Raising the green stakes

Business Times 4 Dec 09;

IMAGINE a poker game to end all poker games, with the richest players seeking to stare each other down through a thick haze of carbon emissions, meeting bid with counter-bid, bluff with counter-bluff; and a small voice suddenly pipes up: 'I'm in; and raise you 16 per cent.'

That voice is Singapore's. Just days before the United Nations summit on climate change in Copenhagen, the Republic has thrown down a gauntlet of sorts by offering to reduce its carbon emissions growth to 16 per cent below 'business as usual' levels by 2020.

That's hardly going to make the big boys blink, given that the island-state is hardly in the same league; it accounts for less than 0.2 per cent of global greenhouse emissions. But that's not the point; making the commitment, and joining hands with the dozens of other countries, large and small, who are making similar commitments, is.

Sceptics will point out that the Singapore offer is conditional on the Copenhagen summit reaching a legally binding deal obliging all countries to cut emissions, when some major players have already indicated they will sign no such deal. Again, that misses the point. Who is to say what will or will not transpire at these talks, especially when the US - once seen as the most intransigent of the great powers - has pledged to lead by example? More to the point, not doing anything is the poorest option of all. The resolution that emerges out of Copenhagen this month might not be as comprehensive and definitive as green advocates would like to see; but surely the more member-nations step up and say 'count me in!', the stronger that Copenhagen accord is likely to be. Every little bit of moral suasion counts.

And does anyone really think that countries committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions (Singapore least of all) are going to wash their hands in disgust and despair if the final document does not bear the magic words 'legal and binding'? Copenhagen is not the end of the road, and one declaration will neither make nor break this league of nations committed to saving us from ourselves. National and regional efforts to heal and save the environment will continue unabated; as will cooperative efforts to convince all countries and corporations to play their part.

One consequence of announcing this emissions reduction target is that it will raise new interest in Singapore's green track record - which isn't a bad one, by any means. The Garden City didn't just happen; it was the result of careful planning and execution. The pollution levels compare favourably against most other cities.

Certainly, there is a lot more that can be done. The recently announced Sustainable Singapore blueprint includes ambitious goals like cutting energy consumption per dollar GDP by 35 per cent from 2005 levels by 2030. Most importantly, efforts to promote environmental consciousness in businesses and among consumers need to be redoubled. Raise the awareness level, and the numerical targets will come of themselves.

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Green, bio, plastic electronics and security output to soar

Ong Boon Kiat, Business Times 4 Dec 09;

(SINGAPORE) Green electronics, bio-electronics, plastic electronics and security should triple in terms of their collective contribution to Singapore's electronics output to 30 per cent over the next 10 years, Economic Development Board deputy managing director Tan Choon Shian said yesterday.

Riding on existing strengths, EDB has identified the four growth areas to 'pre-position' Singapore, Mr Tan said at a briefing.

He also had good news to electronics job seekers, saying companies here have recently indicated that they are looking to hire workers in anticipation of the upswing.

On the four new prongs of growth, Mr Tan said: 'We are optimistic because the mega trends are driving these growth areas. At this moment I do not see any big risk factors'.

EDB expects the four areas to contribute 30 per cent of Singapore's electronics output by 2020, up from about 10 per cent now, he said.

Singapore's electronics sector produced about $68 billion of goods last year, providing employment close to 92,000 workers. According to EDB's latest figures, the sector's output grew 17.7 per cent year-on-year in October. Year-to-date, the electronics sector has contracted 15.2 per cent compared with the same period in 2008.

Examples of green electronics products are energy-efficient computers and solar panels. Bio-electronics products include devices such as artificial hearts and infectious disease identification chips. Plastic electronics are products with circuits created out of ink through printing, such as flexible memory devices and printed solar cells. Security products includes video surveillance systems and biometric devices.

Mr Tan said that there is a growing appetite for clean energy and innovative healthcare solutions, while demand for plastic electronics should soar once products are available at the 'right price points'. And security-related electronics products will be in demand because 'security will always remain a very important aspect of our lives'.

'On the technology front, maybe some things will take a bit longer to commercialise, but on the other hand it may be faster. So we have to build up the capabilities to be ready when the opportunities come,' he said.

And when these opportunities blossom, an electronics industry such as that in Singapore, which has a good track record of being able to design and produce goods quickly, will be well placed to take advantage of them.

On immediate prospects, Mr Tan said that the consensus is the 'worst is over' for the electronics sector here. And he expects hiring to pick up. 'In our conversations with companies in the electronics industry in the past two, three months, we are hearing companies say they are going to hire people because they are preparing for the upturn,' he said.

'And if the upturn continues, as we hope it will, then there will be more hiring on all fronts, in all parts of the electronics industry.'

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Reduce, reuse, recycle... and eat less meat

Getting that steak on your plate involves release of considerable amount of greenhouse gases
Victoria Vaughan, Straits Times 6 Dec 09;

What is a major beef among climate change supporters? They say eating meat like beef is bad news for the environment.

There is now a growing call to watch what you eat for reasons besides your health.

As world leaders gather at the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen from tomorrow to tackle the rise in global temperatures, thoughts may also turn to action on a more personal level.

Recycling and taking public transport are well-known measures but there is a growing clamour to eat less meat to cut carbon emissions. The livestock sector is one of the largest sources, responsible for 18 per cent of global emissions from human activities.

A report by the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation explains that livestock emits considerable amounts of the three main greenhouse gases - carbon dioxide through breathing, methane through the digestive process and nitrous oxide from manure.

Meat of all kinds contributes to these, with beef topping the charts in the amount of greenhouse gases (GHGs) released.

In Singapore, beef is the third most popular meat, but trails quite far behind chicken and pork, which are not as environment-damaging as beef.

Crops such as rice and corn also release GHGs but at a much lower rate than livestock, which accounts for 80 per cent of emissions from agriculture.

For example, a serving of broccoli, eggplant, cauliflower and rice combined will still produce about 25 times less carbon emissions than a slab of steak.

Various campaigns to get people to go flexitarian and give up meat for just a day a week have gathered momentum.

The United States' Meatless Monday campaign, started by the Centre for a Livable Future in association with Johns Hopkins' Bloom-berg School of Public Health, now has a presence in Britain, Brazil, Holland, Canada, Finland and Taiwan.

Ghent, a town in Belgium with a population of 240,000, in May became the first city in the world to establish a vegetarian day each week. Thursday Veggie Day is a campaign by the Ethical Vegetarian Alternative (EVA), Belgium's biggest vegetarian organisation with 3,300 members.

EVA's founder-director Tobias Leenaert told The Sunday Times that the day has been well received. In the city's 35 schools, 95 per cent of students have opted to go meatless on Thursdays.

'The long-term aim is that in the next four years, 80 per cent of the country takes part in Veggie Day. A longer-term aim is to see 80 per cent of people eating meat only once a week - in the next 20 years,' said Mr Leenaert, 36.

Two other cities in Belgium have followed Ghent's lead. Sao Paulo in Brazil and Tel Aviv in Israel have also backed a meat-free day. The Vegetarian Society of Singapore hopes to start such a campaign next year.

A group of students at the National University of Singapore began promoting Meatout Thursdays in September on campus.

Members of Students Against Violation of the Earth put up pos-ters around campus touting vegeta-rian dishes as 'meatout' options.

The group's vice-president Goh Hong Yi, 20, said that while it was not possible to estimate how many people on campus adhere to the non-meat Thursdays, a pre-campaign survey found that 3,000 out of 10,000 students polled were willing to take part.

Several major scientific studies have linked red meat - high in saturated fat and protein - to some cancers, heart disease, diabetes and obesity.

A World Health Organisation study, published last year, showed that a 1 per cent decrease in the intake of saturated fat, found in meat and dairy products, would result in about 13,000 fewer deaths from cardiovascular disease in Europe each year.

The Health Promotion Board in Singapore says on its website that there is evidence that a well-balanced and healthy vegetarian diet usually means a lower body mass index, lower blood cholesterol levels and reduced risk of death from heart disease.

Health debates aside, the benefit to the environment of eating less meat is undisputed, experts say.

Dr Rachendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Pa-nel on Climate Change, set up to provide scientific information on climate change, has spoken on the issue.

In his lecture Less Meat, Less Heat: Impacts Of Livestock On Climate Change delivered in Ghent last year, he estimated that if a region with a population of about six million were to go vegetarian one day a week for a year, it would have the same effect on the environment as taking 500,000 cars off the road.

Livestock also contributes to climate change when forests, which absorb carbon dioxide, are chopped down to clear land for pasture and crops for animal feed.

Dr Pachauri points out that 70 per cent of deforested land in the Amazon is used for cattle pasture and feed crops cover a large part of the remainder.

The production of meat also uses more water than crops such as rice and corn. Beef needs15,500 litres of water for a kilogram, compared with 900 litres for a kilogram of corn and 3,000 litres for the same amount of rice.

'A reduction in the size of the livestock industry through reduced consumption is the most effective way of cutting GHGs from animal production,' he said.

Greenpeace International Sustainable Agriculture campaigner Jan van Aken said a meat-free day a week could reduce emissions from cattle by 10 to 20 per cent.

Greenpeace estimates every kilogram of beef eaten produces about the same amount of greenhouse gases as flying 100km - about one-third the distance between Singapore and Kuala Lumpur.

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Designers with heart

Tan Hui Yee, Straits Times 6 Dec 09;

We stare at the curious-looking teapot, which has a spout pointing skywards instead of sideways.

This keeps the tea fresh, explains a kindly waiter at the Conrad Centennial hotel. He opens the pot to show a divider inside separating the tea leaves from the water.

We continuing staring at it after he leaves.

'That,' declares Ms Emily Pilloton, 'is a product that is cool but it's not necessary. It's an accessory.'

Those are strong words, but they are fitting for a 28-year-old who has spent a good part of her working life thinking through the kinds of design sorely lacking in this world.

The trained architect and product designer is the founder of Project H Design, a United States- based non-profit group that seeks to bring good design to those that need it most.

Since last year, its 300 volunteers have devised wide-ranging items like educational playgrounds for schools in Uganda and the US, and water transport and filtration systems in South Africa and India.

She pulled no punches either when she was in town two weeks ago to speak at the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design's World Design Congress.

The design world, she said, was 'misguided' - too caught up in the world of luxury and consumption. 'It's the equivalent of the majority of doctors coming out of medical school working on elective surgery instead of in the emergency room,' she told her peers.

Speaking to The Sunday Times separately, the American with Chinese and French roots stresses that good design really does not require a lot of money.

'We (designers) are so beholden to these corporate clients and think that if we don't have a big funder upfront, then no product can happen. That's the totally wrong approach.

'We don't have to follow the money. We can lead with the solutions and then make them work.'

A case in point: Project H worked with a school in the US state of North Carolina to introduce a playground that would allow students to learn maths in a fun environment. The actual physical space comprised nothing more than recycled car tyres stuck into the ground. But teachers, armed with workbooks on how to use the playground, found that the students learnt maths better through the physical games that formed part of this system.

Unfortunately, cheap materials cannot solve the other nagging problem - designers themselves have yet to find a way to earn a decent living while working for what she calls the 'underserved'. She

uses the word because the humanitarian or human-centred design she advocates does not focus exclusively on poor communities.

'In a lot of law firms, it is required for you to do a certain number of pro bono hours. In a lot of other professions, there is a social justice component where you can work for the underserved and still make money. Design and architecture haven't really had that.'

To do the work she does, for example, she lives in a trailer on someone else's property in southern San Francisco ('I don't pay rent'), gets by on a US$18 (S$25) Casio calculator watch ('It has broken seven times; I somehow manage to fix it') and designs on the fly in spaces like parks or homeless shelters.

Project H's designers do not have any office. They produce their designs 'in the field', working closely with end-users to ensure the final outcome is something that is sustainable and appropriate to the context.

'I get e-mail messages from people going 'I want to design a really cool water device for people who live in Africa'. I'm like, 'Okay, that's great, but 17 of those devices already exist... How did you decide that a water transport device is what's needed?''

Project H uses a ground-up approach. It goes into a community and interviews its members to

figure out what kind of work it needs to do.

'It's really important for us not to go in there saying we're here to design a product. Instead of just going and building a bridge, we ask how you might cross a river.'

The humility has reaped unexpected dividends. One of its projects at a Los Angeles homeless shelter involved teaching the shelter's residents to design and produce retail items for sale from donated material. After the items were worked out - bags, scarves, mats - one homeless woman remarked how she had always wanted a hammock when she was living on the streets. With the hammock, she explained, she would not have to sleep on the cold, hard asphalt. One thing led to another and the residents eventually created bags that could double up as hammocks.

'We never would have thought of that ever,' Ms Pilloton says.

The hands-on designer, who loves taking things apart to understand how they work, laments consumers' increasing unwillingness or inability to do so.

'Consumer culture is just so good at creating a false connection to products. We look at the iPhone and we go, 'Ah, it's so sleek and beautiful, I don't want to drop it'. And yet you have no idea what's going on in there. If you drop it, you are screwed and you have got to buy a new one.'

Few people these days bother to repair damaged products. 'I think that's really sad. Not only do we not think of fixing things, but also if we are going to, we can't do it ourselves.'

But manufacturers are equally guilty of disabling consumers. Take some of the latest cars on the market. 'If you open the engine hood, there's a second hood that's covering everything up. God forbid we see what's really going on.

'The instinct is just to hide all the inner workings because they are something ugly. I know how to change engine oil, and yet I wouldn't know how to do it in those cars because there's a second thing covering it all up.'

In her view, the throwaway culture would not be half as bad if companies created truly disposable versions of the items that have a short shelf life now.

'If we acknowledge things to be disposable, then we should design them to be disposable and biodegradable. We take advantage of the fact that we need them for only five seconds.

'On the other hand, we also design things which are so well-made you need only one in your lifetime.'

To reduce their impact on the environment, products should be designed to fit into either end of the spectrum.

Products like mobile phones, for example, are designed to last longer than two years, but are changed at that rate, if not faster, by gizmo- hungry users.

Any socially responsible phone maker, in her view, could do well asking itself these stark questions:

'If you acknowledge that someone is going to own the phone for only two years, are you making it out of something that's not going to sit in the landfill forever? Are you designing it in a way where you can reuse the parts?'

Ideas that make you go 'wow'
Straits Times 6 Dec 09;

Designers, says activist Emily Pilloton, need to document, share and measure good design instead of just churning out unthinking gadgets for the commercial world.

With that in mind, she produced a book this year called Design Revolution: 100 Products That Empower People.

We highlight some interesting projects:

Anti-virus cap

Designer: Han Pham

This simple plastic cap that permanently attaches to the top of an aluminium drink can facilitates the safe removal and disposal of needles after they are used.

The cap is moulded with international hazardous waste and danger graphics, making it universally understood.

The cap's built-in system safely dislodges a needle and drops it into the container.

Playground fence

Designers: Tejo Remy, Rene Veenhuizen

The designers were asked to transform a playground in the Netherlands in 2004 without adding new material to the space.

They did so by cleverly playing with the school's metal fence to create a three-dimensional space for sitting and playing.

Stop Theft chair

Designer: Design Against Crime

This chair, an interpretation of the elegant 1955 Series 7 chair by Arnie Jacobsen, features two slots on which a user can hang his belongings while seated. This keeps the belongings safe and the floor clear of obstructions.

Voting ruler

Designer: Concentrate Design

This simple tool has a 'yes' on one end and a 'no' on the other. Students can raise either end to answer a teacher's question on whether they understand the topic being taught.

Since their peers cannot see their answers on their rulers, students need not feel embarrassed if they answer 'no'.

Read more!

Singapore on wikipedia: Strict checks for local pieces

Straits Times 6 Dec 09;

Much about Singapore can be found on Wikipedia but there's more to be done still.

The Wikipedian community here lists dozens of topics that need to be created or expanded, from this year's flu pandemic to the battle of Bukit Timah and the country's flora and fauna.

Yet, few have come forward. Regular contributors believe part of the reason could be the tight scrutiny by the diehard contributors and editors who have raised the stakes for newcomers.

Contributors said the evaluation and rating of an article - done by a peer review - can be intimidating.

Only six of the 3,368 articles relating to Singapore have been given a top rating so far.

Homegrown contributor Jack Lee, an Assistant Professor of Law at the Singapore Management University, believes the quality control has merit. He suggests that at some stage a foundation could be created to reach out to local institutions to upload accurate facts.

A spokesman for the Ministry of Information, Communications and the Arts said no designated officials monitor Wikipedia.

He added that the Government, aware of the website's popularity, had given talks to public agencies to build awareness of new media platforms.

Shefali Rekhi

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Botanic Gardens dazzles at 150

Terrence Voon, Straits Times 6 Dec 09;

A drizzle did not dampen the carnival atmosphere at the Botanic Gardens yesterday.

After all, this year marks the people's park's 150th anniversary and a party at the Shaw Foundation Symphony Stage last night drew an estimated 1,000 people.

Picnic baskets and mats were out in full force, as composer Robert Casteels led a group of musicians through jazz classics and familiar tunes, spliced with real birdsongs from Singapore and the region.

The event - which marked the end of a year-long series of festivities - culminated in the light-up of 150 trees around the green oasis by the guest of honour, Minister for National Development Mah Bow Tan.

'Singaporeans have come to the Gardens and fallen in love with it,' he told the concert-goers.

'This is truly a People's Garden, a place for bonding, bringing people together, a place for making memories.'

Many in the audience have sentimental ties to the parkland.

Newlyweds Adrian Sng, 34, and Pamela Koh, 27, for instance, had their first date there during a concert performance last year.

'We've been back for every concert since,' said Mr Sng, an advertising executive.

Earlier this year, it was announced that the Gardens - which draws more than three million visitors annually - would be expanded.

A 9.8ha site next to Tyersall Avenue will be turned into a showcase of different types of rainforest plants, as well as a marshland habitat. It will be completed by 2012.

Botanic Gardens director Chin See Chung said the goal in the coming years is to raise the standing of the facility as a research hub.

'We are already a leading tropical garden, but we need to be a leading research institution in tropical botany in this part of the world,' he said.

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Indonesia arrests kangaroo smuggler: police

Yahoo News 5 Dec 09;

SURABAYA (AFP) – Indonesian police said on Saturday they had arrested a man believed to have smuggled 10 rare kangaroos by boat from New Guinea island.

East Java maritime police officer Widarmanto said that the police had caught the man on Friday off the coast of Surabaya, the capital of East Java province, with the red kangaroos.

"When we caught him, five of the red kangaroos were already dead. The police then safeguarded the other five," Widarmanto, who goes by one name, said.

"The man said that he bought the kangaroos for two million rupiah (212 dollars) each."

The police were investigating whether the suspect was connected to a network of rare animal traders.

The suspect, named Mulyadi, faces up to five years in jail for violating conservation laws.

Kangaroos are native only to Australia and New Guinea, an island divided between Papua New Guinea and Indonesia.

Suspect caught selling red kangaroos
Jakarta Post 5 Dec 09;

SURABAYA: East Java's Police arrested a man in the Madura Strait on Friday for alleged involvement in the trade of red kangaroos (Macropus rufus).

An official from the East Java Police, Comr. Widarmanto, said the suspect, Mulyadi, was a crew member of the KM Mitra Nusantara.

During his arrest, 10 red kangaroos from Papua were seized. Red kangaroos are a protected species in Indonesia.

"At the time of the arrest, five of the kangaroos were already dead, while the rest were secured by the police," Widarmanto said.

"The suspect admitted buying the animals from a Papuan resident for Rp 2 million each," he added.

ProFauna Indonesia head Rosek Nursahid said this was not the first case of illegal trade in red kangaroos in the Madura Strait, but that it was the first uncovered by local authorities.

"ProFauna activists in Papua tell us the trade of red kangaroos is widespread, with animals going to Tanjung Perak Port in Surabaya, and Banyuwangi in East Java," he said. - JP

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Chicken of the sea? Tuna farming getting a boost

Yuri Kageyama, Associated Press Yahoo News 5 Dec 09;

KUMANO, Japan – Thousands of tuna, their silver bellies bloated with fat, swim frantically around in netted areas of a small bay, stuffing themselves until they grow twice as heavy as in the wild.

Is this sushi's future? Tuna raised like chickens or cows?

As the world's love affair with raw fish depletes wild tuna populations, long-running efforts to breed the deep-sea fish from egg to adulthood may finally be bearing fruit. Though the challenges are daunting, the potential profits are huge.

By the end of this year, an Australian company says it will begin selling small amounts of southern bluefin tuna hatched in its fishery. A Japanese firm breeding the more prized Pacific bluefin tuna hopes to start sales in 2013 and ship 10,000 fish by 2015.

Whether tuna farming will become viable on a large scale remains an unanswered question. Tuna are much harder to rear than the widely farmed salmon and shrimp. They are large and need room to swim. They only spawn under certain circumstances. In some experiments, fewer than 1 percent of the babies survive. And those that do eat so much that they could wipe out other fish species.

The bulk of the tuna farmed today isn't bred from eggs; it is caught in the sea and fattened on farms, which does nothing to save nature's dwindling stock.

Atlantic bluefin, found in the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean, is disappearing so rapidly that Monaco is pushing to list it as an endangered species at an international meeting in Qatar in March. The U.S. says it will back the proposal.

Separately, the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas recently slashed the quota for next year's catch by about a third to 13,500 tons, a move criticized by environmentalists as not going far enough.

No wonder Japan's biggest seafood company, Maruha Nichiro Holdings Inc., is bullish on tuna. Maruha operates several tuna farms, including the one here in Kumano, a small coastal city in western Japan. Here, in a small bay, the fish live in netted sections mostly 50 meters by 80 meters (160 feet by 260 feet), smaller than a football field.

"For years, everyone assumed it was impossible to breed tuna on farms," says Takashi Kusano, a general manager who has worked for 20 years on cultivating tuna. "Tuna remains forever a mystery."

Japanese consume 80 percent of the world's Atlantic and Pacific bluefin tuna, the two species most sought after by sushi lovers. In Japan, they are called "hon-maguro," which translates roughly as "true tuna."

The survival rate for hatched Pacific bluefin is about 0.4 percent of the 28 million eggs collected for tests at Maruha's farms. Another effort, at Japan's Kinki University, has achieved a 6 percent survival rate.

Those numbers sound low, but one tuna lays tens of millions of eggs and the survival rates are improving.

"I had to solve the puzzle of why our fish kept dying," recalls Kusano.

Unlike other fish, which can pump oxygen better through their mouths, tuna must swim continuously at up to 80 kph (50 mph) to absorb oxygen through their gills.

Baby fish, which aren't developed enough to brake or steer, often die ramming into the nets that cordon off tuna farms in coastal waters.

Learning about tuna diseases and dietary habits took years of trial and error, and tuna are surprisingly vulnerable to stress, Kusano said.

A handful of tuna that Maruha has produced are set to lay eggs next year, a sign that the full life cycle may be finally completed.

Kinki University has already done that, producing 40,000 Pacific bluefin babies this year from eggs laid by tuna on its farms, up from 10,000 last year.

Even if the hurdles to a full life cycle are cleared, other concerns remain, such as the tuna's voracious appetite.

"Bluefin tuna are like lions and tigers. They are at the very, very top of the food chain. And they eat other fish. What you are doing is catching wild fish to create bluefin tuna," said Mike Hirshfield, chief scientist at Oceana, an advocacy group for the world's oceans. "The anchovies, the sardines and the herrings are already fished to the max."

That raises ethical questions about feeding tuna with relatively cheap fish that are needed by people in developing countries, Hirshfield said.

Maruha's answer is a tuna feed, which it patented in 2006, made of fishmeal mixed with oils and nutrients and looking like brown sausages.

The company says its feed is less polluting, fattens tuna three times faster than feeding them small fish, uses fish that aren't eaten by people, and can be stored at room temperature, slashing energy needs.

Eventually, Maruha hopes to develop a vegetarian tuna feed.

Hirshfield calls vegetarian feed the last hope, noting it has had some success with salmon and trout.

Wild tuna still commands a premium over farmed tuna. In January, a 200-kilogram (440-pound) Pacific bluefin tuna fetched a record 20.2 million yen ($220,000) at a Japanese fish market. 40-kilogram (90-pound) tuna raised at Maruha fetch about 100,000 yen ($1,100) each.

Farmed tuna's disadvantage is that "it doesn't have a fish taste, and its color is almost white," said Kazuo Sato, 56, who has run a sushi shop outside of Tokyo for 31 years. But, he added, "we can't be relying just on natural tuna these days, and there are bound to be improvements in farmed tuna."

Maruha harvests its fish the old-fashioned way, with baited lines from small boats — the method believed best to preserve a sought-after buttery taste.

The company aims to be marketing 10,000 tuna bred from eggs in 2015, worth 1.5 billion yen ($17 million) at today's prices. That would be 10 percent of Japan's current annual farmed tuna production of 5,000 tons, only a tiny fraction of the 44,000 tons still caught in the wild.

At Kinki University, Osamu Murata, head of research, says, "It's our mission to spread to the world our knowledge about producing man-raised tuna that doesn't rely on nature's resources."

In Australia, Clean Seas Tuna worked with Kinki to overcome such problems as cannibalism and young tuna crashing into tank walls, the company said. And Hawaiian regulators have approved the world's first commercial farm for "ahi," bigeye tuna.

In Japan, tuna is such a staple that it recently merited an editorial in Yomiuri, the country's largest newspaper, urging readers to curb their appetites for the sake of the fish's long-term survival.

That would include eating less "toro," the prized fatty cut. "To keep enjoying 'toro,' we must exercise self-control," it said.

Read more!

Iron Curtain kept out alien birds

Matt Walker, BBC News 4 Dec 09;

The Iron Curtain that divided Europe for 46 years left an indelible imprint on the continent's wildlife.

The isolation of Eastern Europe meant that far fewer alien bird species colonised it, scientists have found.

Restrictions on the movement of people and trade into Eastern bloc countries prevented the birds entering.

While westerners imported exotic birds such as parrots and weavers, people in Eastern Europe introduced just a few game birds that were good for hunting.

The discovery is published in the journal Biological Conservation.



"We obviously do not want to go back to the Iron Curtain days. However, there are some important policy lessons," says Professor Salit Kark, who conducted the research with colleagues based at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.

Invasive species remain a significant threat to biodiversity, she says.

"The Iron Curtain somewhat protected the more isolated Eastern bloc from invaders."

"On the other hand, the co-operation today across borders opens more ways to invasion. But it also allows us to address this problem together."

Prof Kark's team initially helped compile an inventory of alien invasive species in Europe.

They added birds to the database, relying on reports, published papers and historical records compiled by birders.

When they analysed the database, they were surprised to find that human activity has a bigger impact on bird introductions than either climate or latitude.

And that impact was exaggerated by the erection of the Iron Curtain.

"During the Cold War, few bird species were introduced into the Eastern bloc, while the West received many more," Prof Kark says.

In Western Europe, the number of non-European bird species introduced steadily rose from 36 before the Cold War had begun, to 46 during the period from 1945 to 1991, to 54 after the Cold War ended.

In Eastern Europe, the number decreased from 11 species introduced before the Cold war to just five during.

Faunal improvement

During the Cold War, people introduced significantly more exotic species such as parrots, weaver-finches and weavers into the West.

These cage birds were brought in as pets, to supply zoos and as part of a general policy of "faunal improvement."

In the East, far fewer birds were introduced. Those imported were mainly game birds, such as partridges, pheasants, ducks and geese that could be hunted for food.

Across the continent, most introduced bird species have remained within the initial country they were imported into.

That means there is still time for policy makers across Europe to take action to prevent them spreading further, say the researchers.

But 14 of the 121 species have spread into neighbouring countries.

"Many of them, such as the rose-ringed parakeet from India, and the monk parakeet from South America, are spreading fast," says Prof Kark.

Urgent action

The realisation that large political and trading blocs can have such impact can be used in a positive way, she says.

"The fact that EU countries are co-ordinated means they can act together, make policy decisions and address them together."

As trade and the movement of people increases across Europe, says Prof Kark, and many former Eastern European countries are integrated into the EU, it becomes more urgent to establish policies to prevent a new flow of exotic species into regions that were once isolated.

The same principles apply to any region where trade has expanded dramatically, such as China and India and developing countries, she adds.

"These countries may not yet have developed the policies to deal with alien species, but they have an opportunity to learn those lessons before more alien species are introduced."

"However, the timing is urgent and countries need to start enacting policies soon."

Read more!

Rice an unlikely global warming culprit

Karl Malakunas Yahoo News 4 Dec 09;

LOS BANOS, Philippines (AFP) – Asian rice farmers typically do not fly around the world on holidays or own big-engine cars but scientists say they have an important role to play in helping cut the world's output of greenhouse gases.

While much of the globe's focus in the climate change fight is on the burning of fossil fuels and the logging of rainforests, water-logged rice paddies are also a major source of global warming-causing methane.

"If you step through a rice field, there is a lot of gas bubbling out and the large bulk of that is methane," said Reiner Wassmann, a biologist specialising in climate change at the International Rice Research Institute.

While carbon dioxide is the most famous of the gases that cause global warming, methane is at least 20 times more effective at trapping heat in the earth's atmosphere.

In an interview with AFP from the institute's headquarters in Los Banos, a farming area on the Philippines' main island of Luzon, Wassmann explained that methane was responsible for one fifth of all greenhouse gas emissions.

About 10 percent of the methane comes from rice farming, while other sources include the flatulence of cows and decomposing landfill garbage dumps.

Wassmann said it was essential that rice farmers in Asia and the rest of the world did their bit to tackle climate change, but lumping them in with more obvious, fossil-burning culprits of climate change was wrong.

"Culprit gives an emotional tone to it that is not necessary," he said, describing some calls by green groups for the billions of people who rely on rice as their staple to eat less of it as being too extreme.

"I have heard suggestions like that but I don't think that makes sense. The key is on the production side, not on the consumption side," he said.

However Trinidad Domingo, a 57-year-old rice farmer with a 2.5-hectare (six-acre) plot of land in northern Luzon, said it seemed unfair to ask people such as herself to make sacrifices as part of the climate change fight.

"If we are contributing to this problem, we are just trying to survive and don't do this intentionally," Domingo told AFP from her small brick home.

"The big factories and industrialists should be the ones to be blamed. Why pick on peasants like us? They are the big contributors to the problem."

Indeed, Domingo's carbon footprint would appear to be a fraction of that of an average businessmen in the United States or elsewhere in the developed world -- she does not own a car and her main luxury is a small television.

"I am a simple rice farmer, a peasant who just wants to eat three times a day," she said.

Offering some hope, Wassmann said reducing greenhouse gas emissions from rice fields did not necessarily require a sacrifice, rather the implementing of smarter and more efficient farming strategies.

The first step is for farmers to use less water, because the methane is created when submerged organic material decomposes.

Wassmann said this was a logical path to follow regardless of the climate change issue because water would only become more scarce in an increasingly populated world.

Using less water can be done through draining the rice fields regularly during the growing season.

However the complicating factor is that nitrous oxide -- an even more potent gas and which mostly originates from widely used nitrogen fertiliser -- is released from drained rice fields.

"The only solution to that we can see is that we couple water saving... with increasing efficiencies of nitrogen fertiliser," he said, adding this could be done without sacrificing yields.

However convincing rice farmers to use less fertiliser will be a huge challenge, as evidenced by the reaction of Domingo when asked if she would change her farming techniques.

"If it contributes less to climate change, we are willing to cut down on using it, but I am afraid my crops won't grow as fast, leading to lesser yields. There could be a problem there," she said.

"We are willing to find alternatives but, at the end of the day, we are just small farmers."

Wassmann also said that there was no concerted push across the world's rice farming industries to educate and help farmers.

"As far as methane is concerned, there is not a single project in the real world, outside of the experimental farms, where there are programmes to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from rice," he said.

Wassmann also said he expected rice to be a virtual non-issue at this week's climate change summit in Copenhagen, and that he expected it would only be discussed in depth at follow-up, more technically focused meetings.

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Forest-saving deal could lift climate summit hopes

Michael Casey, Associated Press Yahoo News 5 Dec 09;

BANGKOK – In a potentially valuable boost to fighting climate change, rich and poor countries are close to an agreement to end the destruction of the world's forests in 20 years, government negotiators said.

It depends, however, on whether consensus on an overarching climate accord is reached by the 192 countries at the U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen starting Monday. But governments and environmentalists hope the forest plan will embolden delegates to overcome their differences and set ambitious targets for curbing the carbon emissions blamed for global warming.

"This has the chance to be one of the real political breakthroughs to helping deliver a deal in Copenhagen," said Duncan Marsh of The Nature Conservancy. "This can be one of the things that brings countries together around a real north-south bargain to protect climate."

When it comes to greenhouse gases, the public tends to focus on smokestacks and exhaust fumes. But deforestation, the burning or rotting of trees, is thought to account for up to 20 percent of carbon dioxide sent into the atmosphere — as much as all the world's cars, trucks, trains, planes and ships combined.

The draft plan worked out at negotiations in Bangkok and elsewhere is called REDD, for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation. It calls for halving deforestation rates by 2020 in poor nations and ending it completely by 2030.

It would be financed either by richer nations' taxpayers or by a carbon-trading mechanism — a system in which each country would have an emissions ceiling, and those who undershoot it can sell their remainder to over-polluters. Under carbon trading, the rich countries would pay the poor ones to keep their forests intact, and earn new carbon credits to cover their own emissions.

Policymakers see forest conservation as a cheap and easy way to start tackling global warming. It could end up reducing by 50 percent the cost of halving carbon emissions from 1990 levels by 2030, according to the Eliasch Review, a report sponsored by the British government.

Decades of international efforts and vast sums of money have done little to save the forests.

About 32 million acres (13 million hectares) are cut down each year — an area about the size of England or New York State — and the emissions generated are comparable to those of China and the U.S., according to the Eliasch Review. Deforestation for logging, cattle grazing and crops has made Indonesia and Brazil the world's third- and fourth-biggest emitters.

REDD would take several years to set up, and could result in more than $30 billion a year going toward forest protection in more than 40 tropical nations, according to the U.N.

But delegates see stumbling blocks: fears that the agreement could become unwieldy if it is stretched to include peatlands and plantations on destroyed forest, measures to prevent corruption and protect forest-dwelling communities, and questions over how to finance the scheme and which countries can participate.

Brazil wants rich nations to contribute 20 billion euros ($30.3 billion) in direct aid by 2015, and wants to limit to 10 percent the amount of credits rich countries can get for investing in forests. Other tropical nations counter that carbon markets should play a bigger role.

Supporters of the carbon market system say it would create a pay-for-performance system. "The money doesn't flow unless you have demonstrated reductions in forest-based emissions below some agreed reference," said Frances Seymour, director of the Center for International Forestry Research, an Indonesia-based research institute.

Studies have shown that carbon markets would raise much more money over the long run. But critics say they wouldn't be able to pay countries the seed money needed to get their REDD programs off the ground, and at their worst would allow rich nations to avoid making more costly cuts in their own emissions.

"The financial architecture is not there. Without this part of the equation, we cannot solve the problem," said Suzana Kahn, Brazil's climate change chief. "We need a predictable financial flow. It's different from a simple donation."

Despite offers of funding from Norway, France and others, and expectations that money eventually will come from carbon markets in the U.S. and Europe, Kahn said she has yet to see hard commitments that would fund the program through its first five years.

Another concern is the gangsters and corrupt power brokers associated with deforestation in some countries.

It's "the dirty secret no one wants to talk about," said Joe Saunders, deputy program director at Human Rights Watch. "But until the lack of oversight and conflicts of interest are taken seriously, pouring more money into the leaky system from carbon trading is likely to make the problem worse, not better."

Agus Purnomo, who heads Indonesia's National Council on Climate Change, dismisses the concerns and says existing national laws should be adequate.

"If you have to clear up all the corruption before you can have REDD, then REDD won't be a useful instrument," Purnomo said. "We should not overburden REDD with all these other issues."

Another issue is who gets funding. When REDD negotiations began two years ago, the biggest benefactors were to be several dozen tropical countries where deforestation is worst. But now China, India, Guyana, Costa Rica and others want a share.

Countries that have curbed deforestation without foreign help will ask why they should go on doing so when others are being paid to change their ways, said the World Bank's leading forest expert, Benoit Bosquet.

"It's important that all the forest countries see something it in for them," he said.

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Study measures ocean's CO2 uptake

Mark Kinver, BBC News 4 Dec 09;

There are substantial variations in the amount of carbon being absorbed by the North Atlantic Ocean, a study shows.

Writing in Science, an international team of researchers said the ocean's uptake of carbon varied by as much as 10% over the space of a few years.

The data set, described as the largest of its kind, was gathered by devices fitted to a fleet of commercial ships.

The world's oceans are believed to absorb about half of the total carbon emissions from human activities.

"Out of all the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere, about half of it does not stay there," said lead author Andrew Watson, a researcher from the University of East Anglia's School of Environmental Sciences.

"It is taken up by the natural world; half of it is absorbed on land, and half of it ends up in the oceans."



Professor Watson said that it had been assumed that the amount of CO2 absorbed by the oceans remained constant.

"What we seem to be seeing is that it appears to be changing over a period of several years," he told BBC News.

"We are talking about a variability (in the North Atlantic Ocean) that is in the order of about 0.2bn tonnes of carbon each year.

"Over a few years, the uptake is changing by at least 3% of the total production of CO2 by all human activities."

Ocean mapping

Professor Watson explained that climate modellers had attempted to assess how much variability there was in the overall carbon cycle.

"They had some difficulty because they simply did not have a sufficient amount of basic data," he said.

Writing in the paper, the international team of researchers said that they overcame the historical problem of sparse observations by using a network of commercial vessels.

"We began this work in the mid-90s when we fitted one automated device," Professor Watson recalled.

"We then realised that if we got a few devices to cover a large region, we could map an ocean with this technique."

Researchers from a number of nations, including Spain, Denmark and the UK, established a co-ordinated network in 2005 that placed the instruments on volunteer observing ships (VOS) that made regular journeys across the Atlantic.

Climate models suggest that carbon sinks will weaken over time as the climate changes, and Professor Watson hopes his team's research will shed light on the dynamics of ocean sinks.

"It is important because the natural system takes up so much carbon, and we do have a suspicion that this uptake will change," he commented.

"Some people are quite nervous about that."

He added that the monitoring system developed by the team could be rolled out in other regions.

"We don't know what is happening elsewhere because we do not have the network in place.

"We could not cover all of the world's oceans because there are not many vessels in the Southern Ocean, for example.

But he said that there was enough traffic across the North Pacific and South Atlantic to establish feasible networks.

"It would be relatively cheap and it would be a huge advance in our understanding of the carbon cycle and where carbon is going."

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