Category: Archive

Small towns unite against Woolworths
7News Today Tonight – Thu Mar 27 06:34pm EST

The towns that don’t like Woolworths or any big supermarket chain, are now joining together, trading advice and protest tactics.

“The cryosphere,” explained Mats Eriksson of ICIMOD “is the part of the earth which is frozen – icecaps, glaciers, snow cover, permafrost, and frozen lakes and rivers.” As temperatures rise around the world, the effects on mountain ice and snow are just as serious as those on the polar icecaps.

Over 50 scientists from Asia, North America and Europe will attend the ICIMOD conference to share information, plan future monitoring activities among the world’s highest mountains and discuss risk management strategies.

ICIMOD has led efforts to raise awareness of the effects of climate change, and this month is also sponsoring the Eco-Everest Expedition, which aims to collect data on shrinking glaciers like the Imja and Khumbu below Chomolungma, and publicise the issue internationally. Political tensions and much of the Himalaya being a war zone make cross-border collection of snow precipitation data and mapping difficult.

The conference will look at what will happen when Himalayan glacial lakes burst, and other hazards such as subsidence of land caused by melted permafrost. ICIMOD’s Vijay Khadgi said: “Many of these dangers are not immediately obvious and may not manifest themselves until there is a major earthquake, but we have to be prepared for them.”

The Himalayas are one of the world’s most earthquake-prone regions. This fact combined with fragile glacial lakes and destabilised mountain slopes poses grave and growing danger of flashfloods and landslides.

Long-term changes to the seasons, temperature and precipitation are also making the precarious lives of people here even more insecure. More water falls as rain and less as snow, and at different times of the year. In dry areas such as Ladakh and northern Pakistan, which depend on snowmelt for much of their water, agriculture is already suffering from reduced water in the growing season.

And it’s not just people in the mountains who are at risk. 1.3 billion people living downstream in the Indo-Gangetic plains, Burma, Southeast Asia and China will also suffer when glacial ice on the Tibetan Plateau is depleted.

The International Panel on Climate Change has predicted that many Himalayan glaciers could melt completely by as early as 2035. Meltwater-fed rivers such as the Ganges, Indus, Huang He and Yangtze may be reduced to trickles or stop altogether in the dry season. This will precipitate a food crisis not just for the massive populations living in the river valleys, but for the whole world which imports grain from these regions.

Due to remoteness and lack of resources, the processes and effects of climate change have been researched less in the Himalaya than anywhere else in the world.

“There is a big need to understand what is happening here,” said Eriksson. ICIMOD hopes more coordinated research in the Himalaya can provide the basis to prepare for the after-effects of climate change.

 

---

Climate change is least understood in the Himalaya

Richard Armstrong is a senior research scientist at the University of Colorado. He is in Kathmandu this week to participate in an international seminar by ICIMOD on ice and snow induced disasters. Nepali Times asked him about the dangers of climate change on our glaciers.

Nepali Times: Is it now proven beyond doubt that carbon emissions are causing climate change?
Richard Armstrong: We cannot prove the extent to which the artificial carbon in the air has contributed to climate change. However, if we combine the temperature and carbon dioxide records at the surface of the earth, we can easily see the correlation.

Is climate change causing Himalayan glaciers to shrink?
Glacial retreat is the most visually convincing evidence of climate change for non-specialists. Compare pictures from 50 years ago with today, you don’t need complex data. But in the Himalaya a possible secondary aspect that might have contributed to the melting of the glaciers is the Asian Brown Cloud, or particles that change the reflectivity of the glaciers. But we have very little data on that, and need more research.

How does glacial retreat here compare with other mountain regions?
Compared to other parts of the world, the pace of glacial retreat is slowest in the Himalaya. In the western hemisphere, the retreat rate is very high due to their climatic pattern which includes low precipitation and low humidity. The glaciers of the European Alps and the Rocky mountains of North America have lost 40 percent of their area in the last hundred years. The Himalaya is the least understood area with regard to climate change.

Why is that?
The elevation range in the Himalayas has no equivalent anywhere else in the world. We don’t fully understand the climate above 6000m so at such high elevations, we can only make assumptions. We are fairly sure that European glaciers will continue to shrink, but it’s possible that global warming could even increase the mass of some of the Himalayan glaciers, as if the monsoon is enhanced there will be an increase in precipitation, hence more snow in very high areas.

How will people in the Himalayas be affected by these changes?
Water resources and human impact in terms of water aren’t well quantified. What we need to know is to what extent are people taking advantage of excess water that wasn’t previously available.

We hear you have been working with Al Gore.
Yes, two months ago Al Gore came for a half day visit. Since he uses our data in his presentations he had a lot of questions. He’s doing a fabulous job in raising awareness about global climate change, and meeting him was an amazing experience. But it was also depressing, because there is no doubt that environmentally it would have been a different world if Al Gore had been elected president.

Novel schemes include a plan to build an artificial wetland at a jail in Mombasa in Kenya, to process sewage from 4,000 inmates that now flows untreated into a creek, or ponds in South Africa where algae purify waste and are then used as fertiliser.

"About 90 per cent of the sewage and 70 per cent of the industrial waste in developing countries are being discharged untreated into water courses," said Achim Steiner, head of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP).

"Understanding the ability of peatlands, of marshes, of wetlands, to play an integral part in filtering … waste water is often overlooked," he said.

The UN set a millennium goal of halving the proportion of people with no access to sanitation – even simple latrines rather than sewers – by 2015 from 40 per cent of humanity or 2.6 billion people now.

"Africa is probably struggling the most," Mr Steiner said.

France’s Veolia, the world’s biggest listed water supplier, says East Asia and the Pacific are progressing best.

In Africa, the company’s only big contract so far is to supply water and sanitation to three cities in Morocco, with investments totalling 2.2 billion euros ($3.66 billion).

 

Children dying

"A lot of countries underestimate the effect of sanitation on health," said Pierre Victoria, head of International Institutional Relations at Veolia Water.

UN data show a child dies as a result of poor sanitation every 20 seconds – that is 1.5 million preventable deaths a year from diseases such as diarrhoea or cholera.

In many countries "we are disappointed by the lack of interest of the politicians about water issues," Mr Victoria said.

"We’d like to have new contracts in developing countries but we need contractual, legal and financial security."

Proper sewers, with pipelines and treatment plants, are prohibitively costly for many nations.

Among lower-cost projects, prisoners at the Shimo La Tawa jail in Mombasa in Kenya will soon start work on an artificial wetland where plants will act as a sewage processing plant in an experimental $126,000 scheme.

"This technology costs very little both for construction and maintenance," said Peter Scheren, manager of joint UNEP-Global Environment Facility projects in Africa.

The scheme will also include a fish farm – fed by waste water purified by two artificial wetlands each 55 metres long, nine wide and two deep.

If it works, the fish can be eaten by prisoners, or even sold.

Such wetlands can have other spinoffs.

"There are experiments going on in Tanzania where types of grass for roof thatching and baskets weaving are grown on wetlands," Mr Scheren said.

 

Natural systems

Many scientists say natural systems, such as wetlands, forests or mangroves, are worth more left alone rather than cleared for farmland because they supply free services such as food, water purification or building materials.

"For sanitation it’s much better to get nature on your side," said Dag Hessen, a biology professor at Oslo University.

Mr Steiner also said the world urgently needs a better understanding of the natural water cycle, under threat from climate change stoked by human use of fossil fuels, to help manage water from rains to drains.

Global warming may aggravate water shortages for hundreds of millions of people, for instance by disrupting Africa’s monsoons or by thawing Himalayan glaciers whose seasonal meltwater now feeds crops from China to India.

UN estimates show it would cost only about $10.8 billion a year to reach the 2015 sanitation target and that every dollar spent on sanitation creates spinoffs worth $7.59 on average, largely because of less disease.

A 2006 UN Human Development Report said rich donor nations gave about 5 per cent of total overseas aid, or between $3.25 billion and $4.3 billion a year, to water and sanitation.

Excluding big investments in Iraq, the recent trend was down.

Many donors view water investments as too risky, partly because of problems of accountable financing, it said, adding that sanitation progress since the 1970s had been "glacial".

Yet many firms stand to benefit from a focus on water and sanitation.

Goldman Sachs sees prospects for growth in the water sector, from drinking water to processing waste.

 

Infrastructure costs

In rich nations such as the United States, upgrading water and wastewater infrastructure should bring 4-5 per cent growth and in markets such as China, new infrastructure should mean 10-15 per cent growth over 5-10 years, it said in a December 2007 report.

"Longer term, we expect the global water sector to surge towards a global water oligopoly, where the market for water equipment and services will be dominated by a few multi-industry companies, including General Electric, ITT Industries, Danaher and Siemens," the report said.

Suez, an international industrial and services group, says it has had successes in cities such as Buenos Aires, Casablanca, Jakarta, and La Paz.

In the 13 years to 2006, it estimates it has helped connect 5.3 million people to a sanitation network.

One headache is how to pass on the cost of upgrades.

"New systems are often under-funded. So the connections go often to the rich or medium-income households and the poor do not get it," said Helen Mountford, head of the Environmental Outlooks division at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

With the world’s population growing, any advances in improving sanitation may be only helping the world stand still.

The OECD said this month that more than 5 billion people or 67 per cent of the world’s population, are expected to be without a connection to public sewerage in 2030.

That is up by 1.1 billion from 2000, when 71 per cent of a smaller world population had no connection.

About 1.1 billion people lack drinking water – another millennium goal is to halve that proportion by 2015.

"Investments in sanitation if anything have to be more urgent than for water because the deficit is double," OECD secretary-general Angel Gurria said.

French 19th Century author Victor Hugo wrote in Les Miserables that "the history of men is reflected in the history of sewers".

"The sewer is the conscience of the city… A sewer is a cynic – it tells everything."

– Reuters

Severe winter storms that damaged and knocked over a tenth of China’s forests in recent weeks should have a relatively neutral impact on Sino-Forest Corp. (SNOFF.PK), the Canadian-listed Chinese plantation owner, Dundee Securities analyst Richard Kelertas wrote in a recent research note. (more…)

Nanling Reserve is one of scores of fragile ecosystems, from Anhui Province in the east to Guangdong Province in the south, that took a beating from storms in late January and early February that set records for snow- fall and low temperatures in some areas. Last week, China’s State Forestry Administration (SFA) announced that the storms damaged 20.86 million hectares-one-tenth of China’s forests and plantations-roughly equivalent to the number of hectares that were reforested between 2003 and 2006. SFA pegs the losses at $8 billion. "The severe storms did a massive amount of harm," says Li Jianqiang, a plant taxonomist at Wuhan Botanical Garden. "This scale of damage has never happened before."

He Kejun and others say it will take decades for the hardest-hit ecosystems to recover. The ecological and economic toll rivals that of devastating floods along the Yangtze River in 1998 that inundated 25 million hectares of farmland. For broadleaf evergreen forests, "this is bigger than the Yangtze disas- ter. It’s unique in the history of south China," says Ren Hai, an ecologist with the South China Botanical Garden (SCBG) in Guangzhou. SFA and other agencies have dispatched scientists to take stock and formu- late restoration plans. "The government is acting very, very fast," says Ren.

In southeastern China’s worst winter in 5 decades, snow and ice knocked out power and paralyzed roads and rail lines at the height of the year’s busiest travel season-the Spring Festival, when many Chinese return to their hometowns. The storms pummeled 21 of 33 provinces and regions, claiming 129 lives. Some 485,000 homes were destroyed and another 1.6 million damaged, displacing nearly 1.7 million people, accord- ing to central government statistics. Agricul- ture officials estimate that 69 million live- stock-mostly chickens and ducks-froze to death. Storm-related losses exceed $21 bil- lion. As Sciencewent to press, electricity had still not been restored to some remote areas. Scenes of scrums at train stations and vehi- cles adrift on highways were splashed across the news in China and abroad last month.

Meanwhile, outside the spotlight, an ecologi- cal calamity was unfolding. In Jiangxi Province, for example, entire bamboo forests were reduced to matchsticks; fast-growing bamboo can regenerate in several years. In Guangdong, officials estimate that more than 700,000 hectares of forest and plantations are damaged severely, with losses approaching $1 billion. Other provinces enduring extensive forest damage are Anhui, Guangxi, Guizhou, Hubei, Hunan, and Sichuan

The carnage was not limited to natural ecosystems. "Exotic species were harmed more than native species," says Ren. In north- ern Guangdong Province, plantations of slash pine (Pinus elliottii), an import from the southern United States, splintered under wet snow, and extensive stands of Australian gum trees "are almost all going to die," Ren predicts. At Wuhan Botanical Garden in Hubei Province, the roof of a greenhouse housing Asia’s largest assemblage of aquatic plants caved in under heavy snow. "A unique collection has been lost," says Wuhan botanist Li Xiaodong.

SCBG scientists maintain long-term experimental plots at Nanling that will allow them to gauge ecosystem damage and recov- ery. At the moment, the picture is bleak. Nanling’s entire forest between 500 meters and 1300 meters in elevation was wiped out, says He. "Before the storm, we could hear birds singing in the reserve. Now it is mostly silent," he says. Many bai xian, or silver pheasants-Guangdong’s official bird- succumbed to the severe weather, and carcasses litter Nanling’s trails, says He. One worry, he says, is that epidemics will erupt this spring in the storm-sapped animal popu- lations and among migratory birds.

With support from Guangdong Province’s government, SCBG plans to send teams of sci- entists to several of the most devastated forests to survey damage and to set up test plots that will track everything from species compo- sition to the susceptibility of the degraded forests to insect pests and fires. The storm damage lends urgency to a new national strategy for plant conservation released last week by SFA, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the State Envi- ronmental Protection Agency. Under the manifesto, crafted with help from Botanic Gardens Conservation International, a Richmond, U.K., nonprofit, China has pledged to launch a nationwide survey of species and habitats, construct a national herbarium, crack down on illegal logging, and establish by 2010 a system to monitor and protect China’s 31,000 plant species, more than half of which are native.

As damage assessments proceed, SFA has established a disaster relief technology group and will hold an emergency meeting later this month to plan for restoration. Botanical gardens are doing their part, too. "We must work hard to save vegetation and lessen the extent of damage," says Ren. "We want to find a way to help natural ecosystems recover with minimal human disturbance." That is a tricky balancing act. At Nan- ling, managers are barring local residents from entering to remove downed timber. Although salvage logging could reduce wildfire risk, it could exacerbate erosion, further degrading ecosystems. The bulk of the restoration work is likely to focus on economic recovery: rehabilitation of plan- tations. The storm’s aftermath should also spur long-term research on plant cold toler- ance, says Li Jianqiang.

The immediate task is picking up the pieces after the worst winter in recent memory. "We cherish our endangered species," says Li. But for some of the precious plants at Wuhan Botanical Garden and in southern China’s battered reserves, he says, "there is nothing we can do to save them." -RICHARD STONE With reporting by Li Jiao in Beijing.

Biofuel from trees a looming disaster

The promise being made is that wood can produce fuels to run our cars. A few years ago we were told corn, rapeseed, sugar, oil palm, soy and various other crops could be grown for biofuels while providing energy security and reducing greenhouse emissions. The reality has been far different with globally surging food prices, loss of rainforests and other important habitats, further depletion and poisoning of aquifers, and rampant human rights abuses — all for little or no greenhouse gas emission reduction.

So called "second generation biofuels", including the use of woody biomass, is being given the same unthinking, ecologically bereft hype. I will focus upon the idea that a wide variety of woody plant materials — including both waste and planted woody crops — should be the basis of a cellulosic ethanol industry. Creating ethanol is trickier than with agrofuels, the cellulose more difficult to break down, but clearly it is possible to produce liquid fuels from woody biomass. But what of associated social and ecological issues that are again being ignored?

Second generation biofuels based upon woody biomass will clearly be an unmitigated disaster. As with agrofuels, a cellulosic ethanol industry will indirectly destroy forests and lead to more costly food by increasing land pressures upon natural forests and agricultural crop lands. We can expect more vast, lifeless, toxic and water dependent monocultures of genetically modified Frankentrees on stolen deforested lands at a net carbon loss. And the biofuels will be sold to us as a green product, perhaps certified as "well-managed" by WWF, FSC, and other forest sell-outs.

Global forest crisis the fundamental ecological problem

Forest waste is a euphemism for the materials left over when industrial forestry decimates a forest. The branches, bark, saw dust, etc. represent nutrients that are best returned to virtually mined soils to make new forests. There is certainly not enough such "waste" lying around unused to power industrial society. Just what the world’s beleaguered natural old-growth and regenerating forest ecosystems need, another potentially limitless draw upon their growth, diversity and regeneration.

Once the infrastructure is in place to toss wood into vast choppers and have energy come out the other end, how long until meager switch grass harvests are supplemented with natural forest clearance? Let’s skip the step of clearing rainforests to plant crops and just toss the chopped up liquefied rainforests directly into our gas tank instead. The use of wood biomass from natural forests is already occurring on a limited scale and will be ramped up. Such is the promise of cellulosic ethanol.

Natural forests and other habitats provide a thin layer of biological life that shields and acts in concert with other aspects of the Earth System to make advanced life possible. This human habitat is endangered, devastated in short order by the human locust. All major environmental crises are entwined, but my observation is that clearing of terrestrial ecosystems — that is dismantling human habitats as resources to allow unsustainable growth — is the crux of the human dilemma.

As if the world’s forests, land base, ecosystems and habitats do not have enough demands upon them already, let us try to use them to power seven billion consumers in their drive to each have it all. Think this a needlessly harsh appraisal? Name one time the global economic system has demonstrated self-control in matching growth to underlying resources. Biofuels based upon wood must be rejected now, before it begins, to avoid the next ecological catastrophe. Given the scale of human energy demands and dismal state of global ecosystems, this one may prove fatal.

Time only for ambitious, sufficient global ecological responses

The Earth system is perilously close to failure and cannot stand more environmental solutions based upon greater and more intensive resource use for current, much less increased, human population and consumption. Most want an energy panacea that allows endless procreation and economic growth. None are to be had. There is a finite amount of energy that can be taken from, and waste put into, the global biosphere before it becomes uninhabitable. And we are reaching or have passed that point.

It is imperative that we embrace an environmental agenda based upon what is actually needed to maintain and restore ecological systems upon which all life depends. It is too late to put our efforts into anything else than the full package of societal and personal change necessary to maintain the biosphere. There are no solutions worth pursuing at this late date other than those that are ecologically sufficient. Anything less is more of the same disease that is assuredly destroying being.

Regular readers will know I have identified several major societal changes that could be implemented now at considerable but affordable cost and would make major headway in saving creation. These include immediately ending the use of coal that emits waste in the atmosphere; ceasing industrial clearance of natural habitats including ancient forests; investing major sums in renewable energy, energy conservation and efficiency; and providing incentives to reduce global population and sum consumption (more at http://www.ecoearth.info/ssi/ ).

These and other rigorous and sufficient measures will be pursued, or global ecological collapse is unavoidable. If part of your shtick is we can cut our forests, burn our fossil fuels, and continue to grow endlessly; you are the disease eating the Earth. Change sides and become part of the cure by rejecting reformist quick fixes such as biofuel from food and trees in favor of an environmental sufficiency agenda. Or we can all die looking for an easy way to have it all at the Earth’s expense.