Water 'more important than oil' businesses told

Looming water crisis could unravel world economy without radical action, investors told
Juliette Jowit, guardian.co.uk 26 Feb 09;

Dwindling water supplies are a greater risk to businesses than oil running out, a report for investors has warned.

Among the industries most at risk are high-tech companies, especially those using huge quantities of water to manufacture silicon chips; electricity suppliers who use vast amounts of water for cooling; and agriculture, which uses 70% of global freshwater, says the study, commissioned by the powerful CERES group, whose members have $7tn under management. Other high-risk sectors are beverages, clothing, biotechnology and pharmaceuticals, forest products, and metals and mining, it says.

"Water is one of our most critical resources – even more important than oil," says the report, published today . "The impact of water scarcity and declining water on businesses will be far-reaching. We've already seen decreases in companies' water allotments, more stringent regulations [and] higher costs for water."

Droughts "attributable in significant part to climate change" are already causing "acute water shortages" around the world, and pressure on supplies will increase with further global warming and a growing world population, says the report written by the US-based Pacific Institute.

"It is increasingly clear that the era of cheap and easy access to water is ending, posing a potentially greater threat to businesses than the loss of any other natural resource, including fossil fuel resources," it adds. "This is because there are various alternatives for oil, but for many industrial processes, and for human survival itself, there is no substitute for water."

In a joint statement, CERES' president Mindy Lubber and Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute, urged more companies and investors to work out their dependence on water and future supplies, and make plans to cope with increased shortages and prices.

"Few companies and investors are thinking strategically about the profound business risks that will exist in a world where climate change is likely to exacerbate already diminishing water supplies," they say.

"Companies that treat pressing water risks as a strategic challenge will be far better positioned in future," they add.

The CERES report adds to growing concern about a looming water crisis. In the Economist's report, The World in 2009 , Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, chairman of food giant Nestlé, wrote: "under present conditions… we will run out of water long before we run out of fuel". And at its annual meeting this year the World Economic Forum issued what it itself called a "stark warning" that "the world simply cannot manage water in the future in the same way as in the past or the economic web will collapse".

CERES, which has members in the US and Europe, made recommendations, including that companies should measure their water footprints from suppliers through to product use, and integrate water into strategic planning, and that investors should independently assess companies' water risk and "demand" better disclosure from boards.

Read more!

"Eco Hubble" to Bring Nature Data to the Public

Ker Than, National Geographic News 26 Feb 09;

A network of ecological "satellites" set to monitor environmental change could do for ecology what the Hubble Space Telescope has done for astronomy, researchers say.

Since 1991 raw data from Hubble have been made publicly available for use by professional researchers, educators, and citizen scientists via an online catalog."The public can access [the data] and do their own research," said Hubble spokesperson Ray Villard. "They paid for it. They deserve it."

A similar open-access model is key to the National Ecological Network Observatory, or NEON, a new program set to be up and running by 2016.

NEON will link together already existing field stations across the U.S. that are using planes and orbiters, ground-level sensors, and human-run labs to monitor activity in the wild.

The project will look for changes related to climate, biodiversity, invasive species, and other environmental issues.

National Resource

Each of the project's 20 candidate sites represents a different habitat in the United States, from the neotropical zones of Puerto Rico to the cold, dry mountains of the Northern Rockies.

With funding from the National Science Foundation, NEON program managers plan to collect and archive data online for at least 30 years.

NEON will cost an estimated 300 million U.S. dollars to set up and about 60 million U.S. dollars a year to maintain, once operational.

The information can be used by scientists to conduct studies, by policymakers to make science-related decisions, and by educators to teach students about the environment.

NEON will also create opportunities for the public to aid scientists in conducting field research, said senior team member Carol Brewer, a biologist at the University of Montana.

"By participating in citizen science endeavors, individuals can increase their knowledge of the natural world as well as increase their understanding of science, nature, and the role humans play in shaping the environment," Brewer said.

(NEON is described in the February 27, 2009, issue of the journal Science.)

Read more!

Billions fewer plastic bags handed out in the UK

Shops' cutbacks could stave off government plan to charge for carriers
Martin Hickman, The Independent 26 Feb 09;

Shops gave out 3.5 billion fewer plastic bags last year under a voluntary scheme which has, for now, headed off the threat of a government ban on free carrier bags. Figures from Wrap, the Government's anti-waste body, show that the number of plastic bags dispensed fell from 13.4 billion in 2007 to 9.9 billion last year, a drop of 26 per cent.

Wrap said that when taking into account increased recycled content in the bags, the use of virgin materials in the bags had been slashed by 40 per cent, well above the 25 per cent target set in 2007.

Supermarkets have now agreed a target of reducing the number of bags by 50 per cent – from 2006 levels – by May. But the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), while welcoming the new figures, warned that it would retain the option of introducing a charge for bags if stores failed to honour their commitments.

Environmental campaigners lambaste plastic bags as one of the worst excesses of consumerism. The bags waste resources and end up in landfill, scattered across the countryside or swirling round the seas, where they choke and kill marine life, particularly turtles. Several countries have banned the bags, including Rwanda, Bhutan, Taiwan, Papua New Guinea, Zanzibar and Botswana.

In the UK, 21 leading supermarkets and high street chains agreed in February 2007 to cut bag waste by 25 per cent. Britain's biggest retailer, Tesco, introduced loyalty points for customers reusing bags, helping slash the number of bags by two billion, and other stores such as Sainsbury's have moved bags from the bagging area, putting the onus on customers to request them. As a result, shoppers have become more used to reusing carrier bags or buying sturdier, long-lasting alternatives such as jute bags. "Consumers deserve congratulations for these results as they clearly show we are moving away from using bags once to re-using bags often," said Liz Goodwin, Wrap's chief executive. "They are also a credit to retailers who have worked hard to find innovative ways of helping us reuse our bags."

The British Retail Consortium urged customers to help stores by remembering to take stronger "bags for life" on shopping trips and, when they had to take them, reusing lighter carriers on five or six shopping trips before returning them for recycling.

The Environment minister, Jane Kennedy, said the "great progress" made showed that the national reliance on carrier bags was diminishing: "It also puts retailers well on the way to meeting the ambitious 50 per cent reduction in the number of carrier bags that they have pledged to reach by the end of May this year."

Later, Defra confirmed that it had not abandoned the threat of a ban on free plastic bags. "The powers are there in the Climate Change Act to introduce a charge, but, particularly in the current climate, we don't believe introducing a charge would be the right option," a spokeswoman said. "It would be a significant burden for retailers. But that's not to say we have abandoned the possibility of introducing a charge; at the moment, the voluntary approach seems to be working."

Cotton and jute: The alternatives to plastic

Cotton and jute bags have become fashionable as shoppers seek to replace plastic carriers with more eco-friendly alternatives. Sales of jute bags alone increased from around 100,000 in 2006 to 7.4 million last year, according to Wrap. The most famous "eco-bag" is the Anya Hindmarch "I'm not a plastic bag" bag, constructed from reusable cotton. Superdrug's £2.99 cotton shopper, released for the 30th anniversary of the Prince's Trust, caught the headlines when Kate Moss was pictured carrying one, while Tesco and Sainsbury's have also released green bags. Stronger "bags for life", intended to be re-used several times, are sold by supermarkets, while many swisher stores are dispensing paper bags with the implication that they are more eco-friendly.

So which bag is the least harmful? "A very difficult question to answer," replied Richard Swannell, Wrap's director of retail programmes. "The best thing you can do to help the environment is to re-use your bag. If you buy a bag for life and then don't re-use it that is a disaster for the environment."

9.9bn

The number of plastic bags dispensed last year, down from 13.4bn in 2007.

The Big Question: What more can Britain do to beat its addiction to plastic bags?
Michael McCarthy, The Independent 25 Feb 09;

Why are we asking this now?

Because yesterday the Government's anti-waste body, Wrap, announced that plastic bag use in the UK had dropped from 13.4 billion in 2007 to 9.9 billion in 2008 – a reduction of 26 per cent, or 3.5 billion bags.

That's a pretty hefty reduction in just 12 months, isn't it?

Yes, indeed it is; the 3.5 billion bags which have been cut from use, laid end to end, would stretch to the Moon and back twice, or around the Earth 44 times, Wrap obligingly points out (which is a bizarre but undeniably impressive image). On the other hand, we are still using 10 billion bags a year – approximately 166 bags for every man, woman, child and infant in these islands. That's hardly a kicked habit.

So how many of those 10 billion can we cut?

There's the rub. In December, seven of the major supermarkets, which are the leading plastic bag sources, agreed that they would seek a 50 per cent reduction in single-use bags by May this year, as against May 2006. It is not clear yet how they are doing, but the rate of change indicated in the UK figures released yesterday certainly suggest that the target is achievable. But where do we go from there? In December, the Government hinted at a 70 per cent eventual reduction in UK plastic bag use (in Whitehall-speak, this is an "aspiration" rather than a target. Targets you have to meet. Aspirations, you aspire to). Could that be attained? Even if it could, we would still be using four billion bags a year. That's a long way from zero.

Why does all this matter?

Because plastic bags are one of the greatest scourges of the consumer society – or to be more precise, of the throwaway society. First introduced in the US in 1957, and into the rest of the world by the late 1960s, they have been found so convenient that they have come to be used in mind-boggling numbers: in the world as a whole, the annual total manufactured now probably exceeds a trillion – that is, one million billion, or 1,000,000,000,000,000. And according to the British Antarctic Survey, plastic bags have gone from being rare in the late Eighties and early Nineties to being found almost everywhere across the planet, from Spitsbergen, at latitude 78 degrees North, to the Falkland Islands at 51 degrees South. They are among the 12 items of debris most often found in coastal clean-ups. On land they are ubiquitous too. Windblown plastic bags are so prevalent in Africa that a cottage industry has sprung up harvesting bags and using them to weave hats, and even bags, with one group harvesting 30,000 per month. In some developing countries they are a major nuisance in blocking sewage systems.

What matters is what happens to them after use. Enormous numbers end up in landfill or incinerators, itself an enormous waste of the petrochemical products which have gone into their manufacture; but billions get into the environment, especially the marine environment, where their lack of rapid degradability makes them a persistent and terrible threat to marine life.

What threat do degrading bags present to nature?

Sea turtles mistake them for their jellyfish food and choke on them; albatrosses mistake them for squid and die a similar death; dolphins have been found dead with plastic bags blocking their blowholes. The British wildlife film-maker Rebecca Hosking was staggered by the plastic-bag-induced mortality of Laysan albatrosses on the Pacific island of Midway; she found that two-fifths of the 500,000 Laysan chicks born each year die, the vast majority from ingesting plastic that their parents have mistakenly brought back as food. As a result, Ms Hosking started a movement to turn her home town of Modbury into Britain's first plastic bag-free community, which many residents and retailers have enthusiastically joined.

So is a plastic bag-free Britain possible?

Perhaps. Who could have imagined half-a-century ago that Britain's public places would one day all become cigarette smoke-free? Of that we would all be using lead-free petrol? Who would have thought even a decade ago, come to that, that about two-thirds of us would by now be actively engaged in recycling? Major shifts in public behaviour can certainly occur.

So what would be needed to make such a change?

Above all, a general change in consumer attitudes, towards the "re-use habit" – employing reusable shopping bags. Older people will remember how this was entirely the norm before the late 1960s; households, and in particular, housewives – as they then were – had a "shopping bag", a sturdy receptacle which was used to carry items bought in the daily shopping expedition. But that was the very different pattern of household shopping then – the purchase of a much smaller number of items, on a daily basis, after a walk to small shops – which were local. Today the housewife is largely a vanished species, and many of us tend to drive to the supermarket once a week and fill up the boot with seven days' worth of provisions, for which plastic bags, of course, are fantastically useful. It's a hard habit to break.

Why have we seen such a dramatic drop in plastic bag use this year?

Because the leading supermarkets and other retailers are making a major effort to wean us from the habit, with a whole host of initiatives, ranging from "bags for life" schemes to bag-free checkouts. It is clear that habits are starting to change; reusable bags are more visible than they were even two years ago. Wrap's Dr Richard Swannell said yesterday: "When you go into supermarkets or go down the High Street, there is a real plethora of people with reusable bags."

Should the Government be putting a tax on plastic bags?

The Government is considering the idea, and Gordon Brown has said that if actions by the retailers do not achieve the desired result, then direct intervention is a possibility. What people have in mind is the example of Ireland, where in 2002 a levy of €0.22 – the PlasTax – was introduced on all plastic bags, the first of its kind in the world. This quickly prompted a quite astonishing reduction of 90 per cent, from 1.2 billion bags a year to fewer than 200,000, and an enormous uptake in the use of cloth bags – with the revenue from the tax ring-fenced for environmental clean-up schemes.

What is the Government going to do next?

In the Climate Change Act, which was introduced late last year, the Government gave itself the power to bring in a plastic bag levy. You might well think that it wouldn't give itself a power it wasn't eventually going to use. Certainly, kicking the habit completely may well require stronger action. To get a sense of the scale of the problem, check out the website Reusablebags.com, which has a "clock" showing how many plastic bags have been produced so far in 2009. At 6pm last night, the figure was 76.37 billion.

Will Britain soon be a plastic bag-free nation?

Yes...

* The trend in plastic bag use is definitely falling, which suggests we are moving in the right direction

* The Government intends to drive bag use down even further

* Ministers may bring in a tax, which in Ireland has reduced usage by 94 per cent, which will help further

No...

* We are now too attached to the weekly supermarket shop, which plastic bags facilitate

* It is unrealistic to expect everyone to return to the habits of the 1960s

* Plastic bags are simply too convenient for people to give up altogether, and they certainly hold heavy shopping better than paper ones

Plastic bag use falls by 26 per cent in two years
The use of plastic bags has fallen by more than a quarter over the last two years as shoppers switch to reusable bags, new figures have shown.
Louise Gray, The Telegraph 25 Feb 09;

Figures from the waste reduction agency WRAP showed the number of carrier bags handed out by the major supermarkets and shops has fallen from 13.4 billion to 9.9 billion since 2006. The amount of plastic used has also been reduced by 40 per cent in the same period by using less plastic for each bag and recycled materials.

The target to reduce the environmental impact of carrier bags was part of an agreement with UK Government and retailers have now agreed to try and cut use of plastic bags by 50 per cent by May this year. This would save 130,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide – equivalent to taking 41,000 cars off the road

Jane Kennedy, the environment minister, said the supermarkets were on the way to meeting the "ambitious" target.

"This is great progress made by both retailers and shoppers and shows that reducing our reliance on carrier bags is becoming a way of life," she said.

But Dickey Felton from Keep Britain Tidy said carrier bags are still a litter problem.

"In the last few years we have seen an increase in the numbers of plastic bags ending up on our streets as litter," he said. "We absolutely welcome moves by supermarkets recently to reduce plastic bag use. We hope this will lead to a reduction in the number of plastic bags ending up as litter."

Read more!

American taste for soft toilet roll 'worse than driving Hummers'

Extra-soft, quilted and multi-ply toilet roll made from virgin forest causes more damage than gas-guzzlers, fast food or McMansions, say campaigners
Suzanne Goldenberg, guardian.co.uk 26 Feb 09;

The tenderness of the delicate American buttock is causing more environmental devastation than the country's love of gas-guzzling cars, fast food or McMansions, according to green campaigners. At fault, they say, is the US public's insistence on extra-soft, quilted and multi-ply products when they use the bathroom.

"This is a product that we use for less than three seconds and the ecological consequences of manufacturing it from trees is enormous," said Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defence Council.

"Future generations are going to look at the way we make toilet paper as one of the greatest excesses of our age. Making toilet paper from virgin wood is a lot worse than driving Hummers in terms of global warming pollution." Making toilet paper has a significant impact because of chemicals used in pulp manufacture and cutting down forests.

A campaign by Greenpeace seeks to raise consciousness among Americans about the environmental costs of their toilet habits and counter an aggressive new push by the paper industry giants to market so-called luxury brands.

More than 98% of the toilet roll sold in America comes from virgin forests, said Hershkowitz. In Europe and Latin America, up to 40% of toilet paper comes from recycled products. Greenpeace this week launched a cut-out-and-keep ecological ranking of toilet paper products.

"We have this myth in the US that recycled is just so low quality, it's like cardboard and is impossible to use," said Lindsey Allen, the forestry campaigner of Greenpeace.

The campaigning group says it produced the guide to counter an aggressive marketing push by the big paper product makers in which celebrities talk about the comforts of luxury brands of toilet paper and tissue.

Those brands, which put quilting and pockets of air between several layers of paper, are especially damaging to the environment.

Paper manufacturers such as Kimberly-Clark have identified luxury brands such as three-ply tissues or tissues infused with hand lotion as the fastest-growing market share in a highly competitive industry. Its latest television advertisements show a woman caressing tissue infused with hand lotion.

The New York Times reported a 40% in sales of luxury brands of toilet paper in 2008. Paper companies are anxious to keep those percentages up, even as the recession bites. And Reuters reported that Kimberly-Clark spent $25m in its third quarter on advertising to persuade Americans against trusting their bottoms to cheaper brands.

But Kimberly-Clark, which touts its green credentials on its website, rejects the idea that it is pushing destructive products on an unwitting American public.

Dave Dixon, a company spokesman, said toilet paper and tissue from recycled fibre had been on the market for years. If Americans wanted to buy them, they could.

"For bath tissue Americans in particular like the softness and strength that virgin fibres provides," Dixon said. "It's the quality and softness the consumers in America have come to expect."

Longer fibres in virgin wood are easier to lay out and fluff up for a softer tissue. Dixon said the company used products from sustainbly farmed forests in Canada.

Americans already consume vastly more paper than any other country — about three times more per person than the average European, and 100 times more than the average person in China.

Barely a third of the paper products sold in America are from recycled sources — most of it comes from virgin forests.

"I really do think it is overwhelmingly an American phenomenom," said Hershkowitz. "People just don't understand that softness equals ecological destruction."

Read more!

Best of our wild blogs: 26 Feb 09

Looking for ‘real’ change
on the Straits Times Blogs - Grace Chua speaks for greener conferences

brown stripe flatworm @ labrador nature reserve
on the sgbeachbum blog

Rain, lightning and rainbow at Pasir Ris
on the wonderful creation blog

After the rain
on the ashira v3.0b blog

Yellow Bittern catches a frog
on the Bird Ecology Study Group blog

Birds and chillies
on the Bird Ecology Study Group blog

We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children on the Hell Hath No Fury Like Nature Scorned blog

Read more!

Indonesian community moves to protect reefs

Indah Setiawati, The Jakarta Post 26 Feb 09;

“If our diving equipment breaks, we can always buy new equipment in shops. But if the precious coral reef is damaged, where do we buy a new one?”

That remark was not made by a political party targeting voters who support the vulnerable marine treasury protection in Bali in the upcoming general election.

Marthen Welly, a professional diver and project leader of a worldwide organization concerned with natural resources conservation, reiterates that message to everyone he meets when he talks about coral reefs and species living in reefs.

He works for the Nature Conservancy-Coral Triangle Center (TNC-CTC), which is working on a project aimed at conserving the marine area in the Nusa Penida islets, which comprise Nusa Lembongan, Nusa Ceningan and Nusa Penida islands.

Known as a paradise destination for tourists who love scuba diving and snorkeling, the islets feature 1,800 hectares of pristine coral reefs made up of 247 protected coral species. The coral reef beds are home to 562 species of reef fishes.

The islands, however, are ill-equipped with regulations to protect the marine resources, and there is a limited budget to preserve the underwater treasury, as tourists only have to pay entrance fees of as little as Rp 1,000.

Marthen said the TNC-CTC proposed the inclusion of three zones, namely the central, the utilization and the marine tourism zones, in the marine conservation area plan.

The central zone will cover areas that have the most breathtaking underwater view and are often visited by the world-famous Mola-mola fish and other types of marine life, including the manta ray and sperm whale.

The utilization zone comprises offshore areas that can be utilized for seaweed farming and fishing; while the marine tourism zone, which also includes the central zone, can be used for water sports activities.

“Separating the zones is important because the activities in the islets are not well-managed now. People can plant seaweed anywhere, or fish in the snorkeling and diving spots,” Marthen said.

He added if such practices continued, they could trigger a horizontal conflict among seaweed farmers, tourism-related businesspeople and fishermen, as each sought out the best locations for their activities.

“We need to conserve the Nusa Penida islets immediately to prevent damage to the coral reefs, but it can’t been done instantly,” he said, adding the program required local residents, the Klungkung administration and the tourism industry to share the same vision the conservation activists proposed.

He said the idea of a marine conservation area itself could somehow give a wrong impression to local residents because they could mistakenly think they would be prohibited from conducting activities in the conserved area.

Marthen said that once the marine conservation area was approved by the local administration in the form of a regent’s decree, it would be run by a collaborative management body.

“The body will consist of representatives from the local residents, the administration, a local NGO and businesspeople. They will run some programs and determine the dos and don’ts in the conservation area,” he said.

“Currently, there are no rules on the maximum number of people who can dive at the same time. Once I saw 20 boats anchored in the same spot.”

Marthen also said the TNC-CTC would run a study to see how much money overseas tourists were prepared to pay to help conserve the marine area each time they visited the islands.

“I’m sure they would be willing to pay, because most divers understand that the coral reef is priceless,” he said.

He added his organization expected it would take five years to set up the project, and said he hoped that by the end of 2012, the collaborative management body would be able to be an independent and financially sustainable institution.

The project aims to endorse the Coral Triangle Initiative (CTI), a program proposed by several countries to halt the degradation of vulnerable coral colonies and conserve threatened marine species in the coral triangle area, which comprised Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Timor Leste, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands.

The six countries will sign the initiative at the first ever World Ocean Conference (WOC) in Manado, North Sulawesi, in May this year.

Read more!

Water usage rises as temperatures soar

Today Online 26 Feb 09;

THE recent weeks of hot and dry weather have seen Singaporeans using more water. With temperatures hitting 34°c last week, the daily potable water consumption rose to 3 per cent beyond the daily average. The increase is enough to fill 16 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

Said Mr Chong Hou Chun, director of PUB’s Water Supply Network: “Consumption patterns typically move upwards during dry spells. However, small acts can go a long way in helping Singapore as a whole save big on water.”

For instance, turning off the tap while soaping up can help save more than 10 litres of water. “If everyone cuts his water use by just 10 litres a day, the amount saved is enough to fill more than 6,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools in a year,” Mr Chong added.

Tips on how the public can conserve water at home are at tenlitres.sec.org.sg/index.asp. Or call PUB’s 24-hour call centre for a water saving kit.

As for the non-domestic sector, responsible for half of the island’s water consumption, building managers and owners can help by installing constant-flow regulators at all taps and use water efficient labelled fittings with the “excellent” rating.

Checking for and fixing leaks promptly also helps – a leaking pipe can waste up to 1,000 litres of water in a day. More measures are at www.tenpercent.sec.org.sg.

To enhance the resilience of Singapore’s water supply, PUB has invested in technology and infrastructure to strengthen the Four National Taps (local catchment water, imported water, NEWater and desalinated water).

Read more!

Poison-Arrow Killings Surge in Africa Elephant Poaching

Nicholas Wadhams, National Geographic News 25 Feb 09;

Poachers on the hunt for ivory have stepped up their use of poison arrows and spears to kill elephants in southern Kenya, according to conservationists who say the techniques are harder to trace than gun attacks.

The surge is part of a nationwide increase in attacks on the animals, according to a report issued earlier this month by the Amboseli Trust for Elephants.

Since the start of 2008, 19 elephants have been killed and another 25 wounded by spears, arrows, and bullets in the Amboseli region near Mount Kilimanjaro, the report says.

Of those killed, ten animals had had their tusks removed—the first time in many years that ivory has been taken from Amboseli elephants, the group said.

In the last six weeks, poachers have also killed five elephants in the nearby Tsavo National Park region. Some were felled by gunfire, others by poisoned arrows.

Conservation groups fear that the rise in poaching is a result of a UN decision to allow the first ivory auction in a decade in 2008, an event that yielded more than a million U.S. dollars from Chinese and Japanese bidders.

"Since the one-off ivory sales from southern Africa countries late last year, we have noted an unprecedented rise of elephant poaching incidents in Tsavo," Jonathan Kirui, Tsavo National Park's assistant director, said in a statement released Monday.

"Our security team is on full alert and is going full force to ensure that the poachers are deterred."

"Soft" Killing

Officials with the Amboseli trust think poachers are using a poison made from acocanthera shrubs, which are common in Kenya.

"The toxin is frighteningly effective and there is no antidote," the report says.

Poisoning elephants attracts far less attention than shooting them with a gun, wildlife officials note.

"When you shoot an elephant—that loud bang—people will hear it," said Patrick Omondi, head of species conservation at the Kenya Wildlife Service.

"You shoot this elephant with a poisoned arrow, then they follow the elephant until it dies, and then they pluck out the ivory," Omondi said. "It's a soft way of killing."

In 2008 the Kenya Wildlife Service reported 98 elephants killed for their ivory, double the 2007 figure, Omondi said.

Conservationists from the Amboseli Trust and Kenya Wildlife Service link the rise in attacks to demand from Chinese workers constructing a road near Amboseli National Park and to lucrative trade across the border into Tanzania.

The wildlife service has launched an investigation into the trade and is collecting evidence in hopes of arresting those involved, Omondi said.

In a recent interview with a local East African newspaper, Chinese embassy spokesperson Liu Bo denied that Chinese in Kenya are smuggling ivory.

Threatened But Healthy

Officials estimate that 1,600 elephants currently live in the Amboseli region. While the attacks are disturbing, the local population remains healthy, conservationists say.

"The threat is there—the indication is that there is a high demand for ivory," Omondi said.

"But it has not hit the elephants in a way that we are going to lose our Amboseli elephants."

Read more!

"Gaia" Scientist Says Life Doomed By Climate Woes

Peter Griffiths, PlanetArk 26 Feb 09;

LONDON - Climate change will wipe out most life on Earth by the end of this century and mankind is too late to avert catastrophe, a leading British climate scientist said.

James Lovelock, 89, famous for his Gaia theory of the Earth being a kind of living organism, said higher temperatures will turn parts of the world into desert and raise sea levels, flooding other regions.

His apocalyptic theory foresees crop failures, drought and death on an unprecedented scale. The population of this hot, barren world could shrink from about seven billion to one billion by 2100 as people compete for ever-scarcer resources.

"It will be death on a grand scale from famine and lack of water," Lovelock told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday. "It could be a reduction to a billion (people) or less."

By 2040, temperatures in European cities will rise to an average of 110 Fahrenheit (43 Celsius) in summer, the same as Baghdad and parts of Europe in the 2003 heatwave.

"The land will gradually revert to scrub and desert. You can look at as if the Sahara were steadily moving into Europe. It's not just Europe; the whole world will be changing in that way."

Attempts to cut emissions of planet-warming gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2) in an attempt to reduce the risks are probably doomed to failure, he added.

Even if the world found a way of cutting emissions to zero, it is now too late to cool the Earth.

"It is a bit like a supertanker. You can't make it stop by just turning the engines off," he said before the release of a new book on climate change.

"It will go on for a long, long time. If by some magic you could suddenly bring the C02 down, it wouldn't suddenly cool off."

SAFE HAVENS

Campaigns to promote recycling and renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power are a waste of time, Lovelock adds, although he concedes that nuclear power will help meet growing demand for energy.

While financial markets and politicians promote carbon emissions trading schemes to reduce emissions and help the environment, Lovelock says they, too, will have little effect.

"I don't see the efforts of governments around the world succeeding in doing anything significant to cut back the emissions of carbon dioxide," he said.

Efforts should instead be focused on creating safe havens in areas which will escape the worst effects of climate change.

In his book, "The Vanishing Face of Gaia," he adds: "We have to stop pretending that there is any possible way of returning to that lush, comfortable and beautiful Earth we left behind some time in the 20th century."

The destruction of natural ecosystems for farmland, deforestation and the rapid growth of the human race and livestock have all exacerbated the problem, he added.

Scientists should not underestimate the crucial role of the oceans as an indicator of rising temperatures and tool for reducing carbon dioxide, Lovelock argues.

"Most of the Earth's surface is the ocean. That holds 800 times more than the atmosphere or the land. And there is no question that the ocean is steadily warming," he said.

A former skeptic of doom-laden predictions, Lovelock admits he is not entirely comfortable with his role as a modern-day Cassandra, the cursed prophetess of Greek mythology whose counsel was ignored.

However, he says the scale and speed of the looming crisis are so great he must speak out. He is still struck by the public's apparent lack of urgency about the problem.

"Don't blame me for the terrible predictions," said Lovelock, a sprightly, trim figure with silver hair who looks younger than his age and was soberly dressed in navy jumper, tie and casual trousers.

"The U.N.'s IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) even in its 2001 report was suggesting temperatures by 2040 and 2050 that were devastatingly hot. All I'm doing is drawing people's attention to it."

(Editing by Michael Roddy)

Read more!

World Lags In Breeding Climate-Proof Crops: Experts

Alister Doyle, PlanetArk 26 Feb 09;

OSLO - The world is running out of time to develop new seed varieties to confront climate change and head off food shortages that could affect billions of people, experts said.

Marking the first anniversary on Thursday of the opening of a "doomsday" seed vault on the island of Spitsbergen in the Norwegian Arctic, they said that people in Africa and Asia were most at risk from a lack of climate-proof crops.

"It's a question of urgency," Cary Fowler, head of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, told Reuters by telephone with other experts from Spitsbergen. He said governments needed to invest more in breeding new seeds.

"Unlike the bank that needs to be bailed out this week, this problem is going to be an emergency 20 years from now. But by then it will be too late" he said.

The vault, blasted from icy rock 1,000 km (600 miles) from the North Pole, opened on February 26, 2008 and has doubled its holdings to 200 million seeds in the past year, representing 400,000 varieties. It is run by the trust, the Norwegian government and the Nordic Genetic Resource Center in Sweden.

"My opinion is that not enough is begin done" to develop new varieties of crops, said David Lobell, an expert in food security and the environment at Stanford University.

There was work under way to help develop crops that can withstand drought and floods but exposure to very high temperatures had not been a focus historically, he said.

AFRICA

Priorities could be southern Africa to help people heavily dependent on crops such as maize in a region likely to be hard hit by climate change, he said. Similarly, India and Pakistan faced disruptions to crops such as rice and wheat.

"We need some tremendous advances," said David Battisti, an atmospheric sciences professor at the University of Washington.

"The whole world will be stressed at the same time" because of global warming, he said. Crops can take a decade to breed and test, with no guarantee of success.

Battisti authored a study in the journal Science last month that predicted that climate change would disrupt growth by both crops and livestock and cause serious food shortages for half the world's population.

Crops cannot simply be moved to new areas as the climate warms because soils, pests, insect pollinators, daylight hours and other factors differ even if temperatures seem suitable.

"It's not going to be enough to create heat-tolerant maize," Fowler said. "We are going to need new varieties appropriate in Ghana, in South Africa, or Brazil. You need crops adapted all over the place."

The seed vault will mark its anniversary on Thursday with delivery of four tons of seeds -- almost 90,000 samples of hundreds of species from collections in Canada, Ireland, Switzerland, the United States, Syria, Mexico and Colombia.

The vault is meant to be a fail-safe for national collections of everything from potatoes to coconuts, a sort of Noah's Ark in case of disasters such as nuclear war. It has capacity to store about 4.5 million samples, or 2 billion seeds.

Read more!

CO2 Rise In Atmosphere Accelerates In 2008

Gerard Wynn, PlanetArk 26 Feb 09;

LONDON - Increases in the amount of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide in the atmosphere accelerated last year, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) told Reuters on Wednesday.

The new data may dampen hopes that a slowdown in industrial output and carbon emissions, which started at the end of last year, will temporarily deflect climate change.

Some analysts had hoped that recession would give the world breathing space to reverse its impact on the climate. The new NOAA data showed that levels of carbon dioxide accelerated slightly last year.

"For us to see (the impact) in the atmosphere it would take a large drop in emissions, but it hasn't happened yet and that's very clear from this data," said Thomas Conway, a NOAA climate scientist who helped compile the figures.

"If the change in emissions is only a few percent we're not going to see that in the atmosphere," Conway told Reuters, explaining that natural processes, whereby for example forests and oceans mop up carbon dioxide, masked small changes in manmade emissions in the short-term at least.

Recession means that developed nations' greenhouse gas emissions will fall by about 2 percent this year, some analysts estimate, although that effect could be much greater if the world slipped into a wider slump or depression.

Emissions are expected to continue to rise in China, which analysts say is the world's biggest carbon emitter.

Levels of carbon dioxide last year reached a global average of 384.9 parts per million (ppm) in the atmosphere, up 2.2 ppm on 2007, compared with a previous annual increase of 1.8 ppm, the NOAA data showed.

Annual increases had been greater in the past decade compared with the 1980s and 1990s, said Conway.

That acceleration was mostly due to increases in emissions, he added, but may also support an unproven theory that oceans, which currently mop up a large part of excess manmade carbon emissions, were becoming saturated.

"There is some evidence that a sink in the southern (Antarctic) ocean is not keeping up ... has been saturated."

Rising global carbon emissions are stoking global warming, most scientists agree. One threshold for dangerous climate change adopted by the European Union is 2 degrees centigrade warming above pre-industrial levels.

"Levels of CO2 at 385 ppm are already approaching a level which in the long-term we have to stay below to have a likely chance of staying below 2 degrees," said Malte Meinshausen, a climate scientist at the Germany-based Potsdam Institute.

It was possible for levels of carbon in the atmosphere to peak and then fall again, however, if people adopted low-carbon sources of energy and technologies which suck carbon dioxide out of the air by burying it underground, Meinshausen added.

Read more!

New Products Aim To Save Money And The Planet

Timothy Gardner, Reuters 26 Feb 09;

NEW YORK (Reuters Life!) - Want to save money as well as the planet?

Dual-flush toilets, glitzy homemade club soda kits and reusable bamboo fiber diapers are just some of the eco-products being offered to consumers at the second annual Green Products Expos as the idea of green shifts to thrift amid the economic crisis.

"Last year green products were mostly about women's apparel made out of eco-friendly materials, this year with the economic crunch people are staying at home and looking to see where they can make a few changes to save money," said Kevin Nichols, the head of Propel Media, whose products were shown at the expo.

To reduce water waste Kohler designed efficient toilets that feature two buttons -- one to produce a flush of 1.6 gallons (6 liters) and a second that uses only half that amount for smaller jobs.

Todd Weber, a manager at the company, said an investment of about $500 into a package that includes the dual flush and high-tech shower heads, which trick consumers into thinking they are using more water than they really are, can pay for itself with in one to two years.

The toilets can save a family up to 16,500 gallons of water per year and the shower heads can save more than 20 percent on hot water bills, according to the firm.

Some companies and consumers have become increasingly concerned about water waste with higher temperatures from climate change expected to bring more droughts and melt mountain glaciers, a source of fresh water for billions of people around the world.

The saving of heated water can cut use of fossil fuels and emissions of gases blamed for warming the planet.

Weber said the toilets are selling well in the Pacific northwest of the United States, where consumers are more aware of water shortages, and in Georgia, which recently experienced severe droughts.

For families who like fizzy drinks Sodastream, a company based in New Jersey, sells kits that inject carbon dioxide into tap water to make seltzer water and flavored sodas.

Company manager Steve Smith said the basic $80 kit can pay for itself in three to six months depending on much it is used. It also saves fuel in the transportation and packaging of carbonated beverages.

If rising landfills are a concern, the Maine Cloth Diaper Co. may have the answer. It produces reusable diapers made out of bamboo fiber.

Murray Perce, a co-founder of the company, said disposable diapers cost about $1,500 from birth to potty training, while bamboo reusables cost about $350, not including water and power bills for washing and drying -- or labor costs.

Perce said sales have not suffered during the economic crisis as consumers see the diapers as a way to save money.

"Sales have been stable this year, isn't that the new up?"

(Editing by Patricia Reaney)

Read more!