Best of our wild blogs: 23 Nov 18

[Spotlight on IYOR Interns!] Our Seas, Our Legacy by Nathaniel Soon
Celebrating Singapore Shores!

Beneath tide, Running forest Exhibition 24 Nov 2018 - Apr 2019
Celebrating Singapore Shores!

Unveiling the world of mushroom
Love our MacRitchie Forest

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Lost villages of Pulau Ubin

Armed with only his mother’s photographs and directions from an old friend, Mr Syazwan Majid goes in search of an abandoned village where his grandparents used to live.
Rachel Quek and Toh Ting Wei Straits Times 21 Nov 18;

SINGAPORE - Mr Syazwan Majid grew up listening to his mother reminisce about her lost kampung in Pulau Ubin.

"It was like a broken record," the 22-year-old full-time national serviceman said.

But the repeated stories gradually piqued his curiosity in both the island and his family's heritage.

Mr Syazwan began to wonder if his family's old house was still standing in Ubin, since the island had yet to undergo a large-scale development.

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Malaysia: Resilient black panther dies after accident on LPT2

FITRI NIZAM, Rosli Ilham New Straits Times 22 Nov 18;

DUNGUN: A black panther sustained injuries and later on died, after it was hit by a car along the East Coast Expressway (LPT2) near Bukit Besi at about 6.30pm yesterday.

Nazaiwadi Mohamed who was driving at the time, hit the animal after failing to avoid it.

"The panther looked like it flew over the divider before falling on the hood of my car," he said.

During the incident, Nazaiwadi was heading home to Kampung Raja Besut from the Kuala Dungun toll plaza.

"I got out of my car to help the animal but it got up and tried to attack me," the 32-year-old project manager said, adding that out of fear, he went back into his vehicle.

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Indonesia: Plastic waste pollution serious - Minister

Antara 22 Nov 18;

Jakarta (ANTARA News) - Noting that plastic waste in the archipelago`s sea have serious consequences for the nation, Minister of Maritime Affairs and Fisheries Susi Pudjiastuti stated all parties should work to resolve the matter.

"Marine debris is creating massive problems for humankind," the minister said in a press conference in Jakarta, Thursday.

The ministry has carried out all the necessary measures to its maximum capability, including by continuously campaigning about it, she remarked.

For example, the Directorate General of Marine Space Management of the ministry has distributed nets to be set up over a number of river estuaries so the waste materials do not flow into the open ocean through the river, she stressed.

Even though the regulation to ban the use of plastic does not come under the purview of the ministry, she reiterated her support and encouragement to the various local governments to issue rules relating to this matter.

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Climate-heating greenhouse gases at record levels, says UN

Carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide are far above pre-industrial levels
Damian Carrington The Guardian 22 Nov 18;

The main greenhouse gas emissions driving climate change have all reached record levels, the UN’s meteorology experts have reported.

Carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide are now far above pre-industrial levels, with no sign of a reversal of the upward trend, a World Meteorological Organization report says.

“The last time the Earth experienced a comparable concentration of CO2 was 3-5m years ago, when the temperature was 2-3C warmer and sea level was 10-20 metres higher than now,” said the WMO secretary general, Petteri Taalas.

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UCI and Singapore researchers find source of 2015 Southeast Asia smoke cloud

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - IRVINE EurekAlert 19 Nov 18;

Irvine, Calif. - Smoke from widespread fires in Indonesia in the summer and fall of 2015 hung heavily over major urban centers in Southeast Asia, causing adverse health effects for millions of people. The afflicted could not have known that the polluted air they were breathing contained carbon from plants that were alive during the Middle Ages.

During the prolonged conflagration, which was triggered by an El Nino-driven drought, scientists collected smoke particles on the campus of the National University of Singapore and sent the samples to their colleagues at the University of California, Irvine. UCI's researchers dated the isotopes of the particles' carbon atoms, finding them to have an average age of 800 years.

Combining this analysis with atmospheric modeling of the wind-driven movement of smoke plumes in fall 2015, the team sleuthed out the source of the harmful cloud: smoldering peat on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra. The findings were published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Our research shows that almost all of the smoke emissions originated from the burning of Holocene-aged peat," said first author Elizabeth Wiggins, a postdoctoral research fellow at NASA's Langley Research Center who led the study as a Ph.D. candidate in Earth system science at UCI, graduating in 2018. "Although this peat has functioned as a massive terrestrial carbon storage reservoir over the last several thousand years, it is now a significant source of carbon to the atmosphere."

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Singapore, Netherlands ink environment and water management agreement

Junn Loh Channel NewsAsia 21 Nov 18;

AMSTERDAM: Singapore and the Netherlands on Wednesday (Nov 21) signed an agreement to enhance cooperation on environmental and water management.

This is the first time the two countries are signing a memorandum of understanding in the area of both environment and water.

Apart from aiming to facilitate knowledge exchange and expertise in the area of water management, the deal will look to support industry efforts to develop technologies and capabilities in water production, including through joint implementation of demonstration projects between the private and public sectors.

It also focuses on enhancing capabilities in four areas: Integrated water resource management, circular economy, climate change, and pollution prevention and control.

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Indonesia: Rising environmental concern over plastic waste polluting Indonesian seas

Fardah Assegaf Antara 20 Nov 18;

Jakarta, (ANTARA News) - The carcass of a 9.5-meter-long sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus) washed ashore the Kapota isle, Wakatobi District, Southeast Sulawesi, on November 19, 2018.

Researchers of the Wakatobi Fisheries and Maritime Community Academy were shocked to find 5.9 kilograms of plastic waste in the whale`s stomach, including flip-flops and 115 drinking cups.

The giant mammal had ingested 750 grams of 115 plastic cups, 140 grams of 19 hard plastic, 150 grams of four plastic bottles, 260 grams of 25 plastic bags, six pieces of wood weighing 740 grams, two flip-flops of 270 grams, a 200-gram nylon sack, and over a thousand pieces of raffia string weighing 3,260 grams, Laode Ahyar, an official of the Wakatobi National Park, informed an Antara correspondent in Kendari, Southeast Sulawesi, on November 20, 2018.

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Surge in marine refuges brings world close to protected areas goal

Reserves cover more than five times area of US, says report, but enforcement is often poor
Jonathan Watts The Guardian 19 Nov 18;

A record surge in the creation of marine protected areas has taken the international community close to its goal of creating nature refuges on 17% of the world’s land and 10% of seas by 2020, according to a new UN report.

Protected regions now cover more than five times the territory of the US, but the authors said this good news was often undermined by poor enforcement. Some reserves are little more than “paper parks” with little value to nature conservation. At least one has been turned into an industrial zone.

More than 27m square kilometres of seas (7% of the total) and 20m sq km of land (15% of the total) now have protected status, according to the Protected Planet report, which was released on Sunday at the UN biodiversity conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt.

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Tharman: Collective leadership needed on sustainability

Chang Ai-Lien Straits Times 20 Nov 18;

The widespread adoption by the corporate sector of sustainable practices will not come automatically, or quickly enough, if this is left entirely to market forces, said Deputy Prime Minister and Coordinating Minister for Economic and Social Policies Tharman Shanmugaratnam last night.

The companies that have moved beyond the rhetoric of sustainability, to actually alter business models and practices, are in the minority everywhere in the world, he pointed out.

There are two realities to contend with in virtually all economies, he said. One is short-termism - the trade-off between short-term returns, which drive many shareholder decisions, and long-term impact. The second is the trade-off between shareholder returns and those of all stakeholders in society.

"If we wait for markets to provide the incentives, we will lose a critical window of opportunity to address the looming challenges of climate change, depletion of natural resources and loss of biodiversity - all of which will threaten the next generation.

"This is why governments and regulatory bodies need to step in to implement policies that will incentivise sustainable practices; why all countries have to move together; and why there is a critical role for collective leadership through international and multilateral organisations."

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Indonesia: Dead whale had 115 plastic cups, 2 flip-flops in its stomach

Associated Press 20 Nov 18;

JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) — A dead whale that washed ashore in eastern Indonesia had a large lump of plastic waste in its stomach, including drinking cups and flip-flops, a park official said Tuesday, causing concern among environmentalists and government officials in one of the world’s largest plastic polluting countries.

Rescuers from Wakatobi National Park found the rotting carcass of the 9.5-meter (31-foot) sperm whale late Monday near the park in Southeast Sulawesi province after receiving a report from environmentalists that villagers had surrounded the dead whale and were beginning to butcher the rotting carcass, park chief Heri Santoso said.

Santoso said researchers from wildlife conservation group WWF and the park’s conservation academy found about 5.9 kilograms (13 pounds) of plastic waste in the animal’s stomach containing 115 plastic cups, four plastic bottles, 25 plastic bags, 2 flip-flops, a nylon sack and more than 1,000 other assorted pieces of plastic.

“Although we have not been able to deduce the cause of death, the facts that we see are truly awful,” said Dwi Suprapti, a marine species conservation coordinator at WWF Indonesia.

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Indonesia: Flooding forces elephants to enter residential area

Rizal Harahap The Jakarta Post 20 Nov 18;

Floods have forced a herd of 11 wild elephants to flee their natural habitat and enter plantation areas located near a residential compound in Tapung district, Kampar regency, Riau province.

The elephants had reportedly eaten and destroyed a cassava plantation, young oil palms and other plants before they went into hiding in the bushes located some 3 to 4 kilometers from the residential area.

The head of the Riau Natural Resource Conservation Agency (BBKSDA), Heru Sutmantoro, said the plantations were in what was originally the natural habitat of the wild elephants, which move from one place to another between Pekanbaru, Kampar and Siak.

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