Arabian Tahr gets royal protection

WWF 28 Apr 09;

Dubai, United Arab Emirates – In a major conservation decision, the United Arab Emirates has established the Wadi Wurayah Fujairah – home to the endangered Arabian Tahr and possibly the rare Arabian Leopard – as the country’s first protected mountain area.

The Wadi is a 129 km-square catchment that occupies the northern reaches of Fujairah between the towns of Masafi, Khor Fakkan and Bidiyah, and is an important natural and cultural region in the Middle East.

The area has been an important source of water for local communities for thousands of years, and is home to rare and endangered species such as the Arabian Tahr and Arabian Leopard.

The Arabian Leopard (Panthera pardus nimr) is considered critically endangered with less than 250 adult leopards left, according to the IUCN Red List. The Arabian Tahr (Arabitragus jayakari) is endangered, with fewer than 2,500 adults in the wild. Both species face threats from hunting and habitat loss because of development.

In addition, the Wadi is located within WWF’s Ecoregion 127 Arabian Highlands and Shrublands, one of the conservation organization’s global ecoregions grouping the richest, rarest and most distinctive of the Earth's natural habitats.

Under the proposed protection plan reviewed by the royal court, EWS-WWF calls for management and park rangers to patrol the area and help educate visitors. Visitors will also be fined for leaving litter behind, polluting the water and painting graffiti – problems that currently threaten the Wadi.

“Wadi Wurayah is of considerable ecological significance allowing among the rarest species found in the UAE, Arabian Peninsular and the world to survive this harsh climate,” said Razan Khalifa Al Mubarak, Managing Director EWS-WWF. “Over the past 3 years, we have revealed the presence of 12 species of mammals, 73 species of birds, 17 species of reptiles and amphibians, and one species of fish and 74 invertebrate families, of which 11 are new species for science.”

More than 300 species of plants have been recorded in the area, including species that are found only in wetlands such as Typha dominginsis and the unique orchid species of UAE: Epipactis veratrifolia, Al Mubarak said.

His Highness Shaikh Hamad Bin Mohammad Al Sharqi, Member of the Supreme Council and Ruler of Fujairah, issued a decree this week that officially establishes the Wadi’s protected status.

The decree comes after the completion of a successful 3 year project launched in 2006 by Emirates Wildlife Society (EWS) - WWF and the Fujairah Municipality with the support of HSBC Bank Middle East ltd, to assess the importance of Wadi Wurayah for nature conservation and to establish it as a protected area.

“We are extremely excited about the decree and thank HH Shaikh Hamad Bin Mohammad Al Sharqi for signing the official document, making history and securing that this gem of nature and culture is here for future generations to enjoy. We also thank Fujairah Municipality and HSBC Bank Middle East for their on-going support and dedication to this important cause,” Al Mubarak said.

The decision follows a 2006 survey Fujairah among the residents of the areas surrounding Wadi Wurayah and its visitors to measure support for the area’s protection.

The survey, conducted by EWS-WWF and students from the Higher Colleges of Technology, found that 67% of residents and visitors supported the move. Only 18% of those surveyed objected to the plan and 13% of respondents were ambivalent. Significantly, the survey also revealed the amount of wildlife seen by residents in the area has dropped dramatically over the past 10 years.

“Wadi Wurayah is an extremely important part of the UAE’s national heritage and our on-going discoveries of the species residing in the area, and support of the locals is a testament to that fact,” said Dr. Christophe Tourenq, Science and Research Manager at EWS-WWF and manager of the Wadi Wurayah project. “At the start of the project we discovered that the endangered mountain wildlife was increasingly threatened, either by direct transformation or through unregulated recreational use.”

“This decree will go a long way in ensuring the wildlife and area is closely monitored and protected for future generations,” Tourenq said.

In 1995, His Highness Shaikh Hamad Bin Mohammad Al Sharqi, ruler of Fujairah, created the first marine protected areas of the UAE.

“The declaration of Wadi Wurayah as the first mountain protected area of the country shows the commitment of the Fujairah government to the conservation of their natural and cultural heritage. The project also illustrates perfectly the collaboration between a local NGO, a local government to protect our heritage with the support of the private sector,” Tourenq said.

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Elephants abandon troubled Zimbabwe

Growing pressure from poaching and human encroachment in Zimbabwe has driven hundreds of elephants to migrate from the country, conservationists have said.
The Telegraph 28 Apr 09;

As many as 400 elephants have crossed the Zambezi River, which separates Zambia from northern Zimbabwe, in recent months, said Johnny Rodrigues, head of the Zimbabwe Conservation Task Force.

Three elephants also roamed into the eastern border city of Mutare this month and state wildlife authorities "want to shoot them before they kill somebody," he said.

The task force and a Zimbabwe animal group received official authority to capture and transport the elephants to Chipinda Pools, believed to be their original home area 125 miles to the south.

"The problem is funding for the relocation," Mr Rodrigues said. State game rangers "won't wait much longer before destroying the elephants."

He said changes in Zimbabwe's countryside had also forced a leopardand its cub out of its natural habitat and into an upmarket Harare suburb.

Mr Rodrigues said the task force set up drugged, baited traps for predators so they could be returned to the wild, but none has been caught since a guard dog was attacked earlier this month.

The independent task force has appealed for more action — and money — to preserve the troubled nation's wildlife.

In Zimbabwe's economic meltdown, "humans are encroaching more and more into areas previously reserved for wildlife," the task force said.

Tourism and photographic safaris have dropped sharply during years of political and economic turmoil since the often violent seizures of thousands of white-owned farms began in 2000, disrupting the agriculture-based economy in the former regional breadbasket.

Longtime ruler President Robert Mugabe blames Western sanctions for the economic crisis that has led to acute shortages of food, gasoline and the most basic goods.

Poaching of small animals has intensified, with villagers torching the bush to drive even rodents and rock rabbits into traps for food, conservationists say.

Mr Rodrigues said more animal fencing was needed at wildlife preserves to combat poaching and the escape of animals from their natural habitat after being made skittish by gunfire.

Conservationists already have raised the alarm for Zimbabwe's rare rhinos after a sharp increase in poaching over the past year because of a breakdown of law enforcement in the country.

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US Interior Revokes Bush Endangered Species Rule

Yereth Rosen, PlanetArk 29 Apr 09;

ANCHORAGE - The Obama administration said on Tuesday it rolled back a Bush-era rule excusing oil and gas companies in polar bear habitat from special reviews designed to ensure they are not harming the animals.

The Alaska energy industry said the move could slow exploration and production activity in the state. Environmental groups applauded the decision as an important step protecting threatened species.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Commerce Secretary Gary Locke said they rescinded the Endangered Species Act regulation issued in December by the Bush administration, which eliminated the long-standing "Section 7 consultation" requirement for special scrutiny of any proposed activities that might harm a listed species.

"By rolling back this 11th hour regulation, we are ensuring that threatened and endangered species continue to receive the full protection of the law," Salazar said.

"Because science must serve as the foundation for decisions we make, federal agencies proposing to take actions that might affect threatened and endangered species will once again have to consult with biologists at the two departments," he said.

For polar bears, the reversal means any oil and gas development in their habitat must be cleared through consultation with U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Polar bears, highly dependent on Arctic sea ice, were listed last year as threatened after federal biologists determined they were especially vulnerable to the rapidly warming climate in the far north.

A decision on a separate special Bush administration rule limiting federal polar bear protections is due by May 10, according to Bruce Woods, spokesman for the Fish and Wildlife Service in Alaska.

Tuesday's reversal of the consultation exemption also affects energy development elsewhere in the United States, where permitting agencies such as the Bureau of Land Management and Minerals Management Service had been allowed to rely on their own internal reviews about potential impacts to endangered or threatened species.

Environmental groups applauded the move.

"Restoring these core protections of the Endangered Species Act signals a renewal of America's conservation ethic," John Kostyack, the National Wildlife Federation's executive director of wildlife conservation and global warming, said in a statement. "Permanently reinstating independent scientific review puts the teeth back into the law that saved the bald eagle and Yellowstone grizzly bear."

But a representative of Alaska's oil industry said withdrawal of the Bush administration regulation could eventually slow permits for development because the Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service -- the agencies with authority over all Endangered Species Act listed populations -- are overburdened.

"Adding this additional huge layer of evaluation on them when they're already stretched thin is troubling and certainly will not do anything to speed up the necessary development of the nation's resources," said Marilyn Crockett, executive director of the Alaska Oil and Gas Association.

(Editing by Richard Valdmanis and David Gregorio)

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In search of forestry’'s El Dorado

Andrew Mitchell, BBC Green Room 28 Apr 09;

The world's tropical forests face the double challenge of climate change and deforestation, says Andrew Mitchell. In this week's Green Room, he explains why he is not giving up on the "impossible dream" of convincing governments that these trees are worth more alive than dead.

Rumour has it that Brad Pitt is going into the Amazon.

He will play out the story of an enigmatic explorer in search of his personal El Dorado.

The explorer in question was Colonel Percy Fawcett, a highly resilient English surveyor who set off almost 85 years ago on his final expedition into the Amazon.

Fawcett, a celebrated veteran of many journeys into the unknown, secretly believed he had discovered scientific evidence of a lost civilisation within the vastness of what today is known as the Xingu, in north-eastern Brazil.

Despite mounting evidence to the contrary, he remained resolute and journeyed repeatedly into the forest, determined to find it.

Newspapers published despatches detailing his quest for many months, but then all news ceased.

Like Livingstone 50 years before him, Fawcett had vanished into a dark continent; only this time, no-one ever found him.

'Impossible dream'

After three decades at the conservation frontline, much of it now encased in concrete jungles searching for a seemingly impossible solution to inexorable rainforest destruction, I am beginning to feel a little bit like Percy Fawcett.

Perhaps I am on the trail of an impossible dream.

Fawcett gave his elusive goal the cryptic name of "Z".

The same could equally apply to the El Dorado that I and many others have been searching for: an economic argument to convince governments that the standing rainforest could be worth more alive than dead.

The fact that tropical forests continue to go up in flames, contributing seven billion tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually (more than all the world's cars, ships and planes), suggests that my Amazonian "Z" may not exist.

Unless, that is, a completely new way to discover it exists.

A clutch of events last week offer several apparently contradictory clues as to how my El Dorado might be found.

At the UN Forum on Forests (UNFF), currently in session in New York, the International Union of Forest Research Organisations (IUFRO) released a report on Adaptation of Forests and People to Climate Change.

It contained the projection that rising global temperatures may condemn forests over the next century to become fire-strewn savannahs, whatever efforts governments may take to conserve them.

This resonates with the finding, recently published in the journal Science, that the Amazon's trees capture a whopping two billion tonnes of CO2 annually; but that during the devastating Amazon drought of 2005, they released five billion tonnes back out again.

Some journalists have asked in response: "What's the point in saving the Amazon, if it's doomed anyway?"

Our common reaction in the face of these uncertainties is to believe that the risks of doing nothing are less than any remedial action we could take.

In this case, the reverse is almost certainly true.

Take cover

Oliver Phillips - the lead author of the Science paper - Yadvinder Malhi of Oxford University, I and others have indicated that halting deforestation may increase the forest's resilience to climate change.

So, my view is that far from reducing efforts to halt deforestation, we should redouble them.

Let me put it another way: if a person has malaria and you want to save their life by keeping their temperature down, surely the worst way to do it is to keep kicking them in the stomach or even amputating their legs.

At the Summit of the Americas last week in Trinidad, a Blueprint for a Sustainable Energy Partnership for the Americas was presented to the many heads of state who attended the summit.

One of its three components was a new "vision for the Amazon". But what has the Amazon got to do with energy?

Brazil is a leader in green power, with 40% of its cars being run on bioethanol from sugarcane and 70% of its electricity sourced from hydropower.

Even in the Sao Paulo hotel where I am writing this, lights in the corridor only come on when I walk through.

The connection between energy and the Amazon is water.

The evapotranspiration of the Amazon's trees, which generates billions of tonnes of water each day, may significantly underpin food and energy security in the region.

Dr Jose Marengo, a scientist at Brazil's space research agency (INPE), has postulated that a proportion of this moisture is carried south on a low-level atmospheric jet stream across southern Brazil and down to the La Plata Basin.

If so, this vast volume of water helps sustain a trillion dollar agricultural industry, feeds hydropower, and could prove to be essential to Brazil's booming biofuel industry.

It seems to me that a new way of looking at the Amazon is to consider it as a locally owned "eco-utility", which is providing ecosystem services across regional and global distances that currently no-one pays for.

It is likely that these services are potentially worth a great deal to those who deliver them and to businesses whose prosperity depends on them.

A 10% fall in rainfall over time - less than some conservative predictions - could deliver a 40% drop in river flow, for example.

Perversely, beneficiaries such as Brazilian beef and soy farmers are at the same time potentially undermining their future success. through their expansion into the forest.

An international bank investing in agriculture and hydropower in the region might legitimately ask if the former investment is, in fact, weakening the latter.

Could the beneficiaries therefore be persuaded to pay a tax to maintain the services?

Doing so might make the Amazon worth more standing up than cut down. This would help sustain global food and energy security, worth billions to national economies.

Hidden value

The question that businesses and policymakers will want answered is whether continued deforestation could make the giant soy fields of Mato Grosso dry up or the lights go out in Buenos Aires.

At INPE last week, I was privileged to join some of the region's leading scientists, economists and community development specialists to brainstorm the idea of valuing the Amazon as an "eco-utility".

The meeting was funded under an innovative new UK government programme called Ecosystem Services and Poverty Alleviation (ESPA).

We concluded that we can't really be sure where the rain goes, and argued over its possible reduction, ranging from a lot to a little.

Yet we were convinced that a new positive incentive system was needed, and that a year of effort lay ahead to figure out how it might work.

Our scientific caution is understandable; but for a policymaker, is it really the point?

If you were in charge of a departing flight in which the captain announced the destination was uncertain but the engineer said there was a 10% chance of the aircraft crashing, would you recommend that everyone happily remain in their seats whilst an argument ensued over probabilities?

I believe the credit crunch, climate change, and consumer appetites are creating a crucial tipping point in this historical debate, which will determine how the world's political process deals with the erosion one of the greatest natural capital assets on Earth.

If I can echo Einstein: it is unlikely that Amazonian nations will be able to solve this problem with the same thinking that caused it.

Although the Amazon belongs to no-one else but these nations and their people, how it fares affects us all, and so is a scientific, political and economic intelligence test for everyone.

Fawcett's ecological ignorance hid the Amazon's true value, which was all around him.

His El Dorado exists today as the vast Xingu Reserve, a land of forests quietly maintaining our resilience because the indigenous communities have maintained theirs.

But will the forests Fawcett once journeyed through disappear?

Will my "Z" in the Amazon become a romantic metaphor for an ineffective environmental Zeitgeist?

I do not know; but expecting science to offer a certainty that it can never deliver excuses inaction and stokes risk.

Who among us has refused to buy insurance because we cannot know accurately when our house will burn down or exactly when our car will be stolen?

Paying a premium to prevent the loss of the Amazon could be one of the best insurance policies planet Earth has on offer.

Andrew Mitchell is founder and director of the Global Canopy Programme

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

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Clash over ecological economics

Pallab Ghosht, BBC News 27 Apr 09;

Warnings are being sounded about the way government is preparing for the cost of climate change.

The government's former chief scientific advisor, Professor Sir David King has told BBC News that he believes that the government is being misled by economic assessments of the impact of climate change such as those drawn up by Lord Stern in his review for the Treasury published in 2006.

Prof King believes that such models are underestimating the true cost of tackling the problem and leading to poor investments by businesses and governments.

Many governments including the UK now include an environmental cost benefit in policy making. That cost benefit uses estimates made by economic models, such as those developed by Lord Stern and his team for the Treasury.

Professor King, who is now director of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at the University of Oxford and an advisor to UBS has said that he "questions the value of these simple models" saying that they are "misleading".

"Economic models such as those produced by Nick Stern are often based on steady growth," he said.

"But they are not very good at predicting the impact of catastrophic events," he added. "It's likely that because of Sea level rise and changes in rainfall patterns people will have to migrate. "That has the potential for massive conflict and massive geopolitical destabilisation and that can lead to a sudden downturn in the global economy".

Cost questions

Professor King argues that economic models are not fully able to account for such upheaval. This raises questions about how economists can put an accurate price on producing a tonne of carbon dioxide.

He also said that these models do not properly cost the environmental impact of large infrastructure projects. The decision to give the go-ahead to build four new coal-fired power stations with experimental carbon capture technology and a third runway for Heathrow airport in London are examples of projects that could not have been properly assessed by economic modelling, he said.

Dr Simon Dietz, deputy director of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and a member of the former Stern Review team, said: "Economic models of the impact of climate change, like scientific models of climate change, have both strengths and limitations.

"Modelling was used very carefully in the Stern Review and the uncertainties and limitations of the results were fully explained in the report," he said. "The models used in the Review had advantages over other economic models which tend to underestimate the potentially severe impacts of climate change.

"It is now two and a half years since the Stern Review was published, and further evidence on climate change has become available," he added. "As Nicholas Stern has highlighted, it has become apparent that the risks and potential costs of the impacts of climate change are even greater than we originally recognised," he said. "Future modelling will take that into account.

"We know that the Government is continuing to use modelling to help formulate its policies on climate change. When the models are used correctly, with good data, they can produce information to make better-informed decisions, but they are not the only sources of information that are taken into account."

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Goal Of Eliminating Malaria In Sight: Experts

Jonathan Lynn, PlanetArk 29 Apr 09;

GENEVA - Fresh efforts and funding to tackle malaria in recent years have brought the goal of eradicating the deadly disease within sight, health experts said on Friday.

Wiping out malaria worldwide could take decades but many countries where it is endemic are on the brink of eliminating the disease, which infects up to 500 million people a year and kills nearly one million worldwide, they said.

"The vision of achieving elimination in a number of countries is certainly in sight," said Rifat Atun, strategy director at the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, an international financing institution.

Most malaria victims are children under the age of five and pregnant women. Roughly 90 percent of fatalities are in Africa, where malaria accounts for one in five childhood deaths.

The goal of eradicating malaria, caused by a parasite transmitted in mosquito bites, could take until 2050 or 2060, said Richard Feachem, chairman of the Malaria Elimination Group.

But it is now endemic in only about half the world's countries after being eliminated from others such as Canada and Finland since 1945, he told a news conference, launching two reports by the group for policymakers and health specialists.

SQUEEZING MALARIA

One report focuses on destroying malaria in countries such as Mexico, South Africa and China on the margins of the tropical areas where it is endemic.

Feachem said the strategy was aggressive control in the heartland to reduce infection and death, elimination country by country from the margins, and research into drugs, vaccines and insecticides.

He said countries could learn from tough rules imposed in Singapore. The tropical city state makes it illegal for construction companies to allow malaria-bearing mosquitoes to breed on building sites and makes individuals responsible for preventing stagnant water gathering in their homes.

"In a country where the legislative and political environment permits it ... legislation can play an important role, requiring householders to do certain things," he said.

The fight against malaria takes several forms -- spraying bednets and homes to deter mosquitoes, using drugs to treat infected people and finding a vaccine to prevent infection.

Such treatments are brought to people in the world's poorest countries by international organizations and private groups such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, buying drugs from pharmaceutical companies at preferential prices.

Some of these methods are controversial. The pesticide DDT has saved millions of lives from malaria, but concerns that its intensive use in agriculture could spread cancer led to its being banned in many countries for farming.

New medical treatments such as a drug developed by Swiss pharmaceuticals company Novartis using artemisinin, a compound derived from a herb used in Chinese traditional medicine, are driving down deaths and infections, said Chris Hentschel of the Medicines for Malaria Venture.

The treatment, administered to 57 million people last year, saved half a million lives last year. About 50 new drug projects are in the pipeline, Hentschel said.

GlaxoSmithKline is about to start clinical trials of a vaccine in a test involving 16,000 children in seven African countries, which could reach the market within three years, the world's second-largest drugmaker said.

(Editing by Stephanie Nebehay)

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Gore pleads for rapid action to halt ice melt

Pierre-henry Deshayes Yahoo News 28 Apr 09;

TROMSOE, Norway (AFP) – Nobel prize-winning climate champion and former US vice president Al Gore called Tuesday for rapid action to prevent the potentially irreversible melting of the planet's ice.

Gore told the first conference devoted to melting ice, held in the Norwegian town of Tromsoe ahead of the UN meeting in Copenhagen in December, that melting was worse than the worst-case scenarios presented by experts a few years ago.

"This conference is a global wake-up call," Gore said. "The scientific evidence for action in Copenhagen in December is continuing to build up week by week."

He explained why the melting ice posed such a threat to the planet.

"Ice is important through the ecological system of the Earth for many reasons, but one of them has to do with its reflexivity," he said.

Ice reflects 90 percent of the sun's radiation back into the atmosphere. If the ice were to melt, the dark water would not reflect the heat but instead absorb it, thereby accentuating the effect of global warming.

"As it disappears we have to keep in mind that it can come back only if we act fairly quickly," said Gore, who shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

He explained that "if we keep turning the temperature of the Earth up, then the heat will go to lower depths of the Arctic Ocean and it will be impossible for the ice to come back."

The Arctic ice cap measured 4.13 million square kilometres (1.59 million square miles) in September 2007, its smallest size ever. It is also thinner than ever, making it more susceptible to rapid melting.

Ice melting in the Antarctic and Greenland as well as on the world's glaciers will also have dramatic consequences, Gore said, warning that each one-meter (3.3-foot) rise of water levels will cause 100 million people to become climate refugees.

Melting snow in the Himalayan mountain range, dubbed "the third pole," will meanwhile lead to flooding, then droughts, for 40 percent of the planet's population which depends on that water for survival.

Scientists attending the Tromsoe conference said the future was ominous, with the scope and rapidity of global warming exceeding the UN climate panel's worst scenarios.

"We are in trouble," said Robert Correll, a US scientist and chair of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, a report published in 2004 which shed light on the effects of climate change on the region.

Temperatures in the Arctic are climbing twice as fast as in the rest of the world.

Action envisaged around the world to counter global warming will only reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by a third of what is necessary, Correll said.

And if no other action is taken, the planet's temperature will rise by 4.5 degrees by the end of the century, he said. Experts have warned that a 2.0 percent increase is the most the planet can tolerate.

If his forecast were to come true, sea levels would rise by one metre (yard), he said.

Following the conference, a working group will write a report to raise awareness among decision-makers about the issue of melting ice ahead of the Copenhagen summit.

Meanwhile, the top US climate negotiator said Tuesday he was more optimistic about reaching a new global warming treaty this year after two days of talks in Washington among 18 major economies.

Climate envoy Todd Stern told reporters that the talks were not a "head-butting exercise."

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Monday told delegates from major European countries, China, India, Indonesia and other powers that President Barack Obama "and his entire administration are committed to addressing this issue and we will act."


Al Gore calls on world to burn less wood and fuel to curb 'black carbon'
Soot from engines, forest fires and partly burned fuel is collecting in Arctic and causing north pole to warm at alarming rate
John Vidal, guardian.co.uk 28 Apr 09;

The world must burn less diesel and wood, Nobel peace prize-winner Al Gore said yesterday, as the soot produced is accelerating the melting of ice in polar and mountainous regions.

Gore, backed by government ministers and scientists, said that the soot, also known as "black carbon", from engines, forest fires and partially burned fuel was collecting in the Arctic where it was creating a haze of pollution that absorbs sunlight and warms the air. It was also being deposited on snow, darkening its surface and reducing the snow's ability to reflect sunlight back into space.

"The principle [climate change] problem is carbon dioxide, but a new understanding is emerging of soot," said Gore. "Black carbon is settling in the Himalayas. The air pollution levels in the upper Himalayas are now similar to those in Los Angeles."

The impact of the soot is as significant as it is surprising — it was not mentioned as a warming factor in the UN's major 2007 report on climate change. A study this month indicated that soot from industry, cars, farming and wood fuel burning has been responsible for half the total temperature increases in the Arctic between 1890 to 2007. Temperatures there are rising twice as fast as anywhere else on the planet, making it the region worst affected by climate change.

Gore warned that all the world's icy regions were experiencing rapid and dangerous global warming. "The cryosphere – the frozen water part of the Earth – is disappearing. Global warming is causing the permafrost to thaw. It contains more carbon than anywhere else and the risk is that it releases methane. That has the potential to double the global warming potential in the atmosphere," he said.

Norwegian foreign minister Jonas Store said action on black carbon was even more urgent than that on CO2: "Even if we turn the rising curve of greenhouse gas emissions in the coming years, the reduction will not occur quickly enough to preserve the polar and alpine environments. We must address short lived climate pollutants such as black carbon."

Glaciologists working in Latin America, Nepal, China and Greenland all reported at the meeting in Tromso that glaciers were losing ice more rapidly and becoming less thick as a result of global warming.

Dorthe Jensen, from the Niels Bohr Institute in Denmark, said: "In the last five years we have seen many ice streams double in speed. Their floating snouts have moved back 30km. We never imagined the ice discharge would change so much."

Glaciers in the Himalayas and on the Tibetan plateau, from which 40% of the world derives its fresh water, are retreating fast, said Yao Tandong, a researcher with the Chinese academy of sciences. "This is causing severe social problems as lakes get bigger and people are forced to move. Himalayan glaciers are mostly retreating at an accelerating rate."

The meeting also heard, in a new report from the international Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (Amap), that climate change was now affecting every aspect of life in the Arctic. Norwegian, Canadian, Russian, US and other polar scientists reported that, in the last four years, air temperatures have increased, sea ice has declined sharply, surface waters in the Arctic ocean have warmed and permafrost is in some areas rapidly thawing, releasing methane.

The report's main findings are:

Land

Permafrost is warming fast and at its margins thawing. Plants are growing more vigorously and densely. In northern Alaska, temperatures have been rising since the 1970s. In Russia, the tree line has advanced up hills and mountains at 10 metres a year. Nearly all glaciers are decreasing in mass, resulting in rising sea levels as the water drains to the ocean.

Summer sea ice

The most striking change in the Arctic in recent years has been the reduction in summer sea ice in 2007. This was 23% less than the previous record low of 5.6m sq kilometres in 2005, and 39% below the 1979-2000 average. New satellite data suggests the ice is much thinner than it used to be. For the first time in existing records, both the north-west and north-east passages were ice-free in summer 2008. However, the 2008 winter ice extent was near the year long-term average.

Greenland

The Greenland ice sheet has continued to melt in the past four years with summer temperatures consistently above the long-term average since the mid 1990s. In 2007, the area experiencing melt was 60% greater than in 1998. Melting lasted 20 days longer than usual at sea level and 53 days longer at 2-3,000m heights.

Warmer waters

In 2007, some ice-free areas were as much as 5C warmer than the long-term average. Arctic waters appear to have warmed as a result of the influx of warmer waters from the Pacific and Atlantic. The loss of reflective, white sea ice also means that more solar radiation is absorbed by the dark water, heating surface layers further.

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Melt From Andes To Arctic May Spur UN Climate Pact

Alister Doyle, PlanetArk 29 Apr 09;

TROMSOE - A fast melt of ice from the Andes to the Arctic should be a wake-up call for governments to work out a strong new United Nations treaty this year to fight climate change, Norway said on Tuesday.

Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere, starting two-day talks of the eight Arctic nations and scientists in the northern city of Tromsoe, said ice was vanishing from land around the planet as temperatures increase, raising sea levels.

"It is a global phenomenon reflecting global warming," he told a news conference, referring to a thaw in places such as "the Himalayas, the Alps, the Andes, Kilimanjaro, Greenland, the South Pole or the North Pole."

Stoere said he and former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, also attending the Tromsoe talks, planned to set up a task force of experts to study the melt and report to a U.N. conference in Copenhagen in December that is due to agree a new climate pact.

Latest evidence of the melt would be a "clarion call, a real wake-up message to Copenhagen," he said.

Many glaciers are retreating but until now, he said the links between a thaw on mountains in the tropics and the Arctic have not been highlighted enough, he said.

Vanishing ice "is not in the grey zone of probabilities, it is about to happen. It is serious, we have to deal with it," he said.

The U.N. Climate Panel projected in 2007 world sea levels would rise by between 18 and 59 cms (7-23 inches) this century. Some scientists have said the rate is likely to be closer to a metre.

IRRIGATION

And that can impact irrigation. A melt of the Himalayas could disrupt farming for hundreds of millions of people in Asia.

The U.N. has projected up to a quarter of global food production could be lost by 2050 due to a combination of climate change, water scarcity, degradation and species infestation, as the world's population is forecast to top 9 billion.

"The Arctic continues to warm," according to a report by the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme, grouping scientists in the region.

It said several indicators since a major 2005 report "show further and extensive climate change at rates faster than previously anticipated."

Sea ice in summer shrank to a record low in 2007.

Stoere will hold talks about melting ice on Tuesday before a formal meeting of Arctic Council foreign ministers or deputies on Wednesday in the Arctic city of Tromsoe, ringed by snow-capped mountains.

The Council groups the United States, Russia, Canada, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Iceland.

He said there were chances for cooperation in the Arctic, saying he hoped it would be "high north, low tension".

Countries could act regionally to reduce pollution that accelerates the melt, he added. Soot from industrial pollution or from forest fires, for instance, can blacken snow and make it melt faster.

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Icebergs break away from Antarctic iceshelf

Yahoo News 28 Apr 09;

PARIS (AFP) – A huge iceshelf that has wrenched away from the Antarctic peninsula has started to fracture into icebergs, the European Space Agency (ESA) here said on Tuesday.

"Satellite images show that icebergs have begun to calve (break away) from the northern front of the Wilkins Ice Shelf -- indicating that the huge shelf has become unstable," it said in a statement.

The first icebergs started to detach last Friday, in a process that is likely to continue for weeks, ESA said.

"The icebergs are calving as a result of fracture zones that have formed over the last 15 years and which turned Wilkins into a fragile and vulnerable ice shelf," it added.

The Wilkins once covered around 16,000 square kilometres (6,000 square miles) before it began to retreat in the 1990s, and by last May a narrow ice bridge was all that connected it to Charcot and Latady islands.

That last link was smashed on April 5, making the Wilkins the biggest casualty in a two-decade-old series of Antarctic ice-shelf losses and retreats.

"There is little doubt that these changes are the result of atmospheric warming on the Antarctic Peninsula, which has been the most rapid in the Southern Hemisphere," explained David Vaughan from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS).

Pictures have been captured by radar images from ESA's Envisat satellite and the German Aerospace Centre's TerraSAR-X satellite, providing the most detailed evidence yet of an ice shelf's demise.

A long tongue of land that points northwards towards South America, the Antarctic peninsula has been hit by greater warming than almost any other region on Earth.

In the past 50 years, temperatures have risen by 2.5 degrees Celsius (4.5 degrees Fahrenheit), around six times the global average.

Ice shelves are ledges that float on the sea and are formed when ice is exuded from the coast by glaciers.

The process of shelf loss is marked by shrinkage and the breakaway of increasingly bigger chunks before the remainder of the shelf snaps away from the coast. It then disintegrates into debris or into icebergs that eventually melt as they drift northwards into warmer water.

ESA has set up a "Webcam from space" with automatic updates from Envisat as it flies over the Wilkins (http://www.esa.int/esaEO/SEMWZS5DHNF_index_0.html).

New York City-Sized Ice Collapses Off Antarctica
Alister Doyle PlanetArk 29 Apr 09;

TROMSOE - An area of an Antarctic ice shelf almost the size of New York City has broken into icebergs this month after the collapse of an ice bridge widely blamed on global warming, a scientist said Tuesday.

"The northern ice front of the Wilkins Ice Shelf has become unstable and the first icebergs have been released," Angelika Humbert, glaciologist at the University of Muenster in Germany, said of European Space Agency satellite images of the shelf.

Humbert told Reuters about 700 sq km (270.3 sq mile) of ice -- bigger than Singapore or Bahrain and almost the size of New York City -- has broken off the Wilkins this month and shattered into a mass of icebergs.

She said 370 sq kms of ice had cracked up in recent days from the Shelf, the latest of about 10 shelves on the Antarctic Peninsula to retreat in a trend linked by the U.N. Climate Panel to global warming.

The new icebergs added to 330 sq kms of ice that broke up earlier this month with the shattering of an ice bridge apparently pinning the Wilkins in place between Charcot island and the Antarctic Peninsula.

Nine other shelves -- ice floating on the sea and linked to the coast -- have receded or collapsed around the Antarctic peninsula in the past 50 years, often abruptly like the Larsen A in 1995 or the Larsen B in 2002.

The trend is widely blamed on climate change caused by heat-trapping gases from burning fossil fuels, according to David Vaughan, a British Antarctic Survey scientist who landed by plane on the Wilkins ice bridge with two Reuters reporters in January.

Humbert said by telephone her estimates were that the Wilkins could lose a total of 800 to 3,000 sq kms of area after the ice bridge shattered.

The Wilkins shelf has already shrunk by about a third from its original 16,000 sq kms when first spotted decades ago, its ice so thick would take at least hundreds of years to form.

Temperatures on the Antarctic Peninsula have warmed by up to 3 Celsius (5.4 Fahrenheit) this century, Vaughan said, a trend climate scientists blame on global warming from burning fossil fuels in cars, factories and power plants.

The loss of ice shelves does not raise sea levels significantly because the ice is floating and already mostly submerged by the ocean.

But the big worry is that their loss will allow ice sheets on land to move faster, adding extra water to the seas.

Wilkins has almost no pent-up glaciers behind it, but ice shelves further south hold back vast volumes of ice.

The Arctic Council, grouping nations with territory in the Arctic, is due to meet in Tromsoe, north Norway, Wednesday to debate the impact of melting ice in the north.

(Editing by Sophie Hares)

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US more optimistic about climate deal after talks

Dina Cappiello, Associated Press Yahoo News 28 Apr 09;

WASHINGTON – The top U.S. negotiator on climate change said Tuesday that he is slightly more optimistic about striking a new international agreement to curb global warming after a two-day meeting with the world's largest emitters of greenhouse gases.

Todd Stern, the U.S. special envoy for climate change, told reporters at a briefing Tuesday that he is "a bit more optimistic" that the U.S. will be able to broker a new deal in Copenhagen in December.

But he warned that it is not going to be easy, since many of the potential sticking points for a new global pact still need to be worked out.

"I walk away more optimistic," Stern said at the conclusion of the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate. "It does not change the fact that the issues are extremely difficult, that it is not going to be easy to reach agreement, or we wouldn't be doing this."

The Washington meeting is the first of a series of three called for by President Barack Obama. The goal is to help broker a replacement to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the international climate treaty that expires in 2012, and to build support for the development of pollution-reducing technologies.

The U.S. never signed onto Kyoto, citing the costs to the economy and the lack of participation by developing countries like India and China.

Those two issues continue to loom over negotiations more than a decade later. But the Obama administration has said it is committed to overcoming them in order to reach a deal.

At the two-day meeting, the administration showed participants it was serious.

Representatives of the 16 major economies present heard presentations from a host of top-level officials, including Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Energy Secretary Steven Chu and White House science adviser John Holdren. Together with the United States, the represented countries account for 80 percent of the global emissions of heat-trapping gases.

Late Monday afternoon they attended a reception at the White House with Obama.

"We come out of it more encouraged about the commitment of all the participants, particularly the United States," said Joao Vale de Almeida, the head of the European Union delegation. "The most important change as we started this meeting was of course the position of the United States. This means the U.S. is fully back in the debate and because of that we are back in business in terms of finding a global solution to a global challenge."

But behind the scenes, two key issues still pose challenges: how much rich countries will pledge to reduce climate-changing pollution and how to raise an estimated $100 billion a year to help poor countries adapt to climate change.

The Obama administration has called for a 14 percent to 15 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from 2005 levels by 2020 and legislation before Congress would reduce such emissions by 20 percent by 2020. Developing countries and the European Union are pressing the U.S. to make deeper cuts.

Stern said these were the two numbers on the table for the U.S.

"What I said to the delegates is that you effectively got a United States number there. It is somewhere in that range," Stern said.

But Yvo de Boer, head of the United Nations climate change secretariat, said that even the reductions being talked about by industrialized nations aren't enough to avoid rising sea levels, harsher storms and droughts. That would require a 25 percent to 40 percent reduction in global emissions.

"It wasn't all sweetness," de Boer said. "Those numbers are still very far from what the scientific community tells us" needs to be done.

Germany's environment minister said Tuesday that the Obama administration's approach to tackling climate change was "the difference between day and night" in comparison with the Bush administration. But Sigmar Gabriel said that the Obama administration's goals for limiting carbon emission were not ambitious enough.

He said the U.S. needed to commit to bigger cuts than than the administration or congressional Democrats have indicated they are considering "The ambitions of the United States targets are too low," he said.

The meeting never got around to addressing the financing issue. They ran out of time.

The next meeting is scheduled for May in Paris.

Envoys more optimistic for climate treaty
Shaun Tandon Yahoo News 29 Apr 09;

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Top climate envoys said they were more optimistic about sealing a global warming deal this year after a US-led meeting of major economies, but they sparred on the level of their commitments.

US President Barack Obama, who champions aggressive action against global warming, invited negotiators from 17 other major economies including developing powers such as China and India to meet in Washington.

The talks came as the clock ticks to a December meeting in Copenhagen that is meant to approve a new global treaty to slow down the planet's rising temperatures.

"I come out of this meeting a bit more optimistic," Todd Stern, the chief US negotiator on climate change, told reporters.

Stern acknowledged that much of the conversation was general in scope but said it was not a "head-butting exercise."

"Believe me, I'm not trying to oversell," Stern said. "I would not downplay or underestimate the difficulty of getting an agreement in Copenhagen."

His remarks were echoed by German Environmental Minister Sigmar Gabriel, who said: "I'm quite optimistic that we will succeed in December."

But he said that emerging countries still did not want to make binding commitments on how much they will cut carbon emissions blamed for global warming.

"Today there was no movement in this respect. It still is an open question if the emerging countries are ready for binding agreements," Gabriel said.

Developing nations charge in turn that they cannot come up with firm targets until they know the position of the United States.

Obama, who personally greeted all the envoys, has sharply changed US direction on climate change and vowed action despite the global economic crisis, hoping to create new jobs in green technology.

Obama's predecessor George W. Bush was the main holdout from the Kyoto Protocol, which he said was too costly and unfair as the landmark environmental treaty makes no requirements of rapidly growing developing nations.

French Environment Minister Jean-Louis Borloo, while hailing the Washington talks as "constructive," said that Obama's reduction targets did not go far enough.

"It's a situation where we're so happy at the change in attitude (after Bush) and at the same time that should not lower ambitions," Borloo said.

The US has agreed to cut its emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, while Europe has pledged to cut its own emissions by at least 20 percent of 1990 levels by 2020, and 30 percent if other advanced economies follow suit.

The Copenhagen conference is meant to lay out global action after 2012, when Kyoto's obligations expire.

More than 180 nations agreed at a major conference in December 2007 in Bali, Indonesia that the next treaty should involve the entire world.

Marcelo Furtado, executive director of Greenpeace Brazil, said that wealthy nations have not yet made enough commitments for some developing states to feel comfortable to take strong action.

"Most countries are either still keeping their cards to themselves or in some cases they actually don't have any cards to show -- they're just watching the game and making their position as negotiations go by," Furtado told reporters.

The US negotiator Stern said that while negotiators did not dwell on past US policy, "there's a lot of sense of appreciation and relief, frankly, that they're dealing with a very different kettle of fish."

The talks involved Australia, Brazil, Britain, Canada, China, the European Commission, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, South Korea, the United States, Denmark and the United Nations.

They will meet again in late May in Paris and at a location to be decided in June.

The format was set up by the Bush administration and originally met opposition from some developing nations and environmentalists who feared Washington was trying to bypass UN-led negotiations.

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Central Asia fails in water talks

BBC News 28 Apr 09;

The leaders of the five Central Asian states have failed to agree on the best way to share their water.

They signed a compromise statement that did not mention water sharing, concentrating instead on the decline in the level of the Aral Sea.

Correspondents say that a deal on water usage is key to regional stability.

Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan hold 80% of the region's water, but much of this is needed in the three states downstream, which are semi-arid.

Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan rely on water from their neighbours for their important cotton industries, as well as for agriculture.

Ecological disaster

In Soviet times a system of exchange enabled the five states to share water and energy resources such as electricity and gas.

But this barter scheme is no longer active and the five states have been unable to devise a new one.

The Central Asian leaders have a poor history of co-operation, according to the BBC's Central Asian correspondent Rayhan Demytrie.

They meet infrequently and usually on the sidelines of other events.

But water allocation is becoming an increasingly pressing issue, and drought and overuse have caused an ecological disaster in the Aral Sea, which has shrunk by 90% in recent decades.

Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, which suffer most from lack of electricity during the cold winters, have long been pursuing the construction of hydropower plants.

But Uzbekistan fiercely opposes these projects, saying the construction of hydropower stations and new dams would reduce the flow of water for cotton irrigation downstream.

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Best of our wild blogs: 28 Apr 09

Inter-Ministerial Committee for Sustainable Development Unveils Sustainable Singapore Blueprint on AsiaIsGreen

Importance of dead specimens to museums
on the Bird Ecology Study Group blog

Cartoon slug at Changi
on the wonderful creation blog

Pregant Papas on the Beach
on the wild shores of singapore blog

Two of a kind
on the annotated budak blog and you'll grow into it and it's hard to be a hermit

A Casual Morning Walk In The Nature Reserve
on the Beauty of Fauna and Flora in Nature blog

The Dragonflies have Emerged!
on the Creatures in the Wild blog

An integrated trail at Envirofest 2009 @ Toa Payoh Hub
on the Toddycats! blog

Status of Singapore's reefs and what we can do: a talk by Dr Wilkinson on the wild shores of singapore blog

White-rumped Shama collecting nesting material
on the Bird Ecology Study Group blog

Olive-backed Sunbird Nesting
on the Glorious Birds blog

The Plug of Nephilid Spiders - A Raffles Museum Fellowship Research on the Raffles Museum News blog

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