Illegal fishing evades U.N. crackdown: study

Reuters 25 Aug 09;

ROME (Reuters) - Illegal fishing is depleting the seas and robbing poor nations in Africa and Asia of resources, but a lack of global cooperation is undermining efforts to track rogue vessels, an environmental group said on Tuesday.

The Pew Environment Group, a Washington-based think-tank, has found that a United Nations scheme to oblige ports to crack down on illegal fishing boats is handicapped by a lack of accurate information, implementation and participation.

In the five years from 2004, of 176 vessels blacklisted by regional fishing authorities, only 55 turned up on port records, Pew said in a report it presented to the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in Rome.

In some cases, ports were not checking ships' identity, using the unique vessel number on their hulls. In others, ships had found ways of avoiding detection, such as changing their names, sometimes doing so mid-voyage before entering a region where enforcement was stricter.

Blacklisted vessels are, in theory, banned from landing fish at ports in the regions signed up to the scheme.

"We need to expand from a regional approach to a global approach so all ports are acting against villains, otherwise they just move to another part of the world," said Stefano Flothmann, head of International Ocean Governance at Pew.

Pew estimates that a fifth of all fish landed come from illegal, unregulated or unreported vessels -- and this figure rises to around half for valuable species like blue fin tuna.

In some areas like West Africa and Southeast Asia, countries simply lack the resources to patrol their waters.

"For some countries, this represents a major loss of income ... and is having a direct impact on the development of these countries," Flothmann said.

"In Somalia, a country which is totally incapable of enforcing anything in its waters, coastal fisheries have been devastated, turning fishermen into recruits for pirate gangs."

Part of the problem that Asian countries which consume large quantities of fish -- such as China, South Korea and Taiwan -- are not too scrupulous about where the catch comes from, Flothmann said.

Europe, however, was also not exempt from criticism: much of the fishing fleet from countries like Spain and Norway use flags of convenience to dodge fishing quotas, he said.

(Reporting by Daniel Flynn; editing by Robin Pomeroy)

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Australia urged to ban illegally logged imports

ROD McGuirk Forbes 25 Aug 09;

CANBERRA, Australia -- The logging industry banded together with conservationists Tuesday to demand the government fulfill its promise to ban illegally logged imports.

Australia estimates 9 percent of its wood and paper imports, worth 400 million Australian dollars ($335 million) a year, are illegally logged, mainly by neighbors Indonesia and Papua New Guinea.

The Australian government rejected newspaper reports Tuesday that it abandoned its two-year-old election promise to ban such imports.

But Forestry Minister Tony Burke said it was not yet possible to block the imports because "we have no way of knowing which imported timber is legal and which is illegal," he said in a statement.

The conservation group Greenpeace called for government action to end illegal imports in a statement issued Tuesday. It was signed by other environmental groups as well as major timber retailers, merchants and the national body representing Australian plantation growers known as A3P.

"A3P urges the government to deliver on its stated election commitments to prevent the importation of illegal forest products into Australia," Chief Executive Richard Stanton said in the statement.

The groups complained that Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's government, which was elected in November 2007, had yet to release a policy option paper detailing how the government might bar the imports.

Burke said Tuesday that a policy paper will be released soon.

Australia has negotiated agreements with Indonesia and Papua New Guinea to help identity legally felled trees, he said. Similar agreements were being discussed with China and Malaysia.

Michael Spencer, chief executive of the Forest Stewardship Council in Australia, a nonprofit organization that promotes independent certification and labeling of products from responsibly managed forests, said the government is wary of banning wood imports.

"They're concerned about trade reprisals from other countries such as Malaysia who may well choose to highlight deficiencies in Australian forest management," Spencer told Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio.

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Pristine forest starting to go

ScienceAlert 26 Aug 09;
University of Adelaide

The world's last remaining "pristine" forest - the boreal forest across large stretches of Russia, Canada and other northern countries - is under increasing threat, a team of international researchers has found.

The researchers from the University of Adelaide in Australia, Memorial University of Newfoundland in Canada and the National University of Singapore have called for the urgent preservation of existing boreal forests in order to secure biodiversity and prevent the loss of this major global carbon sink.

The boreal forest comprises about one-third of the world's forested area and one-third of the world's stored carbon, covering a large proportion of Russia, Canada, Alaska and Scandinavia.

To date it has remained largely intact because of the typically sparse human populations in boreal regions. That is now changing says researchers and co-authors Associate Professor Corey Bradshaw, University of Adelaide, Associate Professor Ian Warkentin, Memorial University, and Professor Navjot Sodhi, National University of Singapore.

"Much world attention has focused on the loss and degradation of tropical forests over the past three decades, but now the boreal forest is poised to become the next Amazon," says Associate Professor Bradshaw, from the University of Adelaide's Environment Institute.

"Historically, fire and insects have driven the natural dynamics of boreal ecosystems," says Associate Professor Warkentin. "But with rising demand for resources, human disturbances caused by logging, mining and urban development have increased in these forests during recent years, with extensive forest loss for some regions and others facing heavy fragmentation and exploitation."

The findings have been published online in Trends in Ecology and Evolution in a paper called `Urgent preservation of boreal carbon stocks and biodiversity'. The findings include:

* Fire is the main driver of change and increased human activity is leading to more fires. There is also evidence that climate change is increasing the frequency and possibly the extent of fires in the boreal zone.
* Few countries are reporting an overall change in the coverage by boreal forest but the degree of fragmentation is increasing with only about 40% of the total forested area remaining "intact".
* Russian boreal forest is the most degraded and least "intact" and has suffered the greatest decline in the last few decades.
* Countries with boreal forest are protecting less than 10 per cent of their forests from timber exploitation, except for Sweden where the figure is about 20 per cent.

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Trees advance in a warming world

Matt Walker, BBC News 25 Aug 09;

Trees around the world are colonising new territories in response to higher temperatures.

From the US west coast to northern Siberia and south-east Asia, trees are growing at higher elevations, and at higher latitudes as the climate warms.

Of 166 sites studied, trees are advancing at more than half, while they are receding at just two sites.

The shift is revealed by the first global analysis of treelines published in the journal Ecology Letters.

However, the trees aren't responding quite how scientists expected.

Instead of advancing as summer temperatures rise, the trees' ability to colonise new areas appears to be more dependent on whether winter temperatures warm.

Hospitable territory

Treelines tend to form wherever conditions for growth become too harsh.

For example, at high altitudes and latitudes, the climate often becomes too cold for trees to survive. At this boundary, a treeline occurs, with forest on one side and shorter, hardier plants such as shrubs and plants on the other.

However, around the world, average air temperatures have risen during the past century.

This warming has been most pronounced at high altitudes and latitudes, the exact places where treelines form.

So in theory, trees should take advantage of these warmer, more hospitable climates, allowing treelines to advance higher and closer towards the poles.

In reality though, the picture has been more complicated. In some places, trees have advanced higher up mountains or further north, but in others they appear not to have moved.

To better understand what is going on, Melanie Harsch of the Bio-Protection Research Centre at Lincoln University in New Zealand and colleagues conducted a meta-analysis of a global dataset of 166 sites around the world at which treeline dynamics have been recorded since 1900 AD.

When they analysed this data, the researchers found that air temperatures had increased at 111 of 166 sites, at an average rate of 0.013 degrees Celsius per year.

Summer warming occurred at 117 of the sites at a mean of 0.0189 degrees Celsius per year, more often than winter warming which occurred at 77 sites at an average of 0.0199 degrees Celsius per year.

Most important, they found that treelines had advanced into previously inhospitable habitat at 87 sites.

The treelines remained stable at 77 sites, while trees had retreated at just two locations.

Crucially, the trees do not seem to be responding to warmer summer temperatures.

"We expected growing season warming to be the dominant driver," says Harsch.

"But we found that it was not, winter temperature was."

That could be because trees that have advanced during warm summers can more easily survive the odd cooler summer. Whereas those that advanced during warmer winters may not survive a particularly cold winter, making winter temperatures the limiting factor.

Also, the researchers found that diffuse treelines, where the number of trees growing gradually peters out, are much more likely to advance than abrupt treelines, which form when trees suddenly stop growing at a certain altitude or latitude.

That could be because other stress factors, such as wind abrasion, snow and ice damage limit the spread of species which create abrupt treelines.

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False fears threaten food supplies

Dominic Dyer, BBC Green Room 25 Aug 09;

European policymakers are losing sight of the realities of food production, says Dominic Dyer. In this week's Green Room, the chief executive of the UK Crop Protection Agency says advances in agriculture risk being hampered by heavy-handed regulation and misplaced concerns.

There's a lot being written at present about the relative benefits of different forms of agricultural production, but one key fact often gets missed.

If farmers' yields were still as low as those of the 1950s, we would need nearly three times as much cultivated land to feed today's global population.

Many people are unaware or uninterested by how the food we eat is grown. Often incorrect perceptions and false assumptions are presented as fact as a result of a lack of familiarity with the countryside.

The truth is that if we enjoy a steady, year-round supply of fresh produce at affordable prices, it's thanks to modern agriculture and well-trained professional farmers.

Developed societies have come a long way since oxen pulled the plough. By doing so, they have drastically improved the nutrition and health of their communities.

Modern agricultural achievements are the result of technological advances, new management techniques and new chemical treatments that have made it possible to feed 6.7 billion mouths.

But soon, even this will not be enough. Experts warn that historic challenges await us. Farmers face external and uncontrollable pressures, putting into question Europe's seemingly continuous supply of fresh food.

Feeding frenzy

Not only is global demand dramatically exceeding the growth in supply, but also we have limited time in which to increase the amount of fruit, vegetables and grains produced if we want to prevent a worldwide food crisis.

Boosting productivity to meet this demand is easier said than done because the world faces huge challenges, with climate change, population growth and resulting resource shortages being perhaps the greatest.

Research presented at a recent meeting hosted by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) concluded that agricultural production would still need to increase "by 70% (nearly 100% in developing countries) by 2050 to cope with a 40% increase in world population and to raise average food consumption to 3,130 calories per person per day by 2050".

Is there a way, other than science-based innovation, for humanity to meet these challenges?

As the world's largest agricultural producer, the onus is on the EU to make a substantial contribution.

EU agricultural policies should help to foster this much needed innovation and must be careful not to undermine current research efforts in this area. Our food supply depends on it.

The trick is to balance high yields with human and environmental safety and protection of biodiversity.

Balancing act

Despite perceptions to the contrary in some quarters, modern agriculture is very good at striking this balance.

Despite, for example, decades of well-funded research to find a "smoking gun" of a major public health impact from pesticides, nothing has been found.

Revised EU legislation to assess and authorise pesticides will soon be in place.

The regulation, which introduces a hazard-based assessment, moves away from a well-established scientific evaluation that has been used for decades in health, environment, epidemiology and even financial sectors.

Contrary to popular perception, it is not logical to use hazard rather than risk as the yardstick.

By looking at hazard alone we are forgetting the two key factors left in the equation: risk and exposure. If there is no exposure, no matter how high or how low the potential danger is, there is no risk.

The exceedingly restrictive new evaluation criteria for pesticides demonstrate a shift away from science towards policy based on myths about pesticides that haunt public opinion.

Moreover, what precedent will it set for other legislation? The safety of a substance is not based solely upon whether or not it is in itself harmful.

Let's take an example that's close to home: cars.

Cars are big, heavy and travel fast. Taking a purely hazard-based approach would mean banning them because inherently they endanger pedestrians.

While the motivation underpinning the regulation might be commendable, hazard-based evaluation criteria will not make our food safer.

At high concentrations most substances - including sugar and salt - are capable of causing damage, but everything needs to be understood in the context of its usage and under realistic conditions.

Looking only at the hazardous potential of substances may reduce the farmers' armoury of plant disease-fighting tools below the critical point.

That is food for thought, especially considering what lies ahead.

Reality check

While pesticides are the focal point of current media debate and criticism, many important questions regarding our food security remain unanswered.

In the face of climate change, how will farmers be able to control increasing pest damage?

How will Europe secure an affordable supply of fresh fruit and vegetables if our farmers' ability to fight pests, weeds and crop disease is eroded?

It seems obvious that innovative agricultural practices are required to increase the amount of grains, fruit and vegetables that we produce. But in which direction is EU agriculture going?

Today's regulatory vision needs to be connected to the reality of food production, and science needs to be put back at the heart of policymaking.

Dominic Dyer is chief executive of the UK Crop Protection Association

The Green Room is a series of opinion articles on environmental topics running weekly on the BBC News website

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Forest fires - a continuing Greek tragedy?

Richard Black, BBC News 25 Aug 09;

Around Athens, the fires appear to be under control - this time.

But with average temperatures in southern Europe increasing, and computer models of future climate suggest that what we have seen so far is just the tip of a (melting) iceberg, were these fires just a foretaste of conflagrations that will come regularly as vegetation turns tinderbox dry?

Are we already witnessing in Greece the fallout from a warming and drying of southern Europe?

Data assembled by the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC) gives something of a mixed picture of trends over the last couple of decades for the five countries in its southern Europe dataset - France, Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain.

"If we look at the number of fires, there was a trend to increase from the beginning of the 1990s," says Andrea Camia, JRC research scientist responsible for the European Forest Fire Information System (Effis), which collates data across the continent.

"But then in the last three years we're looking at a slight decrease.

"If we look at the total area burnt, which is in fact the most important thing, what we see is a large variation from year to year, and it's difficult to find any trend."

Whether fires begin is largely a question of what people in the area are doing; accidentally or deliberately, humans are the biggest single cause of ignition.

The weather, though, is a key factor in determining how large a fire will get and how much damage it will do, with rainfall the biggest single influence.

And Europe's weather is changing, in a number of ways.

Summers are becoming longer across the continent; southern countries are seeing less rainfall.

Some of the changes that Effis has noted appear to tally with this changing climatic picture.

"We're observing relatively extreme events outside the normal fire season, even as early as March, and outside the normal fire-prone area," Dr Camia told BBC News.

"In June, Scandinavian countries had very large fires - the largest on record in Norway, and a big one in Sweden.

"This is a signal that the fire-prone area is enlarging. We don't know if this is already the effect [of climate change]."

Two years ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published the most comprehensive projections ever of how conditions are likely to change in future.

The projections it makes for southern Europe depend to a large extent on which computer model is used, and what assumptions are made about economic development.

The most extreme show water availability falling by more than 50% by 2070 right across Portugal, about half of Spain and pockets of Greece, Turkey, France, Croatia and a handful of other countries (compared with a baseline of the 1961-1990 average).

Fire brakes

Whether this translates into more fire damage is, though, a question of human behaviour.

Will people simply take more care, so fewer fires start? And will societies invest more in managing the risk, and managing blazes once they have begun?

This is something that is a way of life for fire-fighters in countries such as Australia and the US; and parts of Europe are now drawing on that expertise and developing their own programmes.

"The general idea is that we should have integrated wildfire management, and that integrated wildfire management should include the use of fire to fight fire," says Francisco Castro Rego, co-ordinator of the Fire Paradox project.

The "paradox" in the name is that fire can be used deliberately both to prevent serious conflagrations and to tackle them once they have started.

"First we have prescribed fires, which are a vegetation management tool (reducing the fuel available for a future fire). That is done in wintertime when there are no problems of fire spread," he says.

"The other is to use fires for suppression of an existing fire, and there are basically two options.

"One is to start a second fire that is cleaning vegetation ahead of the main fire; and the other- which is more risky but more effective - is to create a second line of fire that's close to the first, and when it's sufficiently close the in-draft created by the first, the wind, will attract the second fire - they'll meet in a very spectacular moment and it's all over."

Burning issue

This second option might sound alarmingly dangerous but the Fire Paradox team has seen it work successfully in South America.

All the techniques have a role in Europe, Dr Rego maintains; and countries such as Portugal - burned, literally, by the inferno summer of 2003, the western European heatwave year - are applying them regularly and successfully.

But not, as yet, Greece.

"We made an effort to include Greece, and we have Greek partners, but the problem is that our methods are forbidden in Greece," he says.

"We have talked with the government, and last year we had our annual meeting there - we invited Greek officials and professionals to hear about what's going on, but apparently without much success."

If climate projections turn out to be true, the threat of wildfires is likely to increase across much of the European continent, both in areas where they occur now and in places where they will be a relatively new phenomenon.

It will then be a question of how society responds.

Portugal now possesses a corps of about 20 professionals trained in the art of starting and managing prescribed and suppression fires; it is unlikely to be the last country on the continent to see advantages in learning how to fight fire with fire.

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Heat Waves Getting Worse

livescience.com 25 Aug 09;

Heat waves out West are getting worse as the climate changes, a new study finds.

One example: From mid July to early August 2006, a heat wave swept through the southwestern United States. Temperature records were broken at many locations and unusually high humidity levels were recorded.

The event included extreme muggy heat that is part of a trend of increasing nighttime heat wave activity observed over the last six decades, the researchers said in a statement today. This trend has accelerated since the 1980s and has become especially prevalent in this decade, they conclude.

The results are not isolated, and they fit with predictions that a warmer world will produce greater extremes.

A study in 2007 found European heat waves are nearly twice as long as they were a century ago and the number of hot summer days there have tripled.

Why it matters: Other studies show heat waves are deadlier than hurricanes or tornadoes, and they have been so throughout modern history. Climate experts have warned that the sort of serious heat wave that is now possible given current climate conditions, but which has not struck yet, could kill thousands of U.S. residents.

And there's some irony in the problem:

As heat waves worsen, more energy is used to run air conditioners. If the electricity is generated using fossil fuels, this could also mean even more emissions of heat-trapping gases that cause climate change, scientists wrote in the Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology last year.

"Electricity demand for industrial and home cooling increases near linearly with temperature," said the leader of that study, Norman Miller, an earth scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and geography professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

"In the future, widespread climate warming across the western U.S. could further strain the electricity grid, making brownouts or even rolling blackouts more frequent," Miller said.

The nighttime heat waves of 2001, 2003 and 2006 were each unprecedented on record when they occurred. The source of the moisture that propelled the heat waves was an area of the eastern Pacific Ocean where a strong increase in sea surface temperatures has been observed and linked to global-scale trends of human-induced warming of the upper oceans, the new study found.

"Water vapor is the main greenhouse gas. During the night in humid environments, air doesn't cool nearly as much as it does in dry conditions," said study leader Alexander Gershunov of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego.

"Elevated humidity also causes heat waves to last longer," Gershunov explained. "Hotter nights pre-condition hotter days and the cycle feeds on itself until the winds change. The weather pattern that traditionally causes heat waves in California is tending to bring with it more humidity, changing the character of heat waves from the dry daytime heat and cool nights typical for this region, to the muggy heat around the clock that locals are simply not accustomed to."

The 2006 event in particular stressed the state's emergency services programs and killed so many dairy cows that milk production fell 10 percent.

A preliminary version of the study was published July 27 in the online edition of the American Meteorological Society's Journal of Climate.

Miller's team, in last year's study, also looked at the increase in heat-wave severity.

In 2008, California experienced an unusually early heat wave in May, they noted: Some 119 new daily high temperature records were set during the May heat wave, including the earliest day in the year in which Death Valley temperatures reached 120 degrees Fahrenheit (on May 19, beating the old record of May 25 set in 1913).

There's been no letup in the Southwest this year. In Phoenix, this July was the hottest on record, with the average of all highs and lows for the month being 98.3 degrees. One reason, meteorologists said: Overnight lows were much warmer than normal.

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Climate Change: Watery apocalypse awaits Pacific islands

Anthony Paul, Straits Times 26 Aug 09;

AS A teenager in the Carteret Islands, a south-west Pacific atoll in the eastern Papua New Guinea (PNG) archipelago, Ms Ursula Rakova walked to her school and church along a road on Han Island, the centre of a thriving community that produced taro, the islanders' staple food.

These days, the taro plantations are gone, swamped by rising seas. The road, too, is underwater. 'Where we once walked,' she told The Straits Times, 'we now have to paddle a canoe.'

Tuvalu, a tiny south-west Pacific nation (population: 12,000) about 3,200km east of the Carterets, is often billed as the likely first community to be devoured by the surrounding ocean. Its situation is indeed dire: Seawater and the saltwater table threaten coconut and taro farming.

According to latest studies of the region's changing conditions, however, Tuvalu won't actually disappear for another 1,000 years, though it will become uninhabitable long before then.

Carteret islanders are already dealing with a watery apocalypse.

The islands form a horseshoe-shaped atoll (population: 3,300) with a total area of 0.6 sq km (the size of about 83 soccer fields) and a maximum height of 1.2m above sea level. Much of the land the community lives on is already awash. Islanders deal with a higher incidence of malaria as the atoll's volcanic foundations slowly collapse, and trees and taro, coconut and banana crops surrender to ever more violent storms.

When their plight began to become more desperate some 20 years ago, islanders built sea walls and planted mangroves to break the waves' advance. 'But recently,' says Ms Rakova, 'it has become evident that these measures aren't going to work in the long run.'

Over the past six months, about 800 islanders have either fled or are currently planning their families' escape to drier land at Tinputz, on Bougainville, PNG's largest nearby island. 'By 2015,' says Ms Rakova, 'we'll have to move the rest.'

The Carterets, populated about 200 years ago by settlers from Bougainville, have a largely matriarchal society: Women inherit much of the land. Ms Rakova, 43, a soft-spoken but clearly strong-willed graduate of PNG University in Port Moresby, heads Tulele Peisa, a non-governmental organisation (NGO) leading the evacuation. The NGO's name means 'riding the waves' in the local language.

Ms Rakova gave up her job with Oxfam three years ago to set up Tulele Peisa. 'Our whole culture is at stake,' she says. 'Our people, especially the older ones, don't want to move, but there is really no alternative.'

The islanders, she says, blame people in industrialised countries for what is happening. 'We don't fully understand the science,' she admits, 'but we're angry about reports that carbon dioxide emissions may be causing climate change.'

If the wider world is indeed causing problems for the Carterets, it won't be the first time. During the Pacific War (1941-45), fighting between Allied forces and the Japanese invaders caused much devastation. The islanders ruefully recall how the Carterets were once seven islands, but bombing obliterated one island, turning them into a six-island atoll. Some outside the islands are sceptical of this story, claiming that over the years, islanders have reduced their available land by using explosives to carve out new fishing areas.

Whatever the truth, latest scientific studies by institutes in Australia don't encourage islanders who may want to stay and continue fighting the ocean's surge.

Australia's National Tidal Centre's measurements show that western Pacific areas nearer the equator, like the Carterets, appear to be experiencing sea-level rises of about 5mm a year, compared with an average global rise of about 3mm.

Meantime, satellite altimeter readings, says the tidal centre, show evidence over the past decade of a kind of grand pan-Pacific 'slosh': Sea levels 'have risen in the south-west Pacific and fallen in the north-west Pacific since 1992'.

In a recent report, Oxfam warns that 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,' the report says. 'With land areas just metres above sea level and narrow strips of land just 50m to 100m wide in some atolls, there is no retreat to higher ground from the ravages on the coast.'

Certainly, the Carterets' islanders are worried. Says Ms Rakova: 'The PNG government allocated 2 million kina (S$1.1 million) to pay for more land in Bougainville (for the resettlers), but we have not seen one cent of this so far.

'We're losing our ancestral home, our culture, our identity, our whole life. We hope the world is listening.

'Climate change is not just about statistics, not just about science. Climate change is about human rights and the vulnerability of all people on small Pacific islands.'

Hardly an idyllic paradise
Bruce Gale, Straits Times 26 Aug 09;

ASIA'S economies may be about to lead the world out of recession, but not the South Pacific. Indeed, while the popular image of the South Pacific is of idyllic islands, the reality is very different.

A recent report submitted to the Australian Parliament concluded that Fiji's economy, the South Pacific's largest after New Zealand's, could contract by at least 5 per cent this year. And while Fiji's problems look particularly bad, they are really just an extreme example of the situation facing island nations across the region.

Most South Pacific nations are expected to register negative economic growth. Cash reserves, investment and trade are declining. The cost of imported goods is also rising as nations devalue their currencies in an attempt to stimulate exports.

The global economic slowdown is not the only reason for the gloom. The H1N1 influenza pandemic has taken its toll, and islanders report more frequent cyclones as well as rising waters - the result of global warming. Tonga's main island of Tongatapu, as well as Pukapuka in the Cook Islands, Kiribati and Tuvalu are particularly at risk.

But not all of the South Pacific's woes can be blamed on external influences. Long before the global financial crisis, many South Pacific economies had already deteriorated to the point where they were heavily dependent on international aid and foreign remittances from an estimated 150,000 Polynesian, Melanesian and Micronesian people living in Australia.

The Pacific island countries receive the highest amount of foreign aid in the developing world per capita. But despite this, few have shown much progress.

Nor is the aid well coordinated. Speaking at a summit of the Pacific Islands Forum in Cairns earlier this month, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd lamented the 'spaghetti bowl' of aid programmes - the 'dozens of competing and occasionally conflicting development assistance programmes'.

According to Dr Mahendra Reddy of the Fiji Institute of Technology, many of those who have prospered in Pacific island countries have acquired their wealth through government monopolies. As a result, vested interests provide strong opposition to market-opening measures.

Meanwhile, the deadening effect of the Melanesian system of traditional chiefs discourages dissent. Fiji is run by a military dictatorship. In Tonga, reformers are trying to replace an authoritarian monarchical system with something that more closely resembles a democratic polity. In other countries, central governments struggle to maintain control. The Solomon Islands is just emerging from a long period of near anarchy.

Other nations launch seemingly pointless reforms. Samoa, for example, is in the midst of a national debate about a multimillion-dollar plan to switch to left-side driving on Sept 7. Tiny Tokelau, on the other hand, seems more focused on critical problems. Its 1,500 residents worry about replacing an ageing vessel that is their only link to the outside world via a 30-hour trip to Samoa.

The eyes of most outside the region are focused on Fiji, an ethnically fractured island state with a population of about 950,000. Fiji's gross domestic product (GDP) grew 0.2 per cent last year after contracting 6.6 per cent in 2007 due to the impact of a coup. Its main industries include tourism, sugar, fisheries and garment manufacturing.

In a report on Fiji to the Australian Parliament on Aug 11, Ms Renuka Mahadevan, a senior academic at the University of Queensland's School of Economics, painted a picture of inappropriate economic policies, political uncertainty and slow progress on economic reform.

According to Ms Mahadevan, a devaluation in April designed to stimulate the export sector did little to help. Worse, she said, this approach to solving the nation's economic problems shifted the focus away from the pressing need for domestic economic reform. Financing the government deficit is also likely to be a growing problem. The ratio of external debt to GDP is low (7 per cent), but political problems have caused Fiji's credit rating to decline significantly in recent years.

Fiji has been under military rule since the country's armed forces chief Frank Bainimarama seized power in a 2006 coup. Fiji's subsequent refusal to bow to international demands for elections has left the country isolated. Suva has already been suspended by the Pacific Islands Forum, a regional bloc of 16 nations. Major trade partners, including the European Union, Australia and New Zealand, have also imposed sanctions. The Commonwealth has threatened Suva with suspension.

Whatever else one may say about it, the South Pacific is hardly an idyllic paradise.

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Top UN climate scientist backs ambitious CO2 cuts

Marlowe Hood Yahoo News 25 Aug 09;

PARIS (AFP) – Barely 100 days before the world hopes to seal a global climate treaty, the UN's top climate scientist has given his personal endorsement to hugely ambitious goals for slashing emissions.

"As chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) I cannot take a position because we do not make recommendations," said Rajendra Pachauri when asked if he supported calls to keep atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations below 350 parts per million (ppm).

"But as a human being I am fully supportive of that goal. What is happening, and what is likely to happen, convinces me that the world must be really ambitious and very determined at moving toward a 350 target," he told AFP in an interview.

In its benchmark 2007 report, the IPCC said that the key for preventing dangerous global warming was to keep CO2 concentrations below 450 ppm.

Above that level, average global temperatures are likely to increase by more than 2.0 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century, a threshold that leaders from the G8 leading industrialised nations agreed last month must not be crossed.

But translating this global target into concrete national commitments at UN climate talks ahead of a landmark conference in December in Denmark has proven extremely difficult.

"How that 2.0 degree limit is going to be obtained is something the G8 nations have not addressed so far," Pachauri said by phone from New Delhi.

According to the IPCC, whose report serves as a guidepost for the UN talks, this can only happen if global greenhouse gas emissions peak by 2015 and rich nations slash their carbon pollution by 25-to-40 percent, compared to 1990 levels, by 2020.

So far only the European Union has come even close to meeting these goals, with the United States seeking to shift the focus to its more long-term commitment of cut CO2 output by 80 percent before 2050.

The IPCC report says that major emerging economies such as China and India would have to green their economies too, though at a slower pace.

But a growing body of scientific evidence suggests that even these hard-to-reach goals may not be ambitious enough, prompting many of the nations most threatened by global warming to set the bar even higher.

More than 80 of the world's poorest and most climate-vulnerable nations have now declared that CO2 concentrations must be scaled back to below 350 ppm, and that temperatures cannot rise more than 1.5 C by century's end.

The Association of Small Island States (AOSIS) staked out this position last December, and was joined earlier this month by the 49-strong bloc of Least Developed Countries, mostly in Africa, along with south and southeast Asia.

"I think this is a good development," said Pachauri. "Now people -- including some scientists -- see the seriousness of the impacts of climate change, and the fact that things are going to get substantially worse than what we had anticipated."

Even at current CO2 levels of 385-to-390 ppm, severe impacts from climate change -- rising sea levels, drought, violent storms -- have started and are likely to get worse, experts say.

Many scientists also worry that carbon pollution has damaged Earth's capacity to absorb CO2 and triggered events -- the shrinking Arctic ice cap, the decay of the Greenland ice sheet, methane release from permafrost -- that will drive global warming on their own.

Pachauri said he was disappointed to see so little progress in the UN climate talks so far.

"It is certainly a source of disappointment," he said. "But I don't feel pessimistic. I think all of this will, hopefully, lead to a culmination in Copenhagen that all of us feel reasonably satisfied with."

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Companies' CO2 cuts fall short of scientific needs: study

Yahoo News 25 Aug 09;

PARIS (AFP) – The world's 100 largest companies are failing to meet scientific recommendations on cutting CO2 emissions to contain global warming, a new study released Tuesday warned.

"We are facing a Carbon Chasm," said the study by the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), an independent organisation based in London.

"To cut emissions in developed economies by the required 80 percent by 2050, we need to see a minimum annual global reduction rate of 3.9 percent" per year, it said.

"However analysis of reduction targets from the Global 100 companies shows they are currently on track for an annual reduction of just 1.9 percent" per year.

The CDP analysts said 73 percent of Global 100 companies reported some form of reduction target, while a significant minority -- 27 percent -- did not.

"There is an urgent need for all companies to establish and achieve required targets," the study said, warning that company target setting was "motivated by market forces - not scientific requirements."

"The analysis done by CDP identifies a serious Carbon Chasm.

"The Chasm highlights the gap between current Global 100 reduction targets and what we need to see if we are to reduce in line with scientific recommendations.

"It shows the majority of companies are currently failing to deliver the reductions required to avoid dangerous climate change."

The CDP said more aggressive targets were needed "if business is to reduce emissions sufficiently" and called for government leadership and action to ensure that happens.

The CDP's recommendations included that every company should set CO2 reduction targets and target years, which should reflect scientific recommendations made by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

It also said governments needed to agree on clear medium- and long-term reduction goals during key climate change talks in Copenhagen in December where more than 180 nations are to negotiate an agreement to replace the existing Kyoto Protocol.

The vision is to set curbs on emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases beyond 2012, with intermediate targets for 2020 that would be ratcheted up all the way to 2050.

In its analysis of the Global 100 responses to the Carbon Disclosure Project the study found that European companies had the strongest target setting with 84 percent reporting a CO2 reduction target, followed by the United States with 71 percent and Asian companies with 66 percent.

But it added that the popularity of the target years up to 2012 "suggests that businesses are waiting to hear outcomes" of the Copenhagen conference before setting longer term reduction goals.

"At present we are not on track to achieve the 2050 targets but the key issue will be how companies respond to this challenge as many of them set targets beyond 2012," the study said.

There is no consensus among climate scientists about what is a safe level of warming, but many have urged policymakers to peg the rise to no more than two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels.

This would require cuts of between 25 and 40 percent by rich countries by 2020, but would also require a brake in the growth of emissions by the emerging giants, according the UN's panel of climate scientists.

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Best of our wild blogs: 25 Aug 09

A sliver of living shore at Tuas
from wild shores of singapore and singapore nature and wonderful creation

Tuas seagrass monitoring
from teamseagrass

Nesting of Whiskered Treeswift
from Bird Ecology Study Group

Charming Chek Jawa
from wonderful creation

Little Sisters - Isn't that 'little'!
from Psychedelic Nature

Stormy shores: the Sumatras
from wild shores of singapore

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Whale shark caught and hacked into pieces in Johor

AsiaOne 24 Aug 09;

A quiet lunch affair at a seafood restaurant turned awry and bloody when a whale shark, size of a pick-up truck, was hauled onto the jetty and hacked into pieces.

A Singaporean eye-witness who was having his meal at the restaurant, south of Johor, Malaysia, at that time wrote this account:
"I was there having lunch with some friends at a seafood restaurant when a local walked in and told the boss that a big shark was caught.

"I did not give much thought to it until the workers who went there to see came back and told their fellow colleagues that the shark was as big as a pick-up.

"This caught my attention. We paid for our meal and went over to the jetty to have a look.

"When we reached the jetty, it was already quite crowded. I managed to squeeze in some photos as the poor shark was being sliced by a hack saw.

According to the eye-witness, the catch could have been the joint efforts of three fishing boats which had brought the big fish in from the South China Sea, as he overheard in murmuring conversations from the crowd.

"As you can see, the shark was being chopped up, did not stay long to watch as we had to catch our ferry.

"Seeing the poor guy being chopped up, I was quite sad.

"What you see in picture is very different from the actual situation. There was the noise from the hack saw, blood flowing out etc."

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