Bee Deaths May Signal Wider Pollination Threat: U.N.

Alister Doyle, PlanetArk 11 Mar 11;

Mass deaths of bee colonies in many parts of the world may be part of a wider, hidden threat to wild insect pollinators vital to human food supplies, a U.N. study indicated on Thursday.

Declines in flowering plants, a spread of parasites, use of pesticides or air pollution were among more than a dozen factors behind recent collapses of bee colonies mainly in North America and Europe, the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) said.

That cocktail of problems -- rather than a single cause killing bees in hives that might be easier to fix -- may also threaten wild bees and other insects vital to pollinate crops such as soybeans, potatoes or apple trees.

"It's the tip of the iceberg we're seeing with the honey bees," Peter Neumann, a lead author of the study of "global honey bee colony disorders and other threats to insect pollinators," told Reuters.

"There is not an immediate pollination disaster but the writing is on the wall," said Neumann, of the Swiss Bee Research Center. "We have to do something to ensure pollination for future generations."

The study said there were also reports of bee colony collapses in China, Egypt and Latin America.

"There are some indicators that it is becoming a global issue," he said in a telephone interview.

BIRDS AND THE BEES

Bees and other pollinators such as butterflies, beetles or birds are estimated to do work worth 153 billion euros ($212.3 billion) a year to the human economy -- about 9.5 percent of the total value of human food production, it said.

Recent estimates of the contribution by managed species, mainly honey bees, range up to 57 billion euros. In the United States, over two million bee colonies are trucked around the nation to help pollination every year.

"Of the 100 crop species that provide 90 per cent of the world's food, over 70 are pollinated by bees," Achim Steiner, head of UNEP, said in a statement.

"Human beings have fabricated the illusion that in the 21st century they have the technological prowess to be independent of nature. Bees underline the reality that we are more, not less, dependent on nature's services in a world of close to seven billion people," he said.

The report urged a shift toward ecological farming, less dependent on insecticides and more resilient to threats such as climate change. Food prices have hit record levels and are one factor behind uprisings in Egypt or Tunisia.

UNEP said farmers could be given incentives to set aside land to "restore pollinator-friendly habitats, including key flowering plants" as part of a shift to a "Green Economy."

Neumann also urged more research into insects, noting that charismatic animals such as polar bears won most attention as victims of global warming. "Insects are usually not cute but they are the backbone of ecosystems," he said.

(Editing by Sonya Hepinstall)

UN alarmed at huge decline in bee numbers
Peter Capella Yahoo News 10 Mar 11;

GENEVA (AFP) – The UN on Thursday expressed alarm at a huge decline in bee colonies under a multiple onslaught of pests and pollution, urging an international effort to save the pollinators that are vital for food crops.

Much of the decline, ranging up to 85 percent in some areas, is taking place in the industrialised northern hemisphere due to more than a dozen factors, according to a report by the UN's environmental agency.

They include pesticides, air pollution, a lethal pinhead-sized parasite that only affects bee species in the northern hemisphere, mismanagement of the countryside, the loss of flowering plants and a decline in beekeepers in Europe.

"The way humanity manages or mismanages its nature-based assets, including pollinators, will in part define our collective future in the 21st century," said UNEP executive director Achim Steiner.

"The fact is that of the 100 crop species that provide 90 percent of the world's food, over 70 are pollinated by bees," he added.

Wild bees and especially honey bee colonies from hives are regarded as the most prolific pollinators of large fields or crops.

Overall, pollinators are estimated to contribute 153 billion euros ($212 billion) worldwide or 9.5 percent of the total value of food production, especially fruit and vegetables, according to the report.

Honey bee colony declines in recent years have reached 10 to 30 percent in Europe, 30 percent in the United States,and up to 85 percent in Middle East, said scientist Peter Neumann, one of the authors of the first ever UN report on the issue.

But in South America, Africa and Australia there were no reports of high losses.

"It is a very complex issue. There are a lot of interactive factors and one country alone is not able to solve the problem, that's for sure. We need to have an international network, global approaches," added Neumann of the Swiss government's Bee Research Centre.

Some of the mechanisms behind the four-decades-old trend, which appears to have intensified in the late 1990s, are not understood. UNEP warned that the broad issue of countryside management and conservation was involved.

"The bees will get the headlines in this story," UNEP spokesman Nick Nuttall told journalists.

"But in a sense they are an indicator of the wider changes that are happening in the countryside but also urban environments, in terms of whether nature can continue to provide the services as it has been doing for thousands or millions of years in the face of acute environmental change," he added.

Nonetheless, scientists have been unable so far to quantify the direct impact of bee decline on crops or plants, and Neumann insisted that some of the impact was qualitative.

Citing British research, the report estimated that pollination by managed honey bees is worth 22.8 billion to 57 billion euros in terms of crop yields, and that some fruit, seed and nut crops would decrease by more than 90 percent without them.

One key driving force behind bee destruction in Europe and North America has been a type of mite, the varroa destructor pest, which attacks bees and that beekeepers struggle to control, Neumann said.

"It's quite shocking how little we know about this essential pest of honey bees although it has caused havoc in agriculture for more than 20 years."

"African bees are tolerant, we don't know why," he added.

Meanwhile, frequent changes in land use, degradation and fragmentation of fields, trade carrying hostile species such as the Asian hornet into France or virulent fungi, chemical spraying and gardening insecticides as well as changing seasons due to climate change have added to the hostile environment for bees.

Bees Under Bombardment
UNEP 10 Mar 11;

From Chemicals to Air Pollution, New UNEP Report Points to Multiple Factors Behind Pollinator Losses

Geneva/Nairobi, 10 March 2011 - More than a dozen factors, ranging from declines in flowering plants and the use of memory-damaging insecticides to the world-wide spread of pests and air pollution, may be behind the emerging decline of bee colonies across many parts of the globe.

Scientists are warning that without profound changes to the way human-beings manage the planet, declines in pollinators needed to feed a growing global population are likely to continue.

• New kinds of virulent fungal pathogens—which can be deadly to bees and other key pollinating insects—are now being detected world-wide, migrating from one region to another as a result of shipments linked to globalization and rapidly growing international trade

• Meanwhile an estimated 20,000 flowering plant species, upon which many bee species depend for food, could be lost over the coming decades unless conservation efforts are stepped up

• Increasing use of chemicals in agriculture, including 'systemic insecticides' and those used to coat seeds, is being found to be damaging or toxic to bees. Some can, in combination, be even more potent to pollinators, a phenomenon known as the 'cocktail effect'

• Climate change, left unaddressed, may aggravate the situation, in various ways including by changing the flowering times of plants and shifting rainfall patterns. This may in turn affect the quality and quantity of nectar supplies.

These are among the findings of a new report published today by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), which has brought together and analyzed the latest science on collapsing bee colonies.

The study, entitled Global Bee Colony Disorders and other Threats to Insect Pollinators, underlines that multiple factors are at work linked with the way humans are rapidly changing the conditions and the ground rules that support life on Earth. It shows humans' large dependency on ecosystem services even for such vital sectors as food production.

It indicates that bees are early warning indicators of wider impacts on animal and plant life and that measures to boost pollinators could not only improve food security but the fate of many other economically and environmentally-important plants and animals.

The authors of the report call for farmers and landowners to be offered incentives to restore pollinator-friendly habitats, including key flowering plants including next to crop-producing fields.

More care needs to be taken in the choice, timing and application of insecticides and other chemicals. While managed hives can be moved out of harm's way, "wild populations (of pollinators) are completely vulnerable", says the report.

Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary-General and UNEP Executive Director, said: "The way humanity manages or mismanages its nature-based assets, including pollinators, will in part define our collective future in the 21st century. The fact is that of the 100 crop species that provide 90 per cent of the world's food, over 70 are pollinated by bees".

"Human beings have fabricated the illusion that in the 21st century they have the technological prowess to be independent of nature. Bees underline the reality that we are more, not less dependent on nature's services in a world of close to seven billion people".

Bees and the Green Economy

Next year nations gather again in Rio de Janeiro, 20 years after the Rio Earth Summit, to evolve international efforts to achieve sustainable development including through accelerating and scaling-up a transition to a low carbon, resource-efficient Green Economy.

Part of that transition should include investing and re-investing in the world's nature-based services generated by forests and freshwaters to flower meadows and coral reefs.

"Rio+20 is an opportunity to move beyond narrow definitions of wealth and to bring the often invisible, multi-trillion dollar services of nature—including pollination from insects such as bees— into national and global accounts," said Mr Steiner.

"Some countries, such as Brazil and India, have already embarked on that transformation as part of a partnership between UNEP and the World Bank. It is time to widen and embed this work across the global economy in order to tip the scales in favour of management rather than mining of the natural world and that includes the services of pollinators," he added.

The new report on bee colony disorders has been led by researchers Dr Peter Neumann of the Swiss Bee Research Centre and Dr Marie-Pierre Chauzat of the French Agency for Environmental and Occupational Health Safety. The team also included Dr Jeffrey Pettis of the United States Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service.

Dr Neumann said: "The transformation of the countryside and rural areas in the past half century or so has triggered a decline in wild-living bees and other pollinators. Society is increasingly investing in 'industrial-scale' hives and managed colonies to make up the shortfall and going so far as to truck bees around to farms and fields in order to maintain our food supplies".

"This report underlines that a variety of factors are making these man-made colonies increasingly vulnerable to decline and collapse. We need to get smarter about how we manage these hives, but perhaps more importantly, we need to better manage the landscape beyond, in order to cost-effectively recover wild bee populations to far healthier and more sustainable levels," he added.

Highlights from the Report

Regional Losses

Declines in managed bee colonies date back to the mid 1960s in Europe but have accelerated since 1998, especially in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and the United Kingdom.

In North America, losses of honey bee colonies since 2004 have left the continent with fewer managed pollinators than at any time in the past 50 years.

Chinese bee keepers, who manage both western and eastern species of honey bees, have recently "faced several inexplicable and complex symptoms of colony losses in both species".

A quarter of beekeepers in Japan "have recently been confronted with sudden losses of their bee colonies".

In Africa, beekeepers along the Egyptian Nile have been reporting signs of 'colony collapse disorder' although to date there are no other confirmed reports from the rest of the continent.

Multiple Factors

Habitat degradation, including the loss of flowering plant species that provide food for bees, is among the key factors behind the decline of wild-living pollinators.

• An Anglo-Dutch study has found that since the 1980s, there has been a 70 per cent drop in key wild flowers among, for example, the mint, pea and perennial herb families.

Parasites and Pests, such as the well known Varroa mite which feeds on bee fluids, are also a factor.

Other parasites include the small hive beetle, which damages honeycombs, stored honey and pollen. Endemic to sub-Saharan Africa, it has spread to North America and Australia and "is now anticipated to arrive in Europe".

• Bees may also be suffering from competition by 'alien species' such as the Africanised bee in the United States and the Asian hornet which feed on European honey bees. The hornet has now colonized nearly half of France since 2004.

Air pollution may be interfering with the ability of bees to find flowering plants and thus food.

• Scents that could travel over 800 metres in the 1800s now reach less than 200 metres from a plant

Electromagnetic fields from sources such as power lines might also be changing bee behaviour. Bees are sensitive as they have small abdominal crystals that contain lead.

Herbicides and pesticides may be reducing the availability of wild flowers and plants needed for food and for the larval stages of some pollinators.

• Other impacts include poisoning of pollinators and the weakening of honey bees' immune systems

• Laboratory studies have found that some insecticides and fungicides can act together to be 1,000 times more toxic to bees

Some insecticides, including those applied to seeds and which can migrate to the entire plant as it grows, and others used to treat cats, fish, birds and rabbits, may also be taking their toll.

• Studies have shown that such chemicals can affect the sense of direction, memory and brain metabolism in bees

The management of hives may also be adding to the problem.

Some of the treatments against pests may actually be harmful to bees and a growing habit of re-using equipment and food from dead colonies might be spreading disease and chemicals to new hives.

Transporting bees from one farm to another in order to provide pollination services increasingly unavailable from nature could be an additional factor. In the United States, trucks carrying up to 20 million bees are common and each year over two million colonies travel across the continent.

• Mortality rates, following transportation, can be as much as 10 per cent of a colony

Notes to Editors

The full report, Global Bee Colony Disorders and other Threats to Insect Pollinators, can be downloaded at:

http://www.unep.org/dewa/Portals/67/pdf/Global_Bee_Colony_Disorder_and_Threats_insect_pollinators.pdf

The report is part of the UNEP Emerging Issues series, which is available at:

http://www.unep.org/dewa/EarlyWarning/tabid/4435/Default.aspx

UNEP is host to a wide ranging partnership—The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) —which is estimating the economics of nature and the returns to communities and countries from improved management of these assets.

For more information, please visit: http://www.teebweb.org/

The Green Economy in the context of sustainable development and poverty eradication is one of the two major themes of the UN Conference on Sustainable Development 2012 (UNCSD 2012) or Rio+20.

For more information on UNCSD 2012, please visit: www.uncsd2012.org

UNEP Green Economy Initiative: www.unep.org/greeneconomy

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Pollution Forms an Invisible Barrier for Marine Life

ScienceDaily 9 Mar 11;

Over 50 percent of the population in the United States and over 60 percent in the world live in coastal areas. Rapidly growing human populations near the ocean have massively altered coastal water ecosystems.

One of the most extensive human stressors is the discharge of chemicals and pollutants into the ocean. In the Southern California Bight, more than 60 sewage and urban runoff sources discharge over 1 billion gallons of liquid on a dry day with the two largest sources of contaminants being sewage from municipal treatment plants and urban runoff from highly modified river basins.

These discharges transport large loads of known and unknown contaminants including heavy metals, chlorinated hydrocarbons, petroleum hydrocarbons, nutrients, and bacteria, that have shown to be toxic to marine life, including both adult and larval (early development) stages. Most marine organisms such as sea stars (starfish) do not move among locations as adults; instead juveniles swim in the plankton before settling onto the sea floor and growing into a sedentary adult. Despite the known toxicity of terrestrial discharge, no one had investigated if it is limiting dispersal of marine larvae between populations along urban coastal areas.

Researchers at UH Mānoa's Hawaiʻi Institute of Marine Biology (HIMB) examined the genetic structure of a common, non-harvested sea star using a spatially explicit model to test whether the largest sewage discharge and urban runoff sources were affecting the genetic structure of this species. They found that these large pollution sources are not only increasing genetic differentiation between populations (presumably by limiting the dispersal of larvae between them) but also decreasing the genetic diversity of populations closest to them. In short, human beings are directly affecting the ecological and evolutionary trajectory of a species that is relatively free of any direct human impacts.

UH Mānoa PhD student Jon Puritz led the investigation, and when asked about the recent discovery said, "This study changes the scale at which we thought human beings can affect non-harvested marine species. These results have the potential to change the way anthropogenic factors are incorporated into marine reserve design and ecosystem-based management." Co-author and HIMB assistant researcher Dr. Rob Toonen added, "This species was previously shown to have well-connected populations from Southern California to Southern Canada, but now we see that these urban runoff plumes in the Los Angeles area are a more significant hurdle for the microscopic larvae to cross than the remainder of the Pacific coast of the U.S."

The full research report by Puritz and Toonen is published in the online journal Nature Communications.

Journal Reference:

1. Jonathan B. Puritz, Robert J. Toonen. Coastal pollution limits pelagic larval dispersal. Nature Communications, 2011; 2: 226 DOI: 10.1038/ncomms1238

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Drought in Thailand sparks water fight

Farmers depending on irrigation unhappy over water management
Nirmal Ghosh Straits Times 11 Mar 11;

BANGKOK: The early onset of seasonal summer drought this year has sparked quarrels between farmers in northern Thailand, again highlighting the critical issue of water management in the region.

Provincial officials this week found themselves besieged by angry farmers who have regularly confronted each other - in some cases at gunpoint - to demand more water from the local canal system.

Reports say 12 northern provinces have been hit by the drought.

Chiang Mai's governor, Mr Panadda Diskul, is scheduled to meet the farmers on Monday to work out a solution to the problem.

'Farmers living in the same district have been fighting over water supply, and in many cases, they have pointed guns at one another,' Mr Jamras Lumma, the leader of a farmers' network in the north, was quoted as saying by The Nation newspaper yesterday.

Roughly half of Thailand's agricultural land is irrigated. The fights typically erupt between farmers living downstream from water sources, when farmers upstream use the bulk of the water.

Parts of Chiang Mai and Nan provinces in the north have been declared 'disaster zones', making them eligible for extra funding for relief measures. The country's fleet of cloud-seeding planes to bring rains began operations over the two provinces last week.

Meanwhile to the east, controversy continues to rage over the Pak Mun Dam - with locals insisting that its sluice gates should be permanently opened for five years, to allow uninterrupted water flow. The gates are currently closed for eight months a year.

Some 1,000 people from the province of Ubon Ratchathani protested outside the prime minister's office in Bangkok earlier this week to press their demand, but left empty-handed when the Cabinet postponed a decision on the issue for 45 days. The Cabinet, which consulted experts, said the issues were too complex for a quick decision on how long the sluice gates should be kept open.

There are fears, for example, that allowing the water to flow freely would result in an overall reduction of water level in the river and associated reservoirs - an argument the protesting locals reject.

Also, government agencies have disagreed on the drought forecast.

The Disaster Prevention and Mitigation Department has warned that 5.5 million people in 26 provinces, mostly in the north and north-east, are vulnerable to drought conditions.

The department recently advised farmers in 23 provinces in the basin of the Chao Phraya River to refrain from growing a second crop of rice as a precaution.

But the Irrigation Department has said the climatic La Nina effect will bring rain in March and April. And it said that water level in reservoirs is at around 62 per cent which is normal, and would last through the dry season.

The Pak Mun Dam - commissioned in 1994 and subject of the demands by protesters in Bangkok - has spawned several adverse effects for locals.

Thousands were initially displaced by the dam and the reservoir.

And according to a World Commission on Dams study, the project underperformed in both power generation and irrigation, and triggered a decline in fish catch in the Mun River.

The dam continues to be symbolic of the controversies surrounding water management in the region.

'There is no clear policy,' said Dr Anond Snidvong, director of Sea Start, a climate change research unit and think-tank.

'And policy alone also won't solve all the problems. We need to put more value on water. Value doesn't mean a cost, it is an attitude.'

Experts have been urging the Thai government to step up rain and flood-water harvesting. Parts of northern and central Thailand were inundated with flood water in October and November last year, killing more than 230 people.

The government is currently reviewing its water policy.

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Indonesia cool on climate mitigation schemes

The Jakarta Post 10 Mar 11;

JAKARTA: Programs aimed at empowering people in developing countries to adapt to climate change have not drawn much interest from the government because they focus more on mitigation, a report says.

The “Climate Finance” report by the Indonesian Environmental Forum (Walhi) is to be officially published on Sunday.

“A number of countries have offered money for adaptation schemes but the government has shown less enthusiasm for it,” Teguh Surya from Walhi said at a discussion at The Jakarta Post on Wednesday. One of the reasons was the system channelling adaptation money went directly to the people while mitigation programs only offered more debt to he government, he added.

He said Indonesia had failed to propose a candidate to run for the committee on adaptation schemes under the international framework of climate change. This also indicated the government’s reluctance to implement adaptation programs.

According to the report, the global debt acquired due to climate change programs has reached US$2.3 billion. The figure included loans issued by France, Japan, the World Bank and the Climate Investment Fund scheme between 2008-2010.

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) plans to provide $600 million in new loans between 2011-2013.

“The climate change issue has been a ‘new window’ to market debt schemes to Indonesia,” Walhi head Berry Furqon said.

Walhi proposed that the government impose carbon taxes on companies operating in Indonesia that produced carbon emissions.

“The companies, such as palm oil plantations and coal, oil and gas firms could be the targets of carbon taxes and the money could be used to help individuals cope with climate change,” the research paper said. — JP

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Blue Carbon: An Oceanic Opportunity to Fight Climate Change

Mangroves, salt marshes and sea grasses soak up to five times more carbon than tropical forests, making their conservation critical
Robynne Boyd Scientific American 10 Mar 11;

Mangroves are tangled orchards of spindly shrubs that thrive in the interface between land and sea. They bloom in muddy soil where the water is briny and shallow, and the air muggy. Salt marshes and sea grasses also flourish in these brackish hinterlands. Worldwide, these coastal habitats are recognized for their natural beauty and ability to filter pollution, house fish nurseries and buffer shorelines against storms.

Less known is their ability to sequester vast amounts of carbon—up to five times that stored in tropical forests. Dubbed "blue carbon" because of their littoral environment, these previously undervalued coastal carbon sinks are beginning to gain attention from the climate and conservation communities.

Because they hold so much carbon, destroying them can release substantial amounts of CO2. People around the world wreck coastal habitats through aquaculture, agriculture, timber extraction and real estate development. To date, human encroachment has destroyed more than 35 percent of mangroves, 30 percent of sea grass meadows and 20 percent of salt marshes.

Stopping such destruction could therefore become an important element in confronting climate change. "Blue carbon is a source of emissions that hasn't been addressed by the climate community and therefore creates an opportunity to reduce emissions," says Roger Ullman, executive director of the Linden Trust for Conservation in New York City, which promotes the use of conservation finance and environmental markets. "These fabulous ecosystems…don't cover a very large expanse of territory, yet still provide enormously important services to humanity and are being destroyed three or four times faster than the rate of tropical forests."

Emissions from wetlands destruction

Case in point is California's Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta, explains Dan Laffoley, marine vice chairman of the World Commission on Protected Areas at the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources. Over the last 100 years, 1,800 square kilometers of wetlands were drained, emitting two gigatons of CO2 that had been accruing in the plants and soils for thousands of years. Between 10 million and 15 million tons of CO2 continues to be released from the Sacramento Delta each year, an amount equivalent to around 3 percent of California's total greenhouse gas emissions.

At the global scale, coastal wetland destruction could account for 1 to 3 percent of industrial emissions; a number that will increase along with coastal wetland destruction. "In 2011 we have a reason why mud is important," Laffoley says.

Even so, almost all coastal and marine system research and exploration is about a decade behind its terrestrial counterpart. People have focused on understanding the surrounding lands, rather than the unseen animals, plants and processes below the ocean's surface, explains Emily Pidgeon, director of the Marine Climate Change Program for Conservation International. The ocean is more dynamic and its systems generally more complicated to access and understand than land-based ecosystems, such as forests.

Take remote sensing, for example. Most approaches, including satellite-based systems, cannot see underwater. So whereas these methods very effectively provide data that enable scientists to estimate the amount of carbon in forests, they cannot get the equivalent information on the carbon load of sea grasses or other submerged marine ecosystems, especially in sediment where most of the CO2 in blue carbon systems is stored. Instead, scientists are required to go to sites and dig up meters of the sediment to measure how much carbon it holds—a thankless task, to be sure.

"Mangroves are as unsexy as you get, since you ride a boat through them and get covered in mosquitoes," Pidgeon says.

Green cash for blue carbon

Getting local communities to save their mangroves will depend on economics. Land managers, farmers and other developers often opt to control these watery landscapes, thereby transforming them into income-generating acreage, such as a shrimp farm or rice paddy. The carbon markets, with their carbon credits selling between $15 to $20 per ton, could offer an alternative. The fees would encourage land conservation, which would prevent the release of carbon into the atmosphere, and the markets would reward them for mitigating climate change.

Whereas many of these programs are at least three to five years in the future, the preliminary economics looks like it could work, especially in certain cases to preserve these fragile ecosystems, such as avoiding the conversion of mangroves to shrimp farms in the Indo-Pacific region.

Still, the main hope for conserving these coastal habitats lies in a combination of economics and science. The first step is recognizing the importance of coastal carbon pools as a significant tool for climate mitigation, says Stephen Crooks, a wetlands expert who is climate change program manager of ESA PWA, a San Francisco–based environmental consulting and engineering firm.

Even without carbon markets nations have obligations to manage their greenhouse gas emissions, which means that the carbon in these coastal habitats can be tallied in national accounts as a way of contributing to their management of global greenhouse emissions. This would be especially helpful in the Coral Triangle (an oceanic area between Southeast Asia and northern Australia that encompasses Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, East Timor, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands) as well as Bangladesh, Indonesia and China, where coastal habitats are being destroyed at an alarming rate. Companies could also start volunteering to launch socially and environmentally friendly coastal habitat projects in the name of climate protection.

The final prong would be the creation of international carbon markets. As Crooks puts it: "One day the biggest bang for your buck may come from conservation."

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Best of our wild blogs: 10 Mar 11

Metallic Caerulean - Dark Days Ahead?
from Butterflies of Singapore

Mother superior
from The annotated budak

A Fruitful Outing To Pulau Ubin Part 2
from Beauty of Fauna and Flora in Nature

Long-tailed Parakeet and the Dendrophthoe pentandra mistletoe
from Bird Ecology Study Group

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Malaysia: Taking a Risk for Rare Earths

Keith Bradsher New York Times 8 Mar 11;

KUANTAN, Malaysia — A colossal construction project here could help determine whether the world can break China’s chokehold on the strategic metals crucial to products as diverse as Apple’s iPhone, Toyota’s Prius and Boeing’s smart bombs.

As many as 2,500 construction workers will soon be racing to finish the world’s largest refinery for so-called rare earth metals — the first rare earth ore processing plant to be built outside China in nearly three decades.

For Malaysia and the world’s most advanced technology companies, the plant is a gamble that the processing can be done safely enough to make the local environmental risks worth the promised global rewards.

Once little known outside chemistry circles, rare earth metals have become increasingly vital to high-tech manufacturing. But as Malaysia learned the hard way a few decades ago, refining rare earth ore usually leaves thousands of tons of low-level radioactive waste behind.

So the world has largely left the dirty work to Chinese refineries — processing factories that are barely regulated and in some cases illegally operated, and have created vast toxic waste sites.

But other countries’ wariness has meant that China now mines and refines at least 95 percent of the global supply of rare earths. And Beijing has aroused international alarm by wielding that virtual monopoly as a global trade weapon.

Last September, for example, China imposed a two-month embargo on rare earth shipments to Japan during a territorial dispute, and for a short time even blocked some shipments to the United States and Europe. Beijing’s behavior, which has also included lowering the export limit on its rare earths, has helped propel world prices of the material to record highs — and sent industrial countries scrambling for alternatives.

Even now, though, countries with their own rare earth ore deposits are not always eager to play host to the refineries that process them. An American company, Molycorp, plans to reopen an abandoned mine near Death Valley in California; but Molycorp must completely rebuild the adjacent refinery to address environmental concerns.

All of this helps explain why a giant Australian mining company, Lynas, is hurrying to finish a $230 million rare earth refinery here, on the northern outskirts of Malaysia’s industrial port of Kuantan. The plant will refine slightly radioactive ore from the Mount Weld mine deep in the Australian desert, 2,500 miles away. The ore will be trucked to the Australian port of Fremantle and transported by container ship from there.

Within two years, Lynas says, the refinery will be able to meet nearly a third of the world’s demand for rare earth materials — not counting China, which has its own abundant supplies.

Nicholas Curtis, Lynas’s executive chairman, said it would cost four times as much to build and operate such a refinery in Australia, which has much higher labor and construction costs. Australia is also home to an environmentally minded and politically powerful Green party.

Despite the potential hazards, the Malaysian government was eager for investment by Lynas, even offering a 12-year tax holiday. If rare earth prices stay at current lofty levels, the refinery will generate $1.7 billion a year in exports starting late next year, equal to nearly 1 percent of the entire Malaysian economy.

Raja Dato Abdul Aziz bin Raja Adnan, the director general of the Malaysian Atomic Energy Licensing Board, said his country approved the Lynas project only after an interagency review indicated the imported ore and subsequent waste would have low enough levels of radioactivity to be manageable and safe.

Malaysia had reason to be cautious: Its last rare earth refinery, operated by the Japanese company Mitsubishi Chemical, is now one of Asia’s largest radioactive waste cleanup sites.

“We have learned we shouldn’t give anybody a free hand,” Raja Adnan said.

Despite such assurances, critics are not convinced that the low-level radioactive materials at the Lynas project will be safe.

“The word ‘low’ here is just a matter of perception — it’s a carcinogen,” said Dr. Jayabalan A. Thambyappa, a general practitioner physician and toxicologist. He has treated leukemia victims whose illnesses he and others have attributed to the old Mitsubishi Chemical refinery.

That plant, on the other side of the Malay peninsula, closed in 1992 after years of sometimes violent demonstrations by citizens protesting its polluting effects. Now, in an engineering effort that has largely escaped the outside world’s notice, Mitsubishi is engaged in a $100 million cleanup.

Rare earths, a group of 17 elements, are not radioactive themselves. But virtually every rare earth ore deposit around the world contains, in varying concentrations, a slightly radioactive element called thorium.

Radiation concerns — along with low-cost Chinese competition — eventually forced the closing of all rare earth refineries in Japan. It was during this phase-out that Mitsubishi moved its refining operation to Malaysia, where old tin mines had left behind thousands of tons of semiprocessed slag that was rich in rare earth ore. It also had extremely high levels of radioactive thorium.

The new Lynas refinery, with nearly two dozen interconnected buildings and 50 acres of floor space, will house the latest in pollution control equipment and radiation sensors. A signature feature will be 12 acres of interim storage pools that will be lined with dense plastic and sit atop nearly impermeable clay, to hold the slightly radioactive byproducts until they can be carted away.

But carted to where? That is still an open question.

Building the lined storage pools was one of the promises Lynas had made to win permission to put the refinery here, in an area already environmentally damaged by the chemical plants that line the narrow, muddy Balok River.

Mr. Curtis, the Lynas chairman, insists that the new factory will be much cleaner and far safer than the old Mitsubishi plant, which “never should have been built,” he said recently, as he led a tour of the sprawling Lynas refinery construction site here.

One big difference, he said, is that the ore being imported from Australia is much less radioactive. It will have only 3 to 5 percent of the thorium per ton found in the tin mine tailings that Mitsubishi had processed. And he said the Lynas factory would also process 10 times as much ore with only twice as many employees — about 450 in all — thanks to automation that will keep workers away from potentially harmful materials.

But the long-term storage of the Lynas plant’s radioactive thorium waste is still unresolved.

After using sulfuric acid to dissolve the rare earths out of the concentrated ore, Lynas plans to mix the radioactive part of the waste with lime. The aim is to dilute it to a thorium concentration of less than 0.05 percent — the maximum permitted under international standards to allow the material to be disposed with few restrictions.

Lynas wants to turn this mixture into large concrete shapes known as tetrapods that are used to build artificial reefs for fish and as sea walls to prevent beach erosion.

Local residents seem to be of two minds about the sprawling plant being built near the river. The river empties into the ocean several miles away, next to an impoverished fishing village, where on a recent evening a small group of fisherman sat at the end of a wooden dock.

Muhamad Ishmail, age 56, said pollution from the chemical factories that started opening upstream in the 1990s had forced local fishing — a river industry for generations — to move primarily out to sea. Although one of his five children works in the nearby industrial district, Mr. Ishmail said he did not want Lynas or anyone else to open any more factories.

“This river used to be clean, and you could catch fish right here,” he said.

But Muhamad Anuar, 30, said his community needed the reliable paychecks that Lynas might offer. “I have two kids, and I don’t want them to be fishermen,” he said. “It’s a hard job.”

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Indonesia: Leaders From Eastern Islands Take a Stand Against Mining

Fidelis E. Satriastanti Jakarta Globe 9 Mar 11;

Community leaders from eastern Indonesia called on the government on Tuesday to stop permitting mining on small islands and instead promote tourism and fisheries as more sustainable economic activities.

“We’re not poor, but our region has never been managed properly by the government,” said Yohanes Kristo Tara, a Catholic priest from East Nusa Tenggara.

“Our main possible sources of income are tourism, given the unbelievable natural beauty we possess that could even beat Bali if we were serious about developing it; livestock breeding, for which the province was once renowned; or fish farming, because of the abundance of fish here.”

Rather than develop those sectors, Yohanes said, the local authorities had instead been busy handing out mining concessions, with at least 307 issued this year alone, mostly for manganese and gold mining.

“President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono came to [the provincial capital] Kupang and talked about turning the province into a hub for food security or seaweed cultivation, yet why does the government continue to issue so many mining permits in coastal areas?” he said.

“Wouldn’t that threaten the fisheries sector? It just doesn’t make any sense to come up with one regulation and then issue policies that turn out to be the complete opposite.”

Yohanes said that overreliance on the destructive mining industry would not help the region develop sustainably.

“Almost all areas with mining concessions have a sad story to tell,” he said. “There’s no social welfare at all, the local residents don’t get anything.

“If we continue with this exploitation, then in maybe 20 or 30 years East Nusa Tenggara will be gone. Mining isn’t suitable for these islands because it threatens our water supply, causes erosion and destroys habitats.”

His call was echoed by Jefry Daeng, a resident of Obi Island in South Halmahera district, North Maluku, who said residents there wanted to return to their agrarian roots and did not want to live with the mining operations in the area.

“We live by the very simple philosophy that we’re already rich because we’ve been blessed with the spices grown on our lands,” he said.

He added opposition to the extractive industries began in the 1980s, when the island was already reeling from another destructive practice — logging.

“We were fooled [by the logging companies] with the promise of better lives,” Jefry said.

“Instead, we had to work long hours, with no job assurances or improved education,” he added. “So we paid for our education by growing spices.”

He said the bitter experience with the logging companies prompted the Obi Island residents to stage protests when mining companies began operating there in 2009.

“How long are they going to stay?” Jefry asked. “Thirty to 60 years, and after that they’ll leave, but what about those of us still living there?

“Ministers, district heads, governors — they’re all just public officials and they’re just going to be around for five years, but we’re the ones who will continue to live with the impact from the mining industry.”

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China legislator urges shark fin ban

Yahoo News 9 Mar 11;

BEIJING (AFP) – A member of China's parliament has proposed a ban on the trade in shark fins, state press said Wednesday -- a move that would likely face huge opposition from the nation's culinary traditionalists.

Shark fins are used to make a soup that is a staple at high-end restaurants throughout China, and is often served on special occasions.

But scientists blame the practice of shark-finning -- slicing off the fins of live animals and then throwing them back in the water to die -- for a worldwide collapse in shark populations.

"Only legislation can stop shark fin trading and reduce the killings of sharks," Xinhua news agency quoted Ding Liguo, a billionaire delegate to the National People's Congress (NPC), as saying.

Enormous profits generated by the shark fin trade have led to over-fishing and the brutal slaughter of sharks, with some 30 species near extinction, he said.

China should lead the world in banning the trade because 95 percent of the world's shark fins are consumed in mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, he added.

It was not immediately clear if Ding, the executive chairman of Delong Holdings Limited, filed a formal written proposal to the NPC, China's rubber-stamp parliament now in session, or just lodged a verbal request.

In any event, any law banning shark fin trade would likely take years to review and come into force if adopted.

A ban would face strong opposition from Chinese fishermen and restaurant owners, especially as rising incomes have led more and more Chinese to seek the health benefits traditionally attributed to a diet of shark fin.

"People are mistaken by the supposed nutritional value of shark fin," Ding countered.

"Research shows the nutritional value of shark fin is similar to that of poultry, fish skin, meat and eggs. It is tasteless and its low level nutritional value is hard to absorb by the body."

According to Shark Savers, a global organisation seeking to ban the trade in shark fins, over 100 million sharks are killed a year, mostly for their fins.

In some parts of the world's oceans, shark populations have decreased by up to 90 percent over the last 20 years, the group said.

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Short Shark Supply: Great White Population Low, Census Finds

LiveScience.com Yahoo News 10 Mar 11;

Far fewer great white sharks are cruising the waters off of California than previously thought, according to researchers who conducted a unique shark census in the northeastern Pacific Ocean.

"This low number was a real surprise," said Taylor Chapple, a doctoral student at the University of California, Davis when he led the great white shark study.

"It's lower than we expected, and also substantially smaller than populations of other large marine predators, such as killer whales and polar bears," said Chapple, now a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute in Germany.

Counting the great white sharks was a hands-on activity. The researchers went out into the Pacific Ocean in small boats to places where great white sharks congregate, and lured the massive predators into photo range using a seal-shaped decoy on a fishing line.

From 321 photographs of the uniquely jagged edges of the sharks' dorsal fins, they identified 131 individual sharks.

From these data, they used statistical methods to estimate that there are 219 great white sharks in the region.

"We've found that these white sharks return to the same regions of the coast year after year," said study co-author Barbara Block, a Stanford University marine biologist and a leading expert on sharks. "It is this fact that makes it possible to estimate their numbers. Our goal is to keep track of our ocean predators."

The study, published in the journal Biology Letters, is the first rigorous scientific estimate of white shark numbers in the northeast Pacific Ocean, and represents one of the best estimates among the world's three known white-shark populations.

Great white sharks also live in the waters around Australia and New Zealand, and off the coast of South Africa.

Shark species around the globe have suffered steep declines in recent years. As many as one-third of the world's sharks and other cartilaginous fishes are threatened, and shark numbers along the United States eastern seaboard have plummeted, some species by as much as 90 percent.

Great white sharks are classified as "vulnerable" by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, but relatively little is known about the elusive species.

"This estimate only represents a single point in time," Chapple said. "Further research will tell us if this number represents a healthy, viable population, or one critically in danger of collapse, or something in-between."

Satellite tagging studies have demonstrated that great white sharks in the northeast Pacific make annual migrations from coastal areas in Central California and Guadalupe Island, Mexico, out to the Hawaiian Islands or to the "White Shark Café," a region of the open ocean between the Baja Peninsula and Hawaii where white sharks have been found to congregate – after which they then return to the coastal areas.

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Pace of polar ice melt 'accelerating rapidly': study

Yahoo News 9 Mar 11;

WASHINGTON (AFP) – The pace at which the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are melting is "accelerating rapidly" and raising the global sea level, according to findings of a study financed by NASA and published Tuesday.

The findings suggest that the ice sheets -- more so than ice loss from Earth's mountain glaciers and ice caps -- have become "the dominant contributor to global sea level rise, much sooner than model forecasts have predicted."

This study, the longest to date examining changes to polar ice sheet mass, combined two decades of monthly satellite measurements with regional atmospheric climate model data to study changes in mass.

"That ice sheets will dominate future sea level rise is not surprising -- they hold a lot more ice mass than mountain glaciers," said lead author Eric Rignot, jointly of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of California, Irvine.

"What is surprising is this increased contribution by the ice sheets is already happening," he said.

Under the current trends, he said, sea level is likely to be "significantly higher" than levels projected by the United Nations climate change panel in 2007.

Isabella Velicogna, co-author of the study, told AFP that the ice sheets lose mass by melting or by breaking apart in blocks of ice, which float into the ocean.

"It's related to the warming of the planet but that was not the point of the paper. We just observed the changes," said Velicogna, a professor at UC Irvine. "It's losing mass -- much more than was expected many years ago."

The study showed that in 2006, a year in which comparable results for loss from mountain glaciers and ice caps are available, the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets lost enough mass to raise global sea level by an average of .05 inches (1.3 millimetres) per year.

The year-over-year acceleration rate of loss on mountain glaciers and ice caps was three times smaller than that of the ice sheets, the study said.

"The authors conclude that, if current ice sheet melting rates continue for the next four decades, their cumulative loss could raise sea level by 5.9 inches (15 centimeters) by 2050," the report said.

"When this is added to the predicted sea level contribution of 3.1 inches (8 centimeters) from glacial ice caps and 3.5 inches (9 centimeters) from ocean thermal expansion, total sea level rise could reach 12.6 inches (32 centimeters)," it said.

The findings were published the March edition of Geophysical Research Letters.

Polar ice loss quickens, raising seas
Richard Black BBC News 9 Mar 11;

Ice loss from Antarctica and Greenland has accelerated over the last 20 years, research shows, and will soon become the biggest driver of sea level rise.

From satellite data and climate models, scientists calculate that the two polar ice sheets are losing enough ice to raise sea levels by 1.3mm each year.

Overall, sea levels are rising by about 3mm (0.12 inches) per year.

Writing in Geophysical Research Letters, the team says ice loss here is speeding up faster than models predict.

They add their voices to several other studies that have concluded sea levels will rise faster than projected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its landmark 2007 assessment.

By 2006, the Greenland and Antarctic sheets were losing a combined mass of 475Gt (gigatonnes - billion tonnes) of ice per year.

On average, loss from the Greenland sheet is increasing by nearly 22Gt per year, while the much larger and colder Antarctic sheet is shedding an additional 14.5Gt each year.

If these increases persist, water from the two polar ice sheets could have added 15cm (5.9 inches) to the average global sea level by 2050.

A rise of similar size is projected to come from a combination of melt water from mountain glaciers and thermal expansion of seawater.

"That ice sheets will dominate future sea level rise is not surprising - they hold a lot more ice mass than mountain glaciers," said lead author Eric Rignot from Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

"What is surprising is this increased contribution by the ice sheets is already happening."
Grace on fire

Extending this rate of ice loss forward to 2100, the sea level rise contribution from the two ice sheets alone is calculated at 56cm (22 inches).

By contrast, the IPCC in 2007 projected a maximum rise of 59cm, while acknowledging this was likely to be an under-estimate because understanding of processes happening on ice sheets was insufficient to enable reliable estimates to be made.

Since 2007, several other research groups using different methods have concluded that a figure between one and two metres is likely - which would have profound consequences for island nations and countries with long, low coastlines such as Bangladesh.

"If present trends continue, sea level is likely to be significantly higher than levels projected by the IPCC," said Dr Rignot.

"Our study helps reduce uncertainties in near-term projections of sea level rise."

The new research combined two different methodologies.

One calculates ice gain and loss through combining various types of satellite reading and data taken on the ground, for example the thickness of the ice sheet and the speed at which glaciers are moving.

The second dataset comes from Nasa's Grace mission, which uses twin satellites to measure variations in the Earth's gravitational pull.

Ice loss causes a fractional reduction in gravity at that point on the Earth's surface.

Two years ago, this mission surprised some in the research community by showing that even the vast and frigid East Antarctic ice sheet was losing some of its mass to the oceans.

The journal is due to publish the paper within a few days.

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Climate researchers: Russian heat wave was natural

Randolph E. Schmid Associated Press Yahoo News 9 Mar 11;

WASHINGTON – Global warming isn't directly to blame for last summer's deadly — and extraordinary — heat wave in Russia, researchers said in a report Wednesday that came with a climate warning.

"We may be on the cusp of a period in which the probability of such events increases rapidly, due primarily to the influence of projected increases in greenhouse gas concentrations," said the team led by Randall Dole and Martin Hoerling of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

It was the warmest July since at least 1880 in western Russia. The heat wave led to an increase in deaths in the region, as well as drought, widespread fires, increased air pollution and severe crop damage. Also affected by the warming were Belarus, Ukraine and the Baltic nations.

The extreme heat raised questions about links to global warming — the rising temperatures worldwide that most atmospheric scientists attribute to greenhouse gases being pumped into the air by industrial and other processes over the last century or so.

The intense heat wave in Russia "was mainly due to natural internal atmospheric variability," the scientists reported in a paper to be published in Geophysical Research Letters.

The cause in this case, they said, was a strong and long-lived blocking pattern that prevented movement of weather systems. Blocking patterns occur when the high-level jet stream directing the movement of weather develops a sharp wave pattern. This forces storms to move around an area while conditions there stagnate.

"Similar atmospheric patterns have occurred with prior heat waves in this region," although those have been less severe, Dole and Hoerling said.

There are indications the blocking pattern forcing storms to move also affected subsequent flooding in Pakistan, they said.

"To be sure, it was a rare event. But rare events happen and rarity alone doesn't imply cause," Dole said at a briefing.

It's important to study the causes of events such as this heat wave because they have global economic impacts, Hoerling said. The heat wave reduced Russian grain yields about 40 percent, resulting in a decline in the world's grain supply.

Hoerling said researchers were surprised to find that the region hadn't experienced the rising temperatures that have impacted much of the planet.

"While the globe as a whole, on an annual basis, is warming, there can be important regional differences," Hoerling said. The 1930s remain the warmest decade on record for western Russia, unlike the planet as a whole, for which the past 10 years have been the warmest on record, he said.

The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found evidence that global warming contributed to heat waves in other areas and probably is to cause stronger and more frequent heat waves in future.

Hoerling heads the climate attribution team at NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory and Dole is deputy director of the physical sciences division of the lab.

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