Two rare elephants shot dead in Indonesian jungles

Irwan Firdaus, Associated Press 31 Mar 09;

JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) — Two Sumatran elephants were found dead with gunshots to the head in a protected forest in western Indonesia, a conservationist said Tuesday.

Park rangers have been riding the animals for weeks in the Kerinci National Park and surrounding areas to prevent entry by illegal loggers, who have been clearing jungles at an alarming rate to make way for palm oil and other commercial plantations.

Though provincial conservation chief Andi Basrul refused to speculate on a motive for the shootings, he said they appeared to have been carried out by professional poachers.

Basrul said the Sumatran elephants were both 20-year-old females. Rangers found their bodies on March 24, hours after they were used for a patrol and several hundred yards (meters) from their camp.

Conservationists believe there are less that 3,000 Sumatran elephants remaining in the wild.

"It is a big blow to our efforts to protect these endangered animals," Basrul said.

The habitats of Sumatran elephants are quickly shrinking due to illegal logging and land clearing. That has led, increasingly, to clashes with humans, often because the starving animals stray into villages and destroy crops in their search for food.

An investigation will be carried out into the latest attack in Bengkulu province on Sumatra island, said Yatim Suyatmo, a police spokesman.

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6,000 Rare, Large River Dolphins Found in Bangladesh

Christine Dell'Amore, National Geographic News 31 Mar 09;

A previously unknown population of Irrawaddy dolphins discovered in Bangladesh has given scientists "great hope" for the survival of the rare species, conservationists said Wednesday.
A research team estimated that 6,000 Irrawaddy dolphins thrive in the country's Sundarbans mangrove forests and nearby waters of the Bay of Bengal.

The group is the largest ever found—previously, scattered groups of only about a hundred Irrawaddy dolphins each had been found throughout the dolphin's Southeast Asian habitat, which stretches from the mouths of rivers feeding the Bay of Bengal across open waters to Indonesia.

The species' total worldwide population is unknown.

(Related: "Irrawaddy River Dolphin Closer to Extinction Despite Reports, Experts Say.")

"Thats why this is so exciting … ," said Howard Rosenbaum, head of the ocean giants research program at the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), the conservation group that made the discovery.

"Here you have this area where we found nearly 6,000 animals—it gives us hope for protecting the entire species and this really important habitat."

Few marine-mammal biologists had previously explored the diverse water ecosystem where the new dolphin group was found, which ranges from freshwater mangroves to brackish water to deep ocean canyons in just a small area.

Because the 6.5- to 8-foot-long (2- to 2.5-meter-long) mammals surface only occasionally, researchers used a transect method to gather data about the population.

The team steered a boat along a straight line, noting any dolphin sightings along each run.

A wider population estimate was then made from that data, presented Wednesday at the First International Conference on Marine Mammal Protected Areas in Maui, Hawaii.

"Not Out of the Woods"

Six thousand is a "tremendous amount" of individuals for the species—listed as vulnerable on the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Red List. But "it doesn't mean we're out of the woods yet," Rosenbaum said.

For one thing, the dolphins, relatives of the killer whale, easily get entangled in fishing nets.

And declining flows of fresh water from dams upstream in India, along with sea-level rise from global warming, further threaten the sensitive mammals, Rosenbaum said.

Populations of the Irrawaddy's cousin, the endangered Ganges River dolphin, are also plummeting due to the same threats. Likewise, the Yangtze River dolphin, which is thought to be nearly extinct, is a "potent reminder" of how humans can impact dolphins.

Dekila Chungyalpa, director of the Mekong River program for WWF-US, said the decline of what she calls the "cutest" of the dolphins has been a huge concern for her conservation group.

"To know that there's a very large population elsewhere is quite a relief," Chungyalpa said.

But, she added, "just because we're finding these wonderful numbers doesn't mean the urgency is any less strong."

To that end, the discovery has motivated WCS and its partners to speed up the creation of a marine protected area in the Sundarbans mangroves, WCS's Rosenbaum said.

The group is working with the Bangladeshi Ministry of Environment and Forests to set aside a sanctuary for both the Irrawaddy and Ganges dolphins.

Thousands of rare Irrawaddy dolphins found along Bangladesh coast
Population of 6,000 endangered dolphins under threat from climate change and fishing, US conservationists warn
Jessica Aldred, guardian.co.uk 1 Apr 09;

Conservationists claim to have found thousands of rare Irrawaddy dolphins on the Bangladesh coast, but warn that the newly discovered population is under threat from climate change and fishing.

Researchers from the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) said they have found nearly 6,000 Irrawaddy dolphins living in the freshwater regions of Bangladesh's Sundarbans mangrove forest and nearby waters in the Bay of Bengal.

The largest known populations of Irrawaddy dolphins to date have numbered in the low hundreds or less – at least 125 in the Mekong river, 77 in the Malampaya Sound in the Philippines and up to 100 in the Mahakam River, Indonesia.

Until this new Bangladesh population was found, figures from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) estimated the Sundarbans population to be around 450. WCS says it used rigorous scientific techniques in an area where little marine mammal research has taken place to document the new population.

"The number of animals could be higher – or lower," said Howard Rosenbaum, the director of WCS's ocean giants cetacean programme. "Our best estimate given the science is that there are 6,000. It sounds a lot but the Sundarbans cover a huge area. When you look at the areas that have been surveyed before the populations are low as they are in areas impacted by human development. But this area had never before been surveyed. We're really excited and this finding gives us great hope but this species is still very vulnerable."

The discovery of a new population is an important finding as scientists and conservation groups do not know how many Irrawaddy dolphins remain across south and south-east Asia. The species, related to orcas or killer whales, were listed in 2008 as "vulnerable" on the IUCN's "red list" of endangered species due to declines in known populations.

"This discovery gives us great hope that there is a future for Irrawaddy dolphins," said Brian D Smith, the study's lead author. "Bangladesh clearly serves as an important sanctuary for Irrawaddy dolphins, and conservation in this region should be a top priority."

"With all the news about freshwater environments and the state of the oceans, WCS's discovery that a thriving population of Irrawaddy dolphins exists in Bangladesh gives us hope for protecting this and other endangered species and their important habitats," said Steven E Sanderson, the president and chief executive of the WCS.

The results of the study were announced yesterday at the world's first international conference on marine mammal protected areas in Maui, Hawaii, and published in the Journal of Cetacean Research and Management.

But the scientists warned that the dolphins are becoming increasingly threatened by accidental entanglement in fishing nets. Declining freshwater supplies also pose a threat – from upstream water diversions such as dams and by rising sea levels caused by climate change that will see the loss of freshwater habitats.

These problems also threaten the Ganges river dolphins, an endangered species that also inhabits the Sundarbans. The recent likely extinction of the Yangtze river dolphin, or baiji, is a potent reminder of how vulnerable freshwater dolphins are to extinction via the impacts of humans, the organisation said.

The Irrawaddy dolphin grows to some 2-2.5 metres in length (6.5-8ft) and lives in large rivers, estuaries, and freshwater lagoons in south and south-east Asia.

As recently as 1996 they were listed as "data deficient" as not enough was known about the species and its range and habitats.

Since then, the IUCN said, five populations have been listed as critically endangered, and the range of the populations and their numbers have declined as they have been caught as bycatch and faced habitat degradation.

Scientists estimated the numbers of the new Bangladesh population using a technique called distance sampling – taking a boat along plotted grid lines and counting the numbers of animals seen, accounting for how many are above or below the surface and whether the same animal has been counted twice. The team covered 1,000 sq km of water during the survey in 2004.

Mark Simmonds, the international director of science for the UK-based Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society, said: "This discovery is an interesting one as it reflects the fact that now the Sundarbans have been more fully surveyed, we have a much better idea of how many animals are there. Irrawaddy dolphins are getting rarer and rarer in that part of the world. To find 6,000 isn't huge – but it's significant – and it does show that when you look for something and survey properly you can get some interesting findings.

"But the most important thing is that mangrove habitat is incredibly threatened, and while it's great to know that they are full of dolphins, we wish they could live somewhere else. Mangroves are threatened by changes in the water passing through them – from extreme weather, sea level rises, changes in salinity and changes to water systems upstream. The Sundarbans system is important and needs better protection."

The WCS has asked Bangladesh authorities to establish a sanctuary for the dolphins in the Sundarbans mangrove forest.

Ainun Nishat, the Bangladesh head of International Union for Conservation of Nature, said the finding was an indication that "ecology in the area is not dead yet".

"There is plenty of food, mainly fish, in the area for the dolphins to eat," said Nishat, who was not involved in the study. "What is now needed is to restrict fishing in the area to protect the dolphins."

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Rumours of Australian possum's death were greatly exaggerated

Rachel Nowak, New Scientist 31 Mar 09;

Last December, the Australian lemuroid ringtail possum was widely reported as the first possible extinction casualty of climate changeMovie Camera.

But last week it rose from the dead with ecologists reporting the discovery of three of the creatures and declaring that the species was never feared extinct. But its future is far from certain.

"They have a very limited range – most likely due to an inability to tolerate high temperatures – so they are at risk from future temperature extremes," says ecophysiologist Andrew Krockenberger of James Cook University in Cairns, Australia.

Stephen Williams of James Cook University in Townsville agrees. "There has been a massive decline in one population. One more hot summer could wipe [that population] out."
Media confusion

Last December, the story took on a life of its own when Williams made an off-the-cuff remark to a local journalist that the possums may already be extinct from the Carbine plateau in the Daintree National Park in northern Queensland. With no sightings in three years, the fear was that the population had been wiped out by record temperatures in 2005.

However, there is a second population of lemuroid ringtail possums (Hemibelideus lemuroides) living on the Atherton tablelands, roughly 100 kilometres south. This population remains in relatively good health.

The story became further confused because roughly 40% of lemuroid ringtail possums living on the Carbine plateau are white, the rest brown – many reports equated the different colours with different species.

These points became irrelevant two weeks ago, though, when, during a last ditch attempt to find whether any of the Carbine plateau population had survived, Williams spotted three of the possums.

"They're hanging in there. But we are completely certain that the species has severely declined – this is not a false alarm," Williams says.
Rapid decline?

Last year the lemuroid ringtail possum was declared not to be at high risk of extinction by the Red List, an influential although recently criticised barometer of extinction risk.

Although the Red List assessment was published in 2008, it "was done in 2006, or very early 2007", so could now be out of date, agrees Scott Burnett of the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, one of the Red List assessors.

He cautions, however, that a road built in the late 1980s through the region occupied by the Carbine plateau population may have made it temporarily easier to count the animals, and that could be a "confounding factor".

Possums are usually counted by shining spotlights from the road into the rainforest, so sightings may have become less frequent as the forest canopy grows back, he says.

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Plan Bee: As Honeybees Die Out, Will Other Species Take Their Place?

In a race against time, researchers propagate native solitary bees as an alternative to our most important pollinators
Christopher Mims, Scientific American 31 Mar 09;

Honeybees have been dying in record numbers in the U.S. for at least the past two years. Experts attribute the mass deaths to a catchall condition known as colony collapse disorder (CCD), although both a cure and the culprit remain elusive. Despite as much as a 35 percent loss of bees per year, we remain almost entirely dependent on what until recently was a self-renewing annual population of billions of honeybees to pollinate over 130 kinds of fruit and nut crops.

"We can't rely on the honeybee forever," says Blair Sampson, an entomologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). That's a problem, given that entomologists have yet to come up with a viable alternative.

But researchers report that another bee known as the blue orchard, or Osmia lignaria, holds out promise of filling in the void.

The blue orchard bee, also known as the orchard mason bee, is one of 3,000 bee species native to the U.S. and is currently the subject of intensive study by the USDA's Pollinating Insect Biology, Management and Systematics Research Unit at Utah State University in Logan.

James Cane, an entomologist at the Logan bee lab, has been working for 10 years to increase the availability of these bees and he says there are now a million blue orchards pollinating crops in California.

The reason these bees are considered the best potential honeybee stand-ins, Cane says, is that unlike some specialist native species, blue orchard bees, like honeybees, can pollinate a variety of crops—including almonds, peaches, plums, cherries, apples and others.

In just about every other respect, however, these bees are totally unlike their European brethren. For one, they tend to live alone. In the wild, rather than hives, they inhabit boreholes drilled by beetles into the trunks and branches of dead trees. When cultivated, they will happily occupy holes drilled into lumber or even Styrofoam blocks.

The blue orchard bees also do not produce honey, rarely sting and, owing to their solitary nature, do not swarm. They are incredibly efficient pollinators of many tree fruit crops—on a typical acre, 2,000 blue orchard bees can do the work of more than 100,000 honeybees. Their biggest drawback is that beekeepers can only increase their populations by a factor of three to eight each year. (Honey bees can grow from a small colony consisting of a queen and a few dozen workers to a population of 20,000 foragers in a few months.)

"We're still in the development stage of applying all the research that has been done" by USDA's Agricultural Research Service, says David Moreland, CEO of AgPollen, the world’s leading producer of blue orchard bees for the California almond industry.

Of the nearly 700,000 acres (285,000 hectares) of almonds cultivated in California this growing season, as many as 300 acres (120 hectares) were pollinated by blue orchards, according to Moreland. Growers' inspiration for trying the new pollinator is simple economics—last season they were paying up to $300 to rent a single hive of honeybees, 10 times what they paid a decade ago. This trend has made blue orchard bees cost-competitive with honeybees, but only barely.

"It's not clear we can [raise blue orchard bees on a commercial scale] in a cost-effective way," says Karen Strickler, an entomologist at the University of Idaho from 1993-2000 who has worked with solitary bees and who currently distributes them to beekeepers and hobbyists through the bee dealership PollinatorParadise.com, located in New Mexico.

Another solitary bee, known as the leaf-cutter, is the success story on which scientists and beekeepers hope to model the trajectory of the blue orchard bee.

"Ninety percent of all alfalfa seed in the U.S. is grown using the alfalfa leaf-cutter bee for pollination," Moreland says. "That's huge—that's an industry that over the past 25 years went from zero to the preferred bee. So there's a model there that says: 'This has happened before, it can happen again.'"

Cane, described by his peers as one of the world experts on orchard bees, cautions that these bees currently can only supplement—and not supplant—honeybees.

"The sheer number of bees you would need—at least 500 per acre (0.4 hectare)—it will never replace honeybees," says Cane. "That's an outrageous number if you think about it."

AgPollen's Moreland is more optimistic. "If we got to the point that we could not maintain populations [of honeybees]," he says, "this is one way to ensure that the largest dollar specialty crop in California for export—the almond—doesn't lose its pollinator."

Is Life Too Hard for Honeybees?
Researchers zero in on the culprits behind colony collapse disorder
Wendy Lyons Sunshine, Scientific American 31 Mar 09;

Commercial honeybees are tough. They get trucked cross-country to pollinate vast crops, often while fed unnatural diets such as sugar water and soy flour. Their hives are treated with chemicals to deter parasites, and they're exposed to pesticides and fungicides in the fields where they work and feed.

"I can feed you a diet of Hershey bars, keep you up all night, truck you around, and spray Raid in your face, and I guarantee you'll get sick," says Jerry Hayes, Florida's assistant chief of apiary inspection. "That's kind of what's happening to bees."

Just how much physical abuse do honey bees face? And what are the implications? Those questions inform research into colony collapse disorder (CCD), a phenomenon that has killed over a third of commercial honeybees in the U.S. and some European countries since 2006. With no obvious cause, scientists have begun examining how beekeeping practices and environmental contamination may be impairing hive immunity.

CCD research poses challenges, because stricken bees disappear, taking forensic evidence with them. Lab experiments offer clues, but translating those into reliable, controlled field studies poses difficulties, because bees roam for miles. Still, with valuable crops such as almond, apple, blueberry and others at stake, even ordinary citizens are trying to help.

"The interest from the general public has been tremendous," says entomologist Jeff Pettis, lead researcher at the U.S. Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service's (USDA–ARS) Bee Research Laboratory in Beltsville, Md. He has received phone tips and even jars of bees from people hoping to help solve the mystery. Lately, he tells them several suspects have already been ruled out, including tracheal mites, small hive beetles, genotype differences, cell phone exposure, melamine contamination and genetically modified crops.

"For almost two years we've been documenting and sampling colonies that are dying and examining healthy colonies in the same area, trying to determine what factors are involved," Pettis says. "I think there are interactions going on, like low-level pesticide exposure and poor nutrition weakening the host honeybees and then pathogens doing the killing. It's similar to a human who might not be eating, or is frail and traveling too much, and as a result is more susceptible to pathogens. If you go into a hospital in excellent health, you don't contract pneumonia, but if you go in weakened, pneumonia kills you."

Pesticides and fungicides
How much pesticide exposure is too much for a honey bee? Traditionally, Pettis says, manufacturers seek clearance for pesticides by using the LD-50 test, which "essentially applies toxic stuff to bees and sees if half or more of them drop dead." This brute force test does not, however, gauge long-term systemic effects.

"The general feeling is that we need to move beyond mortality testing to sublethal testing that looks at the shortening of life span, disorientation, reduced vigor, and other things," says Pettis, who has been in discussions with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) about developing newer, more sensitive pesticide tests.

EPA spokesperson Dale Kemery says that the EPA's Office of Pesticide Programs, industry stakeholders, and academics have huddled at least twice over the past six months to discuss additional pesticide testing. He refused to provide details of the meetings.

Pesticide residues show up in a variety of ways. For example, "entombed pollen" in the hive can display pesticide and fungicide content, according to a study by Pennsylvania State University researchers and Pettis now in press at the Journal of Invertebrate Pathology. Pettis says he is working on additional pesticide studies that may provide important new insights into hive risks.

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Hundreds of Dead Penguins Wash Up on Beach in Southern Chile

Latin American Herald Tribune 1 Apr 09;

SANTIAGO – Several hundred dead penguins have washed up on a beach in southern Chile in the past few days, but experts have not yet determined what killed the birds, the press reported.

The remains of more than 800 penguins began washing up last Thursday on the five-kilometer (3.1 -mile) stretch of beach in the Las Niñas and Los Piojos sections of Queule, a town in La Araucania province, located some 790 kilometers (nearly 500 miles) from Santiago.

The dead penguins were of the Magellanic (Spheniscus magellanicus) and Humboldt (Spheniscus humboldti) species, which live in extreme southern South America and migrate to northern Chile and beyond during the Southern Hemisphere winter.

Researchers from Universidad Austral in Valdivia are trying to determine what killed the birds.

Navy Lt. Rodrigo Zambrano, who is assigned to the maritime authority in Valdivia, told reporters that the penguins did not appear to have been exposed to any toxic substances.

Penguins sometimes get caught in fishing nets, but never in such large numbers, Zambrano said, adding that 803 carcasses had been found. EFE

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Mudflow mixed with oil threatens Indonesian fishermen

Indra Harsaputra, The Jakarta Post 1 Apr 09;

The Sidoarjo hot mudflow, now mixed with oil, poses a greater threat of environmental damage because it flows through residential areas and the Porong River before getting to the sea, an official said.

"Thousands of fishermen in Sidoarjo and Pasuruan will be affected by the oil-tainted mudflow, as well as hundreds of milkfish farmers," Surono, head of the Volcanology and Geological Disaster Mitigation Center (PVMBG), told The Jakarta Post on Monday.

Surono said the PVMBG had found traces of a black, heavy liquid discharged together with the mud in its study on March 22.

He said the volume of oil was currently small, compared to the mud and water gushing out from the borehole at 126,000 cubic meters daily, or equivalent to 1 million barrels per day.

"The Upstream Oil and Gas Executive Agency (BP Migas) is analyzing the oil to evaluate its contents," he said.

That aside, Surono and a number of oil and geology experts from the Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB) and Surabaya's 10 November Institute of Technology (ITS) are convinced that the oil being released now is just the beginning of an oil flow of greater volume, because the area around Porong is potentially rich in oil.

The Sidoarjo Hot Mudflow Mitigation Agency (BPLS) said the mudflow could not be plugged because it was a natural phenomenon in the form of a mud volcano, although ITB and ITS were positive the mudflow could be stopped using two methods - a relief well and a Bernoulli dam.

ITB petroleum expert Rudi Rubiandini said the government and PT Lapindo should immediately plug the mudflow and not allow the oil to flow into residential areas or the Porong River.

"The discharged oil will pollute the environment. I am sure it's not too late to stop the mudflow," he told the Post.

ITS marine expert Mukhtasor said discharging the mudflow into the Porong River was very dangerous as it could hurt hundreds of milkfish farmers who rely on the river. Based on satellite images, the hot mudflow has flowed into the shipping route in the Madura Strait and into fishing areas in Pasuruan.

"Dumping mud alone into the Porong River is dangerous because it could silt up the Madura Strait," said Rudi.

The strait was already badly silted up by materials carried by the Bengawan Solo and Brantas Rivers, even before President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono instructed that the mud be channeled into the Porong River in 2007.

According to the Indonesian Marine Geological Institute, the volume of sediment carried by the Bengawan Solo River amounts to 2.75 kg per cubic meter, while those by the Brantas River at 1.3 kg per cubic meter daily. The volume is expected to rise in conjunction with logging activities along the river basin areas.

The current depth of the Madura Strait is between nine and 10 meters deep, and 100 meters wide, while the mud dumped into the Porong River, that will reach the sea, amounts to 50,000 cubic meters per day.

Head of the PT Pelindo III state-run port authority Iwan Sabatini said foreign freighters weighing over 2,000 tons could not berth at the Tanjung Perak International Port in Surabaya because of the silted-up Madura Strait.

"We had planned to dredge the Strait to prevent sedimentation, but have been held back by Kodeco's pipe-laying activities in the Strait," Rudi said.

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Deforestation maps for Sumatra now available on Google Earth

mongabay.com
31 Mar 09;

Despite many years of research in conservation biology, precise maps of tropical deforestation that document the global spatial extent of tropical forests destruction are generally not available outside of the scientific community, says David Gaveau a researcher from Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology. For nearly seven years, Gaveau has been documenting forest destruction on the island of Sumatra since early 1970s using satellite technology. He publishes his full-resolution maps and scientific results using Google Earth.

Indonesian government in its mission to inform the general public and decision makers about the true scale of environmental destruction on the island of Sumatra, Gaveau created the first world’s website (sumatranforest.org) that puts precise maps of tropical deforestation freely at user's fingertips. Through a link on the website, maps of tropical deforestation will unfold onto Google’s digital Earth in full resolution (up to 1:150,000 scale). Internet users will obtain a bird’s-eye view of Sumatran forest landscapes, and the threats they are facing inside and outside protected areas.

"Among the most inspiring and challenging duties we face in the conservation community, is to put the full range of tropical deforestation worldwide for everyone to see to improve ecological transparency, a key requirement of sound environmental governance," said Gaveau.

Gaveau is now working towards the development of a free online cartographic database of the Earth’s tropical forests, and hopes to find investors that are willing to fund this effort.

"Our duty is to put the full range of tropical deforestation worldwide for everyone to see."

Sumatra has lost roughly half of its forest cover since 1985, mostly due to logging and conversion for agriculture. Environmental group WWF says there has been an 84 percent decline in elephant populations and a 70 percent in the number of Sumatran tigers on the island since 1982.

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UN climate talks: Save the forests -- but how?

Marlowe Hood Yahoo News 31 Mar 09;

BONN (AFP) – Deforestation, one of the main drivers of global warming, has barged its way to the heart of UN climate talks, which resumed in Bonn this week.

But which makes the better incentive for saving the carbon-absorbing tropical woodlands: market mechanisms or public funding?

This question has split nations, divided green groups and tossed in yet another factor to bedevil efforts to agree a pact by year's end for tackling climate change.

Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation -- an effort known as REDD -- emerged last year as a key element in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations.

It owes its rise to scientists' warnings that destruction of tropical forests cannot be ignored by policymakers, for it now accounts for a fifth of all greenhouse-gas emissions.

Logging and ground clearance are especially concentrated in Brazil and Indonesia. They each account for about one third of forest-related emissions, making them the world's top carbon polluters after China and the United States.

"There is broad consensus now that the post-2012 agreement will include some sort of incentives for tropical countries to reduce their deforestation," said Steve Schwartzman of Environmental Defense, an advocacy group based in Washington.

"The issue is, what kind of mechanism? And that is where the polemics start," he told AFP.

The United States and a coalition of around 20 small rain-forest nations, led by Papua New Guinea and Costa Rica, are demanding that deforestation "credits" be added to carbon markets, say sources.

Under carbon trading -- an innovation of the Kyoto Protocol that will be superseded by the treaty -- companies in industrialised nations can offset obligations to slash CO2 emissions by funding certified carbon-reduction projects in the developing world.

For this to work properly, the price of carbon has to be high enough to create a juicy enough carrot for investing in clean and renewable technologies.

But many green groups, along with the European Union (EU), fear that an influx of deforestation offsets would cause carbon prices to plummet.

A study commissioned by Greenpeace International, unveiled in Bonn on Tuesday, predicted that introducing forest credits would depress carbon prices by 75 percent, starving developing countries of clean investment.

"Of the many options for forest financing currently on the table, this one ranks as the worst," Greenpeace's Roman Czebiniak told AFP.

"Forests are the wild card in these negotiations -- it could be used to bring us closer to our goals, or to water them down."

Schwartzman couldn't disagree more. "We think it's a terrible idea to preclude the option of creating positive economic value for standing forests," he said.

Protecting forests through other methods is bound to fail, he argued.

Direct grants or carbon levies in rich nations would either fail to generate enough cash or would be vulnerable to mismanagement, poor accountability or corruption.

"There is now a 40-year history of public sector international development assistance in the forestry sector -- in Indonesia, in the Amazon -- which has been entirely unsuccessful in reducing deforestation," he said.

By contrast, Schwartzman contended, a company facing a legal obligation to comply with emission caps has a strong incentive to be sure the carbon credit it is buying corresponds to reality.

For Kim Carstensen, leader of the WWF's global climate initiative, both market and public funding mechanisms are necessary, but not all at once.

"The initial stages need to be funded by public mechanisms, not tradable credits. Markets are not a good option now because in the near term we don't see any credible REDD units coming into existence," he told AFP.

Only five years ago, Brazil opposed any discussion of deforestation at the UN forum.

But in December, it announced a national target to reduce its deforestation by 71 percent by 2017, using a 10-year average up to 2006 as a benchmark.

It has opened a fund to receive international compensation, and has recently received the first 110 million of a one billion dollar pledge -- contingent of continuing progress in forest protection -- from Norway.

The key, argues Schwartzman, is that both donor and recipient nations have to have national emissions caps in place, otherwise they will simply shift the carbon pollution from one location to another.

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New greenhouse gases targeted by UN talks

Marlowe Hood Yahoo News 31 Mar 09;

BONN (AFP) – Delegates at UN climate talks on Tuesday targeted more than a dozen new industrial chemicals for inclusion in the successor to the Kyoto Protocol climate treaty, which runs out in 2012.

The synthetic compounds are potent greenhouse gases that could, if produced in large quantities, contribute significantly to global warming, scientists warn.

"In terms of the impact these new gases will have over the next decade, it is not that significant," said Steve Sawyer, executive director of the Global Wind Energy Council, an industry lobbying group.

"What is important is the political message it sends to the chemical industry: 'stop inventing gases with a high global warming potential'," he told AFP.

Most are not yet widely used, but at least one -- nitrogen trifluoride (NF3) -- is a standard component in the manufacture of computers and LCD flat-screen televisions.

NF3 is about 17,000 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide (CO2).

By 2010, world production of NF3 is projected to reach 8,000 tonnes a year, the equivalent of 130 million tonnes of CO2, according to a study published last year in Geophysical Research Letters.

Lead researcher Michael Prather of the University of California at Irvine dubbed the chemical the "missing greenhouse gas."

Ironically, it was developed to replace another family of chemicals, perfluorocarbons (PFCs), covered by the 1997 Kyoto agreement.

Under Kyoto, 37 industrialised countries agreed to cut their overall emissions by five percent, compared to 1990 levels, by 2012. The United States never signed on to these commitments.

Beside CO2 and PFCs, the Protocol includes four other man-made gases that heat up the atmosphere: methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), and sulphur hexafluoride (SF6).

More than 190 nations party to UN Convention Framework on Climate Change (UNFCCC) are tasked with crafted a successor treaty by year's end, and began debate today in Bonn on whether to include the new basket of chemicals.

"This tells the chemical industry it should find substitutes or be sure these gases don't escape" into the atmosphere, said Brice Lalonde, France's top climate negotiator.

The time to act is now, before these chemicals are woven into industrial infrastructure, he said.

"We are talking about less than one percent of all greenhouse gases, but the principle here is to keep them under control," said Jose Romero, a climate negotiator from Switzerland.

All the delegates interviewed thought that the new basket of chemicals would eventually be covered in a new climate deal.

"I think we will be able to find a solution that is fair and effective," said a foreign affairs expert at the US State Department, adding that the United States was still developing a position on the issue.

"The most important thing is CO2, and you would not want to distract from that. But we want to make sure they do not grow to become an even larger component of the greenhouse gas picture," he said by phone.

The new chemicals under review include new types of PFCs and hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), trifluoromethyl sulphur pentafluoride (SF5CF3), fluorinated ethers, perfluoropolyethers and hydrocarbons.

Other compounds are dimethylether (CH3OCH3), methyl chloroform (CH3CCl3), methylene chloride (CH2Cl2), methyl chloride (CH3Cl), dibromomethane (CH2Br2), bromodifluoromethane (CHBrF2) and trifluoroiodomethane (CF3I).

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No technology yet to make coal-fired station clean: Stern

'Kingsnorth should be shelved'
Steve Connor, The Independent 31 Mar 09;

Britain's latest coal-fired power station should not be built, according to Lord Stern of Brentford, the economist who led the Government's review into the financial cost of climate change. Lord Stern called on the Government to halt the planning process and said that the new coal-fired power station proposed for Kingsnorth in Kent cannot be justified until the technology is developed to capture and store its huge carbon dioxide emissions.

It is the first time that the author of the landmark 2006 Stern Review has spoken out against coal power.

Coal is one of the dirtiest fossil fuels in terms of the amount of carbon dioxide release per megawatt of electricity generated. Lord Stern said it was important to send out a message to other countries, notably China, that Britain will not contemplate new coal-fired power stations until carbon capture and storage is proved to work.

"We shouldn't go ahead because coal is so polluting and we need very strong examples of how to move forward with our electricity supply in a way that doesn't use coal... without carbon capture and storage," Lord Stern said.

It could take 10 or 15 years to develop the technology, where carbon dioxide emissions are prevented from being released into the atmosphere to exacerbate global warming. "There are other ways we can handle the interim," he said. "The fastest way is to put up a gas-fired power station. That is emitting, but much less so than coal. We've got to build up solar and wind."

Last year, James Hansen, the leading Nasa climate scientist, said: "Kingsnorth is a terrible idea. One power plant with a lifetime of several decades will destroy the efforts of millions of citizens to reduce their emissions."

Lord Stern said the climate crisis was so urgent that we must reduce carbon dioxide emissions as fast and as soon as we can, otherwise the expected increase in global average temperatures could exceed 5C above pre-industrial levels.

"We haven't seen temperatures like that for 30 million years," Lord Stern said. "We've got to understand the magnitude of the risks we face. It will transform where we live. Some places will be deserts, others will be racked by storms. It will involve the likely movement of hundreds of millions, possibly billions of people, and extended conflict."

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Carbon labels present taxing problem

Alexander Kasterine, BBC Green Room 31 Mar 09;

Labels showing products' carbon footprints will not help tackle climate change, says Alex Kasterine. In this week's Green Room, he argues that carbon labelling schemes will harm exports, especially from developing nations, without making much impact on emissions.

Carbon labelling schemes have been developed in order to show how much carbon dioxide (CO2) has been emitted during the production, processing and transport of a product.

Retail giant Tesco is trialling carbon labels on 20 products in its range, and other retailers in the UK, France, US and Japan have followed suit.

The aim of these carbon labels, according to the UK government-funded Carbon Trust, is to "empower us all to make informed choices and in turn drive a market for low carbon products".

The main concerns with carbon labels come down to their effectiveness in reducing our carbon footprint and their fairness towards suppliers, particularly in developing countries.

Carbon labels look ineffective because the consumer can choose to ignore the information about the product's level of "embedded" carbon - just as we frequently ignore nutritional information, despite knowing that ice cream and oven chips might be bad for us.

This is not a useful tool for driving emissions reductions of 80% over the next 30 years.

In search of meaning

As things stand, most consumers do not even understand what carbon labels mean.

A recent survey found that just 28% of shoppers in the UK chain Boots knew that a carbon label related to climate change. Almost half confused the label with fair trade; most thought it was important to show the amount of carbon emitted during the item's production.



It is not surprising that most of us do not understand the labels. The meaning of a label with a footprint and a figure of "75g" on a packet of crisps is not immediately obvious.

If shoppers do recognise the figure as a measurement of the total CO2 emitted in the production and processing of the crisps, they still have to compute whether this figure is high or low.

This calculation would have to be based on knowing one's own annual CO2 emissions (how many people know this?), the proportion that comes from food consumption, and some pretty sharp maths skills in the supermarket to work through the sums to arrive at a judgment.

However, the calculation is pointless unless you have another product on the same shelf to compare it with.

Driving concern

Currently, retailers are using different methodologies for calculating and presenting the information in such a way that labels can not be compared.

Innocent Drinks tries to help us out of the confusion. The company states that the UK government recommends a target of 7.9 tonnes of annual consumption of CO2 in 2009, which means 21kg per person per day; drinking a smoothie means consuming 2,700g of CO2, or 8% of our daily allowance.

Despite this clear explanation, there are several problems with this approach.

Firstly, the information on the carbon label counts for very little unless you do your weekly shopping by bicycle or by foot.

Tesco and other big retailers have migrated out of town, so consumers now mostly use cars to get there. Driving to pick up a bag of low-carbon crisps for the kids' party won't stop climate change - quite the opposite.

We are all prone to self deception; maybe that is why the consumers in Boots thought carbon labels were a good thing, as it gives them the sensation they are doing something about climate change, even as they drive home in their petrol-fuelled car.

The information also cannot point to an alternative food product that is much lower in carbon emissions. As the animal welfare movement has reminded us, producing a kilogram of beef generates many times more greenhouse gases than producing an equivalent level of protein from pulses such as lentils.

The "green marketing" potential of carbon labels is clear. A UK survey by Populus for crisp manufacturer Walkers revealed that more than half of the 1,000 people interviewed were more likely to buy a product with a carbon label, and 69% thought the label demonstrated corporate commitment to reducing carbon emissions.

Free choices?

More broadly, the government is only recommending an allowance for how much carbon we should use.

Given that climate change is now threatening irreversible catastrophic changes to life on Earth, as Nasa's Jim Hansen projected recently, surely governments should set rules for economic behaviour that causes climate change, rather than guidelines.

Implicit in the concept of carbon labels is that our private choices are always in line with the public interest, namely curbing carbon emissions.

The problem is that many of us don't want to be green if that means missing out on a weekend in Barcelona, heating a bigger house or running a bigger car; all the stuff we aspire to.

The shopper can choose not to "be green", and free ride on the efforts of those who decide to cut back on consumption.

There is a potential development impact too.

Africa still relies heavily on agriculture to generate wealth for its people; and it is quite feasible that retailers implementing carbon labels schemes will require African exporters to provide information on their carbon emissions and evidence of carbon emission "reduction plans".

African countries risk losing out financially if they do not receive a premium price for carbon labelled goods.

Africans have a carbon footprint on average 20 times lower than Europeans, yet they potentially face increased costs to trade in the name of climate change mitigation.

The problem of aligning our private choices with public needs can be resolved through putting a price on carbon, for example through a tax.

This will allow consumers automatically to factor in the environmental costs (in this case CO2) when deciding what fridge to buy, how much electricity to use and so on.

Increasing the price of carbon relative to prices of labour and capital also sets a powerful incentive for industry to develop "low carbon technologies" like renewable energy, energy efficient building design and so on.

The UK government target of reducing emissions by 80% in a little over 40 years requires a new industrial "low carbon" revolution every bit as dramatic as the first industrial "high carbon" revolution 150 years ago. That can only be achieved by taxing carbon, not by designing new labels for food.

Alexander Kasterine is a senior market development manager for the International Trade Centre (ITC) in Geneva. The views expressed in this article are those of Mr Kasterine and do not necessarily reflect those of the ITC

The Green Room is a series of opinion articles on environmental topics running weekly on the BBC News website

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Stimulus plans short-change environment: Greenpeace

Yahoo News 31 Mar 09;

BEIJING (AFP) – Economic stimulus packages launched by crisis-hit countries are not investing enough in "green" sectors, the environmental group Greenpeace said on Tuesday.

Executive director Gerd Liepold said stimulating consumption for its own sake was the wrong response to the economic crisis, and urged governments to pay more attention to the "climate crisis."

"At this moment, because of this economic crisis, we'll have a lot of stimulus packages, a lot of state-sponsored economic activities," Liepold told journalists in Beijing.

But he added: "The wrong responses are to stimulate consumption for the purpose of stimulating consumption."

Governments should end subsidies to industries that pollute or emit the greenhouse gases that cause global warming, he added.

"While the headlines are dominated by the economic crisis, we should simply not forget that we are in the middle of a climate crisis," Liepold said.

The Greenpeace leader singled out Germany for its subsidies aimed at boosting the car industry.

"In my own country, Germany, you are now paid a premium if you destroy your old car just to buy a new one, and it's been sold as a green stimulus package," he said.

Investment in clean energy or more efficient energy technologies would create more jobs, more rapidly, than investment in polluting industries, he said.

Guruswamy Ananthapadmanabhan, Greenpeace's international programme director, said that less than 0.8 percent of Britain's stimulus package would go into "any kind of green investment."

Liepold said China's stimulus package included some environmentally friendly provisions, but it was too early to tell how effective they would be.

"We believe that (China's) stimulus package has some positive signals in terms of green investment. However, it's not specific enough to make a clear statement of how green is it," Liepold said.

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