can convince developing countries to risk crimping economic growth to help the environment.
But some environmental activists have been skeptical of the deal, saying it doesn't go far enough and that government officials can't be trusted to implement it fully. A recent Greenpeace report suggested the program could end up hurting the environment in Indonesia as powerful lobbies in the palm oil and paper industries could find ways to pocket some of the money earmarked for conservation, even as they continue destroying forests to feed their huge expansion plans.
In Cancún this week, Greenpeace unveiled maps of Indonesia showing all the forest that could be destroyed if Indonesia doesn't impose tighter controls on the industries.
"These maps further support our argument that the pulp, paper and palm oil industry is unnecessarily pursuing a deforestation-as-usual approach to business" in Indonesia, said the lobbying group's forest campaigner, Bustar Maitar.
Indonesia is one of the world's top sources of greenhouse gases because of widespread clearing of peat and forest land for its paper, palm-oil and other industries, which are currently a crucial part the economy's growth.
People on both sides of the debate say Indonesia has so far delivered on its promises to start forming some of the institutions needed to implement the Norway-backed project, but some environmental groups still question the government's commitment.
How much the project actually helps the environment will depend on enforcement and which areas of the country are included in the government's two-year moratorium. The boundaries have yet to be defined, though the project is slated to begin soon.
"Everyone is still waiting to see whether Indonesia can do it," Agus Purnomo, head of secretariat for Indonesia's National Council on Climate Change said in Jakarta before leaving for Cancun. "We will show the world that we mean business."
After the failure of U.N. climate talks in Copenhagen last year, Indonesia's agreement with Norway was one of the few bright spots in world-wide efforts to protect the environment.
The 12-day climate conference in Cancún is focusing on how to give countries such as Indonesia more reason to choose environmentally friendly paths to growth through tens of billions of dollars in subsidies from industrialized countries. In Copenhagen, diplomats promised $30 billion in climate funding for poor countries by 2012, and an additional $100 billion annually starting in 2020.
In its deal with Norway, Indonesia will get a payment at the end of every year if it can prove it is protecting its forests and lowering emissions by doing things such as implementing tougher restrictions, policing protected areas and educating and providing employment for poor communities that live near the forests.
Indonesia says Greenpeace has misunderstood industrial expansion projections, and the deal with Norway has checks and balances that would stop the money flowing to Indonesia or its companies if they are abusing the forests.
Government officials further note they have delivered on promises to create a task force on deforestation and have mandated the building of an independent institution in charge of measuring and verifying the state of the country's forests.
It will measure what forest and peat land exists and has been saved and how much greenhouse gas was kept from being released. Indonesia and Norway plan to bring in independent auditors to confirm the program's progress before Norway releases any money.
The institution will soon unveil a pilot province where it plans to be most aggressive about implementing the new policies, they say.
By the end of this month, Indonesia will have drafted a map showing which forests are protected from new government-issued clearing permits. Once it is made public, individuals and corporations with claims on different tracts of land will be allowed to come forward to dispute the way the map was drawn.
So many clearing permits were issued by different levels of government over the years that Jakarta doesn't know who still holds unused claims, Mr. Purnomo said. As disputes come in, the map will be redrawn every six months, he said.
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has shown how serious Indonesia is about change by putting Kuntoro Mangkusubroto—the man known for successfully spearheading the reconstruction of Indonesia's province of Aceh after a devastating 2004 tsunami—in charge of the environmental task force, said Per Fredrik Ilsaas Pharo, special director of Norway's International Climate and Forest Initiative, a government program to support the reduction of greenhouse-gas emissions in developing countries.
"Minister Kuntoro and his colleagues are focusing on the 2010 institutional and policy reforms and the robustness of the moratorium," he said. "They are in the process of identifying all the key drivers of deforestation and a potential strategy to deal with them."
In each of the past 10 years, Indonesia lost more than 1 million hectares of forest. Close to half of Indonesia's roughly 130 million hectares of forest land is still pristine, its Forestry Ministry says.
Mr. Purnomo, one of Indonesia's top environmental officials and a former head of the World Wildlife Fund in Indonesia, is also in Cancún this week.
Mr. Purnomo said if the program can weather the skepticism, it will prove that the right incentives can trigger a transformation in developing countries.
"I have seen many forestry ministers come and go, and every time they left they have hurt the forest," he said. "Now the stars are aligned for us to suddenly make a big change."
—Yayu Yuniar contributed to this article.
Antara 9 Dec 10;
Jakarta (ANTARA News) - Australia Thursday announced an allocation of $45 million to Indonesia as part of Australia`s $599 million fast start climate change financing.
Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd said that Australia welcomed Indonesia`s strong leadership on climate change and the opportunity to build on Australia`s long-standing cooperation with Indonesia on reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) and climate change adaptation.
"Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation - which accounts for 18 per cent of global emissions and more than 60% of Indonesia`s total emissions in 2005 - is critical to achieving a global outcome on climate change," Rudd said as quoted on the official website of the Australian embassy in Jakarta, Thursday.
New funding of $30 million will extend support for our demonstration work in Kalimantan and accelerate joint work on Indonesia`s National Carbon Accounting System, taking Australia`s total support for Indonesia`s REDD+ efforts to $100 million.
Speaking at the United Nations Climate Change negotiations in Cancun, the Climate Change and Energy Efficiency Minister, Greg Combet, said that developing a national carbon accounting system is critical to providing credible evidence of emissions reductions.
"This will be a crucial part of our cooperation as it will enable Indonesia to monitor and measure the success of its efforts. Our existing support for Indonesia`s efforts positions Australia well to be a lead partner in the establishment of a new independent institution for forest measurement, reporting and verification in Indonesia," Minister Combet said.
Building on this strong cooperation on REDD+, Australia today also accepted an invitation from Indonesia to join the Indonesia REDD+ Partnership. This is an important opportunity for Australia to further support practical activities and work closely with other countries and multilateral organisations to coordinate support for Indonesia`s REDD+ efforts.
"We are pleased to accept the invitation to join the Indonesia REDD+ Partnership and this builds on the strong bilateral cooperation we launched together in 2008," Minister Rudd said.
New funding of $15 million will support Indonesia`s efforts to adapt to climate change, including to increase understanding of likely climate change impacts, and support the development and implementation of local adaptation responses.
"Indonesia`s many islands are highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, and this funding recognizes how critical the issue is," said Minister Combet.
This additional support for Indonesia is part of Australia`s $599 million climate change fast-start funding which was announced in June 2010.
John Ruwitch and Ho Binh Minh Reuters AlertNet 9 Dec 10;
LONG XUYEN, Vietnam, Dec 9 (Reuters) - About a year ago some farmers from Binh Thanh commune in Vietnam's southern rice growing heartland suspected the worst -- that their irrigation water had become too salty.
They telephoned Vo Thanh, the head of An Giang province's hydro-meteorology centre, and he came to take water samples from the commune, which is about 20 km (12 miles) from the sea.
The farmers' hunch turned out to be right. The brackish water would damage their crops, so Thanh advised officials to tell farmers to stop pumping it into their rice fields immediately. Not everyone took heed.
"Those who didn't suffered losses," Thanh said. "Some 4,000 hectares (9,880 acres) of rice were damaged."
Cropland salination represents just one of the many increasingly acute environmental challenges in Vietnam, exacerbated by climate change, that are testing the government's ability to coordinate countermeasures.
While negotiators in Cancun work to lay the foundation for a deal to try to turn down the global thermostat, or at least slow its rise, Vietnam is in the early stages of cobbling together plans to adapt to changes already starting to take place.
Study after study flag Vietnam as one of the most vulnerable countries on earth to the effects of climate change, such as a sea level rise and volatile weather.
The Mekong Delta is particularly at risk. Nearly half of the country's rice is grown in the Delta, including almost all that Vietnam sends abroad to make it the world's second-biggest rice exporter after Thailand. A fifth of Vietnam's 86 million people live there, and it is one of earth's most biodiverse regions.
The government said in a report last year a third of the Mekong Delta could be submerged if the sea rose by 1 metre (3 ft). Other parts of the beach-lined country will be swamped, volatile weather patterns will hurt flood- and drought-prone areas and warmer temperatures will trim rice yields.
A study by the International Food Policy Research Institute this year estimated that a sea level rise of 17 cm (6.7 in) accompanied by other changes in climate could slash rice yields country-wide by as much as 18.4 percent by 2030.
CLOSED GATES
Thanh had seen salty irrigation water before, but never so far inland from the sea. What was troubling about Binh Thanh's case, though, was not the salt. It was that the problem was caused by an increasingly complex network of dykes and sluice gates built precisely to prevent salination, he said.
"The other gates were closed to keep fresh water in, so the salty water flowed there," he said.
It is an example of the type of problem experts say Vietnam will face more often as hard choices are made to adapt.
"Things are happening already, it's not in the future, and it's going to get worse," said Koos Neefjes, the United Nations policy advisor for climate change in Vietnam.
"It is easy to say what needs to be there by the year 2100, but it is very difficult to say what is tomorrow's priority."
Consultants and non-governmental organisations give the government high marks for its relatively early recognition of the risks and the need to adapt.
This year, the ruling Communist Party included the need to face the effects of climate change in public drafts of policy documents prepared for a five-yearly Party Congress planned for January, underscoring its commitment.
The government approved a National Target Programme to deal with climate change two years ago and is collecting submissions of provincial plans to incorporate into a national plan.
But there is a wide divergence in how local governments understand the problem and approach it.
"I think that they've done a lot over the past two years. But I think that an urgent situation needs them to act faster in the future," said Nguyen Thi Yen, climate change coordinator for the non-governmental organisation CARE International in Vietnam.
"We feel like there's a need for support for the communities, for the local levels, on how to adapt to climate change, how to understand the situation in the local context, how to mainstream climate change into the local planning. It's very urgent."
In some of the mountainous northern provinces where she recently conducted surveys, the level of understanding and action seemed very limited, she said.
In the Mekong Delta and some other coastal areas, by contrast, local governments appear to have a better understanding.
ENGINEERING A RESPONSE
Adapting will also require the government to think comprehensively, encompassing social, economic, land use and other policies -- something experts say will be a challenge for a polity still emerging from an era of stovepiped central planning.
"The knee-jerk response is engineering," said Jeremy Carew-Reid with the Hanoi-based International Centre for Environmental Management.
Many localities, for instance, think dykes are the answer to projections of increased flooding. As an example he notes the government approved a $650 million plan to encompass Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam's commercial hub, in a system of dykes.
He modeled the impact for a widely read study and showed that while the plan might stop flooding it would create a whole new set of problems for the city of more than 7 million people.
"Since then it's been on hold as more and more people have been criticising it," he said.
For places like Binh Thanh commune, environmental challenges will only increase. But the action-reaction cycle of change and responses will play itself out, as it has in the flood-prone region for centuries.
Le Van Banh, a rice exert at the Cuu Long Delta Rice Research Institute, says the salty water situation will worsen -- but researchers are creating new strains of rice that can withstand ever saltier water.
Standing by his muddy fields that yield three rice crops a year, farmer Nguyen Van Banh poked holes in a paddy dyke with a staff and planted beans with his wife.
Asked if he was worried about climate change, his answer was telling: "We don't have time to worry about that stuff."
Timothy Gardner PlanetArk 9 Dec 10;
Beetles killing trees in North America, blue tongue disease ravaging livestock in Europe, and borers destroying African coffee crops are examples of migrating invasive species not getting enough attention at global climate talks, scientists said on Wednesday.
Invasive pests have plagued agriculture and nature for thousands of years as mankind's migrations brought them to places without natural enemies. But the price tag to battle them, now estimated at $1.4 trillion annually, may go up as rising temperatures and more storms and floods unleash species to new areas.
"The problem of invasive species has been all but omitted from the U.N. talks here in Mexico," A.G. Kawamura, the secretary of California's Department of Food and Agriculture, told Reuters.
He said scientists want to reintroduce the issue of invasive insects, germs and plants so at next year's talks in Durban, South Africa, pests will be a top subject.
Humans are also at risk as mosquitoes and other pests may spread malaria, dengue fever and other diseases as they move north. Nobody can say a particular outbreak is caused by climate change, but a look at growing problems in ecosystems can give clues to what the world may face if the world warms further.
Pine beetles are probably North America's worst example of a pest broadening its range and causing damage. The hungry bug, facing no predators, has moved north into Wyoming and Canada, costing billions of dollars in lumber and land values as milder winters fail to kill it.
As pests transform forests and other ecosystems, their regions to store carbon dioxide in plants may also be affected, and hurt the world's chances to fight climate change.
And it is not just higher temperatures from climate change that link pests to damage. James Maclachlan, a pathologist at the University of California, Davis, said outbreaks of blue tongue disease in European sheep and cattle may be the "point of the spear in the global emergence of viruses driven by climate change."
Blue tongue, which is transferred to livestock by biting midges has caused hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars worth of damage to European agriculture, Maclachlan said on the sidelines of the climate talks.
MIDGES AND MOTHS
The infected midges, which originated in the Middle East and North Africa, are carried to other regions by dust storms, which are expected to get stronger from climate change. The infected bugs spread the disease to local midge populations that have infected livestock as far north as Norway.
The disease affects milk production in animals and can cause trade disputes. France has had to curtail livestock trade to Italy because of the disease.
In Isla Mujeres, a tiny island just a few miles from the U.N. talks, a hurricane in 2005 brought an infestation of cactus moth, which threatens local biodiversity, said Stanley Burgeil, of the U.S. government's National Invasive Species Council.
Officials in Sonora Mexico, home to a great variety of cactus important for both food and materials, are worried the moth could spread.
As the world warms, scientists and policy makers say the United Nations and world governments need to pay more attention. In the United States, local and federal funds to fight the problem have not kept up with inflation and in some cases have fallen.
(Editing by Russell Blinch)
Jerome Cartillier Yahoo News 8 Dec 10;
CANCUN, Mexico (AFP) – The World Bank launched an initiative Wednesday to help emerging and developing countries set up carbon markets, inaugurating a fund that it hopes will reach 100 million dollars.
The World Bank expected a growing number of nations to look at so-called cap-and-trade systems, in which firms or countries face restrictions on carbon emissions blamed for climate change but can trade credits on the market.
"We are launching this partnership for market readiness to try to share information but also provide some additional financial support," World Bank president Robert Zoellick announced on the sidelines of UN-led climate talks in Cancun, Mexico.
"We have a number of countries such as China, Chile, Indonesia (and) Mexico actively exploring how they can use market-based instruments to support their overall domestic emissions mitigation and action plans," Zoellick said.
China's climate negotiator Xie Zhenhua welcomed the initiative, saying that his country -- the world's largest carbon emitter -- has set up low-carbon pilot projects in five cities and eight provinces.
"China intends to explore feasibility of domestic emissions trading schemes to achieve mitigation," Xie said in a statement.
The World Bank partnership would help countries set up markets similar to the cap-and-trade system in place for for companies in the European Union.
The World Bank initiative would also look at systems along the line of the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism, under which wealthy nations required to cut emissions can receive credit by investing in green energy projects in the developing world.
"Some of these programs can be done within a country, or a region or a sector but one of the possibilities is then how do you interconnect these markets over time," Zoellick said.
Australia led support for the initiative with a pledge of 20 million US dollars, the World Bank said.
"A broad and well-functioning carbon market will help countries reduce carbon pollution in the fairest, most efficient and cost-effective way," said Greg Combet, Australia's climate change minister.
The European Commission pledged five million euros (6.6 million dollars) and the United States and Norway each offered five million dollars, the World Bank said, adding that Britain, Germany and Japan have also said they will provide financing.
Friends of the Earth, an environmental advocacy group which is strongly critical of carbon markets, said the World Bank was playing a "perverse role" in efforts to fight climate change.
"Carbon markets are an irreparably flawed means of addressing climate change," said Karen Orenstein of Friends of the Earth US.
"They further entrench the economic arrangements that facilitate the North's over-consumption and have landed us in this climate crisis in the first place."
The European Union's Emissions Trading System, or ETS, is the world's premier cap-and-trade market.
A proposal to create a similar system in the United States died in Congress this year and prospects for a nationwide cap-and-trade system are all but dead after the Republican Party won November elections.
However, a number of US states have taken action on their own, with California -- the largest state -- setting up its own cap-and-trade system.
Shaun Tandon Yahoo News 8 Dec 10;
CANCUN, Mexico (AFP) – The world's climate negotiators worked Wednesday to turn a growing consensus into concrete progress as talks in Mexico made headway on a range of issues including aid for the poorest countries.
One year after the Copenhagen climate summit ended in widespread disappointment, the United Nations and host Mexico have tried to keep hopes in check by concentrating only on building blocks to a future deal.
With three days to go in the two-week conference, negotiators voiced hope at coming to agreement on three key areas: the architecture of a global climate fund, aid to stop deforestation, and verification of countries' climate pledges.
"I believe an agreement is within reach. But that does not mean that we already have it within our grasp," said Mexican Foreign Secretary Patricia Espinosa, who is guiding the talks at the beach resort of Cancun.
A new draft proposal spelled out the technicalities for setting up a global climate fund to administer assistance to some of the poorest nations that are most vulnerable to global warming.
The European Union, Japan and the United States all pledged before the Copenhagen conference to contribute to a 100 billion-dollar-a-year climate package for poor nations.
In a revision, the text explicitly calls for a role for women in the fight against climate change. But some environmentalists criticized the draft for removing a reference to ensuring that 50 percent of assistance goes toward helping people adapt to climate change.
The omission would allow wealthy nations to meet pledges through other means, such as offering technical know-how to help curb emissions of greenhouse gases blamed for global warming.
"We need to put real meat on the bones and not put things on the sidelines," said David Waskow, climate change program director at Oxfam America.
On the sidelines of the conference, the World Bank announced an initiative to help emerging and developing countries set up cap-and-trade markets, under which companies are restricted from carbon output but can trade credits.
World Bank president Robert Zoellick said that a growing number of countries including China, Chile, Indonesia and Mexico were "actively exploring" setting up such markets, which are now fully developed only in the European Union.
"We are launching this partnership for market readiness to try to share information but also provide some additional financial support," Zoellick said. Australia pledged more than 20 million dollars for the initiative, leading the way on the goal of 100 million dollars in funding.
But the World Bank has long been controversial. Environmental group Friends of the Earth called the World Bank involvement "perverse," saying that carbon markets are "an irreparably flawed means of addressing climate change."
"They further entrench the economic arrangements that facilitate the North's over-consumption and have landed us in this climate crisis in the first place," said Karen Orenstein of Friends of the Earth US.
Despite movement on an array of issues, one major controversy has hung over the talks -- what to do about the Kyoto Protocol, whose commitments to curb greenhouse gas emissions end at the end of 2012.
Faced with the growing likelihood that no new treaty will be in place soon, the European Union has led calls for nations to make another round of pledges post-2012 under the Kyoto treaty.
Japan has led opposition, saying that such an extension is unfair as Kyoto does not cover the two biggest emitters: China, which has no obligations as a developing nation, and the United States, which rejected the treaty in 2001.
But Brazil's climate negotiator, Izabella Teixeira, said she saw "advances" on the Kyoto deadlock, which Mexico had tasked Brazil and Britain with trying to unlock.
Environmentalists following the talks say Canada and Russia have also been against a new Kyoto round, although they were happy to let Japan be the public face of the opposition.
U.N. Climate Talks Seek To Avert Damaging Failure
Robert Campbell, Alister Doyle and Russell Blinch PlanetArk 9 Dec 10;
The world's governments struggled on Wednesday to break a deadlock between rich and poor nations on steps to fight global warming and avert a new, damaging setback after they failed to agree a U.N. treaty last year in Copenhagen.
Several ministers warned that failure at the talks in Cancun, Mexico, could undermine faith in the ability of the United Nations' 194 member states to tackle global problems in the 21st century as power shifts toward emerging nations led by China and India.
"I think that what is at stake here is also multilateralism," said European Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard. "It's absolutely crucial that this process, which is the only one we have ... can prove that it can deliver results."
The talks in this Caribbean beach resort from November 29 to December 10, have more modest ambitions than at Copenhagen last year, but there are still yawning gaps over the future of the Kyoto Protocol for curbing greenhouse gas emissions by rich nations until 2012.
Japan, Canada and Russia say they will not extend the pact unless poorer nations also commit to emissions cuts. Developing nations insist the rich world must lead by setting deeper cuts beyond 2013 before they take on curbs.
"I believe that an ambitious, broad and balanced package is within reach," Mexican Foreign Minister Patricia Espinosa told delegates, looking tired after 10 days of talks. "That does not mean that we already have it in our grasp."
Negotiators want to set up a new fund to help developing countries combat climate change, work out ways to protect tropical forests, help poor nations adapt to climate change and agree a new mechanism to share clean technologies.
MODEST GOALS
Failure to achieve even those modest steps would be a blow after U.S. President Barack Obama and other world leaders could only manage a vague, non-binding deal in Copenhagen in 2009, when many had pinned hopes on a treaty.
"A car crash of a summit is in no one's interest," said Britain's Climate Change Secretary Chris Huhne.
Some countries linked deadlock in Cancun to Obama's failure to pass U.S. legislation to curb climate change. All other industrialized nations have already capped their emissions under the Kyoto Protocol.
"We cannot afford to be held hostage by the political backwardness of one developed country," said Tuvalu's deputy prime minister, Enele Sosene Sopoaga. "This is life and death, a survival issue for Tuvalu," he said of rising sea levels.
Confidence in the U.N. talks has already been hit by Copenhagen, which agreed only a non-binding deal to limit a rise in average world temperatures to below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 F) above pre-industrial times.
Without success in Cancun, faith in the seemingly endless U.N. talks, which require unanimous support for any accords, could wither away.
"I think the U.N. process has real problems, potentially fatal," said Robert Stavins of Harvard University. "Anything under the United Nations tends to polarise developing and industrialized countries."
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged progress toward working out how to raise $100 billion a year in aid from 2020, promised under a 140-nation deal in Copenhagen to help poor nations combat global warming.
"It is not a panacea for the climate problem, but it is crucial for building trust," he said. Draft U.N. texts circulating in Cancun give options both of $100 billion, and a far higher 1.5 percent of rich nations' gross domestic product.
Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg warned developing nations against ignoring the Copenhagen Accord and demanding more. There were risks that some rich nations, facing austerity at home, might simply respond by offering less, he said.
(Editing by Kieran Murray)
Cancun delegates debate climate fund: Who pays?
Charles J. Hanley, Associated Press Yahoo News 9 Dec 10;
CANCUN, Mexico – Should airline passengers pay a small tax to help out? How about global money dealers? Or perhaps governments should take what they spend subsidizing gasoline prices and put it toward the climate cause.
Delegates to the U.N. climate conference hope to agree in its final days on setting up a new "green fund" to help poorer countries grapple with global warming. Then the real arguments will begin — over where the cash will come from.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon stepped into the middle of the debate earlier this year by enlisting a high-level group of international political and financial leaders to offer advice. On Wednesday the U.N. chief presented their ideas to the conference, including airline and foreign-exchange levies, as he led a discussion with key figures on the panel.
It will be "challenging but feasible and doable even in the context of the ongoing economic crisis" to raise $100 billion a year by 2020, as promised by richer nations at last year's climate conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, Ban said.
He said "adequate" financial support would build trust between the developing and developed world, needed to forge an eventual umbrella agreement among all nations to fight climate change.
Besides the green fund, the annual two-week meeting of parties to the 193-nation U.N. climate treaty may also agree on ways to make it easier for poorer nations to obtain patented green technology, and may pin down further elements of a plan to compensate developing nations for protecting their climate-friendly forests.
But once more, as at the Copenhagen summit, negotiators won't produce a sweeping deal to succeed the relatively modest Kyoto Protocol after 2012, one that would slash greenhouse gases to curb climate change.
The U.S. has long refused to join Kyoto, which mandates limited emissions reductions by richer nations, and whose commitments expire in 2012. The U.S. complained the accord would hurt its economy and should have mandated actions as well by such emerging economies as China and India.
Washington's climate envoy, Todd Stern, repeated that position in Cancun on Wednesday, saying the U.S. won't sign up to any legally binding climate pact unless it applies to "all the major countries," including China and India.
Meanwhile, carbon dioxide and other global warming emissions from industry, vehicles and agriculture continue to accumulate in the atmosphere.
The green fund would be considered a key success for Cancun, but many details would remain to be worked out later, and agreement here was far from assured.
The financing would help developing nations buy advanced clean-energy technology to reduce their own emissions, and to adapt to climate change, such as building seawalls against rising seas and upgrading farming practices to compensate for shifting rain patterns.
The debate here zeroed in on the size and sources of the fund.
Behind closed doors, haggling over proposed Cancun decisions, delegates dueled over what developing nations considered an inadequate goal — the $100 billion a year by 2020.
The developing south views such finance not as aid but as compensation for the looming damage from two centuries of northern industrial emissions, and propose that the richer countries commit 1.5 percent of their annual gross domestic product — today roughly $600 billion a year.
Northern delegations resisted such ambitious targets, and also objected to language indicating most of the fund's money should come from direct government contributions.
One of the developing world's own leaders, Ethiopia's Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, defended the north's stand on that point.
In view of the economic crisis, "it is not feasible for most of that money to come through the (government) budgetary process at the moment," Zenawi, a cochairman of the U.N. high-level panel, said in the Ban-led discussion.
In the Cancun talks, northern delegations leaned toward the conclusions of Ban's advisory group as the basis for the inevitably intense debate over funding that will follow any Cancun decision.
The group's final report last month said the greatest contributions should come from private investment and from "carbon pricing," either a direct tax broadly on emissions tonnage from power plants and other industrial sources or a system of auctioning off emissions allowances that could be traded among industrial emitters.
Either route would make it economical for enterprises to minimize emissions, and would produce revenue. Zenawi said his group recommends that at least 90 percent of such revenues flow to domestic budgets and the remainder to the global fund.
The United States has been a major holdout against such carbon pricing plans, however, and the impending Republican takeover of the U.S. House of Representatives all but guarantees none will be enacted for at least two years.
The U.N. advisers also see possible revenue sources in a tax or trading system for fuel emissions of international airliners and merchant ships, or a fee on air tickets, with a potential for $10 billion a year.
They also suggested a possible levy on foreign-exchange transactions, producing possibly another $10 billion, and removal of government subsidies of fossil fuels, with the money redirected to a climate fund.
Fuel subsidies are believed to run into tens of billions of dollars annually worldwide. The U.S. federal government gave $72 billion in subsidies to the fossil fuel industry between 2002 and 2008, says a study by the Environmental Law Institute.
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