Heat is on for carbon trading plan

Michael Richardson, For The Straits Times 19 Apr 10;

A HYDROPOWER dam in the Himalayan mountain country of Bhutan has just been registered as the first cross-border project in a United Nations programme to encourage developing nations to reduce carbon emissions.

Known as the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), the programme allows government and private sector investors to develop clean energy projects in poorer nations to earn certified emission reduction (CER) credits - each equivalent to one tonne of carbon dioxide.

These CERs can be traded and sold, and used by industrialised economies to meet a part of their emission reduction targets under the Kyoto Protocol climate change treaty. Developing countries are not bound to make similar cuts.

Although the protocol is due to expire in 2012 and negotiations on a follow-on framework are mired in contention, supporters of the CDM see it as a way of demonstrating that developed and developing nations have a common interest in working together to achieve sustainable development. This, they say, could help encourage agreement on a new international framework to limit climate change.

The US$200 million (S$275 million) Dagachhu dam in Bhutan, financed by loans from the Asian Development Bank, Japan and Austria, is expected to reduce CO2 emissions by about 500,000 tonnes per year, largely through export of power to India, which relies heavily on coal-fired plants for its electricity generation.

The 114MW project will earn income for Bhutan's state-owned utility, which says royalties from the project will enable it to supply low-cost electricity to rural domestic customers while providing the government with a long-term revenue stream to alleviate poverty.

This first cross-border project under the CDM to encourage regional trade in renewable energy follows registration in January of the UN scheme's 2,000th project - a biogas extraction and distribution venture in Thailand's Sakaeo province that will reduce CO2 emissions by more than 56,000 tonnes annually.

The first CDM project was registered with the UN certification authority in November 2004. It took almost 31/2 years for the first 1,000 projects to be approved, and less than two years for the next 1,000, ranging from wind and solar power to waste handling and reforestation. With 450 projects now being considered for final approval by the CDM executive board and more than 2,000 additional ventures being assessed, it is hoped the 3,000 mark will be reached in an even shorter time.

The secretariat in Bonn, Germany, of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the parent treaty of the Kyoto Protocol, expects the CDM to save more than 2.7 billion tonnes of CO2 from being spewed into the atmosphere in the five years to 2012.

CDM projects are designed to ensure measureable and verifiable emission reductions. But in a scheme that yields tradeable credits worth billions of dollars, there have been abuses. Much of the preliminary auditing of CDM projects is done by private firms. The UN recently suspended two of them for procedural breaches, bringing to four the total number removed from the scheme in 15 months.

Some governments, too, have been lax in supervising CDM schemes. So far, despite efforts to encourage other developing regions to take advantage of the programme, the CDM has been dominated by Asia, chiefly China and India.

An independent review of the UN secretariat supporting the CDM highlighted the need for reform. The review, released in December, found that while demand for the CDM was rising fast, the proportion of projects registered without the need for corrections had dropped from 80 per cent to 30 per cent in four years.

As a result of the need for more careful checks to ensure that projects delivered the promised environmental benefits, registration times tripled in two years to an average of 200 days, substantially increasing costs and the workload of the over-stretched secretariat. The review concluded that while project quality had been restored, the CDM process needed to be better coordinated.

This effort is now underway. It includes allowing developers to put up similar small-scale clean-energy projects in a single programme for registration to cut expensive auditing fees. Swiss firm South Pole Carbon says it recently received the first letter of approval from the Indonesian government to bundle dozens of small hydropower projects for formal UN registration next year. Submitting each of the Indonesian projects singly would have been time-consuming and costly.

The UN says it already has 40 bundled CDM projects being processed. The moves to accelerate registration offer South-east Asia the chance to increase its share in the clean energy scheme, which currently stands at just 231 of the 2,141 approved ventures. Only eight of the 10 Asean member states have registered CDM projects, with Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam the most active so far.

The CDM is the first global environmental investment and credit scheme of its kind. If it is to be a trailblazer for a new global climate change framework, it must produce broadly based benefits and credible emission reductions.

The writer is a visiting senior research fellow at the Institute of South East Asian Studies.

Read more!

Best of our wild blogs: 18 Apr 10

Requiem for the Butterflies
from Butterflies of Singapore

Pulau Hantu is alive!
from wild shores of singapore with Box of Surprise

More flaring up at Pulau Bukom
from wild shores of singapore

Wild Wild West After Rain
from Beauty of Fauna and Flora in Nature

Showy flowers in urban forest
from Urban Forest

Mother Nature’s Avian Architects/Builders
from Life's Indulgences

Grey Heron manipulating prey
from Bird Ecology Study Group

Read more!

NEA fights illegal dumping with private investigators

Private eyes have helped reduce such offences by 80% from 1999 to 2009
Goh Chin Lian, Straits Times 18 Apr 10;

Don't think you can treat the country as a dumping ground.

To stop such dirty business, private eyes have been hired by the National Environment Agency (NEA) to track down individuals and syndicates that dump waste illegally on state land.

These investigators have proven effective, reducing the number of offences by 80 per cent over a decade, the NEA told The Sunday Times.

It first hired private eyes in April 2000 to combat a surge in such activity.

Alarm bells rang when the amount of improperly disposed waste rose seven-fold from 3,835 tonnes in 1998 to 24,612 tonnes in 1999.

Such activities were also becoming more organised, with syndicates involved, the NEA said. Construction waste and debris were dumped in remote areas of Lim Chu Kang, Jalan Buroh, Mandai and Neo Tiew Road.

The private investigators joined NEA's enforcement officers to conduct ground surveillance.

They also gathered evidence to enable NEA to prosecute the culprits in court - on 310 charges of illegal dumping offences so far. The offenders have been fined a total of $850,000.

One case that made the headlines eight years ago involved a sub-contractor who was fined $102,000 for allowing illegal dumping near the Kranji water catchment area. His job was to build an embankment around a plot of state land to prevent illegal dumping. But he let lorries dump waste earth and construction debris there for a fee.

The NEA said the illegal dumping situation is now under control, with the number of cases falling from 190 in 1999 to 39 last year. It will continue to hire private eyes and expects to award a new contract in June.

Read more!

Is this the end of bird migration?

Climate change is affecting bird behaviour at a staggering rate. Some 20 billion have already changed their flight plans

Alasdair Fotheringham, The Independent 18 Apr 10;

It's rained three times as much as usual this winter in Andalusia, and almost every day unemployed amateur ornithologist Javier Caracuel has walked past a disused mining tower in the decaying industrial town of Linares and looked up, expecting the pair of white storks that nest there to have migrated south.

Yet despite the surrounding high noise levels – the tower, some 10 metres high, is jammed between a school and a street clogged with traffic – and Andalusia's wettest winter in decades, the storks have stayed put. And they're not alone. "There have always been a couple of storks at the top of the church spire down by the railway station, but I've never seen so many across town," Mr Caracuel explains, "and there are dozens more in the villages."

The changes in storks' behaviour that Mr Caracuel has observed in one near-forgotten mining town in north-eastern Andalusia are far from uncommon. At a recent high-level congress attended by 200 migration experts, leading Spanish ornithologist Miguel Ferrer estimated that 20 billion birds have changed their migrating habits in the last few decades. The biggest single identifiable reason behind such a massive behavioural shift, involving 70 per cent of the world's migrating birds is – surprise, surprise – climate change.

"Long-distance migrators are travelling shorter distances, shorter-distance migrators are becoming sedentary," says Mr Ferrer, who works for Spain's Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) in the Doñana National Park, one of the key European "stopovers" in bird migration routes. "That has a knock-on effect on almost everything they do, from breeding habits to feeding habits to their genetic diversity, which in turn affects other organisms in their food chain. It's a huge behavioural change, forced on them by rising temperatures."

"Climate change and environmental change are simultaneously forcing migratory birds to adapt extremely quickly," says Ian Newton, a Royal Society member and lifelong researcher into the subject. But if the adaption process is necessarily far faster than the last comparable geophysical phenomenon, the Ice Age, this time round it may not be anywhere near as successful.

"Fossil evidence suggests that in the Ice Age migration patterns changed, but now it's not such an easy option. The worldwide landscape is much more fragmented because of human activity. Put simply, it's not the same for a bird to try to adapt to the environment in Manhattan as it is in the Maldives."

Apart from migration changes, the birds' other option in the face of a fast-heating environment is fast-track evolution. This time there is evidence they are doing both. Reduction of wingspan sizes and changes in beak shapes have already been recorded. In another recent discovery, Francisco Pulido of the Complutense University in Madrid has ascertained that the recent shifts in migratory patterns are not necessarily temporary: rather for some birds, they're genetic.

"Pulido looked at migratory restlessness in blackcaps and warblers over a 13 year period," Professor Newton explains. "Studying a separate sample of birds each year, he found that their restlessness became progressively earlier each season. The only explanation for such a change is genetics."

Such changes are likely to become ever more common, as temperatures rise across the planet. "Average annual temperatures are moving northward at a rate of four kilometres a year," Mr Ferrer estimates, "so the normal summer temperature in your city 12 months ago is now normal four kilometres further north. It doesn't sound like a lot, but that's 20 times quicker than temperatures changed in the last Ice Age. At the same time, because birds are migrating less, one traditional path for genetic development – when they strayed from their migration paths by accident and had to adapt – is being closed off."

Scientists insist the consequences of rising temperatures have barely begun to scratch the surface of birds' behavioural patterns. But changes are becoming increasingly dramatic, with radical population shifts just one known effect. To use the example of white storks again, as long as six years ago recorded numbers in Spain had almost doubled to 32,000. Even in far-flung Tykocin, north-east Poland, they have risen by 20 per cent.

At the same time, wild geese in Doñana, once numbered in the hundreds of thousands, have plunged by 40 per cent. However, in Lake Gallocanta in Zaragoza, Spain, amateur ornithologist Javier Mañas reports that numbers of wintering cranes have increased six-fold in the past five years, from 3,000 to more than 18,000.

On the other side of the planet, there have been similar changes in migration patterns, according to a British specialist in Japanese wildlife and author, Mark Brazil. "We see considerable annual variation now in the presence and absence of wintering birds arriving into Japan." he says.

"Some people might say to heck with biodiversity," comments Peter Marra, a research scientist at the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Centre in the USA, "but they'd be wrong. Birds are the most sensitive thermometer of environmental change we have, and if up to 20 per cent are going to become extinct, it doesn't say to me we're living in a sustainable way."

Read more!

Britain's wildlife - birds, mammals and insects under threat

It has been called the "Domesday book of British wildlife" - a new publication, compiled by 40 of Britain's leading scientists, provides a complete picture of the state of the country's wild animals and plants.
David Harrison The Telegraph 17 Apr 10;

The book, called Silent Summer, makes for some grim reading. Farmland birds, brown hares, water voles and many butterflies and other insects are in decline because of changing farming practices and loss of habitat, it says.

There are, however, some success stories. The otter, which between 1957 and the Seventies disappeared from 94 per cent of its habitats, is now back at more than a third of those sites, thanks to a special conservation programme.

And, controversially, the book credits field sports with helping to conserve several species, saying activities like hunting and shooting are "almost universally good" for the hunted species and many other species living in the same habitats.

The 600-page book was written by a team of experts and edited by Professor Emeritus Norman Maclean, of Southampton University's School of Biological Sciences, and a leading UK authority on fish genetics and genomics.

The book records how some farmland birds, including the skylark, have seen their population fall by more than half in recent decades. Farmland birds are a key government barometer for measuring the countryside's health.

Other species, including the yellow hammer, turtle dove, grey partridge, willow tit, spotted flycatcher, wood warbler and pied flycatcher are also in serious decline.

Robert Robinson of the British Trust for Ornithology says in the book that half the 220 bird species in Britain and Ireland " are of conservation concern". Climate change is a threat but deterioration and loss of habitat is a bigger problem, he says.

The dramatic fall in insect populations in the past 20 years has had a knock-on effects for other animals, especially birds and mammals. British butterflies in trouble include the Large Heath, Duke of Burgundy and Lulworth Skipper.

The brown hare, which has been in decline in the UK since the 1960s, has suffered from an increase in the number of predators – mainly foxes – and loss of cover, according to the book. There are an estimated 800,000 hares in the UK and although not rare or endangered, the mammal is one of the Government's priority species for conservation.

In addition to the otter, other species that have benefited from targeted measures include the buzzard – up by over 50 per cent – and the red kite, which was on the brink of extinction and now boasts a population of 1,000 breeding pairs in the UK. Sea birds are flourishing and badgers, helped by strict legal protection, have seen their numbers rise to more than 300,000.

Prof Maclean told The Sunday Telegraph: "The book is like a Domesday Book of British wildlife. There are serious concerns about many species of birds and insects. The problem is chiefly man-made and the solutions can be man-made too.

"But the picture is mixed. The evidence suggests that targeted conservation campaigns work. We have to protect the species in danger because so many other species depend on them for survival.

"And we should also protect them because wildlife is important to our quality of life."

Sir David Attenborough says in the book's foreword: "This book... gives us a benchmark. It is invaluable now and in the future it will be irreplaceable."

The book highlights the importance of field sports to the wellbeing of wildlife. Robin Sharp, Chair Emeritus of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, says that "field sports ... have been almost universally good for the hunted species and the non-hunted, non-predators that thrive in the same habitat".

Prof Sharp praises foxhunting and reveals that 86 per cent of woodland managed for hunting had vegetation cover – important for other species – compared with just 64 per cent in unmanaged woodland.

Managed areas also had an average of four more plant species, greater plant diversity and more butterfly species than unmanaged areas.

Prof Sharp also reports on a study of three areas in central England which found that all owners of land used for hunting and shooting had planted new woodland, compared with only 30 per cent of landowners who did not host hunts or shoots.

"This suggests that those who hunt and / or shoot provide significant conservation benefits," he said.

Prof Sharp calls on hunters and shooters to make more effort to explain the benefits of their activities to conservationists, policy-makers and the public.

"Overwhelmingly the target species for field sports have fared well over the last century ... More game-keeping, game crops and habitat management would undoubtedly achieve even more."

Read more!

Hydrogen still in the eco-car race

Arthur Max, Associated Press Yahoo News 18 Apr 10;

BERLIN – Hydrogen, one of Earth's most abundant elements, once was seen as green energy's answer to the petroleum-driven car: easy to produce, available everywhere and nonpolluting when burned.

Hydrogen energy was defeated by a mountain of obstacles — the fear of explosion by the highly flammable gas, the difficulty of carrying the fuel in large, heavy tanks in the vehicle, and the lack of a refueling network. Automakers turned to biofuels, electricity or the gas-electric hybrid.

But hydrogen, it turns out, never was completely out of the race. Now Israeli scientists and entrepreneurs claim to have brought hydrogen energy a step closer by putting it in much smaller, lighter containers.

Rather than using metal or composite cylinders of compressed gas that look like bulky scuba gear, hydrogen is packed into glass filaments which, once out of the lab, will be only slightly thicker than a human hair.

These 370 glass capillaries are bundled into a glass tube called a capillary array, about the width of a drinking straw. The scientists say 11,000 such arrays will fuel a car for 400 kilometers (240 miles), take less than half the space and weight of tanks currently installed in the few hydrogen cars now available.

"We have shown new materials that can store more hydrogen than any other system," says Dan Eliezer, chief scientist of C.En Ltd., the company based in Geneva, Switzerland, where the Israelis are developing their invention.

The scientists make no attempt to improve the standard fuel cell, which is not much different today from when it was invented more than 150 years ago. A fuel cell makes electricity from chemical reactions involving hydrogen and oxygen, producing only water vapor as a byproduct. The fuel cell can be compared with a standard car's engine, while the capillary arrays would be comparable to the gasoline tank.

The system was unveiled in Berlin at a demonstration for The Associated Press at the German Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing, known as BAM, which has been testing the materials since 2008 and has pronounced the system safe. Also attending was a representative of Italian-based Generali Insurance, which has invested $10 million in the project.

While its backers call the technology a breakthrough, it is unlikely to gain traction without a large injection of capital to scale up development. It also would need a distribution system and the support of major car companies, which have poured billions of dollars into their own closely guarded research programs.

Auto companies "are still investing significant amounts of money in hydrogen and fuel cells," and have hundreds of researchers working on the technology, said David Hart, director of E4tech, a business and energy consultancy in London. Automakers refuse to disclose details of their research or funding.

Hart said the glass capillaries appear to be an "interesting" technology that would be "very significant" if it were to provide the energy claimed by the company. But if it means creating a new refueling infrastructure, "it may still not be the right answer for cars," he said.

Like electric cars, the driving force behind hydrogen research is the need to break away from oil and rein in emissions of greenhouse gases blamed for climate change, especially carbon dioxide from industry and transport. Transportation adds about 13 percent of manmade carbon to the atmosphere.

Hydrogen boasts zero emissions. It can be produced from water through electrolysis, or harvested as the waste product of nuclear reactors and chemical plants.

"In terms of saving carbon dioxide, you do a great deal more with renewable hydrogen," said Danny Dicks, a biofuels expert from the British consultancy group Innovation Observatory. "So ultimately, hydrogen is where things ought to be driving toward."

Automakers, for now, still are focused on battery power. At the Geneva Motor Show last month, nearly all major manufacturers displayed their latest electric vehicles or plans to produce them. The few hydrogen vehicles on the floor attracted little attention.

It was not always that way.

U.S. President George W. Bush allocated $1.2 billion for hydrogen research and said in his 2003 State of the Union address: "The first car driven by a child born today could be powered by hydrogen and pollution free." The Obama administration largely scrapped the program.

In Europe, too, hydrogen is low-priority. The Dutch government, for example, recently announced a euro5 million ($6.75 million) subsidy for hydrogen, but gave eight times more for electric cars. Buyers of plug-ins get tax breaks and rebates, and cities like London and Amsterdam are planting charge-up pillars on their streets.

"Electricity is taking all the subsidy schemes. It's taking it away from hydrogen," said Robert van den Hoed of Ecofys, an independent Dutch consultancy on renewable energy.

The main reason is cost. Electric cars are road-ready and in production, while hydrogen vehicles are still experimental. Nissan's new electric car, the Leaf, will go on sale for about $25,000 in the United States, including a government rebate.

Honda has produced a roadworthy hydrogen vehicle, the FCX Clarity, but it is not for sale. Only 50 of them are available for lease in the United States at $600 per month; Honda says it intends to increase the fleet to 200 this year. Honda declines to put a sales tag on the Clarity, but some experts say the market price would be $1 million each. Toyota, a leader in electric car technology, plans to put its first hydrogen vehicle on the road in 2015.

In December, the German luxury carmaker BMW ended an experimental run of 100 hydrogen-fueled internal combustion engines and retreated back into the laboratory for more research. "We learned everything we wanted to learn from this huge field test," said spokesman Tobias Hahn, and BMW is now working on the next generation.

"We are still committed to hydrogen as the long-term alternative for switching to sustainable mobility," Hahn said, speaking from Munich, adding that the biggest problem is on-board storage.

Among U.S. carmakers, General Motors produced a test fleet of 100 Chevrolet Equinox fuel cell cars and let 5,000 people test them over a 25 month period. Like BMW, Chevrolet is withdrawing the vehicles to upgrade the technology.

A combination of plug-in electric and hydrogen may emerge as the most eco-friendly solution. "A fuel cell hybrid looks like a good long-term option," said Hart. "It's not an either-or. It's both, most likely."

Public transport also is experimenting with hydrogen. The Vancouver Winter Olympics deployed 20 fuel cell buses. The European Union and 31 industries teamed up to run a four-year trial of hydrogen buses on regular passenger routes in 10 cities ending last year, and a new generation of buses will begin operating later this year, said Frits van Drunen, who runs the project for the Dutch public transport network GVB.

"We predict that by 2017 these buses will be priced per kilometer at the same level as diesel buses," said van Drunen, interviewed at GVB's hydrogen refueling station in Amsterdam.

At BAM, the Berlin testing site, researchers guided a remote-controlled model truck around the laboratory floor powered by a fuel cell and three hydrogen-filled arrays bound together, about the thickness of a thumb. A similar device lit up a panel with 20 LED bulbs. The researchers say such devices can be built into power packs for laptop computers and even mobile phones.

BAM's research director, Kai Holtapples, said the C.En system can be on the road within two to five years if it can be developed as a replaceable rack that can be swapped at filling stations. Eventually, cars will be able to refuel with nozzles, like gas pumps today, he said. "Both systems will need some engineering, of course, but some ideas already exist."

BAM has no financial stake in the capillary array project, he said.

Moshe Stern, C.En's chief executive, said the electric car will dominate the market for years to come, but the cheap and unlimited supply of hydrogen will make it the power source of the future.

Within a few years, perhaps a decade, hydrogen fuel will shift the world's energy balance away from oil, he said.

"The real revolution is not the technical revolution, it is the political revolution," said Stern.

"We are Israelis. We know what it means to be blackmailed by oil," he said.

Read more!

Major economies to delve into climate impasse

Shaun Tandon Yahoo News 17 Apr 10;

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Representatives from the world's leading economies were to meet here Sunday to see if they can find common ground on climate change, as wide gaps divide the United States, China and other key nations.

The US-led Major Economies Forum includes 17 countries responsible for the bulk of global emissions -- and excludes smaller nations such as Sudan whose firebrand negotiators held up sessions at December's much criticized Copenhagen summit.

The United States hopes that the closed-door talks, which start with a dinner, will let key nations quietly assess what, if anything, they can achieve heading into the next major climate summit in December in Cancun, Mexico.

"Clearly, there is still a gap between the views of the developing and developed world," State Department spokesman Philip Crowley said.

"We're going to see if we can, through the course of this discussion, narrow that down," he said.

White House aide Michael Froman and US climate negotiator Todd Stern sent participants a set of questions for the discussions, starting simply with, "What is the outcome we are all seeking in Cancun?"

Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, which supports action against climate change, said it was "very difficult to close the deep gaps between countries such as the US and China."

The Washington talks offer a chance to "see if there is any convergence on what these key countries want, because if there is, that will give us a sense that there might be some way forward to get progress in Cancun," Meyer said.

China has surpassed the United States as the world's top emitter of carbon, which UN scientists say is causing global warming that could put entire species at risk if unchecked.

China has announced plans to reduce the intensity of carbon emissions.

But China, India and other developing nations have resisted a legally binding climate treaty, arguing that wealthy nations bear primary responsibility for climate change.

The United States was the only major country to reject the Kyoto Protocol, whose obligations expire at the end of 2012, calling it unfair because it made no demands of emerging economies.

President Barack Obama is pushing for the first-ever nationwide plan to curb US emissions, with senators set to present long-delayed legislation later this month.

In a recent interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corp., Obama said that while the United States needed to act on climate change, China and other emerging countries should not wait until their living standards improve as it was "not a sustainable, practical approach."

But Ben Lieberman, an expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation, doubted that the talks in Washington could bridge the divide, pointing to China's heavy reliance on coal to power its economy.

"They get a lot of positive press about the wind power and solar power that they have and that they export, but that's a trickle compared with their coal-fire generation," Lieberman said.

"They've made it very clear they're not going to jeopardize economic growth for global warming," Lieberman said. "And even if they were to focus on the environment, they have more pressing problems."

Still, some China watchers say that climate change could mark a turning point in the nation's global role. Beijing, long a champion of the developing world, faced criticism both in wealthier and poorer nations for its position.

"Copenhagen, in this respect, may have been a watershed event," said Elizabeth Economy, director of Asia studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

"For many developing countries, climate change has revealed China as less and less 'one of us' and more and more 'one of them,'" she said.

The Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate (MEF) was launched in March 2009 with the purpose of facilitating dialogue among major developed and developing economies.

The 17 participants include Australia, Brazil, Britain, Canada, China, the European Union, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Russia, South Africa and the United States.

US, China to see if climate gap can be bridged
Shaun Tandon Yahoo News 17 Apr 10;

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Four months after the widely criticized Copenhagen summit, key nations including the United States and China are trying to find out if they can bridge wide gaps on climate change.

Representatives of 17 major economies making up more than 80 percent of global emissions gather in Washington on Sunday to try to grope forward amid disputes on the shape of a future treaty on fighting climate change.

It is not the first meeting since Copenhagen -- representatives in the nearly 200-nation UN Framework Convention on Climate Change met last weekend in Bonn, Germany for talks again riven by disagreements.

But the US-led Major Economies Forum offers a more intimate setting, away both from cameras and from smaller nations such as Sudan and Venezuela whose firebrand negotiators held up sessions in Copenhagen.

White House aide Michael Froman and US climate negotiator Todd Stern sent participants a set of questions they want to discuss at the Washington forum, which includes a closed-door dinner.

One question asks simply what each country seeks from the next UN climate summit to take place in December in Cancun, Mexico.

"Most countries have acknowledged it's going to be very difficult to close the deep gaps between countries such as the US and China," said Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, which supports action against climate change.

The Washington talks offer a chance to "see if there is any convergence on what these key countries want, because if there is, that will give us a sense that there might be some way forward to get progress in Cancun," Meyer said.

China has surpassed the United States for the dubious distinction of being the world's top emitter of carbon, which UN scientists say is causing global warming that could put entire species at risk if unchecked.

China has announced plans to reduce the intensity of carbon emissions and a recent study found that the growing Asian economy had leapfrogged the United States as the top investor in green technology.

But China, India and other developing nations have resisted a legally binding treaty, arguing that wealthy nations bear primary responsibility for climate change.

The United States was the only major country to reject the Kyoto Protocol, whose obligations expire at the end of 2012, calling it unfair for making no demands of emerging economies.

President Barack Obama is pushing for the first-ever nationwide plan to curb US emissions, with senators set to present long-delayed legislation later this month.

In a recent interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corp., Obama said that while the United States needed to act on climate change, China and other emerging countries should not wait until their living standards improve as it was "not a sustainable, practical approach."

But Ben Lieberman, an expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation, doubted that the talks in Washington could bridge the gap, pointing to China's heavy reliance on coal to power its economy.

"They get a lot of positive press about the wind power and solar power that they have and that they export, but that's a trickle compared with their coal-fire generation," Lieberman said.

"They've made it very clear they're not going to jeopardize economic growth for global warming," Lieberman said. "And even if they were to focus on the environment, they have more pressing problems."

Still, some China watchers say that climate change could mark a turning point in its global role. Beijing, long a champion of the developing world, faced criticism both in wealthier and poorer nations for its position.

"Copenhagen, in this respect, may have been a watershed event," said Elizabeth Economy, director of Asia studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

"For many developing countries, climate change has revealed China as less and less 'one of us' and more and more 'one of them,'" she said.

Read more!

Best of our wild blogs: 17 Apr 10

Even MORE posts
from Ecological observations in Singapore

Andie and the banded leaf monkeys also on Lianhe Zaobao
from The Biodiversity crew @ NUS

crocodile or rocking log?
from sgbeachbum

Charming Changi shore
from wonderful creation

Grappling with blogging
from Otterman speaks

Wiping out the Trade in Wildlife Recapped
from The Leafmonkey Workshop

Spotted Owlet and Indian Roller fighting for a nesting hole
from Bird Ecology Study Group

Read more!

Sea turtles found dead after oil spill in India

Olive Ridley carcasses sighted near rookery
Sib Kumar Das, The Hindu 17 Apr 10;

Carcasses of Olive Ridley turtles were sighted floating near the Rushikulya rookery on the Orissa coast after an oil spill from a ship near the Gopalpur port.

Environmental activists suspect this to be the impact of the spill. Some 25 carcasses were reported to be floating between Prayagi and Arjipalli since Thursday. Most were two to three days old.

Around 7,000 litres of oil had spilt from the Essar-owned vessel MV Malabika on Tuesday evening when a barge hit it due to rough weather.

Buried hastily

It is suspected that suffocation or toxicity of spilt oil may have been a catalyst for the deaths.

Environmental activists have alleged that carcasses were being hastily buried by the authorities without any attempt to determine the cause of deaths.

Soumya Tripathy of the Greenpeace, who visited the Rushikulya rookery on Friday, said a toxic impact on mature Olive Ridleys in the sea near this coast and the young hatchlings that are about to come out from the nests on this mass nesting coast cannot be ruled out.

According to him, the spill can cause cutaneous toxic reactions and suffocation for marine turtles, which can cause death.

According to marine scientists, the planktons near the beach have been affected by the spill. This would affect the delicate marine food chain in the area. The first food of tender hatchlings are planktons and small sea animals.

It is feared that due to this pollution of the sea near the nesting site, the mortality among hatchlings may be quite high this year.

Even after four days, the residue of emulsified hydrocarbon was floating and getting carried to the rookery.

The port authorities had to deploy workers again to clean up the beach by collecting and segregating the sand affected.

Rabindra Sahu of the Rushikulya Marine Turtle Protection Committee said the effect of the spill would extend to the Chilka lake, connected to this region by the Palur canal.

Fish stinks of lubricants

He said the fish catch from this stretch now stinks of lubricants and salt producers of the area are worried that their produce too may get affected.

Read more!

Rush for REDD could undermine local forest rights

David Fogarty, Reuters 16 Apr 10;

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - A U.N.-backed forest preservation scheme could become too valuable and complex, raising the risk local communities, the very people seen as key to the scheme's success, could be shut out, scientists say.

Reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation, or REDD, has already attracted billion of dollars of funding pledges from rich nations keen to see the scheme established as part of a broader global climate pact from 2013.

REDD would allow developing nations to earn valuable carbon offsets for projects that preserve or rehabilitate forests, which soak up planet-warming carbon dioxide as they grow.

Rich nations would buy the offsets to help them meet emissions reduction goals at home. That demand would underpin forest investments that could reach $30 billion a year by 2020, the United Nations has estimated.

That same demand could also undermine a major shift in the way forests have been managed in poorer nations, where cash-strapped national governments have given local communities and administrations more rights and powers to run their forests.

Such "decentralized" management has been shown to boost forest carbon storage and result in better incomes in a number of developing nations, say Edward Webb and Jacob Phelps of the National University of Singapore.

The scientists, along with co-author Arun Agrawal of the University of Michigan, in a study published in Friday's issue of the Journal Science, looked at how the rush for REDD could affect local management and governance of forests.

"One of the issues has been people's rights for use and management of forests because there has been a decentralization trend over the past two or three decades," Edwards told Reuters.

The risk, they say, is that by monetizing forest carbon, REDD would substantially increase the market value of forests, including those previously considered marginal, prompting central governments to increase control.

A performance-based payment mechanism would pressure governments to avoid the risk of non-payment resulting from local failures, the authors say in the study.

"BILLIONS AT STAKE"

"With billions of dollars at stake, governments could justify recentralization by portraying themselves as more capable and reliable than local communities at protecting national interest," the authors say.

Deforestation is responsible for nearly a fifth of mankind's greenhouse gas emissions and curbing forest loss is regarded as a key way to brake the pace of global warming.

The key is incentivizing major forest nations such as Indonesia and Brazil, which have already attracted investment to create REDD pilot projects. Indonesia has more than a dozen.

Globally, there is now widespread support for an enhanced form called REDD-plus that also covers sustainable management of forests, conservation and enhancement of forest carbon stocks.

Draft negotiating text on REDD-plus under U.N. climate talks does not mandate the rights of local communities in forest management nor guarantee revenue from carbon offset sales, propping up fears of some green groups that REDD will trample on locals' rights.

"It is the market that is going to be coming in and serving a lot of these investments for carbon emissions reductions. And we don't see a mandate for local participation or decentralized forest management," Edwards said.

At U.N. climate talks last December in Copenhagen, the United States, Japan, Norway and three other rich nations pledged $3.5 billion as fast-start financing to ramp up REDD in poor nations. The money comes on top of other funds already pledged.

Phelps said such funding levels would drive outcomes but to

develop REDD projects was complex, time-consuming and there was a danger in rushing for a result.

"There's a tension and that tension is time," he said. "To develop REDD that is going to generate long-term emissions reductions is going to be the challenge."

(Editing by Clarence Fernandez)

Read more!

Indonesian President Calls for Developed Countries to Help Indonesia in Battle Against Global Warming

Camelia Pasandaran, Jakarta Globe 16 Apr 10;

Indonesia remains steadfast in its commitment to protecting the environment, despite international differences over the issue, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono claimed on Friday, but a comprehensive national plan to reduce emissions remains out of reach.

“We realize we have to take steps to save the environment with our own resources and funding,” Yudhoyono said at the opening of a cabinet meeting at the Presidential Palace. “With help from developed countries, we can increase our target. But even without having crunched the numbers, we can’t be negligent in protecting the environment.”

He added that Indonesia should have a concrete plan in place that could be monitored.

“This is so we can tell the world that we understand the role we must play for the sake of the environment, and are willing to play it,” he said.

Yudhoyono said several international meetings to discuss the solution had not ended as desired. These included the summits in Kyoto, during which developed countries agreed to reach emissions targets by 2012, and in Copenhagen last year, where no major binding agreement was reached.

“Developed and developing countries are waiting for one another to take the first step,” he said. “But we can’t negotiate with the climate and the Earth. I’m afraid the upcoming Mexico conference will end much the same way as Copenhagen.”

Forestry Minister Zulkifli Hasan said part of the effort to protect the country’s environment and reduce carbon emissions by 26 percent was a massive reforestation drive.

“During the flurry over regional autonomy between 1997 and its peak in 2002, there was massive clearing of land of up to 3.5 million hectares a year,” Zulkifli said. “The current rate of deforestation is around 700,000 hectares a year.”

He claimed massive illegal logging was now concentrated in Papua, with the timber exported directly.

Communication and Information Minister Tifatul Sembiring said Yudhoyono had ordered the Judicial Mafia Eradication Task Force to probe the light sentences given to those convicted of illegal logging.

“Of 92 illegal logging suspects tried at court, 49 were acquitted, 24 were sentenced to less than a year in prison and 19 were sentenced to between one and two years,” Tifatul said.

“The president has also advised governors and district heads to be more judicious when granting logging and mining concessions,” he added.

The issue of deforestation arose at Wednesday’s meeting between Vice President Boediono and Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg in Washington.

Boediono had highlighted three key problems in the country’s fight against the threat — fire, limited funding and capacity for reforestation and weak law enforcement.

Norway has reportedly offered technical guidance on monitoring and surveillance to prevent deforestation.

Giorgio Budi Indarto, coordinator of the Civil Society Forum for Climate Justice, said any commitment on the government’s part should move beyond mere lip service.

“The reality on the ground is that even with more commitments, there’s more environmental destruction,” he said.



Additional reporting by Fidelis Satriastanti

Read more!

Amazon Dam Project Pits Economic Benefit Against Protection of Indigenous Lands

Alexei Barrionuevo, New York Times 16 Apr 10;

RIO DE JANEIRO — The indigenous leaders had a plan. They would unite for a last, desperate stand against the mammoth dam threatening their lands in the Amazon, vowing to give their lives, if necessary, to prevent it from being built.

“This will be our last cry for help,” said the chief of the Arara tribe, José Carlos Arara, after a meeting of leaders from 13 tribes last month. “We are not here to kill. We are here to defend our rights.”

For a moment this week, it looked as if they had won an unexpected reprieve. On Wednesday, a federal judge in Para State, where the third largest dam in the world would be built, halted the government’s April 20 auction to award contracts for its construction, saying the project could cause “irreparable harm” to indigenous peoples.

But by Friday, the dam was back on the table. A judge in the capital, Brasília, overturned the ruling and said the auction would take place as scheduled.

The judge in Brasília, Jirair Aram Meguerian, the president of the regional federal court, found that “there is no imminent danger for the indigenous community” because the auction “didn’t imply immediate construction” of the dam, “which involves numerous stages,” the court said in an announcement.

The legal seesaw was part of a protracted battle here over the future of such dams in indigenous territories as the government tries to meet the growing energy needs in far-away cities like São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.

Halting the auction for the project, known as the Belo Monte dam, “would do grave harm to the economy,” the court said, forcing Brazil to procure other forms of energy that are “more expensive and polluting.”

Brazil uses hydroelectric power for more than 80 percent of its energy, and President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has said that more dams are needed. Dilma Rousseff, the presidential candidate that Mr. da Silva is backing as his successor, has also pushed for more dams, including Belo Monte, which would represent about 10 percent of Brazil’s total power generation.

“This project is very important for Brazil’s future energy supply, and policymakers are counting on it, particularly now that the Brazilian economy is recovering so vigorously from the economic downturn,” said Christopher Garman, analyst at Eurasia Group.

Without it, Mr. Garman said, the government could be forced to rely on dirtier energy sources, or go in the other direction and accelerate the development of renewable sources like wind and biofuel from sugar cane.

Belo Monte comes at a very different time in Brazil’s history from when it was first dreamed up under the military government some 30 years ago. With the world watching more closely, the country has struggled to find a balance between the push to develop and the demand to protect the delicate ecosystems and indigenous peoples of the Amazon.

Most previous Amazon dam projects were set in motion before Brazil’s latest Constitution was ratified in 1988, granting protections to indigenous peoples.

To build Belo Monte, builders would have to excavate two huge channels larger than the Panama Canal to divert water from the main dam to the power plant. The reservoir would flood more than 160 square miles of forest while drying up a 60-mile stretch of the Xingu River, displacing more than 20,000 people, many from indigenous communities, according to non-governmental groups citing government figures.

Government planners have revised the plant’s design several times to try to reduce its environmental impact. But before his decision was overturned, Judge Antônio Carlos de Almeida Campelo ruled Wednesday that Congress would have to pass a law changing the Constitution’s limits on building dams that negatively affect indigenous communities.

The project has also drawn a storm of criticism from advocates and celebrities, including James Cameron.

Studies by nongovernmental groups have shown that the plant would be inefficient, producing less than 30 percent of its capacity during the dry season and an average of 39 percent annually. Environmentalists fear the government would need to construct other dams upstream to guarantee enough water — dams that would flood more forest and affect yet more indigenous peoples.

Eletronorte, the government utility directing the Belo Monte project, has denied that more dams would be necessary, saying Belo Monte would be part of the national electric grid and draw capacity from other pre-existing dams when necessary.

For indigenous groups, the drying out of the Xingu would change life as they know it. So at their meeting last month, leaders from 13 tribes made an unusual decision: They decided to create a new tribe of about 2,500, and then station it directly on the construction site, occupying it for years, if need be.

“If we lose this river we have no idea what will happen to us,” the chief said. “The river provides us with fish and food. How will we eat if we no longer have fish? And how will we ever leave here if we no longer have the river to travel on?”

Read more!