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Environment
Blue Planet winners urge CO2-cutting efforts
Akemi Nakamura, Japan Times
Two scientists who won the 2005 Blue Planet Prize on Wednesday urged the governments of industrialized nations to increase their efforts to cut carbon dioxide emissions and help build a sustainable environment.
The Asahi Glass Foundation gave Briton Nicholas Shackleton, professor emeritus of the department of earth sciences at the University of Cambridge, and American Gordon Hisashi Sato, director emeritus of the W. Alton Jones Cell Science Center in the United States, 50 million yen prizes for their work on the environment.
The Blue Planet Prize was created by the foundation in 1992 to recognize researchers who have contributed to solving environmental problems.
Shackleton said at a news conference in Tokyo that the most important problem humankind faces is climate change, which is being caused by increasing emissions of carbon dioxide generated from the growth of human activities.
“I think initiatives like the Kyoto Protocol are terribly important (to control carbon dioxide emissions),” Shackleton said. “I just wish some of the biggest governments would do something more actively” to achieve the Kyoto goals.
Under the Kyoto Protocol, which took effect in February, industrialized countries are required to cut their emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases between 2008 and 2012 by an average of 5.2 percent over 1990 levels.
Shackleton was recognized for his studies on paleoclimatology, the study of extended climatic conditions in past geologic ages, especially his efforts to identify interglacial climatic cycles and to understand the relationship between cycles of climatic changes and the role of carbon dioxide. His research has made climate change predictions more accurate.
At a time when the world is beginning to see large increases in carbon dioxide emissions from developing nations, particularly China and India, Japanese-American Sato proposes an unusual approach to tackle climate change — planting mangrove trees.
“If we plant the deserts of the world with mangroves, we could easily fix the carbon dioxide increase created by economic activities,” Sato said.
He developed a mangrove-planting program in a desert in Eritrea, which was cited by the foundation when it awarded him the Blue Planet Prize. Using mangrove seeds and leaves as livestock feed, Sato, whose main concern is reducing poverty, has shown that his technology can help local people build a sustainable environment in one of the poorest areas of the world.
“The mission of my life is to plant mangrove trees in the Sahara Desert,” he said. “I want to transform the Sahara Desert into mangrove forests.” Mangroves grow in seawater when nitrogen, phosphorus and iron are present. Sato said a cost-effective way to pump seawater into the desert is to use wind-powered generators.
(21 October 2005)
China emerges as main threat to Asian forests
Geoffrey York, Globe and Mail (Canada)
Illegal logging for cheap plywood, furniture is destroying old-growth tracts, reports say
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BEIJING — The world’s last remaining rain forests and old-growth forests are being rapidly destroyed by illegal loggers to feed the voracious appetites of Chinese plywood and furniture exporters, two new reports have warned.
In just the past few years, China has emerged as the biggest threat to the planet’s tropical rain forests, consuming nearly 50 per cent of all timber logged in threatened rain forests around the world, according to a report by Greenpeace this week.
The second report, by the London-based environmental watchdog Global Witness, documents how illegal logging for the Chinese market is decimating the old-growth forests of northern Myanmar, one of the most bio-diverse regions on earth.
Last year alone, the report said, more than a million cubic metres of timber, worth more than $250-million (U.S.), were illegally exported to China from the endangered forests in Myanmar (also known as Burma), where more than 100 Chinese logging companies with 20,000 employees have already devastated most of the old-growth forests closest to the Chinese border.
“Large tracts of forest adjacent to the China-Burma border have been almost entirely logged out,” the report said. “As a result, Chinese logging companies have had to move deeper into Kachin State [northern Myanmar] to source their timber.”
The illicit plunder of these forests is occurring with the “full knowledge” of the governments of China and Myanmar, which have allowed the trade to increase by 60 per cent in the past four years, the report said. On average, Chinese customs officials allow a 15-tonne truckload of illegally logged timber to cross the border from Myanmar every seven minutes, every day of the year, it said.
(21 October 2005)
Satellite images reveal Amazon forest shrinking faster
Peter N. Spotts, Christian Science Monitor
New methods detect twice as much logging as previously estimated
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Brazil’s Amazon rain forest – one of the most biologically productive regions on the planet – is disappearing twice as fast as scientists previously estimated.
That is the stark conclusion ecologist Gregory Asner and his colleagues reached after developing a new way to analyze satellite images to track logging there.
The team traces the additional loss to selective logging, which some environmental groups say is occurring illegally. The technique removes trees piecemeal from a forest, rather than carving large swaths. This has made it easier to hide. This project is the first time satellites have been used to track selective logging. [Editor’s note: The original version identified selective logging as illegal. Not all groups agree that the practice always occurs illegally.]
For the region, this activity increases the forest’s vulnerability to wildfires and undermines its biological productivity. Selective logging in the region releases nearly 100 million tons of additional carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year.
(21 October 2005)
Global warming a major threat to Africa
Alexandra Zavis, Associated Press
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — Deadly epidemics. Ruined crops. The extinction of some of Africa’s legendary wildlife. The potential consequences of global warming could be devastating for the world’s poorest continent, yet its nations are among the least equipped to cope.
“It is our vulnerability that sets us apart from developed nations,” said Luanne Otter, a researcher at the University of the Witwatersrand during a conference this week in South Africa on climate change.
Surface temperatures rose about 1 degree Fahrenheit in the 20th century _ the largest increase in 1,000 years, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 1998 was the warmest year on record, and 2005 could be even hotter.
Climate experts say the trend will continue as long as carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels and other gases keep building up in the atmosphere, trapping heat like a greenhouse.
African nations account for a tiny percentage of the emissions but are already suffering the consequences, researchers say.
The ice cap is receding on Africa’s highest peak, Mount Kilimanjaro. Desertification is spreading in the northwestern Sahel region. Droughts, flooding and other extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and severe. Numerous plant and animal species are in decline.
(21 October 2005)
In the Great Basin, scientists track global warming via pikas
Michelle Nijhuis, High Country News
…Today, Hall’s diligent fieldwork, along with that of his influential professor, is helping define the scope of global climate change. Wildlife biologist Erik Beever, along with a handful of collaborators and students, is using Hall’s work to document marked declines in pikas.
Pikas, tiny, short-eared relatives of rabbits, live at high elevations throughout the Western states. Though they’re little bigger than baseballs, they’re hard to miss. Hikers who frequent rocky mountain slopes are familiar with their high-pitched calls, and with the imposing “hay-piles” the animals construct; since pikas do not hibernate, they use the piles as a winter food supply, and perhaps for protection from the cold.
In the early 1990s, when Beever first revisited 25 Great Basin pika populations recorded by Hall and others, it was obvious things had changed. Though the rocky talus slopes looked the same as when Hall had visited about half a century earlier, six of the 25 populations had completely disappeared.
The disappearances followed a definite pattern. “In five of the mountain ranges we studied, the populations at lower elevations are gone, and the populations at higher elevations remain,” says Beever. Previous research showed that pikas have a low tolerance for high temperatures, and Beever’s analyses suggested that climate played a strong part in the declines. While some of the animals may have found cooler climes uphill, pikas don’t generally move very far; many of the lower-elevation pikas Hall and others saw may have simply died out.
Beever, until recently a researcher with the U.S. Geological Survey in Oregon, visited the sites a second time between 2003 and 2005, and found that two more pika populations had blinked out during the previous decade.
Since Beever and his coworkers first published their results in 2003, the photogenic pika has become something of a poster child for global warming’s impacts on the Western states. But Beever, now a wildlife biologist with the National Park Service Great Lakes Network in Wisconsin, cautions that pikas are only a small part of a larger tale. “Each species has its own behavior and its own life history,” he says, “and each one will respond differently to climate change.”
Nonetheless, the pika provides a stark look at what is possible: A warming climate threatens to sweep the species right off the map. Within Beever’s 17 remaining study sites, the lower edge of the population has moved an average of 130 yards uphill since the 1990s. And at four of those sites, there are so few animals that long-term survival of the populations looks unlikely.
“One of the things that managers tend to do when species are lost is to say, ‘Well, we can reintroduce it,’ ” says Beever. “But if the climate is unsuitable, then the relocation will be in vain.”
(17 October 2005)
