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Goodwill and compromise: Nagoya biodiversity deal restores faith in UN
Jonathan Watts, The Guardian
In the long run, the biodiversity deal scratched out in Nagoya in the early hours of this morning is intended to benefit habitats and species such as tigers, pandas and whales. But in the short-term, the biggest beast to get a reprieve may well prove to be the UN itself.
After the misery, disappointment and anger of last year’s climate talks in Copenhagen, the body was fiercely criticised and the entire multilateral negotiating process called into question. It seemed time-consuming, prone to grandstanding and dominated by selfish national interests rather than pressing global concerns.
At the start of this week, the talks in Nagoya looked likely to become another chapter in the same sorry story. But since then, there has been an impressive – and ultimately successful – willingness to work.
Square brackets (which denote areas of disagreement) have been steadily whittled away from the negotiating texts. Pragmatism has been more evident than ideology. Delegates actually seemed willing to listen to the advice of scientists warning of the perils of inaction.
Some key goals have been set, including a plan to expand nature reserves to 17% of the world’s land and 10% of the planet’s waters. For a scarred veteran of the Copenhagen or Tianjin climate talks, the extent of the progress, goodwill and readiness to compromise during these past few days has been pleasantly shocking.
(29 October 2010)
Related: UN Seals Historic Treaty to Protect Ecosystems (AFP) -BA
The UK’s great forest sell-off
Leo Hickman, The Guardian
The government’s plan to put half of England’s state-owned forests up for sale might raise billions, but what will we lose?
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… according to reports over the weekend, half of [the Forestry Commission’s] properties in England – including Cardinham – could be put up for sale over the coming decade as part of the coalition government’s attempts to reduce the budget deficit. It was spared being used as kindling in the recent “bonfire of the quangos”, but the commission could yet be a high-profile victim of the 30% cuts earmarked for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. The environment secretary Caroline Spelman is expected to soon spell out plans to raise as much as £5bn from the sale. (Control of the commission’s assets in the other regions has been devolved.) If confirmed, it would amount to the largest change of land ownership since the second world war and could, some claim, see previously protected woodlands make way for golf courses, housing developments and a wave of new Center Parcs-style resorts.
The news has been met with near-universal disgust and shock. Caroline Lucas, the Green party MP, described it as an “unforgivable act of environmental vandalism”. The Labour party said it feared developers would “cherry-pick the most profitable land”, while the Woodland Trust said the planting of much-needed new native woodland could be jeopardised if the revenue from the sales, as looks highly likely, does not directly benefit the commission. By yesterday, more than 10,000 people had signed an online petition urging the government not to proceed with the sale.
The news seems to have stirred a raw, emotional reaction in many people. Our inner treehugger leads most of us to recoil at the notion of a tree being cut down. And yet, as a nation, we are a ferocious consumer of timber and paper products, so much so that we currently import about 75% of the wood we consume each year.
(29 October 2010)
The Shock Doctrine in action. -BA
Bat disease threatens ecological catastrophe
Jerome Taylor, The Independent (UK)
A virulent and deadly pathogen in America is exterminating a predator that is vital to farmers for controlling insect pests
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… Dr Kunz, a biology professor at Boston University and one of a handful of bat specialists in America, is describing the terrifying advance of white-nose syndrome. In just four years the virulent fungal infection has spread from a single cave in upstate New York to massacre more than a million bats across the North-east.
Scientists and conservationists have been astonished by both the virulence and viciousness of the disease. When a cave becomes infected 75 per cent of the bat colony is likely to be wiped out during the first winter hibernation. After the next winter 90 per cent of the original colony will have succumbed.
This savage fatality rate threatens to destroy one of North America’s top predators, leaving a gaping hole in the continent’s food chain with as yet incalculable knock-on ecological effects. One senior US wildlife official has gone so far as to describe the massacre as “the most precipitous decline of North American wildlife caused by infectious disease in recorded history”.
(29 October 2010)
Growing Calls for Moratorium on Climate Geoengineering
Stephen Leahy, Inter Press Service/Tierramérica
NAGOYA, Japan — Delegates to the world summit on biodiversity here are calling for a moratorium on climate engineering research, like the idea of putting huge mirrors in outer space to reflect some of the sun’s heating rays away from the planet.
Climate engineering or geoengineering refers to any large-scale, human- made effort to manipulate the planet to adapt to climate change.
Representatives from Africa and Asia expressed concern about the negative impacts of geoengineering during the opening week of the 10th Conference of Parties (COP 10) to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), Oct. 18-29. They were joined by civil society organizations in calling for a moratorium on geoengineering experiments.
The geoengineering proposals include installing giant vertical pipes in the ocean to bring cold water to the surface, pumping vast amounts of sulphates into the stratosphere to block sunlight, or blowing ocean salt spray into clouds to increase their reflectivity.
Broadly speaking, there are two main geoengineering approaches: solar radiation management and carbon sequestration, in other words, absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to reduce the concentration of this greenhouse-effect gas.
To manage the sun’s rays, there are ideas like releasing sulphates into the atmosphere or placing giant mirrors in outer space. For absorbing carbon, the possible approaches include ocean fertilization, in which iron or nitrogen is added to seawater to stimulate the growth of phytoplankton to sequester the carbon deep in the ocean.
“Some of the proponents of these technologies think it’s easier to ‘manage the sun’ than get people to take a bus” to reduce carbon in the atmosphere, said Pat Mooney, executive director of the ETC Group, an international environmental organization headquartered in Canada.
… Britain’s Royal Society, a highly respected global network that includes the world’s most eminent scientists, now defends geoengineering research.
“We oppose a moratorium because we don’t want to restrict scientific research into geoengineering,” said John Shepherd, a climate scientist at the National Oceanography Center of the University of Southampton, and Royal Society fellow.
“Climate change could get to the point of ‘desperate times requiring desperate measures’ and therefore we should be ready with some good research on what might help,” said Shepherd, author of the 2009 Royal Society report on geoengineering.
(26 October 2010)
