Scientists seek new tools to fight malnutrition

Betsy Taylor, Associated Press Yahoo News 29 Jul 09;

ST. LOUIS – Missouri researchers have launched a new effort in their fight against worldwide hunger: bringing together a doctor who has long treated the malnourished with plant scientists working to improve the nutritional content of food.

The group hopes to create a bridge from greenhouses and labs in Missouri to health centers and farms in regions where people die from malnourishment.

Three internationally known organizations based in St. Louis — the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, the Washington University School of Medicine and St. Louis Children's Hospital — have formed the Global Harvest Alliance. The partnership's aim is to create inexpensive, nutritionally complete food to help the world's hungry and undernourished.

Alliance researchers will look broadly at the best approaches to fight malnutrition and focus on a few of them. They'll seek to improve enriched foods already used to treat malnourishment.

In addition, the alliance aims to help testing and distribution of crops genetically modified to boost nutritional content. They hope to provide the crops cheaply to farmers to produce more nutritious foods.

"This is not a magic bullet. It's a part of the puzzle to helping people be healthier and have a better life," said Roger Beachy, president of the nonprofit Danforth center, where plant research is aimed at improving health and the environment.

Dr. Mark Manary, a pediatrician who will serve as the alliance's director, said malnourished children in Africa used to be hospitalized and given fortified milk-based treatments.

Manary, who has treated malnutrition in Africa for years, has provided an enriched peanut-butter mixture to malnourished children in the sub-Saharan country of Malawi that has led to high recovery rates.

These days, that mixture of peanuts, powdered milk, vegetable oil, sugar, vitamins and minerals is given to parents to feed their malnourished children at home. The new alliance will work to improve such home-based approaches in hopes of distributing them more widely as well as lowering costs.

At the same time, the alliance will seek more sustainable solutions. "Prevention is always better than a cure," Manary said.

Since 1999, the Danforth center has spent about $20 million trying to improve the nutritional content of cassava, a staple crop in Africa harvested for its starchy roots. The food may be best known in the United States as the basis for tapioca. Much of the funding for cassava improvements has come from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Monsanto Fund and the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Researchers have added DNA at the cellular level to enable cassava, naturally low in protein and beta carotene, to produce high levels of those nutrients. Scientists are testing some of the genetically modified cassava plants at greenhouses in Missouri and fields in Puerto Rico.

Beachy said many poor families largely live off one type of food, like cassava or plantains, so increasing the nutritional value of such food would help address malnutrition.

Larry Beach, a USAID scientist who helps improve crops in developing countries using biotechnology, knows those working on the alliance, but is not directly involved in it.

He acknowledged suspicions in parts of the world about biotechnology use and outside scientists proposing solutions to malnourishment. "There's been skepticism about providing more nutrition through food because that's not the way it's been done in the past," he said.

But the Global Harvest Alliance will bring together scientists with a track record of helping the hungry and allow them to research specific needs and crops.

"One of the big problems in helping to make improvements in nutrition is the integration of what needs to be done," Beach said.

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Energy efficiency could save U.S. $600 billion

Reuters 29 Jul 09;

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States could save about $600 billion in energy costs by 2020 if it hiked annual efficiency spending about five-fold, business consultants McKinsey and Co said in a report on Wednesday.

Governments, businesses and the general public would have to boost annual spending on existing energy-saving measures, like insulating walls and more efficient appliances, from about $10 billion annually to $50 billion per year. The upfront costs would pay off by saving $1.2 trillion by 2020, according to the report called "Unlocking Energy Efficiency in the U.S. Economy."

The report, which did not look at energy used in transportation, said the savings would cut energy used for heating and to generate power about 23 percent.

It would cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by about 1.1 gigatons annually -- or the equivalent of taking the entire fleet of U.S. vehicles off the road, the report said.

"The potential to reduce the energy we waste is compelling," said Kenneth Ostrowski, a senior partner at McKinsey. To reach the savings, the country needs coordinated national and regional strategies to overcome barriers and deploy more energy efficiency technologies, he said.

The climate bill passed by the House of Representatives includes measures for energy efficiency that would be included with renewable energy programs. The legislation faces an uncertain future in the Senate.

Some efficiency gains have been made through initiatives such as the Long Island Green Homes initiative, in which the town of Babylon helps finance energy retrofits for homeowners.

But such programs need to be speeded up, said McKinsey principal Jon Creyts, who added it would take 100 years for such programs to reach their full potential.

Lisa Jackson, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, said in a release about the report that, "The energy that most effectively cuts costs, protects us from climate change, and reduces our dependence of foreign oil is the energy that's never used in the first place."

Barbara Hingst, a marketing vice president at power utility Southern Co, said the report was an accurate portrayal of the potential to save energy, but "what can actually be saved will all depend on what policies and programs are going to be implemented to achieve it."

The report: http://www.mckinsey.com/clientservice/electricpowernaturalgas/US_energy_efficiency/

(Reporting by Timothy Gardner; Editing by David Gregorio)

Efficiency Drive Could Cut Energy Use 23% by 2020, Study Finds
Kate Galbraith, The New York Times 29 Jul 09;

The biggest opportunity to improve the nation’s energy situation is a major investment program to make homes and businesses more efficient, according to a study released Wednesday by the consulting firm McKinsey. An investment of $520 billion in improvements like sealing ducts and replacing inefficient appliances could produce $1.2 trillion in savings on energy bills through 2020, the study found.

The report said such a program, if carried out over the next decade, could cut the country’s projected energy use in 2020 by about 23 percent, a savings that would be “greater than the total of energy consumption of Canada,” Ken Ostrowski, a senior partner in McKinsey’s Atlanta office, said at a forum in Washington on Wednesday. It would also more than offset the growth in energy use that would be expected otherwise.

“The scale is vast if we can put together the means to pursue it,” Mr. Ostrowski said.

Homes account for about 35 percent of the potential efficiency gains, according to McKinsey, while the industrial sector accounts for 40 percent and the commercial sector 25 percent. The report included only efficiency improvements whose long-term savings would outweigh the initial costs. It did not consider the potential environmental benefits of cutting energy use.

The report acknowledged substantial barriers to achieving the savings, foremost among them the initial costs. The $52 billion annual investment envisioned by McKinsey is four or five times more than the nation currently spends on energy efficiency, and would have to be maintained over a decade. The economic stimulus package passed in February barely makes a dent; by McKinsey’s estimate, it contains $10 billion to $15 billion in spending on energy efficiency.

Some home or business owners may not have the money to finance efficiency improvements, even if they would pay off in the long run. Other barriers include inertia (a homeowner may simply not feel like replacing an old air-conditioner); and poorly aligned incentives (a landlord who does not pay the electric bill has no economic reason to replace the old air-conditioner).

The potential gains are also spread across millions of homes and businesses, so getting widespread participation would be a challenge.

“No question, the potential is there theoretically,” said David G. Victor, an energy expert at the University of California, San Diego, noting that he had not yet seen the report’s details. “It’s really, really difficult to achieve that full potential in the real world.”

To achieve $1 trillion in savings, Mr. Victor added, would require “a lot of people and a lot of complex organizations to change their behavior.”

The McKinsey report’s recommendations include providing education and better information about the potential savings from energy efficiency, tighter building codes, stricter efficiency requirements for appliances and greater financial incentives for making efficiency improvements.

The Obama administration has been pursuing many of these avenues — for example, some energy-efficiency funding in the stimulus bill requires states to promise to strengthen their building codes. President Obama has also made stricter appliance standards a priority.

Jon Creyts, a McKinsey partner in Chicago, said that energy efficiency presented the “most compelling” way to combat climate change, as well as to achieve energy security and affordability. It is not, however, a panacea, he said.

“Energy efficiency is an important and compelling low-cost option,” Mr. Creyts said, “but there are reasons that we need to innovate and continue to develop clean sources of energy.”

Peter Lehner, executive director of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said even greater savings were possible. The McKinsey report made conservative assumptions, he noted, and it did not account for savings from changes in behavior — people turning out lights in empty rooms or turning down the thermostat in winter, for example.

Nor did the $1.2 trillion figure take account of a possible cost for greenhouse gas emissions, which could be capped under climate legislation pending in Congress, and could bring about increases in energy efficiency.

“Even if we don’t get a climate bill this year, it’s extremely conservative to think there will not be a price on carbon in the next decade,” Mr. Lehner said.

The study was partly financed by McKinsey, and by a group of co-sponsors that included the Southern Company, a utility holding company, as well as the United States Green Building Council and the Department of Energy.

A separate study released on Tuesday by the National Research Council cited potential energy savings of 15 percent by 2020 and 30 percent by 2030 if more efficient technologies were adopted. Unlike McKinsey, the research council included transportation, acknowledging that it would be a difficult sector to transform quickly.

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Don't desert us, say sinking Pacific islands

Rowan Callick, The Australian 30 Jul 09;

THREE of Australia's biggest non-government organisations are hosting competing visits by Pacific Islanders to urge Kevin Rudd to do more to combat climate change - and especially rising sea levels.

The delegations' visits ahead of next week's Pacific Islands Forum summit in Cairns, which the Prime Minister will host, come as Australian experts warn that although climate change does appear to be a factor in changes in sea levels, there are also many other reasons.

These include tectonic plate movements, El Ninos and the effects of fast-rising populations, including the use of groundwater and deforestation.

Experts predict that the sea around the Pacific islands will rise by about half a metre by the end of this century.

At this rate, Tuvalu - often cited as especially vulnerable to rising sea levels - would survive geographically for 1000 more years, although the atoll nation would become uninhabitable well before then.

Bill Mitchell, who manages the South Pacific Sea Level and Climate Monitoring Project that provides the only observed data for the region, said its records only extended to almost 20 years.

"It is not clear yet what contribution long-term climate change is making to sea levels, but we are getting there," hesaid.

The islanders' visits are timed to place pressure on the Pacific Islands Forum to act more urgently and to press Australia and New Zealand to spend much more on helping islanders adapt.

AusAid is already spending $150 million on such a program over three years, but Oxfam says in a new report that Australia and New Zealand should urgently commit up to $668m.

Australia should also spend $4.3 billion a year to finance emissions cuts and longer-term adaptation efforts in developing countries, Oxfam says.

By 2050, 150 million people may be displaced globally because of climate change, half of them in the Asia-Pacific region.

"The potential for climate displacement is especially a concern for low-lying atoll nations in Polynesia and Micronesia," it says. "With land areas just metres above sea level and narrow strips of land just 50-100m wide in some atolls, there is no retreat to higher ground from the ravages on the coast. The potential for forced displacement among the Pacific islands population of about eight million people demands urgent debate."

The Oxfam report does not, however, cite the South Pacific Sea Level and Climate Monitoring Project, which is run by Australia's National Tidal Centre, based at the Bureau of Meteorology in Adelaide, which operates the only Pacific-wide equipment to measure sea level rises.

The centre installed, mostly from 1992 to 1994, sophisticated tidal gauges in 12 of the 14 island states, leaving only Palau and Niue unmonitored.

These have revealed that the Pacific countries - especially those in the west and nearer the equator, mostly Melanesian and Micronesian islands - are seeing sea level rises of about 5mm a year, compared with an average global rise of about 3mm.

These figures are further complicated by satellite altimeter measurements, which, the National Tidal Centre says, "show evidence of a decadal slosh of Pacific sea level, with sea levels having risen in the southwest Pacific and fallen in the northwest Pacific since 1992". Tuvalu, an atoll nation of 10,000 Polynesian people to the north of Fiji, has a land area of 26sqkm and a maximum height of 5m.

Sydney University geography professor John Connell has explained, though, that other factors besides global warming that have probably affected Tuvalu's vulnerability include the construction of new roads between islands, the sealing of an airport runway, removing vegetation, land reclamation, sea wall construction and mining for sand used in construction.

The first islands to organise an evacuation are the Carterets, eight hours by boat to the northeast of Bougainville in eastern Papua New Guinea.

Ursula Rakova, 43, who grew up on the Carterets - six tiny atolls around a lagoon 25km across-- is visiting Australia with the Australian Conservation Foundation.

She says 2700 people are still living there, after about 200 years of human occupation. But half of the land -- whose highest point is only 1.2m -- has already been lost within her lifetime.

She acknowledges that a contributory factor is that the islands are located on top of an underwater volcano, which is steadily subsiding, but says she believes climate change is another factor.

"We have very high tides, strong waves, much more powerful currents, and more storms, with plenty of rain," Ms Rakova says. "We can paddle canoes where we used to walk."

She has already established a new home for her family in Arawa, the capital of Bougainville, and the first 50 people are now shifting to Tinputz on Bougainville's east coast under a voluntary evacuation program drawn up by the PNG government, for which it allocated about $1m for 2007.

"But we have not seen a single toea (cent)," said Ms Rakova, who runs Tulele Peisa, an NGO assisting the relocations.

"For us born there, we're losing everything: our identity, our culture, our connections to the islands, our whole life."

Oxfam and Greenpeace are hosting a visit about the impact of climate change from Pelenise Alofa Pilitati, managing director of a Kiribati NGO; Reverend Tafue Lusama, chairman of the Tuvalu Climate Action Network; and Marstella Jack, former attorney-general of the Federated States of Micronesia.

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Australia's deadly wildfires 'worse next year'

Yahoo News 29 Jul 09;

MELBOURNE (AFP) – Australian officials on Wednesday warned the country could be hit by even worse wildfires next summer than the deadly blazes which killed a record 173 people in February.

Victoria state premier John Brumby said the fire season could be the toughest in a decade, after a leaked report warned of a "worst-case" situation prompted by an expected El Nino weather pattern.

"The prognosis in terms of this year's fire season is that it's going to be a very, very tough fire season again," Brumby said.

"All of the advice at the moment is that this will be as bad, if not worse, than anything that we've seen in the past decade," he added.

The Victoria environment department report, widely leaked to media, said El Nino would bring extensive drought to southeastern Australia, where entire towns were engulfed in flames during the last southern hemisphere summer.

February's fires were the worst natural disaster in Australia's modern history, with one expert likening their intensity to the energy produced by 1,500 Hiroshima atomic bombs.

"The prospect we are looking at is not just another above-average fire season with above-normal losses or risks to life and property," the report said.

"The genuine prospect of a season with the greatest potential loss to life and property is now in sight and, as climate indicators strengthen, this looks to be an increasing likelihood."

The report said there was a "high likelihood" of an El Nino event this year, with an "observed lack of rain, increased evaporation and the strongest predictions so far of the continuation of drier and warmer conditions."

El Nino, which is caused by warming of the eastern Pacific Ocean, results in extensive drought in the west Pacific and has been associated with a spike in fire activity.

Victoria and its neighbouring states are in the grip of a decade-long drought, and experienced a run of record-breaking temperatures in the weeks before the fires, leaving uncleared bushland tinder-dry.

An official inquiry into this year's fires, which consumed more than 2,000 homes, is due to deliver its preliminary findings on August 17.

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Bolivia's Indians feel the heat

James Painter, BBC News 29 Jul 09;

Marcos Choque is a 67-year-old Aymara Indian with holes in his trousers and battered sandals. He appears remarkably cheerful.

Sitting among his fellow villagers from Khapi, perched high up in the Bolivian Andes, he seems to delight in cracking jokes.

But ask him about Illimani - the 6,400m (21,000-ft) mountain that towers above his village - and his mood turns more sombre.

"When I was young, the snow often came down as far as there," he says, pointing to the hills. "But in the past few years, the snow-line has risen 500m. It's getting hotter, which is melting the mountain."

Mr Choque and the 40 families that make up his community have been watching Illimani with increasing alarm. They depend on it for part of their water supply - both to drink and to irrigate their small, terraced parcels of land.

"We calculate that there will be no snow or ice left on Illimani in the next 30 or 40 years. It will be black, or what we call peeled of its whiteness," he says.

Water supply worries

The glaciers on Illimani are estimated to have been there for thousands of years. Its white peaks tower over the nearby city of La Paz, Bolivia's administrative capital.

Many of La Paz's residents swear the snow-line is gradually creeping upwards.

Some were shocked when a newspaper recently published a photo of what Illimani could look like in 2039 - with no sign of any whiteness on top.

Hydrologists from La Paz are planning to measure the glacial loss of the mountain. They already know that the nearby glacier of Mururata has lost more than 20% of its surface area since 1956 due to higher temperatures, and probably a greater percentage of its volume.

Earlier this year, the Paris-based Development Research Institute (IRD) estimated that the glaciers in the Cordillera Real mountain range in Bolivia, of which Illimani forms a part, had lost more than 40% of their volume between 1975 and 2006.

The IRD said that the volume had remained pretty constant until 1975, but had diminished quickly since then.

If this tendency continued, the IRD said, it could have a very negative impact on the water supply in the dry season to some cities like La Paz.

Unpredictable

In the case of Khapi, the water from Illimani plays a crucial role in the life and religious beliefs of the community.

Every September, they carry out a ritual, involving offerings called Waxt'a in Aymara. This includes the sacrifice of a llama and other offerings like coca leaves, alcohol and cigarettes to Illimani.

They go through the elaborate ceremony so that, in their words, "Illimani gives them water through the year".

The villagers think that the snow and ice from Illimani accounts for up to half of their annual water supply, although they are not sure.

Bolivian scientists are trying to answer the crucial question of just how much of the water comes from glacial melt at different times of the year. Precipitation and underground aquifers provide the rest.

The more immediate concern of the villagers is the changing climate. They say there is no longer any predictability about when the rains come, compared to the past. And they are sure that there is less rain, and that the weather is getting hotter.

Theirs is not the international language of global warming and carbon emissions.

"Our weather is coming up from where it used to be further down," says Severino Cortez, a community leader, pointing down the mountain from Khapi, which is 3,600m high.

Not everything is bad news. The warmer temperatures mean that some of them can now grow peaches and maize where previously they could not.

Vulnerable

But the Khapi villagers are very worried for the future. "I am getting old," says Marcos Choque.

"I am not going to see Illimani melting away completely, but the young will."

Lucia Quispe, a 38-year-old mother of three, wonders where the water will come from to irrigate her plot of land, where she grows potatoes, maize and beans.

"I am sad and very worried when I think about the future of my children," she says. "If we don't have water, how will we live? Water is life."

Non-governmental organisations working with Khapi and other nearby communities high up in the Andes say it is particularly unjust that Aymara villagers will suffer the fall-out from global warming when they are amongst the least responsible for it.

Some of the communities are active members of a new civilian pressure group formed this year, called the Platform of Civil Society against Climate Change.

One of the Platform's demands is for the formation of an international tribunal on climate justice, and for an international compensation fund for victims of climate change.

"What's happening at Khapi is typical of what hundreds of poor, indigenous and vulnerable communities throughout Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador are facing," says Juan Carlos Alurrade, executive director of Agua Sustentable (Sustainable Water), which is helping communities to adapt to climate change.

"They depend on glacial melt for irrigation, but the glaciers are doomed."

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Arctic tundra hotter, boosts global warming: expert

David Ljunggren, Reuters 29 Jun 09;

OTTAWA (Reuters) - Regions of Arctic tundra around the world are heating up very rapidly, releasing more greenhouse gases than predicted and boosting the process of global warming, a leading expert said on Wednesday.

Professor Greg Henry of the University of British Columbia also said higher temperatures meant larger plants were starting to spread across the tundra, which is usually covered by small shrubs, grasses and lichen. The thicker plant cover means the region is getting darker and absorbing more heat.

He said tundra covers about 15 percent of the world's surface and makes up around 30 percent of Canadian territory.

Henry, who has been working in the Arctic since the early 1980s, said he had measured "a very substantial change" in the tundra over the last three decades, citing greater emissions and plant growth.

Since 1970, he said, temperatures in the tundra region had risen by 1 degree Celsius per decade -- equal to the highest rates of warming found anywhere on the planet.

"We're finding that the tundra is actually giving off a lot more nitrous oxide and methane than anyone had thought before," Henry told reporters on a conference call from Resolute in the northern Canadian territory of Nunavut.

"We're really trying to get a handle on this because if (further tests show) that's true, this actually changes the entire greenhouse gas budget for the North, and that has global implications," he said.

Scientists blame climate change on a surge in emissions of greenhouse gases. The effects in Canada's North and Arctic regions have been particularly notable.

Henry said his research station in Nunavut had recorded record high temperatures virtually every summer since the early 1990s. The warmer temperatures mean plants are growing bigger and faster, while larger species are spreading northward.

"The tundra is getting a lot weedier all the way around the globe. This has major implications," said Henry, who also chairs an international project studying tundra.

"You're changing the color of the surface of the earth by making it darker ... so the consequence of that is increased warming again."

Some scientists also fear that as the permafrost in the Arctic melts, it will release vast amounts of carbon and methane into the atmosphere.

(Reporting by David Ljunggren; editing by Rob Wilson)

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Sub-Arctic timebomb: warming speeds CO2 release from soil

Yahoo News 29 Jul 09;

PARIS (AFP) – Climate change is speeding up the release of carbon dioxide from frigid peatlands in the sub-Arctic, fuelling a vicious circle of global warming, according to a study to be published Thursday.

An increase of just 1.0 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) over current average temperatures would more than double the CO2 escaping from the peatlands.

Northern peatlands contain one-third of the planet's soil-bound organic carbon, the equivalent of half of all the CO2 in the atmosphere.

Peat is an accumulation of partially decayed vegetation found in wetlands or peatlands, which cover between two and three percent of the global land mass. While present in all climate zones, the vast majority of peatlands are found in sub-Arctic regions.

A team of European researchers led by Ellen Dorrepaal of the University of Amsterdam artificially warmed natural peatlands in Abisko, in northern Sweden, by 1.0 C over a period of eight years.

The experimental plots exhaled and extra 60 percent of CO2 in Spring and 52 percent in Summer over the entire period, reported the study, published in the British journal Nature.

"Climate warming therefore accelerates respiration of the extensive, subsurface carbon reservoir in peatlands to a much larger extent than previously thought," the authors conclude.

The findings highlight the extreme sensitivity of northern peatland carbon reservoirs to climate change, and the danger of a self-reinforcing "positive feedback" in which the CO2 released adds to global warming.

And unlike the boreal forests in Canada, Russia and Northern Europe, very little of the extra carbon was absorbed by additional vegetation spurred by the warmer temperatures.

The researchers warn that annual surplus CO2 released by peatlands with a 1.0 C increase -- between 38 and 100 million tonnes -- could cancel out the European Union objective of slashing greenhouse gas emissions by 92 million tonnes per year.

In another study released last month, the Global Carbon Project based in Australia found that the amount of carbon stored in the Arctic and boreal regions of the world is some 1.5 trillion tonnes, more than double previous estimates.

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China wants climate deal this year: U.N.'s Ban

Louis Charbonneau, Reuters 29 Jul 09;

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - China's leaders told U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon that Beijing wants to reach a new agreement on combating climate change in Copenhagen in December, Ban said on Wednesday.

"I was pleased that President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao assured me that China wants to seal a deal in Copenhagen in December and that China will play an active and constructive role in the negotiations," Ban told a monthly news conference.

The U.N. chief returned on Tuesday from official visits to China and Mongolia at which climate change topped the agenda.

China recently passed the United States as the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases and together the two countries account for 42 percent of the world's emissions.

Greenhouse gas emissions are widely considered to be one of the principal causes of global warming. Nations will gather in Copenhagen in December to work out a new agreement on reducing emissions to succeed the current Kyoto Protocol, whose first phase ends in 2012.

Climate concerns are expected to be high on the agenda when U.S. President Barack Obama visits China for a summit meeting with Hu later this year.

They will also be the subject of a summit in September in New York on the sidelines of the annual General Assembly gathering of world leaders. Obama and Hu are both expected to attend, U.N. officials say.

"LESS THAN FIVE MONTHS" TO SEAL DEAL

Ban said more than 100 heads of state and government were planning to attend the September summit, intended to help build momentum before the Copenhagen conference.

He said it would be "the largest gathering of leaders on climate change ever."

"Two years ago, only a few leaders could speak to these issues," Ban said. "Today, leaders are walking the road to Copenhagen together. But we have less than five months to seal a deal."

The U.N. chief also said he would travel to the Arctic polar ice rim next month to get a first-hand look at conditions there -- above all, the melting sea ice.

Earlier on Wednesday, Xie Zhenhua, a deputy chief of China's National Development and Reform Commission, which steers climate change policy, told the official Xinhua agency that industrialized nations must agree to large, measurable cuts in their emissions if a deal is to be sealed in Copenhagen.

He was speaking after the United States and China signed an agreement that promises more cooperation on climate change, energy and the environment without setting firm goals.

In a speech in Washington, U.S. Democratic Senator John Kerry criticized the agreement, saying, "More could have been achieved." He said it lacked dates, timelines and "specific steps that need to be taken" ahead of Copenhagen.

Xie's comments stopped short of Beijing's insistence earlier this year that developed nations should make cuts in greenhouse gas output of "at least 40 percent" below 1990 levels by 2020, suggesting the world's top emitter may be softening its stance with an eye on reaching a pragmatic deal.

Industrialized nations say that steep, expensive cuts in emissions are out of reach when they are trying to stimulate recession-hit economies.

The key players in Copenhagen have been struggling to reach a consensus on other core issues like financing climate change adaptation programs in developing nations and the transfer of clean technology.

(Additional reporting by Richard Cowan in Washington and Emma Graham-Harrison in Beijing; Editing by Peter Cooney)

Read more!

Best of our wild blogs: 29 Jul 09

Lim Chu Kang cleanup, 8th August 2009
from Toddycats!

Fri 31 Jul 2009: 2pm – Ben Godsall on “Preliminary insights into the behaviour of tree-dwelling crab, Selatium brockii” from The Biodiversity crew @ NUS

A walk on the wild side: Woodcutter's Trail
from Water Quality in Singapore

East coast lagoon
from Singapore Nature

Wonder Fruits of Bukit Timah
from Urban Forest

Invisible birdies
from The annotated budak

Back to Buloh for nem hunt
from wonderful creation

And if you were an ocean, I'd learn to float: Tanah Merah Shore
from You run, we GEOG

Asteroid shower
from The annotated budak

Sea turtles of the Coral Triangle and Singapore
from wild shores of singapore

Blue-throated Bee-eater: 11. Reflection
from Bird Ecology Study Group

How to Recognise a Species
from Catalogue of Organisms

The Starfish Invasion of Australia!
from The Echinoblog

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New boardwalk links Sentosa to VivoCity in Nov 2010

938 LIVE Channel NewsAsia 28 Jul 09;

SINGAPORE: S$300 million will be pumped in to boost transport infrastructure within and leading into Sentosa.
This involves several new projects, including building an intra-island cable way and a bridge linking Merlion Plaza to Resorts World.

Come November next year, visitors will have yet another mode of entry to the island. They can choose to walk to the island via a new boardwalk.

Chief executive officer of Sentosa Leisure Group, Mike Barclay, said: "We've got about a doubling of visitorship coming in to Sentosa from next year. Currently, we have about six million visitors every year, (and) we're going to go up to about 12 million a year.
"So we've built a second bridge, but we don't think everything should be a road-based solution. So that's why we're building a boardwalk next to the two bridges, with a capacity of about 8,000 people per hour in each direction."

The 620-metre long boardwalk links VivoCity Promenade and Sentosa. It is touted as South-East Asia's largest thematic walkway, featuring five garden themes depicting different landscapes of Singapore.

Visitors can also make use of the canopy-covered travellators for their journey to the island.

On average, it will take about 15 minutes to cross the walkway. At night, the boardwalk will be illuminated to enhance the precinct and visitors' experience.

The groundbreaking for the boardwalk was held on Tuesday morning.

The project will cost about S$70 million, and access to the bridge will be free to the public. However, there will be a ticketing booth at the Sentosa end of the boardwalk for those who wish to enter the island.

- 938 LIVE/yb

New boardwalk to Sentosa
Lim Wei Chean, Straits Times 28 Jul 09;

BY NEXT November, visitors to Sentosa will have another option of getting to the resort island - on foot. A new 620-m boardwalk with five pairs of covered travellators will make the journey a breeze.

Works on the $70-million boardwalk kicked off on Tuesday.

from Straits Times PDF

Ranging from 25m to 40m in width, the walkway will also be lined with retail and food and beverage outlets along the way.

The walkway will link up to Sentosa's integrated resort, Resorts World at Sentosa, which will direct visitors to the resort or to attractions within the rest of the island. It is designed to carry 8,000 visitors per hour in each direction and is part of the resort island's plans to enhance transport links as it gears up for a surge in visitors when the IR opens early next year.

The boardwalk, said Sentosa Leisure Group's chief executive officer Mike Barclay, is part of a $300-million budget to overhaul the transport links on the island to ensure that it can receive the increase in visitors, which is expected to double.

The walkway will offer five different themed gardens, from mangrove, rock garden, terrain and hill, coastal flora and rainforest, giving visitors a different experience as they pass from one zone to the next.

It will be lit at night to offer a different experience. This boardwalk will replace the original pedestrian path along the causeway bridge to the island that was closed in August 2007 for the construction of the second bridge.

Read more!

Scientists may have killed a dengue outbreak in Singapore

Straits Times 29 Jul 09;

A DENGUE outbreak here may have been stopped in its tracks by a team of scientists at the Environmental Health Institute.

In March, the scientists, studying common strains of the virus here, discovered the resurfacing of a third, less common type in Little India and Geylang. They alerted the National Environment Agency (NEA), which stepped up its infection control measures and manpower to rid these areas of mosquito breeding.

Yesterday, the institute's key findings on dengue and chikungunya were presented by its head, Dr Ng Lee Ching, at an EU-South-east Asia meeting on vector-borne diseases, organised by the Singapore Immunology Network under the Agency for Science, Technology and Research.

For instance, there are four strains or sterotypes of dengue. A switch in predominance from one strain to another is associated with outbreaks, as people have lower immunity to a new strain.

Researchers also found that the chikungunya virus can replicate in mosquitoes and be ready to infect humans within just three days, compared to seven to 14 days for the dengue virus.

That's why chikungunya can spread so fast - just as it did last year, when the first local infections struck here. Since the start of last year, there have been 803 local cases and 214 cases imported from elsewhere in Asia.

Researchers are now also able to conduct genetic 'paternity tests' to discover which countries the virus came from, said Dr Ng.

The institute is still studying the current malaria outbreak, she added.

The disease, which resurfaced here with perhaps the largest local cluster in almost three decades, is transmitted by the Anopheles mosquito.

'Today's Anopheles population might be very different from the past; it may have evolved and changed, and we know less about that change,' Dr Ng said.

But one difficulty of studying Anopheles mosquitoes is getting the insects, which are outdoor breeders, to reproduce in the lab.

'You can't force them to mate - they're very shy,' Dr Ng quipped.

At the same two-day conference, which ended yesterday, Imperial College London rector Sir Roy Anderson announced that the British university was in early talks with local varsities and research institutes to start a programme or school for global and public health.

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Singapore to gear up for growing need for 'green-collar' jobs

Today Online 29 Jul 09;

IT'S bright. And it's green.

That is the outlook for the construction sector, with total construction demand over the next three years estimated to be between $18 billion and $27 billion annually.

Senior Minister of State for National Development and Education Grace Fu said yesterday that the outlook for the construction sector is "bright".

But to reap the opportunities, the industry needs to transform itself by attracting and grooming more talent and focusing on areas that add more value.

Green building technology that increases energy efficiency is one example.

Along with this, Singapore - which is aiming for 80 per cent of all its buildings to be certified "green" by the year 2030 - will also need a "green-collar" workforce of about 18,000 to 20,000 specialists, she said.

These are the people who will help develop, design, construct, operate and maintain green buildings.

Ms Fu said despite the economic downturn, the building and construction sector saw double-digit growth in the last one-and-a-half years, and is expected to stay that way. The industry's annual average from 2000 to 2006 was $11 billion.

"Green collar" workers are not only highly sought after in Singapore but in countries elsewhere where huge resources are being devoted to build up such expertise.

An United Nation report on "green" jobs estimated that the global market volume for green products and services last year was nearly US$1.4 trillion ($2 trillion). This is expected to double by 2020.

Ms Fu was speaking at an awards ceremony where she handed out 19 BCA-Industry Built Environment Scholarships.

The Building and Construction Authority (BCA) will also work with leading firms to offer more scholarships to build up the talent pool, she said.

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