Best of our wild blogs: 29 Jun 17

Pulau Jong is alive!
wild shores of singapore

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Singapore launches S$150m research initiative to improve living environment

Rachel Phua Channel NewsAsia 29 Jun 17;

SINGAPORE: The Ministry of National Development (MND) launched a S$150 million initiative on Thursday (Jun 29) aimed at developing Singapore’s urban planning research capabilities.

The initiative, called the Cities of Tomorrow R&D Programme (CoT), aims to address key challenges facing Singapore such as climate change, ageing infrastructure, resource constraints and demand for space. CoT will support basic research, applied research, and small-scale demonstration projects, the ministry added.

Speaking at the opening of the fourth Urban Sustainability R&D Congress on Thursday, National Development Minister Lawrence Wong said the research under CoT will help Singapore deal with the "increasing complexities" of running a city-state, which require greater coordination and better integration of research efforts.

“We’re also looking for research that can be translated from the lab to real-world deployment … so as to reap tangible social and economic benefits,” he added.

Funding for the project will come from the S$900 million allocated to the Urban Solutions and Sustainability sector under the S$19 billion Research, Innovation and Enterprise 2020 plan announced last year.

The programme will be a multi-agency effort led by MND, and focus on six research areas: Advanced construction, resilient infrastructure, new spaces, greater sustainability, urban environment analytics and complexity science for urban solutions.

For example, under the "new spaces" theme, researchers can look at how to develop tools to improve underground mapping accuracy or reduce the cost of developing underground. They can also look at how to move functions such as utilities, warehousing and storage facilities underground in order to free up surface land for other activities.

At the congress, the Housing and Development Board will also sign a Memorandum of Understanding with Imperial College London and A*STAR’s Institute for Infocomm Research.

They will collaborate on a research project to expand the capabilities of sensor networks, strengthen the use of analytics and predictive modelling for better planning and resource optimisation in an urban environment, optimise estate maintenance and enhance the quality of the living environment, MND said.

S$150m set aside to create ‘Cities of Tomorrow’: Lawrence Wong
NEO CHAI CHIN Today Online 29 Jun 17;

Singapore – The Government will set aside S$150 million to conduct research and development on construction and infrastructure, and create new spaces and a more resource-efficient living environment integrated with nature.

Announcing the new initiative called the Cities of Tomorrow on Thursday (June 29), Minister for National Development Lawrence Wong said the S$150 million kitty will come from the S$900 million set aside for Urban Solutions and Sustainability under Singapore's Research Innovation and Enterprise 2020 plan. Announced last year, the plan sets aside S$19 billion to drive innovation in Singapore's economy and society.

Firstly, research and development (R&D) on advanced construction and resilient infrastructure will boost construction productivity and use smart technologies to maintain buildings well, said Mr Wong, who was speaking at the Urban Sustainability R&D Congress organised by his ministry with 16 government agencies, involving more than 1,000 participants from government, research institutes and the private sector.

For example, the Housing and Development Board is looking at ways to move towards a more predictive and proactive approach to maintain towns and estates, using sensors, the Internet of Things and big data. It will sign a memorandum of understanding with Imperial College London and the Agency for Science, Technology and Research for its project.

Secondly, research into new spaces aims to create more usable underground and sea space in a cost-effective and environmentally sensitive way.

Singapore's priority is to move functions like utilities, warehousing and storage facilities underground to free up more land on the surface. Safety is a key aspect, and research is being done by JTC and Nanyang Technological University on life and structural fire safety of underground caverns.

The third key R&D area of the Cities of Tomorrow programme will be on building a more sustainable city. Research will delve into ways to enable residents to interact closely with greenery, and live in a cooler and quieter environment.

For example, the Building and Construction Authority and National University of Singapore are working on nanocomposite films that can convert heat to energy for more effective indoor cooling in the tropics while improving air quality.

Cities of Tomorrow will enable Singapore to deal with the increasing complexities of running a city state, said Mr Wong. This requires greater coordination and better integration of research efforts to reap synergies, he said.

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Cambodia conservationists find rare cache of crocodile eggs

Associated Press Yahoo News 28 Jun 17;

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia (AP) — Wildlife researchers in Cambodia say they've found a clutch of eggs from one of the world's most endangered crocodiles, raising hopes of its continuing survival in the wild.

The New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society said in a statement Wednesday that its researchers, along with Fisheries Administration employees and local residents, found six eggs of the Siamese Crocodile in Sre Ambel District in the southern province of Koh Kong as they were exploring for tracks, signs and dung of the reptile. It said it was the first Siamese Crocodile nest recorded in six years of research and protection in the Sre Ambel area.

The group says the crocodile, with an estimated global population of around 410, is found only in Cambodia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam, with the greatest number in Cambodia. The species is listed as critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature because its numbers are rapidly shrinking

"To avoid any threats, we moved the eggs to a safe place to hatch and track their progress," the statement quoted In Hul, a staff member of the Fisheries Administration, as saying.

Such threats, said the statement, "include illegal hunting of adults and hatchlings and collecting of eggs to supply crocodile farms in Cambodia and Thailand, especially during the last two decades."

Other threats include the "degradation of habitats, decrease of natural food, low chance of breeding in the wild due to low number of individuals in the wild and weak law enforcement such as regulations on crocodile farming and trading."

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A million bottles a minute: world's plastic binge 'as dangerous as climate change'

Annual consumption of plastic bottles is set to top half a trillion by 2021, far outstripping recycling efforts and jeopardising oceans, coastlines and other environments
Sandra Laville and Matthew Taylor The Guardian 28 Jun 17;

A million plastic bottles are bought around the world every minute and the number will jump another 20% by 2021, creating an environmental crisis some campaigners predict will be as serious as climate change.

New figures obtained by the Guardian reveal the surge in usage of plastic bottles, more than half a trillion of which will be sold annually by the end of the decade.

The demand, equivalent to about 20,000 bottles being bought every second, is driven by an apparently insatiable desire for bottled water and the spread of a western, urbanised “on the go” culture to China and the Asia Pacific region.

More than 480bn plastic drinking bottles were sold in 2016 across the world, up from about 300bn a decade ago. If placed end to end, they would extend more than halfway to the sun. By 2021 this will increase to 583.3bn, according to the most up-to-date estimates from Euromonitor International’s global packaging trends report.

Most plastic bottles used for soft drinks and water are made from polyethylene terephthalate (Pet), which is highly recyclable. But as their use soars across the globe, efforts to collect and recycle the bottles to keep them from polluting the oceans, are failing to keep up.

Fewer than half of the bottles bought in 2016 were collected for recycling and just 7% of those collected were turned into new bottles. Instead most plastic bottles produced end up in landfill or in the ocean.

Between 5m and 13m tonnes of plastic leaks into the world’s oceans each year to be ingested by sea birds, fish and other organisms, and by 2050 the ocean will contain more plastic by weight than fish, according to research by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.

Experts warn that some of it is already finding its way into the human food chain.

Scientists at Ghent University in Belgium recently calculated people who eat seafood ingest up to 11,000 tiny pieces of plastic every year. Last August, the results of a study by Plymouth University reported plastic was found in a third of UK-caught fish, including cod, haddock, mackerel and shellfish. Last year, the European Food Safety Authority called for urgent research, citing increasing concern for human health and food safety “given the potential for microplastic pollution in edible tissues of commercial fish”.

Dame Ellen MacArthur, the round the world yachtswoman, now campaigns to promote a circular economy in which plastic bottles are reused, refilled and recycled rather than used once and thrown away.

“Shifting to a real circular economy for plastics is a massive opportunity to close the loop, save billions of dollars, and decouple plastics production from fossil fuel consumption,” she said.

Hugo Tagholm, of the marine conservation and campaigning group Surfers Against Sewage, said the figures were devastating. “The plastic pollution crisis rivals the threat of climate change as it pollutes every natural system and an increasing number of organisms on planet Earth.

“Current science shows that plastics cannot be usefully assimilated into the food chain. Where they are ingested they carry toxins that work their way on to our dinner plates.” Surfers Against Sewage are campaigning for a refundable deposit scheme to be introduced in the UK as a way of encouraging reuse.

Tagholm added: “Whilst the production of throwaway plastics has grown dramatically over the last 20 years, the systems to contain, control, reuse and recycle them just haven’t kept pace.”

In the UK 38.5m plastic bottles are used every day – only just over half make it to recycling, while more than 16m are put into landfill, burnt or leak into the environment and oceans each day.

“Plastic production is set to double in the next 20 years and quadruple by 2050 so the time to act is now,” said Tagholm.

There has been growing concern about the impact of plastics pollution in oceans around the world. Last month scientists found nearly 18 tonnes of plastic on one of the world’s most remote islands, an uninhabited coral atoll in the South Pacific.

Another study of remote Arctic beaches found they were also heavily polluted with plastic, despite small local populations. And earlier this week scientists warned that plastic bottles and other packaging are overrunning some of the UK’s most beautiful beaches and remote coastline, endangering wildlife from basking sharks to puffins.

The majority of plastic bottles used across the globe are for drinking water, , according to Rosemary Downey, head of packaging at Euromonitor and one of the world’s experts in plastic bottle production.

China is responsible for most of the increase in demand. The Chinese public’s consumption of bottled water accounted for nearly a quarter of global demand, she said.

“It is a critical country to understand when examining global sales of plastic Pet bottles, and China’s requirement for plastic bottles continues to expand,” said Downey.

In 2015, consumers in China purchased 68.4bn bottles of water and in 2016 this increased to 73.8bn bottles, up 5.4bn.

A worker sorts plastic bottles at a recycling centre on the outskirts of Wuhan, Hubei province, China
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A worker sorts plastic bottles at a recycling centre on the outskirts of Wuhan, Hubei province, China. Photograph: Jie Zhao/Corbis/Getty Images
“This increase is being driven by increased urbanisation,” said Downey. “There is a desire for healthy living and there are ongoing concerns about groundwater contamination and the quality of tap water, which all contribute to the increase in bottle water use,” she said. India and Indonesia are also witnessing strong growth.

Plastic bottles are a big part of the huge surge in usage of a material first popularised in the 1940s. Most of the plastic produced since then still exists; the petrochemical-based compound takes hundreds of years to decompose.

Plastic population

Major drinks brands produce the greatest numbers of plastic bottles. Coca-Cola produces more than 100bn throwaway plastic bottles every year – or 3,400 a second, according to analysis carried out by Greenpeace after the company refused to publicly disclose its global plastic usage. The top six drinks companies in the world use a combined average of just 6.6% of recycled Pet in their products, according to Greenpeace. A third have no targets to increase their use of recycled plastic and none are aiming to use 100% across their global production.

Plastic drinking bottles could be made out of 100% recycled plastic, known as RPet – and campaigners are pressing big drinks companies to radically increase the amount of recycled plastic in their bottles. But brands are hostile to using RPet for cosmetic reasons because they want their products in shiny, clear plastic, according to Steve Morgan, of Recoup in the UK.

In evidence to a House of Commons committee, the British Plastics Federation (BPF), a plastics trade body, admitted that making bottles out of 100% recycled plastic used 75% less energy than creating virgin plastic bottles. But the BPF said that brands should not be forced to increase the recycled content of bottles. “The recycled content ... can be up to 100%, however this is a decision made by brands based on a variety of factors,” said Philip Law, director general of the BPF.

The industry is also resisting any taxes or charges to reduce demand for single-use plastic bottles – like the 5p charge on plastic bags that is credited with reducing plastic bag use by 80%.

Coca Cola said it was still considering requests from Greenpeace to publish its global plastics usage. A spokeswoman said: “Globally, we continue to increase the use of recycled plastic in countries where it is feasible and permitted. We continue to increase the use of RPet in markets where it is feasible and approved for regulatory food-grade use – 44 countries of the more than 200 we operate in.”

She agreed plastic bottles could be made out of 100 percent recycled plastic but there was nowhere near enough high quality food grade plastic available on the scale that was needed to increase the quantity of rPET to that level.

“So if we are to increase the amount of recycled plastic in our bottles even further then a new approach is needed to create a circular economy for plastic bottles,” she said.

Greenpeace said the big six drinks companies had to do more to increase the recycled content of their plastic bottles. “During Greenpeace’s recent expedition exploring plastic pollution on remote Scottish coastlines, we found plastic bottles nearly everywhere we went,” said Louisa Casson, oceans campaigner for Greenpeace.

“It’s clear that the soft drinks industry needs to reduce its plastic footprint.”

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World has three years left to stop dangerous climate change, warn experts

Former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres among signatories of letter warning that the next three years will be crucial to stopping the worst effects of global warming
Fiona Harvey The Guardian 28 Jun 17;

Avoiding dangerous levels of climate change is still just about possible, but will require unprecedented effort and coordination from governments, businesses, citizens and scientists in the next three years, a group of prominent experts has warned.

Warnings over global warming have picked up pace in recent months, even as the political environment has grown chilly with Donald Trump’s formal announcement of the US’s withdrawal from the Paris agreement. This year’s weather has beaten high temperature records in some regions, and 2014, 2015 and 2016 were the hottest years on record.

But while temperatures have risen, global carbon dioxide emissions have stayed broadly flat for the past three years. This gives hope that the worst effects of climate change – devastating droughts, floods, heatwaves and irreversible sea level rises – may be avoided, according to a letter published in the journal Nature this week.

The authors, including former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres and Hans Joachim Schellnhuber of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, argue that the next three years will be crucial. They calculate that if emissions can be brought permanently lower by 2020 then the temperature thresholds leading to runaway irreversible climate change will not be breached.

Figueres, the executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, under whom the Paris agreement was signed, said: “We stand at the doorway of being able to bend the emissions curve downwards by 2020, as science demands, in protection of the UN sustainable development goals, and in particular the eradication of extreme poverty. This monumental challenge coincides with an unprecedented openness to self-challenge on the part of sub-national governments inside the US, governments at all levels outside the US, and of the private sector in general. The opportunity given to us over the next three years is unique in history.”

Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, added: “The maths is brutally clear: while the world can’t be healed within the next few years, it may be fatally wounded by negligence [before] 2020.”

Scientists have been warning that time is fast running out to stave off the worst effects of warming, and some milestones may have slipped out of reach. In the Paris agreement, governments pledged an “aspirational” goal of holding warming to no more than 1.5C, a level which it is hoped will spare most of the world’s lowest-lying islands from inundation. But a growing body of research has suggested this is fast becoming impossible.

Paris’s less stringent, but firmer, goal of preventing warming from exceeding 2C above pre-industrial levels is also in doubt.

The authors point to signs that the trend of upward emissions is being reversed, and to technological progress that promises lower emissions for the future. Renewable energy use has soared, creating a foundation for permanently lowering emissions. Coal use is showing clear signs of decline in key regions, including China and India. Governments, despite Trump’s pronouncements, are forging ahead with plans to reduce greenhouse gases.

The authors called for political and business leaders to continue tackling emissions and meeting the Paris goals without the US. “As before Paris, we must remember that impossible is not a fact, it’s an attitude,” they wrote.

They set out six goals for 2020 which they said could be adopted at the G20 meeting in Hamburg on 7-8 July. These include increasing renewable energy to 30% of electricity use; plans from leading cities and states to decarbonise by 2050; 15% of new vehicles sold to be electric; and reforms to land use, agriculture, heavy industry and the finance sector, to encourage green growth.

Prof Gail Whiteman said the signs from technical innovation and economics were encouraging: “Climate science underlines the unavoidable urgency of our challenge, but equally important is the fact that the economic, technical and social analyses show that we can resoundingly rise to the challenge through collective action.”

While the greenhouse gases poured into the atmosphere over the last two centuries have only gradually taken effect, future changes are likely to be faster, scientists fear. Johan Rockström of the Stockholm Resilience Centre said: “We have been blessed by a remarkably resilient planet over the past 100 years, able to absorb most of our climate abuse. Now we have reached the end of this era, and need to bend the global curve of emissions immediately, to avoid unmanageable outcomes for our modern world.”

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