Remembering the Boxing Day Tsunami

Owe it to the mangrove trees
Andrea Filmer, The Star 25 Dec 09;

LIKE the previous four Boxing Days, tomorrow will be a day of reflection for the Penang Inshore Fishermen Welfare Association (Pifwa) in remembrance of the fifth anniversary of the Asian tsunami tragedy.

The fishing community in Pulau Betong, Balik Pulau in Penang owes much to the mangrove trees which broke the force of the giant waves that time, thus saving many homes and belongings from the destruction.

Fishermen returning from sea had also grabbed hold of the sturdy plants which saved them from being swept away.

Pifwa chairman Ilias Shafie said to date, the association had planted over 114,000 mangrove trees and there was no slowing down for them.

“The support is strong for the planting of mangroves, but what we are lacking is combined, sustainable support to oversee the growth of the trees,’ he said.

“People want us to plant mangroves in many areas, but we have to look at the neighbouring communities before we start.

“We need the support of the Village Development and Security Committees or community heads to monitor the development of the trees as Pifwa does not have enough manpower to do so, especially on the shores around Penang island,” Ilias said in an interview.

He said monitoring was important to ensure the trees grew healthily and were not trampled on.

“There would be no point in planting them if there was no one to maintain them,” Ilias said, adding that Pifwa had received suggestions to plant mangroves along Gurney Drive, among other places.

Next year, he said, Pifwa would focus on diversifying the mangrove species they planted as this would make the planting areas fertile spawning grounds for fish, prawns, crabs and other wildlife.

“The main species we grow now are Bakau Kurap and Bakau Minyak but we find that the more species there are in one area, the more fertile the place is for wildlife.

“We are also in discussions with the south Seberang Prai District Office to set up an eco-education centre in Sungai Chenaam where visitors, tourists and researchers can see different mangrove species at one site.

“We already have saplings of about eight mangrove species that were collected by hand from places in Penang, Kedah and Perak,” he said.

Ilias added that much of Pifwa’s current focus was planting mangroves along Sg Acheh and Nibong Tebal and they now planned to move to north and central Seberang Prai next year.

Members of Pifwa, along with their counterparts from Sahabat Alam Malaysia, will gather at Kuala Sungai Haji Ibrahim in Sungai Acheh tomorrow to plant 600 mangrove saplings.

“An important lesson to learn from the (2004) tsunami is not to wait until things go wrong.

“After some time goes by, people become less afraid of what might happen, but we should always plan for the future,” Ilias said.

Tsunami early warning must start at community level
Katherine Baldwin, Reuters 25 Dec 09;

LONDON (Reuters) - Five years on from the Indian Ocean tsunami, the region has its own early warning system but experts say the new technology will not save lives unless local communities are more involved in planning how to respond.

The 230,000 people killed in Africa and Asia by the 2004 tsunami received no formal warning of the approaching waves.

Since then, millions of dollars have gone into building a vast network of seismic and tsunami information centers, setting up sea and coastal instruments and erecting warning towers.

But studies show that the closer the warning gets to those it is designed to help, the more it fades out, and much more needs to be done to connect the technology to the people.

"The weakest link remains at the interface between the early warning system and the public, and in ensuring there's enough preparedness at the local level to react appropriately," said Bhupinder Tomar, senior officer for disaster preparedness at the International Federation for the Red Cross (IFRC) in Geneva.

In terms of technology, the region has made great strides since December 26, 2004, and is much better prepared, experts say.

Warning centers in Japan and Hawaii receive seismological and tidal data and send out alerts to national agencies in Indian Ocean countries. These agencies then warn the population, via SMS, radio, television, watch towers and loud speakers.

By 2010, regional centers in Australia, India, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand are set to take over primary responsibility from Hawaii and Japan for issuing the warnings.

START WITH COMMUNITIES

Many relief workers, however, believe the system's design is too top-down and that local communities should be the starting point, not the end point, in any early warning network.

Local people should be the 'first mile' in early warning, rather than the 'last mile' as they are often called, the workers say.

"You need to start with the people and move outwards," said Ilan Kelman, a senior research fellow at CICERO, the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo.

In a June 2009 report, the Global Network of Civil Society Organisations for Disaster Reduction found community participation in the decision-making process was insufficient.

It said the emphasis must shift from international and national policy-making to policy execution on the ground.

Similarly, Oxfam found in a recent report, "Collaboration in Crises," that disaster-affected communities wanted the chance to play a more decisive role in programs designed to help them.

Evacuation routes and drills need to be integrated into communities' day-to-day activities, experts say.

"In a heavily vegetated area, people need paths to get from the coast to inland ... and there's no reason why those paths should be different from an evacuation route," said Kelman.

"Having a development project to create more paths and maintain them is actually useful for the communities every day, as well as every decade when there's a tsunami warning."

Other community-based measures that need to be developed further include the teaching in some schools of "Shake, Drop, Run" -- when the earth shakes, drop everything and run.

Teachers and children must be taught what most fishermen know, that when the sea recedes you should run, said Kelman.

Thailand has put tsunami education on its national curriculum and more countries should do this, the experts say.

MULTI-HAZARD APPROACH

Communities must also design their own warning messages.

"We don't want to see panic, we don't want to see people taking the wrong action. So getting the words right, getting the message right and getting it delivered are key components," said Al Panico, head of the tsunami unit at the IFRC.

In order to maintain the tsunami early warning system, at the community, national and international level, it is vital to extend it to other hazards like cyclones and storm surges.

"Any warning system you don't notice is a dormant system, and treasuries don't like anything that they cannot justify," said Peter Koltermann, head of the Tsunami Coordination Unit for the United Nations' Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC), which began coordinating the Indian Ocean system in 2005.

The best approach to saving lives, however, is better urban and coastal planning to move people away from high risk areas. But experts agree this is the hardest thing to accomplish when communities and livelihoods are established.

"That is by far the best approach," said Panico. But "it's the individual who decides where to live."

(Additional reporting by Thin Lei Win in Bangkok; Editing by Jerry Norton)

FACTBOX: How the Indian Ocean gets tsunami warnings
Reuters 25 Dec 09;

LONDON (Reuters) - For more than 40 years, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center (PTWC) has been alerting countries in the Pacific region to the dangers of killer waves.

Following the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that killed almost 230,000 people, the United Nation's Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) began coordinating efforts to create an Indian Ocean tsunami early warning system.

Before 2004, there were no sea-level monitoring instruments in the Indian Ocean and many countries did not have agencies responsible for tsunami warnings or points of contact to receive messages from international warning centers.

Five years on, a vast network of seismographic centers, national warning centers or agencies, coastal and deep-ocean stations is in place across the Indian Ocean to detect potential tsunamis and pass on warnings to communities.

Here's how the system works:

WARNING CENTRES

When an earthquake strikes in the Indian Ocean region, data from a variety of sources is transmitted to the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center (PTWC) based in Hawaii and the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) in Tokyo.

The two centers currently have responsibility for providing the Indian Ocean with what are known as tsunami "watches."

By 2011, a number of so-called Regional Tsunami Watch Providers (RTWPs) in Indian Ocean countries are set to take over this function. Australia, India, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Asian Disaster Preparedness Center in Bangkok are on track to become regional watch providers.

Countries able to invest more in technology will share data with smaller states that cannot, such as the Maldives or the Seychelles.

In addition, the ADPC has been coordinating its own efforts since 2005 to have a multi-hazard early warning system, known as the Regional Integrated Multi-Hazard Early Warning System(RIMES).

RIMES will work alongside the national and regional watch providers and will also share information with Hawaii and Japan. RIMES is expected to be operable early next year.

Hawaii and Japan receive earthquake information and data from tidal gauges and Deep-ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunamis (DART) sensors or buoys.

They also receive news bulletins, telegrams, and information over the telephone. The Commission for the Nuclear-Test Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) also contributes data from seismographic stations.

The centers locate and determine the size of earthquakes, determine whether they have the potential to produce tsunamis and predict tsunami wave arrival times wherever possible.

It takes about 15 to 20 minutes for earthquake data to be deciphered and a tsunami watch to be issued.

SENDING TO THE COUNTRIES

The two centers issue watches, if necessary, to national bodies in the Indian Ocean and it is the responsibility of each national agency to alert its population, by whatever means.

Many national agencies will have also received their own information, from local or regional seismic centers, buoys, news bulletins and so on, and all this information will be fed back and forth between Hawaii, Japan and the region.

WARNING THE POPULATION

Warnings to the population are delivered over the airwaves -- radio, television, SMS, email -- and manually, using bells, megaphones or loud-speakers attached to mosques.

In some countries, well-rehearsed drills will kick in and local agencies will coordinate an evacuation.

On the ground in many Indian Ocean nations, NGOs and community groups are involved in educating and coordinating local populations to know what to do when they hear a tsunami warning or when they feel or see signs of an earthquake or tsunami - when the earth shakes or the sea recedes.

Technology does not reach all areas and even if it does, warnings can be confused or not in the right language for all the affected people to understand. In other areas, there are no escape routes as transport infrastructure is poor.

(Reporting by Katherine Baldwin; Editing by Jerry Norton)

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Adapting to disasters is our only option

Our naturally volatile region demands better measures to save lives.
Robert Tickner, Sydney Morning Herald 26 Dec 09;

THE past five years have been bracketed by the most devastating natural disasters in our region's history: the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, which killed 226,000 people in 14 countries, and the unprecedented triple punch of an earthquake, tsunami and typhoon three months ago. These disasters understandably received blanket media coverage, outlining the unfolding catastrophe, the mounting human toll, and then the extensive humanitarian relief effort. This neat, closed account, however, has created the perception that they are one-off events, with a clear end point. It overlooks the increasingly frequent nature of disasters, often linked to climate change, that the Asia-Pacific region has experienced in the past five years.

Straddling the ''Ring of Fire'' - the meeting point of Pacific and Indo-Australian tectonic plates - Indonesia registers an average of 400 earthquakes with a magnitude of 4.0 or above annually. Since 2004, major earthquakes have hit Sumatra, Yogyakarta and West Java, claiming thousands of lives. Deadly tsunami waves have also struck Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands in recent years. In one Solomon Islands community, not realising the danger, people walked down to the sea to watch in awe as it receded several kilometres before being swept away with the incoming tidal surge. Earlier this year, Fiji was hit with massive flooding, affecting 10,000 people. These major catastrophes are compounded by an increasing number of localised, smaller-scale events, increasing the average number of disasters per month in the Asia-Pacific from 21 in 2004 to 51 in 2008.

Disasters such as these are often stereotyped as ''acts of God'' or of ''mother nature''. Instead, in many recent ''natural'' disasters, there is a distinctly man-made dimension. They are more often the permanent condition of many of the world's poorest. Economic patterns have ensured the concentration of poor communities in high-risk areas, such as during Hurricane Katrina, or in terms of structural social inequalities that render particular groups such as women or the elderly especially vulnerable. As a result, developing countries account for 95 per cent of deaths from physical disasters and experience economic losses up to 20 times greater, as a percentage of GDP, than developed countries.

All the evidence indicates that the risks to these vulnerable communities are set to intensify in line with the frequency and severity of physical disasters due to global warming. Rising sea levels are already a growing problem for the sprawling archipelago to our north, with coastal towns and even the capital, Jakarta, increasingly vulnerable to tidal surges and waves. The future is possibly even more dire to our east, where the mainly low-lying Pacific island communities face intensifying climatic and geological dangers. In Papua New Guinea, a remote community on the Carteret Islands in Bougainville is among the first recorded people to have lost their ancestral lands to rising sea levels.

For these communities, some of the world's poorest, effective disaster management and adaption measures are becoming increasingly urgent. A properly resourced regional strategy is needed, which is fully supported by governments and decision makers, and implemented at the community level.

At a local level, disaster preparedness has already proved to be successful and cost-effective, with early warning and early action, as well as preparedness measures, saving more lives and livelihoods per dollar spent than traditional disaster response.

Its effectiveness was demonstrated recently in Samoa, where church bells rang out as a tsunami warning. Red Cross volunteers - well trained in tsunami preparedness drills - helped villagers evacuate to pre-identified sites on higher ground. When the latest quake struck the city of Padang in West Sumatra, a trained network of radio operators swung into action, keeping vital lines of communication open between Indonesian Red Cross in Jakarta and its field offices in the quake zone. Pre-positioned emergency relief items in the area meant that help was at hand for survivors and 200 disaster response volunteers immediately fanned out into affected areas to assess urgent needs.

At a global level, the international community now needs to step up risk-reduction measures significantly in the face of ever more extreme and frequent disaster. The incredible generosity after the 2004 Asia quake and tsunami, repeated this year, must be harnessed to help communities adapt to known weather and seismic events and new disasters emerging from changing climate patterns. At the same time, international donors must honour their commitments to increase funding towards risk reduction initiatives.

Responding effectively to disasters will always be essential but nothing is more effective than preparing for disasters and preventing them. Indeed, is this not our moral obligation to the thousands who have lost their lives in natural disasters in the past five years?

Robert Tickner is chief executive of the Australian Red Cross.

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Fuel spill at same Alaska reef as Exxon Valdez

Yahoo News 25 Dec 09;

LOS ANGELES (AFP) – A tugboat struck the same reef as the Exxon Valdez tanker 20 years ago, spilling diesel into Alaska's Prince William Sound and creating a three-mile-long slick, the US Coast Guard said on Friday.

An unknown quantity of the fuel leaked from the Pathfinder tug after it ran aground Wednesday on Bligh Reef. The boat's owners were pumping the remaining diesel from the original 33,500 gallons (127,000 liters) in its tanks.

Flyovers by a C-130 cargo plane and helicopters revealed "a light grey or silver diesel sheen spanning an area approximately three miles (five kilometers) long and 30 yards (meters) wide approximately one mile east of Glacier Island," the Coast Guard said on its website.

The tug had been scouting shipping lanes for ice when it struck the same rock that did for the Exxon Valdez on March 24, 1989, spilling 11 million gallons of crude into the sea in the worst US oil disaster.

Wednesday's accident was nothing like on the same scale and the Coast Guard said the slick was "rapidly dissipating" and not expected to hit the shoreline of Glacier Island for some time.

Experts surrounded the boat with containment booms to prevent the slick from spreading, while a recovery vessel, the Valdez Star, was using oil skimmers to try and recover spilled fuel.

"There's no recoverable sheen," Jim Butler, a spokesman for Crowley Maritime Service which owns the tug, told the Anchorage Daily News (ADN).

When the remaining fuel is removed, officials will be able to estimate how much spilled into the sound, the Coast Guard said.

Butler said it was not clear how the tug ran aground, ADN reported, but a navigational error at such a well-known spot left some people dumbstruck.

"Like most Alaskans, we at the Prince William Sound Regional Citizens Advisory Council are baffled as to how the Pathfinder managed to hit perhaps the most famous navigational hazard in the world -- Bligh Reef -- in conditions of relatively mild weather," council president Steve Lewis wrote in a blog posting.

The accident raises questions "about how well the painful lessons of the Exxon Valdez spill of 1989 have been learned by today's mariners," he said.

The Coast Guard said tests administered to the Pathfinder crew late Wednesday found no alcohol, ADN reported.

The captain of the Exxon Valdez, Joe Hazelwood, had been drinking on board the tanker before the 1989 wreck.

Alaska tanker-escort grounds at notorious wreck site
Yereth Rosen, Reuters 24 Dec 09;

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) - A tugboat used to help oil tankers travel safely through Alaska's Prince William Sound has run aground at the site of the Exxon Valdez disaster and is leaking diesel fuel, the U.S. Coast Guard said on Thursday.

The tug, called the Pathfinder and owned by Crowley Maritime Corp, hit Bligh Reef on Wednesday evening. The submerged reef, a notorious navigation hazard, is where the Exxon Valdez ran aground in 1989, leaking 11 million gallons (42 million liters) of crude oil in the country's worst oil-tanker spill.

Fuel tanks holding up to 33,500 gallons (127,000 liters) of diesel were breached in the grounding, and aerial surveys show that a sheen about three miles long and 30 yards (meters) wide has formed, Coast Guard Chief Petty Officer Dana Ware said.

Tanker traffic out of Valdez, site of the marine terminal for the Trans Alaska Pipeline System, was temporarily interrupted but resumed Thursday morning, Ware said.

The 136-foot (41-meter) tug, part of the tanker-escort system set up after the Exxon Valdez disaster, had been scouting the tanker route for ice buildup, the Coast Guard said. It was not escorting a tanker at the time.

It is unclear what caused the grounding. All six crew members passed the alcohol test that was administered, the Coast Guard said.

(Reporting by Yereth Rosen; editing by Bill Rigby and Eric Beech)

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Cultivated coral reefs now also exported from Indonesia

Antara 25 Dec 09;

Denpasar (ANTARA News) - The coral reefs cultivated by coastal fishermen in Serangan village, Denpasar, have found their way to the export market.

"We have been applying the technique of transplantation in coral reef cultivation and the result is that the products are now exported to Europe," Chairman of the Association of Serangan Fishermen Wayan Patut said here Thursday.

He also said that trading coral reefs is actually against the law, as it harms natural conservation.

However, by applying the transplantation technique in coral reef cultivation, the farmers produced the reefs in such a way that they could be locally marketed and even exported.

"We have been cultivating coral reefs in this way for many years including for natural conservation, in the Serangan waters," one of the farmers said.

"Besides saving nature, the technique also has its economic value, so that the farmers became enthusiastic in both cultivating and rehabilitating coral reefs," he added.

He said he could tell the difference between observed coral reefs from the saleable cultivated ones, by monitoring the reefs and rehabilitating them.

"We have succeeded in cultivating coral reefs of different colors like brown, green, yellow, and other shades," he added.

He said the coral reefs had already been exported to various countries, like the United States, and are also marketed at local markets. Coral reefs are normally used to decorate sea water and fresh water aquariums. (*)

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Best of our wild blogs: 25 Dec 09

Another Red-Legged Crake found dead
from Bird Ecology Study Group

Venus Drive
from Singapore Nature

Oriental Pied Hornbill and papaya
from Bird Ecology Study Group

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The Singapore Green Plan and "Areas of Natural Scenic Beauty"

Not part of the plan
Home to several endangered species, but this green spot at Lorong Halus is itself in danger of being wiped out
Esther Ng Today Online 25 Dec 09;

SINGAPORE - The path leading to the ponds at Lorong Halus is a scenic sight of grasslands and wooded hills. If it is hard to imagine that this once housed a landfill and sewage works, it's probably even harder to recall that before it became a dumping ground, this was once an area full of mangroves, mudflats and ponds.

"Thousands of birds during their annual migration would swarm here like the globally-threatened Chinese Egret and Asian Dowitcher," said the deputy chairman of Nature Society Singapore's (NSS) conservation committee, Dr Ho Hua Chew.

Since the Lorong Halus landfill was closed in 1999, some green shoots with patches of woodlands and two small ponds have emerged here.

It is the only known site for the breeding of the Little Grebe, a critically-endangered bird, with only 10 such birds believed to be surviving in all of Singapore.

Yet while Lorong Halus and other green spots like Bukit Brown, the grassland at Simpang, Bidadari and Springleaf Woodlands are home to several endangered species such as the Straw-headed Bulbul, the rare Twin-barred Tree Snake and critically endangered orchid species like Dendrobium Lobii and Liparis ferruginea - they are not part of the Singapore Green Plan (SGP) - which is a sore point with the NSS.

The NSS believes these places should be designated "Areas of Natural Scenic Beauty" - and legislated protected areas - as is the practice in other countries like the United Kingdom, with potential for being turned into an educational and conservation asset.

"Being a small nation, our areas of natural scenic beauty are rather unspectacular but they have a charm of their own, if our sense of scenic beauty is not constricted by what we see overseas on our holidays and if we bother to explore our countryside," said Dr Ho.

According to a report from the National Parks Board (NParks) and the National University of Singapore's Centre for Remote Imaging, Sensing and Processing, Singapore's greenery grew from 36 per cent in 1986 to 47 per cent in 2007.

Out of the 47 per cent, 10 per cent has been set aside for nature reserves and parks, while the remaining green areas are open to future development.

NSS estimates that these green pockets are mostly undeveloped areas - patches of mangrove, scrublands, woodlands as well as remnant orchards and rubber plantations which have reverted to a wild state.

They also include areas once designated as Nature Areas in the 1992 SGP - Mandai Estuary, Sungei Khatib Bongsu and Pulau Semakau - which were de-listed from the URA's Master Plan in 2003. Six years on, the NSS is still calling for these areas to be re-listed as such.

Restoring de-listed nature areas into green plan

"These green areas have become a refuge for the remaining wildlife of Singapore, including many species that are thought by experts to be supposedly extinct or rare, as well as serving as harbours for migratory species," said Dr Ho.

"Given this scenario, the possibility of increasing our nature areas in the SGP should not be automatically ruled out in the name of land scarcity," he added.

When asked, NParks and the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) told MediaCorp the Government has to take a balanced and pragmatic approach to land-use planning - and it may not always be possible to keep as much of the existing greenery or nature areas as it would like to.

But it gave the assurance "a process is in place to ensure that where possible, the necessary studies are done and mitigating measures taken to minimise the possible environmental impact whenever development projects are planned in or close to areas with significant biodiversity".

The URA and NParks told MediaCorp that some of the areas mentioned in the 1992 SGP were not included as nature areas in the Parks and Waterbodies Plan as they have been committed for "strategic and long-term development".

However, these areas will still be "retained for as long as they are not required for development".

As it stands now, Bukit Timah Nature Reserve, Central Catchment Nature Reserve, Sungei Buloh Wetland Reserve and Labrador Nature Reserve cover about 4.5 per cent of Singapore's land area and represent indigenous ecosystems, such as primary lowland forest, freshwater swamp forest and mangroves, said the agencies.

In addition, the 300-km Park Connector Network, when completed, will link up green spaces throughout the island, bringing the community closer to nature.

However, this does not go far enough for NSS. It wants all 47 per cent of Singapore's green spaces to be preserved as a "carbon sink" which can be traded for carbon credits.

In environment-speak, a carbon sink is a natural or man-made reservoir or area that accumulates and stores some carbon-containing chemical compound.

"Planting individual trees is less effective in creating a carbon sink than allowing woodlands to remain as they are.

"We're prone to protest about forest fires in Indonesia but our protests sound very hollow if we were to progressively wipe out our remaining greenery until what is left are nature reserves and public parks."

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Government should formulate policy on mangrove forest: Malaysian activists

SAM wants govt to formulate policy on mangrove forest
The Star 24 Dec 09;

PENANG: Sahabat Alam Malaysia (SAM) has urged the government to draw up a specific policy on the mangrove forest to ensure that the forest would not be destroyed to enable development activities to be carried out.

Its president, SM Mohamed Idris said the policy should include the conservation of the mangrove forest and outline the measures that would be implemented to achieve the objective.

"Priority should be given to preserve the mangrove swamp area," he told reporters here, Thursday.

He also wanted the mangrove forests to be stated in the Forestry Acts as a permanent forest reserve.

He said the tsunami that hit several countries on Dec 26, 2004 should always be remembered and the conservation of the mangrove forest was important as the forest could lessen the impact of the disaster.

"It appears as though we have never learnt from the destruction caused by the tsunami. We continue to destroy the mangrove forests for development," said Mohd Idris. - Bernama

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Subsidise methane bio-power: Sabah activist

Jaswinder Kaur, New Straits Times 24 Dec 09;

KOTA KINABALU: The Malaysian Palm Oil Board's suggestion for Sabah to use methane from mills to generate electricity, instead of building a coal-fired power plant, is in line with calls to use renewable energy to solve power shortage in the state.
Sabah Environment Protection Association (Sepa) president Wong Tack said there was a need for political will to provide incentives to make use of green technologies.

"What MPOB has said reinforces the point that we have been making, and we hope these growing voices will be taken seriously.

"The generation of renewable energy is subsidised in many countries and they are allowed to sell to the grid at higher prices.

"I hope Tenaga Nasional Berhad and the government will do the same. The government can step in as a matter of policy because an initiative like this has to be supported and encouraged."

Wong was responding to a recent statement by MPOB chairman Datuk Sabri Ahmad that there were 117 palm oil mills in Sabah that emitted methane, which could be trapped to fuel steam turbines.

Sabri had said it was a cleaner alternative for Sabah, instead of a coal-fired plant, adding that biomass and biogas technologies were also available.

Wong said Sabri's statement showed that he knew the potential of renewable energy from vast oil palm plantations in Sabah.

A coalition of non-governmental organisations that calls itself Green Surf wants TNB and its subsidiary, Sabah Electricity, to increase the efficiency of power facilities and to look at other alternatives instead of the 300-megawatt coal plant at a Felda plantation in Lahad Datu.

'Need for study on biomass option'
New Straits Times 24 Dec 09;

KOTA KINABALU: Studies should be done on the feasibility of using biomass and biogas to resolve the electricity shortage in Sabah, state Tourism, Culture and Environment Minister Datuk Masidi Manjun said yesterday.
"If it is possible, it is a good substitute for fossil fuels. I'm curious to know whether it can be done.

"I think all of us in Sabah are eager to know if indeed it (biomass-generated power) can be done here. That is something for Sabah Electricity Sdn Bhd and Tenaga Nasional Berhad to think about."

Masidi said it was up to these bodies to conduct a thorough study to see if agricultural waste could be used to generate power on a sufficient scale for residential and commercial use.

He was asked to comment on a recent report which quoted Malaysian Palm Oil Board chairman Datuk Sabri Ahmad as saying that biogas methane emitted by waste sludge in the retention ponds of 117 oil mills in Sabah could be trapped to fuel steam turbines and generate electricity.

Sabri had said it was a cleaner alternative to building a coal-fired power plant. Sabri had said biomass and biogas technologies were available now.

"I'm sure it is possible on a small scale, but we are talking about an entire grid -- a much bigger scale," said Masidi after opening the Snips College of Creative Arts in Karamunsing here yesterday.

"It must also be made cheaper for consumers. Will our consumers be ready to pay a premium for electricity?"

A coal-fired plant to be built in Felda Sahabat on the east coast of Sabah to solve the state's power woes has attracted much controversy.

On another matter, Masidi said Sabah was not ready for single-session schools as the infrastructure in many schools was not in place for such a plan.

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Study On Turtle Population In Feeding Grounds In Semporna

Bernama 25 Dec 09;

SANDAKAN, Dec 25 (Bernama) -- A study to determine the turtle population in feeding ground areas has been conducted at the Tun Sakaran Marine Park and Sipadan Islands in Semporna from Sept 29 until Oct 12 this year.

The study, the first in the country, was conducted by a group of researchers from the Sea Turtle Research Unit (SEATRU), Universiti Malaysia Terengganu, led by Dr Juanita Joseph.

Dr Juanita said blood samples of 69 Green turtles and nine Hawksbill turtles were taken for the study, adding that the turtles were marked before they were released.

"The marking of the turtles was done in the feeding ground for long-term observation and monitoring," she told Bernama here.

She said similar studies had been conducted in Australia and the United States of America.

The study was important to aid efforts for turtle conservation, as well as identify feeding grounds which are threatened by fishing activities, she added.

Dr Juanita said the outcome of the study would be presented in a working paper on strategy to address illegal catching of turtles in Malaysian waters and the Indo-Pacific region.

-- BERNAMA

Study to help in turtle conservation
The Star 30 Dec 09;

SANDAKAN: Blood samples were taken from 69 green turtles and nine hawksbill turtles under a study in Semporna to determine the turtle population at feeding grounds.

Dr Juanita Joseph, who led the group of researchers from the Sea Turtle Research Unit in Universiti Malaysia Terengganu, said the turtles were also marked before they were released.

“The marking was done at the feeding ground for long-term observation and monitoring,” she said here.

She said that similar studies had been conducted in Australia and the United States.

However, the study in Sabah carried out from Sept 29 to Oct 12 was the first in Malaysia. It covered two areas – the Tun Sakaran Marine Park and Sipadan Islands.

The study was important to aid efforts in turtle conservation and to identify feeding grounds threatened by fishing, said Dr Joseph.

She said the study’s outcome would be presented in a working paper on strategies to address illegal catching of turtles in Malaysian waters and the Indo-Pacific region. — Bernama

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Christmas with the leatherbacks

Larry Greenemeier, Scientific American 24 Dec 09;

Want to know where Noelle and Darwinia—two intrepid adult female leatherback turtles (Dermochelys coriacea) that nest in Gabon—are spending their Christmas? Researchers at the University of Exeter in the U.K. have made it easy by launching a new Web site on Wednesday that uses satellite tracking technology to monitor the turtles' movements off the coast of west central Africa.

The turtles are each traveling solo but have logged about 1,287 kilometers between them since the researchers began tracking on December 7. The transmitters allow the researchers to determine the turtles' positions when they surface to breathe.

The story of Noelle and Darwinia is more a story of survival than of their progress, as the waters around Gabon are increasingly subject to industrial fishing, pollution and oil exploitation, particularly from nations outside western Africa, including countries in Europe, according to the researchers. "It is only by having detailed information on where these creatures go that we can try to protect them," Exeter postdoctoral researcher Matthew Witt said in a prepared statement.

During three nesting seasons, scientists conducted land and aerial surveys along Gabon's 600-kilometer coast, estimating that a population of up to 41,373 female turtles uses the nesting beaches. Gathering information about leatherbacks when they are at sea is not as easy, given that they are the deepest diving of all sea turtles. Researchers have recorded dives of up to 1.2 kilometers, on par with the dives of sperm whales.

Leatherbacks—the largest of all sea turtles, generally measuring up to nearly two meters long and weighing up to 540 kilograms—saw their population in the Indo-Pacific region diminish by more than 90 percent in the 1980s and 1990s. Although the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) issued a report (pdf) last week indicating that leatherbacks (along with the Artic fox and koala) are "the species destined to be hardest hit by climate change," the Exeter researchers say there is a lack of information about their populations in much of the Atlantic, especially near Africa.

The IUCN reports that the "critically endangered" turtles are being affected by rising sea levels and increased storm activity due to climate change destroying their nesting habitats on beaches. Temperature increases may also lead to a reduction in the proportion of males relative to females. The sex of leatherbacks is determined by the temperature of eggs during incubation. With leatherbacks, temperatures above 29 degrees Celsius result in female hatchlings.

The Exeter researchers are working with Gabon's government and a number of NGOs working there, including the Wildlife Conservation Society and Seaturtle.org, to learn more about the leatherbacks' movements.

"Over the Christmas period we will follow their movements with great interest with the hope that the information we gather can feed into truly useful approaches to help promote the protection of the species," Witt said.

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Impact of warming seas on Indian Ocean reefs

Coral reefs may be affected due to sea warming
IANS Thaindian 24 Dec 09;

New Delhi, Dec 24 (IANS) Coral reefs, the most diverse marine habitat that support half-a-million species, may start losing dominance from Indian seas starting 2030 following increase in sea temperature, says a new study.

Scientists from the Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute, Cochin studied the coral vulnerability due to warming of Indian seas reef regions of the Andaman & Nicobar, Lakshadweep, the Gulf of Mannar and the Gulf of Kutch.

According to scientists, corals are among the most sensitive ecosystems to temperature changes, exhibiting bleaching - a process of whitening of corals when stressed by higher than normal sea temperature.

Indian coral reefs have experienced 29 widespread bleaching events since 1989 and 2002. Bleaching events and the ambient temperature at the time of bleaching provide scope for making projections, on the vulnerability of coral reefs with future warming of seas. The study was based on future projection of rise in sea temperature from 2000 to 2099.

“The results indicate that if there is no increase in thermal tolerance capacity, bleaching would become an annual or biannual event for almost all reef regions along the Indian coasts in next 30-50 years,” said scientist E.Vivekanandan, who led the study.

Corals are small animals that live in colonies and form reefs. The coral reefs are important marine ecosystem that act as life support system for million of coastal inhabitants in terms of coastal protection, nutrient cycling, recreation, tourism and fisheries.

“We studied the sea surface temperature date prior to, during and after 1998 coral bleaching events in the five regions and found that coral bleaching occurred when the maximum summer sea surface temperature exceeded 31 degrees Celsius and remained high for more than 30 days,” said Vivekanandan.

The study found that the reef building corals may lose dominance between 2030 and 2040 in the Lakshadweep region and between 2050 and 2070 in the other four regions.

The results show that monthly sea surface temperature is predicted to increase to 34 degrees in all the regions of the Indian seas during 2000-99.

“The annual average sea surface temperature may increase by 3 degrees to 3.5 degrees in the Indian seas by the turn of this century. With rise in temperature, coral bleaching in all the five regions may exceed frequently until the middle of this century and almost every year after 2050,” he said.

Scientists warn that catastrophic exposure is the most likely outcome of the bleaching by 2050.

“Given that recovery time of such a event is at least 10 years and 50 years for full recovery, this scenario would mean a non-coral dominated reef structure,” he added.

Read more: http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/enviornment/coral-reefs-may-be-affected-due-to-sea-warming_100294026.html#ixzz0aazRxfKY

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Super rice under development

Scientists genetically engineering plant hope to boost crops by 50%
Alastair McIndoe, Philippines Correspondent Straits Times 25 Dec 09;

LOS BANOS: Near a patchwork of emerald-green rice fields, a research facility is being built here to house the experimental plants that crop scientists hope will produce a revolutionary high-yielding rice strain.

If successful, the project led by the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) will ensure that future global demand for the food staple can be comfortably met.

'This is an Apollo project - long range, high risk, but with an extremely high pay-off,' IRRI director-general Robert Zeigler told The Straits Times.

After the spikes in world food prices in 2007 and last year, 'now is the right time to start this bold challenge', he added.

Leading plant scientists from Asia, Europe and the United States are collaborating on the 'C4 Project' to alter the intricate biochemisty of rice plants so that they capture sunlight - a process called photosynthesis - more efficiently.

The programme, already under way, is in uncharted scientific territory.

Newly-appointed project leader William Quick, a professor of plant physiology and photosynthesis specialist from Britain's University of Sheffield, thinks it will be between 15 and 25 years before C4 rice is ready for farmers' fields.

Funding to get the project off the ground came from an US$11.5 million (S$16.2 million) grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. An early breakthrough would probably see more funds being ploughed in from other sources.

The goal is to genetically modify rice into a C4 photosynthesis plant, like maize, sorghum and sugar cane, which absorb sunlight faster and more efficiently than C3 plants, which include rice.

Dr Quick said: 'To make the conversion to C4 photosynthesis, we have to change the biochemistry and anatomy of the leaf, and we don't yet understand the mechanism for doing this. But we're just at the start.'

The IRRI - which initiated the first green revolution of high-yield rice and is marking its 50th anniversary - believes C4 rice could boost yields by 50 per cent.

As Dr Zeigler put it: 'If the project is successful, we won't have to worry about rice supplies.'

And Dr Quick added: 'It would be like a second green revolution.'

Meanwhile, there are renewed supply concerns after last year's rice crisis, when prices surged to record highs and countries scrambled to stock up.

Typhoons in the Philippines, severe monsoons in India, and insect damage to crops in Thailand, a major rice exporter, have again put upward pressure on prices - and again focused international attention on the challenge of ensuring global food security for rice.

According to the IRRI, production will have to rise around 2 per cent a year to keep pace with consumption, but not even half that is being achieved.

While there is hope that new land for planting rice may open up in Brazil and Argentina, land in Asia's traditional rice-growing countries is being squeezed by urbanisation and pressured by the impact of climate change. This means higher-yielding and more resilient rice will need to be developed.

But Dr Zeigler said: 'There is a reasonable certainty that we can build rice plants that produce well in the difficult environments we'll be facing.'

He noted that research is progressing into developing rice with high tolerance to flooding, drought and salinity in soil.

'So if farmers manage crops better, improve post-harvest handling - by not drying rice on roads, for example - and use the technologies that we know are good, then I think over the next 20 years demand can be met,' he said.

The research rainbow does not end with developing C4 rice, however.

'The next frontier would be a really smart rice plant that would not need a lot of fertiliser. It could detect the nitrogen content in soil and balance out its own needs by capturing additional nitrogen from the air,' said Dr Zeigler.

'Basically, it would have its own genetic control system to fine-tune how it interacts with the environment.'

Another possibility is creating a rice strain that requires less cooking or, in other words, rice that would be nearly edible at harvest.

'We're talking about some very funky plants,' said Dr Zeigler.

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