Great apes 'facing climate peril'

Baby orangutan
Dr Leakey says climate change is putting great ape species at risk
Great apes are facing an "inevitable crisis" arising from climate change, a leading conservationist has warned.

Dr Richard Leakey said that growing pressure to switch from fossil fuels to biofuels could result in further destruction of the animals' habitats.

The chair of WildlifeDirect called for immediate action and proposed financial incentives to save forests from destruction as one possible solution.

He said: "Climate change will undoubtedly impact everything we know."


The implications for biodiversity are there for all to see
Dr Robert Leakey

The great apes - gorillas, chimps, bonobos and orangutans - are already under threat from habitat destruction, poaching, logging and disease.

The Great Apes Survival Project (Grasp), a United Nations Environment Programme (Unep) initiative, has warned that great apes are at risk of imminent extinction unless drastic action is taken.

Palm oils

In advance of a talk at the UK's Royal Geographical Society, Dr Leakey told journalists that climate threats now had to be added to the mix.

The former director of the Kenyan Wildlife Service said: "I am concerned about the pressures on the land as a result of changes to the climate, but also the pressures on the land in terms of people's reaction to climate change and the shift away from fossil fuels to biofuels."


The great apes: Status check

In pictures

He said that "great swathes" of forest had already been destroyed in South Asia to make way for palm oil plantations, and this had had a dramatic impact on orangutans, which currently number 50,000.

Palm oil is used in vegetable oil, soaps, shampoos, industrial substances, but it has also been proposed as an alternative to fossil fuel.

Dr Leakey said the growing pressure to turn to biofuels such as palm oil could place the great apes' habitat in further peril.

He added: "People shrug their shoulders and say what are poor countries to do if they cannot exploit their natural resources, and I can understand this, but it is not sustainable the way it is going.

There is also evidence that deforestation would further drive climate change itself by raising the amount of greenhouse gas carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, Dr Leakey said.

New incentives

Dr Leakey suggested "biodiversity credits" could be a possible solution.

"Being paid for not cutting down indigenous forests and getting credit for that is a further step that builds on the idea of getting paid for planting new forests," he explained.

"It does seem that we cannot stop development, but it does also seem that perhaps we can stop development where critical species are threatened, and perhaps there could be a price added to that."

Richard Leakey
Dr Leakey is a prominent conservationist in Kenya

He said that there could be creative ways to solve the problems that climate change could bring, but added that it was crucial that action was taken now.

Dr Leakey told journalists: "Could the great apes go because of climate change? Yes. Possibly not within our lifetime, but what about in 100 or 200 years?

"Climate change is measurable and is happening at rate that is almost unprecedented from what we know in previous history, and the implications for biodiversity are there for all to see."

Richard Leakey is a palaeo-anthropologist, responsible for extensive fossil finds related to human evolution, and renowned Kenyan conservationist. His parents, Louis and Mary Leakey, were prominent palaeontologists, finding and excavating key sites around Africa.

Leopard in visit to Israeli home

Mr Du Mosch had no time to think before grabbing the wild creature

An Israeli wildlife guide has overpowered an ageing leopard that jumped into his bed during the night.

Clad only in his night clothes, Arthur Du Mosch lunged at the big cat and grabbed its neck, pinning it down for 20 minutes until help arrived.

"This kind of thing doesn't happen every day," the 49-year-old said. "I wasn't thinking, I just acted."

Leopards usually enter villages after they become too weak to hunt in the wild. They are little threat to humans.

The uninvited guest is thought to have been trying to catch the family's domestic cat, which had also been lying in the bed.

Mr Du Mosch, who emigrated to Israel from the Netherlands in 1985, said he took the whole experience in his stride, "but the kids were excited".

Israel nature and parks protection officials answered Mr Du Mosch's emergency call and came quickly to collect the leopard.

Spokesman Raviv Shapira said a group of leopards had been observed near Mr Du Mosch's small community of Sde Boker in southern Israel's Negev desert.

"But we have never heard of a leopard coming into a private home," Mr Shapira said.

Mr Du Mosch admitted he might not have fared so well if the leopard had been in better physical condition.

The animal was taken to Beit Dagan veterinary hospital near Tel Aviv for tests and was expected to be released into the wild with an electronic tag.

India tigers 'in rapid decline'

There has been a sharp decline in the number of tigers in India
India has far fewer tigers living in the wild than had been thought, initial results from a major new study suggest.

The Wildlife Institute of India census showed tiger numbers falling in some states by two-thirds in five years. A final report is due out in December.

India's last major survey in 2002 put tiger numbers at 3,500. That was far too optimistic, say conservationists.

They blame poaching and urbanisation for the decline and say the authorities must do more before time runs out.

A century ago India was believed to have tens of thousands of tigers.

'Depressing'

The new survey, conducted over two years, was the most ambitious ever undertaken to try to stem the decline in the population of India's tigers.

It found the largest decline in the tiger population to be in the central state of Madhya Pradesh, where the number of big cats has gone down from 710 to 255 in the past five years.

Tiger skins
Tiger skins and other body parts sell for thousands of dollars

"The figures are quite different from what we have seen earlier," said Mr Rajesh Gopal, secretary general of the government's Tiger Conservation Authority of India, which also took part in the survey.

Mr Gopal said the new study was far more detailed than any previous research.

Results are available only for some regions and a total overall figure is not expected until later this year.

But conservationists say the 2002 census badly overestimated tiger number.

Wildlife experts have criticised the Indian government for failing to crack down on poachers and the illegal trade in tiger skins.

"The results are depressing," Belinda Wright, director of the Wildlife Protection Society of India, told the Associated Press news agency.

"But it's a major step forward that a government study has finally come to terms with this disastrous decrease in tiger numbers," she said.

Pricey pelts

According to reports, there were 40,000 tigers in India a century ago.

The country is home to 40% of the world's tigers, with 23 tiger reserves in 17 states.

Tigers are poached for their body parts - skins are prized for fashion and tiger bones are used for oriental medicines.

Tiger pelts can fetch up to $12,500 in China.

Some conservationists say forest officials often inflate the number of sightings to paint a rosy picture of how India's tigers are surviving.

Tiger expert Valmik Thapar says the government has failed to protect its tigers.

He says instead of wasting time and energy on carrying out the new survey, the government should concentrate instead on protecting tigers.

Spain sends African migrants home

The Canary Islands are struggling with an influx of African migrants

The Spanish government has repatriated more than 750 African migrants, including 30 children.

The majority were Senegalese and were caught last week trying to enter the Canary Islands, according to Spain's interior ministry.

The government said all illegal immigrants would be expelled.

The latest influx is blamed on the temporary suspension of maritime patrols between the Spanish islands and the western coast of Africa.

The Spanish Interior Minister, Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba, confirmed the migrants had been returned home.

"We have repatriated, with the invaluable help of the government of Senegal, nearly 600 citizens of that country," he said. "This is an unmistakable message to the mafias."

Traffickers often extort money from Africans trying to reach Europe via hazardous sea crossings to the Canaries.

See the main routes taken by African migrants

No information was given about where in Africa the other migrants had come from.

Overall this year, though, the numbers of would-be immigrants are down compared to the same time last year.

In 2006 an estimated 30,000 immigrants were caught trying to reach the Canary Islands.

The vast majority sailed from west Africa in crowded open boats, many dying en route.

The European Union's external borders agency, Frontex, suspended maritime patrols around the Spanish islands early last month, when its 2006 mission ended.

The patrols are expected to restart within weeks, after the agency receives equipment including planes, helicopters and boats.

The environmental groups pushed for an end to all whaling!

Relations between Japan and the US have had troubled times
In the late 1960s, with the scent of flower power fresh in the air and the Vietnam War in spate, the nascent environmental movement, with US groups in the vanguard, began to adopt whaling as a signature campaign.

Patricia Forkan, who has campaigned against whaling for more than 30 years and now works for the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), says activists feared the disappearance of all whales - forever.

"They had completely extirpated the blue whale, they were on their way to doing that with fin, humpback and others, so why wouldn't they just continue down to the minke?" she recalls.

"All of us were saying 'why would you eliminate the very resource that is keeping your business afloat?' And there was an economic study done that showed it was more profitable to go out and take as many as you could and then re-purpose your boat to go off and do other kinds of fishing."

The environmental groups pushed for an end to all whaling. And their call was heard by governments which had recently retired their own fleets, such as the US, the UK and Australia.

The first major victory came in 1972, with the adoption of a resolution at the first global environmental conference, the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, held in Stockholm, calling for a halt to whaling.


Why did America have to cheat us like that?
Shigeko Misaki
A decade later, in 1982, the moratorium was voted through in the body which mattered, the International Whaling Commission (IWC); all commercial whaling would end in 1986.

Apparently, the environmentalists had won. Yet whaling continues today.

Norway and Iceland hunt commercially, while Japan, which behaves more assertively in the international arena than its northern counterparts and attracts most ire from the anti-whaling bloc, catches whales in the name of scientific research.

So what went wrong?

One theory, explored in the BBC World Service's One Planet programme, is that the environmental movement pushed too hard; that its strident calls helped to alienate Japan at the very point where it was prepared to abandon whaling, and to remove a key bargaining tool from the US armoury.

Did the environmental movement harpoon its own ambitions?

'Irrational' ban

There is no doubt that Japan felt affronted by the moratorium. The most depleted species such as the blue whale were already protected, the IWC was awarding ever-declining annual quotas for the rest, and Japanese negotiators felt a complete halt was an unnecessary political act.

United Nations Environment Programme logo. Image: UN
The first UN environment summit was a rallying point on whaling
"It was a totally irrational position, to us," recounts Kazuo Shima, one of Japan's Commissioners to the IWC in the 1980s and 90s.

"The US gave strong pressure, which was a very irrational activity of them."

This came on top of Japanese resentment that they were being blamed for bringing some whales close to extinction by nations such as the UK and US which had historically caught far greater numbers.

Along with Norway, Peru and the USSR, Japan lodged an objection to the whaling moratorium, which any IWC member was entitled to do, exempting themselves from the decision. It is on that basis that Norwegian whaling continues today.

The diplomatic pressure on Japan was about to increase.

Vein of vitriol

Reports from the period document the strong vein of anti-Japanese sentiment running through some strands of US society at the time.

The nation which US bombers had razed less than 30 years previously, which had entered the war through the attack on Pearl Harbour, was now out-competing the US industrially.

Japanese electronic goods were ceremonially smashed in Congress, and Tokyo voluntarily withheld car exports to avoid US protectionism.

Ronald Reagan. Image: AP
Green groups tried to force action from Ronald Reagan's government
Turning American citizens and American politicians against Japanese whaling, with lobbying, publicity and boycotts, was perhaps rather easy for NGOs.

The US had two pieces of legislation which it could use to put pressure not only on Japan in general, but on its huge fisheries interests directly.

The Packwood-Magnuson Amendment allowed Washington to cut the fishing quotas in US waters of any country which it felt was undermining an international conservation agreement; under the Pelly Amendment, it could impose trade sanctions on any offending nation.

Fishing quotas were hugely important to Japan. Its boats were catching more than a million tonnes of fish per year in US waters, mainly off the Alaskan coast. The New York Times of 1983 priced the catch at $425m annually, well beyond the value of Japan's whaling.

At the end of 1984, a coalition of environmental groups initiated a lawsuit aimed at forcing Ronald Reagan's administration to invoke Packwood-Magnuson and Pelly against Japan.

But in bilateral discussions, the two governments reached an agreement. Japan would cease whaling in 1988, two years beyond the moratorium date, and withdraw its objection; in return, Ronald Reagan's administration agreed not to take action under Packwood-Magnuson or Pelly.


I think that's just sour grapes
Patricia Forkan
Again, it seemed that an end to Japanese whaling was in sight. However, the court action continued, the NGOs claiming the administration had no right to make a deal with Japan.

Eventually, in June 1986, the Supreme Court ruled in favour of the administration. The deal, apparently, was sealed; in return for keeping its fishing nets full, Japan would hang up its harpoons for good.

The next month, Japan formally withdrew its objection to the whaling moratorium.

Gone west

However, on the US west coast, a completely different issue was raising its head.

In a bid to develop their own industry, US fishermen were pushing for the removal of foreign access to US waters. They were aided by a coalition of 14 NGOs led by Greenpeace who went to court against Japan, claiming its fishing methods harmed porpoises, seals and birds.

The Japanese quota plummeted. From 900,000 tonnes in 1985, it halved in 1986, then fell to 104,000 tonnes the following year. In 1988, the quota was zero; an estimated 130 Japanese fishing boats had nothing to catch.

Shigeko Misaki, who worked with Japanese IWC delegations first as an interpreter and later as an advisor, recalls great anger within the Japanese government and fishing industry at the time.

"(The US) said 'we didn't promise - we just have to give more fish to our fishermen'," she says.

"Anger is the only word that can describe it - why did America have to cheat us like that?"

Within months, Japan had announced it would begin hunting whales for scientific research, a programme that continues to this day.

Pressure group

Patricia Forkan rebuts any notion of a link between the withdrawal of fisheries rights and Japan's initiation of scientific whaling.

Harpoon. Image: BBC
Might Japan's harpoons now be mothballed with different tactics?
"There was never a discussion that I heard about them feeling betrayed on fisheries," she contends.

"Everybody - meaning the US government and the NGOs - knew those fisheries were going, for everybody. So I think that's just sour grapes."

Even if Japan's scientific whaling programme did not stem from a perceived betrayal by Washington, what is clear was that the Reagan administration had lost one of its key bargaining chips, the Packwood-Magnuson Amendment.

And something certainly fuelled the determination of officials such as Kazuo Shima, who vows: "Always I was beaten by United States and United Kingdom. However, I will never give in, because we have a rationale on this issue."

When activists look back from this year's IWC meeting, which marks the 25th anniversary of the moratorium decision, will they feel any qualms that their lobbying, demonstrating, boycotting and suing might have been too extreme, forcing Japan to kick back?

If they had lowered the pressure, might they now be looking at a world without Japanese whaling?

"We'll never know; but I have thought about that a lot," says Patricia Forkan.

"It's possible, if we all passed the moratorium and we all went home, maybe."

One Planet: Japan And The Whale is broadcast on the BBC World Service at 1130 GMT on Thursday, 17 May. Check the World Service schedules for other timings. The programme will also be archived on the One Planet website

Richard.Black-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk

Spielberg urges China over Darfur

Spielberg said China was "uniquely positioned" to act
Oscar-winning director Steven Spielberg has become the latest Hollywood figure to call for an end to the killing in the Darfur region of Sudan.

In a letter to Chinese President Hu Jintao, the 60-year-old film-maker called on China to pressure the African nation into accepting UN peacekeepers.

The UN estimates that 200,000 people have died and a further two million displaced in the conflict since 2003.

Spielberg is serving as an artistic advisor to the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

"I add my voice to those who ask that China change its policy toward Sudan," he wrote in a letter that was sent last month but released to the media on Friday.


China should be a clear advocate for United Nations action to bring the genocide in Darfur to an end
Steven Spielberg

He went on to ask the Sudanese government "to accept the entrance of United Nations peacekeepers to protect the victims of genocide in Darfur".

The Schindler's List director said the issue of genocide was especially close to him due to his work with the Los Angeles-based USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education.

The institute, based in Los Angeles, has collected videotaped testimonies of around 52,000 Holocaust survivors from 56 countries.

Its mission, said Spielberg, is "to use those testimonies to overcome intolerance, prejudice, bigotry and the suffering they cause".

Mia Farrow

Mia Farrow has criticised Spielberg for his role in the 2008 Olympics
"We are doing that now in many countries around the world, and I hope that China will someday be one of them," he said.

China has major oil interests in Sudan and has been accused of blocking moves to end the violence in Darfur.

Spielberg's letter follows criticism from actress Mia Farrow, who attacked his involvement in the 2008 Olympics in a Wall Street Journal article in March.

"Does Mr Spielberg really want to go down in history as the Leni Riefenstahl of the Beijing Games?" she wrote, likening the director to the Nazi-backed filmmaker who chronicled the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.

Desertification

(CNN) -- Millions of people could lose their homes and livelihoods as the world's deserts expand because of climate change and unsustainable human activities, an environmental report warned on Friday.

The report, part of a series examining the state of the world's biological resources, was released on the eve of "World Day to Combat Desertifcation," which marks the 11th anniversary of a UN agreement to tackle spreading deserts.

But Zafar Adeel of the United Nations University International Network on Water, Environment and Health, an expert on water management and a leading author of the report, warned that more needed to be done to combat desertification.

"Desertification has emerged as a global problem affecting everyone," said Adeel. "There are serious gaps in our understanding of how big deserts are, and how they are growing."

Drylands, which range from "dry sub-humid" to "hyper-arid" regions, make up more than 40 percent of the world's land surface and are home to two billion people. The largest area stretches from Saharan Africa across the Middle East and Central Asia into parts of China.

Most of Australia is also classified as drylands, along with much of the western U.S., parts of southern Africa, and patches of desert in South America.

The report said that that up to 20 percent of those areas had already suffered some loss of plant life or economic use as a consequence of desertification.

It said that global warming was likely to exacerbate the problem, causing more droughts, heat waves and floods.

But human factors have also played their part, with over-grazing, over-farming, misuse of irrigation and the unsustainable demands of a growing population all contributing to environmental degradation.

Adeel warned that some of the world's poorest populations were likely to be among the worst affected, with large swathes of Central Asia and the areas to the north and south of the Sahara in danger of becoming unsuitable for farming.

"Without strong efforts to reverse desertification, some of the gains we've seen in development in these regions may be reversed," he said.

Desertification has also been linked to health problems caused by dust storms, poverty and a drop in farm production, with infant mortality in drylands double the rate elsewhere in developing nations.

But the problem causes dangerous changes to the environment on a global scale, the report warned, with dust storms in the Gobi and Sahara deserts blamed for respiratory problems in North America and damage to coral reefs in the Caribbean. Scientists estimate that a billion tons of dust from the Sahara are lifted into the atmosphere each year.

While very difficult to reverse, the report said that specific local strategies should be employed to tackle spreading deserts. Alternative livelihoods such as ecotourism and fish farming could provide an alternative to intensive crop farming, while better management of crops and irrigation and the adoption of alternative energy sources such as solar power would all contribute to environmental sustainability.

The first Millennium Ecosystem Assessment report, released in March, warned that approximately 60 percent of the ecosystem supporting life on Earth was being degraded or used unsustainably and that the consequences of degradation could grow significantly worse in the next half century.

India should check consumption to save ecology: US expert

Posted May 12th, 2007 by Tarique

• India News

By IANS

Kolkata : The rapid pace of industrialisation in India could subsequently create ecological imbalances unless use of green energy and a check in consumption are emphasised upon, a US-based environmental historian said here.

"To maintain industrial sustainability in a developing state like West Bengal, the only way is to switch over to alternative energy resources. We can only maintain this factor by consuming less volume of resources available around us," environmental historian Daniel Klingensmith told IANS after a lecture at the American Center here late Friday.

The session was arranged by the United States Educational Foundation in India (USEFI), Kolkata.

Explaining how natural resources were used disproportionately during the early 1900s, the professor said many natural reserves were destroyed in the US due to industries and urban set-ups developed that time.

"Though I don't know much about a state like West Bengal but it is clear that we cannot turn our back to industries. We can always prevent the ecological menace by less consumption and collaborative efforts involving local people and outside agencies into the developmental process," Klingensmith said.

Talking on "Global Environmental Crisis, Now and Then: Lessons from the 1930s for the 21st century", he said the quest for prosperity and national security caused major environmental damages like global warming, rapid deforestation and the loss of many rare species in the contemporary world.

Klingensmith is an associate professor of history at Maryville College, US, and a recipient of the prestigious Fulbright Scholar award.

He is here as the Fulbright visiting scholar at the University of Calcutta for his independent research on 'Nature, Empire and Nation: Environmentalist Discourse in India, 1900-1947'.

The Fulbright Fellowship is the United States' flagship international educational programme, which has been designed to increase mutual understanding between the people of the US and other countries

Project aims to extract dam methane

By Tim Hirsch Sao Paulo, Brazil

Dam impacts on greenhouse emissions are a contentious issue

Scientists in Brazil have claimed that a major source of greenhouse gas emissions could be curbed by capturing and burning methane given off by large hydro-electric dams.

The team at the country's National Space Research Institute (INPE) is developing prototype equipment designed to stop the greenhouse gas from entering the atmosphere.

The technology will extract the methane from the water to supplement the energy produced by the dam turbines.

The scientists estimate that worldwide the technique could prevent emissions equivalent to more than the total annual burning of fossil fuels in the UK - and reduce the pressure to build new dams in sensitive areas such as the Amazon.

We cannot hide from this problem; you have to address it Fernando Ramos, INPE

The project follows a long-running controversy over how clean hydro-electric power really is.

Critics of the industry have claimed that in tropical areas of Brazil - which supplies more than 90% of its electricity from large dams - some reservoirs emit so much methane that their contribution to climate change is greater than an equivalent power station burning fossil fuels like coal or gas.

How the technology will work

'Soda' factor

Methane is produced mainly by bacteria that break down organic matter where there is little or no oxygen, for example at the bottom of lakes and reservoirs.

Since intake pipes for hydroelectric turbines tend to be placed quite deep, methane-rich water is suddenly transferred from conditions of high-pressure to the open air.

The lead scientist of the INPE project, Fernando Ramos, told the BBC's Science In Action programme: "It's like opening a bottle of soda. A large part of the methane is dissolved in the water bubbles, and it's released to the atmosphere.

"That's the reason big hydro-electric dams built in tropical areas are harmful to the environment."

There is still great uncertainty about the precise amount of methane added to the atmosphere in this way, as each dam behaves in very different ways depending on the amount of vegetation in the water, the temperature, the shape of the reservoir and many other factors.

However, a statistical analysis carried out by the INPE scientists has estimated that large dams could be responsible for worldwide annual emissions equivalent to some 800 million tonnes of carbon dioxide.

To put that in perspective, last year's total greenhouse gas emissions from the UK were around 660 million tonnes.

Partial waters

The impact of methane emissions is disproportionate to their actual quantity, since, tonne for tonne, the gas is estimated to be more than 20 times as powerful than CO2 in creating the human-induced greenhouse effect linked to climate change.

The INPE scientists are proposing that with relatively simple technology, this unwanted by-product of hydro-electric power generation could be turned into an extra source of clean, renewable electricity.

They have estimated that some dams with an especially heavy methane load in the Amazon could increase their output by up to 50%.

The first stage of the plan is to prevent deep, methane-rich water from going directly into the turbines, reducing the "soda bottle" effect.

A submerged membrane or steel barrier close to the dam would channel surface water to the intake pipes - there is little or no methane at the higher level of a reservoir where oxygen is plentiful.

To tap the methane, a floating device would pump deep water to an enclosed rotor on the surface. This would create small droplets that would liberate the dissolved gas, which could then be piped to a plant that would burn it to produce electricity.

Technology demonstrator

Burning methane does produce carbon dioxide, but since this carbon would have originally been taken out of the air by plants through photosynthesis before being locked into the sediments on the floor of the reservoir, the scientists argue there would be no net addition of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

It would also prevent the much stronger global warming impacts of direct methane emissions, they say.

But the process of extracting the methane would require considerable amounts of energy.

However, the team suggest this could be supplied by hydro-power at night when demand is much lower; and in any case, they say, it would be far outweighed by the power generated by the thermal plant.

INPE hopes to develop prototype equipment to demonstrate the process later this year.

It is sure to be very controversial in Brazil where power companies have been strongly disputing claims that their dams are significant sources of greenhouse gases.

Dr Ramos told the BBC: "We cannot hide from this problem; you have to address it. In fact, it's better to recognise there is a problem today, and to use this methane that is there as a commodity, harvest it to produce energy.

"And most important, it will reduce the pressure for building new dams in sensitive areas like the Amazon region."

Hear more about the methane extraction project on Science In Action on the BBC World Service this Friday, 11 May, at 1130 GMT. (Check World Service schedules for alternative broadcast times)

Reservoir waters are drawn by gravity towards the dam wall and the turbine intakes positioned near its base A membrane preferentially steers higher, methane-poor waters into the turbines to produce electricity A deep pump takes the methane-rich waters to the surface for separation and gas capture in a sealed vessel The methane is stored for burning, to drive a steam turbine and make more electricity. Depleted waters return to the reservoir