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July 01

Malaysia calls a halt to new forest clearing for palm oil industry

The Malaysian government is intent on prohibiting any new forest clearing for the establishment of oil palm plantations, the online journal Mongabay reports.

According to Malaysia's Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi only areas zoned for agriculture will be allowed to be converted for palm oil production.

"We don't have to reduce the protected forests to increase new oil palm plantations," Abdullah was quoted in the New Straits Times as saying. "With more effective management of the plantations and new technologies, production can go up by 30 per cent."

But notes Mongabay," some environmental groups have expressed concern that as Malaysia improves the environmental performance of oil palm within its borders, Malaysian firms have lower standards when operating in neighboring Indonesia where much expansion is taking place."

Malaysia — the world's second larger producer of palm oil after Indonesia — has already acquired land in Papua, Kalimantan, Aceh and Brazil for future expansion.

Indeed the new policy may be tough to enforce at home. Last last week the Chief Minister of Sarawak province, Tan Sri Abdul Taib Mahmud, said that his government would continue to open up more land for oil palm plantations as it was convinced there was adequate protection for endangered orangutans and the indigenous Penan population.

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June 13

U.S. to blame for global warming and the sinking global economy?

That's the perception of the majority of non-Americans who responded to the latest Pew Global Attitudes Survey, The New York Times reports. The NYT writes:

Concern about global warming has increased since last year in 11 of the 20 countries for which trends are available, Pew found.

“When asked which country is ‘hurting the environment the most,’ majorities or pluralities in most countries surveyed cite the United States,” the Pew report said. “But people are increasingly pointing fingers at China.”

The United States and China are among the 10 countries where majorities do not define global warming as a very serious problem.

The survey of 24,717 people is the seventh major study conducted by the Pew Global Attitudes Project since 2002.

Also, of the two dozen countries surveyed, just 8 have majorities who have a favourable view of the U.S. They are: Britain, India, Lebanon, Nigeria, Poland, South Africa, South Korea and Tanzania.

Tough crowd.

-- Bernhard

June 09

Attention climate change sceptics

For those of you who ascribe to the old crack "climate is what you expect; weather is what you get" here's a handy bit of news to reinforce your more sceptical views on climate change. In Italy, from where I write, we are experiencing one of the wettest and coolest Springs in the past 200 years, according to the latest statistics from the Italian research commission at CNR (in Italian). With still two weeks to go in the spring season, precipitation in Spring 2008 is 35 per cent above the national annual average, as recorded during the past 30 years, CNR says.

Italy's primavera bagnata of 2008 would seem to obliterate all those calculations predicting climate change would inflict North African-style drought on the Mediterranean region, particularly when you consider last summer was so hot and dry half the country was engulfed in brush fires. But that's the thing about what we're entering into: extreme climatic fluctuations. Desert conditions one year, underwater the next. Though, here in Italy, it's pretty much a foregone conclusion we'll be having a lot more of the former. Correct that. What we expect to get.

-- Bernhard

May 28

Do cars belong in the city centre?

It's a contentious debate, to be sure. Here in Italy, the historic centres of most Medieval hilltowns have been partially shut to car traffic, primarily because the roads are too tight for both man and machine. The cities are a different story. Fiat cinquecentos and Mini Coopers, and more recently Smart cars and those silly 50 CC cars that Italian teens drive with abandon, line most every street of the old quarters. City officials would love to get them off the streets but the locals complain it would kill the local shop trade and send their property values plummeting.

One Italian city is trying to be the first (dicounting Venice) significantly sized city to go car-free in its town centre. It is Perugia, the capital city of Umbria. On a few frigid days in December I had the opportunity to visit the Mini Metro construction project, a 95-million-euro alt-transport project that, at its height, can ferry 72,000 people a day in and out of the town centre.

I wrote about the Mini Metro for The Guardian this week.

If you are heading to Perugia this summer for the Jazz Fest or later in October for the decadent Chocolate Festival, you should give it a ride. You'll be silencing the critics if you do. (And, if you are in Perugia from 15-30 June, you may want to check out an interesting art exhibition, the works of the eclectic artist Michael Eldridge. It's in the centre of town on the Via Oberdan in the ex-Chiesa di Santa Maria della Misericordia.)

- Bernhard

May 20

Could clean energy be the next credit crunch victim?

The ripple effects from the sub-prime crisis and the resultant credit crunch in the United States is being felt well beyond the financial sector. Investments in clean energy in the U.S. are down, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. It notes that investments from private equity firms totalled just $2.4 billion (£1.2 billion) in the first quarter of 2008, down from $3.7 billion in Q1 2007. By our maths, that's a greater-than 50 per cent drop year-on-year. Not a promising start to the year.

According to an editorial in The San Francisco Chronicle, any reduction would be bad news as private equity is the fastest growing area of clean energy investment. The author of the commentary, Daniel M. Kammen, from the Energy and Resources Group, noted that "no nation is better positioned to adopt a low-carbon energy diet than we (the United Nations) are."Kammen calls for more government investment in this area.

Perhaps, market forces (and some help from canny Spanish investors) will make up the difference. As the always reliable Greenbang reports, Spanish utility Iberdrola has promised to invest €8.6 billion into the US renewable energy market between 2008 and 2010, with an eye to claiming 15 per cent market share of the U.S. renewables market by the end of the decade.

With credit-strapped U.S. competitors feeling the pinch, it might get there sooner.

All this movement comes as the multilateral process headed by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is trying to encourage private investors to get more involved in clean energy. They meet next month.

May 15

Degradated mangroves exacerbated Burma cyclone disaster

As Burma and the international community start to grapple with the true scale of destruction from last week's cyclone, one top regional politician claims massive mangrove destruction exacerbated the damage.

Speaking at a meeting of the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) in Singapore, secretary-general Surin Pitsuwan said widespread coastal developments had resulted in mangroves, which act as a natural defence against storms, being destroyed, the BBC reports.

"Encroachment into mangrove forests, which used to serve as a buffer between the rising tide, between big waves and storms and residential areas; all those lands have been destroyed," the AFP news agency reported him as saying.

"Human beings are now direct victims of such natural forces."

Burma's coastal degradation has been a worry for some time. In 2002, The World Rainforest Movement highlighted the problems in a report "in which it described the mangroves of the Irrawaddy Delta as 'some of the most degraded or destroyed mangrove systems in the Indo-Pacific'. WRM blamed the declining mangroves on upstream deforestation and the conversion of mangrove forests into prawn farms," the Democratic Voice of Burma website reports.

This is not a new trend. As the Wall Street Journal writes, "Researchers in Myanmar estimate that 83% of the mangroves in the Irrawaddy were destroyed between 1924 and 1999. The destruction was spearheaded by British colonial authorities who encouraged rice cultivation in the delta, which was once known as the "rice bowl" of the world."

And neither is Burma an exceptional case. As the WSJ notes, the cyclone highlighted "an environmental problem plaguing Asia's coastlines: widespread degradation of mangrove forests that once protected coastal villages from tidal surges and strong winds."

April 21

Greenpeace warns of Canada's "carbon bomb"

Continued heavy logging in Canada's boreal forest could ignite a "carbon bomb" that could drastically worsen global warming. That's the warning of a new report prepared by researchers at the University of Toronto and commissioned by Greenpeace.

The report, titled Turning Up the Heat, estimates the boreal forest currently stores 186 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide, which is more than 27 times the world's annual fossil fuel emissions. However, it says the combined threats of forest fires, insect outbreaks, permafrost melting and industrial development are undermining the boreal forest's resistance to the impacts of global warming.

"If left unchecked, these problems could culminate in a catastrophic scenario known as 'the carbon bomb': a massive release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere driven, for example, by a widespread outbreak of forest or peat fires," says the report.

"Research is starting to show that the forest is tipping from being an annual carbon sink to being an annual carbon source," said Christy Ferguson, Greenpeace's forests campaigner in Toronto.

Canada's forest industry has argued that because harvested trees are replanted, carbon released through logging is eventually recaptured as the new trees grow. The Canadian Forest Products Association intends to make the industry carbon neutral by 2015 without having to purchase carbon offset credits.

The Greenpeace report estimates that logging removes about 36 million tonnes of above-ground carbon annually - that's more yearly carbon emissions than all the passenger vehicles in Canada combined, according to an Environment Canada report on greenhouse gas sources.

Yet late last week the report was attacked by a senior federal government expert on forestry.

"Increased temperatures and changes in precipitation are already having impacts on the severity of forest fires and insect infestations," wrote Dr. Werner Kurz, a leading scientist in the department's Canadian Forest Service and a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "But these impacts are the result of global climate change, not local logging activities."

Food and biofuel fight for land while the poor suffers

Rioting on the streets of Cairo and Bangladesh. Haiti's President resigning after protesters stormed his palace. These are the signs that have leaders around the world roiling at the prospect of a global food shortage and the devastating social unrest that is likely to accompany it.

Both the UK's Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, and the World Bank President Robert Zoellick warned last week that fast-rising food prices - spurred on by crop failures and the rush in the West to create biofuels to replace fossil fuels - could trigger a global catastrophe.

Darling, for his part, has demanded an urgent review of international biofuel programmes, reports the Observer. He has called on the World Bank to produce an analysis - for June's G7 meeting of global leaders - on the impact of green policies, including America and Europe's biofuel programmes, on global food shortages.

Meanwhile, on Sunday, Zoellick warned that a doubling of food prices over the past three years could push 100 million people in poorer developing countries further into poverty, AFP reports.

Here's the scale of the crisis told by looking at the numbers. According to the Guardian, "In less than a year, the price of wheat has risen 130 per cent, soya by 87 per cent and rice by 74 per cent. According to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation, there are only eight to 12 weeks of cereal stocks in the world, while grain supplies are at their lowest since the 1980s."

While the rush to convert food crops into biofuels is only part of the problem it's political symbolism - rich nations raiding the food sources of the developed world to keep their cars running - is exacerbating tensions in the global community.

"When millions of people are going hungry, it's a crime against humanity that food should be diverted to biofuels," India's finance minister, Palaniappan Chidambaram, told the Wall Street Journal in an interview. Turkey's finance minister, Mehmet Simsek, added the use of food for biofuels is "appalling."

One fast developing nation that isn't criticising the biofuel boom is Brazil, home to a massive sugar cane ethanol industry. " Rather than causing economic ruin ethanol production "can be the hope for a development model for many countries, particularly in Africa, Latin America and Asia," Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said last week as he signed an agreement with the Netherlands to intensify cooperation on biofuels.

April 14

Are some species simply unfit for survival?

One of the most controversial areas of conservation is human-aided conservation. In other words, when people step in to help endangered species reclaim a habitat in the hopes they will settle down, reproduce and thrive once again. It's problematic even for conservationists as it throws the balance of species out of whack, allowing a strong species (in almost all cases, us) to reverse the evolutionary tide of nature for the benefit of a more precarious species. But there is growing support for human-aided conservation as we come to grips with just how much damage we humans are inflicting on planet earth.

But it's still not a black-and-white issue. For example, what about species that simply haven't adapted well? Should we help them too?

This is the interesting question raised by the fascinating work of a determined group of researchers in Austria who are trying to re-introduce the endangered Northern Bald Ibis to southern Europe.

To put it kindly, the ibis, also known as the Waldrapp Ibis, hasn't evolved well. Over the centuries, it has lost much of its motivation and its sense of direction, problematic if you are a migratory bird that needs to get to point A down south to wait out the winter and point B up north to breed.

The birds are one of the most precarious in the world. Just a few hundred survive in the wild, and none (as of yet) in Europe. To be sure, the birds haven't helped themselves. They are poky flyers, have poor motivation and are tasty, evidently. They are true slackers. Still, the Waldrapp Team is heroically trying to revive their numbers. All of this perhaps raises the question: are some species simply not fit for survival in this cruel world?

Before you answer that, read my article in today's Guardian about a determined group of biologists attempts to teach the species how to migrate, and, ultimately survive.

And, for more on the research team's efforts, click here.

-- Bernhard

April 09

UN Joins the Biofuels Backlash

UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, last week called for a comprehensive review of the organisation's policy on using biofuels to help fight fossil fuel-led climate change.

"We need to be concerned about the possibility of taking land or replacing arable land because of these biofuels," Ban told the Guardian.

His comments comes as a new peak in global food prices - partly due to the increased use of crops for energy generation - threatens to trigger social instability throughout the world. The UN's World Food Programme said last week that 33 countries in Asia and Africa now face political instability as the urban poor struggle to feed their families. As the Daily Telegraph reported, the World Bank said last week "that the price of staple foods has risen by 80 per cent in the past three years".

The latest alarm over the rush to embrace biofuels - something the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman calls "Grains Gone Wild" - comes as the "EU is being urged to take action to stop a biofuel trading scam that exploits US agricultural subsidies and undermines the fight against global warming," writes the Guardian.

This so-called "splash and dash" scam where, as the Wall Street Journal explains, traders ship biodiesel from Asia or Europe to U.S. ports, where it is blended with a “splash” of regular diesel. That qualifies for U.S. export subsidies and then it is shipped back to Europe where it is sold below domestic prices, undercutting Europe's biofuel industry.

As the WSJ writes, "Biofuel’s already-tarnished environmental reputation comes under more fire, because round trips across the Atlantic add unnecessary transport emissions to the mix".

So, with food prices set to rise for a few years to come according to biofuel executives will the UN turn its back on the biofuel "solution"? Ban doesn't think so:

He tells the Guardian: "At this time I wouldn't make any definitive judgment or definitive plans, in particular vis-à-vis these biofuels.....I know there are some concerns raised by certain quarters about biofuels. But biofuels are a renewable source of energy when we are experiencing extreme difficulties [with] resources."

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