Vanishing forests a counterpoint to Indonesia's climate crusade

Aubrey Belford, Yahoo News 16 Nov 07;

Head man Mursyid Ali stands amid blackened stumps, the remains of much of the rainforest belonging to this village on Indonesia's Sumatra stripped and drained in spite of local protests.

It'’s a scene repeated across much of Indonesia, where poverty and voracious demand for commodities -- coupled with corruption and poor law enforcement -- drive the destruction of forests.

Thanks largely to the burning of forests and destruction of carbon-rich peatlands, Indonesia is the third biggest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, a statistic coming under the spotlight ahead of the nation hosting a major international climate change conference next month.

The December 3-14 UN summit on the resort island of Bali will see delegates from around the world -- including more than 100 ministers -- thrash out a framework for negotiations on a global regime to combat climate change when the current phase of the Kyoto Protocol ends in 2012.

Satellite images from environmental watchdog WWF show that only 25 years ago, the majority of Riau province -- home to Ali's village -- was covered in equatorial forest, one of the most ecologically diverse habitats on Earth and a vital absorber of carbon.

Today, four million hectares (nearly 10 million acres), or more than 60 percent, have gone. Land clearing, both legal and illegal, has made way for tree and oil palm plantations, logging concessions and small farms.

In Kuala Cenaku, the landscape has been denuded to make way for oil palm plantations cashing in on booming demand for palm oil -- ironically seen as a source of climate-friendly biofuel.

Ali'’s fight is with Indonesian plantation company Duta Palma, two subsidiaries of which were granted permits by the local district head from 2004 to clear the forests around his village and its neighbour Kuala Mulia.

The area was originally granted to state-owned company Inhutani IV in 2002, but public opposition forced the local government and the national forestry ministry to revoke the permit, according to the Riau head of Friends of the Earth Indonesia, Johny Setiawan.

Duta Palma got its concessions by promising to follow a local government regulation stipulating that it hand control of 40 percent of the land to the community and provide them with jobs.

Setiawan said the company has not kept its promises, clearing most of the land for its own use and causing severe fires and choking smoke. Villagers have protested to the local and provincial governments with few results.

"Who can put pressure on this company? The district head and the governor are the ones who can do it, not ordinary citizens like us. All we do is protest, but they accuse us of being anarchists," Ali told AFP.

"We cried and begged (the district head) to stop this company but he paid no attention," he said.

According to Setiawan, district head Raja Thamsir Rachman announced in 2006 that land clearing would be suspended until the dispute was resolved. But when AFP visited the site, heavy machinery continued to clear the land.

Repeated requests by AFP to meet with Duta Palma were declined.

Some of the biggest players reshaping Riau'’s environment and economy are pulp and paper giants Asia Pulp and Paper (APP) and Asia Pacific Resources International Holdings Limited (April). Each company produces an average of around 2 million tons of pulp in Riau alone every year.

National police have taken over an investigation into illegal logging that was launched in February this year, releasing a list of 14 APP and April partner companies as suspects.

April denies it is involved in illegal logging. Its Riau subsidiary, Riaupulp, is observing a "de facto moratorium" on cutting natural forests during the investigation, said its environment manager, Elizier Lorenzo.

April puts a lot of energy into polishing its green image and is acknowledged by many conservationists as being ahead of the pack when it comes to mitigating the environmental impact of its work.

But even the best intentions can fall flat in the often lawless and disorganised world on the edges of RiauÂ's dwindling forests.

A proposed boundary of the expanded Tesso Nilo national park looks nothing like it should. In place of what should be a final refuge for endangered elephants and tigers, the land is stripped back, burnt and raw.

WWF and April have been in discussions since 2001 to expand the park from 38,576 hectares to 100,000 hectares.

In 2004, April built its own access road on the edge of the forest, despite objections from WWF, who argued the road would open the way for illegal land clearing.

"Once it's open, you can'’t stop encroachers from coming in," said Desmarita Murni, a campaigner with WWF, referring to small-scale farmers who take advantage of the access.

April promised to ensure the road would be guarded, but they concede this has not eventuated. They say they now have an agreement with local police to act as forestry officers in a new checkpoint system they hope will be ready by year-end.

WWF satellite images show that more than 12,000 hectares have been cleared in the area since then, much of it inside the proposed new boundaries of the park.

Encroachers on the road corridor to Tesso Nilo live simply, planting small numbers of oil palms, rubber trees or cassava. Most are reluctant to speak to activists and journalists.

Paris Gultom, a father of four from neighbouring North Sumatra province, moved to the area last year. He said most families in the area -- many from his home province -- live on plots of two to four hectares.

Paris bought his own four-hectare plot for 16 million rupiah (1,750 dollars) from a "community leader". He has the papers to prove it, but like everyone else in the area, he knows it's not all above board.

"If (land ownership certificates are) issued legally then there's money involved, from the head of the district or the head of the village," Murni said.

Legal uncertainty or not, Gultom intends to stay. Here he has land, he says, and with land scarce in his home district, it'’s an opportunity too hard to pass up.

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Biofuels bonanza facing 'crash'

Roger Harrabin, BBC News 15 Nov 07

The biofuels bonanza will crash unless producers can guarantee their crops have been produced responsibly, the UN's environment agency chief has said.

Achim Steiner of the UN Environment Programme (Unep) said there was an urgent need for standards to make sure rainforests weren't being destroyed.

Biofuel makers also had to show their products did not produce more CO2 than they negated, he told BBC News.

Critics say biofuels will lead to food shortages and destroy rainforests.

They point to the destruction of Indonesia's peat swamps as an example of biofuel folly.

The swamps are one the richest stores of carbon on the planet and they are being burned to produce palm oil.

Mr Steiner implied that because of Indonesia's inability to police its land use, biofuels from palm oil grown by the nation might never be deemed to be sustainable.

But he said some biofuels could be considered sustainable. He highlighted ethanol production in Brazil, and a dry land crop called jatropha, which is resistant to pests and droughts.

Mr Steiner urged investors not to turn their backs on developing second or third generation fuels that would use non-food crops and burnable waste.

He feared that beneficial biofuels might be lost as part of a consumer backlash.

Mr Steiner made his comments in response to criticism from a group of independent scientists who said they had written to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) complaining that the climate body's comments on biofuels have been naive.

The independent scientists pointed to two phrases in reports by the IPPC, of which Unep is a co-sponsor, which the scientists said could not be substantiated.

One stated that biofuels were an effective solution in at least a number of countries, while the other suggested that biofuels in the transport sector would generally have positive social and environmental benefits.

False economy

One of the scientists, Tad Patzek from University of California Berkeley, US, said: "In the long-run, the planet cannot afford to produce biofuels because we're going to run out of the land and water and environmental resources.

"In addition, because of the land use changes, drying up peat-swamps, burning tropical forest, these biofuels involve up-front enormous emissions of greenhouse gases that will never be recouped by their later use," he told BBC News.

Professor Patzek also doubted Mr Steiner's confidence in Brazilian ethanol. "The [IPCC] description of Brazilian sugar-cane ethanol production as 'highly advanced' and 'a model' is somewhat of an exaggeration.

"It's neither good nor a model," he said.

Brazilian producers are adamant that their bio-crops are not grown on rainforest land - but the environmental group Friends of the Earth Brazil claim that peasant farmers - dispossessed by biofuel conglomerates - are moving to the Amazon to seek new land.

Mr Steiner said Brazil had enough land to ensure that biofuel cropping could be sustainable.

The group of scientists said their letter to the head of the IPCC, Professor Pachauri, had not been answered.

BBC News has not been able to obtain a comment from Professor Pachauri, though this may be hardly surprising given that the final summit on the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (A4R) is currently underway in Valencia, Spain.

Mr Steiner said Unep had set up a high-level task force to study the life-cycle implications of all biofuels. The group is expected to publish its findings next year.

By then much of the Indonesian peat swamps - one of the most valuable stores of carbon in the world - will have been torched.

The only way of stopping may not be through the UN or the Indonesian government, but through one or more private philanthropist with a burning desire to own an Indonesian swamp.

Related articles

Bioenergy growth must be carefully managed: FAO FAO Website 13 Nov 07;
New Biofuel Crops Pose Risks to Farms, Ecosystems Timothy Gardner, PlanetArk 12 Nov 07;

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Understanding the climate ostrich

Kari Marie Norgaard, BBC News 15 Nov 07;

Why do people find it hard to accept the increasingly firm messages that climate change is a real and significant threat to livelihoods? Here, a sociologist unravels some of the issues that may lie behind climate scepticism.

I spent a year doing interviews and ethnographic fieldwork in a rural Norwegian community recently.

In winter, the signs of climate change were everywhere - glaringly apparent in an unfrozen lake, the first ever use of artificial snow at the ski area, and thousands of dollars in lost tourist revenues.

Yet as a political issue, global warming was invisible.

The people I spoke with expressed feelings of deep concern and caring, and a significant degree of ambivalence about the issue of global warming.

This was a paradox. How could the possibility of climate change be both deeply disturbing and almost completely invisible - simultaneously unimaginable and common knowledge?

Self-protection

People told me many reasons why it was difficult to think about this issue. In the words of one man, who held his hands in front of his eyes as he spoke, "people want to protect themselves a bit."

Community members described fears about the severity of the situation, of not knowing what to do, fears that their way of life was in question, and concern that the government would not adequately handle the problem.

They described feelings of guilt for their own actions, and the difficulty of discussing the issue of climate change with their children.

In some sense, not wanting to know was connected to not knowing how to know. Talking about global warming went against conversation norms.

It wasn't a topic that people were able to speak about with ease - rather, overall it was an area of confusion and uncertainty. Yet feeling this confusion and uncertainty went against emotional norms of toughness and maintaining control.

Other community members described this sense of knowing and not knowing, of having information but not thinking about it in their everyday lives.

As one young woman told me: "In the everyday I don't think so much about it, but I know that environmental protection is very important."

Security risk

The majority of us are now familiar with the basics of climate change.

Worst case scenarios threaten the very basics of our social, political and economic infrastructure.

Yet there has been less response to this environmental problem than any other. Here in the US it seems that only now are we beginning to take it seriously.

How can this be? Why have so few of us engaged in any of the range of possible actions from reducing our airline travel, pressurising our governments and industries to cut emissions, or even talking about it with our family and friends in more than a passing manner?

Indeed, why would we want to know this information?

Why would we want to believe that scenarios of melting Arctic ice and spreading diseases that appear to spell ecological and social demise are in store for us; or even worse, that we see such effects already?

Information about climate change is deeply disturbing. It threatens our sense of individual identity and our trust in our government's ability to respond.

At the deepest level, large scale environmental problems such as global warming threaten people's sense of the continuity of life - what sociologist Anthony Giddens calls ontological security.

Thinking about global warming is also difficult for those of us in the developed world because it raises feelings of guilt. We are now aware of how driving automobiles and flying to exotic warm vacations contributes to the problem, and we feel guilty about it.

Tactful denial

If being aware of climate change is an uncomfortable condition which people are motivated to avoid, what happens next?

After all, ignoring the obvious can take a lot of work.

In the Norwegian community where I worked, collectively holding information about global warming at arm's length took place by participating in cultural norms of attention, emotion, and conversation, and by using a series of cultural narratives to deflect disturbing information and normalise a particular version of reality in which "everything is fine."

When what a person feels is different from what they want to feel, or are supposed to feel, they usually engage in what sociologists call emotional management.

We have a whole repertoire of techniques or "tools" for ignoring this and other disturbing problems.

As sociologist Evitiar Zerubavel makes clear in his work on the social organisation of denial and secrecy, the means by which we manage to ignore the disturbing realities in front of us are also collectively shaped.

How we cope, how we respond, or how we fail to respond are social as well.

Social rules of focusing our attention include rules of etiquette that involve tact-related ethical obligations to "look the other way" and ignore things we most likely would have noticed about others around us.

Indeed, in many cases, merely following our cultural norms of acceptable conversation and emotional expression serves to keep our attention safely away from that pesky topic of climate change.

Emotions of fear and helplessness can be managed through the use of selective attention; controlling one's exposure to information, not thinking too far into the future and focusing on something that could be done.

Selective attention can be used to decide what to think about or not to think about, for example screening out painful information about problems for which one does not have solutions: "I don't really know what to do, so I just don't think about that".

The most effective way of managing unpleasant emotions such as fear about your children seems to be by turning our attention to something else, or by focusing attention onto something positive.

Hoodwinking ourselves?

Until recently, the dominant explanation within my field of environmental sociology for why people failed to confront climate change was that they were too poorly informed.

Others pose that Americans are simply too greedy or too individualistic, or suffer from incorrect mental models.

Psychologists have described "faulty" decision-making powers such as "confirmation bias", and argue that with more appropriate analogies we will be able to manage the information and respond.

Political economists, on the other hand, tell us that we've been hoodwinked by increased corporate control of media that limits and moulds available information about global warming.

These are clearly important answers.

Yet the fact that nobody wants information about climate change to be true is a critical piece of the puzzle that also happens to fit perfectly with the agenda of those who have tried to generate climate scepticism.

Dr Kari Marie Norgaard is a sociologist at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington state, US

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Eco-ruin 'felled early society'

BBC News 15 Nov 07

One of Western Europe's earliest known urban societies may have sown the seeds of its own downfall, a study suggests.

Mystery surrounded the fall of the Bronze Age Argaric people in south-east Spain - Europe's driest area. Data suggests the early civilisation exhausted precious natural resources, helping bring about its own ruin.

The study provides early evidence for cultural collapse caused - at least in part - by humans meddling with the environment, say researchers.

It could also provide lessons for modern populations living in water-stressed regions.

The findings were based on pollen preserved in a peat deposit located in the mountains of eastern Andalucia, Spain.

The researchers drilled a sediment core from the Canada del Gitano basin high up in Andalucia's Sierra de Baza region.

By studying the abundances of different pollen types - along with other indicators - preserved in sedimentary deposits, researchers can reconstruct what kind of vegetation covered the area in ancient times.

They can compile a pollen sequence, which shows how vegetation changed over thousands of years. This can give them clues to how human settlement and climate affected ecosystems.

The Argaric culture emerged in south-eastern Spain 4,300 years ago. This civilisation, which inhabited small fortified towns, was one of the first in Western Europe to adopt bronze working.

But about 3,600 years ago, the culture mysteriously vanished from the archaeological record.

"Archaeologists are convinced that something happened in the ecological structure of the area just prior to the collapse of the Argaric culture," said Jose Carrion, from the University of Murcia, Spain.

"But we previously lacked a high-resolution record to support this."

Environmental change

Before the appearance of the Argaric civilisation, the slopes of Sierra de Baza were covered with a diverse forest dominated by deciduous oaks and other broad-leaved trees.

But about 4,200 years ago - just after this civilisation emerges - significant amounts of charcoal appear in the pollen sequence. According to the study's authors, this is a sign Bronze Age people were setting fires to clear the forests for mining activities and grazing.

Not long afterwards, about 3,900 years ago, the diverse forest ecosystem disappears, to be replaced by monotonous and fire-prone Mediterranean scrub.

What astonished the researchers was the speed of this change. This ecological transformation is very abrupt, appearing to have taken place in little more than a decade.

About 300 years after this ecological transformation, the Argaric civilisation disappeared.

Climatic effect

Professor Carrion said the term "ecocide" was too strong to apply in this case. Climate must also have played a part, he explained.

There is evidence conditions were becoming progressively arid from about 5,500 years ago onwards. This is indicated by a broad reduction in forest cover, the appearance of plants adapted to dry conditions and a drop in lake levels.

But Jose Carrion added: "The climatic influence began millennia prior to the appearance of the Argaric culture.

"It's not critical to the change in the landscape we see about 3,900-3,800 years ago. What appears to be critical is the evidence of burning, which in our opinion is man-made."

The degradation of soils and vegetation could have caused the collapse of agriculture and pastoralism, the foundation of the Argaric economy.

This would have led to massive depopulation of the area.

The findings were outlined at the recent Climate and Humans conference in Murcia, Spain, and appear in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews.

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China Defends Mega Dam, Guards Against Disaster

Chris Buckley, PlanetArk 16 Nov 07;

BEIJING - China defended the environmental effects of its huge Three Gorges Dam on Thursday, with a senior official saying pollution was under control and threats from landslides under close guard.

The dam on the Yangtze River lies in the central province of Hubei and holds a 660-km (410-mile) reservoir. In September, an official warned of environmental calamity if landslides, siltage and pollution were not contained.

But in an implicit denial of that warning, the office director of the Three Gorges Project Committee, Wang Xiaofeng, said problems were manageable and within expectations.

"I can say with all responsibility that the environmental impact of the Three Gorges Project has not exceeded the scope of what was predicted in the original viability report," he told the official Xinhua news agency.

Yet Xinhua also paraphrased Wang as saying that "the ecological and environmental security of the dam area merits a high degree of attention".

Wang's defence comes in the wake of the official's warning and signs of geological strain around the dam. Last week, Vice Premier Zeng Peiyan told dam officials to "double efforts" against environmental and geological threats, Xinhua said.

The Three Gorges Dam is the world's biggest, an engineering feat that seeks to tame the world's third longest river while displacing 1.4 million people, many of them poor farmers from Hubei and neighbouring Chongqing.

"LAST BLOCKS" GO

Xinhua reported that the last blocks of apartments on land to be engulfed by the reservoir had been razed on Thursday, with one row going up in smoke at the push of a button.

Kaixian was the last of Chongqing's eight counties to finish relocation work for the project, the report said.

But the "last blocks" appeared to be a symbolic watershed, as other towns along the reservoir's length still have buildings waiting for demolition -- and residents waiting to be moved.

Since the dam was finished in 2003, the reservoir has been filled with water in stages. If all goes to plan, it will reach its maximum of 175 metres above sea level by late 2008, providing what Wang called an "irreplaceable" protection from devastating floods downstream.

Critics have long said the dam was a folly that would trap silt and pollution and dangerously destabilise the brittle hills on its shores and tributaries.

During a recent visit to the dam area by Reuters, residents pointed to erosion, landslides and deformed terrain they said had seriously worsened since last year.

Wang said pollution from algae blooms was localised and temporary, and "the frequency of geological disasters has been effectively controlled".

Since the dam's water level rose to 156 metres last year, there had been no "major geological disasters" creating large loss of life, Wang said.

In the summer of 2007, landslides across the dam area killed at least 13 people, according to local news reports and the dam environmental agency.

On Thursday, an official in Chongqing -- a sprawling municipality of 28 million that covers many rural areas affected by the dam -- denied a previous report that 4 million of its residents would have to move due to the dam's environmental strains.

Chongqing spokesman Wen Tianping said the ambitious plan was a development programme "to narrow the urban-rural wealth gap", and not an environmental retreat. The policy would not involve "forced relocation", Xinhua said. (Reporting by Chris Buckley; editing by Roger Crabb)

Last Buildings Demolished for Three Gorges Reservoir
PlanetArk 16 Nov 07;

BEIJING - The last blocks of flats standing on land to be engulfed by China's vast Three Gorges reservoir were razed on Thursday, with one row going up in smoke at the push of a button.

Thirteen blocks in Kaixian county, under the jurisdiction of Chongqing municipality in the country's southwest, were reduced to rubble within four seconds by 400 kg of dynamite as their former occupiers looked on at a safe distance.

Kaixian was the last of Chongqing's eight counties to complete relocation work for the Three Gorges project. Residents could be seen carting away furniture as late as Wednesday.

A total of 457 households living in Kaixian had been relocated by the end of October.

The Three Gorges Dam lies across the country's longest river, the Yangtze, and when completed will be the world's largest flood control and hydropower station.

Construction began in December 1994, and officials say the final bill will be about US$25 billion.

Two cities, 11 counties, 116 towns, and hundreds of cultural sites in Hubei province and Chongqing have been flooded to create the reservoir and about 1.4 million people have been displaced.

The vast scheme is meant to subdue the Yangtze River, but as water levels rise, parts of its shores have strained and cracked, dismaying scientists and officials and alarming villages.

Along the 660-km (410-mile) reservoir, residents pointed to erosion, landslides and deformed terrain they said have seriously worsened since last year, when the water level was raised a second time.

But a high-ranking Chinese official said on Thursday the environmental impact had been less damaging than feared.

"The problems, including landslides, trapped silt and algae blooms, did not go beyond the scope predicted by the feasibility report in 1991, and in some aspects, they are even less severe than predicted," Wang Xiaofeng, director of the office of the Three Gorges Project Committee of the State Council, told Xinhua. (Reporting by Nick Macfie; editing by Roger Crabb)

Related reports

• China's 'giant toilet bowl' Today Online 15 Nov 07;
• As China's mega dam rises, so do strains and fear Chris Buckley, Yahoo News 14 Nov 07;

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Paying Farmers to Protect the Planet is Future - UN

PlanetArk 16 Nov 07;

ROME - Paying farmers to protect the environment -- rather than just for their produce -- will be an important way to ensure a rapidly increasing demand for food does not destroy the planet, a UN agency said on Thursday.

The United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said paying for "environmental services" is set to be an important way to link two of humanity's greatest challenges: beating poverty and safeguarding the environment.

"(Farming) has the potential to degrade the Earth's land, water, atmosphere and biological resources -- or to enhance them -- depending on the decisions made by the more than 2 billion people whose livelihoods depend directly on crops, livestock, fisheries or forests," said FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf.

"Ensuring appropriate incentives for these people is essential," he said in his foreword to the agency's annual report "The State of Food and Agriculture" which focused on environmental payments.

The FAO points out that many governments already subsidise farming, but rarely do so to protect the environment.

"Current incentives tend to favour the production of food, fibre, and increasingly, biofuels, but they typically undervalue other beneficial services that farmers can provide," it said.

The report concentrates on three particular "services": the storage of carbon dioxide in plants and soil which can help slow global warming; water provision from flood prevention and water filtration through roots and soil; and nature conservation.

One of the first such payment schemes was the Conservation Reserve Program, a 1985 programme to pay US farmers to retire crop land from farming for 10-15 years. The report says hundreds of schemes now exist in rich and poor countries, mostly in the forest management sector.

As deforestation is estimated to produce at least 18 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, a potentially huge growth area would be in paying poorer countries not to chop down their forests.

That option is now allowed only to a limited extent by the Kyoto Protocol, but countries meeting in Indonesia in December to discuss global climate change initiatives for after 2012 will consider whether it should be expanded.

Environmental payments to farmers do not have to be linked to them stopping farming, but can be an incentive to make it less damaging, such as encouraging "shade-grown" coffee rather than intensive production where forest canopies are destroyed.

The report stresses the drawbacks as well as potential benefits of environmental payment schemes, for example the risk that they may reduce food output for hungry populations.

"The impact of a PES (payment for environmental services) approach on the poor is highly dependent on who holds the rights to use resources," the report says -- noting the risk that such schemes might benefit relatively wealthy landowners more often than the extremely poor who own nothing. (Reporting by Robin Pomeroy, editing by Philippa Fletcher)

FAO report urges paying poor farmers to be green
Yahoo News 15 Nov 07

The UN food agency called Thursday for cash payments for poor farmers to encourage them to become eco-friendly.

"Modern agriculture provides ever growing quantities of agricultural, fisheries and forestry products, feeding today six billion people," FAO chief Jacques Diouf told a news conference launching the agency's 2007 report on the state of food and agriculture in the world.

But this progress "has often come at the expense of the climate, water and biodiversity," added the head of the Food and Agriculture Organisation, which is based in Rome.

The report urges "incentive measures to ensure that farmers consider the impact of their production decisions on the environment," Diouf said.

He urged that such schemes "contribute to the fight against hunger and poverty by encouraging poor farmers to participate in them and benefit from the payments."

Compensating farmers for eco-friendly practices "is a new policy approach that is generating growing interest among policy makers, NGOs (non-governmental organisations) and private decision makers," he said.

The approach is "only one policy tool among others for addressing environmental problems," Diouf said, but in combination with other policies it "can be a promising instrument for strengthening the role of farmers in sustaining ecosystems."

Prabhu Pingali, head of the FAO's agricultural development division, cited an example in New York, where 10 years ago surrounding farms polluted the water supply.

"Instead of installing lots of powerful filters, the city decided to compensate farmers for cutting down on the pollution they were causing," he said.

In the foreword to the report titled "Paying Farmers to Protect the Environment," Diouf wrote: "Poverty reduction, food security and environmental sustainability have all moved to the top of a crowded international agenda. At the same time, the close relationships among poverty, hunger and ecosystem degradation are becoming ever clearer."

Links

Paying farmers to protect the environment?: FAO publishes The State of Food and Agriculture 2007 on the FAO website with links to the full report

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Boost Recycling? Try a Little Persuasion

Peter Griffiths, PlanetArk 16 Nov 07

LONDON - How do you persuade people to reuse their hotel towels, recycle more rubbish and protect the countryside when they go for a walk?

Rather than relying on dire environmental warnings, one author and academic thinks the answer lies in understanding the subtle social pressures that influence behaviour.

Professor Robert Cialdini, a social psychologist at Arizona State University, says the desire to conform is so strong that people are far more likely to change their ways if they think their neighbours are doing the same.

In a new book, he argues that public appeals would be more effective if they were reworded using the sort of persuasive techniques favoured by advertisers and sales teams.

"Passing yet another law or providing yet another tax incentive or installing yet another expensive technological fix to encourage desired behaviour has its limitations," he told Reuters in London before speaking at the Royal Society of Arts.

"If we can simply communicate more effectively ... it is almost costless. It is just framing the message differently."

Persuasion, he argues, should be seen not as an art but as a science that can be measured, studied and taught.

He cites the example of an experiment to see if guests could be persuaded to reuse their towels.

Cialdini says that simply by changing a few words on a notice in each bathroom, the recycling rate rose by 26 percent.

Researchers first left signs stressing the environmental benefits of reusing towels. They then repeated the experiment with new notices saying that most people who previously stayed in that room had recycled.

By changing the wording to emphasise what other people had done, the recycling rate rose dramatically.

Cialdini, who has studied human behaviour for more than 30 years, calls this "social proof", the tendency for people to look to others for cues on how to act.

In another example, officials erected notices at the Arizona Petrified Forest National Park to try to stop visitors from stealing fossilised wood.

Researchers found that signs explaining that visitors stole 14 tons of wood each year encouraged others to also take wood.

The signs sent the message that it was normal for lots of tourists to steal wood, Cialdini says.

After conducting experiments with different signs, researchers found that theft dropped when people were simply asked not to steal. It also fell when the signs were removed.

A third study found that households cut energy consumption when told they were using more power than their neighbours.

Cialdini explains his theories in more detail in the book, "Yes! 50 Secrets from the Science of Persuasion", written with Noah Goldstein and Steve Martin, published this month.

(Editing by Steve Addison)

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Europe Can Do More to Recycle Electronic Waste: UN

Story by Alister Doyle, PlanetArk 16 Nov 07

OSLO - Europe can do far more to recycle electronic waste ranging from mobile phones to freezers since most ends up on dumps despite years of collection efforts, a UN study showed on Thursday.

"There is a lot of room for improvement even though Europe is often seen as a good example," said Ruediger Kuehr, manager of a study led by the UN University for the European Commission on how to salvage electronic and electric waste.

It said that Europe by 2011 could collect about 5.3 million tonnes of such waste, out of a projected total 9.7 million tonnes, against 2.2 million tonnes in 2005 of an 8.3 million total. Europe accounts for about a quarter of world electronic waste.

"Consumers are not aware that they are meant to return equipment and have not been informed of the environmental impact of the waste," Kuehr, based in Bonn, told Reuters. Many components are toxic.

The study said that the 27-member European Union could raise collection rates for big appliances, such as dishwashers or cookers, to 75 percent in the long term from 40 percent now.

And it could improve collection of smaller objects, such as MP3 players, hairdryers, TVs or microwaves, to 60 percent from 25 percent.

"The heart of our study is: collect more and treat it in a good environmental way," said Jaco Huisman, a lead author.

Among priorities were better collection of old fridges and freezers that release coolants when they rust that are powerful greenhouse gases that also damage the ozone layer.


TOXIC MERCURY

And an estimated 4.3 tonnes of toxic mercury was contained in 660 million energy saving light bulbs sold in the EU in 2006.

A separate US survey on Thursday showed only 23 percent of Americans recycle old or unused electronic items, according to office products group Staples, which introduced a programme in May offering to recycle any item for US$10.

In Europe, costs for collection and salvage are expected to rise but could be dampened by higher costs of salvaged metals that include traces of silver, gold and platinum. Recycling systems are in place but are not fully exploited.

"My guess is that there is no need really to increase the price" for buyers of electronic goods, Kuehl said.

The study said that collection and treatment costs were expected to rise from 0.76 billion euros (US$1.11 billion) in 2005 to 3.0 billion euros in 2020.

The study is meant to help the EU with a 2008 review of a directive that makes producers responsible for financing the collection, treatment and recovery of waste and forces distributors to let consumers return waste free of charge.

(Editing by Peter Millership)

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Hurricane Katrina Boosted Greenhouse Gases - Report

Deborah Zabarenko, PlanetArk 16 Nov 07


WASHINGTON - Hurricane Katrina left a big "carbon footprint" along the US Gulf Coast, where the destruction of large trees cut into the amount of greenhouse gases the area can absorb, researchers reported on Thursday.

The monster storm that tore across Louisiana and Mississippi in 2005 killed or severely damaged approximately 320 million big trees, the scientists wrote in the journal Science.

Trees, like other vegetation, soak up carbon dioxide, a potent global-warming gas, creating what climate scientists call a carbon sink. In a carbon sink, the carbon stays locked up in living trees instead of being released into the atmosphere to create greenhouse warming.

But when trees die, they stop taking in carbon dioxide and the process of decay starts emitting this gas, and that is what happened after Katrina roared through, said Jeffrey Q. Chambers of Tulane University.

All those dead and damaged trees that had been reducing carbon emissions suddenly became emitters. Altogether, they gave off about 100 million tons of carbon, enough to offset the total amount of carbon that forest trees in the United States suck up in a year.

"It was astonishing that a single storm could be of that magnitude," Chambers said by telephone from Manaus, Brazil, where he was doing field work.

A carbon footprint is a measure of the impact that activities have on the environment in terms of the amount of greenhouse gases produced, measured in units of carbon dioxide.

Compared with total carbon emissions from fossil fuel burning, emissions from the Katrina-ravaged forests are a tiny fraction, he said.

To figure out how many trees were hit by the big storm, Chambers and his colleagues reviewed satellite images of the area from 2003 and compared them with images from 2006. The research was published in the current edition of the journal Science.

He noted that some climate scientists, including most of those on the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, have predicted a greater number of powerful storms as the planet warms. If this is the case, the dead-tree effect could add another dimension to storm disasters.

And while the impact of one storm, even one as strong as Katrina, is small by comparison with other sources of greenhouse emissions, the impact could climb if more storms each year are intense, he said.

"What if you look at a year when you've got 25 big tropical cyclones all over the world?" Chamber said. "It starts adding up."

320 Million Trees Lost to Katrina, Fuels Global Warming
Andrea Thompson, LiveScience.com Yahoo News 15 Nov 07;

Major hurricanes may not only be fueled by global warming, they may also contribute to it, according to a new study that puts the Hurricane Katrina death toll for trees at 320 million.

Recent research suggests that in our warming world, devastating hurricanes, like Katrina, may become more common. The new study, detailed in the Nov. 16 issue of the journal Science, adds another element to this dilemma, suggesting that the damage these hurricanes cause may actually fuel global warming due to the loss of carbon-consuming trees.

Tulane University researchers estimated the number of trees felled by Katrina using satellite imagery taken before and after the storm. Forest trees act as a carbon sink, sucking up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to provide themselves with food. Carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, is the major driver of global warming.

When trees are destroyed, they decay, returning the carbon stored inside them to the atmosphere.

The total amount of biomass lost by the destruction of the trees lost during Katrina was about 105 teragrams of carbon (for comparison, the Great Pyramid of Giza weighs 6 teragrams), or at least half of the net annual carbon sink in U.S. forest trees.

Trees accumulate carbon as they grow, year by year, storing that carbon as their wood and leaves. But when they die, fungi, bacteria, termites and other decomposers consume that biomass and release all the carbon that the tree has accumulated over its lifetime. So when a huge number of trees are killed off by an event like Katrina, they become a carbon source, releasing anywhere from half to 140 percent of the carbon that all the trees in the United States take up in a year.

While it will take a number of decades for all of the carbon from the lost Katrina trees to be released, that is still less time than it took to build up the biomass of the forest into a carbon sink, said study leader Jeffrey Chambers.

While these lost trees will eventually be replaced by other vegetation, it will be younger and smaller and therefore a smaller carbon sink than the Gulf Coast forests once were.

If hurricanes and other forces of disturbance become more frequent in the future, forests may never have a chance to fully recover, the researchers say, permanently eliminating the carbon-sink work they do and allowing all that previously stored carbon to stay in the atmosphere.

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Robot science turns to nature for inspiration

Julie Steenhuysen, Yahoo News 15 Nov 07;

To build a better robot, scientists increasingly are looking to nature, making robots that move and interact socially with cockroaches, slither like a salamander and even learn and make decisions like humans.

The new designs, reported on Thursday in the journal Science, suggest that robot science is finally catching up with science fiction.

One team of European researchers led by Jose Halloy of the University Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium, created cockroach-sized robots that interacted with their living counterparts.

While they did not look like cockroaches, they were coated with chemicals to make them smell like cockroaches.

And they behaved like robots, so much so that they influenced their roach clan into making a bad choice of shelter, choosing a light shelter rather than a darker one.

"What is new here is that the robot is autonomous, it is not remote-controlled by humans, and it acts at the social level in a group living insects," Halloy said in an e-mail.

By changing some parameters, the robotic cockroaches infiltrated the group and influenced its behavior.

"We see them as a tool to explore decision-making mechanisms in group-living animals," Halloy said.

ROBOTS WITH BRAINS

The study is part of a bigger effort to create robots that can respond flexibly to changes in the environment.

Gerald Edelman of the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, California, has spent the past 20 years working on brain-based devices that simulate the activity of the human brain.

"Of course, the number of neurons and synapses is much smaller. But if you do the thing right, it actually does function for sophisticated purposes, such as perception and episodic memory," Edelman said in a telephone interview.

Because the brain learns by interacting with the environment, building a robot that can learn must incorporate this process. "It's not a brain in a vat. It's the interaction of the body and the environment that counts," he said.

Edelman, writing in Science, describes Darwin VII, a brain-based robot fitted with a video camera for vision, microphones for hearing and a gripper device that can sense how well different steel blocks conduct electricity, a process that functions as a sense of taste.

Darwin VII could learn which blocks had a good taste -- they offered a type of reward -- and which had a bad taste, in an experiment that replicated a value system.

A subsequent version, Darwin X, learned how to find a hidden platform, replicating a common rat study in which they must find a submerged platform in a maze of milky fluid.

In this case, Darwin's infrared detector sent a reward signal each time it passed over the platform. After training, Darwin could go to the platform from any point in the maze.

Edelman said this process can be studied to understand how the brain learns.

In a review of biologically inspired devices, Rolf Pfeifer of the University of Zurich describes robot insects, spiders, snakes, lobsters, dogs, monkeys and humans.

Such robots, Pfeifer suggests, offer the opportunity to study different patterns of movement, locomotion, navigation, orientation, manipulation, imitation and cooperation.

Ultimately, he wrote, these might result in machines that are "adaptable, robust, versatile and agile."

"Exciting times are ahead of us," he wrote.

(Editing by Maggie Fox and Sandra Maler)

Scientists use robotic bugs to change cockroach behavior
Yahoo News 16 Nov 07

Roach-sized robots that scientists introduced into real roach colonies were able to change the bugs' group behavior, a study released Thursday found.

"While this kind of behavior has been seen in groups of living animals ranging from insects to vertebrates, this study shows that autonomous robots can be used to study and control group behavior," said Jose Halloy and colleagues in the study published in the November 16 issue of Science.

Halloy, of the Universite Libre de Bruxelles, and his co-authors used robots similar to cockroaches in size but not shape, and which were coated to mimic a natural cockroach exterior cuticle.

They introduced the minority robots which, with the majority cockroaches, together determined the choice of shelter.

The scientists said robots controlled the collective decision-making process and yielded a behavior -- the choice of an inappropriate shelter -- not observed in groups of cockroaches alone.

"These results demonstrate the possibility of using intelligent autonomous devices to study and control self-organized behavioral patterns in group-living animals," Halloy and co-authors added.


Robo-Roaches Can Control Insect Groups
Susan Brown, National Geographic News 15 Nov 07;

Cockroaches will often choose shelter unwisely when under the influence of robots, a new study shows.

Usually when the creepy crawlers are let loose in a brightly lit area, they gather under the darkest shade they can find.

"Nice means dark, for a cockroach," said lead study author Jose Halloy, a social ecologist at the Free University of Brussels in Belgium. "They look for shadows."

But when the bugs were joined by tiny robots designed to smell and behave like roaches, the machines were able to control the insects' behavior.

If the robots lingered beneath a less desirable, more brightly lit shelter, for example, the cockroaches did too—a choice they rarely made when the robots weren't around.

The findings show that such robots can influence group behavior in animals, the authors report in this week's issue of the journal Science.

This means that the tiny machines could be valuable tools in helping to understand how animals that move in swarms make collective decisions.

Scent of a Cockroach

The robots used for the experiment were about the same size as cockroaches, but they looked more like toy cars than insects.

Although cockroaches perceive light levels well, they don't recognize each other by sight, Halloy said. Instead, they rely on smell.

So Halloy and his colleagues dressed the little robots with cockroach-scented paper.

The team then programmed the robots to behave according to a simple set of rules derived from watching groups of cockroaches crawling around a test arena.

Based on their observations, the team figured out that the bugs wander randomly.

If roaches stumble into darkness, they take a break. If a few other cockroaches are nearby under this shelter, they rest longer.

Following these rules, most of the cockroaches eventually assemble under a single shelter, even if another identical shelter is available.

If one shelter casts darker shade than another, the insects gather in the darkest one most of the time.

Initially the researchers had the robots follow these observed rules, so that the bots and the bugs both wound up under the darkest shade in most cases.

For the final round of tests, the team released groups of 12 cockroaches and four robots into an arena with two shades, one darker than the other.

But this time the team programmed the machines to pause beneath the brighter of the two shelters.

Under the influence of the robots, the cockroaches gathered under the brighter shelter more than twice as often as they did when the robots followed regular cockroach rules.

"It's an interesting piece of work," said Ronald Arkin, who studies robot swarms at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.

"They have influenced gregarious animals to change their behavior in ways consistent with the [robot] designers' intent."

Robot Ethics

Halloy and his group will next try to get hatchling chicks to accept a robot as their leader by taking advantage of their inclination to bond with moving objects.

If that works, the researchers will watch to see how the relationship between animal and machine develops.

Halloy noted that has no plans to design robots to interact with humans.

"I must confess that we are not interested in human behavior," he said.

But other experts are, and they say that experiments like Halloy's raise the question of whether robots could be designed to alter the ways humans interact.

Once humans begin interacting with robots more, they may influence us in ways we're not aware of, said Georgia Tech's Arkin, who also co-chairs an international committee that is encouraging discussion about robot ethics.

"We have to think about those issues especially when dealing with human involvement," Arkin said.

"Cockroaches I'm much less concerned about."

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OPEC wins praise for global warming stance

Adam Plowright, Yahoo News 15 Nov 07;

OPEC, the cartel that pumps 40 percent of world oil, won praise on Thursday for tackling the subject of global warming at its summit here, a problem it is more usually accused of exacerbating.

The 12-member Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries has made "protecting the planet" one of three headline issues at a meeting of leaders in the Saudi capital.

"I think the debate here points to a constructive willingness to participate in international dialogue about climate change," the UN's top climate change official Yvo de Boer told a press conference.

De Boer, who took part in a debate about energy and the environment, said that OPEC had shown "recognition that oil is a major contributor to the greenhouse effect, but also a willingness to talk about how oil can be produced and brought to market in a cleaner way."

The summit, only the third in the organisation's 47-year history, is to tackle the themes of "providing petroleum, promoting prosperity and protecting the planet."

Saudi Oil Minister Ali al-Nuaimi, who chaired the debate with de Boer, the executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), said the host country was concerned and ready to act.

"We (Saudi Arabia) are willing to participate with others to help in reducing world emissions because like the rest of the world we are concerned about the environment," he said.

Leaders of the 12 member countries of OPEC plus the president of Ecuador, who is expected to seal his country's return to the organisation, are to arrive in Riyadh on Saturday for two days of talks.

On Thursday and Friday, oil ministers and delegates were discussing the future of the oil industry.

Daniel Yergin, chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates and author of a best-selling book on the history of the oil industry, said the emphasis on the environment was "striking."

"This (the OPEC summit) is now part of a global dialogue looking beyond the identification of the issue (of climate change) and looking for solutions," he told AFP.

"Ultimately the answer is going to be finding the technology (to reduce emissions). It is clear they'll (OPEC) take part in it."

The leaders are expected to issue a joint communique at the end of their meeting, which OPEC Secretary General Abdullah al-Badri said would discuss the environment.

De Boer urged them to pledge to invest in carbon storage and sequestration (CSS), a nascent technology to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and he promoted an idea to set up a joint investment fund with money from OPEC producers, industrialised nations and developing countries.

A commitment to look at investing in CSS would be "very constructive outcome of the deliberations at the heads of state level," he said.

CSS, with which oil producer Norway, a non-OPEC member, is leading the way, consists of trapping carbon dioxide and storing it long-term underground.

"I think we are going to see a lot of money and funds being very focused on innovation technology (and) a wave of innovation building up," said Yergin.

Other ways oil producers can improve their environmental record include stopping a practice known as flaring, the burning of natural gas extracted from oilfields.

Many producers, including OPEC members Algeria, Angola, Indonesia and Nigeria, have signed up to a voluntary initiative known as the Global Gas Flaring Reduction programme.

Badri, who will travel to Bali for a crucial international meeting on climate change next month, stressed that extracting oil created a relatively small proportion of global emissions -- a position backed by de Boer.

"The part of producing oil (in greenhouse gas emissions) is not that high, the cost of consuming oil is," he said.

"(CSS) needs a lot of money, investment and research. Developed countries have the technology to take the lead."

OPEC Willing to Help Fund Climate Change Battle
Andrew Hammond and Alex Lawler, PlanetArk 16 Nov 07

RIYADH - OPEC is concerned about climate change and is willing to help develop ways to cut emissions such as carbon capture and storage (CCS), officials said on Thursday at a summit of the exporter group.

The group's Secretary General, Abdullah al-Badri, said carbon capture could be a solution and that OPEC would be willing to play its part to develop the technology alongside developed countries.

"This needs a lot of money, this needs a lot of research," Badri told reporters ahead of an OPEC heads of state summit on Nov. 17-18.

"Developed countries have the financial backup, they have the technological backup to take the lead. Also, we will try to contribute."

One idea floated in forums ahead of the summit was for OPEC, industrial nations and developing countries to each stump up US$1 billion to research CCS, a leading UN climate change official said earlier on Thursday.

"I'd be interested to see when the OPEC heads of state meet over the weekend, whether that's an idea that they pick up on," said Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

"If oil producing countries put the first dollar bill on the table then, to my mind, that makes it impossible for rich oil consuming countries to then not put another one next to it."

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries includes many of the world's top oil producers, whose economies are booming as prices hit record highs.


NOT A WAR ON OIL

Harmful emissions could be reduced if the carbon can be captured and stored, for example in depleted oilfields.

A UN study said CCS may be one of the best ways to cut emissions of man-made heat-trapping gasses blamed for global warming, but development has been slowed by high costs and legal and safety risks.

Environmentalists and other critics have said development has lacked urgency so far.

De Boer urged OPEC to take climate change seriously at its summit, ahead of a key meeting to tackle global warming in Bali next month.

"I encourage OPEC to contribute to climate change abatement and to play an important role in history to drive forward sound solutions to a global problem," he said.

"International action on climate change is a war against emissions, not a war against oil."

Adnan Shihab Eldin, a former head of research at OPEC's headquarters in Vienna, said CCS technology would be a winner for OPEC, the source of more than a third of the world's oil.

"OPEC stands to gain from a more proactive role to encourage accelerated development of CCS," he told a forum.

De Boer said December's UN climate change conference in Bali, where negotiations on a new international climate change regime are to be launched, will be a make-or-break point for international efforts to stop the planet heating up.

"If things go wrong in Bali then we really are in deep trouble. If you get a wake-up call from science now and don't act on it, then that means you are in trouble."

"There are strong signals that countries are willing to advance negotiations in Bali and come to a negotiating agenda." (Additional reporting by Alister Doyle, editing by Anthony Barker)

OPEC Must Tackle Climate Change - UN Official
Andrew Hammond, PlanetArk 16 Nov 07

RIYADH - OPEC oil exporters must take climate change seriously at their summit meeting this week, ahead of a key meeting to tackle global warming in Bali next month, a leading UN climate change official said on Thursday.


Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, told an OPEC forum in the Saudi capital he hoped the exporter group's leaders would discuss proposals for funding research into reducing levels of carbon in the atmosphere.

"I encourage OPEC to contribute to climate change abatement and to play an important role in history to drive forward sound solutions to a global problem," he said.

"They should continue to take climate change seriously," he said, speaking of heads of state from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, who are due to meet in Riyadh on Saturday and Sunday.

"International action on climate change is a war against emissions, not a war against oil."

OPEC includes many of the world's top oil producers, whose economies are booming as energy prices soar to record levels.

De Boer told reporters one idea floated in forums ahead of the summit was for OPEC, industrial nations and developing countries to each stump up US$1 billion to research carbon dioxide capture and storage -- removing gases from the atmosphere.

"I'd be interested to see when the OPEC heads of state meet over the weekend, whether that's an idea that they pick up on," he said.


FIRST DOLLAR BILL

"If oil producing countries put first dollar bill on the table then, to my mind, that makes it impossible for rich oil consuming countries to then not put another one next to it."

He said OPEC was looking to new technologies to help curb greenhouse gas emissions from oil: "They have rightly continued to focus on the idea that it's about addressing climate change and not about stigmatising particular fuels."

De Boer said December's UN climate change conference in Bali, where negotiations on a new international climate change regime are to be launched, will be a make-or-break point for international efforts to stop the planet heating up.

"If things go wrong in Bali then we really are in deep trouble. If you get a wake-up call from science now and don't act on it, then that means you are in trouble," he said, describing climate change as the most complicated issue facing the international community.

"There are strong signals that countries are willing to advance negotiations in Bali and come to a negotiating agenda."

But the UN climate chief said a solution must not cripple the developing world's economies and that nuclear energy would be key to handling the problem.

"I really feel we have to accept economic growth and the desire to eradicate poverty as a reality," he said.

"I have not seen a credible scenario to reverse climate change that doesn't involve nuclear," he said, citing the future energy needs of China and India, which each have populations of over one billion.

(Additional reporting by Alister Doyle, editing by Anthony Barker)

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Mass Wildebeest Drowning: Were Tourists to Blame?

Nicholas Wadhams, National Geographic News 15 Nov 07;

The number of wildebeest killed in a deadly pileup in Kenya's Mara River this fall has been exaggerated by conservationists and the media, officials at the Kenya Wildlife Service say.

The deaths were caused by flooding and possibly the interference of tourists who came to watch the migration, they add.

However, conservationists who witnessed the mass deaths in September say the wildlife service has it wrong and that the number of animals killed is twice the official estimate.

The first media report of the wildebeest deaths, published by National Geographic News, reported conservationists' statements that as many as 10,000 wildebeest had died when they surged into the Mara River and could not scale the steep bank on the other side.

The news report detailed the accounts of field workers with the Mara Conservancy, a nonprofit that does conservation work in Kenya's Masai Mara Reserve, who conducted counts of the carcasses (see map).

Subsequent reports in other media outlets put the death toll as high as 20,000.

But the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) says that, based on its own counts and reports from witnesses, only 5,000 animals died during the pile-up, just 2,000 more than normally die each year during the migration.

In a report titled "Unusual Wildebeest Mortality in the Mara River" and a subsequent news release, KWS suggested that the deaths received media attention because many occurred at crossing points popular with tourists.

KWS said that the river was high because of heavy rains and that waters were higher than usual because the Mau Forest upstream is no longer absorbing as much rain due to deforestation.

Once the animals began to cross, there was no turning back, the officials said.

"It's just miscalculation of a natural instinct," said Patrick Omondi, head of species conservation and management at KWS.

Tourists to Blame?

Tourists come by the thousands to witness the wildebeest's annual migration through the Mara Reserve .

KWS actively encourages tourism, and indeed the mass deaths threatened to pose a public relations problem that could drive tourists away.

But in its report, the agency says that sightseers on safari may themselves have played a role in the deaths.

Crowding caused by vehicles full of wildlife-watchers may have forced the animals from their preferred crossing point and sent them to a less auspicious spot, officials say.

"It's something the tourists do, they flock to this [crossing] point," Omondi said. "In other years they flock [to this point], then if the wildebeest move a distance of five meters from the crossing point, it makes no difference.

"But this time there was a lot of water, so that could have been one of the factors—tourists flocking and having a lot of water could have led to the extra deaths that we saw."

Conservationists who witnessed the wildebeest pileup, however, contradict KWS's account.

"There was no tourist interference that made the wildebeest cross where they did," said Terilyn Lemaire, a Mara Conservancy conservation worker who saw the event and first reported it on her blog.

"In fact, they crossed in an area that was not even viewable by vehicle and that was far from the usual crossing point, [called] Omega.

"Tourist vehicles always have the potential to interfere, but here in the Mara Triangle, the Mara Conservancy's rangers diligently ensure that tourist vehicles are constantly kept at a distance that ensures crossings are not impeded."

Lemaire added that she stands by her group's count of 10,000 dead.

Killing the Mara With Tourism?

Whether or not tourists contributed to the wildebeest deaths, the event has raised the question of how many tourists are too many in the Mara.

"[Death] is a feature of the [wildebeest] migration and a feature of huge numbers crossing at a bottleneck," said Richard Estes, a Harvard professor and one of the world's foremost researchers on wildebeest.

"This can happen without human interference, but one of the points that I think is relevant is they're killing the Mara with tourism," Estes said.

"Building more and more camps, going in more and more vehicles, [tourists and safari operators] are not being properly supervised, prevented from [doing] stupid things like blocking a crossing. It's happening more and more."

KWS says it is working to confront the growing pressures posed by tourism. The agency is in the middle of a management review to see if its current plans for the Mara are working, officials said.

"The [tourist] levels are still OK," said chief Mara warden Michael Koikai. "The problem is you have tourists concentrating in southern pressure points, and that is what's causing degradation.

"They congregate in specific areas where, for example, carnivores feed, and that is what causes animals harm and vegetation destruction."

"The problem is all minibuses are equipped with radios, and once one person sees a lion or a cheetah, they call other minibuses and all congregate at a particular point."

Nonetheless, some observers say there's no need to debate why the wildebeest died or what might be learned from the event.

The deaths, like most in the Mara, were simply an unpreventable and natural event, they say.

"There's a whole lot that die and things like this, but it shouldn't become such a big problem," said Johann du Toit, a professional safari guide.

"People are making a mountain out of an anthill. Sometimes you have a bad drought and everything dies, and sometimes you don't. It's all part of a natural cycle."

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