Rescue baby civet 拯救小麝猫
from PurpleMangrove
THE GREEN VOLUNTEERS UPDATE (February) with plan to find out who is polluting Sungei Api Api and more, from The Green Volunteers by Grant W.Pereira
Monday Morgue: 21st February 2011
from The Lazy Lizard's Tales
Adianto P. Simamora, The Jakarta Post 20 Feb 11;
Forest fires have ravaged North Sumatra, Jambi and Riau — three of the eight provinces most vulnerable to forest fires — in the last three days with fires spreading to peatland areas in Jambi on Saturday, officials said.
Gusti Nuspansyah, an aide to the environment minister, said the fires had not impacted on economic activities in the three provinces.
“We detected hotspots in the three provinces including the burning of peatland areas in Jambi,” he told The Jakarta Post on Saturday.
There is no immediate data on the number of fires as of Saturday.
Fires in peatlands are difficult to contain because the blazes are located beneath the topsoil.
The fires come on the heels
of an ASEAN environment ministers’ meeting on the potential threat of haze at a two-day summit in
Singapore. The meeting ended Thursday.
Singapore’s weather agency forecast the rainy season to continue until the end of March.
“Given that prediction, the potential of forest fires escalating would be small, at least until March,” Purwasto Sapoprayagi, the head of the Environment Ministry’s forest fire division, told the Post on Saturday. Purwasto attended the Singapore meeting.
The dry season is expected in April, increasing the threat of forest fires.
“However, we have improved our coordination with the 10 most vulnerable provinces. We have also set up community centers in preparation,” Purwasto said.
The provinces most prone to forest fires include North Sumatra, Riau, Jambi, South Sumatra and all provinces in Kalimantan.
Indonesia has for years been dealing with the protracted issue of
forest fires, especially in the dry season, with thick haze often blanketing neighboring Singapore and parts of Malaysia.
The Singaporean and Malaysian governments last October issued letters to Indonesian authorities protesting the thick haze from forest fires.
The Dumai, Riau, environmental agency stated that thick smoke had reduced visibility to less than 1 kilometer Friday.
Agency head Basri told Antara news agency that the thick smoke irritated the eyes.
The Riau weather agency said it had recorded 80 hotspots across Sumatra as of Wednesday.
“The 80 hotspots are spread across Riau, North Sumatra, South Sumatra and Jambi,” Riau Geophysics, Climatology and Meteorology (BMKG) head Marzuki said.
In Riau itself, the agency said, there were 39 hotpots located in all regencies.
The Environment Ministry called on local councilors in vulnerable provinces to deliberate bylaws prohibiting the burning of forests. Only three provinces — Central Kalimantan, West Kalimantan and Riau — have bylaws banning people from starting fires in forests.
Fidelis E. Satriastanti & Antara Jakarta Globe 21 Feb 11;
An expert from the Environment Ministry has called on regional authorities and political parties to draw up provincial bylaws to ban the use of fire for land clearing purposes as a way of reducing haze and saving forests.
Gusti Nurpansyah, an expert at the ministry, said only three provinces — Central Kalimantan, West Kalimantan and Riau — had haze regulations in place so far, while the majority of forest fires annually hitting the country at the end of the rainy season burn across Sumatra, the Indonesian part of Borneo island and Papua.
“Political parties and local governments need to take the initiative and draw up regional regulations banning the burning of land and forests,” Gusti said over the weekend.
He added that such regulations would help reduce the number of yearly returning hotspots and curb the emission of greenhouse gasses.
Central Kalimantan, he said, was one of the provinces that had managed to reduce the number of its hotspots by up to 65 percent.
Meanwhile, in Dumai city, Riau, haze — suspected to be coming from forest fires — had begun to appear on Friday.
The head of Dumai’s Environmental Agency, Basri, said the haze was beginning to pose a threat to health and transportation in the region.
“We are asking drivers to be careful in the streets and turn on their lights to prevent any accidents because we estimate visibility to be under one kilometer now,” Basri said.
The Environment Ministry is still struggling to get the country to ratify the Agreement on Transboundary Haze Pollution.
The agreement was drawn up by countries around the region in 2002 in response to the widespread wildfires in Sumatra and Kalimantan that sent a thick haze into the skies for months in the mid-1980s and late 1990s.
The worst haze was in the late 1990s, with thick smog blanketing the sky over Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand for months.
Indonesia is the only member country of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations that has yet to ratify the pact, with the House of Representatives objecting in 2008, saying it threatened the country’s sovereignty.
The Environment Ministry said last month that the agreement could pave the way for more carbon trading projects because Indonesia would have more forested area to leverage in carbon-trading negotiations with other countries. That would only work if the fires could be prevented, though.
The central government has already broadly outlawed the burning of forests, but enforcement of the law has been weak because of manpower and financial constraints.
Antara 20 Feb 11;
Gorontalo, N Sulawesi (ANTARA News) - Mangrove forests in Tomini Bay areas, covering Gorontalo, North Sulawesi and Central Sulawesi, are going to vanish by 2038, an activist said here Sunday.
"Mangrove forests will disappear if they are not conserved under government strict policy and local regulations," Rahman Dako, coordinator of Tomini Bay Sustainable Coastal Livelihood and Management (SUSCLAM) said here Sunday.
He said the mangrove forests in Tomini Bay had been decreasing significantly. Based on a field survey, the mangrove forests in Tomini bay covered 21,122.41 hectares, and reduced by 6,550.20 hectares from the total of 27,672.61 hectares.
The largest reduction was in Parigi Moutong district in Central Sulawesi (4,857.77 hectares) , and the second largest in Pohuwato district in Gorontalo (4,315.87 hectares), and Boalemo district was the third (1,451.80 hectares).
The rate of mangrove deforestation in the last 20 years reached 578.36 hectares per year, or 2.09 percent per year.
"The extent is equal to 826 times of a football field," he said.
He added, about 93.26 percent of the main cause of the mangrove deforestation was the exposure of big farm land the hunt for materials. Mangrove was a kind of shrubs resistant to abrasion and home for many sea birds.(*)
Editor: Ruslan
Prithvijit Mitra The Times of India 21 Feb 11;
KOLKATA: Is the Sunderbans turning denser than ever before, making it difficult for tigers to hunt? A yearlong study by researchers indicates that the mangroves have indeed turned thicker due to the proliferation of species which are dense, making it difficult for animals to penetrate them easily. It might be a reason why tigers in the forest are losing weight and could even have contributed to their leaner look, according to the study done by a team from Jadavpur University's School of Oceanography.
While studying the salinity of water in the rivers of the mangrove forest, researchers found that the mangroves in the core area appeared denser. A scrutiny revealed that two species which are particularly dense avicennia marina and avicennia alba have multiplied in areas like Satjelia in the south and the entire western side of the forest from Namkhana to Kalas. These are within the core area where tiger population is believed to be among the highest in the forest and have recorded frequent straying over the last two years. About 15-cm long and 5-cm wide, the dark green leaves of these shrubs grow very close and make movement through very them difficult. "These are about 20% thicker than the other major mangrove variety. It's difficult to spot prey animals and hunt them down through these shrubs. This could be one of the major reasons why tigers have been finding it difficult to procure food easily in the forest. But this is an assumption since we haven't yet done enough study on tigers to conclude that their physical appearance has changed due to geographical factors," said Pranabesh Sanyal, member of the research team and former director of Sunderbans Tiger Reserve (STR).
Studies are, however, on to co-relate the weight and size of Sunderbans tigers to alteration in the nature of mangroves. While the average weight of an adult male should be around 180 kg, straying Sunderbans tigers have been found to weigh only around 100 kg. A minimum of six tigers need to be observed and studied to draw a definite conclusion. So far, five have been studied.
"We are on the verge of what could be a significant finding. Whatever be the other reasons, geographical factors are indeed responsible for tigers straying so frequently. And perhaps, even for their shrinking size," said a member.
There are others who feel that thicker mangroves could have just a marginal impact on tigers in terms of either hunting or their physical appearance. "It's physical stress due to food shortage that could be a bigger cause. And an inadequate prey base seems to be a more logical reason. A lower body weight is more likely to be the fallout of hunger than anything else. Size can't shrink in 20-30 years. This is the period when the forest has got reduced in size and prey animals have been dwindling," said Gautam Sen, oceanographer.
While dense mangroves could be a cause of worry, there was also good news for the fragile ecological system. Fiddler crabs have been found to be acting as a fertiliser, enriching the soil composition.
B. Aravind Kumar The Hindu 21 Feb 11;
Navin Srinivas, software professional and a volunteer on a night patrol last week along the Injambakkam beach, found a female turtle dead with its belly open. Closer to the city, a young volunteer for Students' Sea Turtle Conservation Network (SSTCN), found a few dead hatchlings near Elliots beach.
The two incidents are typical of the causes of the death of Olive Ridley Sea Turtles that visit the city's beaches every year for nesting - the fishing nets that offer no escape for the turtles and the city lighting that lures turtle hatchlings into getting trapped in debris.
“The mortality rate is a cause of concern,” says Akila Balu, co-ordinator, SSTCN. To identify the nests and incubate the eggs in hatcheries, the student volunteers are patrolling the beaches from Besant Nagar to Neelangarai, in two shifts, every night and early morning.
At the beginning of the nesting season, Chief Wildlife Warden R. Sundararaju ordered the switching off of mast lights to prevent hatchlings from wandering towards the city instead of the sea. SSTCN volunteers have found over 50 nests this season and.
Tree Foundation, an NGO that operates through its Sea Turtle Protection Force comprising mainly of youth from the fishing communities from Neelankarai to Marakkanam, has buried about 80 sea turtles this season and is incubating over 80 nests in its hatcheries, says Supraja Dharini, chairperson, Tree Foundation.
As the beach profile this year is steep, fishermen have noticed turtles returning to the sea without nesting. A study by Salim Ali Centre for Ornithology and Natural History (SACON) has revealed that the density of nests has come down from 100 a kilometre to 10 nests in a kilometre over the years. In parts of the State's southern coast, sea turtles have become locally extinct, says Ms. Akila.
“The trawlers should have Turtle Excluder Devices (TEDs) to enable the turtles caught in the fishing nets to escape to safety,” says Ms. Dharini. TEDs cost Rs 15,000 each. Ms. Akila says the Fisheries Department has to effectively monitor the use of TED nets by the fishermen as they might not use it due to loss of a percentage of catch.
The Forest Department and Fisheries Department are exploring the possibility of compensating the fishermen on the lines of the model adopted in Gujarat wherein they will lift their nets every hour to release sea turtles caught in them. Usually, the nets are submerged for three to four hours and the sea turtles which have to come up to the surface once every 45 minutes for breathing, get trapped and die.
Marking the location with GPS, the fishermen could use their mobile cameras to shoot pictures of the turtle in the net and of it being released to claim compensation. “The framework is being worked out. A proposal will be submitted,” said a senior Forest Department official.
Cities across the continent are growing at an unprecedented pace, creating new environmental challenges
Umesh Pandey Bangkok Post 21 Feb 11;
SINGAPORE : Asia is set to witness a sharp increase in the number of urban dwellers, something that governments must take into consideration in their city planning.
"Asian cities can make a difference to a greener planet, because more than 1 billion people are expected to be added to the various cities across the region in the near future," says Barbara Kux, the chief sustainability officer and a board member at Siemens AG.
China alone, which has been growing at breakneck speed over the past decade, will see more than 100 additional cities with a million residents or more.
"Asia, therefore, can plan its green cities going into the future, as most of these new cities that are yet to come are still in the planning stage," says Ms Kux. "Urbanisation in Asia is a mega-trend, and this is now non-reversible."
But what is needed is a good balance between urbanisation and sustainability, something that can be better achieved through the use of technology.
Ms Kux says that if the right technology is used, greenhouse gas emissions can be reduced by anywhere from 30-40%.
"These technologies are available in the market, and each city could learn from the others," she says.
Better planning might gain greater acceptance if governments realised that 90% of the global population will live in urban areas by 2030 and that even today cities consume 75% of the global energy supply and emit 80% of greenhouse gases.
This Asian surge and good planning for it are therefore of paramount importance to the future of the planet, says Jan Friederich, chief researcher for the Asia Green City Index, a newly launched index that measures the environmental conditions of various cities on the continent.
Mr Friederich, who is also a senior consultant with the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), says good planning can help governments better manage their limited resources. More than 100,000 people are added to Asian cities each day, and if planning is not done well in advance, problems could appear.
He says the number of cities with more than 1 million population is rising dramatically, and 194 of the 387 that exist globally now are in Asia.
"To meet the challenges of the future, Asian cities need to deploy the technological innovations that would be the key for the future," he says.
Technical innovation is the key for Asian cities to find and pursue the best path towards a future that is both climate-friendly and worth living in, says Mr Friederich.
Technologies for transmitting electricity more effectively, using energy more economically and moving people more efficiently are crucial to making cities more sustainable.
Most of the global population growth in the next decade will take place in Asian cities. As these become transformed at a breathtaking pace, they will need to tap the best ideas available to ensure they remain viable.
Ms Kux says Siemens believes a comparative approach is the most effective way to highlight where things are going well and where there is room for improvement.
About a year ago, Siemens commissioned the EIU to conduct a study of urban development in Asia. The resulting Asian Green City Index carefully evaluates 22 major cities throughout the continent based on almost 30 environmental sustainability criteria.
The index supports cities in their efforts to expand their infrastructures sustainably in order to enable Asia's up-and-coming urban centres to achieve healthy growth rates coupled with a high quality of life.
The study also found that one Asian city in particular has been especially successful in pursuing ambitious environmental targets, effectively implementing environmental policies and integrating master planning _ Singapore, considered Asia's greenest city.
The trend toward urbanisation, above all here in Asia, raises questions of how soaring populations can be provided with infrastructure that conserves resources and protects the climate, an unprecedented challenge for Asia.
The proportion of Asians living in urban areas grew from 32% in 1990 to 42% last year. At this rate, Asian cities must be ready to accommodate an additional 1.1 billion residents over the next 20 years.
Yahoo News 21 Feb 11;
WELLINGTON (AFP) – More than 100 pilot whales died in a mass stranding at a remote New Zealand beach, conservation officials said Monday.
Hikers on Sunday reported finding 107 whales beached on Stewart Island, off the South Island's southwest coast, a Department of Conservation (DoC) spokesman said.
He said some of the whales were already dead and DOC rangers had to euthanise the 48 remaining survivors as there was no prospect of refloating them.
"We were quickly aware that it would be at least 10 to 12 hours before we could attempt to refloat them and that given the hot, dry conditions many more would soon perish," he said.
The spokesman said a storm was also bearing down on the beach near Mason Bay where the whales were stranded, making it too dangerous to try to get them back into the sea.
"We were worried we would be endangering the lives of staff and volunteers," he said.
Pilot whales up to six metres (20 feet) long are the most common species of whale seen in New Zealand waters.
Mass strandings are common on the country's rugged coast. Earlier this month, 14 died after beaching near the South Island tourist city of Nelson and 24 perished last month near Cape Reinga in the country's far north.
Scientists are unsure why pilot whales beach themselves, although they speculate it may occur when their sonar becomes scrambled in shallow water or when a sick member of the pod heads for shore and others follow.
Yahoo News 21 Feb 11;
MAJURO (AFP) – Extreme high tides have flooded parts of the low-lying Marshall Islands capital Majuro with a warning Sunday of worse to come because of rising sea levels.
Several areas of the city were flooded Saturday and forecasters predicted more to come on Sunday evening before the current high tide levels ease.
Flooding of the Marshall Islands atolls, many of which rise less than a metre (three feet) above sea level, will increase in "frequency and magnitude" in the coming years, University of Hawaii marine researcher Murray Ford said.
Ford, who is studying rising sea levels in the Marshall islands, said the weekend's extreme tides of 1.67 metres were exacerbated by La Nina, a weather phenomenon that has caused the base sea level to rise by 15 centimetres (six inches) in recent months.
"As the sea level is temporarily higher as a result of La Nina and overlies long-term sea level rise, the impacts are magnified," Ford said.
"While these events happen only a handful of times a year at present they will continue to increase in both frequency and magnitude."
Ford said a gauge measuring long-term sea level changes at Majuro indicated the "average sea level is more than six inches above predicted" levels.
The Marshall Islands, a collection of coral atolls and islands, announced plans late last year to build a wall to hold back rising sea levels around Majuro which is home to nearly half of the country's 55,000 population.
Overcrowding in the urban centre have forced people to build homes within a couple of metres of the shore, increasing their exposure to flooding during peak tide periods.
Alister Doyle PlanetArk 21 Feb 11;
Strict curbs on soot and ozone air pollution would limit global warming by 0.5 degree Celsius (0.9 F) in a step toward achieving tough world climate goals, a U.N.-backed study showed on Friday.
Stricter limits on "black carbon" soot and tropospheric ozone -- a greenhouse gas that is a big component of smog -- would also clear the air and so reduce human deaths and improve crop yields, especially in Asia, it said.
"Rapid implementation of proven emission reduction measures would have immediate and multiple benefits for human well-being," it said.
Proposed measures include cuts in flaring of natural gas, curbing gas leaks from pipelines and reducing methane emissions from livestock. Poor countries should make wider use of cleaner-burning stoves, and open-field burning of farm waste should be banned.
The study, backed by the U.N. Environment Program, the World Meteorological Organization and the Stockholm Environment Institute, will be reviewed by environment ministers from around the world during a meeting in Nairobi from February 21-25.
Full implementation of proposed measures to clamp down on black carbon and ozone would reduce future global warming by 0.5 degree Celsius (0.9 Fahrenheit), within an estimated range from 0.2 to 0.7 degrees Celsius, the report said.
Almost 200 countries agreed in Cancun, Mexico, in December to limit a rise in world temperatures to below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times, mainly by curbing emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas.
Many studies show that existing pledges for cuts in greenhouse gas emissions are insufficient to reach the 2 degree goal, which is viewed as a threshold to dangerous change from floods, heatwaves, desertification and rising sea levels.
"This is not an alternative to carbon dioxide reductions, it's complementary," Johan Kuylenstierna, of the Stockholm Environment Institute who was scientific coordinator of the report, told Reuters.
The study also estimated that less air pollution could avoid 2.4 million premature human deaths a year and the annual loss of 52 million metric tons, or about 2 percent, of world production of maize, rice, soybean and wheat.
"The most substantial benefits will be felt immediately in or close to the regions where action is taken to reduce emissions, with the greatest health and crop benefits expected in Asia," it said.
Black carbon, caused by incomplete burning mainly of fossil fuels and wood, is blamed for accelerating global warming by soaking up heat from the sun. Soot can darken snow and ice when it lands, hastening a thaw such as in the Arctic or Himalayas.
Ozone is not directly emitted but is produced from precursors including methane and carbon monoxide. The troposphere is the lower atmosphere -- higher up, ozone is beneficial as un ultra-violet sunshield.
Benefit to cutting 'black carbon'
Roger Harrabin BBC News 22 Feb 11;
Cutting atmospheric soot, methane and ground-level ozone is the quickest way to tackle climate change in the short term, according to a new report.
The governing council of the UN Environment Programme (Unep) in Nairobi will hear that reducing these short-lived emissions could reduce warming by half a degree.
And it would be more easily achieved than reducing emissions of the gas principally implicated in long-term climate change, CO2.
It would also have spin-off benefits because soot and ground-level ozone harm human health - and ozone damages crops.
Loss adjustment
The assessment comes from Unep and World Meteorological Organization, in collaboration with a global team of scientists.
Its authors insist that nations must continue to strive to reduce CO2 emissions, which will continue to warm the atmosphere for more than 100 years from the time they are produced.
But it says that using existing technologies and institutions to cut ozone and black carbon (soot) can halve regional warming for 30 to 60 years whilst averting millions of premature deaths and avoiding tens of billions of dollars of crop losses annually.
Black carbon comes from the incomplete combustion of fossil fuels, mostly through diesel engines and biomass burning - including in cook stoves and brick kilns.
It heats the atmosphere directly and also increases warming when particles fall on to snow and ice and reduce their reflectivity.
Ozone in the upper atmosphere protects us from harmful rays. At ground level it is a serious pollutant formed by the action of sunlight on methane, carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds and oxides of nitrogen.
Methane recovery
The report says: "A small number of emission reduction measures targeting black carbon and ozone precursors could immediately begin to protect climate, public health, water and food security, and ecosystems.
"They include the recovery of methane from coal, oil and gas extraction and transport, methane capture in waste management, use of clean-burning stoves for residential cooking, diesel particulate filters for vehicles and the banning of field burning of agricultural waste."
It says the task of reducing these gases needs strategic investment and institutional plans and continues: "The identified measures complement but do not replace anticipated carbon dioxide reduction measures.
"Major CO2 reduction strategies mainly target the energy and large industrial sectors and therefore would not necessarily result in significant reductions in emissions of black carbon or the ozone precursors methane and carbon monoxide.
"Significant reduction of the short-lived climate forcers requires a specific strategy, as many are emitted from a large number of small sources.
It has been known for several years that non-CO2 gases are important short-term climate forcers but the impetus to control them was boosted by a paper in Nature Geoscience in April 2009.
A model by Drew Shindell from Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies suggested that 45% or more of the Arctic warming over the past 30 years was likely to have been caused by black carbon and sulphate aerosol particles.
International strategy
There have been attempts to include short-lived forcing agents into the on-going UN climate talks but although methane is included in the basket of gases to be controlled by rich nations, other ozone precursors and black carbon have been kept out of the talks on the grounds that negotiations are quite complicated enough.
Unep envisages that strategies to tackle the short-lived forcers could be possibly tackled under regional pollution agreements without the need for a global deal.
But some experts still argue that including these pollutants in UN talks would be a benefit.
Dr Mike McCracken, chief scientist for the US NGO The Climate Institute told BBC News: "Most of the emissions on these short-term warming agents are coming from developing countries.
"Most governments want to cut the emissions anyway because of the health of their people and their crops. But because the pollutants aren't included in the climate talks, the developing countries can't get any credit for cutting them.
"We have to credit them in the climate talks for creating a global benefit as well as a regional benefit."
Durwood Zaelke, President of the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development said: "We also have to start now with aggressive cuts in CO2 if we want to win the longer term climate battle. But it's not one or the other - we need to cut both CO2 and the other climate forcing agents.
"This assessment makes clear that cutting CO2 now will not reduce warming in the next 20-30 years. This means passing the 2C level several decades earlier if we don't reduce these local air pollutants."
The latest UNEP initiative runs in parallel with another initiative to use the Montreal Protocol on ozone-depleting substances to phase down hydrofluorocarbons, which are also other powerful climate forcers.
Professor David Fowler from the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Midlothian told BBC News that the role of ground level ozone was particularly pernicious as ozone pollution was slowing the growth of plants which would otherwise be absorbing CO2 emissions.
"Many countries have introduced controls for the ozone precursors. These have helped knock the peaks off ozone concentrations in the UK, but during the last 20 years the tropospheric background ozone has been growing steadily...and is often in the UK spring close to or in excess of values which effect vegetation."
In other words, people and crops in the UK are suffering from ground-level ozone pollution provoked by the emission of gases somewhere else in the northern hemisphere.
"The effects of tropospheric ozone on the carbon cycle are similar in magnitude (in radiative terms) to its effects as a greenhouse gas," Professor Fowler said.
"This background pollution requires hemispheric scale control measures."
Yahoo News 20 Feb 11;
WASHINGTON (AFP) – A growing, more affluent population competing for ever scarcer resources could make for an "unrecognizable" world by 2050, researchers warned at a major US science conference Sunday.
The United Nations has predicted the global population will reach seven billion this year, and climb to nine billion by 2050, "with almost all of the growth occurring in poor countries, particularly Africa and South Asia," said John Bongaarts of the non-profit Population Council.
To feed all those mouths, "we will need to produce as much food in the next 40 years as we have in the last 8,000," said Jason Clay of the World Wildlife Fund at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
"By 2050 we will not have a planet left that is recognizable" if current trends continue, Clay said.
The swelling population will exacerbate problems, such as resource depletion, said John Casterline, director of the Initiative in Population Research at Ohio State University.
But incomes are also expected to rise over the next 40 years -- tripling globally and quintupling in developing nations -- and add more strain to global food supplies.
People tend to move up the food chain as their incomes rise, consuming more meat than they might have when they made less money, the experts said.
It takes around seven pounds (3.4 kilograms) of grain to produce a pound of meat, and around three to four pounds of grain to produce a pound of cheese or eggs, experts told AFP.
"More people, more money, more consumption, but the same planet," Clay told AFP, urging scientists and governments to start making changes now to how food is produced.
Population experts, meanwhile, called for more funding for family planning programs to help control the growth in the number of humans, especially in developing nations.
"For 20 years, there's been very little investment in family planning, but there's a return of interest now, partly because of the environmental factors like global warming and food prices," said Bongaarts.
"We want to minimize population growth, and the only viable way to do that is through more effective family planning," said Casterline.
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