UN urges Asia to set up disaster fund

UN official says $16.7b was spent on relief efforts last year; two more quakes strike - off Java and Sulawesi
Straits Times 17 Oct 09;

JAKARTA: Indonesia was rocked by two earthquakes yesterday, less than a day after a top United Nations official said governments in Asia's most catastrophe-prone areas should set aside one-tenth of their development funds to limit the risk of disaster.

The world spent US$12 billion (S$16.7 billion) on humanitarian responses to disasters last year, and 99 per cent of those killed by natural phenomena were in the Asia-Pacific region, said Mr John Holmes, the UN Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, during a visit to Jakarta on Thursday.

'A 10 per cent figure of what you are spending on response or even on development should go into disaster risk reduction because that is a good investment,' he said.

Mr Holmes toured West Sumatra on Wednesday, visiting areas where a magnitude 7.6 quake late last month triggered landslides and killed 1,117 people.

Before visiting Indonesia, Mr Holmes had stopped in Manila, also badly hit by tropical storms recently.

The United Nations official said that the Indonesian and international response to the earthquake in Padang, West Sumatra, was one of the more successful he had seen, but that building codes needed to be enforced to minimise the impact of the next natural disaster.

'All development measures should have disaster risk reduction measures built into them,' he said, adding that disaster risk reduction should also be built into discussions on a world climate pact that will take place in Copenhagen in December.

'That also has to be part of the wider Copenhagen discussions and negotiations in December in order to ensure that not only do we focus on reducing emissions to tackle climate change at its source but also to make sure we are focusing on the adaptation side,' he said.

'In other words, helping developing countries cope with the effects of climate change which are with us right now and disaster risk reduction is very much a part of that.'

Indonesia, which sits on one of the world's most active seismic fault lines, has several active volcanoes and is prone to earthquakes and heavy flooding.

A strong earthquake struck off Java island yesterday, rocking office buildings in Jakarta and sparking panic closer to the epicentre, officials said.

The epicentre of the 6.4 magnitude quake was in the Sunda Strait off the western coast of Java, Indonesia's Meteorology and Geophysics Agency said.

There were no immediate reports of damage or injuries.

Early yesterday morning, Kendari in south-east Sulawesi was rocked by a 5.8 magnitude quake, which caused residents to rush out of their houses in panic.

Its epicentre was located at a depth of 20km and 88km north-east of Kendari, according to the meteorology and geophysics agency. Both quakes were not powerful enough to cause a tsunami.

On Monday, an earthquake measuring 5.0 on the Richter scale rocked the Melonguane area in North Sulawesi.

REUTERS, ASSOCIATED PRESS, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

A wave of natural disasters
Straits Times 17 Oct 09;

Sept 2: A 7.0-magnitude earthquake hits West Java, killing more than 30 people. The temblor rocks high-rise buildings in Jakarta and can be felt in parts of neighbouring Malaysia and Singapore.

Sept 26: Tropical storm Ketsana slams into Manila and surrounding areas, triggering landslides and widespread flooding. The government declares a nationwide state of calamity. More than 330 people are killed.

Sept 29: Typhoon Ketsana roars into central Vietnam after gathering strength over the South China Sea. It leaves more than 120 people dead.

Sept 30: A 7.6-magnitude earthquake rocks West Sumatra province, devastating the provincial capital of Padang. The authorities have revised the death toll upwards to 1,117 people.

Sept 30: India is hit by the worst flooding in 100 years. More than 260 people are reported killed, mostly in the states of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh.

Oct 3: Typhoon Parma wreaks havoc in northern Philippines. The second major storm to strike the Philippines in two weeks kills close to 300 people.

Oct 8: Melor, the first typhoon to make landfall in Japan since 2007, damages homes, topples trees and causes travel chaos on the main island of Honshu. It leaves four people dead.

Oct 16: Two quakes, hours apart, strike Sulawesi and off Java island respectively. There are no immediate reports of damage or injuries.

U.N. urges Asia to spend more on disaster preparedness
Sunanda Creagh, Reuters 15 Oct 09;

JAKARTA (Reuters) - Governments in Asia's most catastrophe-prone areas should set aside one-tenth of their development funds to limit the risk of disaster, especially given the impact of climate change, a U.N. official said on Thursday.

The world spent $12 billion on humanitarian responses to disasters last year, and 99 percent of those killed by natural phenomena were in the Asia Pacific region, said John Holmes, the United Nations Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, during a visit to Jakarta.

"A 10 percent figure of what you are spending on response or even on development should go into disaster risk reduction because that is a good investment," he said.

Holmes toured West Sumatra on Wednesday, visiting areas where a magnitude 7.6 quake in late September triggered landslides, killed more than 1,000 people and destroyed more than 130,000 homes.

Before visiting Indonesia, Holmes had stopped in Manila, which was been badly hit by tropical storms recently.

Holmes said that the Indonesian and international response to the earthquake in Padang, West Sumatra, was one of the more successful he had seen, but that building codes needed to be enforced to minimise the impact of the next natural disaster.

"All development measures should have disaster risk reduction measures built into them," he said, adding that disaster risk reduction should also be built into discussions on a world climate pact that will take place in Copenhagen in December.

"That also has to be part of the wider Copenhagen discussions and negotiations in December in order to ensure that not only do we focus on reducing emissions to tackle climate change at its source but also to make sure we are focusing on the adaptation side," he said.

"In other words, helping developing countries cope with the effects of climate change which are with us right now and disaster risk reduction is very much a part of that."

Indonesia, which sits on one of the world's most active seismic fault lines, has several active volcanoes and is prone to earthquakes and heavy flooding.

In December 2004, a magnitude 9.15 quake off the coast of Indonesia's Aceh province triggered an Indian Ocean tsunami that killed 230,000 people in Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka and India, with around 170,000 killed in Indonesia's Aceh alone.

A recent tsunami in Samoa also caused widespread destruction. (Editing by Sara Webb)

INDONESIA: Climate change worsening disasters, says UN
IRIN Reuters Alert 16 Oct 09;

JAKARTA, 16 October 2009 (IRIN) - Climate change is contributing to more frequent and deadlier natural disasters, and governments need to speed up measures to mitigate their impact, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, John Holmes, warns.

Holmes, in Indonesia for a two-day visit after a deadly 30 September earthquake off West Sumatra, warned there would be more intense typhoons, flooding, droughts and forest fires because of climate change.

"Look at the trend. How many [disasters] there are and how bad they are, not only here but also in Central America, and it's perfectly clear what's happening and that's what scientists said would happen," Holmes, also the UN's Emergency Relief Coordinator, told IRIN in an interview on 15 October.

"To me, that means there's a link between climate change and more frequent disasters," he said.

Given this, governments should be better prepared, and take measures to reduce the impact, he said.

"That means people not living in areas that are flood-[prone]; it means making sure buildings are not in areas that are flood-[prone]," said Holmes.

Holmes also said recent disasters in the Asia-Pacific region made negotiations for a new climate change deal - which are faltering - all the more important.

The Asian region has been hit by several disasters in recent weeks, including devastating floods in the Philippines, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and Nepal, affecting millions.

About 99 percent of those killed by natural disasters were in the Asia Pacific region, said Holmes.

"Obviously it's important to reduce emissions, that's fundamental to stopping climate change in the end. But in the meantime, whatever we do about emissions, the results are already with us for the next 50 years," he said.

Separately, Holmes urged disaster-prone Asian countries to spend one-tenth of their development funds on efforts to reduce disaster risks.

The international community spent US$12 billion on disaster relief last year. "A 10 percent figure of what you are spending on response or even on development should go into disaster-risk reduction because that is a good investment," he told reporters.

Funding for West Sumatra

Holmes travelled to quake-hit areas in West Sumatra and met the head of the National Disaster Management Agency (BNPB), as well as humanitarian agencies.

He said the UN would release about $7 million from the Central Emergency Response Fund for aid efforts in West Sumatra, including 12 projects focusing on emergency shelter, nutrition, reopening schools and health sector support.

The UN on 9 October launched a $38 million appeal to help the Indonesian government meet the needs of quake survivors.

The BNPB has revised the death toll from the earthquake to 1,117, including those missing and believed buried in landslides.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in its latest situation report on 15 October that 198,200 households needed emergency shelter.

Lack of access to remote areas remains the major obstacle to providing aid to survivors, but the Indonesian Military (TNI) has agreed to deploy 500 soldiers to rebuild roads or create new access routes to affected areas, OCHA said.

Reconstruction delays

Oxfam Indonesia's humanitarian programme manager, Sébastien Fesneau, said survivors needed tarpaulins, tents and plastic sheeting for shelter - as well as food.

But he said rebuilding houses would prove a greater challenge, because the brick industry in West Sumatra had been paralysed by the quake.

"It will be a problem when we are looking for adequate building materials, and this could possibly delay the reconstruction phase," Fesneau told IRIN.

Some NGOs were considering building transitional shelters using bamboo or coconut trees pending the availability of building materials, he said.

Fesneau also said many survivors had been forced to sell their belongings to meet their basic needs, resulting in what he called "asset erosion".

"We will introduce a cash transfer programme targeting the most vulnerable groups to ensure their belongings will not be sold," he said.

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Low-carbon growth the best option: Nicholas Stern

Nicholas Stern, Straits Times 17 Oct 09;

THE United Nations Climate Change Conference, to be held in Copenhagen in December, should provide the climax to two years of international negotiations over a new global treaty aimed at addressing the causes and consequences of greenhouse gas emissions.

A global deal on climate change is urgently needed. Concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have reached 435 parts per million (ppm), compared with about 280 ppm before industrialisation in the 19th century.

If we continue with business-as-usual emissions from activities such as burning fossil fuels and cutting down forests, concentrations could reach 750 ppm by the end of the century. Should that happen, the probable rise in global average temperature relative to pre-industrial times will be 5 deg C or more.

It has been more than 30 million years since the earth's temperature was that high. The human species, which has been around for no more than 200,000 years, would have to deal with a more hostile physical environment than it has ever experienced. Floods and droughts would become more intense and global sea levels would be several metres higher. Some parts of the world would be under water; other would become deserts.

Developing countries recognise and are angered by the inequity of the current situation. Current greenhouse gas levels are largely due to industrialisation in the developed world. Yet developing countries are the most vulnerable to the consequences of climate change. At the same time, emissions cannot be reduced at the extent required without the central contribution of the developing world.

Climate change and poverty, the two defining challenges of this century, must be tackled together. If we fail on one, we will fail on the other. The task facing the world is to meet the environment's 'carbon constraints' while creating the growth necessary to raise living standards for the poor.

To avoid the severe risks that would result from a rise in global average temperature of more than 2 deg C, we must bring atmospheric concentrations to below 450 ppm. This will require a cut in annual global emissions from about 50 gigatonnes of CO2-equivalent today to below 35 gigatonnes in 2030, and less than 20 gigatonnes by 2050.

Today, per-capita annual emissions in the European Union are 12 tonnes, and 23.6 tonnes in the United States, compared to six tonnes for China and 1.7 tonnes for India. As the world's population will be about nine billion in 2050, annual per-capita emissions must be reduced to approximately two tonnes of CO2-equivalent, on average, if the global annual total is to be less than 20 gigatonnes.

Developing countries need substantial help and support from rich nations in order to implement their plans for low-carbon economic growth, and to adapt to the effects of climate change that are now inevitable over the next few decades. Developed countries should also provide strong support for measures to halt deforestation in developing countries.

Based on recent estimates of the developing world's extra requests as a result of climate change, rich countries should be providing annual financial support - in addition to existing foreign aid commitments - of about US$100 billion (S$140 billion) for adaptation and US$100 billion for mitigation by the early 2020s. Some of the latter can come through the carbon market.

Rich countries must also demonstrate that low-carbon growth is possible by investing in new technologies, which should be shared with developing countries to boost their mitigation efforts.

We are already seeing extraordinary innovation by the private sector. Investments in energy efficiency and low-carbon technologies could also pull the global economy out of its economic slowdown over the next couple of years. More importantly, in driving the transition to low-carbon growth, these technologies could create the most dynamic and innovative period in economic history, surpassing that of the introduction of railways, electricity grids, or the Internet.

There is no real alternative. High-carbon growth is doomed. Low-carbon growth will be more energy-secure, cleaner, quieter, safer and more bio-diverse.

We should learn from the financial crisis that if risks are ignored, the eventual consequences are inevitably worse. If we do not start to combat the flow of greenhouse gas emissions now, the stock in the atmosphere will grow, making future action more difficult and costly. Other public expenditure can be postponed, but delaying climate change measures is a high-risk, high-cost option.

Climate change poses a profound threat to our economic future, while low-carbon growth promises decades of increased prosperity. The choice in Copenhagen will be stark, and the stakes could not be higher. We know what we must do, and we can do it.

The writer is chairman of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and professor of economics and government at the London School of Economics, and a member of the British House of Lords.

PROJECT SYNDICATE

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Fossil Fuel Production Up Despite Recession

World Watch Institute 15 Oct 09;

World production of fossil fuels-oil, coal, and natural gas-increased 2.9 percent in 2008 to reach 27.4 million tons of oil equivalent (Mtoe) per day, the highest ever recorded. In the first half of the 2008, producers strained to meet global demand, but by year's end the global recession left the market swamped by excess supply, causing oil prices to fall to from $144 per barrel in July to $34 per barrel in December.

According to the latest Vital Signs Update on fossil fuel production:

• Continuing a decade-long trend, most of the growth in fossil fuel production was in the Asia-Pacific region, where production grew 6.3 percent.
• For six years running, coal has led the growth in fossil fuel production. The growth in China's coal consumption since 2000 dwarfs that of all other countries combined.
• Natural gas production has maintained a 27-28 percent share of fossil energy production since 2000. High gas prices have spurred exploration and development, especially in the United States, which provided 19 percent of global gas production in 2008.

This new fossil fuel production update includes the latest figures on fossil fuel production globally and by region.

Read the Vital Signs analysis, "Fossil Fuel Production Up Despite Recession" by James Russell.

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Law change needed to cover climate exiles: lawyers

Reuters 14 Oct 09;

LONDON (Reuters) - International law is unfit to deal with the millions of people expected to flee their home countries to escape droughts and floods intensified by climate change, a group of lawyers said on Thursday.

Under existing laws, host countries must protect and care for cross-border refugees, who are defined as those forced to migrate because of violence or political, racial or religious persecution.

There are no such provisions for so-called climate refugees. Yet by 2050, between 200 million and 1 billion people could be forced to leave their homes because of global warming, said the Foundation for International Environmental Law and Development, which advises vulnerable countries and communities.

"International refugee law ... was not designed for those who are left homeless by environmental pressures," said the group's director Joy Hyvarinen.

"The international legal framework needs to be adjusted to help climate exiles and deal with statelessness and compensation," she said in a statement.

FIRST CLIMATE REFUGEES

Climate change will hit small island states the hardest, the foundation said, adding rising seas might submerge Kiribati and the Marshall Islands or climate changes in other ways might make them uninhabitable.

Kiribati's government has asked larger nations, including New Zealand and Australia, to open their doors to its citizens who might become, along with people in the Maldives and other Pacific islands, climate refugees.

Some in the Pacific say communities are already moving within nations because of climate change. Often-cited examples are the Carteret islands of Papua New Guinea, Tegua island in Vanuatu or Moala in Fiji.

But experts say there is no overall tracking of people moving or of the causes for their migration. Some leave outlying islands drawn by jobs in bigger centres.

What most experts agree on is that rising temperatures will leave an additional 200 million to 600 million people hungry by 2080 and cause critical water shortages in China and Australia, as well as in parts of Europe and the United States, according to a 2007 global climate report.

Coastal flooding will also hit another 7 million homes, the study by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted.

Moreover, last month a U.N. report said global warming was increasing the frequency and intensity of storms and otherwise altering weather patterns, so natural disasters were now "an extremely significant driver of forced displacement globally."

(Reporting by Olesya Dmitracova; Editing by Matthew Jones)

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Pacific islands meet over climate change plan

Yahoo News 16 Oct 09;

MAJURO (AFP) – Officials from Pacific island countries expected to be among the earliest victims of climate change will meet next week to devise a negotiating strategy for a crucial Copenhagen conference.

The officials will meet in Majuro, the capital of the Marshall Islands, a nation where islands average less than one metre (three feet) above sea level and are among the most vulnerable in the world to rising sea levels caused by global warming.

More than a dozen Pacific Island countries will be plotting their strategy for the United Nations Climate Change Conference in December in Copenhagen, which will attempt to hammer out an international deal to combat warming.

Espen Ronneberg, the climate change advisor to the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP), said Thursday that Pacific countries would be gathering new information on the impact of global warming in the region to devise a negotiating strategy.

"We are in need of strong binding commitments to reduce emissions and to support adaptation to impacts (of climate change)," Ronneberg said of the Copenhagen conference.

"We are going to be among the first casualties of climate change," added Marshall Islands Environmental Protection Authority acting board chairman Ben Chutaro.

Mark Lander, a meteorologist with the University of Guam's Water and Environmental Research Institute, told officials in Majuro this week that the rise of sea levels in Micronesia this decade had been three times the world average.

"Globally, the average is about three millimetres per year increase in sea level, said Lander.

"In Micronesia, we're seeing 10 millimetres per year. This is extreme sea level rise and far exceeds the global average."

This is believed to be partly due to the impact of the La Nina weather pattern in the years since 2000, when the sea in the eastern Pacific cools, changing weather patterns and sea levels.

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Indonesia as a major greenhouse gas emitter

Alan Oxley, Jakarta Post 16 Oct 09;

Because a report published on the eve of the visit to Jakarta by Lord Stern, the British Climate Change expert, late in 2007, said so. On the basis of that report, the Indonesian government is being pressed to adopt a strategy to cut emissions by 40 percent by 2030.

The pitch is that this is an opportunity for Jakarta to show global leadership at this critical time as the international community gears up to settle a new agreement on climate change at Copenhagen in December. The reality is different. No new agreement can be struck for several years. It will take that long to narrow the gaps between the positions of the US, EU, India and China.

Yet an impressive set of interests is working quietly to coax the Indonesian Government into this role. It includes the World Bank, the UK's aid agency (DFID), as well as trenchant opponents of Indonesia's current development strategies - the World Wide Fund for Nature, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth.

Like Lord Stern's findings which were severely criticized by development economists world wide as unnecessarily harmful to poor countries, the 40 percent target would harm Indonesia, plausibly reducing its GDP in today's dollars by 9 percent. Poverty would rise, not fall. Today, official estimates rate 35 million Indonesians as poverty- stricken. Indonesia's population is also slated to increase by 44 million.

No other leading developing country will go that far. China has decreed climate change is a "development" problem. While reforming its dirty industries, it will continue to increase, not reduce, its emission of greenhouse gases, until poverty is under control. That may not be until 2030 according to assessments by Chinese economic planning agencies.

Why are leading development bodies advancing such anti-growth strategies? The answer is saddening. Like environmental groups, they now attach more importance to seeing an end to conversion of forest land, than to an end of poverty.

They haven't even got their environmental facts straight. Biodiversity is protected by setting up conservation areas, not freezing conversion of forest land. The UN decreed years ago that ten percent of the world's forests needed to be reserved for that purpose. That target has already been met. In Indonesia's case, over 20 percent of forest land has been set aside.

The remaining land is a resource asset available to raise living standards, and was used that way in Europe and North America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The ambition of activists is to deny the same right to developing countries.

Indonesia showed how to use that land to reduce poverty when it sponsored introduction of Palm Oil in the seventies and eighties. The World Bank, then in a pro-development mode, commended that as effective poverty-reducing action. Malaysia has done the same. Palm Oil can encourage small holders to acquire property and prosperity. It is now a major export industry for both countries and Indonesia is the world's biggest producer.

Palm Oil in fact is something of a miracle product. It is a high quality and low priced food staple in the developing world. It is also a highly sustainable. It produces more oil from less land than other vegetable oils. Properly managed, Palm Oil plantations will also outperform traditional forest as a carbon sink.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN *s research body on global warming, pointed out in its last assessment that building bigger carbon sinks by expanding sustainably managed forests was the easiest and cheapest way to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide.

This has been an inconvenient truth for environmental NGOs for a long time. Their long term ambition has been instead to ensure global agreements on climate change restrict, not promote, forestry in developing countries.

Hence the incredible attack in recent months on Palm Oil: It is just too successful. Western brand food and consumer companies have been "greenmailed" to cease using Palm Oil. It has been blamed for devastation of forestry, peat lands, and Orang-utan. The EU has been pressured to restrict imports of biofuel (read diesel from Palm Oil).

Until the 2007 report, Indonesia was rated only between fifteenth and twentieth on the global scale. So why the change?

It was the surge of emissions of carbon dioxide from the fires in Sumatra and Kalimantan from the late nineties. And the realization that the fires were also occurring in carbon intense peat soils.

Suddenly very large numbers for emissions of greenhouse gases in Indonesia were produced, almost overnight. The 2007 report was produced in three weeks, and, by its own emission, based on desk research and consultation with anti-forestry NGOs, like Greenpeace.

The key piece of research on global emissions used in that report warned it was subject to a margin of error of 50 percent either way in its calculations. In other words, these are highly uncertain numbers. As well, as new and recent research on the impact of clearance of peat soils reveals, the impact of fire and plantation forestry on peat land is really not known.

The 2007 report also assumes that the firing of peat land will continue in the future at the same rate. There is no basis for that assumption. All scientists accept that the El Nino weather cycle created exceptionally dry conditions in the late nineties and early eighties, creating a very fire prone environment. Only environmental activists, and it seems the World Bank and DFID, assume that that is a permanent condition.

Proper research is required. It is a tempting time for developing countries to receive aid to work out how to address these problems.

Around US$ 800 million has been pledged so far. Yet the lesson of the Trojan Horse should not be forgotten.

The opportunity for leadership Indonesia might consider is to commission independent research on the carbon cycle in Indonesian forest and plantations and determine in its own good time a strategy that best meets it development needs.

The writer is Chairman of World Growth and released a report Palm Oil - the Sustainable Oil at the Bangkok negotiations on climate change last week.

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What is holding up progress in climate talks?

Reuters 16 Oct 09;

(Reuters) - U.N. climate talks on expanding the fight against global warming have largely stalled, making the outcome of a major climate summit in Copenhagen in December uncertain.

With less than 60 days to the Copenhagen meeting, negotiators face serious differences in finding a way to get the United States and large developing nations to sign up to a deal that leads to big reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Following are efforts to expand or replace the Kyoto Protocol climate pact.

MONEY

No money, no deal. Developing nations, who say wealthy countries are largely to blame for climate change to date, want cash to help them green their economies. Money to adapt to rising seas and greater extremes of weather is also essential, they say.

Without cash and clean-energy technology, they see no point in taking anything more than voluntary steps to curb the growth of their greenhouse gas emissions.

Rich nations have so far failed to put significant sums on the table and instead talk of "fast-start" cash in Copenhagen for initial adaptation and technology transfer programs.

Details on larger and longer-term funding would come later but there remains disagreement on whether this should be mostly public money or raised through carbon markets and levies on shipping and aviation fuels.

The United States says its hands are tied until the Senate passes a climate bill. The European Union will likely have clarity on funding after a leaders' meeting in a few weeks.

TARGETS

Rich nations have also failed to put final emissions reduction targets for 2020 on the table. Collectively, the figures offered are far below the 25-40 percent cut from 1990 levels by 2020 the U.N. climate panel says is needed to help limit the growth of carbon pollution in the atmosphere.

Many rich nation's targets are also conditional on the outcome of Copenhagen or the actions of big developing nations, such as top greenhouse gas polluter China.

Developing nations want rich countries to adopt tougher targets to show they are serious in fighting climate change.

KILL KYOTO?

Just as contentious is the legal framework of a broader climate pact to succeed Kyoto from 2013. The European Union says Kyoto hasn't worked and that most rich nations will fail to meet their 2008-12 emission targets. The U.S. wants a new agreement that focuses on binding domestic action and wants all nations to put their emissions reduction steps into a registry.

Developing nations want Kyoto to remain since there's nothing better to replace it. They fear wealthy states are trying to dodge tough emissions cuts by 2020 and point to a history of broken promises on financing and failure to meet past emissions cuts.

MEASUREMENT

Rich nations want all countries to provide regular and detailed reports on their efforts to cut emissions and to agree on ways to check, or verify, these steps really lead to greenhouse gas reductions.

But the G77 bloc of developing countries say they should not be part of a universal measurement, reporting and verification system, saying richer nations should be held to a tougher standard. More broadly, developing nations say they shouldn't be treated the same way as rich countries in terms of how their efforts to fight climate change are treated in a new pact.

Analysts say the rigid split in actions by rich and poor nations under U.N. climate treaties is no longer valid, pointing to China, India, Indonesia and Brazil being among the top greenhouse gas emitters. Getting them to agree to binding steps to cut emissions is crucial.

(Reporting by David Fogarty; Editing by Jeremy Laurence)

What "Plan B" for Copenhagen might look like
David Fogarty, Reuters 16 Oct 09;

(Reuters) - Negotiators are already talking about "plan B" for the Copenhagen climate talks in December, with uncertainty growing that nations will be able to agree in time on a tougher and broader U.N. climate pact.

While that might sound bad, some analysts say that none of the major players is talking about "no deal," just a deal that will take a little longer to agree on.

Following are possible scenarios for the Dec 7-18 Copenhagen talks.

PLAN A: BROADER CLIMATE PACT

The U.S. Senate passes its climate bill before Copenhagen, allowing Washington to offer a 2020 emissions reduction target and substantial funding for poorer nations for climate change adaptation and green energy technology.

Developing nations agree to formally include their emissions reduction actions into a new climate deal. They also agree to report regularly on how these efforts lead to a substantial reduction in the growth of their emissions and to open up such efforts to independent scrutiny.

With these steps, other rich nations toughen their 2020 emissions reduction targets, pledge near-term climate financing and agree on the need for substantial longer-term financing, how that money will be raised and how it will be managed.

PLAN B: SEAL THE DEAL IN 2010

In reality, the U.S. Senate might pass the climate bill in the first part of 2010, allowing President Barack Obama's administration to bring a 2020 target and financing pledges to the table during a major U.N. climate meeting in Bonn in June.

At worst, nations would have to wait until annual U.N. climate talks in Dec 2010.

In addition, developing nations say they have concerns about the legal nature of a broad climate pact, particularly over efforts to set aside or radically overhaul the Kyoto Protocol.

Copenhagen might instead yield an agreement deciding on the political essentials and add conditional offers by China, India and other big developing nations based on what the United States was prepared to do once the legislation passed.

Global conservation group WWF says the essentials would include: a clear indication of the sources and methods of funding and to ensure the money comes from predictable revenue streams; clarity on the bodies managing the money and the level of developing country representation; and immediate funding.

Failure to at least agree on this could lead to just a broad political statement at the end of Copenhagen on what the structure of a new agreement should be.

PLAN C: U.S. SENATE SAYS NO

The U.S. Senate votes against the climate bill, but other nations reluctantly go ahead with many measures to fight climate change anyway hoping the United States will formally join the global effort at some point.

In the worst-case scenario, negotiations start to resemble failed trade talks that repeatedly stall. Nations instead work on bilateral clean-energy and carbon offset deals that fail to achieve major reductions in the growth of emissions.

(Sources, WWF, The Nature Conservancy, E3G)

(Additional reporting by Alister Doyle; Editing by Ron Popeski)

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Supporters Say Summit Won't Reach Climate Deal

Richard Cowan, PlanetArk 16 Oct 09;

WASHINGTON - An international meeting in December to create tough new goals for fighting global warming will fail to produce a deal, but more modest objectives can be achieved, supporters said on Wednesday.

"I think it's impossible to really get to a binding international agreement" by mid-December in Copenhagen, said Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change.

Speaking at a forum sponsored by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Claussen sketched out interim steps that could be taken, with the goal of wrapping up a comprehensive deal by mid-2010, instead of December this year.

"We can get a strong political statement -- an agreement to get to two degrees -- and then a date certain to conclude the negotiations. That may be where we end up" at the conclusion of the Copenhagen meeting, Claussen added.

In July, leading carbon-polluting countries including the United States, agreed at a summit in Italy to try to limit global warming to a maximum of two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels to head off severe problems.

But efforts in the U.S. Congress to pass legislation forcing industry reductions of greenhouse gas emissions have slowed and it is now seen as highly unlikely that the Senate will pass a bill this year, even though the House of Representatives did so last June.

NO SPECIFIC TARGET

"The main reason that we are not further along (in international negotiations)... is that the United States is really not able to say what it is prepared to offer in terms of a specific target" for carbon reductions, Claussen said.

Mohamed El-Ashry, an environmental expert and senior fellow at the UN Foundation, echoed Claussen's assessment, saying, "It has become obvious that a comprehensive deal ... is not going to be possible" in Copenhagen.

Instead of focusing on sealing a pact that developed and developing countries would then try to ratify, some "ambitious but achievable goals" could be crafted in Copenhagen, El-Ashry said. Those could include energy-efficiency steps to reduce carbon emissions, without mandating the broader levels of pollution reduction by 2020 and 2050.

He also said progress could be made on efforts to reduce deforestation, which is contributing to global warming.

On Tuesday, leading U.S. senators insisted they were making progress toward passage of a domestic climate change bill that would bolster the international efforts. But that legislation may clear some committees, not the full Senate this year.

Some progress in the Senate, coupled with the House bill and steps already taken by the Obama administration to address global warming, would be seen as evidence of Washington's commitment to tackle climate change after eight years of foot-dragging by the Bush administration, supporters argue.

"We will make our best effort and we will advance this ball and Copenhagen will know we're not fooling around," Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry told Reuters on Tuesday.

The House-passed bill aims to reduce industrial emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases by 17 percent by 2020 from 2005 levels, while a bill proposed in the Senate seeks 20 percent.

Both plans are less ambitious than those of European countries. Some experts fear the U.S. plan would not be enough to avoid "catastrophic" consequences of climate change like worsening drought, floods and the melting of polar ice.

(Editing by Chris Wilson)

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Best of our wild blogs: 16 Oct 09

Life History of the Five Bar Swordtail
from Butterflies of Singapore

Black-throated Sunbird feeding on nectar
from Bird Ecology Study Group

Adult Tiger Shrike does arrive in Singapore
from Bird Ecology Study Group

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Kelongs can be a Singapore attraction

Straits Times Forum 16 Oct 09;

I REFER to Tuesday's report ("Know how to woo more tourists? Tell STB") on the Singapore Tourism Board needing ideas to boost tourism.

We have some treasures in our back yard just waiting for the authorities to give the green light to show to the world. Three weeks ago, The Straits Times carried a report on kelongs vanishing fast. A venture I have in mind could certainly prove to be a new lease of life for the kelongs.

I am a neighbour of Mrs Maureen Wong, the kelong owner named in the report.

Many people do not know that we have kelongs (fish farms included) in Singapore. When news of the plight of kelongs was reported, we received a lot of inquiries from people wanting to visit them.

We can tap the potential of the humble kelongs and extend it to the world. I have friends from China, Malaysia, Indonesia, Korea and Japan who want to visit a kelong.

Kelongs have a natural charm: One is out at sea, immersed in a breezy atmosphere, with the unmistakable salty air.

If the place is set up for a romantic sunset dinner, featuring fresh catch from the sea, it would be a mind-blowing experience.

Best of all, it does not have to cost an arm and a leg to enjoy this.

Naturally, there are challenges and issues to consider, like public safety, but with resolve and determination, we can overcome them.

Industry players in the food and beverage, hospitality and travel trade could partner kelong operators in this new venture.

Granted, we will have the world-class Integrated Resorts very soon, but we can also offer the humble kelongs which are worthy of a heritage status.

Lee Van Voon

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NUS team makes cloning breakthrough

Straits Times 16 Oct 09;

The manipulation of cells took five years to complete and cost $1.5 million

SCIENTISTS in Singapore have become the first to 'semi-clone' an animal by fertilising an egg with an embryonic stem cell that mimics sperm.
Holly, a 4cm-long medaka fish, is now 15 months old and a great-grandmother, with a family of more than 100 fish which are able to reproduce normally and healthily.

The success by the scientists from the National University of Singapore may spell promise in future for infertile couples.

The key to the discovery is that scientists managed to generate a haploid DNA cell which mimics sperm. The isolation and manipulation of these cells took five years to complete, and cost $1.5 million.

The work by Associate Professor Hong Yunhan of the National University of Singapore's Department of Biological Sciences came through persistence - he continued his work to create haploid cells even when Nobel Prize winners had given up.

In essence, what the scientists did was to take eggs from one fish, and sperm from another.

The sperm cells were then zapped with UV rays to strip them of their DNA code, and these were then used to 'fertilise' the eggs.

As only one set of DNA was contained in the eggs, the resulting division created haploid cells. These cells were then combined with eggs from another fish, and Holly was born.

This method opens up the possibility of obtaining a haploid cell from a man, enabling him to pass on his DNA even if he is infertile.

That will be some time in the future, however, as further tests will still need to be carried out.

There will also be ethical hurdles to cross: Scientists and others have long debated the issue of whether it is right to clone humans.

For now, though, scientists here are celebrating what they say is akin to turning science fiction into reality.

'Eight years ago, semi-cloning was science fiction. Our work with the fish as a first model has revealed the possibility of carrying it out on vertebrates, to which humans belong,' said Prof Hong.

Holly is quite different from animals like Dolly, the world's first cloned sheep, and the myriad of others that came after her.

Instead of a clone, which is an exact genetic replica of an organism, Holly is a semi-clone with a unpredictable genetic code - similar to how it occurs in nature.

Dr Alan Colman, a principal investigator at the Agency for Science, Technology and Research's Institute of Medical Biology, executive director of the Singapore Stem Cell Consortium, as well as one of the creators of Dolly, said the isolation of a haploid cell was interesting and valuable to science.

He said: 'The reason haploid cells are desirable is that all of us have two copies of each gene.'

He explained that being able to look at a human haploid cell, if one day possible, will allow scientists to study and treat genes that cause diseases such as cancer, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

The next step for Prof Hong's team is to seek international collaboration to try and carry out its work on mice. Such a study will take about five years and, if successful, will proceed to trials with monkeys and, finally, humans.

Dr Benjamin Capps of the Centre for Biomedical Ethics at NUS' Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine said: 'The results of this study are closer to IVF - replacing the role of sperm with that of an artificially created haploid cell - and so raise little immediate ethical concern as a technique.'

Prof Hong, however, noted: 'It will be interesting to see whether human society would accept these semi-cloned children once the technology is established in humans.'

A fish called Holly
Singapore the birthplace of the world's first semi-cloned animal
Ong Dai Lin, Today Online 16 Oct 09;

SINGAPORE - A fish named Holly may have placed Singapore on the world map for being the birthplace of the very first semi-cloned animal.

By combining the stem cell of an embryo - one which is created to contain only one set of chromosomes - with an egg which provides the other set, three National University of Singapore (NUS) researchers were able to create a fish that is not an exact clone.

In traditional cloning, a baby is formed from a stem cell with two sets of chromosomes from one parent, making it an exact duplicate - and spawning great debate about the ethics of cloning since the world's first animal, Dolly the sheep, was cloned from an adult stem cell in 1996.

Now, the successful birth of the first semi-cloned animal, Holly the fish, means researchers can possibly use semi-cloning as a method to treat infertile couples.

Associate professor Hong Yunhan, who led the research team from the National University of Singapore Department of Biological Sciences, said semi-cloning is better than cloning, as it produces babies in an "unpredictable" way.

"We can't even predict whether the offspring is a male or female," said assoc prof Hong.

What is needed, for instance, could be for a man without mature sperm to use stem cells - which can later develop into all other kinds of cells - from another part of his body, to fuse with his wife's egg.

But it may take as long as 10 years to get to the stage where the technique can be researched in humans, said assoc prof Hong, who added that the semi-cloning technique can also be used to study diseases by analysing gene mutations.

His five-year research programme, funded by NUS, the Agency for Science, Technology & Research (A*Star) and the Ministry of Education, has so far cost $1.5 million. Assoc prof Hong estimates he needs between $5 and $10 million more to further the work.

She's a mother of 308, grandmother of 977
Ong Dai Lin, Today Online 16 Oct 09;

SINGAPORE - She is 15 months old and she already has 308 children and 977 grandchildren.

Holly, the world's first semi-cloned fish, has a friendly nature and likes to play with other fish.

Every day, Professor Hong Yunhan presents a male medaka fish to Holly as her playmate to encourage the fish to breed.

The history-making fish has quirky eating habits, too. As a baby, Holly's favourite food was green algae and pet fish food. Now that she is an adult, Holly prefers to eat living brine shrimp embryos.

Contrary to the perception that cloned specimens have health problems, Professor Hong says that Holly is very healthy.

The team of researchers from the National University of Singapore practically treats Holly like family, celebrating each stage of her growth with a meal.

When Holly was born and started swimming, the team went for a meal at a restaurant in West Coast. When Holly produced eggs after mating, the team celebrated over a seafood Chinese dinner.

Holly belongs to a species of fish called the medaka fish or Japanese rice fish. They are a freshwater species and are indigenous to Japan, Korea, China and Vietnam where they inhabit slow-moving waters.

They are reared as aquarium fish and are also used extensively for scientific research.

A medaka fish can live for up to two years and grow to 4cm.

The making of Holly, a semi-cloned fish
Breakthrough by NUS team spells promise for infertile couples
Victoria Vaughan, Straits Times 17 Oct 09;

FOR 15 years, molecular biologist Hong Yunhan dreamt of making a breakthrough in a new technology that could help infertile couples have children.

Now, he and his team have come a step closer to doing so.

They have worked on isolating and maintaining haploid cells for five years. These are cells containing half the DNA of a normal cell and are found in eggs and sperm before fertilisation.

It did not matter to the team that 2007 Nobel Prize winner in medicine Martin Evans, with Dr Matthew Kaufman, had closed the door on isolating these cells 26 years ago, after their mouse study found them to be unstable and prone to mutation.

Associate Professor Hong and his team at the National University of Singapore's Department of Biological Sciences pressed on and have made remarkable inroads.

To prove the viability of their haploid cells, the team went on to harness them to create Holly, a medaka fish, the world's first semi-cloned vertebrate.

Holly is healthy and so are her offspring, numbering more than 600. And it has over 1,000 grandchildren.

Created from two haploid reproductive cells - one an egg cell, the other an embryonic stem cell manipulated to mimic sperm - Holly could hold promise for infertile couples much further down the road if scientists learn how to obtain stable human haploid cells.

Prof Hong, 53, said he was doing this research for two reasons: First, fewer people are having babies and, second, couples are having them later, a factor that is accompanied by a decline in the quality of the human genome.

'Child production is not only a medical problem, it's a social problem and has an impact on daily life as well as the country,' said the Chinese national, who moved here eight years ago with his wife and two daughters, and is applying for permanent residency.

'With medical technology, there is a greater possibility of people with ill health surviving and having children. But by doing so humans are passing on bad genes. Consequently, the human gene pool will become worse.'

The technique can theoretically allow scientists to study the genetic makeup of a haploid cell and correct any disease mutations - or discard non-viable cells - before it is used in fertilisation.

During fertilisation, two haploid cells are joined together. This process can allow weaker genes, which cause diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and cancer, to hide making it difficult for scientists to study and 'correct' them.

Prof Hong was helped by molecular biologist Yi Meisheng and PhD student Hong Ni.

Dr Yi, 41, took seven months to create a batch of stable haploid cells. He did this by zapping the fish sperm cells with UV rays to kill their DNA but without destroying their ability to swim.

A sperm is then used to 'fertilise' a fish egg. This sparked the 'embryo' into cell division, but with only the DNA of the egg cell, making it a haploid cell.

'When I had a medaka haploid cell, I kept it very carefully. When the cells were still growing well 20 days later, I told Prof Hong and he was happy. After 59 days, he bought me a beer,' said Dr Yi. The cells were cultured for 400 days to confirm they were stable.

Molecular biologist Hong, 29, was bought in to validate that the cells were good, while Dr Yi took a month to train his hands to be steady enough to inject a haploid cell into a 1mm egg.

After many attempts over two months, three embryos began to grow.

One became Holly, created in 2007. It was named by Prof Hong in tribute to Dolly the sheep, the world's first cloned animal, but with an 'h' for haploid.

Previous efforts
Straits Times 17 Oct 09;

# 1996, Edinburgh, Scotland: Dolly the sheep is created in the first successful cloning of a mammal from an adult cell.

# 2003: Dolly is euthanised because of an incurable lung disease. It is only six years old, while the average lifespan of a sheep is 12 years.

# February 2004, Seoul National University, South Korea: Professor Hwang Woo Suk's team claims it has created 30 cloned human embryos.

# May 2005: Prof Hwang's team says it has made stem cell lines from the skin cells of 11 people.

# August 2005: Prof Hwang announces the creation of the world's first cloned dog, an Afghan hound named Snuppy.

# November 2005: Prof Hwang apologises for using eggs from his own researchers.

# December 2005: A university panel finds Prof Hwang's cloning research to be fabricated and he steps down as a professor at the university.

# 2008, South Korea: RNL Bio arranges for the re-creation of Booger the pit bull terrier through its refrigerated ear tissue. Ms Bernann McKinney pays US$50,000 for the five puppies that are born.

# November 2008: Dr Teruhiko Wakayama of the Riken research institute in Yokohama, Japan, clones mice whose bodies had been frozen for as long as 16 years.

# April 2009, South Korea: Cloned pig Xeno is created by a team of scientists doing research on making pigs suitable for human transplants.

# June 2009, Harayana, India: Scientists clone buffalo Garima at the National Dairy Research Institute in Karnal, northern India. The institute had cloned the world's first buffalo four months earlier, but it died five days after its birth.

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The Non-Tragedy of the Commons

John Tierney, TierneyLab The New York Times 15 Oct 09

The 2009 Nobel Prize for economics is a useful reminder of how easy it is for scientists to go wrong, especially when their mistake jibes with popular beliefs or political agendas.

Elinor Ostrom of Indiana University shared the prize for her research into the management of “commons,” which has been a buzzword among ecologists since Garrett Hardin’s 1968 article Science, “The Tragedy of the Commons.” His fable about a common pasture that is ruined by overgrazing became one of the most-quoted articles ever published by that journal, and it served as a fundamental rationale for the expansion of national and international regulation of the environment.

His fable was a useful illustration of a genuine public-policy problem — how do you manage a resource that doesn’t belong to anyone? — but there were a couple of big problems with the essay and its application.

First, Dr. Hardin himself misapplied the fable. Declaring that “overpopulation” was a tragedy of the commons, he warned that “freedom to breed will bring ruin to all.” He and others advocated a “lifeboat ethic” of denying food aid, even during emergencies, to poor countries with rapidly growing populations. But “overpopulation” was not even a theoretical example of the tragedy of the commons. Parents are not like the cattle owners who profit individually by adding cows to the pasture (while collectively destroying it). Parents, unlike the cattle owners, have to pay to feed and house and educate their children, and the high economic costs of children are one reason that birth rates have declined around the world — without any of the coercion discussed by Dr. Hardin and some other ecologists (like Paul Ehrlich).

The second problem arising from Dr. Hardin’s fable was the presumption that a commons needed to be regulated by national and international agencies. Dr. Hardin didn’t explicitly make that generalization in the essay — he noted that the tragedy could be avoided either by regulating the commons or by converting it to private property — but others in the environmental movement essentially drew that conclusion. Although some greens talked about the virtue of “acting locally,” major environmental groups lobbied in Washington for expanded federal authority, and they urged the rest of the world to follow the American and European example by creating national rules governing commons like forests and fisheries.

But too often those commons ended up in worse shape once they were put under the control of distant bureaucrats who lacked the expertise or the incentives to do the job properly. Dr. Hardin and his disciples had failed to appreciate how often the tragedy of the commons had been averted thanks to ingenious local institutions and customs. Dr. Ostrom won the Nobel for her work analyzing those local institutions. In an interview at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, Dr. Ostrom discussed the damage that had been done by those who had supplanted the local institutions:

International donors and nongovernmental organizations, as well as national governments and charities, have often acted, under the banner of environmental conservation, in a way that has unwittingly destroyed the very social capital — shared relationship, norms, knowledge and understanding — that has been used by resource users to sustain the productivity of natural capital over the ages. The effort to preserve biodiversity should not lead to the destruction of institutional diversity. . . . These institutions are most in jeopardy when central government officials assume that they do not exist (or are not effective) simply because the government has not put them in place.

Another Nobel laureate economist, Vernon Smith, described her work in an interview with Ivan Osorio for the Competitive Enterprise Institute:

She’s looked at a huge number of commons problems in fisheries, grazing, water, fishing water rights, and stuff like that. She finds that the commons problem is solved by many of these institutions, but not all of them. Some of them cannot make it work. She’s interested in why some of them work and some of them don’t.

One example is the Swiss alpine cheese makers. They had a commons problem. They live very high, and they have a grazing commons for their cattle. They solved that problem in the year 1200 A.D. For about 800 years, these guys have had that problem solved. They have a simple rule: If you’ve got three cows, you can pasture those three cows in the commons if you carried them over from last winter. But you can’t bring new cows in just for the summer. It’s very costly to carry cows over to the winter—they need to be in barns and be heated, they have to be fed. [The cheese makers] tie the right to the commons to a private property right with the cows.

Letting cheese makers set their own rules is an example of what Dr. Ostrom calls polycentric governance. In the interview at the Mercatus Center, she explained the advantages of trusting locals:

The strength of polycentric governance systems is each of the subunits has considerable autonomy to experiment with diverse rules for a particular type of resource system and with different response capabilities to external shock. In experimenting with rule combinations within the smaller-scale units of a polycentric system, citizens and officials have access to local knowledge, obtain rapid feedback from their own policy changes, and can learn from the experience of other parallel units.

Here’s a paper by Dr. Ostrom on fisheries. Here’s a a report for PERC by Donald Leal that summarizes Dr. Ostrom’s research: “Her studies of well-managed, commonly-owned property show that well-defined boundaries, a strong community tradition, and absence of government interference can preserve resources.”

You read more about Dr. Ostrom’s work in these posts from David Bollier at Forbes.com, J.P. Freire at the Washington Examiner, Daniel and my colleague Catherine Rampell.

As Catherine notes, the comedian Larry David explains one way to avoid the tragedy of the commons in an episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” Mr. David discusses the tradition requiring guests at a party to refrain from eating too many hors d’oeuvres at once. After your first helping, he says, you have to wait 20 minutes and make sure that the food isn’t disappearing too quickly before you go back for seconds. Does that qualify as polycentric governance?

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