34-year-old engineer chosen as Singapore's happiest person

Channel NewsAsia 17 Apr 08;

SINGAPORE: A 34-year-old engineer, Andy Goh, has been chosen as Singapore's happiest person in a search that saw more than 200 people nominated.

"The idea was actually hatched by my wife and sister-in-law about three weeks ago when they first saw the article. They thought it'd be funny to put my name in, and one thing led to another," said Mr Goh.

The engineer was chosen over 207 nominees in a search by local consulting firm, Global Leadership Academy, which is preparing to organise a well-being conference.

What clinched it for Mr Goh was his attitude about the little things in life.

He said: "Happiness is not just about money and stuff. You've got to count your little blessings – health, family, friends, good support group. These are the things that I have a lot of and that makes me feel like a really happy person."

Nominees were judged based on their smile, ability to bring happiness to others and how he or she remains positive. They also need to have a strong sense of belonging to the community.

Philip Merry, Founder of Global Leadership Academy, said: "He had many, many people who actually voted for him and in terms of the characteristics we looked for, he epitomises all of those."

Along with the title of being the happiest person in Singapore, Mr Goh also won a two-night hotel stay in Phuket, Thailand.- CNA/so

The secret of being happy? It's all in the laugh
Manager's infectious cheer helps him clinch title of S'pore's Happiest Person
Hong Xinyi, Straits Times 18 Apr 08;

A 34-YEAR-OLD manager of an engineering company with a booming laugh and a love of cooking has been named Singapore's Happiest Person.

Mr Andy Goh scored that title yesterday, beating out over 200 other nominees in the first islandwide search for Singapore's jolliest resident.

Described by friends and family as a laugh riot, Mr Goh is certainly not the strong, silent type.

'Talking is underrated,' said Mr Goh, who won a two-night stay in Phuket worth over $2,000. 'I always make the effort to hang out and catch up with friends and family. They are what keep me going.'

A panel of four judges chose Mr Goh ahead of 206 other contenders, most of whom were nominated by friends and family.

The judges were looking for qualities such as a consistently cheerful disposition even in the face of adversity and an ability to bring happiness to others.

The search was run by local management consultancy Global Leadership Academy (GLA).

Mr Goh's friends and colleagues sent in a total of five nominations for him.

'There is no gathering where he is present where you do not hear the sound of his laughter,' wrote a friend in his nomination. 'It's hard to be sad with Andy present.'

Although he gets peeved when he sees 'waste and inefficiency', Mr Goh cannot really recall ever getting boiling mad.

'I usually just think about how to solve the problem instead of getting angry, which sometimes annoys my wife. She says women don't always need problems solved; they just need someone to listen to them,' he said.

Nominees for the Happiest Person title were all smiles yesterday at the Singapore Expo, where the results were announced at a conference on the science of happiness. Organised by the GLA, it saw psychologists and educators talking about issues such as making workplaces and classrooms more positive environments.

Coming in second in the Happiest Person contest was Mr Ng Chai Lee, 61, a polyclinic records searcher. Ms Zaibun Siraj, 61, a polytechnic consultant, and Ms Stella Fernandez, 43, a hospital porter, tied for third.

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Swedish researchers find world's oldest living tree

Yahoo News 17 Apr 08;

The world's oldest living tree on record is a nearly 10,000 year-old spruce that has been discovered in central Sweden, Umeaa University said on Thursday.

Researchers had discovered a spruce with genetic material dating back 9,550 years in the Fulu mountain in Dalarna, according to Leif Kullmann, a professor of Physical Geography at the university in northwestern Sweden.

That would mean it had taken root in roughly the year 7,542 BC.

"It was a big surprise because we thought until (now) that this kind of spruce grew much later in those regions," he said.

Scientists had previously believed the world's oldest trees were 4,000 to 5,000 year-old pine trees found in North America.

The new record-breaking tree was discovered in Dalarna in 2004 when Swedish researchers were carrying out a census of tree species in the region, Kullman said.

The tree's genetic material age had been calculated using carbon dating at a laboratory in Miami, Florida.

Spruces, which according to Kullmann offer rich insight into climate change, had long been regarded as relatively newcomers in the Swedish mountain region.

The discovery of the ancient tree had therefore led to "a big change in our way of thinking," he said.

World's oldest tree discovered in Sweden
Roger Highfield, Science Editor The Telegraph 17 Apr 08;

The world's oldest tree has been found in Sweden, a tenacious spruce that first took root just after the end of the last ice age, more than 9,500 years ago.

The tree has rewritten the history of the climate in the region, revealing that it was much warmer at that time and the ice had disappeared earlier than thought.

Previously, pine trees in North America were thought to be the oldest, at around 5,000 years old.

But Swedish scientists report that in the mountains, from Lapland in the north to Dalarna in central Sweden, there are much more ancient spruce trees (Picea abies).

Prof Leif Kullman at Umeå University and colleagues found a cluster of around 20 spruces that are over 8,000 years old.

The oldest tree, in Fulu Mountain, Dalarna (“the dales”), was dated by carbon dating at a laboratory in Miami, Florida to 9,550 years old and underneath the crown in the soil there were another three generations of wood from the same clone, dating 375, 5,660 and 9,000 years old that have the same genetic makeup.

The clones take root each winter as snow pushes low lying branches of the mother tree down to ground level, explains Prof Kullman.

“A new erect stem emerges, and it may lose contact with the mother tree over time.”

The trunks of the mother tree would survive only around 600 years but the trees are able to grow a new one, he adds.

The finding is surprising because the spruce tree has been regarded as a relative newcomer in the Swedish mountain region and is thought to have originated 600 miles away in the east.

"Our results migration in the complete opposite direction has be considered, because the spruce is one of the oldest known trees in the mountain range,” says Prof Kullman.

Ten millennia ago, a spruce would have been extremely rare and it is conceivable that the ancient humans who lived there imported the tree, he says.

“Man immigrated close to the receding ice front. We have also found fossil acorns in this area, and people may have taken them with them as they moved over the landscape.”

It had been thought that this region was still in the grip of the ice age but the tree shows it was much warmer, even than today, he says.

“Spruces are the species that can best give us insight about climate change,” he says.

The summers 9,500 years ago were warmer than today, though there has been a rapid recent rise as a result of climate change that means modern climate is rapidly catching up.

The tree probably survived as a result of several factors: the generally cold and dry climate, few forest fires and relatively few humans.

Today, however, the nature conservancy authorities are considering putting a fence around the record breaking tree to protect it from trophy hunters.

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Gorilla Vaccine Urgently Needed

Clara Moskowitz, LiveScience.com Yahoo News 17 Apr 08;

NEW YORK - If the usual threats of poaching and habitat loss weren't enough, gorillas face the added danger of a deadly disease that has been surging through their ranks. The highly-infectious Ebola virus has decimated huge swaths of the already diminished western lowland gorilla population. Scientists are in a race against time to protect these animals from the disease.

Western lowland gorillas are the most common type of gorilla, but there are probably only between 50,000 and 100,000 left in the wild, all of them in the forests of the Congo basin in central Africa. All other types of gorilla, including the cross river gorilla, the mountain gorilla, and the eastern lowland gorilla, total only a few thousand, and are also found in Africa.

Over the past 20 to 25 years, hunting and disease alone have reduced the numbers of western lowland gorilla by 60 percent, according to the World Conservation Union (IUCN).

"Throughout their range the great apes in central Africa are being hammered by those triple threats: loss of habitat, hunting for the bush meat trade, and disease," said Kenneth Cameron, a field veterinarian with the Wildlife Conservation Society in the Republic of the Congo, at the Gateways to Conservation 2008: The State of the Wild conference here this week. "At their current rate of population decline, we stand to lose 80 percent of the population of [the western lowland gorilla] over the next ten years."

Because of the decimation Ebola has caused, the IUCN elevated the status of the western gorilla from endangered to critically endangered in September 2007.

Scientists say their only chance to save the species is to combat Ebola, which kills about 95 percent of the gorillas it infects. The virus causes massive internal bleeding in its victims, and has no known cure.

There is hope, however, of a vaccination.

"These animals obviously need help," Cameron said. "And were hoping that being able to vaccinate them against one of their major threats will be something that is possible, but it is too early to tell. We don't know for sure that it's going to work, but we do feel we need to try."

Scientists hope to use a vaccine that's been developed for humans on the animals, which share many of our genes.

Even if researchers find the vaccine effective in preliminary trials, it will be tough to vaccinate enough gorillas to make a difference. The gorillas are spread out throughout the Republic of Congo, Gaban, Cameroon, and the Central African Republic, and they are notoriously difficult to find. For those reasons, shooting large numbers of them with dart injections of the vaccine could be a challenge. But if scientists try to hide oral vaccines in some of their favorite fruits, individuals could hoard them or other animals may get to them first.

"I think we're going to be able to protect particular populations, but not every gorilla," said William Karesh, the vice president and director of wildlife health services at the Wildlife Conservation Society. "The urgent thing is to make sure we get some animals protected. That might buy us time to figure out some other strategies and mechanisms to protect them from going extinct."

The roughly 400 western lowland gorillas in captivity around the world are doing fine, Karesh said, so the species will likely survive in zoos at least.

"We're just concerned about them going extinct in the wild," he said. "They play an important role in the ecology of the forest. They distribute the seeds of the trees - they're basically gardening the forest. That will all change if they're gone."

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Bad policy, not biofuel, drive food prices: Merkel

Reuters 17 Apr 08;

BERLIN (Reuters) - Bad agricultural policies and changing eating habits in developing nations are primarily to blame for rising food prices, not biofuel production as some critics claim, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Thursday.

Environmentalists and humanitarian groups have stepped up campaigning against biofuels, arguing they divert production away from food and animal feed while contributing to sharp rises in the price of cereals and milk products.

But Merkel, whose country is Europe's largest biofuel producer, said the rise in food prices was not mainly due to biofuels but to "inadequate agricultural policies in developing countries" as well as "insufficient forecasts of changes in nutritional habits" in emerging markets.

"If you travel to India these days, then a main part of the debate is about the 'second meal'," Merkel said.

"People are eating twice a day, and if a third of one billion people in India do that, it adds up to 300 million people. That's a large part of the European Union," she said.

"And if they suddenly consume twice as much food as before and if 100 million Chinese start drinking milk too, then of course our milk quotas become skewed, and much else too," she said referring to EU limits on dairy production.

Biofuels, which are seen by supporters as a way to increase energy security and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, are made mainly from food crops such as grains, oilseeds and sugar.

Critics argue there are few, if any, environmental benefits for so-called first generation biofuels. They have also been blamed for increasing grain demand and pushing up prices at a time of growing threat of famine in some parts of the world.

The FAO and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) have said biofuels were "one of the main drivers" for forecasts of food price increases of 20 percent to 50 percent by 2016.

(Reporting by Gernot Heller, editing by Kerstin Gehmlich and Mary Gabriel)

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Wild fires likely to spread due to global warming

Sylvia Westall, Reuters 17 Apr 08;

VIENNA (Reuters) - Wild fires are likely to be bigger, more frequent and burn for longer as the world gets hotter, in turn speeding up global warming to create a dangerous vicious circle, scientists say.

The process is being studied as part of work to develop a detailed map of global fire patterns which will be used with climate models to predict future fire trends.

The scientists told a geoscience conference in Vienna they already predict fires will increase and could spread to previously fire-free parts of the world as the climate changes.

"An increase in fire may be the greatest early impact of climate change on forests," Brian Amiro from the University of Manitoba said late on Wednesday.

"Our forests are more likely to become a victim of climate change than a savior," he added.

Last year more than 200 wild fires swept across parts of southeastern Europe, destroying homes and devouring woodland. In Greece 65 people died.

Amiro said global warming will cause more fires which as they burn contribute to global warming by producing greenhouse gases.

"Fire avoids environmental extremes, like the deserts, tundra and rainforests," said Max Moritz from the University of California, Berkley.

"But there are some predictions which show there could be fires in deserts and there are worries they may occur in tropical rainforests if they were drier," he said.

Forests are natural carbon stores, some built up over millions of years, but as they burn they release the carbon quickly in the form of carbon dioxide.

Scientists already estimate that Canadian wild fires will double in area by the end of the century and that the fire season will be longer.

(Editing by Matthew Jones)

Mediterranean forest fires set to become 'norm': green group
Yahoo News 17 Apr 08;

Greece's lethal forest fires of last year are set to become the norm across the Mediterranean thanks to climate change, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) warned Thursday.

Nearly 70 people were killed and 150,000 hectares (370,000 acres) of forest burnt to the ground in last August's fires, which were exacerbated by failings in the Greek firefighting emergency services.

"The most immediate and obvious repercussion of climate change for the Mediterranean forests is an increase in fires, which will also become more intense and widespread," a regional official from the WWF, Nora Berahmouni, said at an Athens conference.

The meeting of more than 30 experts on the subject agreed unanimously that higher temperatures, prolonged droughts and fierce storms would leave the forests more combustible.

Berahmouni called for action before it was too late to halt a "vicious circle" where less forest coverage due to climate change risks exacerbating the effects of global warming.

"Protecting forests must also now mean allowing them to adapt to global warming," said Greek forester Aristotle Papageorgiou, pleading for both more money and a root-and-branch reorganisation of the entire system of fighting forest fires.

Serious failings in the Greek system were blamed for not extinguishing the fires sooner, although a dry winter and a succession of heatwaves were contributing factors.

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Philippines population climbs, food problems loom

Raju Gopalakrishnan, Reuters 17 Apr 08;

MANILA (Reuters) - The Philippines' population has grown over two percent each year since 2000, the government said on Thursday, but experts said Asia's biggest Catholic nation was unlikely to change policies to slow the increase.

The country has one of the highest population growth rates in the region, with at least three babies born every minute. Its population reached 88.57 million at a census in August last year, up from 76.5 million in 2000, the government said on Thursday.

The figures come as the government grapples with soaring prices of rice, due at least partly to the inability of the country to grow enough of the staple to feed its rapidly growing population.

As a measure of the seriousness of the problem, Manila has temporarily halted conversion of agricultural land for property development, hoping to ring-fence paddy fields to meet the food needs of the country.

Soldiers armed with M-16 automatic rifles guard the sale of subsidized rice and hoarders are being prosecuted.

The country's top economic planner said population control policies needed to be reviewed, but promoting artificial birth control, anathema to the Church, is not a likely option.

"The population is increasing and it means that government has to more vigorously implement its population policy, which is responsible parenthood and the advocacy for natural family planning," Economic Planning Secretary Augusto Santos told Reuters. "I think the population commission will have to review its policies," he added. "We really need greater efforts. It means we have to work harder to make the economy function more properly and more smoothly."

At least one-third of the country's population are poor and the number of poor is growing faster than the population.

Last month, government data showed that 28 million people were subsisting on less than $1 per day in 2006, up 16 percent from 2003.

But Santos said artificial birth control remained a sensitive issue.

In a nod to the Church, the government emphasizes natural family planning over artificial methods, and experts said there was not likely to be any change in this in the immediate future.

President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, who came to power in 2001 with the backing of the Church, has consistently emphasized natural family planning. Government booklets on responsible parenting make no mention of condoms, pills or intrauterine devices.

MADE IT CLEAR

"She has made it very clear she will not purchase contraceptives, she will not promote any other method except what the Church approves and she has very strong links with the most conservative elements of the Church," said Alberto Romualdez, a former health secretary.

Still, the National Statistics Office said the annual population growth rate was 2.04 percent between 2000 and 2007.

Although that fell short of the aim of bringing the growth rate below 2 percent, it was a drop from the average annual growth of 2.34 percent between 1990 and 2000, officials said.

Romualdez said it was not good enough.

"For me, 2.04 percent is well within the normal variation of population growth rates with or without intervention by government. For me, 2.04 means that the government has not done anything."

Other experts, however, said it was a beginning.

"I think it is a significant drop," said Benjamin de Leon, President of the Forum for Family Planning and Development Inc. "But I still have to see in this administration a policy that informs people of the need to space their children, the need to plan their families."

According to the United Nations Population Fund, the average population growth rate in Asia is 1.1 percent.

Solita Monsod, professor of economics at the University of the Philippines, said the problem did not lie with the Church.

She said most Filipinos wanted to regulate their families and providing access to information and funding for civil service groups involved in family planning was key.

"Survey after survey has shown that when it comes to family planning, the Church does not make a difference," Monsod said. "The people don't have access. Give them what they want and then the population problem will take care of itself."

(Additional reporting by Karen Lema; Editing by Valerie Lee)

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China says farmland down close to 'critical' level

Yahoo News 17 Apr 08;

The amount of farmland in China shrank closer to critical levels last year, state press reported Thursday, amid concerns in the world's most populous country over how to contain food costs.

The rush in modern China to turn traditional farming areas into industrial zones or residential areas for expanding cities was again one of the factors behind the decline in 2007, the China Daily said, citing the land ministry.

However, the ministry said the pace of decline was slower than in previous years thanks to government efforts to curb the problem, such as cracking down on illegal land grabs by developers and local officials.

Last year, the amount of arable land fell by 40,700 hectares (100,500 acres) to 121.73 million hectares, according to the ministry.

The government has for many years warned of a critical situation when the amount of farming land fell to 120 million hectares, and it is now trying to devise ways to use what is left more efficiently.

"The aim of the plan is to better protect the limited arable land and make more efficient use of areas designated for development," the head of the ministry's planning commission, Hu Cunzhi, was quoted as saying.

Hu said 120 million hectares would continue to be regarded as the critical level, unless there was a "biological revolution" that boosted farm yields.

Declining farmland has coincided with a sharp increase in food prices in China over the past year, which has been one of the main factors behind soaring inflation.

The government said on Wednesday that food prices jumped 21 percent in the first quarter of this year, with overall inflation at 8.0 percent.

In a cabinet meeting on the same day, Chinese Premier Wen Jiaobao called for stronger efforts to rein in soaring food prices, state press reported on Thursday.

Wen said more must be done to boost the nation's farm output and warned often disobedient local governments that they must more closely follow the economic directives of the central authorities in Beijing.

"The most prominent problem in the domestic economy is that prices are still running at high levels," Wen said.

"Curbing price rises... should be put into an even more outstanding position."

Wen said boosting agricultural and grain production was one of the most pressing priorities, but did not give specifics on how this would be done.

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Australian state to ban plastic bags

Yahoo News 17 Apr 08;

South Australia state said Thursday it would ban plastic bags from next year after a meeting of environment ministers failed to agree on a national programme to address the issue.

The state announced it would go it alone after federal Environment Minister Peter Garrett ruled out imposing a levy on plastic bags and set up a working group on the matter instead.

"After six years ... we're still unable to come to a nationally consistent approach," state environment minister Gail Gogo said.

"But South Australia can hold its head high. We will bring about a ban."

The federal government in Canberra announced in January that it hoped to phase out plastic bags from shopping centres by the end of the year.

It has not said how it will do that, and Garrett on Thursday reiterated the government's opposition to a levy.

"But we do want to see increased action to reduce plastic bag use in the community," Garrett told reporters.

"We've identified the need for an urgent working group to be established between government and industry to look at making sure retailers are exploring all the options."

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Extinct Javan elephants may have been found again - in Borneo

WWF website 17 Apr 08;

Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia: The Borneo pygmy elephant may not be native to Borneo after all. Instead, the population could be the last survivors of the Javan elephant race – accidentally saved from extinction by the Sultan of Sulu centuries ago, a new publication suggests.

The origins of the pygmy elephants, found in a range extending from the north-east of the island into the Heart of Borneo, have long been shrouded in mystery. Their looks and behaviour differ from other Asian elephants and scientists have questioned why they never dispersed to other parts of the island.

But a new paper published today supports a long-held local belief that the elephants were brought to Borneo centuries ago by the Sultan of Sulu, now in the Philippines, and later abandoned in the jungle. The Sulu elephants, in turn, are thought to have originated in Java.

Javan elephants became extinct some time in the period after Europeans arrived in South-East Asia. Elephants on Sulu, never considered native to the island, were hunted out in the 1800s.

“Elephants were shipped from place to place across Asia many hundreds of years ago, usually as gifts between rulers,” said Mr Shim Phyau Soon, a retired Malaysian forester whose ideas on the origins of the elephants partly inspired the current research. “It’s exciting to consider that the forest-dwelling Borneo elephants may be the last vestiges of a subspecies that went extinct on its native Java Island, in Indonesia, centuries ago.”

If the Borneo pygmy elephants are in fact elephants from Java, an island more than 1,200 km (800 miles) south of their current range, it could be the first known elephant translocation in history that has survived to modern times, providing scientists with critical data from a centuries-long experiment.

Scientists solved part of the mystery in 2003, when DNA testing by Columbia University and WWF ruled out the possibility that the Borneo elephants were from Sumatra or mainland Asia, where the other Asian subspecies are found, leaving either Borneo or Java as the most probable source.

The new paper, “Origins of the Elephants Elephas Maximus L. of Borneo,” published in this month’s Sarawak Museum Journal shows that there is no archaeological evidence of a long-term elephant presence on Borneo.

“Just one fertile female and one fertile male elephant, if left undisturbed in enough good habitat, could in theory end up as a population of 2,000 elephants within less than 300 years,” said Junaidi Payne of WWF, one of the paper’s co-authors. “And that may be what happened in practice here.”

There are perhaps just 1,000 of the elephants in the wild, mostly in the Malaysian state of Sabah. WWF satellite tracking has shown they prefer the same lowland habitat that is being increasingly cleared for timber rubber and palm oil plantations. Their possible origins in Java make them even more a conservation priority.

“If they came from Java, this fascinating story demonstrates the value of efforts to save even small populations of certain species, often thought to be doomed,” said Dr Christy Williams, coordinator of WWF’s Asian elephant and rhino programme. “It gives us the courage to propose such undertakings with the small remaining populations of critically endangered Sumatran rhinos and Javan rhinos, by translocating a few to better habitats to increase their numbers. It has worked for Africa’s southern white rhinos and Indian rhinos, and now we have seen it may have worked for the Javan elephant, too.”

Borneo pygmy elephants may be extinction survivors: WWF
Yahoo News 17 Apr 08;

Borneo's mysterious pygmy elephants may be the last survivors of Javan elephants thought to have become extinct centuries ago, the environmental group WWF said Thursday.

Researchers believe the pygmy elephants, which are much smaller and more docile than their cousins found elsewhere in Asia, were brought to Borneo by royalty long ago, and then abandoned in the jungle.

"It's exciting to consider that the forest-dwelling Borneo elephants may be the last vestiges of a subspecies that went extinct on its native Java Island, in Indonesia, centuries ago," said retired Malaysian forester Shim Phyau Soon.

"Elephants were shipped from place to place across Asia many hundreds of years ago, usually as gifts between rulers," said Shim, whose ideas on the origins of the elephants WWF said had inspired the latest research.

Scientists have long wondered about the origins of the pygmy elephant, and why they are found only in a section of Borneo. There are perhaps just 1,000 of them in the wild, mostly in the Malaysian state of Sabah.

WWF said the new study found no archaeological evidence of a long-term elephant presence on Borneo, reinforcing the theory that they were brought there centuries ago by the Sultan of Sulu, which is now in the Philippines.

"Just one fertile female and one fertile male elephant, if left undisturbed in enough good habitat, could in theory end up as a population of 2,000 elephants within less than 300 years," said WWF's Junaidi Payne who co-authored the paper.

"And that may be what happened in practice here."

The pygmy elephant has an appealing rounded appearance, and males stand only about 2.5 metres tall, compared to about 3.0 metres for mainland Asian elephants.

Their faces are smaller and squarer, their tails are longer, reaching almost to the ground, and their tusks are straighter.

Another major difference is their good temperament, calmer even than the Asian elephant which is famously cooperative and hardworking compared to the larger, more aggressive African subspecies which is rarely tamed.

It was only in 2003 that the pygmy elephants were identified as a new subspecies after DNA testing found they were genetically distinct.

WWF said satellite tracking has shown the animals prefer the same lowland habitat that is being increasingly cleared for timber rubber and palm oil plantations.

"If they came from Java, this fascinating story demonstrates the value of efforts to save even small populations of certain species, often thought to be doomed," said Christy Williams, coordinator of its Asian elephant and rhino programme.

"It gives us the courage to propose such undertakings with the small remaining populations of critically endangered Sumatran rhinos and Javan rhinos, by translocating a few to better habitats to increase their numbers.

"It has worked for Africa's southern white rhinos and Indian rhinos, and now we have seen it may have worked for the Javan elephant, too."

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Best of our wild blogs: 17 Apr 08

Naked on TV this Sunday!
on the adventures of the naked hermit crabs blog

Status update on Singapore's coral nursery
on the wildfilms blog

6 million pounds of trash on world’s beaches
ICC 2007 Report on the News from the International Coastal Cleanup Singapore blog as well as link to the ICC 2007 report

Think about systemic actions this Earth Day
on the AsiaIsGreen blog

Stunning Sisters Islands
on the singapore celebrates our reefs blog

Melibe melody
on the budak blog

Rule of claw
and other snappy stories on the budak blog and do seahorses eat seagrass?

Oriental Pied Hornbill and a hairy caterpillar
on the Bird Ecology Study Group blog

Read more!

Singapore Integrated Resort rivals, north and south

Tan Hui Leng, Today Online 17 Apr 08;

A YEAR before Singapore's first Integrated Resort (IR) at Marina Bay is due to open, potential competition is already brewing to the immediate north and south.

In Malaysia, the government yesterday confirmed it is in talks with not just Walt Disney, but also other theme park operators. The discussions are "preliminary", said spokesman for Malaysia's sovereign wealth fund, Khazanah Nasional, Mr Mohd Asuki Abas. Some 890 hectares have been set aside for theme park use.

The park in Johor would compete with Universal Studios at Resorts World at Sentosa. Buzz of a theme park began as far back as 2005 when Malaysia toyed with the idea of wooing Mickey Mouse.

In the south, Malaysia's Landmarks is hoping to set up Indonesia's first legalised casino on Bintan island — details of which were revealed by chief operating officer Lim Boon Soon in a Bloomberg report yesterday. The US$3.1-billion ($4.2-billion) resort aims to compete with the one at Marina Bay here.

With Singapore planning to double the number of overseas visitors to 17 million annually and triple tourism receipts to $30 billion by 2015, Landmarks aims to capture the spill over.

"It could work, though the execution risks are there," said Mr Keith Wee, an analyst at OSK Research. With casinos in Malaysia as well as Singapore, "competition will be tough".

How much of a threat will both developments pose to Singapore?

Industry players Today spoke to said issues of accessibility stand in the way of the upstarts. While Johor has an airport, those in Singapore wanting to cross over may face traffic jams on the Causeway; Bintan has no airport yet and the ferry ride from Singapore takes 55 minutes.

And travellers will likely drop by Singapore before visiting the other two. "It's very unlikely that they will give Singapore a skip as we are a hub and they have to come through," noted Mr Robert Khoo, chief executive officer of National Association of Travel Agents Singapore.

For tourists looking for a complete getaway, Landmarks' Bintan resort will bank on the island's current tourist offerings. The developer will also offer private luxury villas with berthing facilities, condominiums and health spas. Said Mr Lim: "Five years down the road, having a casino won't be special."

Indeed, Resorts World at Sentosa — slated to open in 2010 — features wholesome family treats like Universal Studios' theme park, a maritime museum and a luxury spa.

Such distinguishing features mean that the two resorts are complementary, said an in-bound tour operator.

Tour East's group vice-president for sales and marketing, Ms Judy Lum, said Bintan can be marketed as an adult getaway and Sentosa a family destination.

As for the IR downtown, Marina Bay Sands told Today it will be a "world-class destination not available anywhere else in the region".

A Disneyland across the Causeway could rival Universal Studios as it "would have the domestic mass to support it and it would probably attract Middle Eastern tourists", said Ms Lum.

"But it needs to be well-managed and well-maintained consistently," she qualified, noting that many theme parks there are not.

Concerns about competition may well prove moot. In 2006, when the Malaysian authorities said they had discussed the project with Disney, the American company denied it.

In Indonesia, Landmarks has yet to finalise the terms and conditions of the gaming business with the authorities.

Regional tourism projects can complement offerings in Singapore
Channel NewsAsia 20 Apr 08;

SINGAPORE: Tourism developments in the neighbouring regions need not be seen as competition for Singapore, said Senior Minister of State for Trade and Industry S Iswaran on Sunday.

He was referring to plans for Iskandar Malaysia in Johor and an upcoming integrated resort on Indonesia's Bintan island.

Mr Iswaran added that what Singapore needs to do is to ensure that it remains a compelling destination for visitors.

"Yes, there may be some competitive component, but at the same time, they're complementary because they enhance the offerings in the region and we wish them luck," he said.

Mr Iswaran was speaking on the sidelines of an Indian community event – Narpani Family Day – which saw the creation of Singapore's largest laddu, a popular Indian snack that is usually the size of a golf ball.

Ladies from PA Narpani Pearavai Ladies' Sub-Committee managed to win an entry in the Singapore Book of Records with their 16.9kg laddu.

In another record-making attempt at the same event, over 500 people joined in an Indian mass aerobic workout called the Aarokkia Aattam.

The event was organised by the People's Association and is part of the three-week long Tamil Language Festival which ends on 27 April.

Organisers hope the festivities will give other racial communities a better understanding of local Indian culture.- CNA/so

Mickey offers competition and benefits
Alicia Wong Today Online 21 Apr 08;

MICKEY Mouse will not be taken lightly if he goes to Johor.

But the possible arrival of Disneyland or another theme park at Singapore's doorstep — which would rival the Universal Studios park in Sentosa — could be beneficial too, said Senior Minister of State for Trade and Industry S Iswaran (picture).

"There may be some competitive elements to those developments but at the same time, they are complementary because they enhance the offerings in the region, and we wish them well," he said in reply to reporters' queries.

Media reports last week highlighted the scramble for the tourism pie both north and south of the Republic, with Malaysia in talks with theme park operators and a developer hoping to build an integrated resort (IR) and Indonesia's first legalised casino on Bintan island.

While Indonesia may or may not change its laws, the Riau island already has Bintan International Resorts, and Mr Iswaran, who was speaking at community event, cited this as an example of a complementary attraction.

The Republic will "need to just track" the developments in the region and more importantly, "what we need to ensure is that Singapore continues to be a compelling and competitive attraction for tourists".

Would that include bringing Mickey Mouse to Singapore, given that the operator of Tokyo Disneyland said last week it was considering opening a new facility in South-east Asia?

Mr Iswaran was non-committal. "We're open to more ideas from different potential investors or proponents on how we can add to our tourism offerings which will complement what we already have," he said.

As part of Singapore's tourism target for 2015 — 17 million overseas visitors and $30 billion in tourism receipts — there are already "a number of initiatives in Singapore", he added, and listed the IRs, Universal Studios and the plans to "significantly enhance Mandai as a nature-based theme attraction".

If the possibility for a second theme park in Singapore arises, he said "we can always find ways to accommodate the appropriate investment venture".

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Biodiversity Studies: What price wild things?

Andy Ho, Straits Times 17 Apr 08;

IN THE environmentalist classic A Sand County Almanac, its author Aldo Leopold declared: 'There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot.'

Actually, because the webs of life are so intimately woven together, none of us can live without the wild things. Take just insects and microbes that break down organic matter. If they stopped working, we would soon be up to our necks in waste.

When Europeans took their non-indigenous cows Down Under in the 1780s, cow dung patties quickly came to pose a problem in the landscape. While the native dung beetle gobbled up the kangaroo's dry pellet droppings quickly, it was not adapted to tackle the big, moist cow patties. Besides fouling pastures, the patties were also breeding ground for the buffalo fly inadvertently introduced with the cattle. Hence, the patties had to be buried.

In 1968, African cattle dung beetles were imported to deal with this problem. One variety, the ball roller, detaches small bits of dung and rolls them away to be buried. Another variety, the tunneller, burrows into the soil and fills its tunnels with dung balls. In this way, they remove the patties efficiently.

The beetle activity also reduces water contamination, increases air and water infiltration into the soil and returns nutrients to the earth. And it can reduce flies breeding in dung by 80 per cent.

Converting land for farming and husbandry, forestry, mineral or fossil fuel extraction as well as urbanisation are now recognised as the main forces degrading the environment, destroying ecosystems in the process and causing losses in biodiversity.

That biodiversity matters was made abundantly clear during the Irish Potato Famine. Because of overpopulation, people moved to less fertile areas to farm, where only the potato - originally from the Andes mountains - could grow. By 1800, 90 per cent of the Irish population was dependent on the potato for food.

Since only a single variety was grown, when the late blight fungus struck in the 1840s, Ireland's entire potato crop was decimated. From 1845 to 1947, a million people died of starvation and two million emigrated to Europe and America.

The economic and human costs of biodiversity losses are usually less dramatic than this if only because this sorry episode in history has taught many about the dangers of monoculture. According to Lord Nicholas Stern, who spoke at the Civil Service College last week, the British government has a report in the works on the economic impact of biodiversity declines around the world.

Many economists had found much to agree and disagree with his 2006 Stern Report on the economic impact of global climate change. It is also likely that the upcoming biodiversity report will evoke as much controversy worldwide. One area of contention will likely pivot on the models of biodiversity that these British economists will rely upon to price biodiversity.

Up to now, most such economic studies tended to, for simplicity's sake, rely on counting discrete species to see if the numbers are rising or falling. But counting species may not be the best way to measure the impact of biodiversity change because how species interact with one another - and their interactions with their environments - also matter. Ecologists now say these interactions and interdependencies may matter more than raw species numbers.

If counting species is not the best way to model the significance of biodiversity change, putting a price tag based on whether species are becoming more abundant or less may not be the most accurate way of going about things. However, being the most convenient way, most economic studies of biodiversity resort to it by default.

For example, a 2007 econometric study done for Resources for the Future, a well-known Washington-based environmental NGO, roped in the expertise of paleo-ecologists to look for pollen remains in peat in Scotland. These were carbon-dated to the 1600-2000 period.

The study aimed to show that the more intensive the land use was, the greater was the biodiversity decline. Though the numbers of livestock would be a good proxy for intensity of land use, only post-1860 data was available. Even then, the early data was patchy.

So, instead, the study's authors assumed that higher meat and wool prices would get farmers to raise more livestock. Thus meat and wool prices as proxies for land use intensity were tracked against plant species diversity, measured as the number of plant species per period as detected in the pollen remains.

The researchers concluded that more intensive grazing led to greater declines in biodiversity. But this would be a valid conclusion only if counting pollen species measured adequately the significance of changes in biodiversity. The researchers acknowledged that biodiversity includes not just species abundance but also 'the interactions between them, and the natural systems that support them'. Yet the last two items were not priced because of technical difficulties.

Indeed, most economic studies of biodiversity tend to resort to this bits-and-pieces approach and focus on taking an inventory of discrete species. A more holistic modelling would include the interaction processes too. However, such processes are continually changing in unpredictable ways that ecologists cannot yet identify comprehensively - especially in complex ecosystems like tropical forests. If so, ecologists do not know for sure at what point biodiversity decline will matter. Thus, pricing such changes would involve many orders of guesswork.

It would be most interesting to see how the British economists deal with these uncertainties in their pricing models. But this difficult work needs to be done if parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity - which Singapore ratified in 1995 - are to begin working towards their target of conserving at least 10 per cent of each of the world's ecological regions by 2010.

Pricing biodiversity accurately and fairly may enable the signatories to begin acting in concert. And they should too. After all, none of us can live without the wild things.

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